Pot Pie

Chapter 41: Dragon Chaperone

Gregory did not want to go on an adventure. He had been on plenty of adventures in his very long life and, in his experience, they mostly involved sore feet, foul weather, and humans who talked entirely too much. He had explained all of this to Svend and Mirabel when they showed up on his doorstep with a basket of apple muffins and a “teeny tiny favor.” Unfortunately, the muffins were excellent, and somewhere around muffin number three, Gregory found that he had agreed to escort Everett on a visit to Fiora and Leoric. Purely a family visit, Mirabel assured him, with a wink that suggested it was nothing of the sort.

So it was that Gregory, royal dragon, former member of the dragon council, and keeper of secrets older than most kingdoms, found himself trudging down a mountain road beside a seventeen year old who would not stop talking.

Everett talked about bread. He talked about the proper ratio of butter to flour in a pie crust. He talked about his many, many siblings, and how in a family that big it was very easy to become the one nobody noticed. He talked about Mirabel’s kitchen, and how it was the first place he had ever felt like he was truly good at something. Gregory grunted at appropriate intervals. Everett took every grunt as encouragement.

On the second day, it began to rain. Not a gentle, refreshing spring rain, but a cold, sideways, soak-you-to-your-bones sort of rain. Gregory, who could have dried himself in an instant with a single puff of dragon fire, was forced to squelch along as miserably as any human. (Dragons do not enjoy being wet. It is undignified.) When a little inn finally appeared around the bend, smoke curling invitingly from its chimney, Gregory very nearly ran to it.

The innkeeper was a round, rosy woman who took one look at the two dripping travelers and planted them by the fire with two steaming bowls before they could so much as ask for a room. “Chicken pot pie,” she announced. “Eat it while it’s hot.”

Gregory took a bite. Then he stopped. Then he took another, much larger bite. Beside him, Everett had gone completely silent for the first time in two days, which was perhaps the most shocking development of all.

The crust was golden and flaky and shattered at the touch of a spoon. The filling was rich and creamy, full of tender chicken and peas and carrots and something peppery that warmed you from the toes up. It was, without exaggeration, the best thing either of them had ever eaten.

“That,” Everett finally whispered, “is better than Mirabel’s.”

Gregory set his spoon down very slowly and looked the boy dead in the eye. “We will never speak of this to your sister.”

“Never,” Everett agreed solemnly. “She would cry. Or worse, she’d make it fourteen more times until she beat it, and we’d have to eat every single one and tell her it was perfect.”

To his great surprise, Gregory laughed. Not a polite chuckle, but a real, rumbling laugh that turned heads all around the inn. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed like that.

They ordered seconds. Then, when the innkeeper wasn’t looking, Everett snuck into the kitchen to interrogate the cook about her crust while Gregory stood guard at the door, which is not a sentence Gregory ever imagined would describe his life. Over a third (very small, they promised themselves) bowl, the conversation turned. Everett asked Gregory if he had ever been in love. Gregory, warm and full and caught off guard, admitted that he had, once, a very long time ago, and that it had ended badly. Everett didn’t push. He just nodded and said, “Well, her loss. You’re not nearly as scary as everyone says you are.”

Gregory decided, right then and there, that he liked this boy. Not that he would ever tell him so. He had a reputation to maintain, after all.

By the time the rain cleared, the reluctant dragon and the chatty baker had become something neither of them expected: friends. And they kept their solemn vow. Mirabel never heard a word about it. This is the pot pie that they ate.