Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology

by Claudie Arseneault

  Alek laughed, the hysteria in his voice almost as terrible as the sadness had been earlier. “You think this is all right, Oriole? Perun help us!” He laughed again, rubbing a hand across his eyes, and she could see he was shaking. “You know, I should have expected it. I should have known you couldn't leave well enough alone. But gods, I didn't expect you to bring trouble back to us before you'd even got out the door.”

  “I will go.” Neither of them had expected the dragon-lady to say anything; she'd been deadly silent up to now, so why change? Oriole took a step towards her, one hand extended in a soothing gesture.

  “You don't have anywhere else to go,” she said. “And I won't let them kill you. Not for talking, by Éostre's crown.“

  “You can't promise that.” Alek spoke before the dragon-lady could, though she'd opened her mouth to respond. “Oriole, believe me, you can't promise that.”

  “He's right,” the lady added, and Oriole felt her whole chest pull tight. But not with sadness, or anything like resignation. Her fists clenched with the lashings of stubbornness that bound her ribs together, and she glared at both of them in turn.

  “I promise it anyway,” she snapped, daring them to argue. “I swear on Éostre's Well. I will not let you die.”

  Alek looked like he was going to argue, but the dragon-lady let herself fall with a sob. It wasn't a faint, or a collapse—it was a fall born of pain, exhaustion, and far too much anxiety. Oriole went to help her onto the unclaimed bed, careful to make certain the lady knew where Oriole was standing before she took her arm.

  And she didn't flinch when Alek held her other arm, just took deep breaths and made an obvious effort to carry her own weight. Even once seated on the bed, she didn't so much as squeak in pain.

  Oriole kept stealing glances in Alek's direction, which he ignored until the lady was settled. Then he stepped back and sighed, resting his hands on his hips. “We're going to get some food,” he said to the dragon-lady. “Is there anything you can't eat?”

  She shook her head, even that motion small and inconspicuous. Both Oriole and Alek waited another half a second for her to say something, but she stayed silent, her eyes fixed on the foot of the bed. Alek just sighed again.

  “Come on then, Birdy,” he said, waving her towards the door. “We'll both go this time, to make sure you don't find the dragon hiding under a plate or something.”

  Oriole smiled, a little, and felt some of the anxiety unwind from inside her ribs. If he was joking and asking if the lady was all right, then he didn't mean to kick her out. Not that she had believed he would. “If it makes you feel any better,” she said, still speaking in a murmur even once they were out in the empty hall, “I didn't mean to find her.”

  “Actually, that does help,” he said, bumping her shoulder with his, his own grin flashing bright in her direction before it vanished again. “What are we going to do, Birdy? We can't just walk around with her in tow.”

  “I've got an idea,” Oriole said as they reached the stairs and started down. “But you're not going to like it.”

  “Have I liked anything about today?” Alek groaned, turning his face skyward to ask the heavens.

  “You liked the crèmes.”

  “That happened today?”

  Oriole nodded, resting one hand on the wall as they walked down. “I know how we can get her out of the city,” she continued, as if Alek's attempt at deflection hadn't even existed. “But I don't know how to get her to the airship harbor without getting caught.”

  “The …” Alek cursed, the sound suddenly loud and echoing in the stone stairwell, and Oriole jumped.

  “No need to be so loud,” she hissed at him, her heart still beating out of pace.

  “You want to get her out on the Maiden,” he accused, but his voice returned to a reasonable level. They fell silent at the sound of feet on a landing below, but it was just another group of guests on their way to the dining hall, and the bubbling of conversation in front of them soon disguised their own words.

  “Do you have a better idea?” Oriole said, her voice hovering just above a whisper.

  “Sure. It starts with not hiding a fugitive from the Accord of the Sun in our hostel room.”

  Oriole didn't even bother responding to that one. They descended several more flights in relative silence, absorbed in the echoing chatter coming from both below and above them.

  “All right,” Alek said at last, just as they reached the first floor. “We'll need a convincing lie to get us out of the harbor. Some reason we're not going on to Perihelion City.”

  “My mother's dying. We can go Wandering again later, but she needs me home right now.” Oriole recited the words with as much sincerity as she could muster, turning imploring eyes on her friend, who raised one eyebrow and a crooked smile in response.

  “You really have thought this out, haven't you?”

  “Would it work?”

  “As long as no one looks too closely at your face,” Alek snorted, bumping her shoulder with his as the two of them reached the bottom of the stairs. The hall was more crowded than before, but the lines were moving in quick-step, and no one looked twice at the two Wanderers.

  “Hey! I'm a good liar when I want to be,” Oriole protested, picking up one of the red-glazed plates. “Kept us out of plenty of scrapes at home.”

  “And got us into plenty more,” Alek shot back. Oriole only smiled as they picked out servings of late strawberries, summer squash, and fried potatoes.

  “Do you think we can do it?” she asked, after they'd taken seats at a table as far away from the rest of the hall's diners as possible. “Is it even possible?”

  “If I said no, would that stop you from trying?”

  Oriole's smile was crooked. He already knew the answer, but he was obviously waiting for her to say it. “Of course not,” she muttered, picking the tops off her strawberries. “I've always liked a challenge.”

  * * *

  They brought a plate upstairs for the dragon-lady, who hadn't moved from her spot on Oriole's bed. She'd curled her right leg up to her chest, but the left was still laid out in front of her, bent at the knee. Oriole sat at the foot of the bed to explain her plan while Alek pretended to pack. Since they hadn't even had a chance to untie their bags, the pretense was more transparent than the solar collectors that served as windows in Waterway, but Oriole didn't say anything about the make-work. The dragon-lady showed no reaction to Oriole's explanation, entirely focused on separating her food into distinct, non-touching piles.

  “We should probably call you something,” Oriole added at the end of her speech, watching the lady eat her potatoes one piece at a time. “Other than dragon-lady. Might attract suspicion.”

  That finally won her a smile, bright as a flash of sunlight before it was gone again. “It might,” the lady agreed. But there was a long pause between her agreement and her drawing breath to speak again, a pause long enough to make Oriole shift uncomfortably. “Faewren,” she said at last, and Oriole blinked, waiting another few beats for some explanation.

  When none was forthcoming, she asked, “That's your name? Or at least, that's what we should call you?”

  The lady nodded, spearing a peppered cube of squash on her fork.

  “Okay then. We'll wait out the rest of the day here, and hit the streets once the lights go off.”

  “It'll give the officers more time to get a sketch or a photo of her face out there,” Alek objected, but there was no force behind his words.

  “It'll take them hours to get one made, and no one was taking pictures. They were too shaken up.” Oriole glanced back to Faewren, but the dragon-lady was still stabbing squash like it'd done her a personal wrong. “Hey,” she asked, trying not to push, “you got any ideas? How long have you been with the dragon, anyway?”

  Faewren hesitated at the word 'dragon,' but she didn't look up from her plate and didn't answer either of Oriole's questions. Her silence couldn't be just fear, Oriole thought, and it wasn't just pain ei
ther. Something about their fugitive was different.

  It was easy enough to identify someone with an uncommon neurotype; human brains were good at sensing differences. It was part of what had made the original society of their world so revolting. But Oriole had no clue what kind of processes the dragon-lady's brain was going through, and until Faewren told them, this whole rescue mission was suddenly a lot more touch and go.

  She and Alek exchanged pointed looks, Oriole putting every ounce of stubbornness she could into her expression. Just because Faewren wasn't as good at communicating as someone with a more common neurotype didn't mean the plan wouldn't work.

  “At least let us take a look at that leg,” Oriole solicited, turning and waving a hand to attract the lady's visual attention. “You're going to have to walk on it a while longer, I think, but there's no reason we can't splint it or something.” Faewren huffed, but she stretched out her leg and started on her strawberries.

  Oriole had never been good at remembering more than basic medical lessons, but she figured the bruised and swollen skin around the dragon-lady's ankle was a good indication of where the problem was. “How'd this happen?” she found herself muttering, glancing up. At first she thought the lady was going to refuse to answer this as well; her eyes narrowed and she glared like the strawberries were the ones trying to kill her.

  Finally she said, “I jumped. He couldn't carry me across the water. I shouldn't have called him.” Her free hand clenched into a fist so tight Oriole could see the thin bones and veins like a strange map across the lady's skin. “I shouldn't have called him.”

  “Hey, it's okay.” Oriole reached across to touch the back of Faewren's hand. The gesture was as much instinct as conscious decision, and for a moment she was afraid it would only make things worse. But after a moment the dragon-lady relaxed her death-grip and opened her eyes, though she looked with distaste at the last of her food.

  Alek cleared his throat and held up a tightly woven linen shirt, one of his. “Do we want to keep this foot relatively whole, or not?”

  Oriole frowned but moved from the bed so he could reach the wounded ankle. She glanced nervously at Faewren, but if the lady was even aware of them, she hid her attention well. It was strange, to have three people in a room and feel like there were only two. Oriole couldn't decide if it was a good thing Faewren was so distant; it might help the lady deal with her pain, but it could mean distraction during their escape.

  And the Maiden's captain hadn't struck Oriole as someone with a lot of patience.

  * * *

  Waterway at night was a soft silver, the red rocks of its foundation stained black by the moonlight. The streets were lit with a combination of silver street lanterns and the green glow of algae lamps, neither of which gave off enough light to reach the second-floor windows of the towers around them. Outside the doors of the hostel, several rickshaws, bicycles, and solar-powered wheelchairs had been parked, all of them rentals. Oriole tapped commands into the lit screen, feeding coins into the machine before pulling one of the chairs away from the stand it was tied to.

  “There'll be another hub before we get to the harbor tower,” she said to Alek's disapproving stare. “Do you want her ankle to break into more pieces?”

  “No.”

  They both stared in surprise at Faewren herself, who settled herself into the chair without looking at either of them, closing her eyes in relief at the lack of pressure on her wrapped foot.

  “That solves it then,” Oriole said, still blinking. Alek moved to help start the lady's chair, but she growled at him and took hold of the controls herself. Only instead of heading towards the canyon, where the tower domes dropped until they were nearly at ground level for those walking on the cliff tops, she headed towards the edge of the city.

  “Hey!” Oriole didn't mean to shout, but Alek hissed at her and the dragon-lady glanced back, her eyes wide in the green light of the algae lamp. “You're going the wrong way.” Oriole lowered her voice to little more than a whisper. But Faewren only shook her head.

  “We don't have time to be lost right now.” Alek crossed his arms, then uncrossed them. “We need to get going. The longer we're out in the city, the better chance people have of recognizing you.”

  Faewren huffed, one hand tapping restlessly against her leg. But the anger in her expression didn't seem to be directed at either of them, and after another uncomfortably long pause she pieced together the words she wanted. “He's waiting out there,” she said, pointing towards the grasslands that surrounded Waterway.

  Oriole felt her heart rate pick up, excitement shooting through her veins. “The dragon?” she breathed back, the hair along her arms prickling.

  Faewren's expression turned strange, a half-smile set below eyes still full of frustration and lines of anger in her dark eyebrows. “Dokeom,” she said, and her voice was softer than Oriole had ever heard it.

  “Oriole.” Alek's tone, on the other hand, was wound tight enough to hang laundry. Oriole turned to him, her weightless excitement turning to dread, plummeting back down to reality when he spoke. “This isn't our job,” he pleaded, keeping his clenched fists by his sides only by locking them there. If the lighting had been better, she was certain she would have seen him shaking. “There's nothing for us out there, just dying for a chance to banter with a—with something we shouldn't. Oriole. We've done enough; more than we should. Let's leave. We'll go to Perihelion, Faewren'll get back to Dokeom, and everything can go back to normal. We're supposed to be Wandering, not looking to commit suicide.”

  In some ways, Oriole didn't have to think about her answer. She would have gone with Faewren if the dragon-lady had told her the dragon was waiting at the very edge of the cliffs. But she knew Alek's loss was too deep a scar for her to understand, and she had to answer his fear with more than careless courage. So she turned to face him, her hands open and loose.

  “You know me better than my own parents do, Alek. And you know what my answer's going to be.”

  He nodded, a sharp motion that looked almost painful in the green light. Oriole glanced over her shoulder at Faewren, who watched them with undisguised curiosity. “I'm sorry,” she admitted, her eyes pulled to the smooth sidewalk. “I'm sorry I can't leave it be. But I swore to both of you I wouldn't let this end here, and I won't.” Oriole forced herself to look back up, to see her best friend shivering. “I know you're afraid, and Alek, I wouldn't blame you for leaving. You can still get your normal back. But I don't think I've ever had it.”

  “Veles damn you, Birdy.” He croaked out a laugh, and she smiled. Even afraid as he was, Alek's laugh was enough to make her smile. “You know if I left you'd only do something even stupider.”

  “Probably true,” she said, tugging on the ends of her hair. “So you'll come?”

  Alek shook his head and laughed again, scrubbing at his face with both hands. “Let's just go, before I think better of it.” He groaned, and Faewren sighed in what might have been relief. With the dragon-lady, it was hard to tell what sort of responses corresponded with what emotions.

  * * *

  The streets around them were nearly deserted in the early night; the nocturnal half of the city was still waking itself up with the haunting sound of keyboards and harps. The markets hadn't closed so much as changed their faces, and the bright sparks of bakery fires were visible like firefly lights around the corners of the silver-white towers.

  Faewren led them through so many back alleys and service corridors that Oriole would have been lost several times over, but the dragon-lady didn't so much as pause to look at street signs before turning. She kept them out of markets and the better-lit streets, and as they drew away from the canyon rift the towers around them turned from residences to businesses, and then, abruptly, they were outside the city.

  There was a ring of caravansaries around the edges of the towers, but beyond that nothing but grass shimmered, bone-pale in the moonlight. Faewren didn't even slow at the edge of the pavement, tipping her chair
into the grass with nothing more than a grimace at the way the motors whirred angrily and the tall blades swept in towards her face.

  Oriole had been wondering how a dragon could possibly hide itself in a grassland that didn't have a single tree for a hundred miles to the north, but the shortest grasses here were almost three meters tall; walking into them was like walking into a building with a starry ceiling. If the dragon kept his head down, and was careful where he stepped, he could be within ten meters of the caravansaries and not a soul would know.

  Faewren twisted their path into something more like a river than a walkway, making curves to keep the city out of sight. Behind her, Oriole could feel Alek's anxiety hovering like a cloud, but she couldn't think of what to say that would reassure him.

  When they came upon the dragon, it happened so quickly Oriole lost her breath. One moment they were alone in the grassland, listening to the crunch and whisper of grass under the wheels of Faewren's chair, and the next the grass had given way to a bare patch of red rock, and taking up most of the open space was the shimmering blackness of the dragon.

  He must have heard them coming, but he stayed still until Faewren trundled into view. The moment he saw her he lunged forward, to wrap his claws around the edges of her chair. He had to tilt his head to one side to look her over, and Oriole was caught by the striated gold of his eyes, wider than the span of her hand and gleaming like liquid metal.

  For a few moments, she and Alek ceased to exist. The two of them stood just within the illusionary protection of the grasses, watching the dragon rumble questions to Faewren, who put one hand upon his sharp face and spoke in kind. Whatever problems she had with the human tongue, whatever misfired signals her mind sent, she obviously did not share them with the dragon-language. Listening to her and the dragon was like listening to a mouse and a dog converse in a shared dialect, but it was far clearer communication than Oriole and Alek had managed with her.