PodCastle

* Author : Evan Kennedy
* Narrator : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali
* Host : Jen R. Albert
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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PodCastle 622: Spoken For is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG-13.
Spoken For
by Evan Kennedy
Twenty-five years after the magic came back, Auden’s wife got turned to stone.
It was the dog’s fault. A cockatrice had been wandering Harlan County for the past few weeks, ever since some damn fool two towns over let a cock’s egg hatch instead of chucking it backwards over the roof. Auden and Ellaree had dealt with a ’trice before, though, and they knew all the new-time tricks. Usually when monsters were about, they’d lock up the goats and chickens, and then stay inside with the curtains pulled ’til the beast passed them by. But this time they couldn’t find the dog, and Ellaree went back out to look for it. Auden tried to stop her, observed she didn’t have a lick of sense, risking her life for some mutt. But she grinned, told him she loved that mutt, and he didn’t know a thing about love, then she went out anyway.
She always was hammer-headed, that woman. It was what he loved about her.
Auden didn’t go after her. He remembered the dragon-wards they’d taught him in the army, but that was twenty years ago. He wasn’t some wizard who could sweet-talk a ’trice. His brother Ty even told him as much when Auden turned up the next day with Ellaree under a sheet in the wagon, board-stiff and glassy eyed.
“Y’can’t blame yourself,” Ty said, awkward in the face of his brother’s grief. Auden nodded, but his ham and okra grew cold on the table as he stared out at the cloth-covered shape in the wagon. You learn to stick together when you’re the only Black kids in the county, so he and Ty were always close, but this was something he couldn’t talk about, even with family.
“Be obliged if you could look after the animals while I’m away. Might be a spell.”
“Gonna go see the shaman?” Ty ventured. Auden frowned and lifted one hand to pull at his beard, but his eyes never left the window.
“Reckon so.”

Five years after the magic came back, Auden Rune-Shot returned from the war.
He’d been so young before, just a stupid kid who lied about his age so they’d let him slay dragons. Pop named him James, for the apostle, and mama called him Auden, for the poet, so when they died in the rift that destroyed Nashville, Jimmy put his name on the line at the recruiter’s office in Lexington, James Auden Clay, with a flourish and went off to make their deaths mean something. But war changes skinny boys from Appalachia, and not just in their bodies. The new times wore away at names somehow, and in any case, the boys in the 8th Mounted Division all got nicknames.
You had to be a bit touched to want to be an echinemon rider, but they were still just kids fresh off the Xbox, and half of them were dead inside a year.
The kid from Appalachia found he was better prepared than most. His old man pulled him off the computer every other weekend to go hunting and fishing and camping, and while Jimmy was on his phone the whole time, he still learned a thing or two. Hunting dragons wasn’t so different from boars once you got past the scales and the teeth and the fire.
Most of the 8th wanted to dance with the wyrms, the way an echinemon did, swaying and striking like a giant mongoose. The boys figured they’d take up their swords and do the same,