Dragon Soul

by Danielle Bennett

  Wherever Badger and Malahide were now, it certainly wasn’t helping me. I hoped they hadn’t gotten their asses snagged up too—if I was lucky, they wouldn’t abandon me completely, but I had a dark feeling about my luck lately.

  Leave it to me to get snagged by a scout while I wasn’t paying attention. So here I was, held back by my hair, while some desert rider shouted in my face. He was probably asking me something, but I didn’t know what the hell he wanted from me; maybe he’d wise up and see nothing was getting through. Limply, I held up my hand, the universal symbol for wait just a fucking second.

  Wrong hand, I thought a moment later.

  Everyone gasped and pulled back.

  “That good, huh?” I asked, not actually thinking for long enough to stop myself from being stupid.

  The man in charge’s eyes narrowed, and he pointed at my hand.

  “Oh, this bad boy,” I said, holding it up; the guy yanking on my hair dropped me like I was on fire, which sometimes I felt like I was, and scurried quickly away from me. Suddenly, I realized something pretty sweet.

  I wasn’t the only one who was afraid of this thing.

  I looked at it like I was thinking about something real hard, and then I held it up again, just to see what would happen. The men all shrank back like I was a witch or something. And hey, if that was what I needed to be to get the hell out of here, then so be it.

  It explained why they hadn’t nabbed Malahide yet, anyway. If anyone ever looked like a witch who’d cut out your eyes and use ’em for marbles, it was her.

  “What can I say?” I asked, getting to my feet, brushing the sand off of me with my good hand while still brandishing the bad one like it was a weapon. “Sometimes a girl just gets a little bored, likes to conduct a few experiments on herself. Nothing you guys’d understand, of course. Really powerful magic. That kind of thing. Not the sort of mess you’d want to get caught up in, if you catch my drift,” I added, punctuating my warning with a hand gesture I’d made up on the spot.

  The man who’d been holding me by the hair crossed over to talk to the one who’d been shouting at me, giving me a wide berth while he did so. They murmured to one another in desert-speak, taking the time to glance over at me every so often just so I could be sure to understand their topic. Remarkable what you could still overcome with a language barrier between you. Well, at this rate, they’d be giving me a real big head.

  Just like that, Shouty started shouting again, gesturing wildly all around like a playactor miming a part, then jabbing his finger in my direction. The hair-yanker shook his head, holding firm to whatever line he’d drawn, and I took a curious step forward. I didn’t want to get too cocky, of course, but my hand was throbbing like fire. If they were planning on letting me go because they thought I was going to curse them with my evil-witch presence, I wanted to know sooner rather than later. And if they weren’t about to let me go, then I figured it couldn’t hurt me at all to stall a little, give Malahide and the Badger time to come to my rescue while my new desert-rider friends argued among themselves about what the hell to do with me, if anything.

  Shouty and Hair-Yanker both looked at me like scared rabbits, and I was the slavering hunting dog coming to bring them home.

  “It’s rude to talk about someone when she’s sitting here right in front of you,” I told them, not that it mattered, since they couldn’t understand whatever was coming out of my mouth anyway. “I assume that’s what you’re talking about, anyway. Guess it could be all about how I’ve ruined your dinner plans because I’m spoiled meat now.”

  “Meat,” Shouty repeated slowly, though the word sounded all wrong in his mouth, like he had something stuck in his teeth. Next to him, Hair-Yanker had his eyes on me like a hawk—or more specifically, he had his eyes on my hand.

  “Hey, that’s not half-bad,” I told him, and took a chance on getting a little closer.

  You’d have thought I’d dropped a bomb into the middle of camp, the way everyone jumped up, frantically scurrying every which way like mice caught in the granary.

  Shouty yelled something—I was getting really sick of not understanding anything that was going on around me—and the desert riders all froze in place like he’d turned them to stone. Then he turned back to me, and I could still see the fear in his eyes, but there was something below it, like pure, hard determination, which scared me just a little.

  Luckily, I was still carrying that trump card of mine. Not like I could let it go.

  “Look,” I said, holding out both hands this time. Everybody flinched back—it reminded me of the old woman, when she said I hadn’t bathed in a while and that I’d be driving off any prospective husband who could get over my looks—but I tried not to let it get to me too much. Hell, after spending so long as someone else’s helpless lapdog, it felt nice to have some power for a change.

  “Look,” Shouty repeated carefully, but he got his tongue hooked around the beginning of the word and it came out sounding garbled and wrong. He took a step toward me, and I didn’t bolt. I wasn’t some scaredy-cat desert rider. I was a bona fide Ke-Han witch. He looked like he was afraid I’d rip his tongue out, which I guess was a fair enough assessment. It’d be a fair exchange, since his man had made my scalp pretty sore, and probably had a handful of hair for his pains.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” I said, just to be encouraging. It made me a little sick to be this close to them—voluntarily, since I wasn’t exactly being held captive any longer. Shouty had sand stuck in the grizzle on his cheeks, and his cloak was streaked with dried blood. I tried my best not to think about where it might’ve come from, like that poor fucking boy Badger’d bandaged up before we left. “You think you boys could find your way toward letting me go, seeing as I’m a menace and all?”

  Shouty tilted his head to one side and shook it, the international symbol for do-not-understand.

  I hated motherfucking bandits. I’d seen what they’d done to the desert village, and probably dozens of other villages before that. And for what? Probably just because they’d been bored. Just knowing I couldn’t reach up and choke the life out of them was killing me a little. I wasn’t exactly the most self-righteous person when it came to fancy morals, and I definitely didn’t count myself among those idiots who followed all the rules of society without really understanding why, but what these men did for profit was downright unforgivable. No judgment from the emperor, no jail sentence, nothing. In the court of Madoka, people who preyed on and stole from the poor and helpless deserved to be buried from the neck down and left to die in the desert while the birds pecked out their eyes.

  Just like that, Shouty turned away from me and hollered something for the rest of his tribe to hear. The gang looked between me and him, like even they didn’t quite understand, then—like they’d come to some kind of mutual agreement all of a sudden—they let out a real hoot-and-holler of a cheer.

  It was the kind of sound that sent shivers down my spine since it was pretty obvious that if something made the nomads cheer, it spelled bad news for me.

  Shouty fixed his gaze on me, and this time there was no fear at all, just the set jaw and hard look of a man about to do something in spite of the fact that deep down it still scared him shitless.

  He started toward me, and I threw up my hand like a warning. This made him hesitate, but not for very long. He was evidently the leader of the tribe—the one man who didn’t have a free pass to cower back from the girl with the compass rotting in her hand. Bad news for me again, because it looked like he was calling my bluff. And before I could do anything he’d seized me tight around the wrist, throwing me off-balance.

  The damned fever’d really messed with my reflexes. If I’d been at the top of my game, I’d never have let a throat-cutter like him put his hands on me, and he’d have had a nice pain between his legs for trying it too.

  “Get off me!” I grunted, tugging hard and feeling only a dull throb in my hand for the effort. He was a strong guy, though, and he had a pretty good
grip on me. I stamped hard on his foot—not caring that I was pretty much surrounded—and we went over and into the sand, with me falling hard on my back. Shouty landed next to me, and I realized we’d tripped over something, half-covered by someone’s stinking shirt. It rolled free into the sand and I stared, unable to do anything but gawp like an addlepated brat. It glittered on the sand like fish scales but smooth, about the size of a fat marmot, if marmots were silver instead of furry. It rolled a short distance along the ground, away from us both, then stopped. I’d never seen anything like it—I couldn’t even start to guess at what it was—but I still couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Without thinking, I reached for it and all of a sudden my hand pulsed hard like something’d slammed straight into it. All I could do was curl up in a ball, gasping from the sudden pain.

  Shouty made a grab for the thing, kicking up the sand around us as he scrambled after it. It was only after he managed to get hold of it that he noticed me, writhing on the ground and shaking my hand like that’d set me free once and for all. He stared down at me like he’d just seen a dog get run over by a merchant’s cart—that same mixture of horror and disgust. Then he grabbed me by the arm once more, prying my fingers back to stare at the compass.

  The hands were on the move again, spinning around and around like a clock gone out of its mind, which must have been what’d set the flesh to burning. Not that I was exactly in a rational frame of mind to appreciate that kind of thing.

  Shouty’s prize started to vibrate softly in his hand, like a broken piece of machinery that didn’t know quite how to function anymore, and I stared at it, completely transfixed. I was scared he was going to drop it, but I guess he needed the other hand for holding me. For a few moments, I felt nothing. Just the sight of it washed over me, cool and calm, and there was nothing else in the world but it and me.

  Then the pain in my hand started up again, so bad and so hot I couldn’t help but scream at it.

  Seeing my reaction, Shouty held it up to the light of their campfire, and closer to me. He’d turned the tables on us right quick, and no mistake. Fire raced through my palm, shooting through my veins and down my wrist, throbbing all the way up into my chest, and I tugged like hell to get away from him and that thing. I was too crazy with the pain to worry about getting kicked anywhere now. Distantly, through the red fog in my brain, I heard something come crashing through the foliage, and someone yelled in Badger’s voice. It sounded like he was saying my name.

  All at once, the nomads who’d shrunk back from my hand crowded forward again at the sudden invasion of their campsite, all of them on the alert and probably drawing out their weapons. I was about to open my mouth and tell Badger he was a real damn fool when all of a sudden Malahide sprang in front of him looking like a sprite from an old myth—the kind that stole babies away from their mothers and replaced them with lumps of coal or stone. She shouted something in the desert language the riders had been using—it figured she’d know that, on top of all the rest—and they all halted, staring at me fearfully.

  Shouty got to his feet at once, not bothering to drag me up along with him, which was fine by me since I wasn’t all that sure I could get my legs to work right now. My knees felt like they were made out of water and my blood felt like it was made out of fire, and put those two together and you got something that didn’t know what the hell it was anymore: me. He said something to Malahide, who answered in turn, and whatever magic she’d been trying to work on me and the Badger seemed to work really nicely on desert riders, since he nodded, then gestured toward me.

  “Hello, my dear,” said Malahide, crouching down at my side while Badger stood over the both of us like a papa bear. “I’ve just explained that you were having a fit, so do feel free to continue lying on the ground foaming at the mouth.”

  “You’re a little late,” I hissed through my teeth, the pain in my hand flaring up all over again with every movement Shouty made.

  “Well, you can thank your stalwart protector for our timely arrival,” Malahide informed me, carefully taking my bad hand in both of hers. “I would’ve been much more comfortable with a chance to observe the situation further.”

  From above us, Shouty said something that didn’t sound entirely rude.

  “He says that you are working a magic on his prize,” Malahide informed me. “Or…that your prize is affecting the magic. I’m not entirely sure,” she confessed. “There are so many different dialects for the different nomad tribes, and I admit I only studied the main four branches…which leaves me at a loss presently, although I am able to communicate on a very basic level.”

  “I don’t want to affect it,” I told her, swallowing against the suspicion that I was about to lose the battle waging in my stomach. Whatever feelings I’d had for that beautiful thing in Shouty’s hand, however much it’d entranced me before, I didn’t want anything to do with it now. I could barely look at it without wanting to throw up. “I don’t mean to. See what it’s doing to my hand? I’m not doing it on purpose. If I could control it…If I could just control it…!”

  “I can see very well,” Malahide told me, hushing me kindly before I made an even bigger ass of myself. “But—well—perhaps the pain has dulled your instincts somewhat.” She leaned her face very close to my own, dropping her voice to a whisper. “The perfume of dragonmetal here is unmistakable. The device in your hand has led us to an unimaginable prize.”

  I wished she wouldn’t say crazy things like that while my hand felt like it was about to fall off. Then it hit me all at once: It was possible that this thing the desert rider was holding in his hand could very well be my key to freedom. It was what I’d been sent questing for in the first place, set free like a rat in a maze, only now I’d found my way right to the hunk of cheese at the end. So long as no one changed the rules on me in the middle of the game, I could be a free woman.

  “You sure?” I asked her.

  Malahide barked something in the desert tongue. Shouty hesitated, clearly not wanting to let go of his prize, and she grabbed my wrist, holding my hand up to Shouty’s merry band like a proclamation to onlookers, a general holding up his enemy’s head so his army would feel real good after battle.

  Slowly, Shouty lowered himself to the ground, kneeling next to my pathetic body and across from Malahide. He spoke a few short sentences, and Malahide replied in her effortlessly levelheaded tones, though I could tell she was having a bit more trouble with this language than she had with mine and Badger’s. At least there was something in this world she wasn’t perfect at.

  Shouty, clearly satisfied with whatever she’d told him, held out his prize, but it didn’t look like he was about to let go of it, either. He clearly didn’t trust us enough to even let us hold the thing for a minute, but I guess I couldn’t really blame him.

  Above our heads, Badger let out a soft tsk, but his sour mood seemed to have more to do with the desert rider than with our situation, or with Malahide and her method of operating.

  Malahide didn’t seem to mind—about whether Badger approved or not or Shouty’s lack of trust. She reached over to examine what he was holding—what she’d called dragonmetal, though it was a cobbling of words I’d never heard before, and led me to believe something was being lost in translation—but it didn’t look like any kind of metal I’d ever seen before.

  It was almost like a ship in a bottle. At least, that was the only comparison my fevered mind could come up with at the minute, distracted as I was by the throbbing in my hand. My problems got worse whenever it came near, and it wasn’t like I could begin to explain why. The object in question was made out of what looked like glass, with two bands around its body like the hoops around a barrel to hold it all together. When Malahide held it up to the firelight, I could see its insides—all sorts of finicky gold pieces that didn’t quite look like jewelry. I could’ve priced it based on its materials, but something told me I wouldn’t’ve come too close to the actual price. The insides were what was vibrating, I realized, an
d they weren’t shaking but dancing, very weakly, like they’d been at the dance for a long time and were starting to slow down.

  By contrast, the compass in my hand whirred like crazy and I was starting to feel like I might bite through my lip if the pain didn’t get any better soon. I could be as tough as the next girl who’d grown up on the Seon border, but I wasn’t too proud to pass out in front of my enemies if it came to that.

  A body knew what it could and couldn’t take. Too much more of this, and I’d go mad.

  Shouty began muttering some further information, and Malahide looked up quickly, her entire attention on him while he spoke. When he’d finished, she chirped something that sounded like a question, and he shook his head, gesturing toward the capsule.

  Malahide made a soft tut in her throat and shifted her grip on this dragonmetal thing so that Shouty would have to do the same. It was when he moved his hand that I saw it, a concave groove set into the topside of the whole contraption, like someone’d taken a loose part clean off of it. The imprint was about the size of a woman’s palm, only shaped in a perfect circle, and just looking at it gave me a bad feeling.

  “Aha,” said Malahide, with triumph in her eyes.

  “Uh-uh,” I said, not caring that Shouty was staring at my hand with something that was more like desire than fear, but nevertheless a pretty good approximation of both. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I don’t want anything to do with it. I’m not…I can’t get any closer, Malahide. I can’t do it.”

  “Nonsense,” Malahide chided me. “Don’t be so suspicious! I was merely feeling extremely gratified that my hunch turned out to be correct.”