Targan Fraser's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Targan Fraser had not slept in three nights, and the black egg had not made a sound in four. He sat on the straw floor of the great timber hall his clan had raised for this hatching, a wide hold of stone footings and high beams built to shelter dragons and their gear. Four eggs rocked in the warm sand at the center. The fifth, the black one, sat still. His old dragon lay curled around it, refusing meat, refusing sleep, refusing him. She had spoken into his mind the day he was twenty and burst his left ear like a struck drum. He was fifty-one now, and half his clan said he was too old to lead another bonding. The other half only thought it. He meant to hatch this clutch anyway and hand his people dragons enough to last a hundred years. The boy came in before dawn, the fourteen-year-old who rode better than Targan ever had. He carried Targan's cloak and a bowl of broth, and he set both down without speaking. Targan waved the broth away. He put his palm on the black shell. It was cold. Not cool. Cold, like a stone pulled from a river. "Bring me the staff from the vigil ground," Targan said. "And help me move the stone." They carried the tall standing stone in on a sled, the one carved with spirals that his grandfather's grandfather had set above the old graves. It took six men. They stood it upright beside the sand pit. Then the boy fetched the druid's staff, the one wound with living vine and set with a green stone at its head. Targan had kept it wrapped in oilcloth for twenty years and had never used it. He had been afraid of it. He was not afraid now. He pressed the foot of the staff to the carved stone and laid the green crown against the black egg. Into his mind he said, wake. He said it to the egg and to his dragon both. The green stone brightened. The vines on the staff uncurled and reached. A line of warmth ran down his arm into the shell. The cold under his palm gave way. Something inside the egg moved, once, then again, hard enough to rock it in the sand. His old dragon lifted her head. She had not lifted it in two days. She drew a long breath through her nose, and the runes along her flank caught the lamp light and held it. She spoke into his good ear, clear as a girl's voice. I felt that. The black egg cracked along its crown. A wet snout pushed through, dark as wet coal, eyes already open. His dragon stood. She ate the meat the boy held out to her without looking at it. Targan set the staff down with shaking hands. The hatchling was alive. His dragon was alive in a way she had not been in a year. And now five dragons would need riders, not four, and the clan outside the doors did not yet know that he had spent a rel