The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition

by Rich Horton

  That, you see, was the truth she’d already known—

  Dragons are cool!

  Yes, that dragons are cool!

  But what about all that business about dragons being individuals with free will—

  Here is what she realized as she talked through all the information in her book. The dragon had been demanding treasure, not food. And while everyone knew that dragons loved treasure, surely they ate sometimes. And yet only a few sheep had gone missing from the edges of town, plus a few unlucky people like Laura, and that just didn’t seem like enough to feed a dragon. So she’d looked carefully at the diagrams of its jaw, and realized that its teeth were not shaped like a bear’s teeth, nor like a lion’s. After thinking about it carefully, she concluded that the dragon’s natural diet was fish. Not people.

  That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t eat a human who made it mad.

  She’d also realized that a dragon did not actually have enough fire in its belly to burn the city to the ground. It could certainly belch out enough flame to kill anyone who came knocking with a sword, but that was a long way from burning down a whole city.

  Maybe it was an empty threat.

  But there was another thing everyone agreed on: dragons were smart. Smart enough not to make empty threats—not when a city might call the dragon’s bluff by getting a big enough army together to take on the dragon.

  The dragon could move, though, if that happened. This dragon had moved before, right? Because you said it moved in.

  But dragons have a hoard. They save everything. And moving is annoying enough if you don’t have a dragon’s hoard to take with you to the Willamette Valley or wherever it is you’re going. The last thing any smart, sensible dragon was going to do was set itself up to have to move all the time. So Heather was pretty sure the threats were coming from someone else, someone who didn’t care that much what happened to the dragon. And the dragon probably knew who, and why, and so Heather thought that perhaps she would go and ask.

  The dragon tucked her wings back—

  It was a female dragon? How did Heather know it was a female dragon?

  She’d been studying dragon anatomy diagrams for months. Do I really need to spell it out for you?

  Yes, actually, I wouldn’t mind knowing how you tell a boy dragon from a girl dragon.

  The easiest way is coloration: the backs of a female dragon’s wings are less brightly colored than the front of the body, to provide camouflage when they’re nesting. Also, female dragons have wings that are scalloped on the bottom edge and male dragons have a penis.

  This dragon, which was female, folded her hands in front of her and lowered herself to the ground. “You’re not here to try to kill me?” she said, sounding a bit surprised.

  “No,” Heather said. “I did bring you a game, though, because I heard dragons like games, and some sheet music—do you read music?—because I heard you like singing. But mostly I came to ask you who it is that’s using you to threaten my city, and whether I can help you.”

  “It’s a sorcerer,” the dragon said. “I’m a very young dragon.” (She was indeed quite a bit smaller than Heather had expected.) “If I were older, he never would have been able to do this to me, but he’s used his magic to trap me here so that I can’t leave. He can’t actually make me go set your city on fire, but when people come to kill me, I defend myself . . . ”

  “Including my sister?” Heather asked, a huge lump in her throat.

  The dragon shrugged. “I don’t remember anyone who looked like you,” she said. “There are bandits, and other dangers nearby—not just me.”

  “How can I break the sorcerer’s spell?” Heather asked.

  “I don’t know,” the dragon said. “I can tell you where to find him, but he’s really powerful—I’d feel terrible sending you off into danger.”

  Heather thought that over. “Do I need to defeat the sorcerer? Or just figure out how to break the spell?”

  “Let me put it this way,” the dragon said. “While I do not normally eat people, because they really don’t taste very good, I would make a special exception for the sorcerer who has turned me into his own personal chained-up pet dragon and used me to intimidate people into letting him steal their money. In other words, if you can figure out how to break the spell, I’ll take care of the rest of it.”

  “If nothing else,” Heather said, “I could go down to the city and tell everyone the truth—that it’s the sorcerer who’s a danger, not you.”

  “You could do that,” the dragon said. “Unfortunately, he’ll just move us on to a new city. That’s what he did the last two times when people figured it out.”

  Heather thought that over. This meant the sorcerer was powerful enough to enslave the dragon, but maybe not powerful enough to protect himself any other way. “Where does he keep all the money he steals?” she asked.

  “He makes me guard it,” the dragon said, and pointed down into her lair. Heather peered down at the hoard. The edge of the cavern shadowed it, but she could see a heap of glittering gold and rubies.

  “Can I go in and look?” Heather asked.

  “Oh, yes. I just can’t let you leave with any of it.”

  Heather went inside the cavern and started poking through the treasure. There was gold and silver, there were gems and strands of pearls, there were bundles of paper bills and a few paintings, there was an ancient cast-bronze horse, and there were books.

  Heather picked her way through all of it; one of the treasures was a gem-encrusted lamp, and she lit it so that she could see a bit better. Bear barked. “Help me look, Bear,” Heather said. “If the treasure’s here being guarded by the dragon, I bet the magic is here, too. Somewhere.”

  The dragon came in and laid her chin on her hands, watching as Heather dug through the piles. After poking through the gold coins (and then rolling in the giant pile of gold because really, how often do you have the opportunity to roll in a giant pile of gold?) Heather started looking at the books. There were a few giant Bibles with gems on the front covers, and one of the lost plays of Shakespeare, and a collection of plays by Aeschylus that included all of Achilles, and a musical score for something called Per la ricuperata salute di Ophelia, which the dragon took an interest in and started studying while Heather searched.

  Wait, is that the lost opera that Mozart and Salieri wrote together?

  It was a cantata for voice and piano, actually, but yes, it was written by Mozart and Salieri together and then lost. You do realize that in real life they weren’t anything like they were in that movie . . .

  Yes yes yes, historically they were probably friends, or at least friendly. Did the dragon not know it was there?

  Oh, she knew it was there and had looked at it before, but you know how sometimes when you’re trying to put away a big pile of books and you make the mistake of opening one, and you sit down and start reading it even though you’ve read it already and you were really intending to clean that day instead of reading for hours? That’s pretty much what happened to the dragon.

  Under a crate of gold bars, which Heather needed a lever to move as gold weighs so much, she found a very plain, unimpressive little book. From the outside, it actually looked quite a lot like the book she had made. Except this one had a picture of a dragon on the cover. The dragon looked up miserably at a man who sat riding on his shoulders.

  Heather opened the book and suddenly became aware that the dragon was watching her. “I cannot let you destroy that book,” the dragon said sharply, and Heather knew right away that she’d found what she was looking for.

  “So, you can’t let me take it,” she said, and the dragon shook her head, “and you can’t let me destroy it. I won’t take it anywhere and I won’t destroy it. I’m just going to look at it,” she said. The dragon watched as she set the lamp on a ledge, then sat down under it to read.

  It was a scrapbook, of sorts, full of pictures of dragons, but each showed the same thing in a different way: a dragon bound. Chained to
a human figure, tied to the ground with giant nets, imprisoned behind bars. Heather thought that destroying it would probably free the dragon, but the dragon was watching Heather’s every movement now, and while it did occur to Heather that maybe she could “accidentally” drop the burning lamp onto it, that seemed awfully risky if it didn’t work.

  She took out her pen, and the dragon didn’t twitch.

  Carefully, she started drawing on the page.

  “What are you doing?” the dragon asked.

  “I’m adding things,” Heather said.

  “Hmm. I guess that’s okay,” the dragon said.

  Heather drew a giant pair of scissors snipping through the net. She drew a file chiseling through the bars, and a key unlocking the chains.

  “Do you feel like you could let me destroy it now?” she asked when she’d finished.

  The dragon paused, and then shook her head.

  Heather looked more closely at the words written around the pictures. Where it said, “By words and magic the dragon is taken,” she put in a caret and wrote “not,” so that it said, “By words and magic the dragon is not taken.” She changed the word “bound” to “boundless” and “grave” to “gravel” and something that ended with “die” she changed into a short essay about “dietary law.”

  It didn’t make a lot of sense when she was done with it, but she didn’t think that would matter. But the dragon still didn’t feel like she could let her destroy the book.

  So finally, Heather took her own scrapbook, and cut out the picture she had pasted into the center, and pasted it onto the cover of the magician’s scrapbook, covering over the picture of the miserable-looking dragon.

  The dragon leapt to her feet. “HA!” she shouted, and bolted out of the cave.

  Well, that seemed to have done it. Heather burned the magician’s scrapbook, just to be on the safe side. She figured the treasure wasn’t hers—it belonged either to the people it had been stolen from, or the dragon—but she couldn’t resist the Aeschylus and the Shakespeare, so she packed those up and left a note saying, I borrowed the plays. I promise to give them back after I’ve read them.—Heather.

  She blew out the lamp, left the dragon’s lair, and looked around. She could see the dragon high overhead and hoped she’d stick to her word and eat the evil sorcerer before she left forever. And then she called for Bear and they walked back down the path to the city.

  Is that the end?

  No. The next morning, everyone in the city woke to the sound of a vast, enormous contralto voice singing a cantata—

  The dragon?

  Yes, indeed, the dragon. And when she was done, she told them that she’d been freed, and had eaten the evil sorcerer, and would now be on her way to explore new lands.

  Did she tell them who’d freed her?

  No, because she could tell Heather would prefer not to have to put up with being famous.

  But what about the reward? She was supposed to get a reward!

  The next day, Heather got a package through the mail; it was a box containing those heavy gold bars, which was enough wealth to keep her well supplied for the rest of her life. The dragon kept Fillard’s game and Peter’s sheet music, though.

  She was also supposed to be a hot commodity. Romantically, I mean.

  Would you want to marry someone who was only interested in you because you were a hero of the realm? She went back to visit Fillard and Peter to tell them how things worked out with the dragon, and they were delighted to see her. And over time she and Fillard became best friends, and they got married and lived happily ever after.

  Did they ever see the dragon again?

  No.

  I want them to see the dragon again.

  Well, the dragon sent them postcards occasionally, from distant cities like Shanghai and Barcelona and Miami.

  That’s not the same as seeing her.

  I suppose.

  Surely the dragon would have come back to visit. Once. Heather freed her from the sorcerer!

  You’re right. She did. One night about ten years after Heather and Fillard had married, and they were sitting on the beach with their child watching the sun set over the water. And in the clouds, Heather saw the dragon; for a moment, she thought it was just the sun in her eyes, but then she saw the huge wings and knew it was the dragon. And she shouted and pointed so that Fillard and their child could see her as well.

  They all saw the dragon, just for a few minutes, in the last light of the day. And as the shadows gathered and the stars came out, they heard her singing.

  The Contrary Gardener

  Christopher Rowe

  Kay Lynne wandered up and down the aisles of the seed library dug out beneath the county extension office. Some of the rows were marked with glowing orange off-limits fungus, warning the unwary away from spores and thistles that required special equipment to handle, which Kay Lynne didn’t have, and special permission to access, which she would never have, if her father had anything to say about it, and he did.

  It was the last Friday before the first Saturday in May, the day before Derby Day and so a week from planting day, and Kay Lynne had few ideas and less time for her Victory Garden planning. Last year she had grown a half dozen varieties of tomatoes, three for eating and three for blood transfusions, but she didn’t like to repeat herself. Given that she tended to mumble when she talked, not liking to repeat herself made Kay Lynne a quiet gardener.

  She paused before a container of bright pink corn kernels, their preprogrammed color coming from insecticides and fertilizers and not from any varietal ancestry. Kay Lynne didn’t like to grow corn. It grew so high that it cast her little cottage in shadow if she planted it on the side of the house that would see it grow at all. Besides, corn was cheap, and more than that, easy—just about any gardener could grow corn and a lot of them did.

  There were always root vegetables. A lot of utility to those, certainly, and excellent trade goods for the army supply clerks who would start combing the markets as soon as the earliest spring greens were in. Rootwork was complicated, and meant having nothing to market through the whole long summer, which in turn meant not having to go to the markets for months yet, which was a good thing in Kay Lynne’s view.

  She considered the efficacy of beets and potatoes, and the various powers carrots held when they were imaginatively programmed and carefully grown. Rootwork had been a particular specialty of her run-off mother, and so would have the added benefit of warding her father away from the cottage, which he visited entirely too often for Kay Lynne’s comfort.

  It would be hard work. That spoke for the idea, too.

  She strode over to the information kiosk and picked up the speaking tube that led to the desks of the agents upstairs.

  “I need someone to let me into the root cellars,” she said.

  Blinking in the early morning light, Kay Lynne left the extension office and made her way to the bus stop, leaning forward under the weight of her burdensacks. The canvas strap that held them together was draped across her shoulders and, while she thought she had done an exacting job in measuring the root cuttings on each side so that the weight would be evenly distributed, she could already tell that there was a slight discrepancy, which was the worst kind of discrepancy, the very bane of Kay Lynne’s existence, the tiny kind of problem that no one ever bothered to fix in the face of more important things. She could hear her father’s voice: “Everything is not equally important. You never learned that.”

  The extension office was on the south side, close enough to downtown to be on a regular bus route, but far enough to not fall under the shadows of the looming skyscrapers Kay Lynne could now clearly see as she waited at the shelter. Slogans crawled all over the buildings, leaping from one granite face to another when they were too wordy, though of course, to Kay Lynne’s mind they were all too wordy. “The Union is strong,” read one in red, white, and blue firework fonts. “The west front is only as strong as the home front. Volunteer for community servi
ce!” The only slogan that stayed constant was the green and brown limned sentence circling the tallest building of all. “Planting is in EIGHT days.”

  A shadow fell on the street and Kay Lynne looked up to see a hot air balloon tacking toward the fairgrounds. The great balloon festival was the next morning in the hours before the Derby, and the balloonists had been arriving in numbers all week. It was part of the Derby Festival, the madness-tinged days that took over the city each spring, at the exact time when people should be at their most serious. The timing never failed to dismay Kay Lynne.

  The stars and stripes were displayed proudly on the balloon, and also a ring of green near the top that indicated that it was made from one hundred percent non-recycled materials. It was wholly new, and so an act of patriotism. Kay Lynne would never earn such a ring as a gardener; careful economy was expected of her and her cohort.

  The balloon passed on, skirting the poplar copse that stood behind the bus stop, and was quickly obscured by the trees. Kay Lynne’s cottage was northwest of the fairgrounds, and the winds most of the balloons would float on blew above her home. She would probably see it again tomorrow, whether she wanted to or not.

  Belching its sulfur fumes, the bus arrived, and Kay Lynne climbed aboard.

  The bus driver was a Mr. Lever #9, Kay Lynne’s favorite model. They were programmed with thirty-six phrases of greeting, observation (generally about the weather), and small talk, in addition to whatever announcements were required for their particular route. A Mr. Lever #9 never surprised you with what it said or did. They made Kay Lynne comfortable with public transportation.

  “Good . . . morning, citizen,” it said cheerily as Kay Lynne boarded. “Sunny and mild!”

  Kay Lynne nodded politely to the driver and took the seat immediately behind it. The bus was sparsely occupied, with just a few tardy students bound for the university sharing the conveyance. To a one, their noses were buried in appallingly thick textbooks.