Dragon Soul

by Danielle Bennett

  “I’m almost positive they do,” I said, since if other people already knew, then there was no point in lying. “I’m traveling with him.”

  “Aha,” Fan said.

  We rounded a cluster of tents just in time to see the small crowd gathered at the outskirts of the campsite: ragtag travelers of all ages and sizes, all trying to look as though they were busy with something else but clearly surrounding Rook, as though they’d been caught up in his peculiar gravitational pull.

  “I’ve seen your statue,” one girl was telling him. She had a rosy face like an apple. “It isn’t nearly so…so breathtaking.”

  “That’s great,” Rook said, in flat tones. I could see him eyeing potential means of escape. “Real nice.”

  Fan whistled low, reaching his hands up to form a picture frame around the scene. “That’s him, all right. You didn’t tell me you were traveling with a real live airman, stranger—though I guess this might be why.”

  “You can call me Thom,” I said, resigned. I didn’t like the way he was gawking, but there was nothing I could do about that. No matter what, Rook was a hero. People responded only as they knew how. If I hadn’t known him, I was sure I’d have done the same.

  “There now, that wasn’t so hard at all, was it?” Fan smiled again, then clapped me on the shoulder. I thought that perhaps there was something in his voice that hadn’t been there before, but I chalked it up to excitement. No one much fancied talking to me when Rook was about; Fan was probably working up the courage to ask me for an introduction. “He doesn’t look too happy about all this attention, does he?”

  I was already cringing inwardly at the expression on Rook’s face, for it was one that I’d come to recognize all too well in the time we’d known one another. In fact, I’d been the cause of it often enough.

  This was certainly not going to improve his mood.

  “What was it like?” asked a boy—just past puberty, I thought, and filled with wide-eyed wonderment. I had to stop him before he said it, the damning word, the ultimate offense. “Riding on a—”

  I cleared my throat helplessly, trying to push my way to the forefront.

  “You!” Rook said suddenly, weeding me out of the crowd as though he’d heard my thoughts. “Did you at least manage to get some dinner ready while I was gone, or’ve you just been wasting time writing in that damn book like always?”

  “Ah,” I said. “I’ll go start on that now.”

  “Good,” he snarled, and took advantage of everyone’s confusion to storm toward our camp, heedless of all those around him who evidently would have been just as happy to keep him there all night.

  I was all but preparing to get out of his way myself and see if I could at least make it back to our site before him when Fan made a sudden movement at my side, and I realized too late that he was heading straight for Rook.

  There was being overly friendly, and then there was just plain suicide.

  I made a grab for Fan’s sleeve—too late again—and then could do nothing but stare in horror as events unfolded in front of me: the last remnants of the crowd scattering in Rook’s wake, my strange acquaintance stepping into his path, smile like the sliver of the moon, and Rook himself halting without warning as he sensed this approach, Fan nearly plowing into him with the momentum he’d built up. It was like watching a boar cornered at a hunt—right before the boar turned wild and eviscerated its hapless pursuers out of self-defense.

  “Pardon me,” Fan said, offering a funny little bow. “I would never presume to delay any man’s dinner, let alone one so distinguished as you.”

  “Then get,” Rook grunted. “Unless you’re volunteering to go into the stewpot?”

  “Nothing so crude,” Fan said, rummaging for something in a pouch on his belt. “We’re not in the desert just yet, after all.” I was still struggling with the simple human urge to get another man out of the way of the hurricane bearing down on him, but I was ashamed to admit that my curiosity was winning me over. I held my place, half a part of the crowd and half not, until Fan retrieved whatever it was he’d been searching for. I caught a glimpse of metal in the firelight, nothing more, but that was enough to make my stomach turn over.

  No, I thought. Anything but that.

  Rook’s eyes sharpened. “Where’d you get that?” he demanded.

  “You aren’t the only one with friends in the desert,” said Fan, seemingly heedless of the danger he was in simply by existing. I rose up on the balls of my feet to try to get a better look at the piece he was holding, and managed to see it over the heads of my fellow spectators. It was a talon, hooked and dangerous. It seemed to take on the colors of the firelight, a muddied red-gold that I didn’t recognize; but then, the only dragon I had ever enjoyed personal contact with was my brother’s.

  Rook grabbed Fan up by the front of his shirt and dragged him close; it seemed all the patience in his stores had run out at last. I took a tentative step forward, though whether it was to intervene or offer my aid, I couldn’t say. There was little I could do to prevent another incident like the one at the inn.

  “I’ve had about enough of that face of yours, shit-eating grin and all,” Rook said. “You have something to say to me about where you got your fucking hands on that? Think real fucking carefully about how you answer me. You feel free to take your time.”

  Fan coughed, looking surprised but not altogether as alarmed as I might have imagined. He had nerves of steel—or something else of steel—and I was momentarily in awe of his composure. “I apologize for coming across as ungracious,” he said. “I can assure you, that wasn’t my intent. Karakhum does a pretty business in the black market these days, being as it’s lucky enough to border both Xi’An and Volstov. I’ve just come from there. I bought this because the man selling it told me it was a real piece of the action. I never thought I’d get a chance to verify that unless I somehow ran into one of the dragonmakers, hey? But here you are. Pretty piece of luck, isn’t it? No offense meant; I just allowed my excitement to run away with me.”

  There was a tense moment when my brother clenched his jaw, glancing at the claw Fan held in his hand. I felt my knuckles give a preemptive throb in protest—the bruises had only just begun to heal—but I readied myself to wade into whatever fray began. We’d certainly come too far together for me to suddenly start choosing the moral high ground.

  Besides, it was obvious the awestruck travelers would be on Rook’s side. The odds were quite decent.

  “Fine,” Rook bit out, releasing Fan and shoving him backward. “You’re lucky I ain’t taking that piece right off you.”

  I privately thought that he was lucky Rook hadn’t taken more than that off him, but I very wisely kept this opinion to myself.

  Fan adjusted his collar, slightly pink around the ears and cheeks, but back to smiling again. He was either the most cheerful person I’d ever met, or he was slightly touched in the head.

  “You’ve just made a stranger one very happy man,” he said.

  “Just what I always wanted,” Rook snapped. He stalked over toward me, making sure to knock my shoulder with his own as he passed and lowering his voice. “I want to talk to you,” he muttered.

  I cast an apologetic look at Fan as I turned to follow, feeling something like the shameful beginnings of relief swelling up inside me. Being spoken to was a step up from being treated like the gravel beneath Rook’s boots.

  When I arrived back at our tent, he had already begun to stoke the fire. I noticed that while he’d been off checking the location, he’d seen fit to hunt down a pair of desert hares to add to the vegetable stew I’d been planning. I had no idea how he’d managed to catch them near such a populated area—doubtless he’d used his skills with a knife, or maybe he’d brought them down with a good, stiff glare. I chopped our vegetables in silence, stirring them into the pot, as Rook sat in front of the fire, poking it moodily and sending up little whispers of ash and ember.

  Something—most likely sap in the wood—caused
the flames to pop and send up sudden sparks. It startled me, but I kept my hold on the cooking spoon.

  “Seems we’re heading in the right direction, if that sly-faced bastard’s one to believe,” Rook grunted into the fire circle.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “You have a lot of thoughts in that head of yours,” Rook said, waving his finger in a circle near my temple. It was the most derogatory gesture he could come up with under the circumstances, and I tried not to let my expression turn sour. “You ever use ’em to think about those dragonmakers?”

  “Sometimes,” I admitted. “I don’t have a Talent myself, and those magicians were highly specialized—it’s a subject that deals in magical theory, which I have no real vocabulary to understand. I’m sorry.” I added, on impulse, “that I’m not more useful when it comes to…them, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Rook said.

  He was quiet for a while, still poking at the fire, sitting cross-legged with his face turned masklike by the erratic firelight. Dinner was starting to smell delicious, and I hoped that food would put him in better spirits. Now and then I openly observed him, but he was so far lost to his own private thoughts—so private I had no wager as to what they were—that there was no point in trying to be stealthy.

  He wasn’t looking at me. For all he knew, I wasn’t even there.

  “But you know something about ’em,” he said suddenly, when my back was turned to him. I whipped around, almost knocking over the pot, and Rook had the kindness to laugh at me while he caught hold of it. “Calm the fuck down,” he said. “You’re pissing me off.”

  “You’re pissing me off,” I said. Apparently I’d lost my mind. “There. Now we’re even.”

  “It’s fair enough,” Rook said—a startling moment of clarity that nearly had me gasping, like a fish, for air.

  “It is?” I asked.

  “I’m acting like a fucking bitch,” Rook said, showing some teeth. “And you’re acting like a jackrabbit. So you’re pissed off, and I’m pissed off. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “I don’t really see how that solves—”

  “Save it for when I give a shit,” Rook said. “You’ve probably…read something about them. The magicians in charge of making the dragons. Were there a bunch of them? Just a couple? What was the fucking deal?”

  “You want a lesson in magical history?”

  Rook snorted. “Only the parts that aren’t boring.”

  “Well, I don’t know much because there isn’t much written on the subject,” I said finally, still of no use to him. All my knowledge wasn’t anything he had any reason to respect—it bore no weight in these circumstances, and it made me angry at myself. Why hadn’t I studied something more practical? Still, it was all a part of the way Rook managed to prey on a subject’s insecurities. I was very well-read. It was just that I couldn’t possibly be a major in every subject—despite how I had once believed it would be possible if I never slept. “They are protected by th’Esar—no one knows where they are now.”

  “So that asshole earlier was just blowing smoke,” Rook said. “There’s no way to actually talk to one of ’em.”

  “You mean…” I trailed off. The name I had been about to utter was taboo; no one was allowed to speak it in Rook’s presence. I bit my lip to hold my tongue and tried to think of a way to alter my question in time to stave off my punishment.

  “Yeah. I wonder what he’s like, you know? The guy who made her.” Rook brought up the stick he’d been using to stoke the flames and snapped it suddenly in half, his frustration focused and released in a small burst of destruction.

  “Well I’m sure someone has to know where they’ve gone,” I said softly. “They can’t have just disappeared.”

  “I could tell you a little something about that,” a familiar voice said from the shadows. “But of course, it’s all got to do with rumor.”

  Rook was up out of his seat in a flash and passing by me so quickly the fire in front of me flared up and scorched my fingertips. I drew back, and Rook grabbed Fan by the collar for the second time that evening, and I was certain the fool would die. My only concern was that, for a brief moment, I rather believed he deserved it.

  “You been eavesdropping on us?” Rook said.

  Something had kept him from killing Fan straight off, and it wasn’t any keen sense of moral obligation, either. The only reason Fan was still alive was temptation—the glimmer of hope.

  I had no idea how much Fan could possibly have known, or whether or not any of it was true. But for the same reason Rook allowed me to continue traveling with him, Rook hadn’t snapped Fan’s neck. There was something Fan had that Rook wanted. Knowledge.

  “It’s my job to hear things other people don’t,” Fan said. His tone of voice held no indication that he was in terrible danger, which seemed smug to me, and offensive. He had no idea what he was toying with—one couldn’t simply play my brother like a flute.

  “So what’ve you heard?” Rook said. “Spit it out and I don’t pull my knife.”

  “Take a step back from me and I don’t pull mine,” Fan replied.

  “Is any of this really necessary?” I asked, and the tone of my own voice frightened me.

  “Stay outta this,” Rook said. “Just keep the fuck back.”

  “Oh, we’ve already met,” Fan said, presumably of me, as though we were all attending a host’s dinner party instead of threatening one another’s lives. “Perhaps I’d rather speak with Thom, come to think of it.”

  “Don’t even fucking look at him,” Rook snarled, before I could get a word in. “He doesn’t know what he’s asking about; you’d be talking in damned circles until daybreak.”

  “Then, I suppose,” Fan said, still all too calmly for my liking, “we’ll have to find some way of speaking that doesn’t involve such enthusiasm.”

  “Right,” Rook breathed tightly. “Enthusiasm.”

  “Do you think you could see your way toward setting me down?” Fan asked. “It’s only that I have so much trouble thinking when I’m not on my feet.”

  Rook grunted, which wasn’t really a reply, but he dropped Fan like a sack of meal instead of setting him down, so it seemed the enthusiasm hadn’t drained out of him quite yet. Immediately after that, I saw his hand move—to rest over one of his hidden knives. Though he changed their locations quite frequently, I knew the gesture, if not the coordinates.

  “Dinner’s gonna burn without someone watching it,” he said, speaking to me even though he was still glaring at Fan. I bristled—my own stubborn, indignant nature at being told where to go and what to do as if I were a child.

  I’d held a conversation quite well on my own with Fan before Rook had even known he’d existed. If anyone deserved to be shooed away for ease of communication, it was the one who’d started things off by threatening to slit Fan open bow to stern. “I beg your pardon,” I began.

  “Get,” Rook said, without so much as a glance over his shoulder, as though I were an unwanted dog.

  “Lovely seeing you again,” Fan added, waving his fingers at me.

  Before, I’d felt a keen responsibility for my brother’s rudeness toward our fellow travelers. And, by that token, I’d also felt a strange sort of urge to shield them from it, despite how evidently I could not discover the trick of shielding myself. But Fan was obviously not the sort of man who needed any kind of protection in the slightest—and after taking the pot from the fire I carefully made my way back, ducking behind the side of a nearby tent.

  “Nice fellow,” Fan was saying. “How’d he end up traveling with a beast like you, hey?”

  “Change topics again and we might have to just see who’s better with a knife after all,” Rook replied. There was something in his voice I scarcely recognized. “You know what I’m asking about. Do we have to dance around the fucking point first? I don’t even dance with women.”

  “I do so love the dance.” Fan sighed. “But I may have heard somethi
ng—one or two things that might have given me a clue. I am sorry for losing my temper with you just now, but every man’s got a right to defend himself, and I daresay you were trampling all over my rights with those fine boots of yours.”

  “The dragonmakers,” Rook said, all but cutting him off. I could have told Fan, had I been in a more charitable mood toward him, just how well flowery prose worked on my brother’s mood. But as far as I was concerned now, he could very well hang himself with his own rope.

  “A very interesting topic to land on, though I can of course understand why someone like you’d be interested,” Fan said, clearly undaunted. “I meant it when I said I never thought I’d get to meet an airman, you know. That was genuine admiration.”

  He was stalling, I realized, recognizing the symptoms from my rhetoric classes, in which sometimes it was possible to talk oneself out of sticky situations if one simply kept talking long enough. I didn’t think that sort of tactic would work on Rook as well as it did on a professor—Rook had a sixth sense about these things, could smell frightened sweat in the air and gave fear no quarter—and so I was ready to intervene if things got violent again.

  There was a sound of scuffling and I poked my head out just the slightest bit from around the tent. Whatever had happened had ended just as quickly as it began, it seemed, only Rook’s hands were clenched now, and Fan was clutching at his arm.

  “My apologies,” he muttered, for the first time looking less than pleased. “I do allow my excitement to run away with me at times; that near-fatal flaw has been pointed out to me before. I was rude enough to mention the dragonmakers to an airman and offer no further explanation; I can only hope that what little information I do have will suffice. You’re taking this all wrong. I returned with every intention of…helping you.”

  “I’ll hear it,” Rook conceded. His back was to me, so that I could only guess at the expression on his face. “Start spilling.”

  Fan rearranged his collar and cleared his throat.