Dragonfell

by Sarah Prineas

  Or to stay with her.

  It feels like the biggest, most important decision I’ve ever had to make. The silence stretches out between us.

  I will never, ever forget what Maud said when I asked her to tell me what she saw when she looked at me. She saw a friend. “You know,” I say slowly, at last. “If we’re going to warn the glass dragon about Mister Flitch, we’d better get started as soon as we can.”

  “Oh, Rafi.” She rubs the tears off her face and gives me a smile as glorious as a sunrise. “You are the best friend, and I adore you.”

  I smile back at her, and it’s a real smile, not a frightening one, and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter that I’ve kept my secrets from her, and it doesn’t matter about Maud lying about her father, and who knows what else, because Maud is my friend, a true friend to me, and I will always be true to her.

  Chapter 22

  Maud, it turns out, is a thief, too.

  As we head out of the alley, she shows me a little leather bag that she stole from Mister Flitch’s—from her father’s—office.

  “Gold, of course,” she says with a sigh. “We’ll be able to buy supplies.” She pauses at the edge of a street and cocks her head, listening. In the distance is the sound of shouting. Gringolet and Stubb. “We’d better hide.”

  Creeping through the darkest alleys, the goats following, we make our way back to the riverfront.

  “I don’t think we can stay here for very long,” Maud says when we’ve climbed back up the cliff to the Skarth dragon’s lair. She flops down on the sand and lets out a weary sigh. “Do you know, Rafi?”

  “Do I know what?” Settling on the sand beside her, I dig in a bag for a candle. When lit, the cave glows like a bowl of warm golden light. The books are stacked all around us. There’s no sign of the Skarth dragon.

  “You have all these . . . things about you that are strange,” Maud says. “Do you know what you are?”

  I nod, and take a deep breath. It’s time to tell her. “I’m dragon-touched.”

  She sits up. “Dragon-touched? I’ve never heard of such a thing.” She pulls her notebook out of her coat pocket. “And trust me, I’ve read everything there is to read about dragons. Hm. All your special powers. I suppose it makes sense.”

  “Does it?” I ask.

  “Yes, of course it does,” she says, and she sounds certain sure about it. “It’s rather, well—” She shakes her head.

  I give a weary nod. Strange, she’s going to say. Or frightening.

  “Well, you know,” she goes on. “It’s amazing.”

  “What?” I say, gaping at her.

  She bursts out laughing. “Rafi, your special powers mean you can’t be burned by a dragon’s flames, and you wouldn’t freeze in a cold mountain lair. And you can understand dragon speech. I’ve been studying dragons for practically my entire life, and I’ve read every book about dragons that I could find, but I’ll never be a friend to dragons the way you are. Don’t you see how lucky you are, and how wonderful it is?”

  “Wonderful enough to get me blamed for a fire I didn’t set,” I say. “And sent away from my village, and hunted by Gringolet and Stubb.”

  “Yes, but look at the adventure you’re having—that we are having. It’s so much better than being cooped up in a—well, in a place where you don’t want to be, being told how to dress and how to talk, and having a father who is, well . . .” She trails off. “Anyway, let me ask you this. How do you explain the goats?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. I like goats, that’s all. And they like me.”

  “That is most definitely not all,” she mutters, reading over a page in her book.

  “There is more that I haven’t told you,” I say, and while she sits watching me with her hazel eyes gleaming with interest, I tell her about how the dragon called me to the highest fells when I was little, how it gave me a tiny spark—

  “A spark?” she interrupts. Then her mouth drops open. “I saw it! Deep in your eyes when I looked, remember?”

  I nod and tell her the rest of the story she interrupted, how the dragon burned my da’s leg so badly, but didn’t burn me.

  Maud gives me a wide-eyed, solemn look. “Your da must be afraid of dragons.” Then she asks the question that I’ve never wanted to ask myself. “If you’re dragon-touched, Rafi, is he afraid of you, too?”

  “I don’t know. He might be, a little,” I admit. “But he loves me.” I glance up at her. “I’m certain sure of that.”

  “My father—” She frowns. “My father is the reason I became so interested in dragons. I knew that he was obsessed with them. But I didn’t know about that room. I didn’t know that he collected . . .” Her face looks very sad. “Rafi,” she says, and her voice shakes a bit.

  “Maud,” I say quietly.

  “Oh drat, I’m going to cry again,” she mutters, blinking away tears. “Rafi, when you talk about your da . . .” She shakes her head. “Me and my father . . . we aren’t like that. He doesn’t love me the way your da loves you.”

  I get up and go to sit next to her and put my arm around her. She turns her face into my shoulder, and a moment later she’s crying, and my coat is getting wet with her tears. “Dragons,” she sobs. “My own father is killing dragons, Rafi. He’s taking their scales and their talons, and their eggs, and their hoards. All those beautiful dragon-flies. Why?” she wails. “Why is he doing it?”

  Her crying makes me feel like crying, too. I miss Da. I miss my village. I don’t want anybody to be afraid of me. I just want to go home.

  After a few more sniffles, Maud sits up and wipes the tears off her face with the palm of her hand, and then blows her nose on her sleeve. I give her a look, and she gives me a watery smile.

  Without thinking about it, I shift to face in the direction of the Dragonfell.

  Maud nods. “You do that a lot, you know. Turn toward home.”

  “I always know where it is,” I say.

  “Fascinating,” she murmurs, and because she is Maud, and always thinking, she opens her red notebook and writes something down. Then she rubs her eyes. “Rafi, why, exactly, is my father hunting you?”

  “He knows I’m dragon-touched,” I tell her. “He wants my spark.”

  “Why?” she demands. “What for? What will he do with it?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, shaking my head. “Gringolet said he wants me to choose between keeping my spark and saving my village. But it’s not really a fair choice.” In my coat pocket I still have the paper that Stubb and Gringolet nailed up outside the tavern in Barrow. Taking it out, I hand it to her.

  She unfolds the paper and reads what it says. “My goodness. That’s a lot of money.”

  “A reward?” I ask her. “For whoever captures me?”

  “Oh, that’s right, you can’t read it,” she says. “It says Rafi Bywater, wanted for arson—that’s burning things down—in the village of Dragonfell.” She reads on. “Dangerous character, and so on. Doesn’t say anything about you being dragon-touched.” She refolds the paper and gives it back to me. “It’s not a very good picture of you.”

  After working for a bit longer, she yawns and mumbles to herself as she reads over what she’s been writing. She’s drooping with tiredness, but her brain is still going like a coal-powered steam engine. I wonder if it ever stops, even when she’s asleep. She must have exciting dreams.

  She looks up at me, then she blinks, as if she’s seeing again how strange my face is. “Rafi, hand over the other book. I want to take a look at the map, and then . . .” She glances at her notebook. “I forget what I was going to say.”

  “You’ll remember when you wake up,” I say, and hand her a ragged blanket. “You can look at the map in the morning.” Taking the blanket, she lies down on the sandy floor. Her eyes drop shut, and a moment later she’s asleep. I put the candle out.

  And then I wait. The stillness of the night settles around me. Without the candlelight, the cave is like a bubble of night and silen
ce, except for the soft snores that Maud makes when she’s sleeping.

  A short time later, the ribbon of darkness that is the Skarth dragon flies in through the cave opening. It swoops around to land on a tall stack of books nearby, and peers down at me.

  Searchers, it says.

  I nod. Gringolet and Stubb know we’re here in the city, somewhere. I feel a prickle of fear. “We’ll leave soon,” I tell the Skarth dragon. We still have a few hours until dawn, enough time for Maud to sleep. I pull the small book out of my coat pocket. “We found it in a hidden room in Flitch’s office. Did you know about his collection?”

  As an answer, the dragon drops off its pile of books and slithers through the air, and a second later I feel the pinpricks of its tiny claws as it lands on my arm. Clinging to my coat sleeve, it crawls toward my hand, which is holding the book. It wraps around my wrist, then snorts out a puff of smoke.

  Yes… know about Flitch’s collection. It fixes me with an intense stare.

  I think back to the moment when I first met Mister Flitch, outside Old Shar’s house in my village. He looked deep into my eyes, and he recognized what I am.

  I shiver, thinking about the tiny dragon-flies pinned in the display case in Flitch’s collection room.

  Flitch hunts dragons. He collects them.

  And now he’s hunting me.

  In the hour before dawn, I light the candle and then wake Maud up.

  “What?” she says, her voice fuzzy with sleep.

  “Time to go,” I tell her.

  “Oh!” She sits up, blinking, and gives me an almost shy smile. “Good morning. I want to look at the map.”

  “We don’t have time for that now,” I tell her. “The dragon says men are out searching for us. Stubb and Gringolet, probably.”

  “Probably,” Maud agrees. “But there are just two of them, and it’s a big city. We can evade them, I think.” She picks up the dragon book from the sandy floor and opens it, then folds out the map. “Come look at this.” She points to the map, which is only a blur to me. “We’ll have to stop for supplies, then get out of the city and head north. The map shows a place called the Ur-Lair, and a note here says that’s where the glass dragon lives.”

  “Ur-Lair,” I repeat.

  “Yes, Ur-Lair,” she says again happily. “It’s a wonderful word, isn’t it? The book says it’s like the original place of dragons. It should be about five days from here.”

  I glance toward the Skarth dragon, who is perched on its books, watching us. “And when we get to the Ur-Lair, and warn the glass dragon, it will help us stop Mister Flitch from collecting dragons, and killing them.”

  Maud gives a determined nod. “That’s right. We’ll learn everything we need to know about dragons there, I should think.”

  “There’s one thing I’m worried about,” I tell her.

  “Only one?” she asks, and raises her eyebrows.

  “One other thing,” I correct myself. “We’ve seen Gringolet and Stubb, but we haven’t seen Mister Flitch. Where is he?”

  “He does travel around a lot,” Maud says. “To different towns and factories.” She blinks several times. “And he must have been hunting dragons, too, all those times he was away.”

  “Anyway, if he’s not here, then he might be making trouble somewhere else,” I say. “He did threaten my village.”

  “So we need to hurry,” Maud concludes.

  “Yes, we do,” I agree. Leaning out the cave opening in the cliff, I look down, checking to be sure it’s safe to leave. The stony bank of the river glimmers in the last of the night. The goats are there, fuzzy lumps bunched together. Only Gruff is awake, standing guard over the others.

  From its perch on a pile of books, the Skarth dragon watches us with eyes that are like pinpoints of flame.

  “Thank you,” I say to it.

  Farewell, it says, and snorts out a puff of smoke. Farewell, Rafi of Dragonfell.

  Farewell feels like an ending, as if I’ll never see the Skarth dragon again.

  During the night, while Maud was sleeping, it hopped onto my knee and fixed me with an intense stare.

  Youngling Rafi. It cocked its head and studied me. Is end of dragons coming.

  “I know,” I told it. “I promise I’ll do whatever I can to stop it.”

  There was a long silence.

  When the dragon spoke again, its voice sounded faded and weary. Is likely that the end of dragons will be end of Rafi, too.

  And I knew it was right.

  Chapter 23

  While it’s still dark, Maud and I climb from the cave down to the riverbank. I greet Elegance and Gruff and Fluffy, who’s even fatter than ever, and I milk Poppy, and then we set off. It’s still early enough, we figure, that we’ll be able to sneak through the city, maybe stop to buy supplies, and be away on the road before Stubb and Gringolet can track us down.

  We’re wrong.

  We reach the docks, which are just waking up. A man carrying a barrel gives us an odd look as we climb from the riverside path to the waterfront, followed by the goats. We pass a crane and a dark warehouse, and we’re about to step out onto a street lined with shops.

  “Maybe we can knock on a shop door,” Maud is saying, “and they’ll open early to sell us the supplies we need.” Then her eyes grow wide, and she grabs my arm and drags me into a shadowed alley. The goats bunch in behind me.

  Maaaaah, Poppy complains.

  “Shhhh,” Maud hisses, and points.

  Coming around a street corner about a block away is someone we know. Stubb. He’s carrying a lantern that lights up the street, and he’s leading a group of ten burly men and women. Stubb gives an order, and two men head down one street, and three more break off and go the other way. They all look keenly alert, and some of them are carrying clubs.

  Maud gulps. “Rafi, those people work at my father’s factory.”

  I see what she’s saying. “They’re hunting for us. How many people work for him?”

  “Oh my goodness,” Maud whispers. “Hundreds. Thousands.” She gives her head a worried shake. “They’ll be all over the city soon.”

  “Then we’d better get out of here,” I say.

  Carefully, quietly, we make our way back to the waterfront, where we sneak onto the path that runs along the river, followed by the goats. The high cliff glows white in the first light of dawn. Our feet crunch over the sand and stones.

  As we walk, the cliff gets lower, and the river makes a wide turn, and as the sun rises, turning the sky gray and then pink, the city is hidden behind us. We get onto a path that winds between patches of swampland. The goats go along complaining, maaah, maaaah, maaaaaaaah.

  “I am soooo hungry,” Maud complains, and then laughs. “Is that what the goats are saying?”

  “No,” I answer. “They don’t like the squishy ground under their hooves.”

  We walk farther until the path ends at a raised road that is paved with stone blocks.

  “There you are, goats,” Maud says. “You’ll like this better.”

  She’s right. After checking in both directions, we climb onto the road, the goats prancing now that they have a hard surface to walk on. The city is behind us. The swamp is on one side of the road; frozen fields are on the other, and in the distance, there are farmhouses and barns. There is a deep purple smudge in the distance. “Hills,” I say, pointing. “And there’s a mountain, too, beyond that.” I know Maud can’t see it, but I can. It rises beyond the hills, a gleaming white spire just over the horizon.

  “You know, Rafi,” Maud says. “We really rather desperately need supplies. And you might not feel the cold, but if we’re going up a mountain I’m going to need a warmer coat and mittens and a hat. We’ll have to stop in the first town we come to.”

  I don’t like it, but I can’t deny that she’s right. “Maybe not the first town,” I tell her, “just in case Gringolet has sent more of your father’s workers after us.”

  Maud bites her lip and looks away. “R
afi . . . ,” she begins.

  I wait.

  “Rafi, I want you to not call him my ‘father.’ Just call him ‘Mister Flitch,’ all right?” She gives one of her quicksilver smiles. “But you’re right. We’ll have to be careful.” Her eyes start to sparkle. “In fact, I think we’ll have to have disguises.”

  We walk along the road, keeping an eye out for anybody coming, and argue about how we’re going to get into a town, buy supplies, and get out again, without being spotted. Even if Mister Flitch’s hunters aren’t in a town, I tell her, he must have had Gringolet and Stubb put up those notices with my picture on them, and I can’t disguise what I am.

  “Not to mention the goats,” Maud adds. “They’re a sure giveaway. I’ll have to go into the town myself, and you can wait for me outside.”

  We’re sitting on a grassy bank beside the road, eating the last of the dried fruit that was in the package the Skarth dragon gave us. While Maud scratches Fluffy’s nose, I climb to the top of the bank and have a look around. My farseeing eyes don’t even have to see that far—there’s a place to buy supplies just ahead.

  “There’s a town around a bend in the road,” I tell Maud, sliding down the bank to sit beside her.

  “Oh, good,” she says, giving Fluffy one more pat. “This is the fattest goat I have ever seen.” Then she opens one of her bags and starts rooting around in it. “Ah,” she says, and pulls out a pair of sewing scissors, which she hands to me.

  “What am I supposed to do with these?” I ask.

  “My disguise,” she says, way too cheerfully. “Cut my hair. I’m going to be a boy. Make it short so there’s no curl left.”

  When I’m finished cutting, she’s left with a ragged black fringe that makes her hazel eyes look huge in her face. She bends and scrapes up some dirt from the ground and rubs it over her nose and cheeks to hide her freckles. Then she stands, puts on my cap, raises her chin, and folds her arms. “What do you think?”

  Even with her hair chopped off and her face smudged with dirt, she’s way prettier than any boy. “You don’t even want to know,” I tell her, climbing to my feet.