Page 42 of Ale Storm

“Is that… a treasure chest?” Sylin pointed at a huge barnacle-covered trunk that had landed in the grass, sinking more than an inch deep into the damp earth. “And I sense…” She pressed her nose to the window as she peered upward. “Yes, your dragon has arrived.”

A moment later, the great silver-scaled Jildarin came into view, wings spreading as he slowed to land on the trunk, his talons curled around the edge. A few barnacles flicked free as he shifted to gaze through the window, straight at Rylana’s father, though he spotted her too. He looked at her with his intent emerald eyes, and his tail swished a couple of times. Did he appear… pleased?

Indignant barks came from the kennel. Jildarin roared, a great reverberating sound that probably traveled miles across the lake and up and down the shoreline. The barks stopped. Jildarin swished his tail again.

“He found it,” Father breathed.

“What is it?” Rylana asked.

“The first cargo I lost after taking over what was then a much smaller business from your grandfather, the gods protect his soul. I was mortified and felt like such a failure. I, ahem.” He glanced at Rylana and Sylin, maybe reminded that he had witnesses, one of whom was a stranger. “Not a failure—as long as you learn from mistakes, they’re valuable and grant wisdom—but it certainly wasn’t a good first year for me. I’d gotten an excellent deal with a new insurer in the city and talked Grandfather into letting me expand our business by buying a couple of armored ironclads that were supposed to be unsinkable. That allowed us to promote the ability to carry far more valuable cargoes than timber, textiles, crops, and the like. But the first winter, a storm drove the Iron Juggernaut off course, and it struck an iceberg and sank with a chest full of gold and jewels that were mined near Agajen’s Contested Colonies. I had to collect on the insurance scant months after getting it, and our company had a black mark with all the insurers in Tranquility for years afterward. I need to see if he found the right chest.” Father ran for the back door.

Rylana scraped her fingers through her hair, not sure what to think. “This is the most my father’s ever opened up to me. I’d never even heard about that loss.”

Maybe that was understandable since she and her brother would have been kids at the time—Grandfather had passed not that many years after her mother. But she couldn’t remember her father ever admitting that he’d suffered failures or had been anything but the perfect entrepreneur.

“Perhaps your new dragon relationship will mend the wounds in your family,” Sylin said.

Rylana frowned at her, then strode to the back door. By the time she reached the yard, Jildarin had hopped off the chest and stood in his human form before her father.

If Father had said anything like, “Thanks for finding and fishing this huge and heavy load out of the wreck at the bottom of the sea,” Rylana had missed it.

He’d already bypassed Jildarin to drop to his knees in front of the trunk. He tried to chip away barnacles to reveal the lock, but it had long since fused with rust and grime.

“Are you all right?” Rylana asked when Jildarin’s gaze swung to her.

He didn’t appear injured, but now that he was in his human form, she could read fatigue in the bags under his eyes and the slump to his shoulders. If he’d not only flown out to the ocean since lunch but found and carried this heavy load back, she could understand that. And he’d been out late the night before on another errand for her father.

Rylana reached out and gripped Jildarin’s arm, wanting him to know that she appreciated him doing all this. And she wanted to tell him again that he didn’t have to do it, but she was reluctant to blurt all that with her father kneeling two feet away.

“I am well,” Jildarin said. “It was only a flight of three hundred miles to the Iceberg Sea and the landmarks your father gave me.”

“Only. How did you get that off the bottom of the ocean?”

“Magic,” Jildarin said simply. “It did require some mental effort.”

“And how’d you carry it back?”

“With physical effort.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Can you open this?” Father looked at Jildarin.

Rylana gave him an exasperated glower. Hadn’t Jildarin done enough? Couldn’t Father go get a chisel and hammer?

“The contents belong to you?” Jildarin asked him, glancing at Rylana.

Did he want to make sure he wasn’t enriching her father with someone else’s long-lost treasure? It was probably a little late to question him about that. If that was what was on Jildarin’s mind, he didn’t voice it.

“Well, since the insurance company paid out all those years ago, the contents will belong to it. I’d like to verify that this is what I think it is before I have it toted to their office.”

“Very well.” Jildarin leaned his hand onto the top of the trunk near the lock. He grimaced as he called upon his magic again—with mental effort, no doubt.

Heat radiated from the trunk, and Father stepped back. Rylana let go of Jildarin and also moved away, half-expecting the iron of the trunk to melt—or the barnacles to burst into flames. Were barnacles flammable? Probably not.

The lock was all that disintegrated under Jildarin’s heat. It broke, the grimy pieces falling into the grass. With physical effort, Jildarin gripped the lid and lifted it. One of the old hinges also broke.

Amid worn wooden boxes and deteriorated cloth bags, gold bars were stacked inside under a film of marine growth from water that had seeped in over the years. Seeing all the gold and knowing how much the stuff weighed, Rylana gaped at Jildarin.