“We can go tell the constable that he needs to deputize about a dozen men with bows to come kill a drug-crazed big-as-a-house dragon-chicken.”
It came to me in a flash. “Poison,” I said. “We’ll have to poison it.”
“You’ve got two quarts of arsenic on you?” she asked skeptically. “Would that even be enough for something big as that?”
“Not arsenic.” I nudged the oilskin sack with my foot.
She looked down. “Oh,” she said, crestfallen. “What about my pony?”
“You’ll probably have to skip your pony,” I said. “But we’ll still have enough to buy you a half-harp. In fact, I bet we’ll be able to make even more money from the draccus’ body. The scales will be worth a lot. And the naturalists at the University will love to be able—”
“You don’t need to sell me,” she said. “I know it’s the right thing to do.” She looked up at me and grinned. “Besides, we get to be heroes and kill the dragon. Its treasure is just a perk.”
I laughed. “Right then,” I said. “I think we should head back to the greystone hill and build a fire there to lure it in.”
Denna looked puzzled. “Why? We know it’s going to come back here. Why don’t we just camp here and wait?”
I shook my head. “Look at how many denner trees are left.”
She looked around. “It ate all of them?”
I nodded. “If we kill it this evening, we can be back in Trebon by tonight,” I said. “I’m tired of sleeping outdoors. I want to get a bath, a hot meal, and a real bed.”
“You’re lying again,” she said cheerfully. “Your delivery’s getting better, but to me you’re clear as a shallow stream.” She prodded my chest with a finger. “Tell me the truth.”
“I want to get you back to Trebon,” I said. “Just in case you ate more resin than is good for you. I wouldn’t trust any doctor living there, but they probably have some medicines I could use. Just in case.”
“My hero.” Denna smiled. “You’re sweet, but I feel fine.”
I reached out and flicked her ear with the tip of my finger, hard.
Her hand went to the side of her head, her expression outraged. “Ow…oh.” She looked confused.
“Doesn’t hurt at all, does it?”
“No,” she said.
“Here is the truth,” I said seriously. “I think you’re going to be fine, but I don’t know for certain. I don’t know how much of that stuff you have left working its way into your system. In an hour I’ll have a better idea, but if something goes wrong I’d rather be an hour closer to Trebon. It means I won’t have to carry you as far.” I looked her square in the eye. “I don’t gamble with the lives of people I care for.”
She listened to me, her expression somber. Then the grin blossomed back onto her face. “I like your manly bravado,” she said. “Do it some more.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Sweet Talk
IT TOOK US ABOUT two hours to get back to the greystone hill. It would have been faster, but Denna’s mania was growing stronger, and all her extra energy was more of a hindrance than a help. She was highly distractible and prone to larking off in her own direction if she saw something interesting.
We crossed the same small stream that we had before, and, despite the fact that it wasn’t much more than ankle deep, Denna insisted on bathing. I washed up a little, then moved a discreet distance away and listened to her sing several rather racy songs. She also made several none-too-subtle invitations that I could join her in the water.
Needless to say, I kept my distance. There are names for people who take advantage of women who are not in full control of themselves, and none of those names will ever rightfully be applied to me.
Once we reached the peak of the greystone hill, I put Denna’s surplus of energy to use and sent her to gather firewood while I made an even larger fire pit than our previous one. The bigger the fire, the quicker it would draw the draccus close.
I sat down next to the oilskin bag and opened it. The resin gave off an earthy smell, like sweet, smoky mulch.
Denna returned to the top of the hill and dropped an armload of wood. “How much of that are you going to use?” she asked.
“I still have to figure that out,” I said. “It’s going to require some guesswork.”
“Just give him all of it,” Denna said. “Better safe than sorry.”
I shook my head. “There’s no reason to go that far. It would just be wasteful. Besides, the resin makes a powerful painkiller when properly refined. People could use the medicine…”
“…and you could use the money,” Denna said.
“I could,” I admitted. “But honestly, I was thinking more about your harp. You lost your lyre in that fire. I know what it’s like to be without an instrument.”
“Did you ever hear the story about the boy with the golden arrows?” Denna asked. “That always bothered me when I was young. You must want to kill someone really badly to shoot a gold arrow at him. Why not just keep the gold and go home?”
“It certainly shines a new light on that story,” I said, looking down at the sack. I guessed this much denner resin would be worth at least fifty talents to an apothecary. Maybe as much as a hundred, depending on how refined it was.
Denna shrugged and headed back into the trees for more firewood and I began the elaborate guesswork of how much denner it would take to poison a five ton lizard.
It was a nightmare of educated guessery, complicated by the fact that I had no way to make accurate measurements. I started with a bead the size of the last digit of my little finger, my guess as to how much resin Denna had actually swallowed. However, Denna had been liberally dosed with charcoal, which effectively reduced that by a half. I was left with a ball of black resin slightly larger than a pea.
But that was just the amount required to make a human girl euphoric and energetic. I wanted to kill the draccus. For that I tripled the dose, then tripled it again to be sure. The end result was a ball the size of a large, ripe grape.
I guessed the draccus weighed five tons, eight hundred stone. I guessed Denna at eight or nine stone, eight to be on the safe side. That meant I needed a hundred times that grape-size dose to kill the draccus. I made ten grape-size pellets, then mashed them together. It was the size of an apricot. I made nine more apricot-size balls and set them in the wooden bucket we had brought from the denner plantation.
Denna dropped another load of wood and peered down into the bucket. “That’s it?” she asked. “It doesn’t look like very much.”
She was right. It didn’t look like much at all compared to the draccus’ huge bulk. I explained how I’d come up with my estimate. She nodded. “That seems about right, I guess. But don’t forget that it’s been eating trees for the better part of a month. It probably has a tolerance.”
I nodded and added five more apricot-size balls to the bucket.
“And it might be tougher than you think. The resin might work different on lizards.”