said. “It’s dangerous, going across the open.”
“It’s early in the day for dragons,” Finnegan said.
“They do tend to rest in the early morning,” Lucas said, “when the mist is in the air. But once it burns off, they will be about, day and night.”
“How many are there?” Aurora asked.
“At least fifty. All adults. But who knows how many there are farther inland, keeping away from the shore, where there’s less water.”
On the horizon, Aurora could see the beginning of a small lake, or maybe a pond, shimmering in the sunlight. Grass and reeds grew around it, dipping into the water, a small splash of green.
“If they can’t bear water,” Aurora asked, “how do they drink?”
“They don’t drink,” Finnegan said. “Or we don’t think so.”
“I’ve been studying them for my whole life,” Lucas said, “but still we know so little. They seem to eat stone. The charred earth they make. Meat occasionally, although they don’t seem to need it. Metal too. We think the mountain they live in is full of the stuff, although no one has had the courage to check. Even before the dragons came, that mountain was considered too dangerous to enter. Too large a risk of a cave-in, you know. It was lucky, in the end, that we never tried to mine there. The mines nearer the river proved dangerous enough, until we built a moat around them to protect them.”
“Yet people were still willing to work there?” Aurora asked.
“People need money,” Finnegan said. “The mines pay better than anything. And people working there are rarely burned anymore.”
“Rarely burned?” she said. “But it happens?”
“Only to the foolish. People who don’t take the necessary precautions. Like us.”
“And what happens to people like us, if they do get burned?”
“They die,” Finnegan said. “Nothing lives where dragons burn.”
“You can see for yourself, Rose,” Lucas said. “Plants can’t grow where the ground has been scorched, even after fifty years. Skin can’t recover from that. Even if people aren’t killed straightaway, it’s a painful and inevitable death.”
The wind was harsher out in the waste, with little but the rise and fall of the land to shelter them. It whistled in Aurora’s ears, as sharp as the cry of a dragon.
Lucas stopped and raised a hand. “Wait,” he said. “On the horizon there.”
In the distance, a long red shape burned across the sky. A dragon. It hovered for a moment, its wings held aloft, then snapped its body downward and dove out of sight.
Aurora stared at the spot where the dragon had disappeared. It should have been impossible. Impossible for her to stand here, over a hundred years after she had been born. Impossible for dragons to exist. Yet here they both were. It made her think of childhood stories, childhood dreams, that yearning for adventure. . . . Was this what others had felt, when the king announced that the sleeping princess was awake, when the dazed girl stumbled out before them? That all things were possible, now this time had come?
“See, dragon girl?” Finnegan said. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist them.”
She looked away. “You don’t know as much as you think you do.”
They walked on through the waste, until the sun was high in the sky and Aurora’s legs ached underneath her. A few more dragons flew on the horizon, but none came close. Sometime after noon, they reached another abandoned settlement, with black, melted buildings. A steep slope sheltered the town on one side, while a small river wove around the other.
“We should stop here,” Lucas said. “Have something to eat.”
They sat in what must once have been the town square. A stream trickled past, flush with greenery on either side. The grass tickled Aurora’s feet, extra soft after the unyielding earth.
“Is the water safe to drink?” she asked.
Lucas nodded, so she leaned forward and cupped some in her hands. It tasted different, like it was a little charred too. It held a trace of dragon fire, as though even the things that dragons could not touch were tainted by their presence.
They ate in silence. Aurora stared at the ruins, trying to imagine that people had lived here once. And not just people, but people like her, women who had been born the year that she was born, women who might still have been alive when the dragons swooped out of the sky. Children who might have been the age of her grandchildren, if she had not fallen asleep.
The sky rumbled, and Aurora flinched and looked up,