Hath No Fury

  The stone platform was gone, and so were the rockwains. All that remained was smoking rubble and a circle of blackened sand.

  “Behold the power,” the druid said with mock solemnity, “of elven alchemy and dragon farts.”

  It felt good to laugh together. Our shared mirth was brief, though, and Zim gave voice to the fear that gnawed at me.

  “Let’s see what got the rockwains this far south.”

  The color drained from Gelanna’s face. “Salt mines.”

  That seemed likely. Rockwains fed on metal and crystal. The only place that offered both in sufficient quantities would be the salt mine.

  We flew northward in silence. I’d never seen the famed Dinistari mines and had never tasted the piquant blue salt miners harvested from the warrens of tunnels and deep caves. The blue salt commanded fabulous prices and accounted for a significant portion of Dinistari’s wealth, so the mine was as heavily guarded as any castle. I’ve seen rockwains at work, and I didn’t think the herd we’d just destroyed were sufficient to overcome the mine’s defenses.

  The sun was passing its zenith as Ysindre spiraled down to the blackened courtyard.

  We climbed out of the castle and walked down the wing Ysindre extended into a landscape of nightmares. What had been a thriving town was now silent, smoking ruins. A few scorched bodies—far fewer than I would have expected—lay here and there.

  Gelanna walked among the ruins, stooping now and then to peer closely at a still, blackened face. Only a few moments passed before she fell to her knees beside a dead guard. A single, keening cry burst from her.

  Zim and Anook bowed their heads in respect and shared sorrow.

  I reached out into the town, and then the tunnels, searching for another living mind. When Zim sent me an inquiring look, I shook my head.

  Ysindre lumbered over to the ruined barracks and nosed aside a smoking timber. I felt her hunger and her intent.

  Horror filled me, and I wrenched free of our connection. Suddenly Zim’s reference to a “funeral feast” made perfect, terrible sense.

  The captain noted my expression. “Dragons need to eat.”

  “The aerie farms raise livestock.”

  “True, but we range for hundreds of miles. Flight requires food. Where else should they get it? Cattle? Farming folk don’t much like that. Deer? How, exactly, would the dragon hunt them without burning down the forest? Perhaps they should dig for rabbit warrens?”

  I took a long, shuddering breath. “This is common practice?”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t know. Our dragons clean up battlefields and pick up after bandits. We have funereal arrangements with certain towns and villages. But every now and then, a dragon gets hungry and the crew goes rogue. Self-defense, sometimes, or maybe Narkahesh”—she paused long enough to lean to one side and spit—“gives the order for reasons of his own. Either way, we’ll find and kill whoever did this.”

  Today had been a day for revelations, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when a great Presence edged into my farsight’s perimeters.

  “It wasn’t a castledrake that did this,” I said.

  Gelanna looked up sharply, and I saw understanding kindle in her tearless eyes. “You’re sure?”

  I opened my mind to the druid, a sharing like the one I’d forged with Ysindre. Her eyes widened at the sudden connection to my thoughts, and through them, the first faint tendrils of the wildwyrm’s mind.

  She rose to her feet, her face grim. “The first wild dragon is here. Let’s go kill it.”

  WE RACED THE WILD DRAGON to Bluestone Castle, and lost.

  The destruction was terrible, especially for a battle so young. A green castledrake lay sprawled and broken on the castle causeway. Another battle-beast plunged, wreathed in flame, into the burning town. The tallest tower, the lair of Narkahesh, stood in smoking half-ruin.

  The creature circling Bluestone Castle was red as blood, as large as a battleship. When a young castledrake darted in, fires blazing, the dragon simply bit it in half. Flying on unperturbed, it tossed back its head and swallowed the hindquarters.

  All my life, I’d prepared myself to fight dragons. Nothing had prepared me for this.

  “I have no idea how to kill that thing.”

  Anook held up a vial. “With this.”

  Gelanna’s thoughts were still open to me. Two things rose above the tumble of grief and vengeance: a deep sense of resignation, and the word dragonsbane.

  I knew that word, but only from legends of a deadly elven potion, lethal to any dragon that would be persuaded to swallow it.

  Or to eat the flesh of another dragon that had swallowed it.

  “It’s time, sisters,” Zim said. “Let’s go out well.”

  Ysindre climbed toward the clouds, readying herself for the attack that would kill us all, and, if the fates were kind, the red dragon as well.

  Anook drew back her arm to throw the vial to Ysindre. Suddenly, Gelanna seized her arm and ripped the vial from her hand.

  “There’s a surer way,” she said, and tossed back the poison in a single gulp. Tremors seized her immediately.

  “Hold tight!” howled Anook.

  I seized the net as our dragon folded her wings in close to her body and went into a roll.

  Earth and sky changed places. When order was restored, I shared the castle with only two women.

  The red swooped under us, so close that I could smell the brimstone stench of its breath, and snapped Gelanna from the sky.

  Ysindre’s grief and rage burned through me. Or perhaps it was my own. Overwhelmed by the force of emotion, I responded in a manner that, before today, would have been too insane to contemplate.

  I seized a passing tendril of the dragon’s thoughts and pulled myself into its mind. As I had with the salamander, I commanded it to hold.

  There was a moment of surprise, comically human, then the all-consuming blaze of the dragon’s mind filled me until I was certain I would explode.

  The agony of my battle against the salamander’s mind, the fire it breathed when I lost control? That was only a pale, weak flicker. Now I understood real pain.

  Every instinct screamed at me to retreat. Instead, I moved deeper into the maelstrom of fire and fangs, rejoicing as the dragon’s pain flared into a blaze to match my own. The poison was taking hold.

  But not soon enough.

  Surprise had given me a moment’s advantage over the monster, but my hold on it faded swiftly. The massive red chest expanded as it drew breath to fuel a killing blast of fire.

  That, we could not permit. Inner flame would burn off the poison.

  Ysindre darted in, clinging and savaging the red dragon’s throat like a weasel attaching a wolf. Massive claws tore at her again and again, but still she held.

  We rode the dragon down, and through Ysindre’s eyes, I saw the grassy plain beyond the town rise up to receive us. Just before impact, my sister released her hold and spread her shredded wings. I felt the jolt of a collision, and then nothing at all.

  I AWOKE LYING IN A goat cart that was trundling along the plain behind a pair of mules. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, which meant we were headed for Bluestone. Several Torches walked on either side of the cart, like an honor guard. Or perhaps a funeral procession.

  “She’s awake,” someone said.

  Gentle hands raised my head and held a waterskin to my lips. I tasted healing herbs and forced myself to swallow a few sips. When I could no longer bear the pain of not knowing, I pushed the skin away.

  My gaze fell on Mirianda. “My crew? My dragon?”

  “The elf survived.”

  Her tone told the rest of the tale. I nodded and lay back, dimly aware that the cart was turning around and heading eastward, but not caring enough to wonder why.

  We pulled to a stop, and two of the Torches helped me from the cart. A soft cry broke free from me as I beheld the still, broken thing that had been Ysindre. Some hundred paces beyond, the red dragon’s corpse rose
like a small hill. Red and black scales scattered across the plain like fallen petals.

  Mirianda pointed to a small, shining scale. “That’s a good one. Shall I pick it up for you?”

  Her meaning came to me suddenly. They had brought me here to harvest scales for my armor.

  “Would you have me skin my human sisters for boot leather, as well?” I snarled.

  Mirianda jerked back as if she’d been slapped. “What would you have us do instead?”

  “Call your dragons.”

  Her brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Call them?”

  I hissed in exasperation and reached for the mind of the silver castledrake circling overhead. Sylvani swooped down and landed with a few running steps. When I relayed my request, she turned to look expectantly at Mirianda, who in turn looked to me.

  “Let her breathe fire,” I said. “The red dragon will provide food for the castledrake fleet, but Ysindre was our sister. Give her the dignity she deserves.”

  The Torch nodded. Gouts of flame poured from her dragon’s jaws, and we stood in silence as Ysindre burned.

  After a moment, Mirianda reached for the shoulder clasps of her dragonscale tunic and let it fall into a shimmering puddle. She stepped out of it, picked it up, and tossed it into the funeral pyre.

  One after another, the other Torches—my sisters—did the same.

  When nothing remained of our fallen dragons but ash, the Torches gathered around me.

  “What you did to call Mirianda’s castledrake,” one of them ventured. “Can it be learned?”

  “Lord Narkahesh would not approve,” another said.

  “Narkahesh is dead,” Mirianda said harshly. “We need new ways.”

  “And a new commander.”

  Murmurs of agreement rippled through the group, and all eyes looked to me.

  A command of my own, not just of a battle-beast, but an entire aerie!

  For several moments, the desire to seize control raged through me like dragonfire. I fought it back until it was banked coals.

  “Do you know your dragon’s name?”

  Mirianda’s brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Its name?”

  “Her name.” I took Mirianda’s arm and led her over to the Sylvani. “It’s time you were properly introduced. And tomorrow, all of you will be flying with your crews. The dragons are coming. Let’s find out exactly how they’re going to die when they arrive.”

  AN ESSAY BY

  SARAH KUHN

  IT AIN’T BAD TO GET MAD:

  THE ANGRY HEROINES OF SF/F

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE, ONE of my favorite Sesame Street bits involved a cartoon goat who was always getting epically pissed off. The message—set to a catchy song, of course—was that it was okay to get epically pissed off. “It ain’t bad to get mad!” went the chorus. Have your feelings, goat! Emotions are cool, even when they aren’t necessarily positive!

  (I would just like to note here that as an adult, I’ve come to the realization that the goat’s other animal friends are total dicks. They pull his beard, scare him with fireworks, won’t share their ice cream. Um, of course he keeps getting mad.)

  I learned a lot of useful lessons from Sesame Street, but while the cartoon goat was one of my favorite dramatis personae, I never quite internalized what he was trying to teach me. Because as a young girl, everything and everyone else constantly conveyed to me that it most definitely was bad to get mad.

  Adults told me—via reactions, subtext, and/or actual words—that two of the most prized qualities in young girls were 1) being nice and 2) calming down. I can still remember my mother chanting, “I need you to calm down—callllmmmmmm,” and then repeating that single word over and over again like a mantra. I was like that fucking goat, always mad about something. And I knew that was definitely not okay, even if I didn’t always know why.

  I saw how getting mad affected everything: how it caused you to get in trouble, punished, dismissed, talked down to, made fun of, ostracized. How it was even seen as something dangerous, an uncontrollable blaze that needed to be contained, tamped down, extinguished. And because of all this, I was definitely on the path toward stamping out any and all vestiges of rage forever, toward residing permanently in Being Niceville, toward learning the exact opposite of what my wise cartoon goat friend was trying to teach me.

  I am forever thankful that I discovered the Angry Heroines of Sci-Fi/Fantasy at exactly the right time.

  First there was Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) in Star Wars: all bold, commanding swagger, never afraid to raise her voice (because that was another thing young girls weren’t supposed to do, right?) in order to get her point across to walking carpets or scruffy-looking nerf herders. And—very important for my hopelessly romantic, young ’shipper’s soul—the angry blaze didn’t dim when she fell in love. Nope, her anger was an essential piece of what her partner loved about her, a key element that made her the galactic badass she still is today.

  Then there was Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a combat booted powerhouse who stomped around the space station like she owned the place, regularly butting heads with everyone and always ready to go into battle with all possible guns blazing (I read somewhere that Visitor went out and bought a pair of Doc Martens in order to get into Kira’s stompy-footed mindset, and that solidified my adolescent Docs obsession that still lives on today). As with Leia, I loved that Kira very decisively got shit done, and that rather than being positioned as a repellant personality trait, her anger drew others to her—friends and lovers and fellow officers admired the passion and verve housed in that rage and didn’t try to shame her for it (This is probably for the best as I can’t even begin to imagine Kira’s reaction to being told to “be nice.”). Yes, she had some things to work through as far as honing, channeling, and nuancing out that anger, but the complexity of her journey just made me love it even more.

  On the animated side of things, I thrilled in the literally fiery rage of Sailor Mars, aka Rei Hino. I loved Usagi, Sailor Moon, for her klutzy, imperfect, can-do attitude, but I related more to Rei’s determination, impatience, and near constant annoyance with the world around her. And I deeply appreciated the fact that even though she and Usagi bickered non-stop, that Rei yelled at Usagi for crying too much, and Usagi whined about Rei being “mean” to her, there was always a deep undercurrent of sisterly Sailor Senshi love between them, perhaps best expressed when Rei notes—right as the pair are about to be plunged into deadly danger—“We always fought, but it was fun.”

  I’ve been thinking about these Angry Heroines of SF/F a lot lately, as every week on the Internet where we all reside seems to bring another round of “what are you so angry about/why are you always outraged/calm down/be nice.” Sometimes, all it takes to prompt that is existing as a woman—particularly a woman of color—who dares to take up space at all. If all I’d had growing up was that lone pissed-off cartoon goat, I might be tempted to listen to those voices. But as someone who discovered the Angry Heroines of SF/F at various crucial moments in her life, I know that I’ve finally internalized what my little goat friend wanted me to know in the first place: it ain’t bad to get mad. Feeling your anger, showing your anger, taking power in your anger is a thing you can do and still be a heroine. Hell, it’s a crucial part of what makes you a heroine.

  I am thankful to have these characters to look up to, to admire, to embody. I am thankful to have discovered even more examples in both fiction and real life. I am thankful that I have been able to incorporate Angry Heroines into my own work and to show their anger as something to be validated and celebrated.

  You know that meme that went around recently? The one where you had to pick three fictional characters to represent you? As I was assembling mine, I noticed something: two of my three (Mars and my beloved Jessica Huang, played by Constance Wu, from Fresh Off the Boat) had photos where they were legit angry: eyes rageful, mouths open to yell. It made me pause for a moment as my finger hovered over the “upload” button
: how did I feel about that?

  Fucking proud, I realized. And I hit “upload” with the confident swagger that would make my Angry Heroines of SF/F proud, too.

  A DANCE WITH DEATH

  MARC TURNER

  TEREN SAT ON A BENCH, staring out across Speaker’s Park as the shadow of the White Lady’s Temple crept towards him. He scratched the remains of his left ear. The top of it had been bitten away long ago, and the teeth marks of the person responsible were still evident in his flesh. There was no tension in his bearing that might have alerted Jenna to trouble. As she advanced to stand behind him, he did not look around. Usually turning your back on an assassin was an unhealthy mistake to make, but Teren would know it was the only thing keeping him alive at that moment. For eight months he had worked as Jenna’s agent, and not once had he seen her face.

  “You took your time,” he said brightly. “I was beginning to think you hadn’t got my message.”

  Jenna pulled a flask of juripa spirits from her pocket and took a swig. “There are lots of people about this evening,” she said. “I had to make sure none of them followed you here.”

  “And did they?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. There was a brunette a few streets back I was certain had her eye on me.”

  Enough with the pleasantries. Another time Jenna might have enquired as to the well-being of Teren’s sister and nephew, but oddly people tended to get nervous when an assassin asked after their family. “You’ve got a job for me?” she said.

  Illustration by NICOLAS R. GIACONDINO

  “Indeed. Senator Erekus Rayne.”

  “My target’s a politician? It’ll make a nice change to be on the good side for once.”

  Teren passed her a scroll over his shoulder, and Jenna tucked it away to read later.

  “Everything you need to know is in there,” Teren said. “Erekus Rayne is quite the rising star. Recently he married into the Storn family, giving him the ear of Tyrin Lindin Tar herself. He has also just been promoted to the Third Tier of the Senate, and is said to own half the property in the Wharf District.”