“You promised me the egg was sterile! I was looking for a decorative piece and that was it! Do you know how much it costs to raise a baby dragon from hatching?”
“Ain’t my problem,” the man behind the counter drawled, gesturing in the sign’s direction. “You bought it. You assumed all the risks associated with it. S’ your problem now.”
“You advertised an unfertilized dragon egg, suitable for decorative use. I bought it from you because I believed you. You made a sale by lying to me.” I had to pause and take a deep breath before I wound up accidentally breathing fire myself, while my new little friend nuzzled the underside of my jaw, the same way a cat might try to offer comfort. She really was a bit like a scaly cat with wings, at this size, and it wasn’t having her around all by itself that I objected to. I just felt - justifiably - that I was owed something. “You understand that there are laws against that, right?”
“Uh huh, and whatcha gonna do about it, buddy, call the King’s Guard on me?” The shopkeeper stuck a cigar in his mouth without even bothering to light it; he did it for no other reason than to make it clear how few fucks he gave about me. “Have fun with that, buddy. We can see how long it takes the six or seven old women who ain’t been dragged to the front lines already to get here. I’m bettin’ on Fleet-Foot Belinda gettin’ here first. They say her new apothecarist’s done wonders for those bad knees of hers. If she’s well rested, she might get here…day after tomorrow, maybe.”
I knew this flimflammer was trying to irritate me into giving up and leaving. He was actually pretty close to succeeding, I had to admit. But I could almost feel my mother glaring at me, her eyes somehow boring into the back of my neck from a hundred miles away at the very idea I might let a cheating shopkeep get the better of me. Or maybe that was my little friend’s hot breath. “What refun’?” she asked me, sticking her snout directly in my ear. “What refun’, daddy?”
Of course she’d ask that right now. “A refund,” I said, sighing heavily, “is when a shopkeeper gives you back the money you paid to buy something from them. Usually it happens because the item is bad somehow. Some shopkeepers will let you give the item back in exchange for your money just because you decided you didn’t like it anymore, as long as they remember you buying it from them in the first place.”
“No, sweetheart, you’re not bad,” I reassured her, scratching behind her crest. “But this man promised me your egg couldn’t possibly hatch, that it wasn’t the kind of egg that could hatch, and that turned out to be wrong. I want a refund because he lied to me about what I was buying in order to trick me into buying it, and that’s a very bad thing to do.”
She still wasn’t able to fly properly just yet, but she was able to make some pretty considerable wing-assisted jumps. One leap took her from my shoulder all the way to the counter, where she stood in front of the shopkeeper like an indignant cat. “You give my daddy refund,” she said.
The shopkeeper, true to his asinine behavior, just laughed at her and tried to sweep her off the counter with his arm. She dodged his arm, then turned and sank her small but very, very sharp teeth into it, making him wail in pain like a baby; as he yanked his bleeding arm away, she breathed a puff of flame into his face for emphasis, setting the end of his cigar on fire. “You give my daddy refund,” she hissed, and the shopkeeper, now trembling just a little, started reaching for his cash box.
