The Dragon's Second-Best Friend

How it begins

The dragon disliked the first statue because it smiled. He disliked the second because it did not. By the time Ada Marsh carried in the third sketch, she had begun to suspect that stone was the easier part of her profession.

'The mouth is wrong,' Garran said.

'That is what you said yesterday.'

'It remains wrong.'

Ada set the sketch on a flat rock. Around them, the dragon's garden climbed the ruined walls in carefully tied rows. He grew beans on old spears and roses through a helmet too large for any human head. Nothing here was neglected except the empty chair beside his gate.

'Tell me what his mouth did,' she said.

Garran's claws folded into the soil. 'Talked.'

'About what?'

'Weather. Soup. The way I planted peas.'

'Did he have opinions about your peas?'

'They were wrong opinions.'

For a moment, something almost like pleasure moved across the enormous face. Then it vanished, and Ada knew better than to point it out. She had made memorials for thirty years. People often brought her a photograph and asked for someone she could not possibly carve: the person before they became someone a photograph had to replace.

Garran had brought her a shoe.

It sat beside the empty chair, brown leather, worn thin at the left heel. His friend's name had been Tomas. That was all Ada had learned without being told to leave.

She took out a fresh sheet. 'Perhaps we should start with the chair.'

'The commission is for Tomas.'

'Yes.'

'Not for furniture.'

'I understand.'

A long silence followed. Ada's knees hurt, so she sat on the low wall. Garran looked offended that she had made herself comfortable. Eventually he pushed a bowl toward her with one careful claw. It contained peas, still warm.

'Tomas said I used too much butter,' he said.

Ada tasted them. 'Tomas was wrong.'