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Maybe, doesn’t make it right though, I said and let out a long breath. I squared my shoulders and then forced myself to walk inside.
“You come back again soon,” the shopkeeper said with a bright smile, pocketing the gold Flea handed her. “We’ve got a shipment from Sariah coming in that promises to have quite the range of delicacies.”
“Will there be any deep-sea tiger abalone? I had some at a restaurant in Damorica and it was divine when sliced wafer-thin and dipped in soy sauce,” I said. Everyone’s eyes turned to me and I instantly regretted opening my mouth. Flea looked surprised but the shopkeeper just sniffed.
“Not likely to get anything highly perishable.” She went back to Flea, “Do tell us if the cheese is to your liking.”
“And don’t forget your flowers,” Jenny said. She picked them up off the countertop and passed them to him, a simple enough gesture if you weren’t looking for the clues. Perhaps it was just me who saw the slight shake in her hand when she handed them to him, her teeth digging into her full bottom lip, her eyes going wide, shining in the late afternoon light. Fuck, I thought, she’s hoping they’re for her.
I almost wished they were. I watched her face fall as he picked them up and shoved them into the basket with a polite nod, not even noticing the play-by-play of her expressions: realisation bleeding into crushing disappointment, then muting into resignation. I remained frozen, unable to look away, transfixed by the all too familiar cycle of emotion on the girl’s face. “Tess?” Flea said, jerking his head to the other basket. I started forward, collecting it and turned to go. I paused for a moment, meeting Jenny’s eyes and wishing there was something I could say. I didn’t get much for my troubles, just a flat stare.
By the time I got outside, Flea was retrieving the ropes we used to coil around Miazydar and tie baskets to. He made his usual disparaging comments about being a flying donkey and my brain went off on a tangent, wondering what the flying baby dragon-donkeys from Shrek would have grown up like. It took for Flea to walk up to me, slipping an arm around my waist to bring me back to the here and now. “I got some stuff for a picnic,” he said, the sun hanging low in the sky casting golden shadows across his face. “There’s a nice spot just up the hill a ways.”
I know where it is. Are you amenable?
“Yeah, OK.”
A strange side effect of getting back into training again was I felt a lot more comfortable in my skin. I was still clumsy AF and seemed able to trip over the tiniest bumps on an uneven surface, but weirdly, when I was training regularly I could fight semi-convincingly. The aches in my muscles drew my attention to my body. I was conscious of how I moved and as I went on; I felt stronger and more competent. Well, all that fled now.
I stood awkwardly as Flea arranged a feast on the grassy slope. Someone or some animal had cropped the grass into a short, plush pile. I looked at it; the bottles, the array of food and… fidgeted. I moved to go and sit down but then where should I sit? He picked up the bunch of flowers as he sorted out the food. Should I be sitting next to him, all romantic like and stare into each other’s eyes as the sun went down? Should I just sit wherever like it was no big deal? Should I wait for him to usher me wherever he wanted me?
Just sit, or don’t, but stop dissecting every choice.
Obediently, I dropped to the ground, cross-legged, realising all too late I wasn’t close enough to the food. While Flea’s back was turned I shuffled over like a dog dragging his bum on the ground. He smiled when he saw me, then held out the flowers, just as Jenny had hoped, I’m sure. “For you.”
“Wow, Flea…” I took the bright-coloured bunch and looked down at the complex patterns on each bloom. They had an alien quality that made them all the prettier to my untrained eye.
“Not exactly a surprise, but I saw them and thought of you, I guess.” He sat down beside me with a fluid grace I hoped to attain one day. He reached over and popped the lid of two bottles of beer, passing me one and taking the other. I watched his throat work as he took a long swig and then he turned to me. “This is nice. It seems you’re always busy with the war games and the bullshit at the university. Then there’s Jez and her crap. It’s nice for it to be just us for once, y’know.”
“It’s only us two in bed at night,” I said with a grin, then realised how that came across.
He laughed at my expression. “I know and I enjoy what goes on in there too, it’s just…” He reached out and took my hand in his, letting his hands rub against mine.
“Maybe you should spend some time with Jenny,” I said, hating the sound of my own voice, sounding suspiciously quavery to me. I kept my eyes on where our fingers met, not trusting myself to look up. “She seemed keen and… it’s OK by me. Not that you need my permission, of course.”
His chuckle was brief and dry, his hand tightening around mine before he hauled me closer, rearranging me, something that took more manoeuvring than it should but finally, I was settled against his body, his arms around me, his legs to either side of mine. “Jenny’s a nice girl, but I very much doubt I’ll ever see her slice a man in two, ride a dragon like she owns it, fight with a sword or a spear and then throw herself off a dragon rather than get cut down. You’re like a real life superhero, Tess, ain’t no other girl gonna give me that.” The fingers of one of his hands tangled themselves in my hair, stroking the strands smooth before slipping free. “Anyway, you don’t need to push me towards anyone, looking to legitimise what you’re doing. I gotta admit, in my heart of hearts, I hope that what’s happening with flyboy is just working through the crush you had on Merlin, but maybe it isn’t. All I can do is hope that I’m the one standing by your side at the end. That maybe I’ll get to see that secret part of yourself you hold deep down inside, thinking no one is noticing.”
“Secret…?”
“You think no one sees it, but I do. I’ve seen you run rings around your sister when we got back, setting up the business deals through the portal and managing both Ash and the clients. That mind of yours is ticking over, seeing what others don’t, working out solutions before anyone’s even noticed there’s a problem. You don’t speak, you do. I don’t know who taught you to keep it all inside, maybe it was that crazy mothe
r of yours, but Tess, I’m here, even if you do decide on flyboy, I’m here. You’re the dragon rider in my drawings, brave, uncompromising, staring down obstacles face on, looking out over alien landscapes, deciding on what needs to be done.”
I was thankful for how we were sitting. I should’ve been flattered, I was conscious of that, but I wasn’t. Instead, the sun saw my no doubt gutted expression. We were wrapped up in each other’s bodies, but I couldn’t have felt any further apart from Flea if I got on Miazydar and travelled to the furthest reaches of the continent. How could he not see it, the cost of getting up each day and facing everyone’s envy and dislike? I was forced to leap off a dragon’s back because I thought I was going to be sliced in two by some kind of lightsaber spear. I couldn’t even complete my coursework here, having to rely on my dragon to do my homework for me. Hot angry tears pricked at my eyes and I rubbed them away before he could see them. It wasn’t his fault; he didn’t know and I didn’t tell him. Rather, I focussed on my breathing until my heart rate began to settle.
We ate afterwards. Jenny had been right, the cheese was especially creamy. We should definitely put that on the list for next time. We didn’t say much, Flea seemed to feel he’d made his grand gesture and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him otherwise.
31
I sat outside with Miazydar later that night after everyone else had gone to bed. My mind was churning: Greynell’s revelations, relationships, war games, school, training, jumping off dragons, poison, assessments, students trying to take me out. I’d been juggling all those balls, keeping them in the air and now they all lay on the ground around me. Miazydar didn’t give advice, just placed his massive head along alongside my body, forcing my hand to rest on his scales as we both looked out onto the stars of an alien galaxy. It was too much, that was apparent as soon as I listed all the things that were happening, so what was I going to do about this?
Survive.
I straightened, looking over at my dragon. The word was a faint hiss in my mind; I wasn’t sure if it came from me or Miazydar. It didn’t matter; it occurred to me because that was all I could do. I had to get through this, get us home where I had the luxury of pondering the rest. Mentally, I packed up all my worries, frustrations and preoccupations and locked them up tight in a box inside me, marked ‘to open later’. Miazydar’s head lifted as I got to my feet, but I patted his shoulder as I passed, walking back into the cottage. I slipped in between the cool sheets, curled around Flea’s sleeping form and dropped off into slumber like a baby.
32
So survive I did.
