I drank too much, Dainin thought as he awoke to Path staring down at him. She looked rumpled. There was sand in her hair. Her clothes were wrinkled. He did not even want to think about what state his own looks were in. The light is too bright. I should have kept count of how many of those drinks they gave me, he groaned.

“The fire was almost out, so I added more to it. Can we go yet?”

He smiled up at her, “You still do not like my Brothers and Sisters under Mysteera?”

“I do not like Mysteera. I want to leave now.”

“Before breakfast?” he asked as he slowly sat up, glad she moved a bit to the side.

“The pirates have not gotten off their ship. Before then.”

He slowly sat up, “Dragon, you know that skyline is still gray. Is it just barely dawn?”

“This is when I normally get up to go hunting.”

He flopped back on the blankets, “Of course you do.” He pulled a blanket over his body and head. “Go back to sleep until breakfast.” She will not let me do that, but it will be interesting to see how she tries to solve the problem.

“So, I do not know how to hunt, but I am hungry, and I am awake, and if you want me to not bother you in the morning, you could let me go back to being a dragon,” she suggested.

“Sorry, Lady Dragon, it is not my choice whether you are a human or a dragon. But, I can get you some trail rations for breakfast if you cannot wait for a warm breakfast.”

He smiled as he heard her huff. “What about the ship monster they were mentioning before? Do we not want to go verify the town is safe?”

He would emerge from beneath his blanket, he liked this thought, even if it was openly manipulative, it was something he wanted to reinforce. “It is just tall tales from pirates.”

She tilted her head, “What do you mean? You were talking with them and acting very close with them.”

“Our shared religion makes us friendly to each other because it pleases Mysteera, but they are still pirates,” he said, trying to think how to explain. “They still make things up, and they spend a long time at the ocean until it does things to your mind.”

She looked thoughtful. “Your religion confuses me.”

He smiled, “Luck favors a rogue.”

“Then are you a rogue or not favored?”

Dainin put the blanket back over his head, “I’m sleeping an extra hour for that sass, dragon.”

He could practically feel her staring at him, glowering at him. He waited to see what she would do while he kept his eyes closed and tried to keep relaxed to avoid aggravating his headache. To his surprise, she was quiet. He drifted off until she started poking his face through the blanket. He felt tired but less bleary. “Yes?”

“Pirates are coming.”

“All right.” He got up now. He got himself a long drink of water, the sun was up properly now, and he realized he had gone back to sleep and slept at least two more hours. He offered her some, and she had a long drink.

“Breakfast time! Porridge coming up!” announced the same male pirate with the bells on his ankle from the day before.

“That sounds perfect, thank you.”

He watched Path as they ate. Well, the spoon at least seems to give her no trouble now. Well, no significant trouble, he thought as he watched how close she kept the bowl to her mouth and the slight awkwardness of it in her hand. Still, it made him feel a little better about things, somehow.

He checked over the blisters on her feet and applied fresh salve. Then, he put her back up on Oberon. I guess I need to start thinking of how we are going to include her in my life moving forward. Would it be better to stay on the road? Take work somewhere we can settle for a time while she adjusts to this new life? It was hitting him that even though the Goddess had seemed to be teasing him with the whole marry the dragon thing, it was feeling a little bit like that. He needed to consider how he was going to adjust his approach to most everything to accommodate her being with him now. “You still have blisters, so you will need to ride Oberon again,” he said, lifting her up onto him.

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He noticed she did not fight him.

It was a quiet walk for them to the next town. It was clearly a fishing village. There was not much in the way of wealth or people in it. He did see a smithy though, identifiable even at this range by the plume of smoke flowing into the sky. “Well, hopefully, they know how to do armor,” Dainin said. He did not have a lot of hope about finding reasonable accommodations, in fact, he suspected they would have to stay in a spare room in some farmer’s house or something.

“We will have to keep moving if they do not know how to fix armor?” she asked.

“Yes, most likely.”

“I am not sorry I dented it. You attacked me.”

“I did,” he said and left it at that, taking the steam out of her by just agreeing with her. She made a little huff that made him smile just a bit to himself as he walked Oberon down the hill.

They got stared at a lot. An older woman took it on herself to approach him, “You lost?” she said, plump body drawn up tall with self-importance.

“No, ma’am. We are travelers in need of a blacksmith. Could you guide us there?”

From there, it turned out a lot of what he expected. There were nosy questions about Path that he answered as if she was a noblewoman he was merely escorting around for a mysterious religious reason. They were offered a room in the mayor’s home once they thought Path was a noble and he was a knight of Mysteera (which surprised them and was also a usual reaction he was used to), and he accepted.

The blacksmith seemed capable enough of fixing his armor, so he paid him part of the cost and left it in his hands. “Who here is a cobbler?”

“My cousin,” the smith gruffly answered, so he took Path and her shoes there.

Path sulked while the cobbler touched her feet and evaluated and adjusted her shoes, at least until he traded a copper for a bit of fruit pie and milk, which cheered her up a bit.

Shoes surrendered to the cobbler, Oberon in the care of a farm boy turned temporary stable hand, Dainin carried Path back to the mayor’s house. He noticed, this time when he picked her up, she put her arm over his back and shoulders, as if she was used to him moving her around, and he felt a little fluttery sensation in his chest that wanted to bring a blush to his cheeks.

“I have been thinking,” he spoke gently, “That we may wish to go a little further south to Panopoly?”

“No, there is a giant white dragon living there. I do not want to go there.”

Dainin thought about arguing this, but then he decided there was no point. “Do you know where you might like to go? More inland?”

She did not answer right away. “Where are you from?”

“Myraduil.”

“That’s on the other side of the continent. Aren’t you a long way from your home?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have people that you belong to?”

“Here, knock on the door for me,” he said as they came up to the mayor’s house.

She did so. They were let in by a butler, or at least, as far as the fishing village of Quiet Wharf could offer. He carried her to their room upstairs. “Well, yes, I have a family back in Myraduil. But I do not belong there.”

“You confuse me, what do you mean by this?”

Dainin set her down and she would stretch and look around bedroom. It was smaller than the inn’s room from the last town, and the floor creaked at them a lot more. “I mean that sometimes you are related to people that you do not belong with, I guess. I was a teenager when I went to the temple and begged Mysteera to bless me.”

Path wrinkled her nose as she poked at the bedding before sitting on it, crossing her legs, which hiked her now very wrinkled dress up. “Yes, but now you get bossed around by a Goddess full of whims, and what did she give you? A bright sword?”

“Back up against an angry dragon,” he teased as he sat at the desk. She looked so sour about the statement, that he immediately repented making it. “She gave me a way to escape my home.”

“You could not leave it without a Goddess?”

“Not very easily, no. In human society, parents are seen as having rights to own their children in a way. I am not sad for my choices. I was never properly acknowledged, so I did not even belong to the dragon that owns Tellren.”

“Tellren is the name of your town?”

He nodded.

“I have decided I still like the ocean. There is a bigger town, between here and Panopoly that did not have a dragon I already know living there.”

“Yes?”

“I do not know what it is called though. I met the dragon of Panopoly, and she is aggressive.”

“Well, let us avoid aggressive dragons.”

That night, in chatting with the mayor’s family, with Path looking awkward at the pasta and seafood she was supposed to eat with a fork, he would find out some details about the next city, called Arulteer, that made it sound promising.

“There’s been all sorts of unsettlin’ things coming out of the water. This food we’re eating here? Tuna as big as a boat.”

“They do not normally come in that size?” Dainin asked, not exactly versed in this.

“A really good one would be a little over the size of a man,” the mayor’s wife said. “This one was like a rowboat.”

“There’s been rumors of a boat taken over by something, and the other day there was that giant octopus that pulled down poor Mortimer’s fishin’ ship.”

Dainin felt a little unsettled to hear the pirate rumors corroborated by the fishers, but he hoped it was all just rumors.

They chatted for quite a while as Path slowly stabbed at and picked at her food.

Then there was a loud crashing noise outside and some screaming.