Dragonfell

by Sarah Prineas

  At last I reach the part of the fell where the grass and furze give way to weathered stone, and the path leads along a cliff just below the dragon’s lair.

  That’s where they catch me.

  As they close in, I put my back to a wall of rock. The wind swirls around us, and their torches flare.

  Gringolet watches me avidly, pacing closer. “Well, little spark boy,” she says, and her voice is almost a hiss. “Now we have you.”

  Furious, I glare at her. “Why can’t you leave me and my village alone?”

  In the quivering light from the torches, Gringolet’s face looks twisted. The pins in her ears glint. “You have something . . .” Now she’s looking at me over the rims of her spectacles, and even in the flickering torchlight, her eyes are gray and dead. “You have something that Mister Flitch wants. And Mister Flitch always gets what he wants.”

  “I don’t have anything,” I protest.

  Gringolet’s voice turns ash-bitter. “You’re special, boy, haven’t you realized that yet?”

  “Now don’t give us any more trouble,” Stubb orders, stepping closer, his feet sliding over the pebbly rock. His face is streaked with soot; his thick black eyebrows make his eyes look like pits of shadow.

  Frantically I glance to the side, looking for a way to escape.

  Gringolet sees, and shifts to block me. They step closer. Stubb reaches out with his long arms to grab me.

  And that strange feeling flares up in my chest again, that scrape of tinder against flint. The spark kindles, right beside my heart. Heat sizzles just beneath my skin. Shadows and sparks gather in the corners of my eyes. I take a quick glance down at my hand, and it’s my own hand, pale and smudged with soot, but then the fingers start glowing ember-red, so bright that I can see the dark shadow of my bones inside.

  Gringolet pulls a long, sharp pin out of her sleeve and steps closer, and my flames respond, making heat crackle from my skin. She jerks back and barks out a curse. The torch she was holding falls, bouncing once on the stony ground and then going out.

  But there’s plenty of light. It’s coming from me.

  “Don’t take another step!” I shout at them, and I can hear the crackle of flames in my voice.

  Their eyes wide, Stubb and Gringolet back away. “Now listen,” Stubb says, raising his hands as if to calm me.

  “Too late,” I shout, taking a step toward them. It feels as if the ground should be shaking under my feet. Clenching my fists, desperate and fierce, I lunge at them. They fall over each other, trying to get away. In their panic, the other torch falls to the ground, and I stomp on it with my bare feet until it goes out.

  While Stubb and Gringolet’s eyes are dazzled, I crouch, wrapping my arms around myself, willing my fire to go out. And the night goes dark.

  But I can see in the dark. Quietly I slip away, leaving them behind. While they run back down to report to their master and tell my entire village what they saw me do, I climb higher and higher on the Dragonfell until I reach the rocky ledge where the dragon had its lair and its hoard of teacups. In that cold and lonely place, I find a corner out of the wind and hide, and I know they will never find me.

  Chapter 8

  I wake up in the chilly gray morning huddled on the dragon’s lair with my head pillowed on my sack of food. Golden, slit-pupiled eyes are staring down at me.

  With a strangled yelp, I sit up, and Poppy the goat says maaaah and dances back a few steps on her dainty hooves.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, and my voice scares me a little, it’s so hoarse from when I roared at Stubb and Gringolet last night.

  Maaaah, Poppy says, and maaah, and she puts her head down to nibble at a bit of lichen on the rock.

  I rub the sleep from my eyes and, staying low and hidden, turn to look at what I can see from up here. The sky overhead is covered with heavy clouds. The wind blows, icy cold; a few flakes of snow sting my face. Far, far below, the village clings to the side of the hill. Smudges of sooty smoke puff from the blackened remains of Old Shar’s house. Lines of smoke stream from the chimneys of the villagers’ cottages, too. I can see the tiny shape of Tam Baker’s-Son leading his donkey up the road.

  And there’s Da’s cottage just outside the edge of the village. Not burned. Da is safe.

  Getting to my feet, I look down at the ground I’m standing on. It’s weathered gray rock, a little slick, as if the dragon’s belly rested here and rubbed it smooth. Shards of teacups with blue flowers on them are scattered around.

  Right here is where it happened. Here’s where the dragon attacked my da. I was a baby, and he was holding me in his arms. The dragon burned him. But it didn’t burn me.

  Why not?

  Jittery, I pace in a circle while I think it through. Why not, Rafi?

  What does it really mean to be dragon-touched?

  The dragon did something to me. It must have. That’s why I can’t be burned, and the cold doesn’t bother me. It’s why I’m so restless, and why I look so different from everybody else. It’s why I can see in the dark and why I can see things that are far away. It’s where the strange spark that’s inside of me came from.

  And I don’t know for sure if dragons are evil. Old Shar says they aren’t. But the Dragonfell dragon burned my da, so maybe they are. I don’t feel evil. But I think evil people probably don’t. How would I know if I’m evil or not?

  Slowly I turn to look down on my village again. It seems so tiny from way up here, like I could reach out and pick it up and hold it cupped in my hands to protect it. But I can’t go back there to be accused of burning Old Shar’s cottage down, or captured by Gringolet to be given to Mister Flitch. And I can’t stay up here, either.

  Something bulky is in my pocket; I reach in and pull it out. It’s Old Shar’s book that I saved from burning last night. It’s about the size of my hand, and twice as thick, with a cracked brown leather cover. One corner is charred from the fire. Putting it into the bag that Da gave me, I take one last look at my home. As I stand there, my feet tingling with their need to move, the clouds lower, the wind picks up, and the air grows thick with snowflakes. That’s a good thing. Snow means Flitch can’t get his wheeled cart up the steep roads near the Dragonfell. My village will be safe, at least for a little while.

  I take a deep breath. Old Shar told me to find the dragon.

  I know what I have to do. I have to go out into the world and find out the truth about me—about what it means to be dragon-touched. And I have to find the dragon who belongs here, up on the Dragonfell.

  Slinging the sack over my shoulder, I set off, feeling twitchy about what happened last night, but feeling keenly excited, too. In my entire life, I’ve never been farther from the village than the dragon’s lair up on the fell. I may be stupid, but I’m not dumb. I’ve listened to people talk about the rest of the world. I know about islands and oceans and mountains, and other things like that. The world is a big place, and now I get to see some more of it.

  And dragons, too, maybe.

  Walking fast, I go along a high ridge that leads like a sharp backbone from the Dragonfell to another set of hills and valleys. The trail is too rocky and steep for running, and the blizzardy wind is fierce in my face, but I go as fast as I can, followed by my footprints and Poppy’s hoofprints in the deepening snow.

  I walk for a long time with Poppy bobbing along behind me. Maaaah, she says, and then a more insistent maaah, maaah, maaah, and I realize that the morning is well along and she hasn’t been milked yet.

  “Poor little goat,” I tell her, and lead her into a sheltered place between two high rocks. Da put one of our tin cups in the sack; I dig it out, and as tiny snowflakes whirl around me, I milk Poppy and gulp down a cup full of the warm milk, and then another one, and squeeze the rest of her milk onto the ground so her udder won’t dry up. “Come on,” I tell her, shoving the cup back into the sack.

  After trudging through the snow all day, Poppy and I spend the night high on the side of a snowy fell lis
tening to the howl of wolves in the distance. In the morning, I set off again, heading down below the snow line to where there is brown, wiry grass.

  Over the fells and along the river is what Old Shar told me about the town of Barrow, where there might be a dragon.

  I shade my eyes with my hand, and with my sharp vision I can see a pale line that is a road leading along the bottom of the valley below me, and then, in the distance, a winding darker line—a river.

  When I get to the road, I follow it. While walking I see lots of other travelers. Some have black hair straight as a stick, or red hair in spiraling curls, or hair in long braids with beads and bits of glass woven in; some have white or pink or light brown or deep brown skin, or freckles covering their entire faces, and some have intricate designs inked on their hands and twining up their necks.

  But none of them are like me; none have fire-red hair and shadow dark eyes. Or a spark inside that makes them dragon-touched and different.

  Chapter 9

  When night falls I make my camp well off the road. The moon rises full overhead. I pull Old Shar’s book out of the bag to have another look at it.

  The leather cover of the book is smooth, well worn. When I open it, the smell of smoke wafts up, reminding me of Old Shar’s burning house, and the frightened stares of the villagers.

  It’s another strange thing about me that I can see in the dark. I can’t read the words, but if I hold the book at arm’s length, and squint, I can make out a blurred picture. The corner of the first page is charred and eaten away by the fire, but there’s still enough of it left to see a drawing of an animal. It’s a hugely evil and snaky shape, with a heavy head and a muzzle full of sharp teeth, bat-like wings, and a spiked tail, all curled around what looks like it’s supposed to be a hoard of gold. A dragon.

  I know what this is. It’s that Igneous Ratch book that Mister Flitch gave to Old Shar. It tells about how dragons are evil and malicious. Coming from Flitch, I doubt it’s a good book, but it might help with my search for the Dragonfell dragon, and it might have more in it about what it means to be dragon-touched. Problem is, I can’t read it. I need to find somebody who can.

  When Poppy and I get to Barrow it’s a town built of brick, with a main brick-paved street wide enough for heavy wagons pulled by huge horses with hooves as big as dinner plates. The people are big, too, as if they spend all their time carrying boxes of bricks around.

  After looking around for a bit, I find somebody I can talk to, an old, old woman sitting in a rocking chair on the front step of a brick house. She has no teeth, and leathery dark skin, and she’s wrapped in three woolen shawls—not as finely woven as Da’s cloth—and she blinks at me with eyes covered by a film of white. She talks about the weather for a bit and calls me a nice lad, and I sit on the brick step beside her chair and listen, feeling like I’m at a hearth soaking up the warmth of her company. Poppy grazes nearby. After telling me about the history of Barrow, and all of her relations going back three generations, I get my question in and she tells me that there’s no dragon in Barrow, hasn’t been for ten years. “It was a beauty,” she adds. “Just a little bitty one, about the size of a dog, but all over green and gold. It used to fly around and perch on the roofs, and that was good luck.”

  “What happened to it?” I ask her.

  She rocks back and forth a few times; her filmy eyes blink. “I don’t rightly remember what happened. It was about the time the bosses came in with their new machines and got the brickworks started. There was a lot of talk, y’see, but nobody really knew.”

  “Have things gotten worse here since the dragon left?” I ask her.

  She gives a little cackle. “I’m ninety-three years old, boy. Old ones like me always think things were better when we were younger.” She chews the next words over for a bit, then goes on. “Now, if you want to find a dragon you should try Coaldowns. There’s talk of a dragon there, an old one, an’ it’s giving ’em plenty of trouble, what I hear.” It’s four more days to Coaldowns, she tells me.

  Then a younger woman comes out of the house. Eyeing me suspiciously, she helps the old woman to her feet. “Come inside, Mother,” she says, as if talking to a baby. “It’s time for dinner and your bath.” She puts her arm protectively around the old woman and pulls her toward the door.

  “Such a nice boy,” the old woman says.

  Because Da would expect me to be polite, I say, “Thank you,” and then I try smiling at her.

  The younger woman flinches, and her face, which was starting to seem friendly, turns frightened. She pulls her mother’s arm. “Go on, boy. You go on away from here.”

  Stupid, Rafi, I tell myself as Poppy and I make our way down the street. No smiling. Keep your face still and quiet.

  And there we are, me and Poppy, walking right down the main road through Barrow, staring at the sights in a town full of strangers, when I see somebody that I know.

  Big man wearing a checked coat and a round hat. Stubb.

  Luckily he doesn’t see me. Quickly I duck into an alley between two brick houses.

  Maaaah, Poppy complains.

  “Shhh,” I hiss at her.

  Crouching, I edge around the corner, with Poppy breathing on the back of my neck, and I watch Stubb go on down the street. At the end of it he meets up with somebody else I know—Gringolet. She looks ashy gray as usual, and sort of starved and fierce. She’s added more pins to the front of her coat.

  At the sight of them, the spark inside me flickers. I tamp it down. I know what they’re doing here. Mister Flitch has sent them out to hunt for me. It’s pure stupid luck they didn’t see me.

  They say something to each other, and then Gringolet snatches a bag from Stubb and steps up to the wall of a tavern. Then she takes out a hammer and a few tacks and she posts a piece of paper with a picture on it and writing. Stowing the hammer in a bag, they go into the tavern.

  “Wait here,” I tell Poppy.

  Maaah, she says, and follows as I dart out of the alley and over to the tavern wall, where I rip down the paper that Stubb and Gringolet posted, and hurry away while trying to get a look at it. There are words that I can’t read, and right in the middle is a smudgy picture of a boy who must be me, looking all squinty-eyed and evil.

  I can guess what the words on the paper say. It’s what I thought—Flitch is after me. He’s a powerful man, a factory owner. All Gringolet has to do is post papers like this and tell people to watch for a kid with fire-red hair and shadow eyes, and they’ll have me.

  To be safe, I switch to traveling only at night, sleeping under bushes during the daytime. As I walk toward Coaldowns, the land changes and the weather gets colder, and the wind smells like snow; the hills grow lower, and they are studded with black rocks, not the weathered gray I’m used to. There aren’t any sheep on these hillsides, not like at home.

  With every step I get farther away from my village.

  I’ve heard the word homesick before, but I didn’t really understand what it meant. There’s a sad, echoing place growing inside me from missing Da and our cottage and the village. If I was at home, Da would notice how ragged I’m getting and he’d give Tansy Thumb a length of fine-woven woolen cloth to stitch a new shirt for me. He’d remind me to put on my shoes, too, now that it’s winter. I miss my cozy sleep shelf and the whirr and thump-thump of Da’s loom. I even miss the way our chickens look so offended when I reach into their nests to take their eggs.

  Chapter 10

  “Dirty beggars isn’t welcome here,” says an old Coaldowns man with a wrinkled face and brown teeth. He’s a guard, he tells me, and it’s clear Flitch’s hunters haven’t been here yet, because he’s only ordinarily suspicious, not on the lookout for a dragon-touched boy. “Go on back where you come from,” he says, “or you’ll end up a propitiation like the last beggar to come through here.” He moves to stand, blocking a narrow street leading into the town.

  We don’t have any beggars in our village, and I don’t know what a propitiatio
n is. “I’m not begging for anything,” I tell him.

  “You sure do look like a beggar,” he says, and folds his arms across his skinny chest. “’Tis a town rule. No vagrants, tramps, lunatics, scroungers, idiots, tinkers, or dirty beggars allowed, punishable by designation as a propitiation.”

  I point to Poppy. “I have a goat. What kind of beggar has a goat with him?”

  He shrugs. “A beggar with a goat, is what. And you don’t look right. You isn’t coming in.”

  Glaring at him won’t work, and neither will smiling, so I turn and walk back along the road leading out of Coaldowns until I find a stream to wash my face. It’s bitter cold, but the spark of heat in my chest keeps me warm as I wade in and then stick my head underwater. All cleaned up, I put my hand on Poppy’s neck and try another road leading into the town. This time when a different town guard stops me, I keep my head down and lie. “I’m taking this goat to the market,” I say, and she lets me pass.

  Coaldowns is a grim, bleak place. All around its edges are hill-sized piles of black and gray stone shards. Inside the town, everything is built of dark gray slate, from the narrow streets, to the rows of blank-fronted houses, to the steep-slanted roofs. It’s all stained with sooty black, and the air is thick with a strange-tasting smoke. In the distance is the roaring sound of metal gears and clanking. The one or two people we pass have suspicious eyes; as Poppy and I walk through the streets, they watch, silent.

  A shrieking whistle sounds, and the streets grow crowded with people carrying baskets to the marketplace, and workers covered with black coal dust making their way home.

  None of them will talk to me.

  And I’m running out of time. Gringolet and Stubb can’t be too far behind.

  Maaaah, Poppy says, so I find a narrow alley between two tall stone houses, pull the tin cup out of my sack, crouch down, and start milking.

  I look up to see a scrawny boy standing at the mouth of the alley peering in at us. He’s a bit younger than I am, and wears a leather helmet and filthy black clothes. His blue eyes are very pale in his soot-covered face. He looks hungry.