Cold and Sweet by Carolyn Lenz
2023 Honourable Mention
It took me a minute to recognize him with his frills puffed out like fireworks. He had been sleek and dark earlier that day. The thin membranes of vestigial wings lining his arms had been stuffed into a charcoal, well-tailored suit, and the iridescent fans on either side of his neck were tucked back and kept colourless through careful self-control.
It hadn’t stopped me from thinking about how the scales on his face and hands shimmered in the sun like the oil in my frying pan. Right now they glowed like candles in the dim light filtering through the smoke-stained windows.
He was at the bar, alone. Hunched over his drink, ignoring the riot of colour and movement around him. A pair of goblins sitting a few feet down from him laughed and slapped the table, sloshing their ale everywhere. A lithe, glittering elf danced with a dwarf dripping in arcane vials and runes. A table at the back corner was filled with a party of creatures, each of their colourful outfits reminding me of a different journey, places I would never go again.
Of the two of us, the half-dragon should have stuck out less than me. But instead the revelry of the adventurers’ tavern stopped within a small radius of his barstool.
He tossed back the last of his drink and stood, rummaging in his pocket. I limped across the tavern. The crowd parted for me at the sound of my gait. Before the half-dragon could find the coin to pay for his tab, I was at his side.
“I’ll get that,” I said, scattering a few copper pieces on the bartop. “If you’ll have another one with me.”
The half-dragon’s crests whipped up. I knew it was an intimidation response, but I couldn’t help admiring the colours splayed across his skin. I wondered if it was my first time seeing any of them. Slitted pupils searched my face for a moment. Finally, his hackles relaxed. “Fine,” he said. “But just one.”
I clumsily clambered onto the barstool next to him and nodded at the bartender for two more. “I’m Ardoth,” I told the half-dragon.
He took so long to reply that I didn’t think he was going to talk to me at all. “Carnan,” he finally said.
“Where are you hurrying off to, Carnan?” I asked.
“I don’t see how that is your business,” the half-dragon replied.
“It’s not,” I admitted. “I was just curious. Considering you’ve only been here a few minutes.”
“Have you been watching me?”
“One tends to notice when the son of Vance’s most powerful crime lord walks in.”
Again the frills came up.
“Whoa, calm down,” I said, a palm raised. “I just mean you’re not exactly the adventuring type.”
Carnan’s nostrils flared in what may have been a snarl. “Yes, well. I could say the same to you.” He motioned at my leg. At the oak bound by magic to bone after the flesh below my knee had been burnt away. The injury that had ended my travels. His eyes focused on me, hard as gemstones. Until he blinked. “That’s how I know you. You have a noodle stand in the industrial district. That’s how you know who I am.”
I nodded. “I’ve seen you there with your father.” The image was still fresh in my mind. The two of them standing in the blistering sun in dark suits outside the distillery. Arguing. Carnan had stormed off. “You don’t need to work for him, you know?”
“Of course not,” Carnan snorted. “I’m sure I’ll have an easy time finding legitimate work. What can I do that isn’t destructive?”
I couldn’t argue with that. Instead, I asked, “Do you want to get out of here?”
*
“I thought we were going to your home,” Carnan said. He looked around at the picked-over market stalls. What was left of the produce was wilting in the late afternoon sun as the vendors packed it in for the day. “Or at least somewhere private.”
“I’m a former adventurer,” I replied. “Everywhere is my home.”
“That sounds suspiciously like you have no home.”
“Well… When you spent the first few decades of your life travelling, you find your own home where you can.” I picked up a sandfruit from a nearby basket and gave it a squeeze, releasing its scent. I remembered a different market, one thousands of miles south, the air spicy and sweet. The trip was too arduous now. At least I had a journal filled with recipes. I could still remember my travels. “I made food my home.”
“I always find sandfruit too gritty,” Carnan replied.
“Not when they’re poached. Here.” I passed him an armload. He took them with a roll of those golden, slitted eyes and trailed behind me as I strolled onward, squeezing between the food market’s crowd.
“I suppose cooking is always a marketable skill,” Carnan sighed. “I don’t have anything like that. Nothing that will make people look past my face. My father is the only person in the city with any pity for me. I suppose he is responsible.”
Sprigs of fresh spices were tied in tight sheaves. I bruised the leaves of a bristlethorn between my fingers. Too acrid. The tetraflare next to it was too obvious. But the dried crimson petals of the crinklebloom were perfect. I pulled a few long stems from the bunch and planted them between the sandfruits in Carnan’s arms.
“I didn’t expect you to try to woo me,” Carnan said.
“They go with the sandfruit,” I replied.
“Wait… You can eat these?”
“No one ever knows that you can eat them,” I smiled. The best duellist I’d ever met had a crest with two stags rampant on either side of a crinklebloom. I’d made him a stew using both.
“So even though you’re retired, you still think of food as your home?” Carnan asked. “What about your family?”
“People don’t become adventurers because they’re close with their family.”
“I see.”
Carnan sounded so disappointed. “I mean, you find your family,” I added.
“I suppose.”
The seller I stopped in front of didn’t even have a stall constructed. Bronwen normally built her stall from the barrels of milk she brought from her dairy, but now her lot was nearly bare, except for empty stacks of crates. I gave her a few coins and grabbed the last few bottles of milk. “Now we’re heading for my home,” I said.
*
The milk simmered over the hearth, orange from the poached sandfruit, speckled with red. A faint, sweet mist wisped from the mixture.
“Your father is a frost dragon, right?” I asked.
Carnan’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”
“I’m an adventurer. Maketh is a crime lord and a dragon. I hear rumours.” With linen wrapped around my hands, I lifted the pot from the hearth and moved it away from the heat, setting it on the dirt floor.
Carnan’s expensive boots paced past. His frills draped back from his neck, a sign of relaxation. He crossed the narrow space in a few steps and then turned. His eyes scanned the shelves lined with preserves, the spices dangling as they dried. “This place is small,” he said.
“It costs less. Easier to heat, too.” Caravans used to be the height of luxury to me, so the few extra feet of width felt opulent. I grabbed a wooden spoon and began stirring the sweet milk mixture into a frothy cyclone. I asked Carnan, “Can you freeze this?”
Carnan frowned. “Why?”
“Trust me.”
Carnan knelt across from me, his eyes questioning. Unsure. I didn’t stop stirring. After a moment, he blew gently into the pot, his breath a white-blue jet of cold. Some of it bounced off the surface of the milk, mingling with the dying steam.
“That’s good,” I said. “Keep it gentle. We want to freeze it slowly. Snow, not ice.”
I saw those golden eyes flick up to me and then back to the pot. The question left unasked. Carnan was curious, but willing to wait for the answer.
The milk thickened. I pushed harder. I couldn’t slow. You couldn’t stop swinging your sword if your shoulders burned in battle.
“Keep going,” I coaxed Carnan.
The half-dragon was steady. I’d asked for gentle, and he could do gentle.
The milk mixture turned into a dense slush. It slid around the inside of the pot, but it was still wet. “Just a bit more.”
Carnan took a quick sip of air. As delicate as possible. There was barely a break in the stream of frost. The wooden spoon got stuck.
“You can stop now,” I told Carnan. “It’s ready.”
*
The iron scoop scraped the bottom of the pot. I gathered what I could of the sweet frozen snow into a paper cup. A rivulet dripped down my hand. Even after sunset, the sweltering summer heat never seemed to dissipate from the city.
I passed the small treat to the goblin child in front of me and turned away their penny. “Sorry it’s not as much as your friends got,” I told them. But they were already running off.
It had only been minutes ago that Carnan and I were wading through a crowd of kids of all sizes. A rainbow of reaching hands, a sea of horns and feathers, laughing, smiling, and not batting an eye at the half-dragon next to me.
You would never know from the adventurers’ district that Vance is majority human.
Carnan watched the last of the children go. “We didn’t make much of a profit,” he remarked.
I tossed the scoop into the pot and took it from Carnan. “I’m not really worried about that,” I said.
“Isn’t food how you make your living?”
“Ah, my living,” I repeated. “Well, we made enough money to cover the cost of ingredients and made my community a little happier. Besides, I had a very pleasant few hours. And what’s living if not that?”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you have money,” Carnan said. “You have your people, regardless.”
“You don’t have anyone?” I asked.
He was silent.
“These could be your people,” I offered.
“I’m not an adventurer.”
I gestured at my leg. “Neither am I. But this is an accepting place. What do you expect from a bunch of people who felt the need to leave their homes and families behind to make new ones?”
“It isn’t that simple,” Carnan said. “Not anymore. I should have grown up here, but…”
I waited.
“Maketh should not have been my father,” he said. “My mother was married to an adventurer, Orlon. He was almost never in Vance, always off saving lives and fighting great evils. He died saving some village that’s too small to have a name.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Carnan shook his head. “I never met him. If he hadn’t died… if my mother hadn’t been overcome with grief…” He paused. “Full dragons can shapeshift. Look like anyone. My mother asked Maketh to look like her husband, and now I’m stuck looking like this.” Carnan stared at the goblin child as they played with their friends, a mix of humans and elves. “My mother hoped I was somehow Orlon’s, but when I was born, she knew the truth. She couldn’t stand the sight of me, and gave me to Maketh. Which was probably what he wanted.”
I pictured Carnan in the industrial district walking behind his father. A potent reminder of what Maketh was, even as he blended in with the swathes of human workers and businessmen. “Is that where you think you belong?” I asked.
“I don’t belong anywhere,” Carnan sighed.
I took his hand. His frills twitched up before relaxing. “You belong anywhere that feels like home,” I told him.
His breath on my face as we kissed was cold and sweet.
Carolyn Lenz is a writer, scientist and badass. Her work has appeared in AE: the Canadian Science Fiction Review and Metaphorosis, and she has stories upcoming in Baffling Magazine and Fanatical Magazine. She was born, raised, and currently resides in Hamilton, Ontario.