Dragon Tamer

Epilogue

Two months later

I woke up to one of my brothers banging on my door. Grumbling, I rolled out of bed and changed for the day. A tight, long-sleeved shirt, riding pants, and my hide jacket. I threw my hair up in a ponytail and followed Tallinn downstairs. I narrowed my eyes on each of my brothers who were dressed in armour with weapons hanging at their hips. Tallinn peered over at me, looking as annoyed as I was to be woken up before the sun.

"What's going on?" I demanded. The bells hadn't gone off, so we hadn't been attacked.

Dad came in from the front door and handed Casper a map; he dropped a coined purse on the table. "Lord Smythe has hired us to kill a few griffins in the mountains. They've run off with our sheep again. At this rate, we're not going to have any for the winter."

Tallinn groaned. "He couldn't have asked the warriors to do it? You know, the guys who are supposed to stop monsters from stealing our livestock?"

Kaden smacked the back of Tallin's head. "Didn't you hear Da? They're in the mountains. Our warriors are skilled fighters, but they can't track like a Dricino. Track and kill--our specialty."

Giles grinned like a madman. "I've never burnt a griffin before."

"Let's not bring Dragon Vain," Harry advised, as uncomfortable with Giles' eagerness to burn new things as we all were.

"Guys, it's fine." Giles waved it off, slinging his personal bag of Dragon Vain as if it wasn't a highly explosive rock that could destroy the whole house with a single spark.

Casper booted him outside before we had to rebuild our house again. We followed suit one by one, calling upon our go-to dragons.

Elesor arrived swiftly and landed in front of me, rearing her head back in excitement. It'd been a while since we'd gone for a flight through the valley. I'd been so busy with the dragonlings, breaking all the bad habits Spence and Kain had let them develop while I guided Prince Camden. Why did they think giving them jerky to stop chewing on the fence was a good idea? We had to fix the cage at least four times last month alone. Dragons will do anything for jerky. Especially cheeky buggers like Xenu.

Harry, being the best tracker in the family, took the lead. We followed a trail of sheep bones and griffin feathers heading north in the valley. As the sun rose, I shed out of my cloak and Elesor flew in the sunbeams to warm up her scales. Her scales glimmered as she moved in and out of the shadows, like the fish in the Walan River; though, if I compared any part of her to a fish, she'd glady drop me where we were--the middle of nowhere--and not think twice about leaving me behind.

Bored out of his mind, Tallinn laid back on his dragon and stared up at the white clouds passing over us briskly. I swear he was asleep, but whenever Casper called back to us to make sure we hadn't been plucked off our dragons' backs by harpies, he replied instantly, most of the time mockingly.

Up ahead, Harry slowed down and gestured for us to land. We banked right for a small hill in the middle of a field. Elesor wandered a little away from the rest to drink some water, so I hopped off her back to see why Harry wanted us to land.

It only took him to point at Thorn's Forest for me to guess why. "The trail leads in there, guys. No fly zone."

"No fly zone?" Giles repeated. "Do you hear yourself sometimes, Harry?"

While Giles mocked our brother for his jargon, Casper shook his head at both of them. He wiped sweat off his brow and continued the motion through his hair, which spiked it all over the place. Since he started dating Bianca, he'd grown his hair out; I guessed she liked it longer. Not that I blamed her. I'd liked Camden's hair longer, it gave him a more carefree look, less princely. I still sometimes wondered what it would have been like to play with it; would it be soft or coarse, silky or knotty?