Page 40 of Consorting with Dragons

Three months later

The water was beautifully warm as Talon flew across the large lake not far from Quinn’s house, dipping and skimming along the surface, scooping up the occasional big fish as he went. He didn’t even stop to feast on them but gulped them down and flew up toward the clouds again. The lake wasn’t quite the blue color we had on Moravia, but more of a pale gray. I had always loved the water no matter what color it was, though.

I spotted a big outcropping of rock close to shore and steered Talon toward it by pulling on his reins and calling out to him to land on it. It was just about big enough that he could stand on it and still have room for me to slide off and land on my feet beside him.

He had grown in leaps and bounds in the past few months. When I was a little boy, Blake had told me about animals at what he called a “soo” or maybe it was, “zoo.” Anyway, it was a funny word that he used for a place he used to go on Earth as a child. He had described the various animals to me and when he got to the elephants, I’d been so amazed that he had shown me some pictures of them. We didn’t have anything that large on Moravia.

If you took away the giant ears and long trunks and if elephants had wings and shorter legs, the body size of one of those fully grown animals would be approximate to Talon at three months of age. And Quinn had assured me he’d get bigger than he already was. He would probably grow until his firstbirthday, if he followed the pattern of the red vetami, so maybe he’d even be as large as Sulamon, Quinn’s dragon.

Though we had tried to research Golden dragons, we hadn’t been too successful in the details, so we were still being surprised by Talon on an almost daily basis. His neck was already longer and more wiry than the other dragons his age and his wingspan was much wider. He never breathed any fire like the Reds, but he loved to chatter away almost nonstop. Again, that was very unlike the Reds and the Greens.

He and Sulamon did communicate in their enclosure though, and when I’d asked Talon about it, he told me that Sulamon “talked to him on the inside of his head.” That’s what Talon did with us too, though we could hear him quite plainly, and as a rule, we couldn’t hear Sulamon at all, though Quinn said he had heard him during emergencies in the past. He insisted that Sulamon had communicated with him a couple of times before, and on one notable occasion during a skirmish with the enemy, Sulamon had told him clearly about a cleft in the side of a cliff where they could hide. It had saved them both. That gave Quinn hope for the future, but so far, any attempt to get the Red to talk to us like Talon did had been unsuccessful.

But today was a beautiful day and not one for worrying about anything. I was enjoying flying with Talon, and he loved the water. Quinn had gone back to work, ending our vacation not long after the wedding Blake had called that time our “honeymoon.” Whatever it was, it had been amazing, and I’d been lonely for Quinn ever since.

Talon jumped in the water as soon as I dismounted and started to splash. He loved to dive deep beneath the surface, and I’d learned that he could hold his breath for long periods of time.

While he went swimming, I took off my shirt and trousers, leaving me in nothing but

mybreka, and I stretched out on my back to let the sun warm my skin. Quinn would be so scandalized if he saw me. The breka didn’t cover much. He thought I was an “exhibitionist” and that I should be more modest, especially since I was a married man now. But he was on one of his “missions,” and I hadn’t seen him now in just under a month. We talked almost every evening before I went to sleep, but it wasn’t the same and it wasn’t enough, and I didn’t quite understand how it could be for him. Or why he thought it could be enough for me.

Our wedding ceremony had been low key and simple, just the way we’d both wanted it. Quinn had given me a ring that had belonged to his father—a heavy chunk of gold that was way too big and fit only my thumb. Quinn took it to a jeweler the next week and I finally had it back now. It was still a heavy chunk of gold, but really beautiful. I mostly wore it on a chain around my neck.

Quinn had taken about three weeks off from his job after our wedding to stay with me, and we’d become so close in that short amount of time that I’d hoped he wouldn’t be able to leave me when it came time for him to go back to work. We’d made love every day, several times a day, and he had taken me flying on Sulamon to show me his moon.

Horvath was so much larger than I’d imagined. Larger than a lot of planets, its defining feature was that it orbited Lycanus 3, held there by that planet’s gravitational pull.

I’d met Horvath’s queen, whose name was Eujanie. She was very nice and softspoken, and he’d introduced me to a few of the other generals, who were council members and his friends.

But most of all, it had been glorious to sail across Horvath with the wind in my hair, hanging onto Quinn’s waist with both arms wrapped around him, while he pointed out the various landmarks of his world. He flew up into the wild, green mountains near his home and Sulamon found a clifftop withan amazing view of the valley below. We dismounted and stood there just admiring the view for a while, with Sulamon crouched beside us.

Quinn pointed out that Horvath’s interior, particularly its high mountains, were mostly unmapped. He made it a point to tell me to never stray from our mapped and predetermined route if I wanted to explore on my own with Talon. He scared me a little with his stories of how easy it was to get lost.

On one notable occasion, we stopped at a place to take a rest, and I had taken off the heavy coat Quinn had given me for flying, along with the oiled cloth rain cloak that had a hood. I had learned to wear that cloak at all times, especially because Sulamon loved to fly through clouds that got me uncomfortably damp. Quinn took a blanket from our pack to spread on the ground, along with some of the sandwiches he liked and a bottle of wine. We sat on the blanket, eating our sandwiches and passing the wine back and forth between us for a long time that day. We made love there on that mountaintop, under the puffy clouds, and I thought I’d never been so happy before. That had been a good day, but I soon learned those days of togetherness would be few and far between.

It wasn’t long before Quinn started talking about needing to get back to work. When he said “work” he really meant training, because that was the majority of what he and his Dragon Riders did. They trained to stay sharp and ready to go whenever they were needed.

I had asked him to explain the Riders to me and he said they were a special operations unit, within the Horvathian army. It wasn’t anything he liked to go into detail about, but I knew from the few stories he told me that they had a wide range of missions. I knew they did reconnaissance and some stealth raids, because with so many vetami flying everywhere, some tamed and some in the wild, it would be almost impossible to track them all. TheDragon Riders had to teach the animals to fly in patterns and stay together. They could still easily be mistaken for random flights of wild vetami, who liked to hunt for game in small packs, but it was necessary for them to attack as a group.

Horvath was a large moon and a well-known destination for smugglers and pirates. They came to hide out, because it was on the trade routes and near the Lycan planets, not to mention Leeria, a known pirate refuge. With its mountainous terrain and heavy, jungle-like foliage, there was plenty of cover on Horvath for pirate ships that used cloaking devices to fly in secretly to hide their contraband in one of the many caves or conduct other illegal activities.

As long as they didn’t conduct any illegal activities on Horvath, Quinn and his men mostly left them alone, a fact that greatly irritated King Davos and Prince Mikos, who hated pirates and felt they were the scourge of the galaxy.

Right now, the Axis skirmishes with the so-called Coalition of Planets were still going on as well. The king of Thalios had been deposed and was on the run, trying to hide from Mikos. During the raid on Thalios, my grandfather’s army had found a herd of adult Goldens left behind when Travon escaped. It was a small group though, and the officials thought King Travon had managed to run and take some of his vetami with him. No one had been able to find the king as yet, though it was assumed others in his “Coalition” might be helping him.

As far as any actual training went with Talon, that was practically non-existent. I’d been riding him as long as he’d been old enough, and I had learned to ride him really well, but he wasn’t the best at following orders. He talked almost non-stop, telling me every maneuver he was about to make, which was good, but if he suddenly decided to veer off course and go investigate some interesting fish or bird, or whatever, he just took off. We were working on that, along with him taking orders,but it was a slow process. And since there were only so many times that I could ride him around to look at scenery, we were both getting a little bored. We mostly did it now to help Talon practice his flying skills.

But, in point of fact, I was just bored, full stop. And I was afraid that Talon would get that way soon too. Back at home, I’d been in my father’s army and had trained and worked with the other soldiers a good deal of the time. Now it seemed that Quinn just wanted me to sit around and be an ornamental fuck toy and that just wasn’t me. Actually, the fuck toy part of that wasn’t totally wrong, as long as it was Quinn, but I still wanted a real job.

What I really wanted to do was train to be a Dragon Rider, but every time I brought it up, Quinn said it was “out of the question.” As if that were supposed to end the discussion. In truth, all it did was piss me off and make me want to do it even more.

I was lying on my back, half asleep that day, basking in the sun, when a big shadow came across me, and I sat up to see what it was. I was shocked to see a black hovercraft above me, like the kind the Tygerians used. I clambered to my feet, shading my eyes with my hand as I looked up at it. It flew past me, then turned and came back, slowing down as if looking for a place to land. Talon saw it too and came rushing to me from the water, getting out and shaking himself off. He stood in front of me with his wings unfurling.

“What is it, Rylie? Is it another dragon like me? One I haven’t seen before?”

“No, Talon, it’s a hovercraft. A spaceship. Tygerian, I think. Maybe somebody I know.”

The hovercraft had landed not far from us, over on shore. I grabbed my trousers and pulled them on and then held the rest of my clothes in my hand as Talon bent down for me toget on his leg, so he could toss me up to his back. It was a fancy little maneuver that we’d practiced so many times we could practically do it in our sleep. It was a little showy, and he tossed me probably unnecessarily high up in the air. I landed with a little plop in my seat. Then when I was settled in my small saddle-like device across his shoulders, Talon took off with a big beat of his wings and soared over onto shore to land about fifty feet away from the hovercraft. I jumped off, still barefoot and shirtless to see the hatch door swing upward and a set of automatic steps descend.

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