Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology

by Claudie Arseneault

  “Are you kidding me?” she whispered back, disentangling herself from his unsteady hold. “This is history being made, Alek. I wouldn't move if my life depended on it!”

  “It probably does,” he hissed back.

  Even as he spoke a man in the pale green and silver uniform of Waterway's police brushed past, his attention focused on the dragon and not any bystanders. But another stopped to glare at the Wandering pair, making clear 'go away' gestures with her baton. None of them, Oriole noted, answered the dragon's questions.

  “You are trespassing here, drake!” The voice came from a balcony, just below eye level for the dragon. It turned at once, lips curled back in a snarl, to see a rabbi leaning out to shout back at it. “By your own laws your lives are forfeit!”

  The woman it sheltered beat one fist against the dragon's shoulder, but it took no notice of the gesture except to move the closest wing forward, shading her entirely.

  “Qieas aeui kuur!” the dragon hissed, the unknown words laced with red rage. “Wru ora aeui su kvaod su ka?”

  “Gas uis uk rara, Dokeom!” It was the woman, giving up her silence for words in a language that, as far as Oriole knew, had never been spoken by humans. The dragon-lady hadn't been afraid before, or at least she hadn't looked it. But now she spoke with terror in her voice and shoved at the creature's leg, as high up as she could reach. And Oriole might not have known what the two were saying, but she could piece together what they meant. How dare you threaten me, puny human! and don't be stupid, let's just leave!

  The guards moved close enough to block her view of the other woman, and Oriole stood on tip-toe to see better. The sheer number of them might have been overkill for one human, but in the face of the long white fangs above them, Oriole couldn't help but feel like they were ants fighting a wolf.

  “No law takes my sister from me,” the dragon snarled. It moved with the speed of a snake, snatching up the woman and launching itself skyward. The wind from its gold-edged wings was enough to drive the guards back, and Oriole covered her head, shielding herself from the dust picked up by the force of the gusts.

  Everyone turned to watch the dragon's flight as it dipped into the canyon-city below, brushing so close to some of the roofs that the tip of its wings struck the domes with not-quite-bell-like chimes that faded the moment they were rung. The sinuous black shape was visible long after it had passed the mouth of the canyon, fleeing across the deepening blue of the sea. Eventually it banked to the north and vanished behind the obscuring towers of the ground-level city.

  After the electrifying presence of the dragon, the square felt empty and silent. Murmured conversations wound through the air like shy cats, and the guard officers huddled near the center. The rabbi, who must have been teaching when the dragon landed, retreated from the balcony only to reappear in the square a moment later. “Yes sir, I know I shouldn't have yelled at it like that.” His voice, not loud but still stronger than anyone else's in the place, sounded clear in Oriole's ears. She turned towards him, planning on getting a better view, but Alek had had enough.

  “Oh no you don't,” he said, reaching out to take her arm again. “We're getting out of here.”

  “Don't be such a mimosa, Alek.” Oriole tried to shrug away again, but he seemed to have recovered from the dragon's presence as quickly as she had. “I'm just going to listen. I won't say a word.”

  “Yeah, and how many times have I heard that before?” He wasn't strong enough to drag her off her feet, but Oriole let him tug them both out of the square and into the street.

  “That was a dragon,” she said, still not quite able to believe it.

  “Let's just get to the hostel, and we can gossip about it all you want. I bet every other Wanderer there will want you to tell the story.”

  “I mean, what are the chances of us being there when it landed?”

  “More'n a million to one. Let's go, Birdy.”

  “All right,” Oriole sighed. The adrenaline from the past few minutes drained away, leaving her joints loose as a puppet's. “Let's go then.”

  * * *

  Most towns had at least one house with a sign posted saying Wanderers were welcome to stay for a night or two. Waterway had an entire tower dedicated to travelers, furnished with everything from bedrooms to one of the city's dining halls. The dining halls were always touch and go, supplied by whatever excess produce people were growing at the moment. Some made it a point of pride to grow more than they needed, so the halls would never go empty. And it wasn't just Wanderers who ate there; anyone from the busiest artist to the most beleaguered city planner was liable to stop by for a snack or two when they were too harried to cook for themselves.

  Oriole would have stopped to admire the huge diameter of the place and the mint-striped onion dome that perched several hundred feet above them, but Alek towed her inside. It was clear her friend had quite enough of the day, and he wasn't giving her any more chances to prolong it. She would ask him about it when they were settled into a room; maybe he would explain why he'd flipped from her co-conspirator to someone who couldn't wait to get away from all the fun.

  The dining hall was on the first floor, and they'd arrived just as the lunch hour was starting. Even with the whole city in an uproar over the dragon sighting, more than a few prosaic folk had deemed food more important than adventure, and the two Wanderers were forced to wade through a fair line of people to get to the key desk. Only a hostel as large as Waterway's would need a desk more than a meter long to show off all their keys. A sign-out book and pen stand had been placed in the middle of the desk, while the keys hung on hooks across the back wall. Several other sheets of paper were scattered across the flat surface, everything from complaints to recommendations and, Oriole noted, several short poems. If the papers were meant to be organized, it'd been a while since anyone had paid attention to the fact.

  She knew Alek should have been itching to comb through the papers for sightseeing tips, but he refused to glance at a single one. Instead he just picked one of the keys labeled 'double' and wrote their names and the room number in the book. “Come on.” He glanced back to make sure she was following before striking off towards the elevators.

  Oriole huffed out a breath caught between annoyance and concern. Still, she didn't want to argue with him in the middle of a busy dining hall. Growing more concerned by the minute, she put up with his ridiculousness for a too-long elevator ride and a confusing circle of hallways before confronting him once their door was closed.

  “What is wrong with you?” she demanded, dropping her bag by the wall.

  “What's wrong with me? Let's start with what's up with you, Oriole!” Alek snapped, shoving his things onto one of the twin-sized beds. He'd obviously expected her question, but he wouldn't turn and face her. Another very un-Alek-like thing. “You want to go explore the city, yeah, but you don't run towards a dragon, for crying out loud!”

  “I thought you'd be excited too,” she said, running a hand through her hair. “How many times did we wish we could just catch a glimpse of a dragon overhead?” Unnerved by his dismissal, she didn't move from the doorway, though usually when they argued it was with a few inches between them—just enough room for shoving, when it came to that.

  “That's different,” he said flatly, and she could hear the rage draining out of his voice. There was something else there instead, something almost like … fear? “That's not breaking the Accord.”

  “Who cares about some dusty old law?” Oriole sighed, her stomach a mess of knots and worry.

  “Just … You scare me sometimes, Birdy.” Alek crossed his arms, still refusing to look at her. “The Accord isn't some dusty old law. You heard what that priest was saying.”

  “They're not going to execute every guard who saw the dragon, Alek.” She gave up her post by the door and walked around to look at his expression. “They're not going to execute someone for being curious.”

  “They're going to kill that lady,” he said. Oriole, still not
sure where this was coming from, leaned against the dresser between the beds instead of getting close to him. There was fear in his face, twisted up in his eyebrows and the tightness of his mouth.

  “If they catch her, yeah,” she admitted, because there wasn't a way around that one. “But she's far away from here by now. The dragon rescued her. Why are you scared for me, Alek? I can take care of myself, you know I can.”

  “You want to tell me you wouldn't have spoken to the dragon if you'd been close enough?” he asked, his voice strained. “You want to say you wouldn't have broken the Accord if you could have?”

  Oriole stayed silent. She still didn't understand, really, how he thought this was any more dangerous than some of the crazy stuff they'd pulled at home. “How can you be all worried and masculine about this when you were fine with us going caving on Midsummer's Eve? We didn't have a clue what we were doing!”

  “What does being masculine have to do—”

  “Ugh!” Oriole threw her hands in the air, stepping away from the wall but unable to start pacing in the tiny room. “Just answer the question, Alek, for Tiw's sake.”

  She pretended not to be glancing back to catch his expression as she made it to the window, pausing to stare over the multi-colored domes and glittering white buildings. Her friend had closed his eyes, and for a moment she thought he was going to refuse to answer.

  “Being reckless is different than throwing your life away.” he said at last, tucking his chin closer to his chest. “Breaking the Accord means dying, Oriole. That's it. And I know you would do it anyway, because laws have always been something vague to you, things that don't matter in real life. This one, though. This one does.”

  “I've known you since we were kids, Alek,” Oriole said softly, turning away from the view. “You can tell me what's wrong.”

  “It's—”

  “It is not nothing,” she snapped. “If you're going to be this upset I deserve to know why.”

  He took a deep breath. “My older brother, Dmitri.” Oriole felt her expression twitch into a frown; as far as she knew Alek had never had siblings. Shared loneliness was one of the reasons the two of them had gotten along so well. She let the silence grow until he spoke again. “He's the one who died.” Alek sighed and sat on the bed, crossing his legs in front of him and staring at his hands. “We were living near the border. Hells, we saw a dragon flight almost every day. I think they patrolled, to make sure we didn't start messing with anything that wasn't ours.”

  “Because that doesn't sound like something the human race would do at all,” Oriole said drily.

  She won a smile out of that, though just a tiny one. “Right. Anyway, my brother was always trying to get out of babysitting me, so he'd go into the forest at the crack of dawn. Most of the time he got back before dinner, but one night he didn't come back at all and my parents panicked. They called most of the town to go looking, stayed out all night, brought way too many flashlights. That sort of thing. Only to have him show up at the house the next morning, wondering why it was empty.”

  “And he was meeting a dragon?”

  “Yeah,” Alek said, dropping his head into his hands. “He kept it a secret for more than a year.”

  He fell silent after that, and Oriole knew from the set of his shoulders he was trying not to cry. She went to sit next to him, leaning against his side and wrapping an arm around his waist. “It wasn't your fault, brother,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. Alek scrubbed at his face with both hands before letting them fall back to his lap.

  “Dom could do no wrong in my eyes. When I followed him into the forest, it was just to be with him. And of course the dragon caught me.” He laughed weakly, shaking his head. “Gods, I was terrified. Something like that sniffing you out and pinning you down? I thought I was dead for sure.”

  “You couldn't have been more than five or six,” Oriole said. “I met you when we were eight.”

  Alek made a broken hum of agreement, rubbing his hands together as if friction would steal away the worst of the memories. “You kept refusing to call me Sasha.” He smiled a very small smile, lopsided and sad. “It felt like being someone completely different, being Alek.”

  Oriole nodded, her cheek against his shoulder, and waited for the rest.

  “I still wasn't allowed to go with him. And I still snuck out to follow whenever I could. My brother's anger was easy to face, because at least it would be his. And being there made it mine, too. But our parents were worried, I suppose. Both of us were around less and less, until one day my father decided to follow the follower.”

  “He turned your brother in?” Oriole stopped herself from pulling away, knowing that would hurt him far more than any of her startled questions.

  “Something like that.” Alek laughed again, and it twisted her heart how heavy and broken the sound was. “He thought if he just kept Dom away from the dragon, neither of them would have to be hurt. And here's where I don't really … understand what happened. Because I was never allowed to be with Dom and Corinth, I don't know what they were to each other. But after two weeks of Dom being kept at home, Corinth came to find him.”

  Oriole closed her eyes, remembering the angry questions from the square, the protective way the dragon had kept its wings out, as if to hide the lady from sight. “And then the guards came.”

  Alek nodded. “Everyone knew, then. And the Accord wasn't a law you could just bend, or ignore. Especially not at the borders. Not long after that, we moved to Chillhorn.” Oriole nodded again, pulling him tighter into their not-quite-hug.

  “I'm sorry for yelling at you,” she said after a while, though she wasn't. And Alek laughed just a little bit lighter than he had before.

  “No you're not. But thanks anyway.” He leaned his head on top of hers, and Oriole smiled, just a little.

  * * *

  Oriole volunteered to go down and get some trays, to save Alek's 'fragile metal state.' She was a little worried when he agreed to the plan, but at least he now trusted her to be out of his sight for five minutes without plunging them into a deadly plot.

  Even though that trust turned out to be horribly misplaced, it was a nice gesture.

  She wouldn't have said much more than 'hi' to the woman in the gold vest if the lady hadn't been limping up the hall, pain clear on her face. Oriole paused to ask if she needed any help, wondering why the heavy skirt and white blouse looked so familiar. The thing about modern fashion was that there wasn't just one thing it could be. Everyone wore something as strange and off-beat as they were, which meant you could see anything from a short skirt and a thin shirt that covered shoulders and chest to a full-length robe and headscarf. It meant that individuals could be identified by what they were wearing as often as their faces, and Oriole definitely didn't know the woman's face.

  But she recognized her outfit.

  “I don't need help,” the woman said, trying to climb past Oriole. Oriole stuck a hand out anyway, and the lady froze.

  “You sure?” Oriole asked, quieter than before. Because the last time she'd seen those colors and that cut of cloth, the person wearing it had been standing next to a dragon.

  The woman in the gold vest just stared at her, and Oriole stared back, trying to convey what she was offering. Because Alek had been right, she couldn't deny that. Maybe it wasn't just the chance to help someone who needed it, or the risk she knew her friend would hate her for taking. Oriole knew she stood at the beginning of a story, something so great she couldn't bear to stand aside and watch it happen. And she also knew, with the certainty of the young, that this was the beginning, and not the end. She would make certain of it.

  She didn't know how much of that certainty was visible, how much (if anything) the lady saw while they stood quiet on the stairs. But it must have been enough, because the dragon-lady nodded, just the tiniest bit, and when Oriole beckoned her back towards the room, she followed.

  “Can you wait here?” Oriole asked, stopping outside their door. Th
e dragon-lady had limped her way here without so much as a grunt of complaint, but she looked around nervously at the empty hallway before nodding. Oriole might have thought she couldn't speak, if she hadn't heard her shouting at the dragon in the square. Fear was coming off her in waves, though, and Oriole couldn't blame her for staying quiet. Some things bypass thought entirely and land on instinct instead.

  Oriole hesitated long enough to take a deep breath and clear her throat before opening the door a little, not quite coming inside. Alek was leaning against the headboard of the bed, his knees curled to his chest and his eyes focused somewhere in the past. But he looked over at her and knew something was wrong the second he saw her. “What did you do?” Alek asked, his shoulders going tense.

  Oriole cleared her throat again. “Alek,” she began, leaning on the doorknob a little too hard. “I want you to not freak out, okay?”

  He just stared back at her, waiting.

  “I want you to not freak out because that would scare her, and I think we've all been scared enough for today. Also I didn't get any food yet.”

  “Who is it, exactly, I'm not scaring here?” Alek sounded suspiciously calm, and Oriole hesitated. This was such a bad idea. But Oriole could no more leave the dragon-lady on her own than she could return a book without finishing it. So she just stepped aside and nodded to the woman in the gold vest, who limped three steps into the room before stopping, watching Alek like he was a bomb about to explode.

  And he didn't know who she was. He just glanced between her and Oriole, trying to understand why she thought he'd flip. But his gaze kept catching longer and longer on the dragon-lady, until he scrambled up from the bed and retreated to the wall farthest away from her, cursing under his breath. “Birdy, that's—”

  “I know.”

  “But you—”

  “I know.”

  “Oriole, you don't—”

  “I know, Alek,” Oriole stopped his first few attempts at shocked babbling and closed the door behind her. She didn't want either of them running downstairs in this state. “It's all right.”