Dark Ends

by Clayton Snyder

  Frost’s story about the boy who was beaten and woke near the spring, to eat the dead dragon. How had he worded it?

  The first thing he found to eat was a dead dragon—a small one, just created—by the side of a spring where he crawled to drink.

  Created. Not born.

  Frost knew about dragons. He hadn’t been subtle with that story. He was the boy. But now everything made sense.

  Dragonmeat wasn’t poisonous; it was transformative.

  How else was he still alive? If he had been beaten so badly his mother thought he was dead? It must have been the magic at work.

  If it had worked to heal him… maybe it would heal my father.

  I reached for the pack with trembling hands. “Papa,” I said, “I want you to eat something…”

  “Ate up your mother,” he said, still shaking his head mournfully. “Always wanted more. Ran experiments. To mimic effects. Experiment with you girls too. Gods forgive me.”

  I stopped, gripping the strips of dragonmeat tight in my hand. “Experiment?” I said, stunned almost speechless.

  He sighed and leaned back against his pillows. “Kept her away from Peri. But Vri… too young, liked sweets too much. Why would Dea go that far? My daughters.”

  Now both corners of his mouth almost matched—both of them tugged down, hard. His hands trembled.

  I didn’t want to upset him more, but I had to know. “Mama was feeding Vri magic in her candy?”

  “Candies. Cookies. Custards, puddings.” He tried to smile at me—tightly. “You—never a sweet tooth.”

  “I ate cookies. Why didn’t Mama try harder with me?”

  “Vri… much more ordinary.”

  “No, Vri’s the special one. She always has been. More beautiful, more talented, full of…”

  Magic. My voice trailed away.

  “She ate cookies,” my father said, looking up at me with an expression in his eyes as if he was pleading with me to understand. Then he went on.

  “Dea wanted… wanted to prove…”

  He stopped, anger sparkling in his eyes as he wrestled with his brain to produce the words.

  “Even the most ordinary. Would rise.” His shoulders sank with release from the effort. Then he shook his head. “You… Peri. Never ordinary.”

  I stared at him, waging my own battle with language and memory.

  “Papa! How could she?”

  “Tried—”

  “If it worked so well, why didn’t she give it to both of us?”

  He glared at me and spluttered, chopping the air with his left hand. “Not the point! False magic. Just—a—likeness. With…” A long pause, and his features twisted with effort. “Consequences.”

  “What kind of consequences?”

  “Dragons. Begin as birds. Lizards. Snakes. Rabbits?” He wheezed a laugh to himself. “Maybe rabbits. Need magic. To maintain—form. The springs. Dammed…”

  The Etereans and their northern garrison.

  I bit off a curse.

  There were places in the island's interior, in the mountains, where magic was said to well up out of the earth in springs. It was rumored that the Etereans had discovered such a place and used it to operate their machines, like the ones Granthus used to quell the food riots.

  “What do they do if you dam up the springs?”

  “Not born with magic. Must have it… from outside.”

  “Vri and Mama couldn’t have been the only new sources of magic,” I said. “Nor me, as little as I ate.”

  “Dragon Girls,” my father said in a raspy whisper.

  “What?” I said. I felt stupid, unwilling to put two and two together even though I knew they added up to four.

  “Dea took girls. Boys. With that Fixer.” He spat the last word, and his face contorted. “Bait.”

  Did Frost know that my own mother had created the Dragon Youth? Was I the only one who didn’t?

  And still I wanted to know the real answer, though I despised myself for it. Even without knowing that she had used us for her own dark ends, I’d written her off. If she didn’t want us, why should I want her? I’d already cried all my tears, alone at night after the chores were done, the books read, and Papa and Vri were asleep.

  But it was easier to say, harder to do. There was still a wound, one that would never heal enough that it couldn’t pop open at the least provocation.

  I took a deep breath. “Papa… if she was using us, why did she leave?”

  “Had an argument. When I found what she was doing to Vri.” He closed his eyes. “Then I found out what else. She had become… half dragon, I think.”

  “So, she really ran off with the Fixer?”

  My father nodded. “But best keep it quiet. Granthus—won’t like it. That his solution is the problem.”

  I thought of the woman dying for the figs, the girl the dragon swallowed, the men and women whose lives it had cast aside with its talons.

  I thought of the morning Papa lost the use of his right side. When the acolytes from the Dragon Temple had come for Vri to make her into a Dragon Girl and feed her to the dragons, and I’d bundled her out the back door of our tidy house on the good side of town and into the arms of the man who wanted to marry her. The man who took her away from this place, from this pain, from these memories.

  I thought of Stefan.

  “Papa!” I said. “How could you keep quiet? We’re all starving so Granthus can drive the dragons away! But he’s drawing them to us instead!”

  Papa looked up at me, his dark eyes rheumy with pain but lucid and familiar for all that. For once, the damage to his face made sense with his expression—the deep hurt, the deep pain, the deep love.

  He touched my cheek.

  “Two girls. No one to care for them but me.”

  I knuckled my hand against my mouth and stared at him. His words echoed around my skull, so much like the words I’d spoken to Frost this afternoon.

  Frost, whom I’d turned in for sedition.

  I dropped my hand and took a big breath.

  “Papa,” I said. “I’m going to give you something. And I want you to eat it.”

  I leaned over and opened the pack Frost had given me. My hand shook as I unwrapped the strips of meat.

  Would the wild magic differ from my mother’s fake magic? Would it still call the dragons, or was it better than that?

  It was a big gamble, but I thought I was right. And in this moment — sitting here with him in the tumble of our cold, cramped basement room, with the faint, thin smell of boiled vegetables hanging in the air though they had all been eaten by someone else — I was tired of hiding. Tired of skulking around the edges of life, tired of being quiet, tired of starving.

  And tired of carrying around this burden my mother had laid on me long ago.

  Though I now knew why my mother had lavished Vri with sweets and treats, it still hurt. It hurt in an even more ironic way. Because I had always thought I was the ordinary one—that Vri was special, that she was talented and unique, the one worthy of being saved. When I was a child, I had eaten jealousy like the sweets my mother fed to my sister. I swallowed it all down, where it sat like a ball in my stomach, undigested, unacknowledged.

  I had always tried not to hold it against Vri. Because, dammit, she had asked for none of it, and she was not the sort of child who lorded it over her solemn and un-fun older sibling. But Mama’s actions had eaten a canker in my heart, and the way Papa treated Vri hadn’t healed the wound.

  And now I learned that I hadn’t even been able to succeed in ordinariness.

  I wanted to lie down on my cot and laugh until it turned into crying.

  But I had responsibilities to fill first. I was Peranza the Steadfast, wasn’t I?

  “Papa,” I said again, going down on one knee before him. “I’m going to feed you some of this meat. I think it might make you well again, or at least better, but I don’t know what effect it will have, truly. It’s dragonmeat.”

  He looked up at me, squin
ting. “Dragon… meat?”

  “Stefan Frost gave it to me. The man who saved me from the dragon. He ate it and it healed him.”

  Stefan had turned a dragon—a huge, hungry dragon—away from me. A man who had just met me. While my own mother had apparently used my sister and I and our entire city as a scientific experiment, in service only to herself.

  I couldn’t let one more person be hurt because we were trying to survive.

  “Peri. Consequences.”

  “Papa, this whole situation was caused by people thinking of nothing but their own self-interest, twisting love so it had no choice but to be crushed beneath their heels. If anything will solve this problem, it will be something wild and freely given. Now hurry. There’s something I have to do as soon as I can.”

  “What is it?”

  “I betrayed an innocent man. And I’m tired of living under boot heels. Take the meat, Papa.”

  Hesitantly, he moved his left hand. I put my hand on his before he could take all the strips.

  “Not all of them,” I said. “Leave some for me.”

  I didn’t know what to expect. If the dragon magic would begin working on my father immediately, if it would take a while—what it would look like. I knew from my reading that wild magic could be as dangerous as a wild animal, but now that my father had told me his secrets about my mother, I questioned everything I had ever read about magic and dragons.

  And I was ready to stop all these lies. This false plainness I’d been carrying around for years, as if I was always adequate but never truly good enough. Dependable, but never special.

  Well, I was done with that.

  My father looked down at the meat in his hand and slowly put it in his mouth. As he chewed, he closed his eyes, and an expression of bliss crossed his face. He’d barely eaten half the strip when it dropped from his hands and he sank backwards into the pillows. A soft glow began in his fingers and spread up his arms.

  I would have been alarmed if not for the peaceful expression on his face. Whatever happened, at least I had given him a moment of relief.

  I pulled the covers up and re-wrapped the remaining strips of meat, then jammed them into the pocket of my cloak.

  “Sleep well, Papa,” I said, and leaned down to press a kiss to his forehead. Then I ran out of the room and up the stairs onto the street.

  I ran as fast as I could to the boardinghouse where Stefan had taken me that afternoon, praying the soldiers hadn’t moved that fast, and that if they had, that Stefan had moved faster.

  But none of my prayers were answered. They were dragging him out of the house, his hands manacled behind him. Blood dripped down his face and stained his white hair red and pink in streaks. Even from this distance, I could see the blue-black sigil the Guard’s Fixers had scrawled onto his cheek to bind his magic.

  I had to do something. But what could I do?

  I did the only thing I could think of. I took the meat out of my pocket and pushed it into my mouth.

  It was sweet and spicy, like an explosion at first, then deep with foreign, smoky notes, and a burn like whiskey as it slid golden down my throat. It nestled warm in my stomach, and then the warmth spread out into my arms and legs. I stretched out my arms and wriggled my fingers, feeling the power come into them.

  Across the court, Stefan raised his head and turned toward me.

  “What are you looking at?” the guard standing in front of him said, tilting forward on his toes. “Are there more of your kind over there? Think they’ll save you? Ungrateful prick.”

  The guard raised his fist to backhand him.

  The power was coursing through me now. Magic I had never experienced before. Wild, like the sight of that dragon hurtling through the air—beautiful and dangerous.

  I raised my hands and power shot out of them.

  I can’t describe what happened in that moment. I saw Stefan’s cat-green-gold eyes, though I stood too far away. I saw the gleam of dragon scales and feathers in the sun, though the sun had almost set. I saw fire leap up in the courtyard, though there was no fuel to light.

  Fire roared through me. I burned up in its heat and anger, turning into a column of pleasure and pain. I let it loose on the men who had brought me to this point, blasting them with flame.

  Was it me or the dragon?

  Did it matter?

  The bodies of the guards turned to ash and fell in fluttering gray flakes to the ground.

  The sight took the heat out of me. The magic cut off suddenly, and I wavered like the last bits of ash falling down.

  Then, I, too, fell.

  Peri, Peri, someone was saying. Peri, open your eyes.

  I blinked. I was on the ground. I felt raw inside, like I’d been scrubbed out with a coarse brush. Standing over me was a man with white-gold hair and eyes the color of a summer meadow. He had bruises on his face, but he smiled.

  “I see you ate the meat,” he said.

  What does dragon taste like?

  It tastes like spring sunshine on the rocks where I sit by a pool of frothing magic, watching as gulls land only to fly away with beaks full of silver teeth and wings of gold. It tastes like the cold, sparkling spray that spangles the coat of deer who come to drink, only to run away with strange bronze racks of antlers and wings sprouting from their sides.

  It tastes like the sight of my father, walking down the path and smiling at me, Stefan walking beside him.

  My father isn’t entirely healed. He limps and shambles like Stefan does, especially when the weather is damp. His smile will never be the same.

  But we’re here among the dragons. We’re here where we can grow our own food—or steal it from the Etereans. We’re still hungry. Still poor. Life is hard in these stony hills. The pool of magic we’ve been able to liberate from the ground is small. But we don’t have to be quiet anymore, here outside Granthus’s grip.

  Stefan and I sit on the rocks sometimes, wrapped up in cloaks against the cold, and we look down on the city still victimized by Granthus’s mad desire to keep everything locked under his control—people, magic, dragons. We watch as dragons cruise by the upthrust towers of the Temple towering above the other buildings—watch them dive for Youth who continue to die in vain, treated like so much meat.

  It’s hard, sitting. Watching.

  But that’s not all we’re doing now. I no longer huddle hidden in a basement, afraid to be seen, starving.

  One day, the dragon fire will come for Granthus, too.

  D.P. Woolliscroft

  D.P. Woolliscroft was born in Nottingham, England but has spent much of the past twenty years living in the US. Influenced by such a wide array of writers as Terry Pratchett, Michael J. Sullivan, Steven Erikson and Joe Abercrombie, his writing has combined real world issues such as inequality, religion and colonialism as a backdrop to dryly humorous character driven stories. His debut novel, Kingshold, introduced the novel concept of a fantasy realm transitioning to a democracy via a magically controlled election. Kingshold was the first novel in the Wildfire Cycle, a series of novels and collections of shorter stories that combine to tell one story. The other books in the Wildfire Cycle are Tales of Kingshold and Ioth, City of Lights. His next book, 2.5 of the Wildfire Cycle, Tales of Ioth, will be released in early 2020.

  Strays, the story that follow, focuses on the adventure of three friends from the Wildfire Cycle with a penchant for high class theft. And while Motega, a native of a far away tribal culture, is a point of view character in Kingshold, and Florian, a formidable hulking fighter with a good heart, who was the subject of a short story in Tales of Kingshold, Strays focuses on the third member of their group, Trypp. Orphan, formerly trainee assassin and ex-member of a guild of thieves, Trypp is the business brains of the trio with a high aversion to risk. In Strays, Trypp has to accept that no matter how much he plans, there are always some surprising things that he can't control.

  Click

  Noises like that were generally not good in their line of business. Crossbow
knocked. Locked door opening. Traps arming…

  “Nobody move. That fucking cat stood on the pressure plate.”

  Trypp froze in place, hoping that Motega and Florian were doing likewise behind him. The cat, black and with a disgustingly smug little face—it knew what it was doing—stared back at him. He’d noticed the pressure plate in the vault as soon as they had made it inside, the eight different locks securing the door having not given him too much trouble. He’d noticed the cat too, back in the banking hall, curled up on a long oaken counter where customers were served during the day. He just hadn’t expected the cat to follow them and mess everything up.

  Who keeps a cat in a bank anyway? A guard dog he could understand, but a cat?

  If he could just get to the bloody thing before it moved, maybe he could keep the pressure plate depressed while one of his friends found something else heavy enough to weigh it down. There were plenty of other heavy things in this particular vault, most of them worth a small fortune to the right buyer. But there was no need to concern himself with that right now. His focus was on the gold bust of some long dead Iothan that rested on the plinth.

  He dug his finger nails into his palm, frustrated with himself. His focus was supposed to be on the cat, not the shiny objects. Trypp took one small step forward, quiet as a mouse, his soft leather soles hushed against the marble floor. The cat tilted its head. Another step, and then a third. He was halfway to the cat when it rose onto all fours, its tail straight in the air behind it. He exhaled through his nose. It’s going to run. It’s going to run.

  Trypp dashed forward. The cat shrieked and bolted past him, but he wasn’t concerned about that. It was the pressure plate that mattered. His foot stamped down on it barely a heartbeat after the cat had ran. He put his whole weight on it, held his breath and waited for the inevitable.

  There was silence.

  No poison darts. No noxious gas. Trypp looked back at Motega and Florian and winked.

  Then the ceiling fell in.