His voice was mellow and musical and she was quite lulled, except that parts of his speech gave her twinges. But then, she knew from her schoolmates’ extracurricular social activities that men were usually untruthful to some degree. And knowing which parts of his speech were lies was not the same as knowing why he said them.
“I can always use more friends,” she said finally, though she was reasonably certain he was unlikely to be among them.
“What are you looking for? Perhaps I can help you find it.”
“I’m not looking for any particular thing, except some garments I can have altered to fit me. I think I’ve just found some in this chest. Someone was rummaging about in my room earlier. If you think they’ve quite finished now, perhaps I could get a bit of rest before breakfast?”
He preceded her down the stairs and gave her his hand to help her down. Totally unnecessary, but it felt rather nice.
He insisted on walking her to her door, as if brigands wandered the halls of her father’s house. Verity didn’t dissuade him. If Sophronia was still snooping, perhaps the two of them could distract each other while she got some rest and decided on her next course of action. Besides, part of her that had little to do with curses or courses of action rather liked it.
Chapter 10
Hopping a Train
The first two times the train stopped after diverting to a siding, Toby and Taz fled the chancy concealment of the boxcar to hide in brush along the embankments. They watched while the cars were uncoupled and sidelined for the local feeder engine to haul them away to load with cargo for the southbound train to return to Queenston.
As soon as the train’s crew resumed their posts, the two stowaways returned to their box car just before the whistle blew to announce the train’s departure.
On the third such stop, in late afternoon from the low position of the sun, once the flat car was left on the branch track, Toby told Taz. “Let’s chance our luck with the mines, shall we?”
Taz gave a rumbling whine. She was starving. For all he knew she might have had nothing to eat since he was captured. The kibble was very efficient feed and it didn’t take much of it to fuel a dragon for a day, or even two, but she had been without for much longer than that.
He ran his hand down the ridges on her spine. “Don’t worry, girl. I have a plan,” he told her.
She fluttered back onto the car, now seeming too weak to actually fly. What she had done earlier had been prompted by fear. Now she was out of steam so had to rely on the engine’s. He hoped the dragon powering the feeder engine didn’t detect her by some communication known only to dragons and draw attention to their presence before they reached the mine.
The engine chuffed and huffed across the tundra for some miles before climbing into reddish foothills topped with snow. The dragonish rotten egg scent permeated the air. The air was much warmer than it had been on the train. When the engine sighed to a halt, Toby nudged Taz, who’d had her head tucked under one wing, napping like a bird, and she blinked her eyes, stretched, and hopped down from the car. The two of them walked into the camp as if they had just been out for a stroll in the neighborhood and thought they’d stop by.
The steam produced when boilers were fired by dragon flame pervaded air so gritty with the grime of the mines that everything was colored a nasty brown. Mud from melting snow, gravel, and cast-off rock littered the ground, so he had to watch his footing even on the more or less level path.
The gold mines of Frostingdung, which didn’t use dragons, were said to pump black smoke into the air day and night. The cities of that land cringed beneath a pall of smoke from the fuel they burned. Dragons, all the wranglers agreed, made a cleaner fire. Even though it stank a bit, you got used to that and it didn’t hurt to breathe it the way the other smoke did.
He asked the first man he saw where to find the boss and was pointed to a small shack on the periphery of the encampment.
He would have knocked on the door, but it was already open. A red-faced man sat at a desk, sorting through papers.
Toby cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt you, but my dragon and I are looking for work and heard the mines could always use a likely team such as ourselves.”
The man gave him an exasperated look from beneath brows that looked like the tails of a couple of angry cats.
“I don’t know who told you that, but we have highly skilled workmen here and highly skilled dragons as well…”
“We can learn. We’ll work for food and what shelter you can offer,” he said.
“Where’d you get your dragon anyway, boy? I hadn’t heard kids was allowed to keep them as pets these days.”
“I found her broken egg in a midden pile when I was a child, sir,” he said, thinking fast, and sticking to as much of the truth as was unlikely to prove incriminating. “It had been cracked and they probably thought she wouldn’t hatch, but I sealed the crack with candle wax and kept it warm till she broke the shell. She’s been with me ever since. But as you might guess, it takes a great deal to feed her so we’d like to work for her food.”
The boss’s eyes beneath his cattail brows seemed to take on an acquisitive gleam. “I reckon we might have some odd jobs for her,” he said. “As for you…”
“She’ll only heed me, sir. She’s known no other.”
Boss’s mouth twisted in a wry expression. “I thought that might be the case. Very well, we’ll give you a try. Report to the smelter beast’s station after dinner and see what work his wrangler might have for your animal, fashioning ingots or sommat.”
“Sir?” Toby asked, and if he’d had a cap in his hand he’d have twisted it.
He was talking to the eyebrows. The boss had lowered his head to his papers again. “What?” he asked sharply.
“About supper, sir. I know I said we’d work for it, but we’ve been traveling awhile without food, so her flame isn’t up to par with no food and I—”
The boss looked like he was going to refuse and then took a long look at Taz, her head poking hopefully through the doorway, and he tapped his lip with his quill. “Sure, that’ll be fine just this once. Can’t well work empty.”
“Thank you, sir,” Toby replied and joined Taz in the yard. He felt the boss’s eyes on his back and turned to wave, lamely, in additional thanks, but the boss was pointing them out to another man, who eyed them with curiosity.
Could word of the accident and their escape have reached this far into the Argonian interior? Toby hadn’t thought so. That was why he had waited until the third uncoupling for them to leave the railway, but it might not have been far enough.
Before finding his own meal, he sought out the dragon’s feeding station and told the man shoveling the kibble into a trough that the boss had said Taz could eat with the others.
The dragons were fed their kibble from a common trough, which was convenient for the men, but not for Taz who was much smaller than the others and couldn’t get her face into the feed. Two big green males squeezed her out of the first position she tried, then a slightly smaller pair of females. A lot of dragonish pushing and shoving resulted in Taz getting very little, if anything. Toby walked around the trough and asked the man at the feed chute to fill the front of his tunic as he held up the hem of it to make a scoop. The man shook his head. “Who are you, anyway? Never seen you or your runt around before.”
“We’re new,” he said.
“Last come, last served,” the man replied, and spat a big nasty gob into Toby’s tunic instead of filling it with kibble.
“We’ll have a lovely time here, I can tell,” he said to Taz when he returned, empty-shirted.
Taz whined again.
He still had his own dinner to get and miners were fed decently. The stew had plenty of meat, potatoes and other vegetables. He picked out the pieces of meat for Taz. It was a very scanty diet for even a small dragon, but it was something.
Toby’s parents were long gone, but he knew from remaining kinfolk
up on the Troutroute River that he was from a long line of dragon people. One of his great grandmothers was the favorite of the famous dragon Sue, who single-taloned protected the winter palace from the onslaught of invaders at the beginning of the Great War. A beautiful dragon she was said to be with brilliant red scales and eyes a sparkling blue. Stories had it that she and her handler, his great grandmother, were perhaps the same creature. His grandmother was called Sue as well and also had flame colored hair and indigo blue eyes. Perhaps that was partially why caring for Taz was not to him simply a job. She was his best friend. This made sense if somewhere in his bloodline, back in the days when there were said to be magical folk, he came from a woman who was sometimes a dragon.
So his people knew, and had always known, he supposed, that you took care of your dragon first, before yourself. This was not mere kindness, it was practical. Most grown dragons weighed several tons and their fires could incinerate a man without leaving so much as a steaming pile. “If your dragon ain’t happy, you ain’t gonna be happy neither, boy, or anything else except toast for much longer,” was one of the earliest pieces of advice he’d been given, but he already knew it instinctively.
He and Taz stayed three days at the mine, growing hungrier and hungrier as they worked hard, Taz melting ore into ingots and Toby unloading the raw stuff from the carts and loading the finished ingots onto the railroad car. He quickly realized that operating balloons and supervising Taz was poor preparation for the backbreaking work. He missed the good and plentiful food he’d enjoyed working for Captain Marsters back in Queenston. Taz grew dispirited too, standing no chance against the larger, heavier dragons at the food trough.
Toby tried to have a word with some of the other dragon wranglers about making room for Taz at the trough, but they shrugged and otherwise ignored him. An unassertive dragon was obviously a wimp. “What do you expect me to do about it?” one of them asked. “Your beast breathes fire like everyone else. If she can’t hold her own, perhaps she ought to have been culled a long time ago. Besides, I don’t tell Grunt what to do so long as he does his job.”
Toby thought Grunt and many of the other mine dragons seemed brutish and dull compared to Taz. She had always been brighter than usual and was beginning to seem like a genius compared to the mine dragons, who flamed on command and other than bullying Taz at the trough, seemed to have no personalities at all.
On the evening of the third day, he was called away from his job by the boss.
“Your beast’s flame isn’t hot enough,” he said, pointing to Taz. She coughed and moaned but was able to spew only sparks that failed to change the metal she was supposed to turn into ingots.
“Sir, she’s hungry. The other dragons won’t let her eat. I feed her some of mine but…”
“You what?” The boss looked at him as if he had said he fed her poison. “Dragons eat kibble, boy, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. If she’s too gutless to get her share, it’s up to you to get it for her.”
“I tried, sir, but the man at the chute…”
“I’ll deal with him,” the boss said, but the only result was from a new man at the chute who fetched Toby a clout on the ear when he approached, and advice to keep his mouth shut or he’d get worse.
“That tears it,” he told Taz.
He’d offered his work and hers in exchange for food. The way he saw it, they’d only received half pay and extra aggravation. His ears ringing and vision blurred, Toby waited until dark and led the coughing, barely-sparking Taz away from the camp, back toward the railroad, where they trudged wearily up the tracks and hid to wait for the next train.
Hiding was what Toby had intended at least. Taz had other ideas.
As they waited, a herd of wild caribou sauntered across the tracks, stopping to graze on either side. At one time, these herds had roamed all over Argonia, but during the Great War they were almost exterminated. Slowly, their numbers were returning. Before Toby realized she was gone, Taz struck, the caribou scattered and she flapped triumphantly over the carcass of a beast three times her size, summoning a last gout of flame to sear it before tearing off chunks that she chewed with great satisfaction. Amazing what proper motivation could do! They feasted off her kill for three days, until the next train came through, whereupon Taz loaded the caribou into a boxcar intended for livestock, judging from the nose-clogging stench of it. Toby wished he had some way to prepare the meat to take with them, but at least Taz’s flame had returned, brighter and hotter than ever, and by the time they reached the Little Darlingham station, he knew it was not his imagination that she was also bigger, not just rounder, than she had been at the mine. He wasn’t sure, but thought she might have a difficult time fitting into her balloon harness now, despite starving at the mine.
Making Verity Vanish
As she slipped from her unsatisfactory search of Verity’s room, Sophronia heard her cousin and stepdaughter on the stairs. She realized Briciu thought he knew how to handle this situation, but she did not care for the turn this was taking. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but after she had taken so many risks and made so many sacrifices, she did not care for the idea that she might be passed over in favor of that lump of a child.
She sent for Balgair that morning. That bothersome brat had to be disposed of. Nothing messy, but another school was no longer an option. Too bad the girl was too wealthy to be suitable for an apprenticeship. A marriage to someone manageable and preferably distant, someone lacking the wit to take control of the family fortune, if such a person existed, would be ideal.
Her note read:
Dear Mr. Balgair,
I grow increasingly concerned regarding the future of my beloved stepdaughter, Verity. Please call on me no later than noon to discuss prospective plans for her further education, employment, or marriage to someone of breeding, wealth, and degree. I find no one in Queenston or indeed within Argonia who is at all suitable and therefore require your help and advice.
Sincerely, Lady Sophronia Brown, née Sophronia Sieke, widow of Gowen Brown.
At ten AM, the butler brought her Mr. Balgair’s card. “Mr. Balgair and—friend, Madame,” the butler said.
“I’ll greet them in the front parlor. And have Nancy bring round the tea cart, if you please.”
The butler bowed and backed out of the room as if unwilling to show his back to her, which was extremely prudent considering Madame’s frequent little moods.
Balgair strode through the door with a wide grin on his narrow face. “Lady Sophronia, I cannot tell you what a pleasure it was to receive your note at such a fortuitous time.” Someone rattled through the door behind him. A small round brown woman with what looked like shells sewn all over her person. “It is a great honor to have the opportunity to serve the needs of two—nay, three—illustrious ladies with one simple deed.”
The only lady’s need Sophronia cared about was her own, but she raised an inquiring eyebrow at him with a slight shifting of her eyes to the person entering after him. She was mildly surprised at Mr. Balgair. He pretended to be such a gentleman and yet, he had preceded his female companion through the room, a gaffe he now corrected by tucking her hand through the crook of his elbow and leading her forward.
“Dame Ephemera Brown-Perchingbird, I believe this is your first meeting with Lady Sophronia Brown, widow of your late nephew Sir Gowen Brown?”
“Ah yes,” Dame Ephemera said with a knowing smile and a nod of her head, sung in a loud clear voice, “‘Come trippin’ down the stairs combin’ back her yellow hair. Bid a last farewell to your lover-O.’ Or something of the sort! I quite forget when I sing the verses out of order. So lovely to meet you, my dear, and excuse my song fragment, but you made me think of the lady in the song. I’m afraid I do this sort of thing.”
“How do you do, Dame Ephemera,” Sophronia said with a very slight curtsy, little more than a nod of her head and a pluck at her black taffeta skirt. “So sorry we must meet under such unfortunate circumstances.”
“I think the lazy creature is still in bed, but I’ll have her fetched if you wish.”
“That would be extremely convenient if she’s to come back with me. I’d like to catch the afternoon train if at all possible. Long trip to Wormroost, you know.”
“So soon?” Sophronia asked, trying not to sound too delighted. “My, Mr. Balgair, you are efficient.”
“Not my doing, dear lady,” the lawyer demurred. “When I wrote to Dame Ephemera about Sir Gowen’s death, she immediately said she wished to come to the funeral and if it was agreeable, to take Miss Verity back with her to serve as her companion.”
“A home with proper family for the girl and someone young with sharp eyes around the place to help me find my spectacles,” Dame Ephemera elaborated.
“That sounds like an ideal situation for her!”
The maid arrived with the tea. “Nancy, please fetch Miss Verity.”
No sooner had Nancy departed than the butler entered the room again. “Lady Sophronia, there is a person at the door for Miss Verity. I strongly suggested the tradesman’s entrance as she seems to come bearing merchandise, but the person said she would wait, that she is pre-paid and requires Miss Verity’s personal approval.”
The Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad Page 9