Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Skinny in mind and hungry of soul, they sought, single-mindedly, what their seers showed them—what they thought they needed more than anything else in this world. What fate told them they must have, no matter what they truly wanted.

  But it did not matter. They were sisters. And they were Fates. And so they would continue until the moment they died—here and now, and centuries in the future.

  The beast-dragon snorted again. By the remains of the great tree, his human echoed his sound. “He says the sun rises. The sun sets. Everyone sees death, little Fate.” The human half of the Dracos dusted ash from his knees. “The emptiness of death is the easiest memory to make.”

  Death was as easy as kneeling under a tree, waiting for a mountain. Easy as taking the hand rage offered and allowing it to guide Ladon into his future.

  A low grumble washed from Dragon.

  The present-seer’s brow crunched. Her ability sounded through the grove, raining like chimes onto Ladon’s skin as much as his mind. She peered into the space Dragon’s invisible body occupied, but she still did not back down.

  Long ago, Ladon awoke under this tree with his blood boiling for a fight. This Fate’s father awoke not far from where she now stood. At that moment centuries before, when five humans and two dragons blinked into existence, this Fate’s father had branded onto Ladon’s soul a look of pure hatred. That look, flung from eyes narrowed to slits and a face more vicious than Ladon’s own, had shaped his centuries. His command.

  His family’s pain.

  What was he, in all this? The Fates acted—passively, yes, but still acted—and he reacted. They triggered. He and the beast exploded. They blew into the wind and he became the gale sweeping in off the Mediterranean.

  The Empire teemed with the murder of the small and insignificant, and the rich and powerful. Dead slaves, dead leaders, dead Emperors littered its streets. Dead fishmongers and traders from the far-flung corners of the Empire piled up in its corners. Whores and gladiators floated face down in its rivers. Soldiers and senators mortared its walls. And the spilled blood of dead children and dead Fates painted all the gates of all its villas with the fresh markings of war.

  Death crawled in Ladon’s muscles and made him dance. It tarnished iron and stole even the strongest will.

  The present-seer said nothing, only dropped her gaze to the mud as she shuffled away from the beast. Dragon tossed his head and the remaining hardened ash slid from his back, but it smeared his hide with a shadow. He mimicked the night and became a shade haunting the dying grove.

  Ismene wheezed in Andreas’s grip. “My boys.”

  The past-seer stared, her eyes glossy and malevolent. Now they spoke of death. Because only death filled their minds. Hers. Ladon’s. Andreas’s own.

  His commander had missed the folly of his decision. Letting her go would serve nothing.

  Andreas held the woman.

  This place had once been holy. He’d seen it with his own eyes, the brilliance. He’d walked with its godlings for two centuries. But the true gods—the ones above who looked down on him and Ladon, Human and Dragon, on his legatus’s sister and her dragon, on Andreas’s wildling goddess mother who’d given him a gift too vile to use, on these two Fates and their Hades-bound father, on their sour and twisted future-seeing brother, on all the normals rubbing against each other in the streets of Rome, on the scents of slaughter and the grating shrillness of a land determined to kill and destroy and end it all—those gods in the heavens, they rained death on this place. On this tree. On Andreas.

  Where was the balance here? Ladon had allowed the mountain to mortar him into his place under the corpse of a sacred tree. He’d allowed his beast to become nothing more than a boulder. The beast stirred from his sleep, forcing the cracking of the ash, yet they did not leave. Ladon tempted the gods by refusing to step out of the way of their descending god-foot. He called death. His own, his dragon’s, and that of these two shrill Fates whose only purpose seemed to be to reinforce Ladon’s dour inaction.

  And under the haze of dirty ash clinging to the beast’s hide, Andreas saw the truth—this decision was not the unfolding of what should unfold. This decision sent out ripples.

  Somewhere else out in the world created by the gods, something else responded, because all changes must be balanced.

  But it wasn’t somewhere else. No. The scales altered in his chest, pressed on his bones, threatened to rip his insides into bleeding pulp. What happened was not a gain, though a grain needed sacrifice to calm the eddy. A slice had to happen and a sliver pressed into his eye.

  Andreas’s throat tightened. Deep inside, down in his neck, below his voice but above his breastbone. In the place which birthed his calling scents.

  He’d long ago tamed it, cinching tight its wiggles and spasms. He’d gained control and proven to the dragons that he alone had the strength to be trusted. He carried his gift-curse with purpose and reason.

  But Ladon could not die.

  “No,” he said. ‘Refusal’ wafted from his mouth with his words. He would not set the past-seer down. He would not let these Fates go. He’d sacrifice his soul and all he knew as family, to bring his body—and the bodies of his commander, man and dragon—out of the ash.

  The present-seer looked over her shoulder at Andreas and her head tipped the same way it had when her ability washed over Ladon. “He uses his—” She shook violently and her seer suddenly ceasing its chiming.

  ‘Indignation’ hit Ladon’s nose in full, clawing glory. He squinted and his body wiggled as it mirrored what Andreas’s calling scents told him what to do. He wasn’t going to let these little whining whores lead him to his death under the mountain. He was better than that. He was a godling.

  Human! The beast staggered and a bright flame screamed from his open mouth into the ash-filled air. Bits of the volcano popped and fizzled, fusing together, and dropped into the hot mud now more glass than pumice. Right your mind!

  The ‘indignation’ flipped over to ‘fear’ and just as quickly yanked on Ladon’s muscles. Vesuvius wasn’t done. It rose impossibly high, spit impossible quantities of death and shadow. He’d dropped into a pit and the mountain stood at the lip, silhouetted by a dying sun, and sneered down at him. It pissed on his head.

  He wanted to take Dragon and run, to leave these three behind, and get to the coast before the mountain exploded again.

  Ismene gasped under the scarf around her face. Her hands gripped Andreas’s arm. “Run… we have to run. I can’t see. What did you do, you vile Mutatae? Your kind is more dangerous than all of mine combined. It’s fated. You shift the world to evil. Evil born of your Progenitor…”

  Andreas tossed the past-seer. She flew up, her arms flailing, and landed next to Dragon’s forelimbs. Her arm snapped.

  She screamed.

  The beast pranced back. His talons dug into the ground. The need to hunt, to kill, flashed to Ladon across their connection like the lightning flashing through the clouds around the mountain’s crest. She deserved to die. All her kind deserved to die.

  “Andreas!” Ladon bellowed. Ash clung to his lips and filled his eyes and ears. But it did not filter what he smelled. His tribunus had unleashed his curse.

  The big man looked up and he pointed at Ladon’s chest. “My charge is to protect you and your sister.” His finger whipped toward Dragon. “To protect the beast and his sister!”

  His foot met the past-seer’s side. “Not to protect Fates! Never Fates.”

  She screamed again.

  Mira’s own fear must have broken through the ‘fear’ Andreas pumped to her. She screamed as harshly and shrillly as her sister and ran at Andreas. Her fists hit. Her teeth gnashed. She tried, in vain, to move a man twice her size away from her fallen family.

  Ismene curled into a ball. Tears mixed into the ash.

  “You murdered the only descendant of the Dracae and you think your petty outrage is justified?” Andreas pulled back his foot to kick again. “You led one—probably both—
of the dragons to want their own death? I will not allow you to kill those whom I serve and protect!”

  If his foot came down on her body—anywhere on her body—he’d kill her. The past-seer of the Jani Prime would become another corpse left to be encased by Vesuvius.

  “Andreas! You will not hurt them!” No more death. It stopped, now.

  Ladon’s tribunus bellowed. His voice was a raw as much from his anger as the ash, and another blast of ‘refusal’ filled the grove. Ladon staggered back.

  A dragon claw-hand cupped Andreas’s chest. And a dragon claw-hand pushed him toward Ladon.

  Andreas hit the trunk of the grand olive tree with a bone-rattling thump. His head bounced, his breath forced from his body. The calling scents vanished.

  Ladon unsheathed his gladius and pushed its point into his tribunus’s shoulder.

  Neither spoke.

  In the ash, at Dragon’s forelimbs, Ismene whimpered. Mira hovered over her, her body an insignificant wall between her sister and the beast.

  Dragon sniffed her hair, then twisted his head back toward Ladon. I do not desire more death, Human. His great tail whipped, and he moved back. Neither do you.

  No, he did not.

  This cycle of revenge—this inciting to violence that he’d allowed—would never happen again. He’d never again be driven to murder by the manipulation of Fates.

  Or the enthralling of a Shifter.

  “Get up.” He lowered his gladius.

  Andreas slumped against the tree.

  Dragon blew out a flame and stepped between the women and Ladon’s tribunus.

  Mira’s ability chimed through the grove. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for allowing us to live.”

  “I should not.” Ladon pointed his gladius at the Fate. “He is right. You should die.” But he no longer had the will to take the life of another child, even this adult child of his fellow Progenitor.

  Ladon walked toward the women as he sheathed his gladius. The satchel he carried over his shoulder shifted. He stopped within arm’s reach. Mira stood and a new wave of indignation rolled from her, but this time he saw it in her posture, not smelled it in the air. Her sister whimpered, but did not move.

  What had these two women lost? One, her children. The other, Ladon suspected, what little joy her family offered. “What were their names?” He’d never learned the children’s names. Not when they walked the halls of the Emperor’s estates and not when he caused their deaths.

  Mira’s eyes, the color the sky should be, looked at him through the folds of the cloth wrapping her face. “Junonius. Jupiter.” She glanced at her sister, then back to him. “Minerva.” A pause. “Her name was Minerva. She was nothing like her father.” Mira looked down at her hands.

  No. Ladon saw that now. Only one Fate would push such pain into the world, and it wasn’t the woman in front of him. Or the girl she so obviously cared for.

  The girl named Minerva.

  “Why did he allow this?” Ladon asked.

  Mira’s chest rose and fell as a silent sigh under the scarf wrapped so tightly around her face. “Ismene asked the same question. On the mountain.” She pointed at Vesuvius. “We’d gone to help Father. Why he called us, I could not see. We did nothing when we were there. Only climbed. We followed and did not interfere.” Her eyes narrowed. “Followed the chafing fate tied tight around our necks.”

  The children—his grandchildren, the one named Minerva, and the two boys, Junonius and Jupiter—were nothing more than knots in Janus’s coiled hate. Knots he’d thrown around all their necks.

  Mira’s entire body shook as her seer’s chiming filled the grove. “This stops with you. It has to stop with you, Dracos, man and beast.”

  She is correct. Dragon twisted and shook, an attempt to dislodge more ash. I do not like Fates, but she speaks the truth, Human.

  Mira looked between Ladon and the beast. “The Great Sir understands, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Of course Dragon understood. Of all of them, he saw the world with the greatest clarity.

  Ladon bowed his head once, quickly, toward the Fate. “As do I, present-seer.”

  Mira returned the gesture. “This new path you choose will be difficult.”

  All paths but death were difficult.

  They must leave. The mountain makes more ash. Dragon pointed his snout inland, toward Vesuvius.

  “He’s telling me it is time for you to take your sister and go.” Ladon reached into the satchel. “Take this.” He offered an olive. “Go north along the coast. You will find a captain. The Carthaginian. Give him the fruit and tell him his son Andreas wishes him to tend your sister’s arm.” He nodded to the present-seer. “He will take you as far as you need to go.”

  She stared at his palm. Her hand snaked out. She snatched the olive, nodding once. “Thank you.”

  A new wave from the distant mountain rocked the ground. She grasped his arm, her hand cupping his elbow—an unconscious gesture to keep herself from dropping to the mud. He steadied her as best he could.

  “What of him?” She let go, her fingers releasing slowly, as she nodded toward Andreas.

  Ladon looked over his shoulder at his Second. He didn’t know what the future held. He never dared to believe he understood or could comprehend what-will-be. “Legio business does not concern you, present-seer.”

  She blinked and backed away, her gaze low, and carefully pulled her sister to standing.

  Ismene babbled and refused her sister’s help, much like a small child.

  She will not learn. Dragon rubbed against the olive’s trunk to dislodge the mud-ash on his back, but it only smeared across his hide. I do not like her.

  Andreas stared at the beast, still silent.

  The two Fates argued, their heads together, doing their best to hide their words from him. But Ladon heard Mira as clearly as if she spoke into his ear: “I am the present, and I want to live, sister.” Mira glanced at him one last time as she vanished into the ash, her sister in tow.

  They would survive. How they would face their future, though, Ladon did not know.

  Dragon knocked against his side and Ladon patted the beast’s neck. Then he hauled his tribunus to his feet. “Come,” he said. “We go to the coast.”

  Dmitri and the Mad Monk

  St. Petersburg, Russia, December 17, 1916….

  Dmitri and the Mad Monk

  “You have brains on you, Grand Duke.” The spy sniffed the air and lifted an eyebrow, proud of his vocal inflection.

  The Englishman’s need to state the obvious and then pass it off as wry humor annoyed Dmitri more than the gore on his greatcoat. He watched the body on the floor of the prince’s flamboyant estate, ignoring both the spy and the metallic stench of blood mixing with the pathetic notes of fear wafting off the other men. The pistol in his hand, he still aimed. Now was not the time for distractions.

  Ten minutes inside the palace and Rasputin had bled out onto the extravagant rug. They’d tempted the vile fornicator with breasts and the promise of a cock sucked by a woman of the royal court. Clubs, a knife strike, and Dmitri now tasted the acrid smoke rising from the English spy’s pistol.

  The prince danced about flapping his arms and whining some nonsense about “destroying the unkillable prey.” He stopped, stared wide-eyed for a long moment, then babbled more about cyanide and his own brilliance under the pressure of the deed.

  The politician watched the prince’s melodrama with dull fascination, one hand on an elbow and the other stroking his chin like some stage villain. The doctor and the lieutenant whispered, heads close, a plan for burning clothes and disposing of the body forming between them.

  The spy held out his hand for the pistol.

  Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, the only true patriot among them, opened the chamber and dumped all but one bullet onto the man’s hand, not once pulling his gaze away from Rasputin’s corpse. “Go home. Tell your superior you did this job.” He waved the pistol at the body.

  T
he spy’s eyebrow arched with an almost audible crinkle, even as his lips frowned.

  “If you interfere again in the affairs of my homeland, I will kill you. Do you understand, Englishman? Now leave.” Dmitri pointed at the door.

  International whining would start as soon as the Tsarina realized her pet monk had vanished. The whore would blubber like the Hessian spawn she was. Cries of “The boy! The boy!” would ring through the cold halls of the Tsar’s winter palace as she pleaded and pawed over the irrelevant Tsesarevich and his blood disease—the disease she brought into Dmitri’s family.

  The disease Rasputin was supposed to control. Dmitri’s bounced the pistol against his thigh, his grip on so tight his fingers ached. No woman incapable of giving the Empire an heir should be allowed the title Tsarina.

  The spy backed away, his stepped muffled by the garish weave of the prince’s imported rug. The others milled about, nattering about alibis and consequences. Dmitri glanced between each, assessing, in turn, the level of intervention necessary to assure the success of this plan. The politician would need to be dealt with. The others, with the exception of the prince, would show caution.

  Wild idiocy at this point would make this murder worthless, and Russia could no longer afford idiocy.

  Dmitri kicked the body. His boot, crafted of fine leather specifically for his Romanov foot by Moscow artisans, had saved his toes on many a winter evening. Now it sank into Rasputin’s shoulder as if Dmitri had struck clay.

  Clay—not meat. He frowned and stepped back.

  He’d sensed Rasputin’s abilities the first time they were within sight of each other. Dmitri had entered the grand ballroom behind his cousin’s guard. Blinking away the morning sun, he’d been more focused on some forgotten foolishness of the court’s women than on the possibility of another like himself walking the halls of the Tsar’s palace.