“Hup!”

With a great heave, a young man with long dark blue hair and pale skin lifted a shovel into the air, its flat end laden with foul-smelling dry droppings. He held the shovel steady as he carried its load through the pen, hauled it outside of the worn-down wooden gate, and dumped it into a half-full pit. He would cover the pit when he was done.

Dragon droppings were mostly too dry and brittle to be used as fertilizer for crops, so the young man’s employer intended to leave them out so they could absorb the rain.

From within the pen, tied up with a frayed woven rope, a single wingless dragon stared at the boy in mild disgust. Her body was covered in white scales that were so fine and yielding that they looked and felt almost like fur, as well as a few more traditional scales on her snout and legs. Her orange eyes narrowed skeptically, and low, irritated dragon words rolled off of her long tongue.

Outside the pen, the young man wiped his brow and rested on the handle of the shovel, planting the blade deep in the earth just outside of the pit. The hisses and growls of dragon speech appeared out of his own tiny mouth, as if thrown by a dragon ventriloquest.

The man who owned Beatrice (or at least her compliance), a farmer who lived about an hour’s walk from town, was paying the young man to tidy up her pen. The farmer mostly had her to pull carts and plows; the horns jutting from her shoulders, waist, and hindquarters made her impractical to ride around the farm. The young man secretly thought the farmer should have been maintaining her living quarters better himself so it wouldn’t get so backed up, but...

The dragon looked incredulous. There was no reason, the boy thought, that a dragon -- even a particularly wise one, as baize were rumored to be -- should know about drake talkers. It was a matter of human culture, and fairly recent human culture, too.

Beatrice let out a cute snort.

‘Ought to’? Is that something she knows? The boy wondered, but he didn’t say anything.

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In the state of Brostel, and in all but a few of the other human countries, it was often said that humans and dragons coexisted in harmony. The trouble with harmony, though, is that it doesn’t imply equity. Some tones may be subordinate to the melody. Others vanish entirely into the chord. What humans call harmony was a hierarchy, where “expendable” sounds gave their all to help the stars shine.

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It isn’t that harmony could only ever look like subjugation, or that other ways of co-existence between sounds or people and dragons were impossible. In fact, multiple baize had guaranteed, in all their wisdom, that things could be different, although the baize couldn’t say specifically how.

If the young man Waver Cove were to guess, he’d have said the trouble probably started when the simple contract of “labor will be exchanged for sustenance and shelter” was complicated by breeding and conditioning -- with what humans called “domestication”. But that was only a guess. Truthfully, for all he knews, the current sorry state of affairs between humans and dragons was established at the moment both came to exist, as the temple records claimed. But he knew one thing for certain: he hated the way things were. If the gods really decided that dragons should be slaves for human convenience, he hated them, too.

As far as Waver knew, he was the only human in the world who could understand and speak dragon words. He didn’t consider himself a genuine “drake talker”, because he didn’t do anything special to acquire the skill, and he didn’t get any work from it. The moment he learned to speak at all, he could speak with dragons. Even those said to be raised by dragons, the ones in the myths (and the slightly less glamorous stories that could actually be verified), didn’t understand dragon language. So, he could only call it a gift.

The gift had put Waver through some hard times, and it would be a lie to say he never envied others their ignorance of dragons’ inner lives, but mostly he was grateful from the bottom of his heart.

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About an hour of shoveling and another hour of walking later, just as the sun passed the crest of the sky, Waver pushed open the double-hinged doors of the old barn he lived in. The familiar smell of earth and whiskey tickled his nostrils, and he called out with human words. “Hey, Valor! Are you up yet?”

Valor, the copper drake, rolled over onto their wing in response. Their scales were a dirty pale green, and to the boy who knew dragons well, their eyes always seemed to exude boredom -- but only their eyes.

If baize were beasts of burden, drakes were beasts of war. Knights rode them into battle, as they were usually incredibly strong, had powerful claws on all four of their legs and each of their wings, and could even glide for a while while carrying an adult in full mail. Their joints, wings, tails, scales, and eyes were all covered in reptilian scales, although there was something wolf-like about their snouts and bodies.

Valor’s voice was full of amusement, but Waver could hear concern, too. He wondered why.

Waver walked over to their shared nest of scattered wheat straw and rubbed their head, which was about half the size of his whole torso, affectionately. Their scales felt smooth and cool to the touch. They closed their eyes in appreciation for a brief moment and then glared at Waver.

Valor says, reproachfully.

Waver knew Valor’s breath killed miasma, but it was also alcoholic. He realized they must have been worried about his skin, which easily developed scales and cracks, becoming diseased. He relented.

Reluctantly, Valor snorts in assent.

When Waver was a kid, Valor was a dragonet, sired from the drake Waver’s mother would ride into battle. The two babbled at each other until they learned to talk, and they quickly became inseparable. When Waver was disowned for his lack of martial talent and fighting spirit, Valor had become useless to the Cove estate, so his mother looked the other way when the young drake fled to live with her son. They lived with each other ever since.

After taking a short nap in a bale of straw, as promised, he got up and brought a change of clothes and two flasks of ointment to the public baths. He waited about fifteen minutes for a worker to drain and refill the water, and then stripped his working clothes from his body.

Oh, I spent too long in the sun during my break, and my skin started to crack. No wonder Valor was worried.

After having a good soak, Waver rubbed some disinfecting salve into his skin, and then began to apply a moisturizing oil.

I’m getting stared at... I don’t know if it’s because of my long hair and slender figure, or my bad skin, but either way I should hurry up.

He was used to being stared at, for both reasons, but it still made him apply the oil a little bit faster.