As the United States of America celebrates two and a half centuries since its founding, one family grapples with its own issues…

Felix and me have been married for five years. We met in the middle of a particularly messy post football match fracas. I was standing on the edge of a fountain defending my honour with a chair leg and he came to my rescue. He was six and a half feet of menace, built like a linebacker and obviously in no mood to take any crap from a crowd of overstimulated college boys. He extracted me from the melee just in time to make ourselves scarce before the boys in blue arrived with riot sticks and short fuses. It seemed entirely natural to hunt up a bar well away from the frat boys and have us a quiet drink.
We must have talked for four or five hours, discovering that a tattoo artist from the boonies and an architect whose partnership in a prestigious practice was still new enough to be making him grin could have so much in common, while being sufficiently different for our discussions to have fire and the sharp edge of two minds sparking off each other.
In the end he slept at mine that night, with his big feet hanging over the end of the sofa.
He pretty much never left, and we married the following spring. Our wedding was quiet and informal and kept deliberately low key because of what people of a delicate disposition refer to as family friction. Which is the sort of understatement that makes thing both less and more complicated than they actually are.
Put bluntly, the two families hate each other.
Only they don’t, what they hate is the idea of each other.
Felix’s family thinks my lot are loud, uneducated rednecks, though most of them are too polite to say so. My lot considers Felix to have sprung from a long line of effete, inbred pseudo-intellectuals none of whom has ever done a hands turn of real work, and they aren’t polite enough to keep their opinions to themselves. Thing is neither lot is completely right or completely wrong.
My lot runs long on tow-headed good ole boys with shoulders like brick walls and apparently indefatigable appetites for beer. I even have cousins called Cletus and Bubba.
Felix’s family, by contrast, is mostly slim, and pale, and as bendy as willow trees. His father is a university professor with soft hands and a wispy beard, and his mom plays violin in a semi-professional string quartet. Felix’s sisters are called Portia and Ophelia.
On the other side of the coin, both lots are hardworking, honest, and morally grounded. It’s just that neither of them can see the common ground for the morass of misunderstanding that divides them.
And that’s our problem in a nutshell.
Things have never descended into open hostility from my side for a couple of very good reasons. One: my mom, who is a community midwife and possessed of a glare that could melt stainless steel, would personally disembowel anyone who caused me grief. Two: none of the cousins fancies taking a pop at Felix because they ain’t entirely sure he don’t bend iron bars with his teeth.
From the other side of the divide, politeness is a given, even if there is a certain hauteur about the relationship.
Which is why we don’t go in for much in the way of family celebrations, spending Christmas with one family and thanksgiving with the other.
This worked fine until we bought the house. It’s nothing fancy, just a suburban arts and crafts villa with blue shutters, a big sheltered yard and a swimming pool. And the yard was nearly our undoing.
Our moms ambushed us. Mine appeared at the play park, where I take our three-year-old twins to burn off some of their innate soddishness, while Felix’s took him to lunch at a wholefood restaurant. Different women, different approaches but the message was substantially the same. July fourth was our ‘turn’. We were, like it or not (to be brutally honest ‘not’), hosting a family day in our big shady yard.
When I got home, trailing two sticky, overstimulated, candy-fuelled, argumentative children in my wake, Felix was already there looking as shell-shocked as I felt. But he gave me a hand with bath and pasta duty before throwing himself theatrically onto the big squishy sofa in our family room.
“My mom came visiting,” he announced.
“Mine too.”
“July fourth?”
I nodded.
“Do you think,” he asked carefully, “this was a coincidence?”
“Nope. This was a coordinated matriarch move.”
“They coordinate?”
“Of course they do. They’re both cut from the same cloth.”
He frowned, but then he thought a bit and his grin spread.
“They really are, ain’t they. I just never thought of it like that before. Well. I’ll be jiggered.”
“It does seem odd. But I’ve noticed it a bit before. It’s subtle but the steel magnolia and momma bear are very far from being above collusion.”
He nodded. “So what do we do?”
“First of all we call out their trickery. Then we give in and host July fourth. With stipulations.”
Fast forward to a steaming hot July day, to icy cold beers and a sandwich bar lunch, and to two families dancing carefully around each other like feral cats on a trash tip. But the atmosphere was at least polite.
Felix and the dads kept close eyes on a gaggle of teenage cousins of both genders, thereby keeping flirtations to an acceptable level of touchy-feely, and preventing showing off from degenerating into dangerous dares.
Felix’s younger sister, Ophelia, merry faced and married to a man who had sense enough to step aside from family judgements, happily herded children and prevented any inter-cousin flare ups. I was grateful and brought her a beer. She smiled.
“This was brave of you.”
“You think we had a choice?”
“Nope. Not if mom got involved.”
“Both moms did. Caught us in a pincer movement.”
“Ouch!” Then she touched my arm. “There is something…”
Before she had chance to say what was bothering her my mom appeared beside us. She looked at Ophelia.
“Portia. How far along is she?”
“Eight months.”
Mom shook her head. “She’s gotten her dates muddled. That girl looks to me like she’s about to give birth.”
My mom has been a midwife for close to forty years, so if she says someone is about to give birth you better believe her.
Ophelia frowned. “That’s what I was thinking. And it would be just like her. I have never met a vaguer human being than my sister. She is kind, sweet and loving, but she drifts through life like a rudderless boat.”
I had more immediate problems. “When you say ‘about to’, mom?”
“This very afternoon if I’m not wrong.”
When it comes to pregnancy and babies wrong is a place Mom doesn’t inhabit, so I braced myself for a bumpy ride.
“What should we do?”
“Right now. Get her to sit in the shade and maybe bring her a cool drink.”

More of this tale by Jane Jago tomorrow…

Summer is a-coming in
So quickly now go you
Down the pub to down a beer
And drink a pint or two
Love that brew!

You now chase the beer with rum
And after hours too
Get it as they call last orders
Got to love that brew!

More beer, more beer,
Get in a pint or two,
Ne’er cease to drink that brew!

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Being a true shifter isn’t the blessing it may seem. But through pain and darkness Perdita seeks to find her own life despite the ambition of others…

In the meantime, Mandrake was carefully herding an increasingly terrified orc back to where his pack awaited him. The screams came closer and Gobshite broke out of the treeline at a shambling gallop. When he saw his packmates he hurled himself facedown on the frozen grass.
“Dragon,” he yelled. “Look out there’s a dragon.”
Behind him, Mandrake made the change and dropped the final few feet to the ground in human form.
Knut’s mate grinned so widely I thought her face might crack in half.
“Mega cool.” She offered Mandrake a hugely knotted fist and they bumped knuckles. “Can all dragons do that?”
“No. Only the most highly trained of battle dragons.”
“Useful trick, though.”
“Indeed.”
The rest of the pack had gathered around Gobshite’s quivering figure. One poked him with a booted foot.
“Get up, asshole, there ain’t no dragons here.”
He peered suspiciously about him before he sat up.
“Did you chase it off?”
“Chase what off?”
“The dragon what was hunting me.”
One of the ones I had pegged as female put her face close to his.
“There weren’t no dragon fuckwit.”
Mandrake and his companion came over to me.
“I take it Gobshite is in for a bit of razzing,” I said.
“Was about time that one learned some humility. This hadn’t happened me or Knut was gonna have to kill him sometime soon.”
“In that case…”
“You ain’t like any human I ever met,” she said.
Knut had come across, walking quietly enough so she hadn’t heard his approach.
“May I tell my mate?” I nodded. “Lady isn’t human no more than her mate is.”
“What you saying you old fool? She ain’t no true born critter I ever seen.”
“No. She ain’t. She’s a True Shifter.”
“Don’t you be razzing me. Them’s just a fairy story.”
Mandrake made as of to say something but I put a finger across his lips.
“Mate of the Pack Leader,” I said formally. “Will you show me your fist?”
She looked confused but proffered a huge, scarred and knotted appendage. I laid my own hand on the air beside it and concentrated briefly. The hand and forearm I Shifted was a complete simulacrum of hers. It felt as if it weighed nearly as much as my human body, but I managed to hold it still. She stared, and I let it dissolve back into a human hand.
“Your fist weighs a lot,” I said and I could hear the physical strain in my own voice.
Mandrake moved to the buffet, returning with a thick slice of buttered bread. I sank my teeth in gratefully.
“Shifting uses a lot of calories,” I explained, not caring that I was talking with my mouth full.
The female orc bent her neck in a gesture of respect. “I never thought to meet one such as you.”
“There is only one so far as we know,” Mandrake said.
I swallowed the mouthful of bread and butter I had been chewing.
“There won’t be any more. I refuse to put another being through what I went through to gain my powers. It really isn’t worth it.”
The big she-orc looked into my eyes for a breath, before turning way as if embarrassed. “I don’t believe,” she said to nobody in particular, “that I would like to have the Shifter’s memories.”
Knut, who had stood in unusual quiet while his mate and I worked things out between us, actually tasted the atmosphere with his thick, red tongue. Finding it unthreatening he looped an arm over his mate’s shoulders.
“Not all her memories are bad,” he offered. “I remember a wild ride through the night with a band of marauding orcs streaming across the sky behind a lone female with blood in her eye and The Dagger of Death in her boot top.”
“She got the Dagger of Death?”
“She do and that little bastard don’t miss wherever she throws it.”
The she-orc pushed out her lip in thought. “You led a shitload of orcs on The Wild Hunt.”
“Yup. Must have been seven centuries past. And I never knew Knut was in that raiding party.”
He grinned and farted loudly. “I was on my first pack ride, and when the bikes rose into the sky I all but pissed myself. Fun though.”
His mate turned to him, and I understood that whatever she had to say it was not about anyone but their own selves. I listened anyway.
“Was that the last time the Wild Hunt rode out of the sunset?”
“Last but one. It was not The Lady who led your father to his death.”
“I wasn’t thinking it was. According to Mother it was likely his own stupidity.”
“Likely. He was growing old and unwilling to accept that.”
“And you, Knut. You became Pack Leader in the void.”
“Only after I made a few orcs get dead. But yes. I won the Pack in a void, but I rule it because there is none among the members who can best me.”
She looked at him and her mouth twisted bitterly. “So why did you need to mate with me then? I was told it was to consolidate your hold on the pack.”
He made a harsh sound in his throat. “I mated you from need for you. There is no other reason than that.”
The smile she gave him was so bright as to hurt the eyes, before she thumped him hard on one of his meaty arms.
“Why did you never tell me?”
“Because I thought you mated me for status.”
She groaned as he dragged her into his arms. The female bit her mate’s lip and I saw the blood flow.
“Mine,” he said thickly and she licked his bleeding lip.
I looked away to find Mandrake smiling down on me.
‘Love orc style,’ he whispered in my head, before turning up the music and encouraging me into the dance.
And that was pretty much how the night ended, with drunken dancing and a sense of recklessness.
The orcs finally fell asleep where they dropped from sheer exhaustion and Mandrake and me crawled into the open store and wrapped our tired bodies in thick northland quilts.
Dawn came and our guests awoke. Mandrake helped me to break out loves of bread and slabs of pre-cooked bacon. The orcs made huge sandwiches and rode off munching. I think Mandrake carried me up the stairs to a proper bed.

Jane Jago

Writing inspired by the art of Ian Bristow

Dying might not be so bad. It was living that had broken him. Taken from his family at eight years old, vowed to celibacy before he understood what the word meant, and sold to the highest bidder time after time. His sword had eaten the blood of so many enemies that he felt today was no more than reparation. As the hooded figure came to his side he looked into its compassionate eyes.
“Am I dead?”
“Nearly. Say farewell to your loved ones.”
The Knight spoke the saddest three words under all the stars.
“I have nobody.”
Then he died.

Jane Jago

Ian is an awesome artist and cover designer, you can find his work at Bristow Design or watch him in action creating this picture on ART with IAN.

Some whimsical words on whimsical themes…

Sonnets on sunsets, and quatrains delightful
Odes to beloveds and limericks frightful
Poetic thinking that dances and sings
These are a few of my favourite things

Perfectly pitched prose and vocabulary
Fiendish acrostics to trap the unwary
Tender love stories whose heroines cling
These are a few of my favourite things

When the plot stinks and the words ming
When the Internet’s down
I simply remember my favourite things
And then I forget to frown…

Jane Jago

An everyday tale of village life and vampires…

Earlier that same afternoon, Em had been debating which of her quietly coloured jersey dresses to shove on for the monthly meeting of the Ladies whilst wondering to herself what this Cropper woman was going to be like. From the voice – she assumed wispy, middle class, and somehow not happy. The phone breaking into her thoughts was, for once, a welcome distraction.
“Emmeline Vanderbilt speaking.”
“Ah. Good afternoon. Christopher Charles Cassington here.”
For a moment Em was at a loss. Then she remembered. This was the bat man. Injecting her voice with a warmth she was far from feeling she responded.
“Good afternoon Mr Cassington. To what do I owe the pleasure.”
“Your colony of bats.”
“Hardly ‘my’ colony, but what about them?”
“The colony is being registered with the authorities as we speak, theoretically ensuring its protection. But I’m not a trusting man, and I have my ear to the ground. I heard rumours that the bats may be in danger, so I have taken a few precautions. This evening, before the bats awaken fully I’m bringing in a ringing team to ring and weigh and record. In addition to the volunteers there will be: a team from Natural Nation taking photographs, a journalist and photographer from Batty about Bats magazine, and a crew from Middle England TV filming a piece for the local news.”
Em began to feel truly fond of the odd little man. “Oh. Well done,” she said fervently.
“I thought you might want to come along and speak to the telly people. I’m not good with that sort of stuff. And you look. Ummm. Imposing.”
Em laughed. “Very well. What time?”
“Six-thirty.”
“Very well. I’ll be there.”
She put the phone down. Grinning. The jersey dresses would have to wait, as would the Ladies. Casual, she thought, if impeccably tailored.
Promptly at six-thirty a smallish convoy of vehicles drew into the village street. There was a minibus full of earnest bat-ringers, a Land Rover emblazoned with the Natural Nation logo, a bulky outdoor broadcast van, a white Volvo she guessed was the Bat magazine, and a Frog-Eyed Sprite she recognised with a wry grin. The vehicles disgorged their passengers and Em quietly tagged onto the end of the crocodile which made its way into the church. 
Erasmus briefly appeared on her shoulder. “The small bats will cooperate. Once I made them understand this would spike the vicar’s guns.”
“We hope. But thanks.”
He flapped off and Em made her way into a church that was now a hive of activity. The television reporter was a fattish man in a loud sports jacket, and Em wasn’t looking forward to speaking to him. But he had his eye on different bait. There was a coltish teenager with dimples among the bat-ringing crew and he already had an avuncular arm about her shoulder. She caught Em’s eye and offered the suspicion of a wink before gazing soulfully at the reporter.  Em retreated to a quiet corner and prepared to watch the show. The pretty teenager managed to tactfully shake off the reporter, who straightened his toupee before giving a piece to camera about the colony of rare bats found in the belfry of St Barnabas Church in Little Botheringham.
He was in full spate, and the comely teen was displaying a newly-ringed bat, when the church door banged open.
The vicar stood in the doorway, he was breathing heavily and his face was puce with rage.
“Get out of my church,” he bellowed. 
The television cameraman, with the faultless instincts of his ilk, turned his lens on the furious clergyman in the doorway.
“Switch off the camera. Switch off the camera. Switch off the camera and clear off.”
He was all but dancing with rage, and Em wondered what he might do next. She wasn’t due to find out, though, because a gentle voice spoke from the back of the church.
“Do calm down, Reverend Turner. All necessary permissions have been granted.”
The vicar jumped as if he had been stung as the owner of the voice stepped towards him. Bishop Esmond’s principal secretary arrived at his elbow and placed an admonitory hand on his biceps. 
The secretary turned his practiced smile into the lens of the camera.
“My colleague and I will just clear up this little misunderstanding. Carry on.”
He waved a white hand and steered the fulminating vicar out into the churchyard.
Em found Arnold at her side and they high fived. 
“Get out of that you bastard,” she crowed.

Part 9 of Much Dithering in Little Botheringham by Jane Jago and Eleanor Swift-Hook, will be here next week.

Because life happens…

Exploring the mysteries of life through the versatile medium of limerick poetry.

Make Hay

The secret of life they do say
Is always find time to make hay
If there’s work to be done
Finish that and have fun
Make the most out of every day

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Sometimes I wonder if my maternal parent is indeed all she claims to be on that account. Could it be, perchance, I was secretly adopted and hail from a genetic line in which the aesthetic principle is celebrated more absolutely? Alas no. The results of the DNA test were pretty clear on that point.

But you will understand my confusion, nay – my utter bafflement at the birthday gift I received from Mumsie last year. I had hoped it would be yet another copy of one of the vibrant tomes by She Who I Am Not Worthy To Name, but instead it was a children’s book – in Latin. When I challenged her choice, suggesting that whilst I was ipso facto her child, I was no longer in childhood, quod erat demonstrandum. But she was not impressed.

“Moons,” she told me, “stop pratting around. Your father paid for you to have an expensive education so use it. Read the book.”

Needless to say ‘Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis’ still sits unread in my writing den where it’s presence is discreetly muted by shadows. However, so I could convince Mummy I had read the blasted thing, I was compelled to procure an English edition.

My review of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.

A boy who is being generously raised by distant relatives, shows extremes of ingratitude and against their wishes takes off for boarding school seduced by the blandishments of those who try to persuade him he is some kind of messiah.

The school, called Hogfarts or something similar, is the educational facility of a secret cult which regards normal people as an inferior breed and calls the ‘muggles’, whilst endeavouring to promote a master race of magic users. Hogfarts uses a hat to choose which house a pupil should be in and the unfortunate child, who is called Harry, is not selected for the superior house and thus has to make do with some rather second-rate companions.

Amongst his adventures, Harry finds a mirror, a dog and a chessboard. He turns out to be quite good at sports, which was not something I had expected as he seemed the geeky sort. He also finds an invisibility cloak but uses it for the most boring things like sneaking around the school. Harry eventually succeeds in stopping a two-faced individual from getting hold of some pebble, but despite his dramatic victory he still finishes the book back where he started.

Two stars for being available in both Latin and English and thus sparing me Mumsie’s scathing vitriol.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

Summer is icumen in
Loudly sing cuckoo!

Or some such rubbish…

Since time immemorial (even before I was born), people have been seriously skittish about the summer solstice. 

Building bonfires, prancing around in impractical clothing, singing songs, and celebrating the longest day of the year. All of which was perfectly understandable – back in the mists of time when things like the rotation of the earth and other such wholly fascinating science were undiscovered and people seriously thought that prancing around naked with a wreath of mistletoe on your noggin guaranteed health, wealth and happiness. (Of course it didn’t. You were more likely to catch a heavy cold – if you were lucky. Or an STD – if you weren’t.)

This having been said we are now in the twenty-first century. We know that the days stretch and contract, the moon waxes and wanes, the seasons more or less follow a set pattern, and it’s quite likely that time will continue to flow in a linear pattern.

There Is No Excuse for turning up on Salisbury plain (probably in the pissing rain) to listen to some geezer in a nightie exhorting the sun to carry on rising. It will rise and set as it pleases, and our sad little ball of clay will continue its eccentric orbit without the intervention of a man who gets his hair cut at an MoT station.  It just doesn’t make sense to burn enormous amounts of fossil fuels in order to get to an event that’s supposed to be about being at one with Mother Earth (who would probably clip you around the earhole if she had hands).

Stop it already.

If you want to greet the rising sun do it in your garden. Or in the beer garden of the Dog and Prolapse. Or in your local park. Just don’t drive there. 

Personally, I shall be greeting the sunrise from behind closed eyelids – unless of course Gyp wants out for a piss. In which case I will salute the sun in my own back garden – and I shall be fetchingly attired in a candlewick dressing gown of indeterminate colour and vintage paired with a pair of wellington boots. (The grass in my garden is seriously unkempt because that’s how me and Gyp like it.) Unless of course it’s raining in which case I will remain in the nice dry kitchen giving the sunrise barely a glance as I swear at the fucking dog.

In a nutshell then. There is nothing special about the summer solstice – or the winter one, or the equinoxes. These things just happen. (I blame physics myself, but that’s another whole story.) 

So. Just please grow up. Wear normal clothes, or some clothes anyway. Don’t eat odd mushrooms. And please stay the fuck at home; the A303 was never built to cope with Druidic influxes.

Right that’s bloody midsummer dealt with. Me and Gyp are off down the pub. He fancies a Guinness and I’m gagging for a pint of Crop Circle.

Piss off then. Or are you buying the beer?

Being a true shifter isn’t the blessing it may seem. But through pain and darkness Perdita seeks to find her own life despite the ambition of others…

Mandrake rested his chin on my head and made the mind link. ‘I can understand why our fae finds this lot disturbing.’
‘Me too. Although they are behaving far better than they ever have before.’
‘Yeah, well. Your man Knut owes me a life debt. And I’m thinking he is the big guy in the group.’
‘He is.’ I favoured Mandrake with a narrow-eyed stare. ‘Where did you learn to instigate the link?’
‘Mothwing thought we might need it.’
I couldn’t argue with that so I just sat back and watched, entranced as always by exactly how much beef and beer seven orcs could get outside of. It was impressive if a trifle messy. It took them the best part of an hour to finish off the beef and a goodly portion of the beer.
Mandrake flicked an eyebrow my way and I nodded.
“Knut,” he said casually, “what was up with those kids at the hot springs?”
Knut was picking his teeth with a needle pointed dagger and he grunted. However, something in my mate’s voice must have penetrated the beer fog, because he put the dagger away and stood scratching at one armpit as he thought.
“I dunno. They were pretty up themselves until we rolled in. Then they mostly shut up.”
One of the other Angels belched quite loudly. “The tall one with the mouth never buttoned it.”
“Until you smacked him around the head.”
“The second time. The first time he just kept right on talking.”
“Asswipe,” a third muscular orc joined in the conversation. “The piece of shit I had hold of was riding high on something. I near to twisted his dick off before he stopped wriggling.”
“Wonder what he was on,” Knut grunted.
“I dunno, but he had some glass vials in his pocket. I stomped on most of ‘em. Ground ‘em to paste under my boot.”
“Where’d he get the shit?”
“His dad’s some sort of science human out of the research station. Snotty bumhole. Didn’t like being told that if his kid got caught trying it on with underage females again he’d be in trouble.”
The orc, who I just then realised was female, grinned at some memory and her neighbour elbowed her hard.
“What’d’ya say to him?”
Her grin grew wider. “I might’ve said that I’d castrate the brat myself and make him eat his own balls.”
Knut belched sonorously. “Seems proportionate to me.”
He ambled off into the trees and I had to push down the impetus to question the female further. It was unlikely she knew any more than she had said, and anyway asking her without her pack leader being present would have been the cue for a fight.
The drunkest of the orcs lay on his back and started to sing. Well, I say sing, what I mean is bellow loudly at the sky.
“Shut up Gobshite.”
“You gonna make me?”
The singer struggled to his feet, but whatever he had been going to say or do was immediately superseded by the call of nature.
“Orcs shit in the woods,” he announced before shambling off into the undergrowth.
I marked his entry place carefully as the chances of him getting lost were high, and if that happened me and Mandrake would have to lead the retrieval party.
While we waited for Knut to return I replayed the conversation in my head. I’d just got to ‘most of them’ when the pack leader stumbled back into the clearing. He’d obviously been thinking too.
“Stomped on most of them?”
“Yes Pack Leader. I kept two.”
“Why’d you do that, my mate?” He sounded puzzled and right on the edge of being angry.
She showed him her fangs. “One for our chemists to look at and one for The Agency.”
It was amazing, and mightily pleasing, to see such a big orc reduced to the status of a naughty schoolboy. He ducked his head and looked at his own huge feet.
“I’m sorry, mother of my cubs, it’s you have the brains.”
She chuckled. “You stick to cracking heads, and leave the thinking to me. Now. If we had some music.”
I sprinted into the biggest of the store caves and came out with the music box my master had stolen from some humans. I keep it charged in his memory so I could turn the dial to ‘heavy rock’ and fill the clearing with wailing guitars and a thumping beat. The orcs started to dance, stamping their feet and swinging their shoulders in perfect time with the beat.
I leaned into Mandrake. “They can keep this up for hours.”
“Somehow that isn’t a surprise.” He watched for a while. “Some of them are females aren’t they?”
I looked carefully. “Two or maybe three.”
“Three?”
As Mandrake studied the whirling stomping figures a ululating wail split the night air. He dropped into a fighting crouch.
“What the frag?”
“Orcs shit in the woods. And quite often get lost.”
The dancers came to a ragged and reluctant halt. Knut scratched his exceedingly hairy chest.
“Anybody know where that fragging moron Gobshite went?”
The orcs all shook their heads, and Knut tugged ferociously at his own beard in irritation.
I whistled sharply to get the big guy’s attention. “I know where your lost packmate went into the undergrowth, and what direction he took.”
“That’s a start, but it’s still gonna frag up the party.”
Mandrake laughed. “I’ll go find him.”
One of the females glared at Mandrake. “What you gonna do we can’t, human?”
Knut’s mate smacked her firmly around the head. “Mouth shut and eyes open,” she snapped.
Mandrake stepped out of the firelight onto the freezing cold grass of the upland meadow and the chilly moonlight. He made the change and the disrespectful orc swallowed audibly.
“You better hope,” Knut rumbled, “that there isn’t a vengeful dragon.”
Mandrake turned his whirling multicoloured gaze on the group of orcs for a heartbeat, before giving his full attention to the business of taking off in a fairly limited space. Three wingbeats took him to treetop height and he began the search.
It didn’t take him long to locate the lost orc and he hovered above it, whistling to attract attention, but the distressed drunkard just carried on crashing about in circles and making his horrible ululating noises. Mandrake swooped and scraped the top of the orc’s head with his talons, but even that failed to break through the twin fogs of alcohol and panic.
I saw the precise moment that my mate’s patience ran out, so the blue flame that lit the woodland in front of Gobshite came as no surprise. The rest of the orcs were a bit more surprised, with Knut going so far as to throw back his head and roar.
“We’re in for some sport now,” he said.
His mate’s grin was a feral thing, and I made a mental note not to get on the wrong side of her.
“Sport?” it was the voice of the orc who had disrespected Mandrake, only now it quivered with barely concealed fear.
“Oh yes. You are about to watch a dragon herd his prey. Only this time he won’t eat what he herds. Or at least I hope he won’t.”
Knut looked at me and I hastened to reassure him. “No. He won’t eat your orc. Orc flesh gives him wind.”
The pack stared at me for a second before the idea that I was joking landed. When it did they laughed far more than such a small jest merited, with Knut hisself capping my joke with a very rude suggestion about hot dragon wind.

Jane Jago