Dragon Games

by Marisa Claire

  That was the one good thing about living in Pithe.

  Nobody bothered to care much about anything.

  Chapter Two

  The Burn was where Pithe used to be.

  Back then, before it was, you know, burned, Pithe had been a real village, one of the nicest in Outer Lanthe, with stone-paved streets and wooden buildings, not the festering collection of filthy shop tents and moldy straw huts that I’d grown up in. What the people of Pithe had done to deserve the Burn was shrouded in even more mystery than the whereabouts of Shell’s leg. Some whispered of a failed uprising. Others insisted it had been a random show of power. Knowing the Nobles, it could have been over something as simple as a stumbling peasant scuffing a tax collector’s fancy shoe.

  I trudged through the thick layer of salt-and-pepper soot that still covered the ground, all these decades later. Once, while we were out here building ash castles, Raff and I unearthed a charred but intact thigh bone. We took it straight to my father, who assured us it had belonged to a young cindragon, but later that night, I watched him bury that bone in the muddy alley behind our hut when he thought I was sleeping. Strange thing to do with a cindragon bone when the streets were full of stray canins.

  Up ahead, a short ridge rose out of the dust, forming the rim of the shallow crater where the cindragons lived. A familiar peal of laughter rang out from the other side, assuring me that I hadn’t come all this way for nothing. Raff was here.

  But who was making him laugh like that?

  Cindragons weren’t exactly known for their sharp wit.

  I broke into a trot. When I crested the ridge, my heart dropped as hard and as fast as if I’d thrown it at Raff’s idiot head. Because there he was, perched on the scaly back of a lumbering cindragon—with his bony arms wrapped around my sickly younger sister.

  Cindragons weren’t real dragons, of course. They had no wings, and instead of breathing fire, they gobbled up what it left behind. Their scales were dull shades of green and gray. Aside from their four heavily-clawed feet, they bore a much greater resemblance to oversized sand serpents than the majestic beasts that lived on Drakken Peak—not that I’d ever seen one of those in person. But the cindragons were close enough for the children of Pithe, and we had been climbing on their backs and pretending to be Legionnaires for so long that the dimwitted beasts were basically domesticated. There was nothing inherently dangerous about playing with them—as long as you had two strong legs to grip their backs with, or, if necessary, run away on.

  My sister only had one. And no one could ever accuse it of being strong.

  “Pali!” I bellowed and plunged over the side of the crater, slipping and sliding in the loose ash and calling down curses on Raff’s lineage for generations to come.

  My sister squealed as the cindragon thrashed its thick body from side to side, its massive belly and log-like tail leaving wide furrows in the blackish dirt. A thick rope dangled from the creature’s toothless jaws—one of Raff’s homemade bridles. One he’d apparently lost his hold on.

  I lunged for the frayed end writhing in the soot, fully prepared to strangle Raff with it once this beast was calmed.

  But my plan boomeranged on me. The cindragon humped its scaly back and Pali and Raff slid right off, landing in a tangled heap that kicked up a cloud of gray dust.

  “No!” I screamed as the cindragon slithered off, emitting a series of disgruntled hissing sounds. I threw myself into the billowing ash, toward the sound of my sister’s choked sobs. My throat tightened and tears stung my eyes. Not even the apothecarist would touch her if she was bleeding.

  “Pali!” I screamed, sucking in two lungs’ worth of dust. The next time I tried to shout her name all that came out was a dry cough.

  “Dima?!” Pali gasped between…giggles?

  Fingers wrapped around my ankle and I tugged my face down into the soot. Spitting black cinders from my mouth, I pushed up on my elbows and saw my sister and ex-best friend lying side by side, coated in ash like two baby cindragons emerging from their nest. Raff had the good sense to look terrified, but Pali’s face stretched into a delighted grin.

  “Dima, what are you doing here?” she asked, pushing herself out of Raff’s arms, still giggling. “Did that ass-bat finally give you a night off?”

  “What am I doing here?” I sat up on my knees, fighting to tamp down the flames of rage kindling inside me. “What are you doing here?”

  She spread her arms wide and looked at me like I was stupid. “Uh, practicing for the Dragon Games? What does it look like I’m doing?”

  Behind her, Raff scooted onto his knees. “Dima—”

  I held up a hand. “You don’t talk right now.”

  Pali groaned. “Oh, bleeding dragons, Dima. Who died and made you Lord of Lanthe?”

  “Who died?” I sputtered, climbing to my feet so I could at least have the satisfaction of looming over them. “Almost you! What were you thinking? You should be at home resting! And you!” I pointed at Raff. “How could you let this happen?”

  “Let what happen?” Pali shot back. “Fun?”

  I flung my arm in the direction the cindragon had wandered off in. “That wasn’t fun, Pali! That was danger!”

  Pali’s eyes narrowed into a ferocious glare. “Then why do you do it?”

  “Because I’m not—” My mouth clamped shut before I said something I would regret.

  But it was too late, judging from the blotchy heat seeping into Pali’s face. She shook her hair out of her eyes and struggled to stand, but of course she couldn’t. Not with her wasted leg.

  I stepped forward to help her, but the fury in her bright blue eyes froze me in my tracks. I had never seen my sister quite like this. My mind raced through all the lists of symptoms I’d read about in the apothecary book I’d borrowed from the bookseller’s cart when he came through Pithe a few months back. Had it said anything about reckless behavior and blatant disrespect being signs of the disease progressing?

  Raff jumped up and tucked his knobby hands under my sister’s arms, lifting her easily onto her good right foot. She leaned the weight of her left side—not that it was much—onto Raff’s offered elbow. Standing next to him and all his jutting angles, Pali’s body looked even more fragile than usual.

  Raff swiped his free hand through his dusty black hair, pushing it off his painfully thin brown face. Two years younger than me, and two years older than Pali, he had always been caught in the middle maturity-wise, but I never dreamed he was still childish enough to go along with a stunt like this.

  “You could have died, Pali,” I croaked, my throat blisteringly dry.

  Pali rolled her eyes. “Dima, I am dying.” She wiggled the floppy, emaciated appendage that had once been a perfectly usable leg. “Or had you not noticed?”

  “Don’t be crass,” I snapped. “And you’re not dying. Cal’s elixir—”

  Pali blew wet air through her lips. “Is only postponing the inevitable.”

  Well, that was just great. While I was out working fourteen hours shifts—with no breaks!—to earn enough money to buy this kid the medicine that had been keeping the rest of her body from wasting these last six months, she’d used her endless free time to become some kind of nihilist. Wonderful.

  Of course she was right. There was no true cure for Wasting Sickness—not that peasants like us could afford anyway—but last year, Pithe’s apothecarist, Cal Hosker, traveled all the way to Centrival Territory, on the other side of the Drakken Range, and studied with an alchemist there. He brought back the recipe for the elixir he now sold in his shop—one that could drastically slow the disease’s steady march toward the brain. But not stop it.

  Unfortunately, ingredients were hard to come by in Pithe, so Cal was often forced to tweak the ratios or leave certain herbs out entirely. For it to have any effect at all, it was imperative that a wasting person receive one dose per week—at thirty gemlinks per dose. Nav had been paying me forty gemlinks per week, just enough to buy the elixir and some les
s-than-fresh produce to feed myself, Mother, and Pali.

  But that was over now.

  Nav’s bloody nose flashed into my mind.

  Really, really over.

  “You know, I’m glad to hear you say that, Pali.” I folded my arms over my chest, in a pitiful attempt to contain the inferno of rage developing there. “I’m glad to hear you say that because you won’t be getting your dose this week. And maybe not next week either. I mean, there’s really no telling when it will happen again.”

  Pali’s face blanched. Good. I was starting to think the disease had already wormed its way inside her brain, but at least she still had the common sense to be worried about missing a dose. Not that I was ever actually going to let that happen.

  Raff’s lips pulled into a hard, flat line and he laced his fingers through Pali’s. “Dima, I know you’re upset, but that’s not funny.”

  My gaze landed on their clasped fingers, and then traveled up Raff’s arm to shoot daggers into his eyes. For ten years, ever since my father found him abandoned in the Burn, Raff and I had told each other everything. But the way he held my sister’s hand—like a cup he was pouring his strength into… Well, that was something he hadn’t mentioned.

  “Do I look like I’m joking?” I growled.

  “What happened?” Pali asked, voice quavering.

  Guilt twinged in my stomach. The threat constantly hanging over her life wasn’t something to be used to get back at her for disobeying. My shoulders slumped, and I opened my mouth to tell them the whole story. Crazy as it was, this was Raff and Pali—the two people I always told the whole story to, no matter what it was. And yet…

  I swallowed the words. If they didn’t care to tell me that they had stopped seeing each other as siblings somewhere along the way, then why should I tell them there was a small possibility that I had actually received a vision of Drakken Peak?

  “Nav fired me,” I said simply.

  Pali’s cheeks flooded with anger. “I’ll kill that ass-bat! Why?”

  I shrugged. “Because I broke his nose with a sweet tuberine.”

  Pali’s mouth fell open. Raff’s eyebrows lifted in horrified admiration. And then they both burst into a fit of giggles.

  “Dima, you didn’t,” Raff wheezed.

  “I did.” I pushed my hands into the pockets of my trousers, a smile twitching my lips.

  “Did he bleed?” Pali asked, her eyes shimmering with excitement.

  My smile grew. “All over the place.”

  “Dima.”

  Heat rolled up my back and over my shoulders. No, not right now.

  “Dima,” the deep voice rasped inside my head.

  My fists clenched and sweat snaked between my fingers. My mouth parted but only a faint hiss left my lips. I couldn’t move my feet. I couldn’t even blink. My wide eyes stared as Pali’s and Raff’s grins crumpled into concern.

  My knee buckled and I dropped. Far away, I heard my sister and best friend shouting my name and felt the vague impressions of their fingers on my burning skin. Is this what melting felt like?

  “Dima!”The ancient female called again, and for the first time since she started talking to me, I detected a note of emotion in her voice—dismay.

  Leave me alone, lady.

  “Dima…hurry.”

  Hold on. Soup’s almost done.

  “DIMA!”The voice roared with such force that I felt the hot wind of her breath gusting over me.

  And then the world exploded into flames.

  Chapter Three

  Three worried faces peered down at me when my eyes fluttered open again—Pali, Raff, and Mother.

  When did she get here?

  No. Wait.

  When did I get here?

  Our hut’s thatched ceiling came into focus above the bent heads, and I recognized the lumps of my own sleeping mat beneath my back. Damp strands of hair stuck to my forehead, and I had to wonder if it was the acrid stench of my own sweat that pulled me down from the clouds.

  I struggled to sit up, but Mother’s firm hands pushed me down. She drew the wet hair off my face with her gnarled fingers. “Not yet.”

  “We thought you were dead,” Pali blurted, and Raff nodded.

  Mother glared at them both. “Give Dima some room, please.”

  They shrank back, leaving only Mother in my field of vision. Her back was bent over me at an almost ninety degree angle—just like always. Twenty years picking dragon’s blossoms and herbalines could do that to you.

  Hard leans creased her brow and she whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me you were hearing the Call?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not…”

  Mother’s lips flattened. “Then why did you tell Nav that you were?” My face must have blanched because she lifted her chin smugly. “Oh, yes. Shell came by to see me.”

  Groaning, I twisted away from her on my mat. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”

  “Which thing, dear? Telling him you saw Drakken Peak, or busting his nose with a sweet tuberine?”

  I clenched my eyes shut. Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could slip back up to the clouds again. The rush of cold air against my cheeks had come as such sweet relief after this long day full of fevers.

  “He insulted Father,” I mumbled to explain the second offense, ignoring the first one and hope she would too.

  Mother sighed. “And you believe your father would have condoned this violence?”

  Shame prickled at my neck and I burrowed my face into the burlap sack I called a pillow. Ten years ago, Lord Lanthe himself had ridden through Pithe, conscripting men for our endless war against the Cosso Empire. My father had refused to go. He objected to the Drakken Army’s brutal methods, especially in regards to women and children. So Lord Lanthe ran his sword through him.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me,” I finally whispered.

  “Perhaps your inhibitions were lowered by the Call? They do say that happens.”

  That was true. A willingness to engage in reckless behavior was necessary for anyone attempting to climb Drakken Peak. But that didn’t make my visions true. They couldn’t be.

  “Peasants don’t get the Call.”

  Mother took me firmly by the arm and rolled me onto my back. “Peasants haven’t gotten the call. Not for a very long time. But who says one can’t? Maybe the dragons are ready for a change?”

  I pushed myself up on my elbows, and this time Mother let me. It was one thing to hop on a cindragon and compete in make-believe Dragon Games that everyone survived, but the reality of being a Legionnaire… well, that had never been something I wanted.

  “And what if I did? If I didn’t die climbing the Peak, the Legion Academy would never let me in. But if they did, then what? I would become a soldier, Mother. On the back of the most powerful weapon the world has ever known. Father would never—”

  Mother pressed a callused finger to my lips. “Your father dreamed of dragons until the day he died. Do you know how many times I had to stop him from making the trek?” She shook her head. “He never saw the Peak or heard a dragon call his name. So I refused to let him try. Certain death, I said. But perhaps I should have let him. Could it have been any worse?”

  My mouth fell open a little under her fingertip. Was my mother seriously suggesting that getting eaten or incinerated alive was better than being swiftly stabbed with a sword? Also, if this was an attempt to convince me I needed to make the journey to Drakken Peak, it was not working. Because as a peasant, I would most definitely get toasted and swallowed. If not by a dragon, then by the Nobles who ruled over the Legion Academy, the place where those—meaning young Nobles—who got the Call went to learn how to wage war from the backs of dragons. No thank you.

  “Dima, you must tell me the truth,” Mother said, removing her finger. “Have you been hearing a voice calling your name? Have you felt yourself flying over Drakken Peak?”

  I refused to say yes, but I couldn’t make myself lie so boldly to my mother
either. I chewed on my lip and cast my eyes to the side where I could just make out the blurry shapes of Raff and Pali hunkered over the table.

  “Then it is true.” Mother closed her eyes and let out a slow breath.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said quickly. “I’m just… working too hard.”

  Mother’s eyes snapped open. “Stand up.”

  “What? Mother, no, I still feel—”

  “Stand up, girl.” Mother took a few steps backward to give me space.

  Reluctantly, I climbed to my feet. Mother’s head came only up to my chest in this position. She couldn’t even turn her head up to look at me. All she ever saw was the dirt floor and our filthy feet.

  “Now tell me, Dima,” Mother said. “How it is that I have never worked hard enough to hallucinate the Call, but after six weeks spent indoors, peeling tuberines, you’ve completely lost your wits? I am ashamed to have raised such a weak child!”

  “I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t mean—”

  She reached out and grasped my hand, squeezing it much too hard. “There is no time to waste on apologies. You must pack.”

  I ripped my hand away from her. “You can’t be serious.”

  Mother grasped me by the elbow and steered me over to the table, pushing me into a chair. Her face hovered just high enough above my own to look me in the eyes as she strained hers up toward her brows. I waited, cringing, for whatever absurd thing she would say next.

  “Eat.” She snatched a plate from the center of the table and slid it roughly in front of me. The crumbling remains of a greenloaf rested on it. Glancing up, I saw that Pali and Raff had faint green smudges around their nervous smiles.

  I broke off a piece and stuffed it into my mouth where it caked dryly around my gums. Mother did her best, but without eggs or milk to hold it together, greenloaf was more like a punishment for being poor than an actual meal. But at least it gave our stomachs something to do.