Total pages in book: 182
Estimated words: 171176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 856(@200wpm)___ 685(@250wpm)___ 571(@300wpm)
Everyone gasped. Silence followed. I stared at her stubbornly.
“Well, you’re wearing dicks on your clothes,” the woman had muttered, crossing her arms over her chest.
“My willingness to wear dicks on my clothes but refuse your request should tell you how absolutely absurd said request actually is. Next?”
If I’d stepped out of line, Finley hadn’t chastised me for it.
“Do you think you have enough information?” Finley asked as we left the house and headed toward the center of town. It was the fastest way back to the wood.
A small collection of emberflies drifted through the quiet lane. The silver moon shed its light overhead.
“Yes, I think so.” I organized my collection of papers. “Question, though. Will I actually be reformulating any of these products, or am I just getting a fun brain teaser?”
“We will sit down and talk over your thoughts, and then choose one or two things that you can fix. We can think about putting them into the local market. We’ll see how that goes. If it goes well, we can improve and/or expand. If not . . .”
“The axe, I get it.” I nodded, thinking about, not just the things I’d heard, but the various other problems people had described. “I like this,” I murmured as I took in the dwellings. The buildings were larger than those in Finley’s old village but similarly maintained, with window-box flowers and manicured front gardens. Cobblestones didn’t line this street, not until we neared the square, but the fine rock and hard-packed dirt did the job, the road smooth and well maintained. Every town we’d been in was the same. It seemed the royalty took care of their whole kingdom, not just the castle.
“What’s that?” she asked as raucous laughter drifted into the night. Glass shattered and Finley glanced toward the sound, but it must’ve been behind this row of little storefronts with hand-carved signs of scrolling text.
“Talking to people, finding ways to help them . . . I’ve always liked this kind of work because of the challenge, but . . . I don’t know, I guess I just like helping people. That sounds a little trite, but it feels like a better purpose than just trying to make gold.”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “That’s because you’ve never gotten to reap the rewards of that gold,” she said.
“That’s true, I guess. Hard to miss something you’ve never had.”
She side-eyed me again. She was doing that a lot tonight. “You’re so . . .”
“Pliant is the word used most often, I think. Boring is another one. Dragons tend to think I am too agreeable.”
“Yeah. Why are you so agreeable?”
“I’m open to new ideas, but more importantly, what’s the point of arguing when it’s not going to get me anywhere? I’ll argue if I can change the outcome of a situation, but there really is no point in expending energy just to be right about something that doesn’t actually matter. It just takes longer.”
“It takes longer for what?”
“To be left alone.”
She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Fuck, man. That’s really fucking tough to hear. It’s one difference between us—”
“I’d imagine there are many. Like height, for example.”
“You were never on equal footing in Granny’s village. Not ever. You were young and small, and you weren’t trained to fight to compensate. You didn’t have the strength and speed and ability to heal as everyone else around you. You were mercilessly bullied, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “But there was fuck-all you could do about it. You just had to take it. Right or wrong, you had to silently take it.” She shook her head and turned away. “Fuck that shit. That really pisses me off. Fuck those people.” She turned back and put a finger in my face. “You’re on equal footing now, do you hear me? You will learn to fight, you will join the fucking pack, and if I need to take over your training to make sure you are pushed, I will. Flexible is good; being pushed around is not. We need to make sure you are never pushed around, not ever again.”
Swearing under her breath, her rage clearly needing an outlet, she turned and screamed into the night. A light clicked on down the lane, and I shrank back, not really wanting to be implicated in the madness. Somewhere not too far away, a scream matched hers, deep and guttural and clearly wild. And sounding very drunk. The town tavern, or one of them, was clearly over there.
I stared at her with a quickly growing fondness. She was the sort of wild my wolf craved, and had the sort of passion that spoke to me. She made me feel better about life, mostly because she made me feel better about my future. She was the sort of person that lifted up everyone around her, and I wasn’t above admitting that, at times, I needed that.