Daughter of Dragons

by Jack Campbell

"Do you do that? Back on…where you live?"

  "Yeah. I tutor kids in math."

  Kira stared at him. "You have a job? You never mentioned having a job."

  "No," Jason said, as if uncomfortable having to explain. "I volunteer."

  "Volunteer? Do you get paid?"

  "No! They couldn't pay me even if they wanted to. I do the tutoring by links and use a fake persona." He looked toward the other side of the barge. "It was kind of neat to be tutoring face to face."

  "Why do you use a fake persona?" Kira pressed.

  He looked like he wouldn't answer, then shrugged again. "Because I'm not doing it so people will think I'm great. It needs to be done, I can do it, so I do, and I don't want people making a big deal out of it."

  Kira realized that her mouth was hanging open and closed it. "You sound like my mother. And my father. Which I never expected to say to you."

  Another shrug. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

  "In this case it's a good thing. Do your parents know? Maybe if you told them they'd think more of you."

  His laugh was short and sharp. "They'd think less. My mom and my dad both think volunteering is for dummies. Give away your labor? Give away your skills? That's for suckers."

  "Oh." Kira searched for what to say next. "You shouldn't have done that. Calling attention to yourself and everything. I'm glad that you did, but…we have to remember how many lives depend on us not getting caught."

  "I know." He looked around in obvious search of a way to change the topic. "That's weird," Jason said, nodding toward a barge with a large family on it. "Four kids."

  "Why is that weird?" Kira asked, willing to let the matter slide since she was still trying to get used to this new aspect of Jason.

  "I guess maybe it's not here. Where I come from, families usually only have two kids or maybe just one, like your parents did."

  Kira felt tension fill her like old pain. "My parents had two children."

  "Huh? But—" Jason paused. "Was it something bad? The way you said that…"

  "Yes." She took a deep breath to calm herself. "My little brother Danel died soon after being born. Something was wrong with his body that no one could heal."

  "Oh. That— That—"

  She looked over and saw Jason staring fixedly off the side of the barge. "It's all right. It was a long time ago."

  "It doesn't sound like it's all right," Jason mumbled. "Why didn't— No, I shouldn't ask, should I?"

  "Shouldn't ask what?"

  "Did they decide not to try again?"

  Kira closed her eyes, remembering her mother's face every time the topic had come up. "They couldn't. Something happened to Mother. I don't know if it was caused by Danel's birth or if it was something inside her that…that…also hurt Danel. We can't talk about it, so I don't know. She can't have any other children."

  "Oh." Jason sounded dejected. "I'm really sorry. That doesn't happen back home any more. They can save every kid no matter what. They could probably fix what's wrong with your mom's body, too. I know life sucks, but that's…that's just awful."

  She looked over at him again. "Father almost died, too," Kira said, not knowing why she was finally sharing something she had rarely been able to talk about. "He tried to heal Danel with his Mage skills. He kept trying, getting weaker and weaker, and Mother was the only one who could break his focus and save him. She had to rise from the birth bed and shake him out of it. They've never told me that. A couple of other people who were there did."

  "He nearly killed himself trying to save his son?" To her surprise, Jason laughed, the sound full of pain. "Oh, man, my dad would've done a happy dance if I'd died at birth."

  Kira stared at him in shock. "Jason, I know you've said he's awful, but that can't be true."

  "It is." Jason sighed. "There's a guy named Tolstoy who wrote stories, and he said that all happy families are the same, but every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way. Something like that. I guess that's true. Look at you and me."

  "My family isn't unhappy," Kira denied.

  "You don't seem happy whenever you talk about them."

  "I—" Kira frowned down at the river. "Really?"

  "Yeah. Any idea why?"

  "I don't know." She felt her frown deepening as she thought. "They're so happy together. I mean, sometimes they argue. Mother has…well, I inherited her temper. But they love each other so much." Kira paused, trying to find the right words. "Maybe it bothers me that…I know it sounds stupid and selfish, but how could I ever find someone like that, someone I would risk dying for and someone who would risk death to save me?"

  "Why do you think that'd be hard for you?" Jason scoffed. "I'll never find that. But you… You're you."

  "What is that supposed to mean?" Kira demanded, feeling defensive and upset even though she wasn't sure why.

  "It means you'll find that person," Jason said, his voice growing brusque at her reaction.

  "No, I won't."

  "You will," Jason insisted.

  "No!"

  "Yes!"

  "Not in a million years." Kira glanced at him again. "You can keep trying, but I'm going to get the last word on this."

  To her surprise, his grumpiness shifted to a laugh. "How can you do that? I was all ready to sulk again for the rest of the day and you made me laugh."

  "It's a gift, I guess," Kira said, finding herself smiling slightly.

  "You'll find that guy, Kira."

  "No, I won't."

  "Yes, you will."

  "No."

  "Yes."

  "Maybe."

  He laughed again. Even though Jason didn't say anything else, he seemed cheerful.

  But Kira looked at the water of the river going by on its journey to the sea that had always been and always would be, and wondered if Jason was right, if every time she talked about her family she sounded unhappy.

  "We'll be at Dorcastle by evening," the woman said as she walked around the side of the deckhouse. "We owe your friend there for his teaching of our son. It's the first time I've seen him work hard at it." She fumbled out one of the crowns that Kira had paid. "Please. For the lesson."

  Kira glanced at Jason. "He doesn't want to be paid. He does it because he likes to. Keep the money."

  "If you insist," the woman said. "But we'll put you off anywhere you like at Dorcastle, even if we have to go beyond our dock."

  "We'd like off at the first good landing," Kira said, thinking that it would be far too easy for anyone searching for her and Jason to check every barge coming downriver. On foot, they'd be able to take different paths through the city and hide more easily if necessary, plus the barge would be delayed by the time required to get through the locks along the river inside the city.

  She wondered what was happening in Danalee, and whether the search had reached Dorcastle yet. Because Kira knew that getting through Dorcastle without being recognized would be the roughest test they had yet encountered.

  Chapter 8

  The boy waved at Jason as they left. "I hope you get back to Oz soon!"

  "Thanks!" Jason said.

  Near midnight, this part of the city was very quiet. By the time they reached the areas near the harbor, where sailors frequented bars far into the night, it should be close enough to dawn that even the latest drinkers should be trying to sleep off the excesses of previous hours.

  "Where is Oz?" Kira asked as they strode off the unlighted landing and onto a dark street leading down into the city and toward the sea.

  "All I remember is that you can get there from Kansas," Jason said.

  "Is that really your home on Earth?"

  "I wished that more than once, but no." Jason's brow furrowed as he looked around. "This is going to be home, isn't it? I'll have to stay here when the ship leaves. This world, I mean. I guess I hadn't really thought about that."

  "Is staying here so bad?" Kira said.

  "No. It's not bad at all." He stole a quick glance at her, then away.

&nbs
p; Elated to have finally reached Dorcastle, she decided to ignore the glance and whatever it might have meant. "There are a lot of places on Dematr that you haven't seen yet," Kira cautioned. "And you're not going to see much of Dorcastle. I cannot walk around this city in daylight. We need to get through the length of the city before dawn."

  "It doesn't look like the movies they've made back on Earth," Jason commented as they walked through the outlying neighborhoods, heading downward toward the sea. "But then, your mom doesn't look some of the actors who played her. Some of them were good, but you'd probably see a lot of mistakes in what they did."

  "How would I see mistakes?" Kira asked, hearing her voice grow cold.

  "Uh…your mom…" Jason fumbled.

  "My mother has rarely told me anything about the battle here," Kira said, trying to relax. "Aunt Bev says…she can't."

  "Oh, yeah," Jason said. "Post-traumatic stress."

  "What?"

  "PTS. It afflicts a lot of people who've endured serious stress, like fighting a battle like the one here."

  "How can you know that's what she has?" Kira demanded, feeling guilty. Had she been resenting her mother for some sort of trauma her mother was still suffering from?

  "I don't know for certain," Jason admitted. "But it sounds like it. It's another form of injury in combat. It doesn't show, but it's sort of a wound. Not to the body, but to the person inside."

  She didn't answer, gazing ahead to where the bulk of a massive wall rose against the dark of the night. The last wall defending Dorcastle. The sight tore at her, since that wall had long represented everything that she resented about her mother, loved about her mother, and did not understand about her. Had she finally learned at least a little more? And her mother had reached out earlier, telling Kira more about her namesake Sergeant Kira. "Do you want to see it?"

  Jason looked at Kira and around him. "See what?"

  "Mother's statue. It's up on the wall. That one."

  "That's the last wall they were defending? Are you okay with showing me that?"

  "Yes, I am. And don't say okay." Kira walked to the stairs leading upward, trying once again to imagine the soldiers racing up these steps almost twenty years ago. Soldiers already exhausted from a long struggle, fighting without hope to hold the last barrier standing between victory for the Imperials and the Great Guilds.

  Kira and Jason reached the broad walkway at the top of the wall, its dimensions matching the width of the wall itself, the stone parapet facing toward the water marred by numerous chips and other scars from the impact of projectiles.

  Just a few steps down, someone seemed to be standing sentry, only the absolute lack of motion revealing that it was not a real person. "There it is," Kira said, pointing. "They put the statue where Mother was when she rallied the defenders to throw back the last Imperial assault."

  Jason walked toward the statue, but almost tripped over a large, flat metal plate set into the stone. "Why is that there?"

  Kira sighed. "It protects the area where my mother's blood stained the stones after she was shot."

  He stared at her, then at the plate. "Not really."

  "Really. There's a belief in Dorcastle, and I guess in the whole Confederation, that as long as the daughter's blood stays in the stone, this wall can never fall."

  "Wow." Apparently unable to think of any other comment, Jason peered at the life-sized statue set at the battlement so it faced toward the harbor.

  Kira had never forgotten any detail of that statue. Her mother, only a few years older than Kira was now, wearing her Mechanics jacket, her pistol held in one hand that was pointing toward the sea, her other fist defiantly raised to the sky, the statue's cold gaze forever confronting the vanished legions that had been broken before her.

  "Mother doesn't like it," Kira said, looking into the eyes of the statue. "She says it makes it look like she was the only one holding the wall, when really she was only one of many."

  "But it was because of her that they held the wall, right?" Jason asked, looking out across the darkened city.

  "Mother says no, that they would have done it even without her. But everyone else says that without her the wall would have fallen, and Mother's tired army, strung out along the road, would have been hit by the legions as the leading elements reached the city. General Flyn—he commanded my mother's army—told me they might have taken serious losses and have had to fall back to Danalee."

  Kira reached out to the statue, her fingers resting on the cold, hard surface of the sculpted jacket. She had once touched the real jacket worn by her mother that day, years ago when visiting the librarians on Altis to whom it had been given for safekeeping. Because she was Mari's daughter, the librarians had brought it out for her, still caked with dried blood, still bearing the hole where the bullet had punched through. Kira had almost fainted just from staring at it, knowing how close her mother had come to dying from the injury she had suffered on this spot. You never want to talk about it, Mother. Maybe you really can't and I've been blaming you unfairly for a wound that's never healed. But how did you do it? How did you stand up here and face the Imperial legions? How did you survive such an injury even with the help Father gave you? How did you do all of the things the daughter did?

  And people think I could someday step into your shoes?

  I look like you, but how can I ever be anything like you?

  "Does it feel weird to you?" Jason asked, unaware of Kira's thoughts. "Knowing that your mom almost died on this spot? That her blood was right there?"

  "Yeah. At first it was just weird because it was a statue of my mother, and I was six and that felt pretty strange. But then I learned the history and…" Kira shook her head. "It's one more thing I never could have done, never could do."

  "Why do you say that?" Jason looked from Kira to the statue. "She looked a lot like you do now."

  "Yeah. Looks. That's not the same as what's inside."

  He didn't answer for a moment. "Isn't what's inside you the daughter's blood?"

  She flinched as the question poked at too-familiar feelings of inadequacy. "So what?"

  "If it can make this wall so strong—"

  "That's just superstition, Jason! You of all people should know better!" She turned away, telling herself that her anger was fully justified. "We need to get moving."

  He followed, not saying anything. On the way down the stairs, Kira's anger cooled enough for her to feel remorse over her treatment of Jason. "Mother got the Confederation to add something besides her statue. I'll show you when we get down on the street again."

  She hurried them through the large tunnel formed by the passage through the wall to the gate on the other side, which stood open and unguarded in this time of peace. Once outside again, in the cleared area in front of the fortification, Kira turned and gestured toward the wall. "See? All those names, going along the wall and up it? They're the men and women who died defending the city. It took years to chisel them all." Looking at those many names made her own concerns seem very small, but also reinforced her resolve to ensure the drive that Jason protected did not fall back into the hands of Jason's mother and the others in the ship from Urth.

  Jason gently ran his fingertips across some of the lowest names engraved in the stones of the wall. "That's a lot. I've seen memorials like this in other places. There's a big one on Mars to mark the first colony collapse. This kind of thing really brings home the human cost."

  Kira pointed to the right and up. "You can't see it when it's this dark, but one of those names is Sergeant Kira of Dorcastle. It's up there. I'm named for her."

  "So you're kind of a memorial, too?"

  "I guess. For a long time all I knew was that she had died in the siege fighting next to my mother. Mother couldn't talk about it. I just finally learned a little more about Sergeant Kira." Kira paused, thinking. "It's funny, I've spent most of my life knowing I could never measure up to my mother. But I also have Sergeant Kira to measure up to. And I don't mind that. I hop
e I do her name proud." Something occurred to her for the first time. "Who are you named after?"

  She couldn't see Jason's expression clearly in the dark, but his voice grew sharp and heated. "Nobody. The court said my mom got to name me, so she picked the least popular boy's name that year to make my dad angry."

  Kira stared at him in shock. "Are you sure she really did that? That it wasn't some lie she told to hurt you?"

  "I looked it up," Jason said, his words as stiff as his body language. "It was the least popular boy's name the year I was born."

  "Jason, I'm so—"

  "Don't say you're sorry! I don't want anyone feeling sorry for me!"

  She stepped back from him. "Everything good in my life is a dig at your life, isn't it? That's why the first time we met you said you should hate me."

  "Yeah."

  "Why don't you?"

  He didn't answer, and at first she thought he wouldn't. But Jason spoke in a rough voice. "Hating you, hating anybody else, wouldn't make my life any better. My parents think tearing other people down, tearing me down, makes them bigger. But I know it doesn't. It makes them smaller. And I am not going to be like them."

  "You're not like them."

  "What have I ever done to make you think that?" he demanded.

  "A lot of things! All right, you're not exactly perfect. But the guy I saw helping that little boy with his math is a good person. Jason, you can make your name something to be proud of. Or you can change your name. But I think the best revenge on your mother is for people to know that Jason did something important."

  He made a small sound of derision, staring up at the star-filled sky. "Yeah. Sure." His voice carried all the sullenness of the teenager she had first met.

  "We should get going," Kira said, deliberately ignoring Jason's tone of voice because she knew she had inadvertently dug into an old scar. "We need to be on the waterfront at first light so we can get a ride out of Dorcastle without risking being seen by many people. You saw how closely I resemble that statue." She started along the deserted street as it ran through the open area before the wall, heading toward where more buildings began. Jason followed, saying nothing.