Cecily places the ring in her palm. She is already planning how she will apologize to Nolan, but she thinks that he will understand.
The dragon lowers its head like a horse to a sugar cube. Cecily doesn’t feel lips or a tongue, but she does feel the click of the dragon’s teeth against metal.
And then the ring is gone, and for the first time she can remember, the dragon’s hunger is gone, too. Not just bearable, not just ignorable—completely, entirely gone. Cecily can breathe, although her ribs ache from the fall she took. The air tastes like dust and sunlight and clean sweat and timothy hay, and the dragon isn’t hungry anymore, and Cecily’s father is silent behind her.
“You’re not supposed to eat iron,” Cecily whispers. “You’re supposed to eat gold.”
The dragon does not answer. It looks toward the open door and shifts its wings, so much like a bird that Cecily can’t help but laugh a little. Her laugh dies in her throat when she sees threads of bright gold spreading through the membrane of the wings, slowly at first and then faster.
“No,” her father says. “No, it’s—you can’t give these things what they want, Cecily, you don’t understand, you have to let them know who’s in charge or else—”
“Or else what?” Cecily murmurs, and her father doesn’t answer her the way he usually would because he’s distracted by the dragon walking toward him. He steps backward, out of the barn, and the dragon steps forward, slow and sinuous. The gold is still spreading through its dark wings like fire eating at the edge of kindling; when it steps into the sunlight, it spreads those wings wide, stretching them until they block out the whole of the barn door. Cecily follows it.
For the first time either of them can remember, the dragon is not hungry, and Cecily is not afraid.
Cecily is eighteen years old, and there is no dragon in the barn. The barn is empty, and there is a dragon in the sky above her house, and she will talk about it with whomever she chooses.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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Maybe Just Go Up There and Talk to It
Scott Lynch
Scott Lynch (www.scottlynch.us) was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1978. He is the author of the World Fantasy Award–nominated The Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels, and his short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies. In 2016, Scott traded the plains of Wisconsin for the hills and valleys of Massachusetts, and married his longtime partner, fellow SF/F writer Elizabeth Bear.
After Saipan in the summer of ‘44, Emery Blackburn had a lot of adjusting to do. First, to the sudden acquisition of a pair of Japanese bullets, one in each leg, and then to the painful tedium of evacuation to a hospital ship. Next came hepatitis, which got him kicked all the way back to Hawaii. Not the postcard Hawaii of legend, either, the one with hot-and-cold-running nurses and more gentle white beaches and ice cream than a sober convalescent could take. In Emery’s case, all the nurses came from the cold side of the tap, and the only intimate acquaintances he made were the mechanical slings that dangled his slowly healing legs in place. He spent two months in bed thinking of himself as half man, half catapult.
Once upright, he learned to adjust to shambling with a crutch, then to stumbling without one, then to walking almost normally, just in time for the doctors to finally tame the wracking of his liver. His eyes, which he examined in a mirror not more than thirty times a day, gradually lost the bright tinge of a ripe mango. However, Emery was never fated to rejoin the 4th Marine Division. His next major adjustments were to (in precise order) the existence of atomic bombs, the surrender of Japan, the end of the war, and an honorable if expedited separation from the Corps.
They cut Emery loose in late ‘45, thirty pounds light and walking with a hoppy little cartoon hitch because of it (and the never-quite-fading ghost of those holes in his thigh muscles). His bank account was reasonably insulated with an E-3’s back pay, and he supposed he was lucky to have a medal with George Washington’s head on it to remind him thereafter of the crucial difference between cover and concealment. He could have got one of those by not surviving, too.
The journey back to Carbon County, Wyoming, wasn’t comfortable. Emery was an advance drop in a wave of a million similarly unemployed men then washing ashore, and he was four years out of sync with the civilian world, so everything was harder than it needed to be and slower than shit rolling uphill. Still, he was good at adjusting by that point, and in due course he adjusted himself home to Reunion Creek, population 315 plus one. There he adjusted to the hollow feeling of being in a town that no longer held any living relations and to the sudden realization that he’d come back by dumb reflex. Emery stared down the barrel of full-on manhood, twenty-four and feeling about two hundred, and wondered just what the hell he’d thought this old familiar nowhere had to offer him for the long decades that needed filling.
That took care of the spring of ‘46, a good lengthy sulk, a proper mope to which still-waters-run-deep sorts like Emery Blackburn occasionally feel entitled and don’t hold against themselves. He looked for clues at the bottoms of beer cans and found only tin. Eventually, he adjusted again, picked himself up, let the sun burn him and the mountain winds push him around a bit. Clear-eyed and copacetic, he felt ready to make a move, and started hunting for the one to make.
That was when the storms blew through, the dry thunderstorms, rainless crackling things under licorice-black clouds, the storms that blotted out the sun for days and ate radio waves like candy, and when they had passed, pouring up into the night sky like dark exhalations, why, goddamn if there weren’t dragons in the world.
The fuss was considerable and it came in every flavor you might expect. Preachers took to their street corners, columnists burned holes in their typewriter ribbons, and the airwaves were lively with cranks proclaiming their apocalypse of preference. Martial law was declared, un-declared, then reinstated in an ever-shifting patchwork. Civil defense administrators who’d missed the chance to test their fancy training against Axis bombers seized their clipboards and ran toward the sound of planning committees. Air-raid sirens came out of garages, not to mention gas-attack rattles, air horns, drums, and flares. Everyone signaled everyone else as often as they could, for reasons that were largely unclear, for about a week. Congress declared a general emergency and the states called out the National Guard, whose first task was usually to smash the barricades some enterprising locals had thrown across their nearest crossroads. Things got more orderly in a hurry.
After all, Emery reflected, the nation was only barely demobilized to begin with, the sinews of coast-to-coast military discipline had slackened only a touch, and maybe it was a fortuitous moment for absorbing the uncanny. Real live dragons were a lot to take in, but then again, what about a six-year war that had killed fifty million people? What about jet planes, rockets, the fall of a few empires, Fat Man and Little Boy? Also, the creatures appearing in the wake of the black storms promptly set about eating people and livestock, and that had a way of focusing attention on matters of immediate practicality.