Dragonfell

by Sarah Prineas

  Rubbing her arms, she stares up at the dragon, her eyes bright. “Ask it—ask about the watches it hoards. Ask it why it lives here. Ask it why it burns the coal mineworks.” She catches her breath. “Oh, and ask it how old it is. I have a theory—”

  “Wait,” I interrupt. The dragon has started crawling wearily toward its cave. My feet slipping on the coal slickens, I follow; Maud waits behind. “Dragon?” I pant, skidding up to its side, “I’m searching for dragons.” My voice shakes, and I steady it. “My village had a dragon once, but it’s been gone for a long time.”

  At the word time it stops and cranes its head around to stare at me.

  “A long time,” I repeat. “Can you tell me . . .” I’m not sure what to ask. “Was the Dragonfell dragon dangerous?”

  The dragon is breathing heavily, pants of sparks and clotted smoke. I wonder suddenly if it is sick, maybe even dying. Dangerous, it wheezes, and it almost sounds scornful. All dragons are dangerous, foolish youngling.

  “I mean, was it dangerous to us? To its village?”

  At that the dragon pauses and turns its head to look at me once more.

  “Or did it protect us?” I ask.

  For a long moment I gaze up at it. I thought the first dragon I met would be huge and glorious and strong. But this dragon is nothing like what I expected. It’s powerful in a different way. It makes me realize that I was stupid to think of dragons as being evil or good. Those are human words. Dragons are not good or evil, they’re just dragon.

  And I realize something else.

  “For a long time,” I say, working it out, “the dragons have been disappearing.”

  The dragon is watching me closely. Its watches are watching me, too. It reaches up with a talon tip and touches them, making them rattle together. The sound of their ticking surrounds us.

  “The world is changing,” I go on. “That’s what Old Shar told me. She said there’s no room in it anymore for dragons.” I shake my head. It’s a sad, hollow thing, to think of a world without any dragons in it. “Your time has passed.”

  Time, the dragon repeats.

  I meet its eyes, and it does something—it shifts, and the ticking of its watches grows louder, and just for a second, the space between one tick and the next, the heavy weight of the time that the dragon carries lifts, and I can see the dragon, not as it is now, all gray and weary, but as it was. Proud. Tall. Gleaming silver, not gray, with powerful muscles shifting under its armored skin. A spiky crest, and a broad sweep of wings, and eyes like night and fire. And deep, deep within, it has a spark burning brighter than any sun, any star.

  Tick, and time catches up with it, and the dragon is hunched and withered again.

  But now I know. I know.

  Even this old, tired dragon has a spark in it. A flame.

  Just like I have a spark in me.

  I am dragon-touched. And now I know why.

  Chapter 13

  When I was a tiny kid, I escaped from my crib, toddled out the cottage door, and climbed through the snow to the highest fell.

  It was a really strange thing to have done.

  Maybe I was chosen from the time I was born, and then I was called, and when I got to the highest fell the dragon gave me a tiny piece of its spark.

  Or maybe . . .

  Maybe even back then I was interested in dragons, and I went out into the snow, and up to the fell, and was half frozen, and the dragon gave me a bit of its spark to save me. To protect me, because that’s what dragons do.

  Or maybe both things happened: the dragon called me, and then it saved me.

  Either way . . .

  What I feel suddenly is a huge wave of relief. There is a reason why I’m so strange and different. Why I can’t be burned, why I can see in the dark, all of it. If the dragon really did call me, this is why. It’s all for something.

  The dragon has turned to look out over the wasteland toward the town of Coaldowns, which is a smudge of shadow and smoke under a sky heavy with clouds.

  “I’m supposed to . . . to save you,” I say, feeling like a foolish youngling even as I’m saying it. Me, a . . . What did the dragon call humans before? A small, soft thing. Me, a kid, and I’m supposed to save the dragons. “I can do that. Or try to do it.” Then I realize that I don’t even know where to start. “What should I do?” I ask it. “Where should I go? Should I keep trying to find the rest of the dragons? If I can save the dragons, will one of them help save my village?”

  The dragon sighs wearily, and a stream of dry-as-dust smoke puffs from its nostrils. The youngling will find the answers to its questions in Skarth.

  “Skarth?” I repeat.

  The city. The cliffs. Skarth. Go there.

  “All right,” I agree. “Will you come with me?”

  No, youngling, it pants. No. This dragon’s lair is here.

  Then slowly, painfully, its belly grating over the sharp rocks, it drags itself into its cave.

  Maud and I get about halfway down the dragon’s slicken heap when Maud trips on a chunk of rock and goes sprawling. “I’m all right,” she says.

  Quickly I go to her side and help her to her feet, still half expecting her to flinch away from me. But she doesn’t.

  Standing, Maud looks down at her palms, which are scraped and bloody. At the same moment, the clouds overhead decide they’ve been holding on to their burden long enough. Icy rain pours down around us; drops of blood mixed with rainwater and coal dust drip from her hands. “Drat,” she mutters, and wipes them off on her coat. “All right. Here’s what we’ll have to do.” She takes a deep breath, as if she’s steadying herself. “I left my bags and things at an inn outside of the Coaldowns. We’ll have a nice dinner and talk there.” She brightens. “I have so many questions for you.”

  Oh, I’ll bet she does.

  When we get to the bottom of the dragon’s slicken heap, Poppy is nowhere in sight. Worry about my goat gnaws at me, but I can’t linger here to search for her. We set off on a path that winds through the slickens and mullock heaps. Thunder grumbles overhead and the rain is a heavy, drenching curtain. The sun is close to setting, and the whole world looks gray and black and dismally wet.

  Maud hunches into her bulky coat. As we walk, she glances aside at me. “Aren’t you cold?”

  My first thought is to shake my head no, and tell her that cold doesn’t bother me. But instead, I lie. “Freezing,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself and hunching the way she is, as if I’m shivering.

  Suddenly Maud stops short. Her eyes are wide. “Wait!” she exclaims. “This is terrible.”

  My heart gives a lurch. It doesn’t matter that I lied—she’s realized about me being strange and different anyway. She’s going to say she doesn’t want me to go along with her to the inn after all.

  She turns to face me. Her teeth are chattering, and her face is wet with rain. “You’ve been so nice, and I entirely forgot to ask your name.”

  “Oh.” I feel a wave of relief. “My name’s Rafi, son of Jos the Weaver By-the-Water.”

  She beams. “Rafi Bywater. It’s a lovely name.”

  We keep walking, making a wide circle around the town. I check over my shoulder, looking for Poppy, but there’s no sign of her. Eventually we come out onto a soggy path through short, brown grass. To our right, in the distance, is the town, a black and sooty lump in the twilight; to our left, the land flattens into what looks like a boggy wasteland. After trudging for long enough that my stomach is grumbling about missing lunch and is starting to get annoyed about dinner, too, we get to an empty, muddy road. At its edge, Maud stops.

  She’s gray with tiredness, and her hazel eyes are shadowed. She’d been tied to that post on the mullock heap since yesterday, I realize, and despite her cheerfulness she must have been afraid at the same time, and now all of her strength has run out. “We go left here,” she says wearily. “The inn’s down this road a mile or two.” We turn onto the road. I can’t see anything in the distance except more rutted road
with the bog on each side of it. “I don’t know why they built the inn so far from Coaldowns,” Maud goes on. “Maybe because the air is so bad there from the mineworks. You’d think they’d have built the whole town farther away from the mines, really.” She chatters on as we walk, as if it’s the talking that is keeping her moving. Finally she looks ahead. “Oh! Here we are at last.”

  On one side of a wide, puddled courtyard is a big building that looks like a stable; next to it, set well back from the road, is a low, stone building with a row of windows along the front. The windows are brightly lit; people hurry through the rain from the stable to the inn’s front door. When it opens, I catch a glimpse of a big, crowded room. Scraps of laughter and talking leak out. I smile, thinking of a hot dinner in a merry, warm room.

  A room full of people.

  “Well, let’s go in,” Maud says with weary cheerfulness. “I can’t wait to get warmed up. I have extra dry clothes and shoes, too, and I think they’ll fit you.” She starts toward the inn.

  I don’t move.

  She turns and looks back at me. “Come on, Rafi,” she says.

  I shake my head. “I can’t go into places like this.”

  She frowns, glances at the inn, then back at me. “Don’t be silly. It’s an inn. They see all sorts here. It’ll be all right.”

  I hesitate. It’s also possible that Stubb and Gringolet have spread the news about the dragon-touched boy who they’re hunting for Mister Flitch.

  “They do a marvelous l-leveret pie,” Maud says, shivering. Her eyes have grown wide and water drips from the ends of her curly black hair, and I can see how much she needs to get in out of the rain and cold.

  “All right,” I agree after another moment. I can try not to be too noticeable.

  “Have you ever had leveret pie?” Maud asks as we cross the puddled courtyard.

  “I don’t even know what a leveret is,” I tell her. My stomach growls. We step onto a covered porch and then inside. Maud closes the door behind us.

  The low-ceilinged room is warm and crowded and smells of wet wool and sweat and of hot dinners. Men and women and a few children sit elbow to elbow at round tables. A bright fire burns in a hearth; coats and cloaks are spread on nearby chairs, steaming as they dry. The room is loud with talking and laughter. The floor under my bare feet is sticky, as if something was spilled on it and not cleaned up. I look carefully and see no sign of Stubb and Gringolet.

  “Be right with you, miss!” says a gray-haired woman, bustling past with a tray full of steaming bowls.

  Maud grins at me. “A leveret is a young rabbit, Rafi. They do it up in a pie with carrots and a lovely gravy.” She takes off her wet coat. “I think we should change first, then eat.” She eyes my bare feet. “Really, you must be freezing.”

  “Right, then,” the woman interrupts, bustling back, holding the empty tray under her arm, wiping her hands on her apron. She smiles at Maud. “We worried about you last night, miss, thinking you weren’t coming back for your things.”

  “That was very kind of you,” Maud answers brightly. “But there’s nothing to worry about. I got a little distracted by something, that’s all. I think we’ll go up to my room and change and then we’ll want dinner.”

  “And hot tea, I expect, on such a foul night,” the woman says. Her eyes move to me. The smile drops off her face. “And who might this be?”

  “This is Rafi Bywater,” Maud says. “Is there any of that delicious pie left from the other night?”

  “No-o-o,” the woman says, still staring at me. Slowly she looks me up and down, head to foot. “No, I don’t think so. Alva,” the woman calls over her shoulder. She raises a hand to keep us standing where we are.

  From across the crowded room, a woman’s deep voice answers, “What is it, Lil?”

  The talking and laughing have quieted; people are turning to look at us.

  A big woman with muscled arms comes to stand next to the innkeeper, who asks, “What do you make of that one?” She points at me.

  I know what she’s thinking. Different means dangerous.

  Alva’s eyes narrow as she examines me. “Looks like trouble, Lil.”

  “Well then, you can stay, miss, as before,” the innkeeper says to Maud. “But he can’t come in here.”

  Maud blinks. “What? Whyever not?”

  “It’s all right,” I say to her in a low voice. “You go up and change and have dinner. I’ll go outside.”

  “No, it’s not all right,” Maud says loudly. “You’ll freeze to death out there. It’s completely unfair.” She turns to the innkeepers. “I’ve paid for my room, and I’ve plenty of money for dinner, too.”

  “Put him out, Alva.” Lil jerks her chin at the door.

  The big woman reaches over and grabs my arm; she opens the door and shoves me out. “Be off with you,” she orders. “And stay out of the stable, too.” From inside I hear Maud’s high voice shouting and other angry voices, and then the door slams shut.

  Night has fallen. The courtyard is empty. I stumble off the porch and the rain pounds on the top of my head, streaming down my face. The bright, happy windows of the inn stare at me. For a minute I just stand there. The little flame inside of me dies down until it’s the tiniest spark.

  Slowly I trudge away from the inn. At least I know that I am this way—different—for a reason. That’s something, I tell myself. I’ve reached the edge of the road when the inn door opens, and then slams closed. I hear footsteps splashing across the courtyard and turn to see Maud, wearing her bulky wet coat again, a heavy leather bag slung over each shoulder.

  “What horrible, horrible people,” she says, and shoves one of the bags at me.

  I take it and stand there staring at her.

  “Really!” she says, and she’s practically vibrating with fury. “I wouldn’t want to stay at such a place, not after such a display. How dare they!”

  Her anger gets her a mile down the road, back toward Coaldowns, but then she stumbles on a rut in the road, and I catch her arm before she lands in a puddle.

  “Drat,” she mutters, and stands with her shoulders hunched. “What a mess.”

  “It’s all right,” I say. Gently I take the other bag from her and put it over my shoulder. “We have to keep going.”

  “Yes, I know,” she says. She shivers. “Rafi, you are the nicest person I’ve ever met in my entire life.”

  I blink. Her cheeks are flushed, and she’s shaking with cold. “I think maybe you have a fever,” I tell her.

  I lead us on through the night. When we get closer to Coaldowns I find a path leading off the main road—we can’t go into the town, we’d just end up as propitiations again, and this time maybe they’d poison us first. I blink raindrops out of my eyes and peer ahead. The path leads away from the flat bogland and winds into steep, rocky hills. “This way,” I tell her, and we start climbing. When Maud stumbles again, I take her hand and lead her on.

  She’s definitely feverish, and too tired to go any farther. I brush wet rat-tails of hair out of my eyes and peer through the rain. A bit higher up the hill, across the slope from us, is a dark shape, blurred by the heavy mist. Shelter, maybe. “Just a little longer,” I tell her.

  When we get to it, I find that the dark shape is an old sheep shed with three walls made of piled stone and a soggy thatched roof that is half fallen in. A corner of it is out of the rain and wind. Maud has gone silent. I prop her against one wall and pull a bundle of wet straw away from that corner, and make a dry nest with the moldy straw that remains. “Come on,” I tell Maud, and lead her inside. I take off her wet coat, help her sit in the straw, and cover her up again with the coat. I crouch before her and rest the back of my hand against her forehead. Yes, she’s hot with fever.

  “Aren’t you c-c-cold?” she asks, gripping the collar of the coat and shivering.

  I nod, another lie, and give a pretend shiver. “And hungry,” I add. “And worried about my goat.”

  “Oh, your poor goat, out in
this wretched weather,” she says sadly.

  For a moment I watch her, huddled under the damp coat, shuddering with cold. I’ve spent all my life looking after my da, so I know how to take care of her. I check in my sack, but all I’ve got is a rind of cheese, Old Shar’s book, my knife, and my tin cup. Until the rain lets up, there’s nothing else I can do for her.

  No, wait. I still have a spark inside me, and it always keeps me warm. It can keep her warm, too. Pushing aside the hay, I settle next to Maud and pull the coat over us both. My warmth spreads and I feel her give a last shiver and then go still. She sighs and her head drops onto my shoulder as she falls asleep.

  Chapter 14

  Later, a maaaaah wakes me up. It’s the middle of the night. Maud is still asleep beside me in the hay. Poppy stands at the edge of our shelter. Seeing her, my heart lifts. Beside her is another goat, one that’s taller and bonier and not as furry, with long lop-ears. A thing about goats is that they never want to be the only goat. They want to be part of a herd, and to a goat, even just two goats counts as a herd.

  I climb out from under the coat, making sure it’s tucked well around Maud, and step outside the shelter. The rain has stopped and the clouds have pulled away, but the stars are hidden behind a pall of sooty smoke that rises up from the Coaldowns in the distance.

  I wonder if the time dragon is all right, and if the townspeople came looking for Maud, and what they did when they didn’t find her at the stake. Maybe they think the dragon ate her.

  I crouch to inspect Poppy. Maaah, maaaah, she says, half glad to see me, half eager to be milked. The other goat pokes his nose in, curious. “Hello,” I whisper, and reach out to touch one of his soft ears. “Where did you come from?”

  Maaaah, Poppy insists.

  “All right,” I whisper, and I go back into the shed and dig in the sack for the tin cup. After squeezing out a cup of Poppy’s warm, sweet milk, I drink it, and then I get another one and carry it carefully into the shelter.