all an expert though I am, that it sounds as though something like that could engender more pain.”
I finish applying the paste. “Probably. Just wanted it out there. You have accepted that I’m not trying to kill or hurt you?”
He pulls his pants back up. “For now. Give me the paste.”
I hand it to him, and he returns the favor, applying it to my shoulders and one little dab on my forehead, which isn’t sore anymore.
“Caronerax, are you a special kind of dragon? You seem different from the others I’ve met.”
He sighs deeply. “More endless interrogations. Yes, every dragon is different.”
“But you are more different than most?”
He finishes up. “There. Your injuries are healing, as opposed to mine. The sun is still in the sky, and I see water up ahead. Let’s walk more.”
I guess that’s not a topic he wants to discuss.
We don’t get far before the ground turns moist and we’re looking out at an immense swamp that vanishes into the horizon on all sides except straight ahead, where there is a dark little shadow of dry land. An island, probably. Or it could be a kind of mirage.
The setting sun is reflected in a million little puddles and lakes, and in between them there’s soggy ground and marsh.
My heart sinks in my chest. “This will be hard to get through. A raft will be useless. We may have to try to find a way around it.”
“There will be no going around anything,” Caronerax says with determination. “I always go through.”
“Don’t you usually fly?”
“I did. Now that I’m bound to this grotesquely debilitating ground, I will go through.”
I like his optimism, but I wonder if it might be slightly out of place here. “Do you think maybe that by tomorrow, you will have healed so much that you can change into a dragon and fly?”
He turns around and walks back to the woods. “I suppose now you want a fire, yes?”
I think that was a ‘no’. “Sure.”
Squinting out at the swamp, I reflect that at least whoever is following us will have a hard time doing that if we end up somehow wading our way through the mire. There are a few bushes, but no trees that anyone can hide behind. That goes for dinosaurs as well.
Except for the alligator kind, of course, if such things exist here. We’ve never seen snakes on Xren, but the giant insects will probably be here in force. Mosquitoes the size of seagulls, probably.
I gather round rocks and make a small circle of them, well away from the soggy ground. I have nothing to cook on the fire, and the walk has warmed me up fine, but I like the light and sounds from a fire at night. That’s the way we do it back in the village, and it’s kind of grown on me.
“Back on Earth I’ll need an open fire in every room to be able to sleep,” I mutter as I make a pyramid of kindling in the middle of the fire ring. “Have to fire-proof everything.”
Caronerax brings a huge heap of dry wood.
“That would be enough for several nights,” I observe. “But better with too much than too little.”
Caronerax sits down against a tree and closes his eyes.
I worry about him. In the beginning, he didn’t sit down at all, but now it seems like he relishes it. Is his face a paler blue, too? It’s hard to tell — he has really dark stubble that’s growing into a pretty thick beard, which I usually don’t like but which is unreasonably fetching on his face. Not that it needed any more manliness, but it makes him look kind of sophisticated.
“Are you feeling okay?” I ask, sitting down beside him on the bed of dry pine needles.
“‘Okay’ can mean so much,” he growls. “Your language is too flexible to convey actual meaning.”
“Because I wonder how far it is to where you want to go. You can do some healing there, right? It’s a part of your hoard?”
He opens his eyes to luminous, blue and yellow strips. “How did you know?”
“It’s pretty obvious. A cache which can help you regain your strength… it pretty much has to be either a full hoard of part of one. I think you’re the only one of the dragons that came here who thought about bringing something like that.”
He closes his eyes again. “I must be sicker than I thought, expressing myself so simply that anyone could understand.”