Dragon Soul Read Free Page B

toward appreciating any of the things we’d seen so far. We were moving too damn slow.
    In fact, I didn’t remember any of our journey, excepting that time we’d taken the shortcut and the horse’d spooked and sent Thom straight into the blueberry bushes. Wasn’t the same as a handprint on his face and
he
sure as shit didn’t appreciate the memories as much as I did, but it’d kept me laughing all the way to that night’s inn.
    But that “incident”—which was what he called it—had all been a couple of weeks back. After trading horses—what kind of an idiot could keep his hold on a
dragon
and not a horse, I wanted to know—I was getting mighty sick of traveling with the forgotten thirteenth wonder of the world: my fucking brother, the talking blueberry.
    I twisted the braids back from my face—only thing more fuckingannoying than damp hair was that same hair hanging in my eyes—and braced myself for whatever barrage of questions lay waiting for me on the other side of the door.
    On a full stomach, Thom’s brain was more daunting than the entire bastion-damned Ke-Han capital laid out bare and blue. I opened the door.
    “She bring the food up yet?” I asked. Talking first was the only way to get the drop on him and it was near on fucking impossible to get a word in edgewise unless you came out swinging.
    Fortunately, I had a lot of experience there.
    He was writing, so of course he didn’t answer me right away, which was just another layer of icing on the fucking cake. We’d been through this before and he said it broke the flow of whatever he was writing and that he had to get his sentences down first before he forgot them, or the point he was making. Damn waste of my time is what I called it, and
he
was the one who got mad when I started throwing things to get his attention.
    “Whatever,” I said, tucking in my shirt, then untucking it again, which pissed me off because I didn’t know why I’d done it in the first place. “Fine. Don’t let up on chronicling your fucking eating tour of Volstov’s piss-poorest inns. Guess you won’t miss me when I drop dead of starvation.”
    The gobbler made a funny sound, almost like a snore, and his head drooped lower to the desk. I couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t been writing at all. He’d fucking fallen asleep.
    “Guess you weren’t that eager for a bath after all,” I said, taking the liberty of moving the tray so he wouldn’t wake up with his face in it.
    It took a special kind of witless moron to fall asleep with his head on a plateful of turkey, but that was my brother for you. At least he hadn’t gotten any gravy in his hair, except that saving grace was only because he’d taken the liberty of eating it all first.
    I cracked my neck and pulled a jacket on over my shirt. Looked like I was gonna have to brave the wilderness of downstairs without him. What a fucking shame. With any luck the bitch’d stay in her room, waiting for my grand appearance—her getting ready for it was probably why she hadn’t brought us our second dinner—and meanwhile I could have myself a real night off.
    She’d gone and told me where she’d be, after all, so I knew just what to avoid.
    Of course, helpful little priss hadn’t told me anything useful, like where the kitchens might be, but unlike some people, I was resourceful. I followed my nose.
    The common area was about as crowded as I’d been expecting, full of bearded men and their wives—who were less noticeably bearded, but not exactly picks of the litter, either. The conversation died down a little when I showed up, which was just fucking peachy by me since the last thing I wanted was someone striking up a conversation about my hair while I was trying to choke down a late fucking dinner.
    I sat down on my lonesome, pretty set on avoiding anything that had both turkey and gravy since I’d seen and smelled enough of that for one night. I was far enough away from people that they’d know to keep their