Chapter Twenty-Three
Mac
A few days later, Galen's paragon and siblings brought giant cuts of raw bovinji. As loath as I was to leave our blanket fort, they asked me to cook them over my camp stove while they chatted. I couldn't refuse.
Galen tucked the blankets around themself and the babies so all their family could see was their snout and eyes. They looked like a fluffy worm, and the blankets were their chrysalis.
I flipped the meat twice, leaving it a touch red in the middle, just the way Galen liked it. I seasoned it the way I always did for special occasions, forgetting I was cooking for Galen's family for the first time.
Galen barely moved to eat, and no one complained when they ate off their plate like a dog and chewed on the bones while we sat and ate with our fingers like civilized folk.
"What are these flecks of green on top of my food?" Chance asked after taking their first bite.
"Tastes delicious," Lux said, jabbing an elbow into Chance's alpha kobold chest.
"Mac always uses seasoning for me," Galen said. "These are my favorites, so far. He said there are many more varieties to try on Earth."
For a moment, I thought Galen's paragon would spit their food out on their plate. They swallowed hard and glared at me. "You are feeding us human spices?" Their tone implied I had given them illicit drugs.
"Basil, thyme, and rosemary," I said. "They didn't come from Earth. We grow them in our herb garden here at the fortress."
Their paragon relaxed at that, though they squinted at the hamburger I'd cooked for myself. "Where are your spices?"
I didn't usually put spices on hamburger, choosing instead to slather it with ketchup, yellow mustard, and a layer of pickles, but I made a show of dousing it with black pepper and a dash of the other spices I named for them before I covered it with my usual condiments.
Despite their concerns, the dragons ate their spiced meat and even licked their plates clean. After dinner, when I picked up the dishes, Galen's paragon leaned toward them.
"I'm surprised you can eat spiced meat, after what happened."
Galen tensed, and we both knew what the older dragon meant. Galen had told me the story many times, how the kobold priestess had brought them a bovinji roast covered in spices and sleeping herbs.
"Sorry for scrying," Lux whispered. "I had to know how you were doing. You were so small, and you looked so lost when we left."
Galen frowned at their paragon. "You knew when they raised the changeling circle?"
Their paragon reached to pat Galen's cheek, but they pulled their head inside the blanket like a turtle.
"We were too far away to do anything about it," their paragon said. "I knew from the ingredients, they hadn't tried to kill you."
"That doesn't make your story any better," Galen said.
I hurried to the sink with the dishes, not wanting to be in the middle of a dragon fight, if it came to that.
"Thank you for the lovely dinner, Mac!" Lux shouted a few moments later.
"We will be back in a week," I heard one of the others say to Galen over the rush of water in the sink.
They were gone when I returned to the nest. "Are you all right?" I asked as I peeled back the covers and took my place on the opposite side of our eggs.
"They knew, and they didn't care." Galen sighed. "I spent so much of my life worried they would see what the priestess had done and kill me for failing them, but they knew this whole time."
I shifted Galen's hand from sitting atop the dragon egg to pressed against my chest. I felt my heartbeat beneath their palm. I only hoped they could feel it, too.
"I'm sorry they left you behind. I know that made you feel a lot of unnecessary anxiety."
"So much." They sniffled. "I worried about everything, thinking I wasn't living up to their expectations."
"You didn't let that worry cripple you," I said.
"I did, until I met you." They coughed. "Well, when I smelled you on Punky and Lark, anyway."
"You're being too hard on yourself. You lived without them for a century. Those dragon books said our baby dragon won't be considered an adult until their final molt."
"I had my final molt less than a year ago." Galen nodded. "That doesn't make me feel better. What was so wrong with me that they couldn't take me with them?"
"Nothing was wrong with you," I said. "There were too few dragons."
Galen snorted a puff of smoke but stayed silent.
"They worried there would be even fewer dragons if they didn't go searching for kobold betas to mate," I continued. "You weren't old enough to mate, and someone needed to stay at the fortress, The Spike," I amended, using their word for my home, "to keep the kobolds in line. You did more than that. You befriended Punky and Lark, and Coz and Grindl. You gave Axel the idea for the dragon pavilion and gave us back the sunlight. For centuries, kobold children will learn about Galen the Great in school."
"I thought it was Galen the Grumpy," they chided.
"Galen the Great and Grumpy," I compromised with a grin. Galen had been so serious about their obligations to all dragons and to their family, but they'd done so much more by being themself.
"I am so proud of you," I said. "No one else can take credit for how well dragons and kobolds get along all over Ignitas, now that we've traveled to the other villages and made amends. That's all you." If any of Galen's family tried to take ownership of their accomplishments, I would learn to breathe fire at them myself.
Galen caressed my cheek and then laced our fingers together atop our kobold egg. My arm fell asleep before I did, but I didn't care. I would do anything for them.
* * *
Emails from kobold villages all over Ignitas rolled into my inbox. The villages with dragons were the first to respond. Of course they would come to the first dragon reunion in almost two centuries. The villages with priestesses were almost as fast, though they gave us more information, like the number of betas who would attend to see if they could find their fated mates.
I wondered why they were so quick to hook up with a dragon, but then I reread the email I'd written in haste after Galen's paragon first mentioned the reunion. When describing the betas' fated mates, I'd somehow inconveniently left "dragon" out.
I responded to those emails with a correction. I couldn't in good conscience let them think they were going to the usual alpha/omega meet-ups, only to find themselves in an audience with all the unmatched dragons on Ignitas.
I almost dropped my tablet on the floor when the priestess responded saying even more betas wanted to take part, if they could be mated to a dragon. Apparently, I wasn't the only beta kobold with a death wish.
While half my friends at the fortress still thought that about me, I knew better. Galen would never hurt me. When we flew, they locked me in place with a spell tighter than a seatbelt. In all the time I'd known Galen, they'd never hurt me on purpose.
They'd spent so long alone, I often felt like their teacher and mentor, though they were far older than me. Galen listened to me and made an effort to change, which was a pleasant surprise. I'd expected them to ignore me, or have a "might is right" attitude, but they were intelligent and considerate, two things I'd been taught dragons were not.
I wanted to repay their kindness with a surprise of my own. I had gotten a few responses about Goff's whereabouts in my search, but no one had an email address for him. "He's older than email," a beta from The Meadows said. "The only way to get ahold of him is to knock on his door."
"Do you have anyone willing to do that for me?" I asked.
The response made me laugh. "You got any extra dragonets flying around? I might find it in my heart to check on him, if you do."
I sent a quick message to Han and Sunny. The young beta agreed to let his babies go if it meant a chance to reunite Galen with their father. I was so proud of him. He was already well on his way to becoming a dragonet trainer.
I emailed my contact out west to offer the final bargain. "If you can convince Goff to come to The Spike for a dragon reunion, you'll have two dragonets."
I only hoped it worked.
* * *
Galen's nesting instincts hit hard in the final month. They started rattling off items we would need to keep the babies safe, warm, and fed. I emailed a new list to the fortress every day, asking them to store the items for us in one of the dry caverns in the grotto until we could retrieve them after our eggs hatched.
I almost thought I was immune to nesting, and then the urge gripped me. I wanted to return to our cave and make it safer for hatchlings. I needed to put a lock on our meat cooler, sweep the entrance so there weren't any leftover bone shards from the last pile Galen pushed off the mountain, and …
"When do baby dragons start flying?" I asked Galen.
"After their first molt."
I only had a few months to move the bone pile further away, or we would have a dragon baby foraging for rotten meat.
"Rotten meat is good for babies," Galen said, answering my thought. Their ability grew stronger by the day. I should have been used to it by now, but it still freaked me out. "They will have an iron stomach by their second molt."
"If they survive," I muttered.
"Stop worrying," Galen said. "Look how beautiful our eggs are, huddled together."
The dragon egg was roughly twice the size of our kobold egg, which was larger than any I'd seen before. I'd heard Punky's and Tuft's eggs had been huge from the sunlight, but we'd tucked ours inside the blanket fort most of the time to keep them warm.
"The shells are glowing," I noticed.
"We're getting close," Galen assured me. "Less than a week now."
I placed a hand on each egg and whispered, "I can't wait to meet them."
"Neither can I." Galen's voice rumbled in their chest, and the dragon egg gave a little shake.
"Did you see that?"
We both watched intently for several minutes, but nothing happened. After a quarter-hour, Galen frowned at the dragon egg and said sternly, "They wanted to play with us, but they wore themself out."
They snorted a laugh at our dragon child's expense, and smoke filled our little enclosure, making me cough. Once we aired out the blanket fort, even the glow from the eggs seemed less intense. They were sleeping once more.