Chronicles of Carnezia (Book 1): Dragons of Dracona

Chapter 7: Missing Meat

Chapter 7: Missing Meat

            The next week or so was just the same; I started recognising faces a lot better and even visited Bert now and again. Mr. Harrison let me borrow Aspen whenever I wanted to go round town, which was mostly every day. On one particular day, I went back to the beech tree where I had heard those men talking. I only spent an hour or so there before heading back to the town; when I got there however there was such a commotion going on that I had to gallop as quick as I could to the shop and untack Aspen and put him in his stall before I could start to know what happened.

            There were a lot of people in the street and from what I could tell from all the turmoil was that someone had stolen a lot of meat from the butcher’s stores and one person had been burnt down a nearby alley. Among all the people, I looked over their heads and shoulders and saw two men arguing by themselves; being curious, I assumed they were the men I heard a week before but I had to get closer to hear their voices. So I made my way round the furthest side of the crowd to them and tried to look like I was listening to the people around me when I was really listening to them.

            ‘You had to lose the one bit of it that was actually worth anything. Now what are we going to do?’ said the man I knew as the second voice.

            ‘Don’t blame me. How is it my fault if it went missing? Anyway, you were supposed to have tied it up in the bag,’ accused the first voiced man.

            It was all too clear that it was them and I didn’t know what they were up to but I wanted, then, to try and sort this out by myself. As dangerous as it was, I took it upon myself to know when all this had happened and I soon had my answer.

            ‘I went into the stores this morning and there was a whole pig gone. I went to check outside but there were no footprints or any sign of the thief but then I saw him lying here with burns all over him. He was just breathing when I found him, any sooner and he might not have been alive,’ I heard the butcher explaining to a few curious crowders.

            The two men that I had been eavesdropping on were now walking off towards one of the more unfriendly taverns and I found out that is where they were staying while in Baedon. I made a mental note of which one before going back to the shop.

            Mr. Harrison was inside and was just serving a customer so I waited by one of the bookcases. The customer left and the elderly man offered to make me a cup of tea; whilst he was in the little kitchen, I went back over to the window to see that the burnt man was now being carried off on a stretcher towards what I assumed to be a doctor’s of some sorts.

            ‘Here you are, dear,’ Mr. Harrison said and handed me the hot mug of tea when I turned around. He looked outside to see what I was staring at. ‘Oh dear, what is all that about?’ he asked.

            I tried to busy myself with setting my mind free of suspicions so I took some of the books off their shelves, dusted them and then re-ordered them back where they had been sitting. ‘Someone was found outside the butcher’s with burns,’ I began. ‘Oh and the butcher is missing a whole pig.’

            ‘My my, seems as there is going to be a few searches around the town then,’ he commented and set his own mug of tea on the counter. I looked over my shoulder and saw he was fishing out an old book from one of the shelves on the hidden side of the desk. ‘There hasn’t been a sighting of a dragon in these parts for a hundred years, I presume,’ he muttered to himself but had caught my attention all too easily. He thumbed through the yellowed pages of the large volume that now sat on the desk before he stopped somewhere in the middle. ‘Ah yes, here we are. Yes the last one to have inhabited a place near here was an orange-red tinted one that used to live over the hill to the north; but that was way before any settlers built a village here,’ he added, more to himself.