by E. P. Clark
The look that Joki gave me had all of the father in it, and little of the wistful would-be lover. “You only think that because you’ve never failed at anything, Laela,” he said. “Nothing worth dying for.”
“The training isn’t worth dying for! None of this is!”
“And yet you were willing to come with me, even though you thought the price of failure was death.”
“That was just...”
“Yes?”
“Curiosity,” I said awkwardly. “I don’t really mean to die for it. I’d never do something like that.”
“If you say so,” said Joki, and urged Tähti onwards.
It was another clear, chill fall afternoon, with the wind blowing off the snowy caps of the mountains and down our spines, just cold enough to be pleasantly unpleasant. I strode along ahead of Joki and Tähti, still feeling strangely light but not bad. When we stopped for the night, I wasn’t tired at all.
“Come,” said Joki, when we had set up for the evening. “It’s time for your next dose.”
I came over to him with less reluctance than the night before, although with funny pangs in my stomach, that I had heard described before, normally by young women in love, but never truly felt.
“Can I take more?” I asked, when he took out the vial of red liquid. “Will it work faster if I take more? Will I become stronger?”
“So eager already?”
“I think you’re right. It is making me stronger. And I want to be stronger for...for when we arrive.”
The look he gave me was almost as sad as the one he had given me when he had told me what I really was. “No,” he said. “Or rather, yes. You could take more. But you would not enjoy what it would do to you. Better, safer, to go slowly. And besides, I don’t have much.”
“Will I be given more when...when I arrive?”
“If you pass the tests, yes.”
“How much more?”
He shrugged. “A bit. Not much. There isn’t”—the words were coming out more and more slowly—“there isn’t much left.”
“What do you mean, ‘not much left’?”
“Exactly what I just said. Not much left. So we can’t afford to waste any, or use too much. Now come here and take your dose.”
I obediently took the last steps up to him, and let him tilt the vial back into my mouth, releasing a single precious, delicious drop onto my tongue.
When the first effects had passed and I returned to myself, holding onto a tree in order to keep from collapsing onto the ground, I found Joki’s eyes on me. His pupils were as large as if he had been given belladonna, and the expression on his face was strange.
“It is true,” he said, not taking his eyes off mine. “What they told me. There is nothing like it. Giving a beautiful woman the blood.”
I didn’t like those words at all, and wanted to say something to counter them, but my tongue would not obey me, and neither would the rest of me, so I only laughed feverishly as he made supper for the both of us and then sent me to my bed under the cart.
4
This morning was the same as the last, except that I was greeted with a chill autumn drizzle when I crawled, feeling light and alive, out from under the cart in the early-morning grayness. Joki was once again sprawled half-covered in the cart, an empty bottle of wine next to him, dead to the world despite the rain that was dampening his face, half-threatening to drown him.
He remained asleep when I wiped off his face and covered him from the rain, and as I went to check on Tähti, and when I went off to gather firewood in order to stoke the fire for breakfast. He remained asleep when the two men from yesterday came upon me suddenly as I was bent over trying to pick up a larger stick without dropping any of the kindling I had already gathered. He remained asleep when they crept up on me from behind and knocked me to the ground, throwing themselves on top of me before I could grasp what was happening. He didn’t wake as Heikki held a drug-soaked rag over my nose and mouth while the other man sat on my legs and pinned down my hands. When he awoke I don’t know, but it was after sight and sound had faded away, and the two men had dragged me off into the woods.
5
The smell of wet wood and dirty cloth filled my nose. There was a strange moaning sound in my ears. I tried to open my eyes and turn my head to find the source of the moaning. My eyes wouldn’t open. Something was in my mouth, which was what was making the moaning sound so strange. The moaning was coming from me. I tried to clench my teeth in order to make it stop. My teeth wouldn’t clench because there was a dirty cloth between them, but the moaning went silent.
I tried once again to open my eyes. They still saw nothing but blackness, but now I could see that was because there was a cloth tied over them. My head ached fiercely, and I could taste vomit rising up the back of my throat. I swallowed it back down. If I threw up now, it would get caught in the gag and I could choke and die. I didn’t want to die. For the first time in my life I was acutely aware of just how fragile and helpless I was. A rock could fall on me, or the cart could overturn and land on top of me, or someone could come up and attack me, and there would be nothing I could do. My body would be smashed to pieces, and I would be able to do nothing but lie there and watch it happen. Only I wouldn’t just be watching it. I would be feeling it too, because it would be happening to me and no one else.
A scream tried to claw its way out of my throat just like the vomit had a moment earlier. I swallowed it down too. Then I swallowed down the next one. I wanted to scream and scream and scream in rage, despair, terror, and the hopeless hope that someone would come and save me, someone would come and rescue me from this terrible thing that had happened to me. Just like an animal trussed for slaughter. But no one ever came and saved them. Including me. So it was wrong of me to hope that someone else would come and save me. If anyone was going to save me, it would have to be myself. How many lambs had told themselves exactly that, a moment before the knife met their throat?
I concentrated on lying as still and as calmly as I could, gleaning what I could of my situation from my nose and ears. I was lying on the bed of a cart—judging by the smell, an old wooden cart. And judging by the creaking I heard and the jolting I felt, a rickety, poorly maintained cart. I could hear the “one-two, one-two” rhythm of shod hooves trotting on a stony road.
“How much longer to the turn-off?” said a voice I recognized as Heikki’s.
“Should be coming up just around the corner,” said the voice of the other man. And indeed, I felt the cart swing around a corner and then swing in the other direction as we turned off the road and started down a rougher, softer road that ran steeply downhill.
I heard one of the men move, and then I was poked roughly in the shoulder.
“Hey,” said Heikki. “I know you’re awake. Sit up.”
I debated ignoring him and pretending to still be unconscious, but he grabbed me by the shoulders and hauled me upright. When he tore the cloth from my eyes, they opened of their own accord, and blinked foolishly in the light.
“Don’t try to scream or do anything stupid,” Heikki told me. “Just sit there like a good little dragon, and we won’t hurt you. Well, not anything they wouldn’t do to you anyway.” He grinned a not very nice grin. “You’ll be grateful when it’s over,” he told me. “Now sit there and don’t move.
The not moving proved to be more and more difficult as we jolted along, as along with the nausea I felt an increasingly pressing need to empty my bladder. I considered telling Heikki and asking him to stop. It might make him think of me more kindly, and thus treat me more kindly, and not do whatever terrible thing he was planning to do to me. Or it might make him despise me even more. No, I should ask. Getting him to like me was the best thing I could do. Because although I knew many things, one thing I had never learned how to do was fight off determined attacks by ruthless and desperate people. I knew how to heal others after such attacks. But when they had come for me, I had been unable to do anything, not even scream for hel
p. I told myself that they had taken me so easily because they had crept up on me without warning. Which they had done with no trouble at all. So I had to get them to like me and pity me as my only hope. But despite all my clever thoughts, my body remained proudly immobile, refusing to bow down and humble myself by confiding in Heikki and asking for his help.
The road got narrower and narrower, and the sky above darker and darker. My healer’s knowledge reminded me of all the bad things that could happen from failing to void a full bladder. And the pain was remarkable. I had never deliberately deprived myself like this before, and it was shocking how unpleasant it was, how much just sitting still was like torture. A torture I could, perhaps, stop simply by catching Heikki’s attention and asking him nicely for help. But I still couldn’t make myself do it.
We wound down out of the trees and into a little valley in the foothills, with a small stone keep at the head of it, its back to the mountain and its front commanding a view of the little valley and its entrance from the plains.
“Lord Hei’s keep,” Heikki told me. “He’ll be glad to get you. He’s been looking for something like you for a long time. And he’ll be even gladder that you’re black-haired like him. Be good to him, don’t argue, and he might even take you as his wife.”
We were met by guards as we approached the keep. All of them were dark-haired and slanting-eyed like me, and unlike Heikki and the other man—or Joki, for that matter—but shorter. And when Lord Hei came out, his hair was as black and straight as mine, and when he smiled at the sight of me, his eyes disappeared into his cheekbones just as my father’s did. If he had been taller, and had the gentle air of a small-town scholar instead of the feral eyes of a small-time lord, he would have looked just like any of the men in my family.
“What’s this?” he asked. “What have you brought me, Heikki? Is she what I think she is?”
“That she is.” Heikki half-pulled, half-helped me out of the cart, and held me up when my numb legs gave way underneath me. “The first female dragon found on the plains in a generation. Joki was bringing her back, but we captured her while he was sleeping.”
“How do I know she is what you say she is? Show me.”
Heikki and Lord Hei haggled briefly over when and how they would demonstrate my dragon-ness. In the end, Heikki went back to the cart and retrieved an even smaller vial than Joki’s.
“I’m going to give this to you,” he told me. “It won’t hurt you; you know that. No funny business.”
I had just enough time to think that I should seize the moment and bite him when he took off my gag, or use the strength that the blood gave me to fight my way free, before he forced the neck of the tiny vial between my lips and tipped it back, pouring not just a drop but a whole swallow, the entire contents of the vial, into my mouth. And then I could do nothing but scream and convulse like a woman struck by lightning, and then collapse into their waiting arms and lie there limply as they dragged me down into the bottom of the keep and threw me into an empty cell.
6
The cell was just long enough for me to lie full-length on the floor, providing I held my legs off to the side to avoid knocking over the slop-bucket in the corner. At least I had that, and wasn’t expected to lie in my own filth. I made use of it, twitching and stumbling and half-convinced by the way it kept pressing down on my head that I was wearing the ceiling as a hat, and then curled up in the corner and waited for whatever was going to happen to me.
7
Time was moving strangely, so I didn’t know whether the wait had been long or short when Lord Hei appeared, flanked by two men who looked enough like him to be his cousins. Or mine. There were not many of us black-haired people on this side of the mountains. Perhaps we were kin, although no one had ever said anything to me about noble blood. But it seemed there was a lot about my blood I didn’t know.
The sound of the cell door rattling open grated on my skin and seemed to crawl under my scalp and lodge somewhere in my spine. When I tried to stand, my legs gave way underneath me, and I had to hold onto the wall to keep myself upright. Even so I was still taller than everyone else. Maybe that was why they stood out in the corridor instead of coming inside. Some part of me that seemed very far way imagined rushing them and overpowering them and escaping. But that only made me shiver from fever till my teeth rattled in my head.
“Is she supposed to be like that?” Lord Hei asked.
The man to his right shrugged. “We gave her a lot,” he said. “The effect can be strong, especially at first, and especially if you don’t bleed them properly. You have to let out the weak blood to make way for the strong.”
“Should we wait till she recovers?” asked Lord Hei.
“Best to bleed her now,” said the man on his right. “She’s strong; like as not she’ll survive. But if we don’t make the change now, it might not get made.”
Lord Hei nodded a decisive nod. “Do it,” he said. “But don’t harm her.”
“There’s no way to do it without hurting her.”
“Laela.” Lord Hei came up to the open doorway. “We are going to help you. It will hurt a bit at first, but don’t struggle, and it will be over quickly and you’ll be better than ever. Stronger than ever. More beautiful and perfect than you could possibly imagine.”
I wanted to say that I didn’t feel beautiful and perfect, but my teeth were chattering too much for me to get a single word out. Then all three men came crowding into my cell, and I discovered that even with a warning, I couldn’t fight at all.
8
Afterwards Lord Hei seemed shaken. Not as shaken as I was, unfortunately.
“Are you sure you didn’t hurt her?” he asked.
“If she’s really a dragon, she’ll survive,” the man who had slit my wrists and bled out a carefully measured cup of blood told him.
“If she doesn’t survive, she wasn’t a dragon,” said the man who had forced more of the red liquid down my mouth.
“Should we keep watch over her?” asked Lord Hei.
The two men shrugged together. “Not much anyone can do for her, one way or the other,” they told him. “And she might cry and scream a lot. No point in listening to that.”
They left, Lord Hei giving me backward glances as he walked away, but walking away nonetheless. I thought about killing them. I thought about capturing them and pinning them down and slitting their wrists and stealing their blood as they had stolen mine, and forcing them to swallow strange liquids. I thought of all the poisons I knew, all the places in the human body I knew where a single cut or blow or twist would be fatal. But none of that had done me any good. They had still come in and done what they had wanted to me, and all my rage had meant nothing and would probably mean nothing when they came in and did it all again, as they had promised they would.
“Don’t struggle,” Lord Hei had told me, stroking my hair as tenderly as a man like him knew how, as the others held me down and hurt me at his orders. “Don’t struggle, and it will be over soon and you will be glad of it. You’re going to be a dragon, Laela, a dragon! My very own dragon. With beautiful black hair, like a curtain of midnight.”
The tenderness in his words and his hand on my hair was the worst part, worse than the pain and the fear and the dreadful feeling of helplessness, because I knew then, knew down to my very marrow in a way I had never known before, why women stayed with bad men who did bad things to them, and I knew I could be one of those women, and very likely would be if I didn’t find a way to fight it, to escape, and soon. Because I would forgive any cruelty from someone who needed to me. The need in his voice and his touch was a stronger draw than any drink, any tincture of poppy, and I knew then I could succumb to it just as so many women had done before me. Everything could turn out exactly as he hoped, because he hoped it and I could not bear to dash his hopes the way he would dash mine.
But then they were gone, taking with them whatever shred of tenderness he had shown to me, and the desire to kill them overcame every ot
her desire. I shivered and shook, and thought the walls were closing in on me and crushing me, and that I was floating in the air and chained to the floor at the same time, and that evil beings were in the cell with me and trying to smother me as they pushed me backwards into an unfathomably deep drop into Hell, and through all of it I plotted how next time I was going to fight back, next time I would break free of my captors and escape and run, run, run all the way back home and never leave ever again.
But when they came the next time, none of that happened. I wasn’t even able to try to fight back. One twist in their grasp made the floor lurch under my feet like a canoe on a stormy lake, and I ended up sagging limply in their grip, unable to offer up even a token resistance as they drained more of my own blood out of my arms and forced more of the foreign blood down my throat. Lord Hei stroked my hair and asked, his voice full of worry, if I was supposed to be so shivery and sweaty and pale.
“It means the change is taking place,” the dirtier of the two men said, and then, wrapping his hands in his sleeves, pried open my lips and poured more of the blood into my mouth.
“You hear that, Laela?” said Lord Hei, stroking my forehead. “The change is taking place. Soon this will all be over, and you will be a dragon. The most beautiful dragon that ever was! Think of all the things you will be able to do when that happens!”
I did. I thought of shredding them all with my claws, and melting the flesh from their bones with my fiery breath, and bursting free from this prison and flying up, up, and away to some remote peak where no human would ever touch me again, or even sully my gaze with their presence. I thought those thoughts over and over as I lay on the cold stone floor, unable even to push myself up to standing, and as they came in and hurt me again, and again, and again.
