Jeryon follows the stream to the beach and his salting operation. He puts seawater onto dragon skin stretched loosely in a frame, then uses a bamboo scraper to collect the salt after the water evaporates. He stores it in bamboo tubes for use in salting fish. The frames are empty now, as are the drying racks and salting crates lined with wing membrane. He hauls them into the trees. The salt tubes are already at camp.
The new cabin faces where the last one stood, a mirror image except it’s elevated only half as high and the windows are even larger than those of the first cabin. Where the last one stood, asphodel grows.
He sits on the porch. He won’t miss this cabin.
He hears a rustling under the porch. Jeryon swings his feet. More rustling. He swings his feet higher and counts. One. Two. On the third upswing, he feints bringing his legs down and a long, wide snout snaps at where his much-repaired sandal would have been. He puts his foot on Gray’s head between her new horns. She can’t shake it off. Her tongue whips over her nose and licks him between the toes. That does it. He jerks his foot away and she pushes out.
Her breath whips over him too. It smells like charcoal. She’s good about her fire now. She won’t use it around the camp and rarely uses it when he hasn’t commanded her to.
When she does it’s usually to torch white crabs. The gelatinous phlogiston, which bursts into flame on contact with air, sticks to their shells, and she likes to watch them run around in a panic. Jeryon douses them before they set fire to the forest, although that, he’s come to understand, is one of her fire’s purposes: to light the brush and drive game into the open. Doing so once resulted in her discovering a hive of blue crabs, which normally hide when they don’t have a dragon to strip.
Disappointingly, her fire also imparts a bad taste to food, like rancid oil, when used to light a cooking fire. So Jeryon trained her to use it on command by having her light a branch he could then use to light his fires. He wishes he could put the raw gel on the ends of small sticks, then coat the gel with a substance that could be rubbed off to set the stock on fire. The Trust would make gobs of money, and he would become the hero of housemaids and sculleries everywhere.
Jeryon had thought that Gray getting her fire signaled the onset of adolescence and a new growth spurt, one that would make her large enough to ride soon, but it hadn’t. Perhaps she was traumatized by the fire. She wasn’t burned badly. Her skin is indeed largely fireproof. When she charged through the cabin wall just before the roof collapsed, she was more injured by the jagged ends of bamboo.
He spent a week trying to wrap her wounds in healing leaves the way the poth had done for him, but she chewed them off. She was surlier than anything for a month, snapping at him and refusing to obey. Fortunately, the wounds healed well, the scars vanished as her top color hardened, along with her scales, to a slate gray, and six months later she began the growth spurt that’s still ongoing.
As her neck emerges, she scrapes it against the bottom of the porch to remove some pale flakes of dead skin left over from her most recent shed. He lined the underside with long wedges of bamboo to help her and, more importantly, to reinforce the porch. They’re no use, though, when she has to scratch in the middle of the night and uses the columns, shaking the whole cabin. He’s worried she could bring it down, and he’s becoming worried she’ll grow so much one night she won’t be able to get out in the morning.
Next come her shoulders, the forearms of her wings, and her elbows with their hand-long bone spikes. She uses them to hold things, pin crabs, stab beetles, and, most often, scratch her back. When he was breaking her to the saddle, she destroyed the first, a wicker number, with her spikes. And when he was breaking her to his weight by lying across her back, she nearly stabbed him several times. In one respect she’s trained him. When she twitches an elbow spike he scratches her back with a small rake. He put a strap to hold the rake on saddle number seven, which has a wooden frame covered in dragonhide.
Now, her torso. Gray flattens like a cat and proceeds with little jerks. The cabin creaks alarmingly as the edge of the porch catches and releases her dorsal spikes like a clock’s movement. She finally pops free and reinflates. She’s seven feet at the shoulders, a foot taller than the tallest draft horse Jeryon’s ever seen, with a body like an aurochs, nineteen feet from snout to tail, with a thirty-five-foot wingspan. She weighs a ton, he estimates.