Page 7 of A Matter of Dragons

“A healer,” she answered. “For my scar.”

She said the word scar very slowly and deliberately, as though she were speaking to a young child, or perhaps a dog. Then she raised the arm I’d touched. She hesitated and, for a heartbeat, she looked like she’d been forced to swallow something bitter. Then, haltingly, she peeled back her sleeve. The skin on her left wrist and forearm was a storm of thick red bands and raised white lines that danced down her wrist and stretched toward her elbow.

“Oh,” I murmured. I raised my hand, then met her eyes. “May I?”

She nodded. I braced myself for another violent shock of unfamiliar magic, then brushed my fingers softly across the rippled skin of her forearm. Nothing. All I felt was the warmth of a woman’s skin. Odd. Had I imagined it somehow, the flash of magic that had snaked across my skin like a spark of dragonfire?

“It’s a burn,” she said. Her voice sounded deeper now, in the closeness between our bodies. “An old burn. From when I was a child.”

I looked up, my attention moving from her arm to her eyes. In the unsteady remains of the fading light, they flashed a deep violet. I suddenly wanted to know more about this scar, this burn, and about the child who had survived them. My father would know how to play this; he’d invite the lady in, offer her tea, and have her out of that elegant blue dress before the bells tolled the next hour. The mental image of this woman spread across the table I’d just cleared suddenly surged through my mind with ferocious insistence, drowning all my other thoughts. Her thick, ember hair would tumble over the stacks of books; her skin would gleam in the lamplight, bright against the dark wood.

Heat rose in my cheeks. I pulled my hand away from her arm, rocked back on my heels, and cleared my throat.

“I— I’m so sorry,” I said. “I don’t do burns. I— I’m afraid I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

The woman’s full lips pressed together, curving into a frown.

“My father’s the healer,” I said, lamely shoveling another lie onto the steaming heap of bullshit I’d already told this poor woman.

“And is he available?” She tilted her head as she asked as if she were trying to peer into the darkness of the shop behind me, and her ember-colored hair shifted around her bare neck.

“No,” I said, somewhat more vehemently than necessary. “No. He’s traveling. For a long time. A very long time.”

“Ah.” Her forehead furrowed. “I’m sorry to have bothered you then, Sir Doshir.”

A nervous laugh slipped out of my lips. “Oh, no, I’m not a Sir. Please. Just Doshir.”

She was still staring at me as though I were a sign in a language she had never quite mastered. Damn it all, I was being awkward again, wasn’t I?

And this was exactly why it had been such a long time since I’d been intimate with a woman.

“I’ve heard the best healer in town is near the greengrocer’s market,” I said, making an effort to pull myself together and sound like an ordinary human. “She’s a woman. Ailen... something. Her sign has an enormous crutch on it.”

Ailen was also the only human healer in town I’d trust. All the others would charge a stack of gold for a potion of ash and bone meal and then blame demons if that didn’t work.

“Ailen,” the woman repeated. “Thank you, Doshir.”

The sound of my name on her lips did strange things to my insides. Perhaps I had been spending too much time alone, shut inside the shop, trying not to think about my mother’s last visit.

The flame-haired woman nodded politely, then turned and descended the staircase. Stars began to dance above her as she walked through the pool of light cast by the streetlamp and vanished around a corner.

“Fine woman,” a deep voice grunted from the shadows. “She yours?”

I shook my head and only just managed to keep my mouth shut my head as Graystone the dwarf crossed the street, his pipe casting a golden light over his rough features. This was not the time or the place for yet another argument about how a romantic relationship among humans or dragons does not translate into ownership. The dwarf grunted as he clambered up stairs built for someone twice his size.

“Shame,” Graystone said. “You could use a woman, you know.”

“Lovely to see you too,” I scowled. “Care to accompany me to dinner, or would you prefer to insult me on my own doorstep?”

Graystone laughed, one of those deep, rollicking dwarven laughs that seems to come from the bowels of the earth itself. “Ah, Doshir! If I’d wanted to insult you, I would have said that you couldn’t keep a two-bit torch lit inside a—”

“That’s just fine,” I said, holding up my hands to stop him. “Dinner?”

He shook his head. “Love to. Can’t. I’ve got a shipment leaving in less than an hour.”

Shipment. I knew better than to ask any questions.

“I’ll be meeting up with your father in a few days,” Graystone said. His bushy eyebrows wiggled in a way that made me think he found this fact amusing. “Got anything to pass on to your old man?”