Shadowed By Wings

by Janine Cross

  “Ignore the fool,” the dragonmaster spat. “Eat, eat. Gain your strength.”

  “Oh, Wai-Cinai, thou One Dragon of All, thou source of purity and strength, mercy show unto our poor, grieving breasts!” the daronpu continued to boom. “Reacheth down from your celestial realm and drive from our midst all that is unholy.”

  Several apprentices shot a brooding look my way. With a clenched jaw, I bent over my food and doggedly ate.

  The next day, after consuming another rich meal from the Komikon’s tin box and quaffing another potion verdant with crushed herbs, I resumed my vebalu training alongside the dragonmaster. The two Cafar guards stood sentinel at the gymnasium’s entrance.

  The dragonmaster and I were alone in the outdoor ring, the ground churned into muddy furrows and ruts by bare feet throughout the Wet. I was dressed still in the viridescent bitoo the viagand eunuch had given me months ago. Using teeth and hands, I ripped the cowl off the garment and shortened its hem to my thighs. I then donned the worn rufous vebalu cape the dragonmaster held out to me. As I closed its rusted clasp above my left shoulder, the heavy chain lay nooselike just below my larynx. The feel of it was dreadfully familiar. I shivered and, for a brief moment, craved venom. I instantly could see my brother, Ingalis, standing before me, haunted eyes wide with terror; understand, I saw him not as a memory, but with dizzying clarity, as if he’d been plucked from Daronpu Gen’s safe haven and plunked before me. At the same time, the strong, mushroomy taste of Gen’s potion blossomed in my mouth.

  Ah. So that would be the way of it. Each time I craved venom, I’d see the image of my wounded and terrified little brother, at the mercy of my mother’s haunt.

  Angry at Daronpu Gen, his charmed herbal, and my own lust for venom and dragons both, I ignored my desire for the dragons’ fire and concentrated as best I could on the dragonmaster before me.

  He handed me a bludgeon.

  “So,” he said, eyes riveted on mine, “you’ll use the thing now, yes?”

  I swallowed, remembered the looks of anger, hostility, and resentment upon the apprentices the day previous. Remembered, too, my vow to never strike one down in Arena, to never sacrifice a life to save my own.

  “No,” I croaked. “I won’t use it. Not as you intend.”

  His eyes bulged. “By all that is sacred, have you no sense?”

  “I made a vow. I intend to keep it.”

  “You’ll not survive their hatred, girl, with your asinine vow! They’ve been poisoned against you; you’ll have no ally but me in Arena!”

  “I won’t sacrifice an apprentice. I won’t commit murder.” But even as I said it, invidious doubt slithered through me. I was not as strong as I had been prior to being kidnapped, understand. Not anywhere near as strong.

  “I order you to use it.”

  “No. Komikon.”

  “I’ll whip the flesh from your back if you don’t.”

  I cleared my throat, felt tears press at my eyes. “That will hardly improve my chances of surviving Arena. Komikon.”

  He stared at me for several moments, fists clenched, bandy legs braced, scarred chest heaving. He snatched his own bludgeon from the ground and thwacked it hard against my rump.

  I fell to my knees with a cry.

  “Get up, rishi whelp,” the dragonmaster growled. “Get up and train.”

  I stared at the thick mud oozing claylike through my fingers, took a quavering breath, and clambered to my feet.

  I trained hard that day, though nowhere near as hard as even the youngest inductee might. I spent too much time doubled over, hands braced against my thighs, wheezing like a hag with pleurisy. I was weak, appallingly so. Even my trademark technique with my cape seemed lost to me, for the speed and dexterity I’d employed prior to my kidnap by Temple were long gone.

  By day’s end, I trembled with exhaustion and dismay.

  “I pray the Skykeeper appears swiftly at Arena,” the dragonmaster said with a mixture of outrage and disgust as we left the gymnasium at dusk. “Or the hope of my people is dashed.”

  “Give me time,” I begged.

  “We don’t have time.”

  “Give me more of Gen’s potions.”

  “A lakeful of the stuff won’t do you any good if you refuse to play by the rules!”

  His words were too like the ones Dono had uttered, shortly after I’d joined the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship: You won’t survive Arena, Zarq. Doesn’t matter how hard you train, doesn’t matter if the dragonmaster keeps Temple away from you. If you can’t play the game by the rules, you won’t make it.

  The dragonmaster turned to the Cafar guards. “Return her to her stall before I throttle her. I’ll fetch your meals.”

  I could barely walk back to my stall, though once I came within view of the apprentices gathered outside their hovel, I bit my inner cheek and steeled myself to straighten my back and pick up my feet. They all turned and watched me, save for Ringus, busy at the cauldron, his back toward me.

  At the threshold of my stall, I came up short. My hammock had been cut down and slashed to pieces.

  I closed my eyes, overwhelmed.

  Then I thought of Prelude, of its rotting wood walls covered with epitaphs. I’d slept upon its filthy, pebbled floor, had survived its vermin-infested isolation. I had no need of a hammock.

  I entered my stall and collapsed upon the old featon chaff upon the flagstone, tamped down by time, dust, and the mud-caked feet that had carried into my stall the knife wielders who’d severed my hammock. Shivering, I waited for the return of the dragonmaster.

  The next day went much as the first.

  As did the day after that, and the day after that. With each passing day, my pitiful craving for venom decreased, though the resentment of the apprentices grew more barbed because of the inordinate amount of time the dragonmaster lavished on me.

  Too often while I trained during the day, my stall was desecrated by dragon manure or renimgar offal, and when the dragonmaster lined all the apprentices outside the stable domain at dusk for a public whipping as punishment, he only increased their determined dislike of me.

  I didn’t know how to stop their spiraling rancor, didn’t know how to end my alienation. A wild, hopeless desperation dogged me always, compounded by the fact that I could not seem to recover my sense of balance in vebalu, had apparently lost all quick reflexes. My energy, regardless of good food, charmed potions, and ample sleep, was always inadequate. The dragonmaster was right. With my stubborn refusal to use my goading tools as weapons against my fellow apprentices, I would never survive Arena unless the Skykeeper appeared the instant I stepped within the stony shadows of that great coliseum.

  Then one morning, the dragonmaster was momentarily diverted to Isolation, to care for a feisty destrier with a stubborn abscess under one wing joint. He briskly sent me on to the vebalu course alone.

  “Practice whipping targets till I join you,” he ordered, stropping a blade in preparation of lancing the ill destrier’s abscess. “Practice till you drop.”

  “Yes, Komikon.”

  Feeling like an old, old axle in a creaking cart, I headed toward the gymnasium, my ever-present guards a penumbra on either side of me.

  I saw Ringus then, just ducking into a stall to groom a destrier.

  Without thinking it through, I immediately detoured from my route to the gymnasium and cornered him.

  Alarmed and trapped, Ringus looked wildly about. He held his grooming pole flat across his chest, as if it were a shield. Sensing his anxiety, the destrier beside him shifted, snorted, eyes dilating. The ebony claws at the end of her wings clicked together like wooden lathes.

  I licked my lips, unsure of what to say, too aware of my desperate need for an ally, of the guards flanking me, of the other apprentices who might see me with Ringus and make the servitor suffer for it.

  A light entered the stable then.

  I cannot explain how or whence it came. Perhaps it was my fierce need, combined with whatever Djim
bi magics I’d imbued from my mother as a child at breast. Perhaps it was the will of the Winged Infinite, touching me with supernatural light. Or perhaps it was merely a post-withdrawal hallucination, for yes, it is true, I’d suffered many such light-drenched hallucinations since my stay in the viagand. But regardless of what is the truth—and I leave it for you to decide, according to your own beliefs and needs—this is what happened, and were Ringus alive today, I have no doubt that he would confirm my story.

  A scintillating blue light filled the stall, bleaching flagstone and bedding chaff, stone wall and ceiling timber, erasing shadows and depth. It was as if we were all length and breadth, but lacked substance, as if we were a faded portrait painted in ghostly hues.

  The destrier beside Ringus stilled. The tip of her forked tongue slid from between her ivy gums, quivering. Slowly, surely, she extended the full length of her tongue toward me. Not a speck of venom was upon it; it was as pink and clean as the petal of a rain-washed incarnadine lily. In the whitewash of that scintillating blue light, solely her tongue had color. Like a lover’s fingers, her forked tongue caressed my cheeks, flickered over my lips, wrapped about my neck, and pulled me close.

  I drifted the few steps to the destrier, didn’t walk, but floated. Her cat-slitted, amber eyes drew closer, closer, became my world. I closed my eyes.

  Scaled lips pressed against mine. I breathed in the essence of dragon. Her mouth opened wide, wider, and serrated teeth and dagger-long fangs grazed my cheek bones, my chin.

  My head was within the maw of a dragon.

  Sunlight burst into the stall; I could see it as a coppery brilliance behind my closed lids. It exploded from every dust mote dancing in the air, as if each mote were a tiny, blazing sun, and the blue luminescence that had moments before blanched walls and floor alike twisted into a spiral and spun, slow and ponderous, about the dragon and me. An arm of the spiral brushed Ringus’s grooming pole; the pole shattered into prisms of light. I was suspended in air, within a dragon, within coruscating radiance.

  Then my feet touched the ground, the dragon withdrew her mouth, and I was staring, giddily, at a gawping servitor.

  “I’m not evil, Ringus,” I croaked. “I’m not your enemy. The grace of the One Dragon touches all who touch me.”

  As if entranced, Ringus nodded.

  On the morning of my twenty-eighth day in the stable domain since my return, I awoke to a clear blue sky blazing with heat. The tart, sappy smell of ferns unfurling in the jungle lay thick upon the air. That distinctive fragrance heralded the arrival of the Season of Fire. Abbasin Shinchiwouk—Arena—was truly almost upon me.

  I shuddered.

  It was then, with a jolt, that I realized that I hadn’t seen the haunt since it had vacated my body upon my return to Clutch Re.

  Swiftly following that awareness was the realization that I hadn’t experienced a single gutembra, had suffered no dream memories of Waivia, even though Ingalis, my brother, had long since been removed from Clutch Re and therefore the haunt’s influence. To whom, then, had the haunt gone for help in search of my sister?

  And what if the haunt didn’t appear in Arena to save me?

  I bolted upright.

  I licked my lips, sticky from Daronpu Gen’s elixir that I’d consumed the night before. The potion coated my palate like kaolin, that fine white powder used so often in the pottery clan in my youth.

  She would appear, certainly. The Skykeeper had rescued me twice when my life had been endangered. It was only good fortune that the haunt hadn’t yet resumed stalking me, yes? The last thing I needed was to be dogged by the haunt’s obsessive will over seeking my dead sister, on top of all I was experiencing. I should thank Re for the respite. Surely.

  But the thanks I tacitly sent to our great Clutch bull were ambivalent. For what if the haunt didn’t appear in Arena … ?

  Pulse skittering, I stiffly rose from my bed of chaff and stretched my cold, aching limbs. Without acknowledging the Cafar guards, I staggered across the courtyard, toward my lopsided latrine. Far above me, a bird skirled.

  The haunt.

  I looked up, quick, and squinted into the sky. The winged figure was too high; I couldn’t ascertain what avian species it belonged to.

  But it had to be the haunt. Had to be.

  Teeth gritted, I continued to my latrine.

  The Cafar guards followed me, clearing out their throats and noses with phlegmy hacks. While I awkwardly ducked into my latrine, my back bending as if made from brittle tin, the guards tended to their own bladders. As a silent trio, we returned to my stall and waited for the dragonmaster to appear.

  Where he slept, I didn’t know, nor where he ate or how he procured our food. But each morn, he appeared at the cusp of dawn, bearing his three little tin boxes punched with impressions of eggs and grain-laden featon stalks, and within those tin boxes there were always thick slabs of steaming paak, cruets filled with sesal paste, chunks of chili-salted gharial meat, and sometimes, little cork-bunged pots of hot jalen. I looked forward to that bayen dish most of all, for I found its rich yolk sauce, laced with mint and muay leaves, most fortifying.

  Always while I and my guards ate such hearty fare in the privacy of my stall, my fellow apprentices slurped their tepid gruel from their cold wooden bowls. I felt their resentment build with each swallow.

  That morning was no different. The dragonmaster appeared with the stamped tin boxes. I drank the charmed, marshy herbal from his gourd, then ate. The guards bolted down their food and swigged watered maska from the bladder the dragonmaster shared with them. As a group, we then started for the vebalu course as the rest of the apprentices labored about the stables.

  Halfway cross the hovel courtyard, I abruptly stopped in my tracks.

  There walked Dono, leading a yearling through the sandstone archway into the courtyard beyond.

  My heart slammed to a halt, then pulsed in a flood-rush of emotion. On either side of me, the Cafar guards halted because I had.

  The dragonmaster had been walking some ways ahead of us; oblivious to my stop, he continued on. He was muttering darkly to himself, scowling and shaking his bald head, hating that each apprentice we passed furtively made a warding sign in our wake. Whether it be inductee filling chinks in stall wall with mortar, servitor grooming scale, or veteran bolting a yearling’s wings to lead the beast out for exercise, every single apprentice flicked both earlobes a clawful of times. From the periphery of our vision, we could see it, but each time the dragonmaster turned to catch an apprentice in the act, the apprentice would scratch nose, head, or neck, feigning irritation from louse or mosquito.

  It wasn’t until the dragonmaster was several stall lengths ahead of me that he noticed I no longer followed. With a dragonish bugle of frustration, he whirled about and waved clenched fists into the air.

  “You can’t be tired already! Walk, sorry rishi whelp, walk!”

  I pointed at the line of veterans just starting to lead their wing-pinioned dragons out for exercise.

  “What’s he doing here?” I asked, my voice high. “What in the name of Re is he doing here?”

  The dragonmaster followed my finger. He hunched his shoulders to his ears, stalked to my side, and opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off.

  “You’ve kept him here all this time! After what he did—”

  “I banished him the moment I found out he informed Temple,” the dragonmaster snarled. “Don’t question my judgment; don’t take me for the fool.”

  I stared into the dragonmaster’s skull face. The mottled sage and brown skin covering his cheeks looked like ill-fitted, poorly cured leather.

  “Then what’s he doing here?” I whispered.

  “The Ranreeb demands it.”

  I gaped.

  “Did you expect much else?” the dragonmaster asked acidly. “Temple wants you dead, girl. Dead. And Dono is their assassin.”

  “How long was he banished for?”

  “Today is his first back.”


  “So he’s not been training, either.”

  The dragonmaster snorted. “Don’t look to equalize his skill with yours.”

  I looked back at Dono. At that precise moment, he turned. The courtyard collapsed; it was as if we stood eye to eye. I caught my breath with the malevolence in his stare.

  “He can’t enter Arena alongside me,” I said.

  “The Ranreeb insists.”

  I tore my eyes from Dono’s long-distance glare and stared instead at the dragonmaster. He looked me full in the eye, and it was harrowing, that look, like gazing into a chasm that held a mirror faintly visible at bottom, a mirror reflecting my own face.

  “Keep away from Dono in Arena. Whatever happens, however the bull attacks, be aware of where that veteran stands.” He spat. “And for the love of your life, use your weapons the way they’re meant to be used. Forget your asinine vow.”

  Fear made it impossible for me to reply.

  Throughout that day, I trained hard, harder than I’d trained yet.

  I sweated and ached, broke a great blister upon my palm from parrying with my poliar so vigorously. Just as dusk began to descend, for the first time since my return, I effectively applied my trademark technique with my cape against the dragonmaster.

  I whipped my cape smoothly over my head, swirled it fast into a rope, and snapped it, chain end out, at the Komikon’s testicles to fend him off. With a startled cry, the dragonmaster leapt back, badly stung. I acknowledged my triumph with a grim nod at the dragonmaster, who stood slightly stooped, cheeks suffusing red from the brutal sting against his manhood. He regained his poise with the swiftness that decades of discipline and training imparted.