Last-born

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Before Ayanna had become pregnant, the largest creature that lived in the valley of Ilingay had been the cows and the occasional ofirka, who would pop out of bushes roaring without warning but only to disappear again when you puffed out your chest and held your arms up over your head. The villagers would walk between each other’s houses at night with bags full of sweet-smelling pastries and spices, never even bothering to glance upwards, and children would dart between bushes well into the night, shrieking and playing on small tambourines.

Ayanna had loved the village then. She loved sitting in her father’s wheelbarrow as he walked around stalls at the market or went to collect herbs, spices, or bandages. She had loved the crusts of bread and orange peel chubby fingered housewifes had snuck her while her Dad was on outcalls, or the smell of gingko and chamomile as she mashed together poultices at the back of her father’s shop, while he examined colicky babies and old men with swollen stomachs. She had loved the pink pastel house at the end of Creenbud Lane that she lived in, and the long nights spent around the bonfire on Harvest Moons, dancing in paint and flower crowns. She had even loved the side glances that she caught the occasional villager giving her father, when someone else threw their arms around him or thanked him again and again for saving their child. It reminded her how important he was, and how the place he occupied in the village was special and set apart from the others, like an island with shining sand in the Ectino Sea. It was only natural that other people envied them sometimes.

Ayanna still loved the village. But it had a long time since she had been allowed at the market or inside the painted shacks of the other townspeople, and longer still since strangers snuck her candy. She no longer basked in envious side-glances from jealous villagers. When she walked anywhere near the town in search of scraps of food or ripped fabric to repair her father's shoes, she had learnt to keep her eyes trained on the dirt road, and hum folk songs under her breath to drown out the whispered comments that swirled around her like a stream. And it had been many years since she had been inside the pink house at Creenbud Lane, or indeed since there had been a house at the end of Creenbud Lane at all. She had heard that the blackened skeleton of the house was still there, slowly sagging in on itself, and that ash were still thick on the grass after hundreds of rain. She could not bring herself to go and see for herself.

Ayanna did not blame the townspeople for her exile anymore. When they had first driven her out, she had blamed them. She screamed and cursed from the tiny hollow in the mountains that she and her father had found refuge in and tried to collect stones to throw at the local children who snuck up the mountain road to stare at her and pelt her and her father with garbage. When her father caught her, he pried the rocks from her grip and tossed them down a ravine, so she couldn’t pick them up again.

“Our family has spent two hundred years looking after these people,” he told her. “We will not start hurting them now that our fortunes have turned.”

“But they’re hurting us,” she would reply. “And they took Piotr. Who knows what they’re doing to him down there.”

“They are good people,” her father responded. “They are terrified and trying to protect themselves the best way they know how. But they would never hurt a child. And we will never hurt their children either.”

“They already think that we hurt their children. They think that the crops is burned and the hills are unsafe because of us.” Her father signed.

“That may be true,” he said. “But causing any more pain will just make that worse.”

“So what do we do?” Ayanna asked him. “Do we just sit here while they throw garbage at us, and do who knows what to Piotr?” Her father pulled her tight into his chest. They stayed like that for a long time, looking down at the valley through a crack in the rock and listening to the sound of cloth-bound feet scuffling on the rocks as the local kids looked for their hiding place.

“We do what we’ve always done,” her father replied. “We try to help them however we can.”

“And Piotr?”

“If we help them, then we are helping him too.”

Down on the valley floor, the dark night was suddenly cleaved in two by an orange streak of flame. Faint screams drifted up from the village. The children clambering on the rocks around their hiding place screamed too and began to run back down towards their houses. Ayanna’s father held her tighter.

"How?" Ayanna whispered eventually. "How can we possibly help them now?"

"Do you remember what I used to tell you when I had a difficult patient?" her father asked. "Where nothing seemed to be working?"

"Yes," Ayanna replied. "You always said that before we could fix the problem, we need to understand it."

“That's right," her father said. "And that's what we need to do now, too. We need to understand just how it could be that Piotr brought dragons to the village.”