Free The First Dragoneer by M. R. Mathias Page B

his scalp where he had felt hot blood
pulsing out of him the night before and was further surprised to
feel nearly healed scar tissue where a fresh raw scab should be.
His fingertips were healing too. A vague memory of Jade’s eyes
flashing crimson and the tingling of his skin under that intense
gaze made him wonder. Had Jade magicked him? His mother might
know.
    Master Kember heaped an armful of green,
leafy foliage onto the ashy remains of Jenka’s larger fire. Nothing
happened at first, but slowly smoke started rising up and branches
began to pop and crackle in the heat. Soon a billowing pillar of
smoke was roiling up and out of the gulch, only to be sheared off
by the wind when it rose above the treetops.
    “Spotted!” Rikky’s distant voice called out
proudly. Of the small group of hunters that Master Kember looked
over, he was the youngest. At thirteen summers old Rikky was
probably going to end up being the best of them all.
    Jenka and Grondy were born the same year and
were the next youngest. Solman was the oldest student, but Lemmy
was the oldest of the group save for Master Kember himself. Lemmy
was more of an assistant than a pupil, though. He earned a wage,
and he tracked as well as anyone in the whole frontier. Every once
in a while, the King’s Rangers would come over from the keep and
ask Master Kember or Lemmy to help them with something or another.
Unlike the village folk, the King’s Rangers favored Lemmy for some
reason. They treated him with the utmost respect, which had always
piqued Jenka’s curiosity. The King’s Rangers had more or less
accepted Lemmy as one of their own, which, in the past, had
sometimes made Jenka a little jealous. Even though his father’s
picture hung in the keep's main hall, the Rangers were never
partial like that to Jenka. They made sure that he and his mother
were well fed, but they treated Jenka like any other village boy.
He would have asked Lemmy about it, but it embarrassed him watching
Lemmy struggle to convey a message without being able to speak.
    Things got bad for Jenka for a while. Solman
and Rikky were anything but gentle when they half hauled, half
dragged him up out of the gully. The long, bumpy ride on the
travois was even worse. Though he shouldn’t have felt as confident
about it as he did, he decided that he probably could have just
ridden one of the horses, but the idea that his friends -- and his
mentor -- might shun him for having been magicked by a dragon
caused him to keep his returning strength and vigor to himself.
    He felt his head wound again, and he was
sure that he was feeling partially-healed scar tissue now. By the
time they finally made it into Crag, Jenka was starting to think
that the dragon really had done something to him. Jenka’s wild,
gray-haired mother came hurrying out into the street to greet her
son, but was waved off by one of the young rangers gathering around
his travois. Without a thought, she shouldered the King’s Ranger
who had waved her away to the side and, after kissing Jenka on the
forehead, she poured a vial of foul-smelling liquid down his
throat.
    “You killed a half dozen trolls, then?”
Captain Brody, the head of the King’s Rangers, asked over the
worried mother's shoulder.
    Two of the other rangers were razzing the
one she had just bullied aside, but stopped cold when they heard
their captain’s words.
    “Here,” Master Kember handed something that
was green and shimmering to his former commander. “The boy said it
was a black, but I found this. It was dark.”
    “Dragon scale,” Captain Brody took it and
gave Jenka a dubious look. He reached out and touched the pink scar
under Jenka’s blood-matted hairline and, after glancing down at the
discarded vial of kettle-witch potion, he gave a short snort of
disbelief. To Master Kember he said: “I’ll send a message by
swifter hawk to Commander Corda down in Three Forks. He’ll get a
message to King Blanchard that will be on the next boat to