Read The Dragons Revenge (Tales from the New Earth #2) for Free Online Page B

he said that you
were meeting with Clara, so I thought I'd drop in and say hello.
Looks like you saved me the trouble.”
    “ Happy to help,”
he responded with a grin of his own. “Actually I was going down
to ask the guard if I could get a bucket of water for my horse, and
if there's a store of hay somewhere.”
    “ Aha!”
Virginia exclaimed with obvious pleasure. “Now I've saved you
some trouble. As one of the poor peasants who helped to harvest the
hay in the fall for the sheep, goats and assorted other livestock,
I'm intimately familiar with where we store the stuff. Come along and
I'll show you.”
    “ Hey, thanks. I
appreciate that.”
    Simon followed the young
woman to a large building set against the wall on the other side of
town. Inside, he grabbed an armful of hay and Virginia found a wooden
bucket and they walked back toward the town center to use the
community water pump.
    All the while, Virginia
chatted about the various goings-on in town, getting Simon caught up
on all the news.
    There had been two more
births among the population. That brought the total number of
children born since the Night of Burning, when the dragons had
decimated the human race, to three.
    Well, it's a start, he
thought.
    All of the population of
the village were Changlings and some had feared that the newborns
might actually be monsters or some type of mutants.
    “ They're all just
normal kids though,” Virginia said as she filled the bucket.
    She looked at Simon with
an impish expression.
    “ But the last one
born, Amy, was born with two different colored eyes. You wouldn't
know anything about that, would you?”
    Simon, with one brown eye
and one blue since he Changed, felt himself blushing.
    “ Of course not! I
certainly haven't been involved with...”
    He stopped protesting as
he realized that Virginia was teasing.
    “ Funny girl,”
he grumbled as they walked back to the hall. “Actually, I'm
pleased that that's the only evidence of the Change in them. Some
kids did mutate into monstrous forms back before the end. I'm not
sure what happened to them, considering the anarchy that society
descended into. It's quite possible that they didn't survive.”
    His friend stopped walking
abruptly, the water in the bucket slopping over the edge a bit.
    “ You don't mean you
think they were killed?” Virginia asked, horrified. “Children?”
    Simon nodded once, his
expression bleak.
    “ Some people were
blaming the Changlings for the loss of technology. Remember how it
was? No power meant no water, no heat, no refrigeration, no
communications. It all fell apart so quickly.”
    He laughed humorlessly.
    “ We never realized
just how fragile our 'advanced' society really was. My buddy Daniel
actually hid me at his place in the last few weeks, as my Change
became fairly obvious. And I was an adult. Imagine defenseless
children in those circumstances.”
    They began walking again.
    “ Well, I don't need
to tell you,” he said gently. “You and Eric and the
others experienced the brutality of humanity firsthand when you were
kept as slaves by that group of mundane humans for almost three
years.”
    “ Yeah. True that.”
    Conversation died at that
point as both of them became lost in their own memories.
    When they reached the
hall, Virginia put down the bucket in front of Chief and Simon let
him drink his fill before scattering the hay for him. The big horse
rubbed his head affectionately against the young woman and she
giggled as she was almost knocked over by his enthusiasm. Their
gloomy mood evaporated.
    “ So why did you ride
here in this cold, Simon?” she asked as they watched Chief
munching the hay contentedly.
    The wizard was torn. On
the one hand, Virginia was a friend and he was tempted to tell her
everything. But until he knew if his condition was permanent, he
found that he didn't really want anyone else to know about his loss
of magic.
    It's as if I have a nasty
disease and am embarrassed to tell anyone, he