by Jaida Jones
“Just what I’ve always wanted,” I said, pulling a face and dropping low to avoid the swipe of her hand. It was a harder feat to accomplish with the pack on my shoulders and so many layers making me slow, but I managed it somehow.
The old woman pushed the tent flap aside and bright light flooded in. Outside, hard-faced men in disciplined lines were organizing us into groups, digging through bags and storming into the half-ruined houses without even knocking. They weren’t shouting—they’d probably gotten enough of that during the war—but they managed to have the same effect. We’d long since been warped by years of tradition and wartime duty to do whatever an official told us.
A convenient system for our emperor, no doubt, but one that spoke very little of the will of the people under him.
It made me sick, but I was a part of it too, and like my village I could hardly cut it out of my being. Even if it was shit.
I shouldered my bag and strode out into the sunlight, sand crunching beneath my sandals and last night’s grit caught between my toes. I could see now that there were caravans, big ones, meant for transporting people as well as cargo. I didn’t like the looks of them, or what it meant that they were there in the first place, but I had enough brains in my head not to run at the first sight of something that spooked me.
“You there,” said one of the soldiers.
“Me here?” I asked, pointing, but he just took me by the elbow and pushed me into one of the scattered lines slowly being formed.
Soldiers never listened to what the common folk had to say, but that had never stopped me from trying to say it. It was an attitude that would one day land me in more trouble than I was looking for, according to the old woman, but I’d gotten lucky so far. I planned on staying that way.
Plus, I was pissed at being interrupted right in the middle of a good dream for some last-minute examination. All we had was trash anyway—nothing the higher-ups would ever want to use. It was funny how the emperor hadn’t given a shit what we took from the capital back when it’d still been burning and he didn’t want to dig through anything himself. But now that other people had gone and done the dirty work for him, he could just follow after them and collect what he liked, simpler than sifting through a whole pile of dirt.
In short, the whole deal pissed me off, but there wasn’t much I could do about it now. I spat on the ground and adjusted one strap on my pack. Maybe if I looked angry enough—and stupid enough, on top of that—they’d think I was a waste of time and go right by me. It was a long shot, but I was willing to take whatever I could.
I wasn’t about to let them get ahold of what I’d found.
Besides that, I wasn’t too keen on giving up the little things either.
We could use this crap—make clothes, wrap our babies in it, see to it that kids had proper shoes. Up at the top of the heap, all it would do was gather dust at best; at worst, it’d burn. But wasn’t that just like power? Someone had to make sure things stayed the way they were—poor people having nothing and rich people having even the things they didn’t want or need.
At the end of my line was another soldier sitting at a long table; he was wearing a hat, which meant he was more important than the others even though he looked a hell of a lot younger from where I was standing. I could tell what kind of man he was without him having to say a word—shirt neatly pressed, cuffs stiff and clean, medals gleaming like he polished them every morning alongside his shoes. Only the young ones had the energy to be that spic-and-span about every little detail. What someone like him was doing in charge of this operation was beyond me, but there was no money to be made in speculating so I didn’t waste my time doing it.
When he lifted his head I could see the poor bastard had a long, ugly scar running up through the center of his cheek and—mercifully—just to the left of one eye. It was the kind of thing you got when something tried to rip half your face off and didn’t quite succeed, which I guess was why he was so young and so important in his hat and all. If he noticed me staring, he didn’t say a thing, only folded his hands together on the table and lifted his chin like he was real sure of himself and used to it.
“Open the bag,” he barked.
Being an obedient little lady of the realm, I swung it off my shoulders and onto the table with a thump. The soldier looked angry, which meant that I’d taken him by surprise and I felt pretty satisfied about that. Less satisfied came afterward, when he snapped his fingers and two soldiers set to undoing the buckles and tabs that kept my pack together, not to mention keeping everything inside it.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek. It wasn’t my stuff anyway, not to begin with. Besides, I was a woman and a peasant, and I had no rights even to things I’d been born with, like hope and dignity and pride. The old woman was always saying my tongue’d be the death of me if I survived the war. Thinking about the smug way she’d laugh if she turned out to be right was all that kept me silent while the soldiers tore through my findings—like patterned cloth too big or still too torn to wear, and things I’d thought to send to my mother once I got the time and the money. There were other things too, smaller and more fragile, bundled in the fabric to keep them safe from the kind of treatment they were getting now.
One soldier pulled loose a smaller bundle I’d made, strips of deep, heart’s blood purple wrapped around my prize. I stiffened, hands clenched behind my back, and if they’d thought to have soldiers holding me they’d have noticed straightaway, only they hadn’t planned for that. Because I was only a woman, probably, or maybe because they just didn’t have the manpower for that anymore. Whatever the reason, I was seconds away from leaping across the table and snatching what was mine back from that soldier’s hands. The only thing stopping me was thinking up the best way to do it.
What they unwrapped was a hunk of metal, scorched black along the back and twisted from the heat of the fires I’d found it in. There was a clock face set into the front—I’d grabbed it at first because I’d thought it was a watch and maybe if I got it working again I could use it to tell the time—but instead of numbers there were only symbols, strange and foreign. I’d been about to throw it back when the pieces had started moving. What I’d assumed to be the hands for telling time, a sculpted arrow and a broken spring, suddenly aligned like the hands of the weirdest damned compass I’d ever seen—the other two were still—and both pointed toward the wreck of the magician’s dome, where the fires had burned the hottest and most scavengers still feared to go.
That was where I’d discovered my real treasure: the shiny, smooth scales of a Volstovic fire-breather, those monsters that had decided the war for good. I’d turned up three scales and one mean-looking claw; I’d sold the claw first and the others pretty quick after that, once word started to spread.
Even if there wasn’t money for food, there was still money enough for that.
I wasn’t some kind of sentimental fool out to keep a memento of the monsters that’d ruined us, and if some idiot wanted to feed me and my family for the privilege of sentiment? Well, that was fine by me.
The hands on my find hadn’t so much as twitched since I’d left the capital, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still checking it regular, every night before I went to bed and every morning when I woke up, and periods in between when no one was looking too.
“What is this?” The soldier with the scar snapped to, all of a sudden, taking my prize in his hands and holding it up to the light, blunt fingers twisting the hands around like he was trying to set it to the right time.
The clumsy oaf was going to break it.
A fool would’ve hit him, but I had better control over myself than that. I shrugged, trying not to look like I cared one way or another. “I found it,” I said. “I don’t know what it does.”
“Perhaps you haven’t heard, but there’s a rumor going around about scavengers selling government-owned property on the black market,” he said, like we were on speaking terms all of a sudden when he hadn’t so much as said “boo�
�� to me this whole time we’d been standing across the table from one another. Soldiers. Arrogant as peacocks, the lot of them, and none so handsome. He’d probably been waiting for just the right time to impress upon me who was in charge and who wasn’t. “Things that should have fallen under the terms of the provisional treaty. That sort of action is treasonous.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” I sniffed. Maybe once things’d been settled in the capital it’d start spreading outward, but I wasn’t holding my breath.
“It would be convenient for you if I believed that,” he said. “I think we’ll take you along with us.”
“To the capital?” I asked, before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to speak. The old woman would’ve got me good with her stick for that one, and I would’ve deserved it.
The soldiers exchanged a look. They’d started shoving things this way and that back into my bag, but I noticed they were still holding on to my prize—like they didn’t plan on giving it back to me ever. I didn’t like to admit it, but I was getting anxious. And anytime I was anxious, I got pissed off.
“Somewhere much closer than that,” my friend in the hat answered me, finally. He pulled me close by one of my seven sleeves, all of them layered like I was some kind of princess straight out of a fairy tale. At least I was tall enough that he didn’t tower over me, and I did my best not to stare right at that giant scar. “Tell me, country girl: Have you heard of the magicians’ city?”
I wanted to tell him all that was a bedtime story. Shit like that wasn’t real anymore, and maybe it’d never been real to begin with, either. But I bit back on my anti-national way of thinking and looked away, off toward the cracked dome of the magician’s tower, lying overturned in a heap of its own rubble. Hatty’d take my drift.
“Commoners,” he said, and shook his head as he pocketed the one piece of treasure I’d ever held in my hands. “You’re coming with us.”
I had no choice, so I went.
CHAPTER TWO
THOM
This was not the first time I’d ever been a part of a barroom brawl. However, it was the first time I had ever participated actively in one.
It was difficult to deny Rook when he issued a command—something he’d learned, no doubt, from Chief Sergeant Adamo and saved only for special occasions. There was more power behind an order when it was bellowed in unfamiliar tones, making a man who’d otherwise remain neutral fall into a sudden alliance from which he could not withdraw. It was, in some ways, the most basic strategic lesson I had been given, inside the ’Versity or out.
And so I had allowed myself to become a hooligan.
While it wounded my pride, the main source of hurt was in my knuckles, which were swollen beyond my capacity to move them.
I didn’t even remember the face of the man I’d struck—it might just as well have been a woman, save for the faint imprint of what seemed to be a beard spread across my stiffened fist. If we were arrested, which we might well be, I had no excuses or even any explanations. I had simply punched a man because Rook had told me to, and it was all over some item, now tightly secured in Rook’s hands, which I couldn’t even identify.
“Didn’t know you could fight like that,” Rook said moodily, the sound of his voice cutting through my troubled thoughts and bringing me, somewhat miserably, back down to earth.
“You forget my upbringing,” I replied.
Rook snorted. “I wasn’t there for it,” he said. Then, perhaps because that was too much even for him, he fell silent again.
We were in our rooms now, after being mobbed by an entire innful of country folk incensed at being insulted. And why shouldn’t they have been, I asked myself, since Rook had called them all thieves, liars, and the women whores. No one would take very kindly to that treatment, and they had only reacted as they saw fit. Besides which, he had confiscated something of theirs.
I didn’t blame them, but still I had fought them tooth and nail. Even now, I felt it necessary to apologize, or at least to offer the innkeeper payment. At this very moment, he was no doubt calculating the extra cost to us for staying in his establishment and doing our level best to tear it down before we set out to our next target.
“Rook,” I said, drawing in a steadying breath. “Since I have now been involved in actions I…am not entirely proud of…” Rook snorted again, and I tried to ignore it. “I’m waiting for an explanation,” I concluded at length. “Any reason at all for why we…Anything, really, would suffice.”
Rook’s face was twisted into an expression of such deep unhappiness that, at first, it might have passed for anger. In point of fact, even I drew back, before the sum total of his features—his hard jaw, his tight lips, the redness around his eyes and the whiteness around his mouth—brought me up short.
I had misread the situation—somehow—and on top of that, I was not the sort of partner he’d wanted.
Of course not. I wasn’t one of the boys. Brawling was not my specialty, and I did not enjoy the rush of simple pleasure brought on by physical fights.
But there was some other key element lacking—something that had to do with camaraderie—and when I thought too long or too well upon the subject, my heart began to hurt.
I tried to move my hand to distract myself. That pain was simple and immediate, and it was a momentary distraction. A dirty tactic, but for the time being it would serve its purpose.
“Like I said before things went to piss,” Rook muttered, “they had a fucking piece of Magoughin’s girl, all right?”
I glanced down at the box in Rook’s hand, trying to follow. His words had barely made sense—and then someone had made a grab for the box, and he’d thrown the first punch, and after that all was chaos. Hitting and kicking and clawing—all manner of action that drove real thought straight from a person’s head.
He’d said that before—our girls—but it hadn’t occurred to me at the time what he was actually talking about.
“Chastity?” I said.
“Yeah,” Rook agreed. His mouth twisted to the left, then resettled into its grim, hard line, like the slashed mouth of a ritual mask from the distant south. Those masks were meant to frighten away the curses placed upon a family by one’s ancestors. I would have explained the dark humor to Rook if I hadn’t already known the outcome: Shut up, Professor. Shut the fuck up. “You’ve still got all that memorized, huh?”
“You do, as well,” I pointed out.
“That’s different,” Rook snapped, and he was right.
I steadied myself to be brave enough for my next question. “May I see it?”
“It’s nothing special,” Rook said. “Just a fucking scale, nothing important. What good’s looking at it gonna do? Fuck me.” He lifted the box, though, as if he were about to slam it down on the table in front of us, then set it down gently, popping open the top. There it was, a scale indeed, though I personally would never have recognized it. I knew very little of the dragons themselves—I’d been given no real time to study them, and mechanics had never been my strong suit. In point of fact, what little I did know was of their riders. If this was Chastity, then it was as much a piece of Magoughin as it was a piece of metal.
I reached forward to touch it with my bad hand, and Rook whistled.
“Looks like that hurts,” he said.
I sniffed. “It does. Quite a bit, actually.”
“You bunched your fist too tight, that’s why,” Rook explained. “You made the muscles too tight. You gotta make your fist go loose—less bruising that way.”
The theory made anatomical sense. “I hope I never have to put that advice into practice, in any case,” I said.
“Well, don’t say I never taught you anything,” Rook muttered.
“I wouldn’t exactly say that.”
Rook got real close to me, his eyes crazy in a way I hadn’t seen them get for a long time. “That some kind of insult?”
“A compliment,” I managed, voice coming out distinctly strangled. “I believe I
intended it to be a compliment.”
“We’re getting sidetracked anyway,” Rook said, wheeling away and stalking to the window. “What the fuck do you think about that thing?”
“About the dragonscale?” I asked, knowing already what the answer was. But I was buying time to think my answer over, foolishly convincing myself that if I put enough thought into it, I could divine the right answer, the one that would assure Rook he hadn’t been completely out of his mind to take me along.
I stretched my hand uneasily, trying to keep it from getting too stiff. I was treading on unsteady ground, and the hard lines of Rook’s back were as unforgiving as they’d ever been—even back in the days before we’d known what we were to one another. I stared at the dragonscale on the table, trying to mold my thoughts around the twisted shape of it.
The problem was, I’d never been as close to the dragons as I’d been to the men—one had to call them men, even if other words were preferable—who’d ridden them, and I’d been somewhat reluctant to raise the topic during my time spent traveling with Rook. How did one broach such a delicate subject? Thus far, we’d never addressed the dragons or what had happened to them at all, to say nothing of those members of the corps still living—or those now lost to us forever.
I’d written letters at first, and shared the responses willingly enough with Rook, until he’d pointed out that he didn’t give two shits whether Ghislain had bought a ship or not, or what classes Adamo was lecturing in. After that, it seemed best to keep both my letters and my theories to myself.
Rook had left Thremedon, and, it seemed, all thoughts of Thremedon as well.
