The Caged Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 1) by Dan Michaelson (websites to read books for free txt) 📕

grab a towel to dry him off. When I returned to the room, I found Joran’s face pale. He looked over to me with an unreadable expression on his face.

“What is it?”

“Ashan,” he started, nodding briefly to my father, “I don’t think he’s…” He took a deep breath and straightened. “I don’t think he made it.”

I carried the towel over to my father and used it to wipe the rainwater off his face, before patting his arms, and then finally checked his neck for a pulse.

There was none.

His body was frigid.

I watched him, waiting for him to take a breath. In the race back to the house, I hadn’t bothered to assess whether or not he still breathed, knowing I had felt a pulse at one point, and thought if I was fast enough, I could warm him up and he would recover.

Sadness and hopelessness welled up inside of me.

My father had been so different the last few years, but I’d always hoped that he’d recover. That the medicines would work. That I could have my father back.

Now he was gone.

Truly gone.

My hands shook uncontrollably.

If I had managed to get to him in time, I might have saved him.

Had I not argued with my mother, maybe he wouldn’t have wandered off.

I touched his hand, not sure what to say, not trusting myself to speak.

The last few years had been hard. Incredibly hard.

It hadn’t always been that way. He had been a good man. Kind. Funny. He had taught me everything I knew about life on the farm and the world. With the accident, we’d all changed, but seeing him like this brought me back to when I’d been younger. Back to when he had still been that man, the one who had taught me how to shoot a bow and how to ride a horse.

I swallowed back the lump in my throat, struggling with it as I managed to speak. “I saw him on Adela, so I chased after them. When I reached her, I found him on the ground.”

“Do you know what might’ve happened?”

“He’s been sick for a while,” I said. “But not so sick that I would’ve expected him to succumb so easily.”

“I’m sorry,” Joran said.

I stared for a long moment, looking at my father, a part of me half expecting that he would take another breath. I knew so little about what had actually happened that day. I had followed my father and brother, trying to get to them before they got too deep into the forest, the only other time that I had attempted to head into the forest. They had disappeared, and when I heard the scream…

I hadn’t managed to get to them in time. I found my father first. He was injured, bloodied, and then I found my brother. Something was obviously wrong, though I couldn’t tell what it was. My father had been in a daze, as if he wasn’t really there. I looked over to Joran. “What are you doing here?”

He took a deep breath, studying my father for a moment before tearing his gaze away and looking up at me. “I found your horse.”

“ Flop?”

He nodded. “He ended up at our house. I was going to come to find you, anyway.”

“Why?”

He studied me for a long moment. “There’s something you need to see.”

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure how to explain it.” Joran took a deep breath before letting it out slowly. “My father saw something. He didn’t know what it was, but he went after it. When he caught up to it, he realized it was a fire.”

“A fire?” I said.

“Right. It reminded me of what we’d found along the road before.”

“You saw this?”

“Not at first. I didn’t think anything of it until he started describing it. It was north of the King’s Road, basically just east of my farm, and far enough away that it didn’t really matter, but it was along the edge of the forest.”

I shrugged. “Why does that matter to me?”

Joran held something up.

It was a scrap of fabric. Not just any fabric, but a pattern I recognized.

It was the same one Alison had been wearing when we had left for the city.

“Where did you get that?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. When I went with my father, I came across the fire. This one was different, though. The one we saw had nothing remaining, but this one had metal and wood and… well, this.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, something must have happened to the caravan,” he told me.

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

I looked down at my father.

I hated that I was forced to be this practical rather than have the chance to mourn my father, but I had no choice. If something had really happened to Alison, then I needed to know. The others were beyond my help. Thenis needed healing I couldn’t provide, and I didn’t know about my mother. Alison was not beyond me.

“Can you show me?”

“In this weather?” Joran asked. I shot him an angry look, and he raised his hands as he backed away. “I guess I can. But it’s far from here.”

I need to see for myself.”

I worried that Joran would argue with me, and that he would debate whether or not he needed to take me there, but thankfully he didn’t. “You might need to gather some supplies. I don’t know how long we’re going to be gone.”

“What else aren’t you telling me?”

“There were signs of a struggle,” Joran said.

“What sort of a struggle?”

“ We saw blood. Arrows..”

I frowned. If it wasn’t for my sister, I would want nothing to do with any of this. It wasn’t the kind of thing that I needed to get involved in.

“There’s something else,” Joran said.

“What else could there be?”

“Wagon tracks.” He held my gaze for a moment. “We think there was another wagon caravan.”

“And you think that caravan took my sister.”

“I don’t know. But it worries me.”

When she’d been selected by the Academy, I could have understood. Now I had no choice but to