Bad Faith

by Jon Hollins

  The dragon was being irritatingly cryptic. “So you’re going back to Natan,” she guessed.

  Yorrax narrowed her eyes as if confused. “Yes,” she said eventually. “That’s why I’m bringing it up.”

  “You could stay,” Quirk said. The begging felt half-hearted even to her own ears.

  Yorrax’s shake of her head was more definitive.

  “But think of what you could achieve!” And there was, Quirk found, still a scrap of passion left in her. “You could inspire something bigger than yourself. You could help start the fire that burns Barph down, even if you don’t get to see it end.”

  Yorrax was back to confused, it seemed. “But why,” the dragon asked, “achieve so little, when we could achieve so much more with all of Natan at our backs?”

  And now Quirk was mirroring Yorrax’s look of confusion. “What?” she managed.

  “Natan,” said Yorrax again, more insistently. “I do not know why you are being so resistant to the idea. I was willing to come here, to see your fighters. That has not worked. Now we go to Natan. We speak to the other dragons. We see what can be done there.”

  “We … go … to Natan?” Quirk could barely hear herself speak over the roaring of blood in her ears.

  “Did you take a blow to the head at some point today?”

  “An army of dragons,” Quirk breathed. “To burn Barph’s world away.”

  “Yes,” said Yorrax, nodding. “That is seeming worth trying, isn’t it?”

  But Quirk didn’t bother answering, she was already running toward Yorrax, ready to mount her back and take to the skies.

  Flight, Quirk thought, explains so much about dragons. Of course they believed they were superior. Of course they were prideful. Of course they were driven to dominate. They could do this.

  The Avarran countryside skidded beneath her at murderous speed. It was irrefutably too far away. This was definitely not a human domain, and as exhilarating as it was to invade, it was terrifying too.

  The journey from Tarramon back to the estate had been, short, low, and mostly full of the excitement of a sudden lurch into action. But this journey, this new venture … The terror went on and on. Unending hours of it. Numbing her body to adrenaline’s tender ministrations and allowing her mind to wander.

  First it focused on the distant ground, on the space between her and it. It summoned half-remembered equations for velocity and terminal speeds and the force that had to be applied to bones to break them. But then, when even that began to lose its bite, her mind found a new theme: her destination.

  She was rushing toward dragons. An island of dragons. And yes, she had made friends with one now, but … she had been a leading figure in the revolution in Kondorra that had killed seven dragons. She had been part of the party that had thwarted their ambitions in Vinter and paved the path for Barph’s victory over the world. And even if the dragons remained ignorant of those points—she certainly wasn’t going to raise them—they were dragons.

  Yorrax was clearly a young dragon. She was small for her kind. She had not been taken as part of the main invasion force. Why should the other dragons listen to her? Why should they not treat Quirk as a particularly tasty canapé?

  There was no reason.

  No reason except her need. Her ability to get them to see that their paths aligned and their desires were one.

  They flew through the day. Yorrax did not complain, despite the presence of the splint on her wing. They landed as night fell, finding shelter at the edge of a wood. Quirk had no sense of where they were, but Yorrax seemed confident of their path, and the sun had set in the right place, at least. They slept on the ground, woke the next day to a meager breakfast, and took to the air once more. Two more days passed this way, sweeping them across the Avarran landscape.

  And then the ocean. Vast and blue and unyielding. Even more terrifying than the land racing past. She screamed as Yorrax raced over the cliff’s edge of the Verran coast and left the known world behind. She felt unmoored, drifting in a void with only the horizon to define it. They passed out of sight of land. The day stretched on. She felt vaguely nauseous, but couldn’t put it into words. Even the wind roaring in her ears canceled itself out through the constancy of its chaos.

  And then … a dark smudge against the horizon, almost like smoke. But it grew thicker and darker, ridges bulging out of it.

  “Is that …?” she managed to shout against the wind.

  “Natan,” Yorrax bellowed. She turned her head back, didn’t look where she was flying when she spoke to Quirk. It made Quirk’s stomach flip. She cut the conversation short.

  Natan came closer, came clearer. The sight of land settled Quirk’s queasiness. She tried to dredge up what she knew about the island. Not much. She seemed to recall it was mentioned in a lot of sea shanties. She’d looked at transcripts of them while researching the relationship between kraken migration and merpeople breeding seasons. There had been one report … A barren land, if she remembered rightly: a lot of mountains and not much else. Scrub and very steep rock.

  From the saw-toothed silhouette taking shape on the horizon, the tales had been relatively accurate.

  Despite watching the vast island approach for the best part of three hours, Quirk still had the impression that it had leapt up suddenly from nowhere. She had become accustomed to its diminutive presence on the horizon, and then suddenly white sand beaches were tearing toward her. Then she was flying over lush forests, their leaves the verdant green of Fanlornian jade. Then rock was a great impassive wall before her, reaching out to bring their rushing flight to an abrupt halt.

  Yorrax angled upward, ascending at a terrifying rate. Gravity placed both its hands on Quirk’s shoulders, began to pull. She screamed again.

  “Quiet!” Yorrax hissed.

  Yorrax’s ascent became even steeper as she clung close to the abrupt cliff face of rock. Quirk kept her screams to herself, though more from the wind battering her in the face than from any act of will. Then Yorrax’s body flexed convulsively, wings angling, and they were hurtling sideways, parallel to the ground hundreds of yards below, hugging the side of the mountain, racing toward a narrow passageway between the peaks.

  Quirk thought perhaps she was going to vomit. Trees rushed up beneath them, climbing the valley floor like a fist punching toward them. Then they were in the passage itself, rock all around her, the change in air pressure rattling her skull, and then out, into a labyrinthine territory of peaks and cliffs, trees, and scrubland.

  Yorrax flared her wings, extended her talons. Rock loomed. Quirk screamed again, unable to help herself, and then suddenly they were perched on a rocky outcropping, peering at the twisting maze of the island’s interior.

  “Quiet,” Yorrax hissed again. Her neck wove back and forth on its sinuous neck.

  Still gathering her breath and her thoughts, Quirk stared about, trying to take it in. The lush fringe of trees gave way quickly inside the mountains into drab brown scrub. The trees in this sheltered interior were little more than brown stalks.

  But that was it, Quirk realized. Rock and scrub, and the memory of trees. Nothing else. No mountain goats scurried up and down the escarpments. No rabbits flashed across the valley floors. No eagles wheeled above them. No life stirred here. “Why,” she said, managing to keep her voice under control at last, “do I have to be quiet?”

  Yorrax ignored her, head still flicking back and forth. Watching for something. Alert.

  “You’re scared,” Quirk said as realization hit her. “Of the other dragons.”

  “I am not,” Yorrax hissed. “Be quiet.”

  “Be quiet because otherwise I might alert the other dragons to our presence,” Quirk said. It wasn’t a question.

  And gods, it had been so easy to talk herself into this. This glorious suicide.

  “It is a question of approach,” Yorrax said finally, conceding the power of Quirk’s condemning silence. “Of putting ourselves in the best light. And your querulous screaming
does little to help with that.”

  And yes, that made sense. Dragons respected strength, after all, and shrill screaming did not usually represent strength. But it was more than that. Over the past few days, Quirk had grown used to the rhythms of Yorrax’s movements. She felt how rigidly the dragon was holding herself now.

  “We should wait,” Yorrax was saying. “Until dusk. Until they’ve eaten. They will be more … receptive then.”

  Sleepier. Sated. Less aggressive. Still, given the new facts, Quirk saw the sense in the proposal.

  “Okay,” she said. “Where shall we—”

  The roar that interrupted her was so loud her vision shook. Quirk almost lost her perilous grasp on Yorrax’s back. She only stayed in place because Yorrax was already moving, leaping away from the cliff face, the momentum of her body plastering Quirk’s arse in place.

  Quirk looked around wildly, saw it. A massive slate-gray brute of a dragon, descending toward them. It must have been on the peak above them. Gods, it might have been part of the peak above them. It was a craggy, crenellated monster of scale and claw. It was a mountain peak of teeth and flame. And it was falling through the sky toward them, mouth open, teeth exposed, the red of its maw the only hint of fleshy softness in all its massive frame.

  “Runt!” it bellowed as Yorrax performed aerial maneuvers that slammed Quirk’s internal organs about like so many bowling pins on a tavern lawn. “We told you never to return, runt!”

  And oh gods, they were going to have words about that. Except they were probably going to have them while dissolving in this newcomer’s stomach acid.

  And then Quirk discovered that her dismay—which surely had reached its zenith—had peaks yet to climb, as fresh calls rose from deeper within Natan’s rocky borders. And even as she and Yorrax raced away, hugging the ground, twisting through impossibly narrow spaces between cliffs, she looked back over her shoulder and saw more vast shapes battering their way into the heavens on blunt wings. The sky was heavy with them, bursting with beasts.

  “A question of fucking approach?” Quirk managed, as all around them death began to rain.

  15

  The High-Stakes Art of Public Speaking

  The fireball arced over Quirk’s right shoulder, somehow finding the infinitesimal space between her head and Yorrax’s snaking neck, and hurtled past them both to detonate among the scrubland below. Quirk felt her mop of hair shorten by a smoldering half inch.

  Screaming honestly didn’t seem to have much point anymore. There was no way it could extend her life. She could only desperately cling to Yorrax’s barrel-rolling frame, gripping scales with knees and fingers stiffened by horror.

  A vast shape flashed into her vision, a howling blur of claws and maw. Then Yorrax was twisting away, bucking over this half-glimpsed specter of death, so she could not be sure if it had been real, or if her inability to draw a decent breath was finally causing her to hallucinate.

  Fire. She could summon fire. She should be fighting back.

  That would mean letting go.

  She tried to convince herself to pry a hand free. Her hands remained unconvinced.

  A roar so close she could smell the rotten meat breath.

  Her thoughts felt too slow against the racing backdrop of Natan’s bleak landscape.

  Yorrax dived. The ground raced toward them. Quirk braced for the inevitable punch to her internal organs as Yorrax pulled up at the last moment. More fire spattered the air around them, painting the trees they were about to crash into a violent, flickering orange.

  They were so close now, Quirk could see individual leaves blackening.

  Yorrax was going to pull up now. Had to now. Yorrax was …

  Oh fuck, was Yorrax dead? Had she somehow missed her ride’s vitals being left behind somewhere in the sky?

  Had she—

  Trees closed around her.

  Quirk found she could scream again.

  “Fuck you.”

  Quirk stood in a narrow tunnel of rock that hid under a sharp lip of rock. The sharp lip of rock was in turn hidden by trees. Trees that Yorrax had punched a dragon-shaped hole through. Trees that still contained, Quirk was relatively sure, a lot of her residual terror sweat.

  She slipped off the dragon’s back, leaned against her heaving flank.

  “From the bottom of my heart,” she said. “Fuck you.”

  If Lette and Balur had taught her nothing else back when they were both alive and screwing up her life, it was the importance of letting off steam.

  Outside, flashes of yellow, orange, and red painted the entrance of the tunnel, while the sounds like thunder shook the stone beneath their feet.

  “We will be safe here,” Yorrax said. “They have never found this place before.” Quirk thought the dragon was attempting to sound dismissive, but she was panting too hard to pull it off.

  “Before?” Quirk was feeling her fire rekindle. “So you’ve needed to hide from the other dragons before?” She pushed herself off Yorrax’s flank. It was hard to chastise someone while you were also using them for support. She staggered to the tunnel’s far wall on shaking knees while Yorrax set her jaw.

  “I told you,” the dragon said, “that we needed to wait for dusk.”

  “So we would be harder to find?” Quirk managed. “So you’d perform better in that game of hide-and-seek?”

  “They’re hungry now.” Yorrax exposed her teeth. “I’m hungry now.”

  “And what about later?” Quirk snapped. “What about …” She could see Yorrax’s hackles rising. And perhaps she should check her anger just a little bit. “Let’s be honest,” she said, trying to modify her tone, trying to acknowledge to herself that she was shaken and probably not thinking straight. “You do not enjoy high social standing here on this island. Mine is likely to be worse. Your ability to vouch for me is going to be negligible.”

  “No!” Yorrax snapped. “They have to listen. They want to listen. Even if they don’t know it.” She huffed jets of blue fire through her flaring nostrils. “They will listen to me.” None of the performance distracted from the desperation in Yorrax’s voice.

  “What?” Quirk managed. “How delusional are you?” Which was probably the sort of thing she would have known better than to say out loud if she weren’t so shaken. “We have to leave.”

  Yorrax lurched suddenly, thrusting her massive head toward Quirk’s gut, teeth exposed. Quirk could feel the furnace heat coming from those flared nostrils.

  “You,” Yorrax growled, “will listen to me.”

  Quirk had been close to death before. She recognized the hollowness in her gut.

  Dragons were driven to dominate. She should acquiesce, expose her belly, be submissive. Except then Yorrax would wait until nightfall, take her outside, and get her killed by a hundred other dragons.

  Which left the other side of dominance.

  If the circumstance had allowed it, Quirk would have groaned. Because this honestly didn’t do much for her chances of survival. Closing her eyes for only a fraction of a second, she summoned fire. She let it flood out of her and fill her hand. A globe of inferno cupped in her palm. Then she folded her fingers into a fist and brought it crashing down on Yorrax’s nose.

  Yorrax yelped, reared back, smashed her head into the roof of the tunnel.

  “No!” Quirk thundered, while Yorrax was still staring about, wild-eyed. “You will listen to me.”

  For a moment their eyes locked. Yorrax opened her mouth.

  Quirk was ready. Two short sharp blasts of fire aimed at the thin joints where Yorrax’s wings joined with her body. They were as delicate as a creature Yorrax’s size got. And her aim was true. Yorrax yelped again.

  “You will listen to me!” Quirk yelled.

  Yorrax hissed, curled back. And there was rage in her eyes, but there was fear too. For a moment the two emotions raged, tearing at each other the same way Quirk’s heart was tearing at the confines of her chest, plunging and bucking like a colt new to the saddle.<
br />
  And then she saw fear win.

  Part of her wanted to mourn, because this had been a partnership of equals. This had been two allies in the face of an uncaring world. And in this moment of calculating survival, that had irrevocably changed. Another friendship had died.

  But survival depended on this. Her ability to keep fighting against Barph depended on this.

  “We will wait here.” Quirk spoke slowly and loudly, careful to keep her emotions tamped down, shoved deep in her gut. “We will wait until darkness. And then we shall take to the air, and we shall return to the Verran coast. Is that clear?”

  Yorrax let out a noise that was almost a hiss, almost a growl, but not quite either.

  “Is that clear?”

  Yorrax bucked once, a short spasm as if trying to throw off the yoke of Quirk’s will, but then she lowered her head, averted her eyes. “Yes,” she hissed.

  Quirk felt different astride Yorrax’s back. Earlier, during their flight here, she had felt almost a part of Yorrax. She didn’t sit astride Yorrax; instead she had been some symbiotic creature, living in a feedback loop of mutual purpose.

  Now she sat up above Yorrax, imposing her will. It made her feel tired and lonely.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  Yorrax hesitated. She had been sulking all afternoon. But finally she started to move at Quirk’s command, a lumbering run at first, down the length of the tunnel, which then broke into something more graceful and lithe, a rhythmic rising and falling of her long body.

  Then the tunnel released them, and Yorrax’s wings burst apart, and she beat the air, her muscles an earthquake of pulsing skin and scale beneath Quirk, and then they were up, up, up. And just for a moment Quirk felt again the glory of flight, the easy dismissal of an earthbound existence. This was a sort of magic too, she thought. This escape. No matter that they were fleeing. They were fleeing gloriously.

  And then, all of a sudden, they were not.

  Something massive fell from the heavens and slammed into Yorrax, snapping the dragon’s head and neck sideways and sending her plunging down, down, down to earth.