Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

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SHE WAS FIFTEEN AND she flew.

Her name was pryn — because she knew something of writing but not of capital letters.

She shrieked at clouds, knees clutching scaly flanks, head flung forward. Another peak floated back under veined wings around whose flexing joints her knees bent.

The dragon turned a beaked head in air, jerking reins — vines pryn had twisted in a brown cord before making a bridle to string on the dragon’s clay-colored muzzle. (Several times untwisted vines had broken — fortunately before take-off.) Shrieking and joyful, pryn looked up at clouds and down on streams, off toward returning lines of geese, at sheep crowding through a rocky rift between one green level and another. The dragon jerked her head, which meant the beast was reaching for her glide’s height…

On the ground a bitter, old, energetic woman sat in her shack and mumbled over pondered insults and recalled slights, scratching in ash that had spilled from her fireplace with a stick. That bitter woman, pryn’s great-aunt, had never flown a dragon, nor did she know her great-niece flew one now. What she had done, many years before, was to take into her home an itinerant, drunken barbarian, who’d come wandering through the town market. For nearly five months the soused old reprobate had slept on the young woman’s hearth. When he was not sleeping or incoherent with drink, the two of them had talked; and talked; and talked; and taken long walks together, still talking; then gone back to the shack and talked more. Those talks, the older woman would have assured her great-niece, were as wonderful as any flight.

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