She keeps telling the dragon about Nolan asking her to marry him—about how he got up on one knee, and he gave her the gold ring that his grandmother left him, the one with a little diamond chip in it. When she says the word gold, another blast of hunger hits her, fresh and brutal, and she curls into a ball and waits for it to die away.
“I don’t have any more iron, I’m sorry,” she cries. When she apologizes, the force of the hunger ebbs, and she straightens. “I’ll ask if we have any extra somewhere,” she says. “I promise. Anyway—I suppose I’ll have to tell Nolan about you, won’t I? So he can bring iron home, and then maybe we can feed you together.”
If that second blast of hunger hadn’t been so cruel—if it hadn’t been so desperate and urgent and overpowering—maybe Cecily would have heard the sound of her father climbing the ladder. Maybe she would have heard him coming into the loft. But I don’t think she would have. After all, the dragon was below her, and even when it wasn’t doing anything, it was a big living animal, breathing and shifting its weight and creaking like an old ship. Its scales rasped on the floor, and its claws dug into the earth, and it was made of noise even if it wasn’t always easy to figure out what it was doing based on the sounds it made.
“Tell Nolan about who?” Cecily’s father was right behind her when he said it, and she jumped about a mile. She would have fallen right off the edge of the hayloft except that her father caught her by the collar. He hung on to it longer than he needed to, gave it a little shake, and she remembered being six years old, mouthing off at the dinner table, that feeling of being small and weak and afraid and not knowing why.
But it’s just a little shake of the collar, and Cecily will not make a big deal about it, even if it does put a familiar knot in her belly.
“I just meant that Nolan would need to know about my chores,” she says. She doesn’t know why she feels afraid to say the word dragon.
“And why on earth,” her father says, “would he need to know that? You just need to go to the barn for five minutes once a week. Why do you need to explain that to anybody?”
Cecily has fallen into a trap. She knows it, and you know it, and I know it. Because the thing is, she isn’t supposed to talk to the dragon. She isn’t supposed to talk to anyone. She’s not stupid; it’s occurred to her to wonder what her father is doing in the loft, why he followed her here, what kind of trouble she’s in. He must have found out about the hours she spends up here each week.
The easy thing to do would be to agree with him, and to go back to spending just a few minutes up here each time the dragon needs feeding. But then Cecily would lose this place, this dark, musty barn where she can talk about being afraid, where she can talk about wanting things. She has already crushed so many small pieces of herself in the name of being safe and keeping her father happy with her, and in this moment, she can’t remember why.
“I need to tell Nolan because he’ll be my husband,” she says. “And I don’t want to have secrets from my husband.”
This is the wrong answer.
Cecily’s father grabs her wrist in his hand that has always been bigger and stronger than hers, and his grip is tight, tighter than it needs to be, but he’s making a point about how much bigger and stronger he is. “You think you’re going to marry that boy?” he says. “You think you’re going to run off and abandon your responsibilities here? You think that’s a smart idea?”
Cecily wants to say that she knows her father knew about Nolan proposing to her, but that would get her brother in trouble and it would make things worse, there’s no point, mustn’t argue. Her father pulls her toward the door to the hayloft, toward the ladder, and for a moment she’s terrified that he’s going to throw her out of it. She yanks her wrist away from him, breaks his grip, stumbles backward.
He shouts, and she doesn’t know for sure what kind of mistake she’s made until she tries to get her balance. She sets her foot down on the floor of the loft, but there’s no floor there. There’s only darkness.
She falls.
It’s a shorter fall than she always feared it would be. She drops like a piece of scrap iron, and she lands hard on her back, and the phrase “the wind was knocked out of her” isn’t adequate to describe the dying-feeling of all the air leaving her at once. She knows that this hurts, she knows that falling that distance hurts, but she can’t feel the pain yet because of the simple shock of landing.
And then there’s the realization of where she is, and there is no time for fear, because the dragon is on her.
Cecily does not hear her father scrambling down from the hayloft, because all she can hear is the scraping of scales, a sound that was like rustling from a distance but that is like a fork on a dinner plate closeup. She does not hear her father unlatching the barn door from the outside, because all she can hear is the bellows whoosh of the dragon breathing. Breathing right next to her, iron-stink breath in her hair. She does not hear the barn door scraping open, wood on metal, rust protesting, because all she can hear is her own heartbeat.
Sunlight streams into the barn, and Cecily sees the dragon.
It is smaller than she imagined, all this time. That does not mean that it is not big. Its eye is close to hers, a dinner plate, and its mouth—
(Oh, Cecily is afraid, she is more afraid than she has ever been.)
—its mouth is on her left hand.
Teeth, on her wrist. Wet on her fingers, she can’t distinguish feelings like “tongue” because her hand is inside a dragon’s mouth and that’s about the limit of what she can process right now. Scales, black as oxidized iron—she’s aware of those but they are in the periphery because the dragon’s teeth are around her wrist.
She wonders why the dragon has not bitten her hand off yet. And then she hears her father’s voice, shouting something that will not resolve into language. She remembers his grip on her wrist, too.
She pulls her hand away from the dragon’s mouth, slowly, gingerly.
It lets her go.
Cecily pushes herself to her feet. She watches the dragon’s eye, the strange pupil contracting in the sunlight. She lifts her hand to see if it is bleeding, and when she does, the sunlight catches on the ring Nolan gave her.
The dragon watches, and hunger pulses in the air around it like a heartbeat.
Cecily has spent years telling the dragon everything about herself. She has told it every wish and want that she has experienced since she was thirteen years old. She has told it about dreams, and about longing, and about lust. She has told it about her hopes. She has told it about her needs.
She thought it wasn’t listening, but she understands now: the dragon has told her the same things. It’s told her about its hunger, every time she’s seen it. It’s asked her for the only thing she ever had to give it, and what she had to give it never quite felt like enough, and she understands, now, why it never quite felt like enough.
Cecily slips the gold ring from her finger. Behind her, her father shouts for her to stop. He steps toward her, and he is radiating the old familiar anger, big and strong, scary on purpose.
The dragon looks at him, and he stops. He has faced it again and again, failed to make it bend to him every time. Today will not be different. The dragon knows this and Cecily’s father knows this, too.