Dragon Soul

by Danielle Bennett

  These were not ideal traveling companions. As fascinating as Madoka was, she had no Talent to speak of; all her importance rested in the palm of her hand, and keeping her alive would be more difficult than anything else. Likewise, Badger would be good for brute strength, but as he was no magician and no mastermind, I needed to hope that he would serve as an arm of strength and justice…and serve me, while we were at it.

  By the time true night fell, I’d been pretending to sleep for hours, and it was only when Badger himself began to stir that I felt safe enough to do the same. Still, I held my position a moment longer, eyes slit open in the dark to watch him as he bent to wake Madoka. He was gentle with her in the same way he’d been with the boy, which could easily have had to do with her injury—or it might not; in which case, it was something I could use to my advantage.

  He cared for her, at least to the point where he felt she was his responsibility.

  I held still until Madoka began to stir, then I sat up myself, rubbing the arm I’d been lying on. It was stiff, the elbow sore.

  “Time to go already?” Madoka muttered, though to her credit, she didn’t complain any further than that.

  We were all up and outside in a matter of minutes, and I drew in a grateful breath of the desert air. The wind was picking up again, and it blew the scent of our quarry into my nostrils. Interesting. His scent had changed since I’d last picked it up. Or rather, someone had joined him.

  It was a small detail—one that I didn’t find necessary to share with my companions just yet—but I resolved to watch it closely. If my man was really one of a pair, that was all the more reason to be extravigilant.

  Madoka studied her hand with an air of disgust, then shook out her shoulders and stood up straight. “This way,” she said, and strode off with a purpose in her step, leaving Badger and me in her wake.

  “I was just about to say that,” I informed him, and hurried along after her.

  THOM

  Months of traveling with my brother, chipping away at him like a sculptor using a mere toothpick to carve a solid block of marble, had done nothing for Rook in comparison to what half an hour with the magician Sarah Fleet had managed. He was like a different person, like a child coming home to his mother, and had I not felt utterly different about her, I would have said she was his mother.

  It was just that she was not mine.

  I was wary of her, and, truth be told, a little jealous, though at least she had warmed to me somewhat. The verbal abuse with which she gifted me, I had come to understand, was of the same tonal quality as that which my brother employed. It was affectionate teasing—I hoped, or at last had learned to assume—and it didn’t mean I was as loathed as it first appeared.

  Still, it was difficult to abide.

  “Stay put,” Sarah Fleet told us, shuffling into the back of the house. From beyond the dividing screen, I could see a very homey kitchen. “I’ll get you boys some coffee and we can talk.”

  Rook took that opportunity to flop down on her lone settee, which groaned in agony at the sudden, violent application of weight. It was moments away from collapsing, and I didn’t want to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were. I pulled up a chair and watched my brother’s face keenly.

  He had changed—he was relaxed now, easy, a little eager. Like a child, I thought, with the same pleasurable giddiness I’d seen him exhibit only once—the first and last time I’d accompanied him in the air.

  My knowledge of the dragons was limited; my knowledge of Havemercy herself fleeting and very personal. I’d been terrified to death at the time, and so the trouble was I couldn’t remember her nearly as well as Rook did. Still, I thought, this woman was quite reminiscent of the dragon in question—or, I supposed, the dragon in question was reminiscent of this woman.

  Magic could be as personal as a memory. The dragons had exhibited their individual quirks and flaws, inspired by their creators. This was only to be expected, but Rook, I realized, searching to replace what had been lost, was far too close at present to putting Sarah Fleet on his camel and eloping with her.

  All physical logistics aside, it simply couldn’t be done.

  “Here you are, boys,” Sarah Fleet said, shuffling slowly back into the room and offering each of us wooden cups filled with a brew so strong just the smell of it made me jittery. I let it warm my hands but didn’t drink yet, not wanting to burn my tongue. Besides—though I would never mention this for fear of being murdered by Rook—I preferred my coffee somewhat sweeter than this.

  Conversely, Rook took a gulp and sighed deeply while Sarah Fleet levered herself down on the other end of the settee from him.

  “Well,” she said. “Where were we?”

  “Looking for Havemercy,” Rook said. The word came easier to his lips, but I saw him hesitate just after he said it; he looked around, then took another deep swig of his coffee. I blew gently on mine, wishing I was not so far removed from the center of the conversation. I couldn’t ignore the imagery present in the very way we were sitting: Sarah Fleet and Rook upon the settee, while I was perched opposite them. I might just as well have been on the other side of the world for all I was necessary to proceedings.

  “Never thought she’d go down that way,” Sarah Fleet said, with a sigh. “Guess it always stood to reason. Wouldn’t want her dusting up in a museum somewhere. Better to go this way, when you think about it.” She turned to level a fearsome gaze on my brother, and I was grateful not to be between them at this moment, much less on the receiving end of an expression as ferocious as that. One of her eyes was slightly lazy, but she managed an intensity that was only magnified by the fact that the crossed eye made her seem marginally unhinged. “So,” she said flatly. “What’re you looking to gain by getting her? You just wanna stop someone else from rebuilding her, right?”

  “And rebuilding her wrong,” Rook snarled, almost spilling his coffee. “She wouldn’t want that.”

  “Guess not,” Sarah Fleet agreed. “So you’re going to make sure no one else rebuilds her, is that it?”

  “She isn’t anybody’s,” Rook said darkly.

  “Son, she’s not yours, either,” Sarah Fleet said.

  The tension in the air became immediately palpable, and I swallowed nervously. It was one thing to keep Rook in line; it was quite another to tell him that the one thing that had even remotely made him happy hadn’t actually been his in the first place. I wanted to explain that Rook loved that dragon—loved her as he was incapable of loving anything else—when I realized how sad it would have sounded, and how little it was my place to put into words what my brother himself was feeling.

  I had been rash in judging all his unkindnesses. I had never been as close to anyone as Rook had been to Havemercy.

  “Don’t give me that look, baby,” Sarah Fleet said, leaning back and folding her hands across her mammoth, dunelike bosom. She drew in a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “Made me feel sad to give her up too, but I’m glad to know somebody loved her. Everybody needs to be loved.”

  “You don’t know,” Rook began, then trailed off. Sarah Fleet did know, and Rook knew it. The usual excuses wouldn’t fly. He looked at me, and I stood quickly, setting my coffee down and moving to stand beside him. I didn’t know how I’d suddenly met the requirements necessary for aiding my brother, but I was grateful to have a place, any place, in this conversation.

  My brother needed me to take charge, and I was more than happy to oblige him.

  “In any case,” I said, stumbling over my words, “we feel as though she is currently being mistreated. You said you could help us find her. Is that really possible?”

  “Oh, I’ll do it,” Sarah Fleet said. “But I’m not doing it for any other reason than to give his royal pain in the highness what he gave me. You probably understand that.”

  “So you don’t think,” Rook said slowly, each word twisted and dark, “that you could rebuild her or something?”

  “Could,” Sarah Fleet said. “Proba
bly. But I’m not gonna.”

  Suddenly, I wondered what Rook’s plan had been all along. It stood to reason that the idea of Havemercy being chopped up, the magical technology behind her being used for ill purposes, would make him raw with anger. But had he been fooling himself, all this time, into thinking he would be capable of resurrecting her?

  By the expression on his face now—one of such sheer, mottled disappointment it was difficult to look at for too long—I realized that, whether he’d known it or not, he had been expecting just that.

  “Rook,” I said carefully. He might turn on either of us, searching for someone to blame.

  “I think he needs to take a walk,” Sarah Fleet said. “Get out there, get some fresh air, and come back when you’re ready to talk about what we’re going to do. How’s that? I’ve got some rice pudding that won’t last; you boys can help me eat it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “but I don’t think—”

  “’Scuse me,” Rook said, standing quickly, and heading out the door with a bang.

  “That went well,” Sarah Fleet said.

  “It did, actually,” I said, because no one had been hurt, no limbs were missing; there hadn’t even been any shouting. It was all the more dangerous for that reaction, though, and I excused myself quickly to follow my brother out into the night.

  He was already halfway across the desert basin that cradled Sarah Fleet’s strange little house, and walking on foot. His camel stood forgotten. I ran after him, not calling out, but catching up. He was in no mood for company, I knew, but I couldn’t just let him wander out into the desert alone. Kalim was waiting for us on the other side of the basin, and Sarah Fleet didn’t exactly seem the patient type. She had agreed to help us, which was more than I’d allowed myself to dare hope for during our expedition, and we hadn’t yet heard all she had to say. Further proof that my brother was not operating upon principles of logic but rather those of emotion.

  Rook didn’t slow down when I caught up with him, but he didn’t speed up either. “Don’t,” he bit out, without a glance toward me. “Whatever you’re about to say, whatever cracked aphorism you’ve got cooked up in there for this occasion—just don’t.”

  “Aphorism?” I asked, unable to help myself. I stumbled in a pocket of sand, but managed to keep my balance. The ground was beginning to rise.

  “Whatever-the-fuck,” Rook said, sharply, storming up the hill. “You know what I mean.”

  “No, aphorism is correct,” I told him, feeling foolish and helpless that all I could do for my brother when he was miserable was talk about language, of all things. “I was merely…taken aback that you’d know it—much less use it properly…”

  “Yeah, well.” Rook shrugged like he was trying to throw something off his shoulder. “Can’t help soaking up some of that ’Versity shit you’re always spewing, I guess. Just soaked into me like I’m a sponge.”

  We crested the dune and he collapsed in an effortlessly graceful act of rage against the sand, which billowed delicately out around him and danced against a sudden gust of wind. After a moment of uncertainty, I seated myself nearby him, drawing my knees up to my chest. It was an uncharacteristically lovely night for the desert, for which I had come to have no lovely feelings whatsoever. The winds were gentle, the sky was littered with the sorts of constellations one needed an observatory telescope to pick out in Thremedon, and there was only a minimal amount of sand in my nose. All in all, conditions were perfect, but neither of us was in the mood to appreciate anything.

  Rook grunted.

  “We’ve some time until morning, it looks like,” I said foolishly, tracing idle shapes in the sand at my feet.

  “Guess so,” Rook said. He tossed his head back to stare up at the moon, and not for the first time I was reminded of everything my brother had lost in the war. There was a phenomenon among certain soldiers who’d been away fighting for too long: that upon returning home, they found themselves lost, without a proper place in the world, nor even a sense that their “homes” were still their own. Reacclimatizing to civilian life after years spent on the battlefield was difficult for any ordinary man, and my brother was far from ordinary. The Esar had specialized the Dragon Corps so utterly that it nearly made it impossible for them to imagine doing anything else with their lives. It was even difficult for me to imagine it: Adamo as a professor, Luvander’s hat shop, and Balfour in training to be a foreign diplomat. Some were better suited to repurposing than others, but it seemed all wrong somehow, like suddenly explaining to a boot that it was now a lady’s dancing slipper.

  I didn’t envy my brother his position.

  I only wished I understood it better.

  “You must have known that…There would be no way of keeping it a secret, were she to be rebuilt,” I said, as gently as I knew how. I hated myself for saying it, but as Sarah Fleet had demonstrated, there were certain things my brother needed to hear.

  Rook snorted. “I ain’t some cindy head-in-the-clouds piss-in-my-boots dreamer,” he said. He certainly had a way with words—almost a poet’s grasp of rhythm and cadence. “Anyway, I know what’s what.”

  And yet, he’d still hoped. That, I knew instinctively, was what was bothering him. He was angry with himself on top of being angry with the situation, and it had crystallized the sentiment into something with which he could no longer avoid coming to terms. Even now I could see it in the rigid line of his back, the unforgiving set of his mouth, the muscles in his jaw hard at work and tightly clenched. He’d done his best to make his posture relaxed, but it wasn’t enough to fool me. I saw right through him and realized he was empty tonight—had been empty, and I had my suspicions for how long.

  “I really think that,” I began, unsure of my words. Words were all I was really good at; I felt entirely useless without them. “Jo—”

  “Not now,” Rook growled, and though he didn’t look at me I felt the shift in his attention as keenly as if he’d grabbed me by the collar. “Can’t deal with that right now.”

  “Rook, then,” I amended, not leaving the time for my feelings to be hurt. This wasn’t about me, at the moment. It was about my brother, and the only something—someone—he’d ever loved. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not looking for pity,” Rook said, the terrible flat anger returning to his voice.

  “I know that,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I merely meant…I wish the situation had turned out differently.”

  “You know what they say about wishing in one hand and shitting in the other,” Rook said, citing a proverb that had always made my stomach turn.

  “Be that as it may,” I acknowledged, trying desperately to remember what my original point had been. This was his technique, throwing my game by interjecting off-topic stings into the conversation and sitting back as I fended them off, my original thrust completely lost. He neatly turned my offense into defense on any given day, but I couldn’t allow him to do it this time. He needed me. “I think we should take up, ah, Miss Fleet’s offer. She said she could help us find Havemercy, which means no more wandering around with no idea whether we’re on the right trail or not. That will give us an immediate purpose. I mean, I don’t pretend to have any idea of how it would work, but if we had some way of knowing where the pieces were, her vital parts, at least, then we could have some sense of closure.” I hesitated, lifting my head and turning in the sand toward him. “We…I mean you could give her a proper burial. I think that would be very fitting, under the circumstances. It’s the decent thing to do.”

  “Yeah,” Rook said, leaning back on his elbows in the sand. I wondered if it felt strange for him, to have to look up at the sky instead of being an integrated part of it. I’d only been up on Havemercy once, and I still felt sometimes as though my perspective had been entirely changed. It wasn’t that often that a Mollyrat was able to rise above palaces and mountains. And Rook had done that—all on his own—for himself, then lost it as suddenly as it had become his in the first place. His
world was still reeling from the aftershock. “Not really used to it being up to me to do the decent thing,” he added.

  “I’m aware,” I said coolly, and before I could react he’d cuffed me on the back of the head. “Ouch.”

  “You were askin’ for it,” Rook informed me, his posture more relaxed than it had been only moments ago. He tore his gaze away from the sky, finally, and settled it squarely on me.

  I stopped rubbing the back of my head. “Just consider the alternatives,” I said. He hadn’t meant to hurt me—I would have known if he had—and that was the kind of gift Rook was in the habit of giving me. Backhanded, yes; hitting below the belt, certainly; but kind in its own peculiar way. I smiled privately to myself, if a little sadly.

  “Yeah?” Rook asked. “What’re those?”

  “She’d have no purpose in a world like this one,” I explained. “Not now. Even if we did rebuild her—and if I thought we could, if I thought that would make you both happy…” I shook my head. “In any case, with all that being beside the point, she’d be too big for how things stand in Thremedon now. So the only other alternative would be to make her smaller—take that same spark she had, reduce her to something tiny enough to fit in your pocket, or the palm of your hand. And that’s all wrong too, isn’t it? She wouldn’t be the same. What you might have thought you could do—return to a time and a place when the war was still being fought, when the Corps was still trying to win—it would require a different sort of magician. I don’t think there’s ever been one that powerful.”

  “Stories,” Rook said, snorting. “S’all stories.”

  “And you’re far too practical for them,” I agreed.

  “I wouldn’t make her like that,” he said, suddenly fierce again. But he wasn’t angry at me, and he wasn’t looking at me, either—just staring up at the sky, probably remembering.