Dark Ends

by Clayton Snyder

  “They’ll give me something to eat before they give me the test,” I panted. “Even if I don’t pass it.”

  “Not pass it?” Frost scoffed, jerking me into an alleyway between the buildings of the Governor’s Office.

  “I’m just the daughter of an herbalist. They’d find out soon enough I wasn’t fit to become a Dragon Girl. But after they fed me.”

  “There are many things wrong with that thinking, Peri,” Frost said between his teeth. I jerked my arm out of his and made him stop. “I’ll feed you,” he said in an urgent voice. “Now come on, before that acolyte has Granthus’s guards after us.”

  “If you want something out of me, you’ll be disappointed. There’s nothing left to give.”

  He looked troubled. Then a shadow swept over us. A big black shadow, like a cloud. But a cloud never moved that fast. We stopped and looked up.

  A dragon shot through the air above the temple.

  The dragon’s scales gleamed bronze in the sunlight, and its fluttering mane and feathered wings were a handsome golden color, the same odd shade as the flecks in Frost’s eyes. The dragon screeched and shot upward, knocking over stalls and tables and chairs with wind from the downbeat of its wings.

  Then it dove, coming right toward us.

  People around us screamed and ran, but I hardly heard them—fixated as I was on the sight of the enormous and beautiful predator hurtling toward me with its teeth bared, fangs exposed, poison dripping from their curved tips.

  Frost cursed and stepped in front of me. It seemed a pointless bit of chivalry, considering the size of the dragon. But he stood his ground. He put his hand up and spoke a string of unintelligible words—or maybe I just didn’t hear them in the panicked din of the street.

  The dragon pulled up, tossing its head. Its nostrils flared, and it bellowed.

  Frost said something else. The dragon’s neck curved as it drew its head back. I couldn’t tell if that meant it would strike or retreat.

  Then the acolytes and their guards spilled out of the temple. Before them, they shoved a line of young men and women, dressed in flimsy white robes. Some of them were trying to break free, to run back to the temple. The dragon jerked its head around to look at them, then like a diving falcon, lunged toward them with shocking speed.

  “No!” Frost cried out.

  But it was too late. The dragon snatched one of the Youth, a girl, in its blocky jaws, and turned its head up to choke her down whole. Its gullet convulsed, and I could see her shape against the skin of its throat.

  The warriors among the acolytes swarmed the dragon with swords, and it pawed them aside with a single swipe of its huge, taloned foot.

  Men screamed, and there was blood on the ground.

  “We should do something,” I said, looking wildly at Frost. “There must be something to do.”

  “Hide,” he said grimly. “Once the process is started, it won’t stop.”

  “What process?”

  “The dragon’s enthralled. They’ve snared it, and there’s no way I could free it.”

  “Why in the depths of the underworld would you want to free that creature?”

  “I would have explained it to you if you’d stayed with me at the tavern. Now we have this!”

  “How can this be my fault?”

  “It—dammit, I’ll explain later.”

  The acolytes were trying to rope the dragon as it fed on the other Youth. I had never been this close to a dragon attack, and I had never seen anything so horrible. None of the books I’d read had prepared me for the sight of such a thing—an odd, giant combination of lizard and bird that impaled human beings like mice on its giant poisonous fangs, then ate them like an eagle swallowing its prey.

  Frost yanked me away. “It’ll run out of food. If those idiots don’t kill it soon, it will rampage.”

  “If you’ve got some sort of magic that will turn it away—”

  “I told you it’s enthralled, didn’t I? It doesn’t matter what kind of magic I have. It’s an animal. Survival instinct. What animal would willingly starve itself?”

  He pulled me down an alley, and the scene of carnage disappeared from view. All I could see now was the dragon’s head lifting in a sinuous curve over the roof of the buildings as it reared up on its hind legs. Its wings rose and fell, and I could only imagine how many people were thrown about and crushed.

  Then the dragon lifted off the ground, snapping the ropes the acolytes had bound it with. It broke free and rose into the air…

  And a row of archers on the roof of the temple loosed a volley of fire arrows at it.

  The feathers on its wings caught fire, and it screamed. Beating its wings only fanned the flames. Fire ate its way greedily to the dragon’s body. Arrows continued to rain down on it, sprouting from throat and breast, until—still on fire—it bellowed in pain and shot off toward the sea.

  “It won’t make it far,” Frost said. “Poor bastard.”

  I followed him, trembling, to a small room in a run-down boarding house, the kind where men brought their whores. I balked before I walked in the door, but he gripped my arm tightly, steering me inside and up the stairs. I swallowed my fear for the promise of something to eat and an explanation.

  The room was at the end of the hall. It had a window which looked across the roofs to the pinnacle of the Dragon Temple and beyond, to the mountains capped in snow. I looked for the dragon, but couldn’t see it. In front of the window stood a small table with two chairs, and not two steps away, a single cot in the corner.

  The room was too neat, as if no one lived in it. A knapsack on the bed was the only sign of a human presence.

  Frost closed the door behind us and threw the bolt. Then he crossed to the knapsack and began pulling food out of it. A bottle of wine. A round of bread. A waxed packet of dried meat. A handful of nuts.

  One small red apple.

  Despite the carnage I had just witnessed, my mouth watered so badly it hurt. I put my hands over it.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Eat slowly. Or you’ll get sick.”

  I all but fell into the seat, and then I fell on the food. I grabbed the bread first, tearing off a big hunk and setting into it like the dragon had gorged itself on the Youth.

  Frost sat down in the other seat. “Slowly, I said.” He scooted the rest of the food away from me.

  “Do you work for Granthus?” I said, my mouth still full.

  He laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. “Me? Work for Granthus? You mean like one of those idiots in their wooden masks, shaking their bells like a circus monkey? Or like one of those rich acolytes throwing girls to the dragons? That could have been you, you know.”

  I dug my thumbs into the bread and tore it apart, forcefully. “Only if the magic tests don’t matter,” I said.

  “Would it have been worth it? For a single shriveled date?”

  “Maybe.” I shoved more bread into my mouth. “As long as they fed me before I had to take the test.”

  “You’re slipping, Peri. If you’d done a little digging, you’d have found out that the Temple takes anyone who comes, even if they fail the test. They cruise the alleys, looking for the hungry and homeless, the people nobody wants. But why are you so sure you’d fail?”

  “Because it was my sister who inherited all of my mother’s magical ability. Not me. I’m the one who takes care of things. She’s the one with the talent.”

  He eyed me curiously. “Peranza the Steadfast,” he said.

  I shrugged, eyeing the food he was still holding hostage. “The Temple came to our door one morning. They didn’t try to lure her in, they just wanted to take her.”

  On a blue-skyed spring morning, back when we had lived in a snug little apartment above my father’s apothecary shop, and I could go to the Lyceum and read as many books as I wanted, whenever I wanted. The same morning my father had lost the ability to use his right side.

  I swallowed, hard. “They left me alone. I’m not worth it. It’s just the way
things are.”

  “Just something you accept?” he said, eyeing me skeptically.

  “What benefit is it to anyone if I don’t? Longing after Talent wouldn’t change anything. I’m not Talented. I’m a good scholar, I write a fair hand, and I’m here with my father. Somebody has to take care of him, and I’m the only one he’s got.”

  Frost pushed a cup of wine at me and another piece of bread to dip in it. I latched onto both with slightly steadier hands.

  “Your name is not just Peranza. You’re the daughter of Ximus Kares. The Governor’s herbalist.”

  I couldn’t deny it. “Papa worked for the Governor a long time ago,” I said. “Before…”

  My voice trailed away, and I made no effort to finish the sentence. Instead, I dipped the bread in my wine and ate half of it at a bite.

  “Slowly,” Frost said again, with more emphasis. “Do you want to get sick?”

  “Now you know who I am,” I said, “why don’t you tell me who you are? Frost seems unnecessarily dramatic. The acolyte said your first name was Stefan.”

  “Feeling more yourself now?” he asked with a hitch of his brow.

  I laughed. Bitterly. “Quite the opposite. I’m not feeling myself at all. Peranza Kares does not encounter dragons at close range. Or follow strange men into boarding houses.”

  Now his mouth quirked, too. “Because she’s too good for them or because she’s never had the chance?”

  “Well, both actually, but I’m not keen on getting knifed or raped. I don’t know what you intend after this food’s gone—”

  “What’s wrong with your father? Is he sick? Is it fever?”

  “No. It’s… a wasting sickness. It struck quick. Without warning.”

  While I was sneaking Vri out the back door. I’d always wondered if my father had brought his injuries on himself, by taking a poison as a distraction, but I had no proof for that.

  “Ever since,” I continued, “my father has trouble speaking and thinking, and the muscles on his right side are weak. He can’t use his right hand anymore.” I took a drink of wine that in my current, starved state went straight to my head, and I looked up at Frost. “His face, his eye… it’s somewhat like yours.”

  I had a sudden, irrational desire to touch the corner of Frost’s eye, to feel out the similarity, to note the abnormalities. To see if what had just happened out there in the temple square was real or dream.

  Fortunately, I hadn’t had enough wine.

  He flinched all the same. His head swiveled toward the window, leaving me only a view of his brown hood. “It’s probably not like mine,” he said softly.

  Then he turned back to me and slowly, he pushed his hood down.

  His hair was not entirely white, as I had imagined it. Instead, it glinted faintly of pale gold. He’d cut it short, against the Eterean fashion, and it stuck out in wild spikes until he lifted a hand to smooth it down. His injured eye stared at me with the same odd intensity as the other, and I wondered how he could see out of it, as extensive as the damage must have been. Perhaps some thought his injury made him ugly, but I didn’t.

  “If your father earned his eye because of a sickness, he’s not like me at all.”

  “Then what happened to you?” I asked.

  He shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “The usual. I had a run-in with Granthus’s soldiers. They beat me, I ended up with this eye.”

  “What do you mean, the usual? That doesn’t happen to people every day.”

  “It does where I come from.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Small village, north side of the island.”

  “What’s on the north side of the island?”

  “A small village,” he said, with an amused twist of a smile. Then the smile disappeared. “It’s where the Etereans landed when they first came. The first place they established a garrison.”

  “It’s been three generations,” I said. “Why are people still being beaten?”

  “Do you think every islander approves of Eterean rule, even now? What’s it brought us?”

  “That is sedition. Saying it out loud like that. If the guards heard you, they’d haul you away, and me, too, for listening.”

  “So, I should just accept the way things are? Out of fear?”

  “You didn’t protest when Granthus had that man ripped apart.”

  Frost looked troubled. “There was nothing I could do in that moment. Not without giving either of us away. But that doesn’t mean I accept Granthus’s government.”

  “A group of scholars attempted to write to the Emperor,” I said, in a slow, calm voice. The voice I used to argue with people. “To request another governor. Perhaps the Emperor is still considering. All we can do now is try to survive. Dragon attacks are decreasing. In spite of today.”

  “Maybe. But in the process of getting rid of the dragons, he’ll kill us all.”

  I’d thought that myself, but hearing Frost say it made me uneasy. “You throw your opinions around with wild abandon,” I said.

  “Do you always talk like you’re writing a report to the imperial court?”

  “Are you always so careless with your words?” I retorted.

  He rested against the back of his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “I like to live on the edge. Saving girls from the Dragon Temple, telling the truth, that kind of thing. What were you going to say to me before, when I asked about your father? Something his years in the Governor’s Office?”

  I swallowed. As hungry as I was, the bread still felt like a lump in my throat. “It was just a long time ago, that’s all.”

  “You were going to say, before he fell out of favor, then?”

  “No,” I sighed. “I was going to say, before my mother left us.”

  Frost looked confused. “You mean she died?”

  “No, I mean she ran away. With an Eterean Fixer who built machines. Who also worked for the governor’s office.” I gave him a tight smile, but my hands began to tremble again, so I closed one of them over the apple. Its skin was smooth beneath my fingers, except for a small dent I felt out with my thumb.

  “How old were you?”

  “Eight.”

  I desperately wanted to eat the apple. But I couldn’t. I was thinking about my father, remembering how he had come home from the office that day, whistling as he walked into our chambers, only to find Vri and I on the couch in our sitting room, alone.

  No one there but the cat, who was no help with Vri at all.

  “My sister was six,” I said, not knowing why I was telling this story to a stranger, but feeling the need to say something. “My mother left us alone in our rooms for the day, saying our nurse would be by soon, but our nurse never arrived and Papa was at work. Vri was frightened.” I exhaled—a sort of laugh, maybe. “I spent hours playing string games with her, trying to teach her how to make cat’s cradle. It was the only thing that distracted her, and only because she was so upset I could do it and she couldn’t.”

  “Your mother worked with the Office, too?”

  “If you know so much about me already, why are you asking me questions? How long have you been watching me? You knew about my father from the first, didn’t you?”

  “Your father’s been missing for a long time, Peri. I didn’t know he was sick. I didn’t know who you were when I began watching you. After we met at the tavern, I started asking around, and that’s when I found out you were his daughter. People know you.”

  “As an herbalist’s daughter, that’s all. They don’t know who he is, and they wouldn’t regard me in the same light, anyway.”

  “I wasn’t looking for him or you, exactly. I saw you in the marketplace, and you seemed… competent.”

  “Until I got caught stealing, you mean.”

  “That’s just odds. You steal enough times, eventually you’ll be caught. It’s like playing cards. You can’t win all the time.”

  “Well, I’m not my father. Or my mother. Or my sister. My father was
brilliant, magic apparently loved my mother so much it seduced her, and my sister…”

  I sighed and stared down at the apple. I heard Frost’s clothes rustle as he moved, and then he touched my shoulder. I looked up at him, and he dropped his hand.

  “Come with me,” he said. “Bring the apple.”

  We rattled up a narrow staircase to the roof. From up here, you could look over the whole city—a jumble of flat rooftops, buildings like a child’s blocks, all the way to the foot of the mountains. Beyond the walls and the docks, black slivers of beach pushed out in fingers between groups of rocks that looked like knuckles. The blue sea rushed up in white breakers, smashing in great sprays against the rocks, then sucked back out again, revealing more flat plains of black sand.

  The dead dragon lay at the line between sea and land like a new landform.

  “What do you think they’ll do with it?” Frost asked me.

  “Do with it?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Will Granthus do anything with the dragon? Will his acolytes? Or will they leave the body there to rot?”

  “What else can they do? It’s a dragon!”

  “You’re starving.” Frost jerked his head toward the dragon. “And that’s meat.”

  “But it’s impossible to eat dragon. The meat is poisonous.”

  “That’s what they’ll tell you. Just like they’ll tell you that if you become a Dragon Girl, you’ll be a hero.”

  “The Youth distracted the dragon.”

  “They gave the dragon an easy lunch. That’s different.”

  “So, what do you serve with dragon? Red wine or white?”

  Frost shook his head. “Eat your apple and I’ll tell you a story. It starts once upon a time.”

  I studied the sheen of the apple, trying not to feel guilty about not taking it back to my father. If I only ate half of it, I could bring the other half home and cook it until it was soft enough for Papa. I bit into it and chewed slowly, savoring its crisp, juicy flesh.

  “So, a fairy story,” I said. “No evidence, no facts, just another inspiring legend.”

  “It’s about dragons.”

  I gestured with the apple. “Well, carry on then. If it’s about dragons.”