Their concentration was poor, but with a little coaxing they kept at it until she helped them form a red-hot roughly rounded marble.
“I wonder how they got the holes in them,” she muttered—to herself, as she thought.
The dragonet who had done the most blowing—she thought it was the one that in sunlight displayed a lavender/blue shading to its scales, but in the cave’s greenish light it was hard to see color—reached out and pierced the molten ball with a claw, and held it up to admire it from all sides. Meanwhile the other dragonet used a claw to flick another crystal rod onto the scale and looked up at her with expectant eyes as large as the headlights on the locomotive.
The creature’s clear intent surprised her. In the short time she’d been with them, she was becoming somewhat attached to the little horrors. She liked animals—one never had to worry about embroidering the truth for animals or children either. Both were as clever about figuring out the truth as she was, so some of her best friends had been horses and cats mostly. Dogs were not quite as truthful since they often looked upon even the most appalling master as if he or she were a god and she seldom shared their over-enthusiastic opinion.
But this small monster looked like a young student eagerly anticipating an enjoyable lesson—well, looked like it if she only looked into the eyes and didn’t notice the scales, the claws, or the long muzzle that glowed faintly around the mouth and nostrils.
“I was getting to you,” she told the dragonet, and picked up the rod with her scale/tongs in one hand while holding another scale to try to give the molten glass blob shape. She had scarcely arranged everything when the dragon began huffing and puffing little bursts of smoke and fumes before burping flame.
She inhaled, and then blew a long steady exhalation.
“Like that,” she told her new student. “Too bad you two will never be able to play with bubble pipes. The breath control is very similar, except of course bubbles would be impossible for you. Maybe.”
An idea had begun to take shape, even as her pupil’s ragged breath was mutilating the little crystal rod. She shaped it with her scale paddle and knife. When it was approximately round—though a bit lopsided—the dragon speared it with its claw just as its sibling had done.
The pair of them watched the beads impaled on their claws as if they were mothers with eggs about to hatch.
Before she could stop them they ran to the entrance and up the tube, beads still on their claws. But in a few moments they came back, doing what she could only describe as a dragonish version of wailing, making dreadful noises and flapping their little wings and lashing their tails in a highly agitated manner.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. Then she saw. Each held out a front foot to her, holding a broken bead.
“No matter,” she said soothingly. “We’ll make others, but this time, don’t try to cool them off so fast. They need to cool gradually.”
She didn’t think they understood her, but the skronking, tail lashing, and wing flapping stopped when she reached for more crystals up higher on the wall. As she did, she kicked something. She wouldn’t have taken any notice, but it felt quite distinct from other things on the cave floor. Leaning down, she picked it up. A rolled leather bundle, longer than her tool kit, tied with a thong and tucked back inside a depression at the bottom of the cave wall. It felt hard in the middle and she heard things clank. Curiously, she opened it and saw the last thing she expected in this place: tools! Made of metal, they included larger versions of the saw, pliers, and files in the kit her father had given her, but also several metal rods.
She looked more closely at what she had taken to be random markings on the wall above where the tools had been stored and below the crystal outcropping.
She waved the dragonets over to the wall. “Could I have a bit of flame now?” she asked them, and immediately felt ridiculous, but her torch was long gone and she needed more light to make out the drawings.
The one with the blue violet scales, Screech, had busied herself trying to leap up and break crystals down from the ceiling, but Skronk obligingly produced a small flame and let it light the section she pointed to. Wavy lines with zigzags flanked a stick figure who seemed to be holding a flute, in a series of drawings that ended with the figures flanking a drawing of two circles, a large one and a much smaller one inside of it.
Who had brought tools to the cave with the deliberate intent of making beads? Apparently there had been at least one previous dragon/human bead-making team.
What a relief if the dragon never intended to eat her but only wanted her as an arts and crafts instructor for her young! The tool roll and the drawings on the wall were reassuring. She felt certain that the person who had left them there must have also left the cave alive.
Suddenly there was a sharp crack! The dragonet who had been lighting the wall slammed into her, knocking her aside as its sibling broke off a gigantic piece of crystal.
Sitting up again, she said in a shaky voice, “Very well then, we have what we need now. Let’s try again, shall we? But this time we will form the beads around this metal rod, see?”
She was familiar with the theory and really, all the dragons had to do was focus their flames, keep them the correct size and practice the breath control she had already taught them—or tried to. It was not what one would call an easy task, but once more they ended with two beads—this time wrapped around the rod.
When the first one was done, she tried to think how they might preserve it this time from the fate of the other one. There must be a way here within the cave, if the previous beads had been made here with no more resources than what they had.
As she pondered this, the dragonet that had been providing the flame for the bead grabbed bead, rod and all and popped it into its maw, which glowed like an oven—or a kiln? “Very good!” she said. “Now if you can just take a nap and not eat or drink or burn anything, perhaps we’ll have better luck this time.
She had a quiet few hours while the dragons clamped their glowing jaws around their beads and sat like brooding hens with eggs to hatch. Much to her amazement, the second beads cooled properly and did not break when the dragons opened their mouths and allowed them to drop. They happily rolled them around the ledge for a time to make sure and to wear off their pent up energy from sitting still for what was quite a long time for them.
But Verity had another surprise when, tired of playing with the beads and well-assured that they would not break, the dragonets rolled them to her feet and stopped, looking up at her again.
“For me?”
They looked down at their beads and nudged them toward her. She picked them up cautiously, removing them from the rods. “It is very good of you to give me something you’ve worked so hard to create,” she told them.
Unimpressed, they focused their gazes on the area below her head and above her chest. She reached up and their tails twitched happily, scattering shell and scale and rock chips. Untying the thong that bound the gift from her mother and the cowry shells, she added the new gifts to it and fastened it around her neck again. “Thank you, little horrors,” she said.
“Not horror,” a childish voice said inside her head at the same time another voice said in the voice of a small girl with a bad cold, “Copperwise!”
The other dragon flew up and down, up and down, and sailed around the ledge in dizzying circles screaming, in the voice of a baby female foghorn, “Loveday! Loveday! Loveday!”
Verity responded as any student at Our Lady of Perpetual Locomotion was trained to do, “How do you do? Lovely to meet you, Copperwise and Loveday. I’m Verity,” she said, placing her fingers against her chest.
“Verrrrrasss!”
“Close enough,” she said, wondering why she was suddenly able to converse with them now. She couldn’t recall ever doing it before.
Perhaps she had become delusional from prolonged exposure to dragon fumes and deprivation of sunlight?
And stress, of course.
Gettin
g scorched by baby dragons while waiting for their mother to wake up and possibly eat one was undoubtedly high on the stress scale, right up there with losing loved ones. But that explanation didn’t feel right.
No, something had happened, something to do with the beads, and she was now able to speak and understand dragonish—at least to a limited extent.
What had changed? The making of the beads, obviously, and the incredible resemblance of the lopsided ones the dragonets made to the bead from her mother.
How had her mother, of all people, come by a bauble probably created a long time ago by a captive in a dragon’s cave, or the dragon’s children?
Had the beads made by Lovejoy and Copperwise established a link between the flame-makers and herself?
It was just like magic, even if it didn’t exist. There was sure to be some sort of scientific explanation if only she knew what it was. The topic had never come up at Our Lady.
If she ever returned to school again, perhaps she might write a paper on it.
Burning Love (a Stockyard folk song collected and recorded by Ephemera B. Perchingbird)
After climbing the embankment and following a narrow track down an otherwise snow-choked road to a tiny hamlet, Ephemera assumed her most appealing vague-and-slightly-dotty-grandmother air and went door to door, asking if anyone had seen a strange girl wandering about, perhaps injured in some way? “She’s hard to miss,” Ephemera said, just so they knew she wasn’t asking a trick question or something difficult. “She’s taller than most men and has dark eyes and skin and sandy hair.” Everyone swore they had seen no one matching that description, or indeed, anything out of the ordinary.
The search party caught up with her at the village, hours later, and everyone in the village seemed very sympathetic to their quest, fed them, and attempted to discourage them from going further.
“You know how these young girls are, so flighty.”
The men from the train had to wait until morning to return to it, and meanwhile at the village pub they were entertained with singing and dancing indigenous to the area. Ephemera circulated around the room, surreptitiously planting shells in strategic places. People would say things to each other they wouldn’t even hint at with a stranger listening, no matter how harmless the stranger appeared.
The songs were the sort she most enjoyed—most had some sort of riddle about them, and the kind of obscure references that made her want to dig for the meaning. One of them might well hold a clue to Verity’s whereabouts.
Ephemera was good at winter. It was long, it was dull, it made hard work and generally staying alive harder and more hazardous. But it also slowed the pace of life and made people long for distraction and entertainment.
She was a good singer of songs, reciter of rhymes and stories, and more importantly, an excellent listener. She was skilled in the needlecrafts and, when she wanted to, cookery. There was nothing like peeling potatoes together to elicit anecdotes and confidences from other cooks, choppers, and peelers.
When the men from the train set out again for the tracks in a light snow flurry, she complained that the trip to the village had been way too hard on her old bones. She gratefully accepted suggestions from the villagers (although a certain amount of charades were necessary to translate) for poultices, packs, and potions to help her aches and pains. She intended to stay among the kindly villagers and rest until the men could return with help—even if it would take them until springtime to do it. She was not leaving without her niece.
To the departing searchers, she said, “This is where Verity disappeared. If she died in the snow, we will find her come spring, but I’d very much like to get to her before the wild animals do. Come back at spring equinox, or tell the authorities to return then, if she is still missing.”
Meanwhile, she could research several facets of this problem. Glassovia had been insulated from the Great War by the Crystal range. Its warlords had engaged in wars of their own before and after Argonia’s began and ended.
She learned the language very quickly with the help of certain of her shells, and by the end of her first month in Stockyard could understand almost everything that was said to her and make herself understood as well.
She was every bit as interested in the local lore as she seemed to be, but she also felt in her bones that beneath their friendly demeanor, the villagers were withholding information and knew much more than they let on.
She listened, sang, made notes, and kept her ears open. Finally she heard reference in a folksong to the local dragon:
I’d sooner sacrifice myself
To Vitia the Voracious
Than have you find one loving word
I’ve said to you fallacious.
“Who is Vitia the Voracious?” Ephemera asked the singer, the innkeeper’s wife.
“The dragon,” the woman answered.
“What dragon?”
“Vitia the Voracious, like the song says. The dragon whose lunchbox this village is.”
“I see,” Ephemera said. “But why does this dragon need sacrifices or lunch boxes for that matter?”
“Excuse me, we’re out of mugs,” the woman replied, standing and shaking out her apron and skirts before she scurried away. “I’d best do the dishes instead of sitting around singing to you.”
Chapter 23
Dragon Beads
The young dragons grew larger and stronger, flew further, higher, and for longer periods of time. Their flames were brighter and steadier. Together with Verity, they made 120 glass beads of increasingly intricate and subtle colors and patterns, sizes, and shapes. Forty-two of them were actually good enough to keep. Normally the more artistic aspects of the process would be controlled by the person wielding the rods, but soon the dragons were training her to move the molten material a turn or two, a twist or two, until beads quite different than she had originally imagined emerged from the flames. Verity felt proud of them, although she actually had little to do with it except staying alive while they did what came naturally to growing dragons as well as making beads of uncommon artistry.
The work comforted her, reminding her of time spent side by side with her father in the workshop.
The creative process was, if not exactly normal, at least scientific to a degree.
It made sense that dragons, who were all about fire and flying through the air, might live in the earth and nest near water. The elements balanced, alchemically speaking. Maybe the combination of the dragons and the crystal rods from their home cave set up some sort of resonance or an electro-chemical reaction. Still, in the back of her mind, she harbored the thought that the results the dragons produced were suspiciously like the magic that wasn’t supposed to exist.
As they searched the levels of the cavern within the mountain for materials, she learned a lot about the cave through the images they sent back. They told her about the river running across the cavern floor and that in the middle of that river there was what amounted to a sandbar made of precious metals, gems, and jewelry, and it was there that Vitia, the mother dragon, rested all winter after hatching her eggs.
In Loveday and Copperwise, she saw the truth of the porter’s comments about the changing colors of dragons. When they flamed, their colors intensified, although it might have been only that she saw more color when they created more light.
However, on their frequent trips to the caldera of the volcano where the tribute herds were pastured, she noted that sunlight did not make their colors brighter, as the light from within them seemed to do when they flamed. Loveday, like her mother, had shiny, metallic looking scales that shone with colors from purple through magenta. Copperwise’s coloring ran from copper through green, through turquoise, and into bright blue, the colors of malachite/azurite, turquoise, and chrysocolla, all of which were derived from copper ore. This gave her an appreciation for how closely the little beasts were tied to the earth. They were very attractive dragons and grew prettier, if larger and with bigger teeth and more intense flames, as they
grew older. Their beauty also increased as she became more convinced that they weren’t going to eat her.
One day, as the three of them went out into the sunlight to snag something for dinner, a shadow passed overhead and the two dragons grew very excited, emitting hissy roars and trying to jump up and catch the creator of the shadow spreading its wings across the crater in the mountain. Verity squinted up at it and shaded her eyes with her hand. Her eyes were unused to sunlight after so long in the dark, and she wondered what trick of the light made the large bird flying overhead seem as big as a—dragon?
That thought sent her bolting for the tunnel entrance again. Her dragons might not consider her an entrée, but she was fairly certain the same could not be said about other—wild—dragons. Since neither Vitia nor her get ate kibble, Verity had little hope that it formed the sole diet of other dragons in this vicinity.
She looked for a long time across the valley toward the hamlet that staked her out for the dragon. The snow was melting further down the mountain. Perhaps she could climb down if she chose her route carefully, but on the whole she thought she’d take her chances with the dragons rather than the treachery of the mountain and the villagers who’d thought they were sacrificing her to them.
She might be able to bypass the village and return to the railroad tracks to wait for the next train, but that could be weeks away in this remote area, and there was no station. She could die of exposure out there more quickly than she’d die from anything the dragons seemed likely to do to her. Copperwise and Loveday, carrying a limp-necked sheep between them, buzzed her playfully and she followed them back into the lava tube. Dragons were trustworthy compared to some humans. She hadn’t had a single lie-induced headache the entire time she’d been in the cavern.
The Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad Page 20
