Chasing Wings - Hanna Dare Page 0,1

mother rounded a corner of the barn, chickens trailing after her in a hopeful cluster, looking for any speck of food that might fall from the woven basket on her arm. Her broad red cheeks crinkled up as she smiled at him, and Tris could see that glad as she was to see him, she was a bit uncertain too, like she wasn’t sure what this strange child of hers was going to do next. But he put that all aside to rush into her arms.

“Ma,” Tris said, a bit hoarsely both from emotion and also because he hadn’t spoken to another person in two days. “It’s good to see you.”

Tris sat across the wide wooden table from his parents, a thick piece of bread slathered with blackberry jam in front of him. There was plenty of new furniture in the house these days, but that table, scarred and stained from three generations of use, remained.

His father drew on a small clay pipe and frowned at Tris. There was a little more gray in his brown beard and his stout body had grown a bit wider over the winter, but the puzzlement with which he regarded his son was unchanged and had been for the last ten years.

“So you’ve been spending the last few months cleaning out a stable?” he asked Tris.

“I was working for a very important man,” Tris insisted. “A scholar. He’s traveled all over. He has houses in the kingdom, Ens, and even Ur Osten.”

He was also supposed to be an expert on dragons and Tris had marveled appropriately at the dragon bones in his collection and listened to his stories. But that’s all they were — stories. He’d never even seen a live dragon and didn’t believe that Tris had.

His father’s frown deepened. “What’s Ur Osten?”

His mother shrugged helplessly.

“It’s a country,” Tris said. “You know. It borders on this kingdom. East of here.”

“Oh.” His father sounded like he was losing interest. “East. So for this fine gentleman, you were…”

“There was some stable cleaning,” Tris admitted. “But it was practically a management position.”

“Plenty of shit to shovel at home,” his father muttered.

“So what happened to this position?” his mother asked.

Tris squirmed on the hard wooden chair. He had grown impatient when he realized that the scholar’s traveling days were behind him and that Tris wasn’t going to learn from him the most important thing about dragons — where to find one.

“I guess I missed you,” he said, turning big eyes up to his parents. It was a ploy that had always worked when he was younger.

They both sighed a little before smiling back at him.

“We’re glad to have you back, son.” His mother went over to the hearth to swing the large kettle over the fire. “And we’re certainly hoping you’ll stay put this time. Just remember a rolling stone gathers no moss.”

Tris wasn’t sure why he’d care about a mossy rock, but he nodded dutifully.

His father leaned back in his chair. “I suppose you’ll be seeing your sister next?” he asked with a hint of reverence that was reserved for Lily, the not-disappointing one in the family.

If his parents were confused by how Tris had turned out, they were absolutely stunned by Lily.

Overnight, she had gone from a humble barmaid to owning the valley’s only inn. Her ambitions didn’t stop there. She’d expanded the inn’s ale production and soon began selling it to surrounding towns, eventually as far as the kingdom’s capital. Lily grew the inn too and made many improvements, turning it from a place that folks went to simply because there was nowhere else to go to the true center of the village.

Her success might have caused resentment among the villagers, because Shadow’s Vale wasn’t a place where ambition was regarded with anything other than suspicion — especially ambition coming from a young unmarried woman — but Lily made sure to share her wealth around. She paid to widen the valley’s main road and refurbished the village square. The inn hosted feast days and funerals free of charge, and Lily was known as a generous employer, though no one ever got anything over on her. Nowadays, folk spoke of her as if she were some gracious, highborn lady instead of the farmer’s daughter with big ideas. And their parents, rather than nagging her constantly as they used to, considered Lily’s wisdom to be unquestionable.

Tris and Lily had no secrets between them — or at least he’d never successfully been able to keep one from