Dragon Soul

by Danielle Bennett

  “The desert’s best for it,” Badger said grimly. That whole sit-down-and-shut-up mentality soldiers had was doing wonders for him here. Mostly I just appreciated that he wasn’t showing how piss-terrified he was. As much as I didn’t like soldiers, there were still a few tricks I could learn from this one. I patted him on the shoulder and he touched my hand, and somewhere in the sand I heard the wounded Volstovic snorting.

  “Pity he’s not choking,” Malahide said dryly.

  “We’d better stop all the private conferencing,” I told her. “Just tell him we’ve got no idea what it’s going to do but we’re gonna do it anyway.”

  “How comforting to hear it spelled out like that,” Malahide said. “I’m sure he will not be amused.” But she straightened and pulled away and turned to explain—I assumed—whatever we’d just gone over. I saw him pale and wipe the sand and sweat from his brow. He asked his wounded friend something, and his wounded friend just laughed at him.

  Malahide returned to us. “They seem to agree that if anything worse happens now, they should just accept it and succumb to their cruel fates,” she said. “How poetic. I concur.”

  “Great,” I said, nodding like I even almost agreed with that crazy statement. I’d gotten pretty attached to living, after I’d fought for it so hard and all, so I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go along with the idea of succumbing to anything just yet, cruel or not. And probably cruel, given my recent streak.

  I just had to look at this like it was my one big chance, or else I might’ve ended up chickening out completely.

  I stared at the dragon-thing. The dragon-thing—even though it didn’t have eyes—stared back at me. It was the strangest piece of work I’d ever seen—not at all like the twisted wreckage I’d pulled out of the capital in those first hectic days after the end of the war. That stuff had all been junk, but it had also looked real to me, like it fit in with everything else. Scraps of metal torn clean off, pieces of wood and stone scorched by fire, splintered pieces almost polished by the debris. Even the compass had made some kind of sense, because I’d seen compasses before. This piece of work sitting in front of me now shimmered and danced like a heat dream, elusive and made-up and way beyond my station. Even though it’d been dragged across the desert for days, it showed no signs of wear and tear like the rest of us—even Malahide. That said something. Hell, as far as I understood it, this thing had been riding its whole life in the belly of a dragon, and you sure as spit couldn’t tell it’d been through the war. I guess that all went to show how little I knew about magic, though—Volstovic stuff at least.

  If I could’ve, I’d’ve probably touched it, just to say I had and to spook the kids back at home—that is, if I’d ever be able to tell stories about this.

  Maybe it was better to leave it all buried here in the desert.

  I didn’t need to understand it any more, though, which was good, ’cause I still didn’t. But things were pretty simple: I had something it needed. I could even see the small, flat groove where the compass had come loose from the main body of the mechanism; next to it was a little groove in the wood canister, and the glass up against that was cracked. It was obvious to anyone with a brain and two working eyes where the compass went; less obvious what it’d do once it went there. I wondered if the palm of my hand would look the same way as the dragon piece did—different or incomplete somehow—once I’d gotten rid of it.

  You could waste a lot of time with wondering, though. And it wasn’t only the dragon piece that was staring at me just then. As much as it gave me confidence to have people standing at my back, even though most of ’em weren’t exactly people I could call friends, it made me nervous too. Somehow, though we’d all ridden out here racing to be the first to capture the prize, we’d managed to agree long enough for me to get a minute alone with the thing. That made a girl feel important. And as someone who’d spent all her life having it ground into her just how unimportant she was, it was kind of like turning the skies on their head.

  I didn’t want to waste it.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Badger said, like he thought someone ought to remind me, just in case. I patted him on the shoulder with my good hand and he patted me right back, like we were two old buddies from the war. I guessed we kinda were.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said, then—while I wasn’t thinking, like I really believed I could trick myself—I lifted my hand and pressed it up close to the dragon-thing. As close as I’d never been able to get.

  No warning for me, no warning for it. That was my thinking.

  It fought me a little, just at first, like holding up two pieces of metal that didn’t want anything to do with each other, and the thin space of air between me and the mechanism suddenly felt as thick and solid as a wall. I gritted my teeth and dug the balls of my feet into the sand—much good it’d do me if the thing decided it didn’t want to be whole again, but what else could I do? My jaw so tight I could hear the bones grinding, I pushed as hard as I could. Then, without any warning, the polarization changed, and what’d once been fighting me tooth and nail was now switched to tugging hard at the compass and pulling me in close. It hurt something fierce—bad enough to send black and red and white lines crisscrossing all over my vision—and I fell forward with the sudden force of the pull, one hand on the ground and the other sucked up tight against the smooth, hard surface of the dragonmetal.

  Good thing Malahide wasn’t holding it anymore.

  It felt more like glass to me than metal, and its surface was faintly warm—though nothing at all like the sand underneath me, or even my own skin, which felt like it was about to roast and peel off at any minute. It was too smooth for that. Something made a clink like the sound of a heavy glass being put down onto a table, then there was a screech like metal being sheared in half by more metal. My hand pulsed, but with warmth this time instead of pain, and it was a welcome change from the usual. In other words, I wasn’t begging for mercy. Not yet.

  I gripped tightly to my wrist with my other hand, praying that whatever happened next, it wouldn’t rip my arms off. Through the haze over my eyes, I could see—or thought I could see—the liquid inside the dragon parts begin to glow, like the river of starlight that stood between the moon princess and her beloved, separating them forever in the sky. It swirled up from the bottom of the capsule, lapping like ocean waves at the clear walls of its container, and I felt another faint tugging in my hand, from somewhere deeper.

  It still didn’t hurt, but it felt so strange that I gasped, and both Badger and Malahide came forward at once, like choreographed dancers. Out of the corners of my eyes, I saw their shadows move. Cute, I thought.

  “What is it?” Badger asked.

  “Are you in pain?” Malahide elaborated.

  “Mm-mm,” I said, and shook my head. The feeling traveled up my arm, cast like a fisherman’s lure to draw out some deepwater prey. It was invasive, but not the same blinding pain I remembered from being brought to the desert rider’s camp and subsequently to his tent. By contrast, this was nothing—a little tickle instead of a hammer’s blow. It felt different from your regular run-of-the-mill pain, but I couldn’t hope to describe it. It tickled, all the way down to my elbow, where it hummed warm and slow. Still looking, peeking and poking through my very blood.

  Behind Malahide and Badger, I could see the Volstovics arguing, the wounded one trying to get up and the not-wounded one somehow keeping him down. He muttered something sharp as an addition, and the wounded one grunted, settling back into a sitting position with a sour look on his face. I could definitely sympathize with the wounded one, since I’d been on that side of things more often than not these days. Sucked to have your body not working the way you wanted it to, and you lying on your back with no way to make it listen up.

  I feel you, brother, I thought to myself, trying to remember his name, and right then was when the smooth surface against my palm got real hot real fast. I shouted, yanking my hand back on instinct, only to find that I cou
ldn’t. Of course not. Whatever magic I’d set into play wasn’t finished with me yet. Rook, I remembered, though I wasn’t all that sure I was the one doing the remembering. Well, at least I could console myself with the knowledge that I’d done this, and no one else, so whatever happened, I only had myself to blame. The silvery contents swirled more fiercely now, glowing like a second sun and not more distant stars, and I had to look away or risk going blind. Malahide covered her eyes and turned to one side. Badger—apparently not possessed of enough soldiering sense to stay back when danger was at hand—lunged forward and put his hand on my shoulder, squeezing it as he quickly shut his eyes, his face pressed to the inside of his elbow.

  What a freak. Maybe he had a thing for sty pigs, after all. Well, to each his fucking own. I wasn’t in any place to judge right now, myself. Would’ve been too cruel, after all we’d been through.

  The feeling in my arm had climbed as high as my shoulder and was even heading into my chest, all tingling and soft like spiders’ webs running along between my veins, when all of a sudden it stopped moving. It latched into place—exactly like fishhooks—and then it started to reverse. I shivered all over, though my hand was still burning, and Badger’s fingers dug into the muscle in my shoulder, right around the bone. That hurt a little too, but it was a good kind of hurt. It gave me a distraction from the rushing recession in my arm—a feeling like the tide going out all at once, ebbing to reveal the wet and muddy sand beneath.

  The glass was vibrating faintly now, and the worst headache of my life was starting up smack between my eyes. But it was nothing in comparison to how my arm felt: like the skin or muscle or even bone was being peeled away, but I could see that it wasn’t. My pulse hammered loud against my temple and in my chest, reminding me of the repair work being done on buildings in the capital. Every morning it started so early you couldn’t sleep much past sunrise, and every night it ran until late. Yeah, that sounded about right. I was getting some repair work done right now, by invisible fingers, reaching up through and into my own, visible hand.

  Someone else shouted—one of the Volstovics, since it was a word I didn’t understand—and my arm shuddered all over like the rest of it was about to be torn off. The pain in my head doubled, and the dragon-thing let out a high-pitched whine—like even it thought all this was way too much. I heard a groan of machinery, the dull scrape of gears moving one against the other and a pop of suction being released, like the stopper being pulled from a tub of water—a fancy bath, the sort I’d never get.

  For a moment there, I even thought I might’ve passed out. I heard a voice—not the same one as the voice on the wind telling me I was crazy, telling me to give up. It snickered at me and said something in Volstovic I couldn’t understand, but it was faint as a whisper, the wind against my face. And then it was gone completely. My eyes were still glued shut, but the bright heat on my face had faded. I wondered if it was safe yet, or if I was still dreaming, or what.

  At some point when I’d had my eyes closed, I’d moved. Either that or the dragon had gotten closer to me, and the wounded Volstovic—Rook, I remembered—was staring up at me from the sand.

  I knelt, still cradling the soul in my other arm.

  “Hey,” I said, and his eyes went wide like I’d stung him.

  “I thought you only spoke…” his companion began, trailing off.

  “One of your eyes changed color there,” Rook grunted, his face tightening in pain as he lifted his hand to point. “Might wanna get that looked at.”

  “You always were a little slow,” I said, only it wasn’t my voice that was coming out of my mouth. It was something from the soul. “Guess it’d be too much to expect something less than a constant disappointment.”

  Rook shook his head. He even chuckled, but his face went dark and the man sitting beside him put his hand on his chest to keep him from doing that again.

  “Sorry, baby girl,” Rook said. “Guess I’m not exactly at the top of my game.”

  “Didn’t ask for a bunch of excuses,” Havemercy said. “You see me making excuses for why I look like a big pile of shit some kid knocked together back there? Look at that; that’s not even my wing. They don’t even match.”

  “Some people got no eye for design,” Rook agreed, with a crooked smile.

  “Listen,” Havemercy said, and I could see him sit up a little straighter. “I don’t wanna hear anything about you trying this bullshit somewhere down the line, you hear? Or else you’ll get a knife somewhere a lot worse to go with the one you’ve got now.”

  “So,” Rook said, eyes flicking over my face as he tried to process that, “you’re sticking around? Gotta be clear with me, sweetheart; I’m dumb as manure right now.”

  “Sure, ‘right now,’” Havemercy said, and I felt myself smiling. “I’ll be…around. Not like this, of course. More like an observer. This woman’s stubborn as dirt, and I don’t much fancy the idea of taking anyone’s freedom away. Call me sentimental.”

  A look of such resignation passed over Rook’s face that for a minute I almost felt like telling her, Sure, go ahead, set up camp. He’d made me laugh when I was feeling pretty low, so he couldn’t’ve been all that bad. The only problem was, I’d never know if he wanted me for me, or Havemercy. And the chances of the former seemed pretty slim.

  “Better get going, then,” Rook said, not as harshly as he might’ve under the circumstances. “I hate long good-byes and everybody’s staring.”

  “Always a gentleman,” Havemercy sighed. Then—despite me doing everything I could do to stop it—she leaned in close and kissed him on the lips. “Learn some manners, you rude little fucker.”

  “Stick around and teach me,” Rook murmured.

  “What do I look like, a professor?” She chuckled, wiping the sweat from his forehead with my hand.

  Then, just as abruptly as she’d come, she was gone.

  The heat in the glass beneath my hand began to fade immediately, and the pain in my head followed. I squeezed my eyes shut. I heard Malahide come up behind me—the sharp click of her teeth, which she used to make noise instead of pushing her tongue off the roof of her mouth like the rest of us. Her version of tsking. For the first time in a long time, my head felt clean, and clear, not like it was so heavy it was going to drop off my neck, and the muscles in my arm were aching—not out of a deeper, poisonous pain, but because I’d been favoring it for so damn long.

  I didn’t want to open my eyes, but I did it anyway.

  “Shit,” I said, which wouldn’t have been my top choice for some first important words, or whatever, but I couldn’t help it. “What the hell was that?”

  The dragon-thing was sitting in the sand, neat as you please, only where before it’d been filled with soothing, silver-white liquid like a million pearls all melted down, its contents were now angry and red. The mixture swirled darkly against the metal-hammered glass, making the whole contraption look more sinister than beautiful—a giant container of somebody’s watered-down blood. Was she in there?

  “I wouldn’t worry about that just now,” Malahide counseled, leaning forward on her knees to examine the dragon piece curiously. I probably wasn’t interesting anymore, considering I was no longer a part of it.

  “Can you move your hand?” Badger asked, giving voice to the one thing I really didn’t want to find out about. It was cowardly of me, sure, but I really didn’t think I could take the disappointment if it’d worked but hadn’t worked, or if I was fucked for life now because of all this.

  Malahide looked at me expectantly, her hands already on the dragon-thing to pull it away before I could tell her not to, and over her shoulder those two men from Volstov were watching too, their eyes glued to me like they’d just seen one hell of a show. I guess they had.

  “Your eye,” Badger said, looking at me appraisingly.

  “Wish you hadn’t said that,” I muttered. There was a part of me that’d been hoping whatever’d just happened was a dream. “What’s it look like?”
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br />   “Gold,” he said, and he was smiling even though I couldn’t think of any reason he’d have to be doing something like that.

  “Great,” I said. “Just what I need. One brown and one gold.”

  He reached out and put his hand over mine—the one I’d been too scared to move up until now.

  “I think it suits you,” he said, and I didn’t have a smart retort for that one.

  Guess I really was some kind of desert witch after all. It was just too bad I didn’t have a bigger audience to see it anymore.

  Gingerly, I lifted my hand from the cooling surface of the glass. My whole body was tensed, expecting the worst: That pain could return at any minute, or maybe the compass would rip out of my hand when I moved it, or maybe I’d be sucked inside to swirl with the bloody liquid. Badger was holding my hand, though, and I didn’t think he’d let anything like that happen to me. Not now, when we’d taken care of that piece-of-shit magician once and for all.

  “Your arm!” Badger exclaimed, startling me.

  “Shit,” I said again, “you’ll scare me out of my skin like that.” The joke was kind of ironic, all things considered, but it put me in good enough spirits at least to look down at myself.

  So I did, and I wasn’t expecting what I ended up seeing there. All the angry red lines had vanished, and there was no sickly, pale green color to the skin, either. That little sliver of hope was all I needed, and I pulled my hand back with certainty now, flipping it over palm up so I could force myself to look at it before I chickened out.