by E. P. Clark
9
It was morning. How did I know? I was underground. But I knew. Lying there on the dirty stone floor, my wrists hurting more than I thought it was possible to hurt from where they had cut me over and over again, twitching uncontrollably and feeling like I was falling even though I was already lying on the ground, I knew it was morning.
I sat up. I still felt like I was falling, like I was sinking into the ground and straight down to Hell, but I wasn’t. I was sitting upright. Everything seemed too bright and too loud and too far away, but I was sitting. And then I was standing. On a floor that was dropping away beneath me and taking me to some terrible, terrible place, but standing nonetheless. When Lord Hei and the other two men came to my door, I looked out through the bars at them.
“Give me the blood,” I said.
The shorter of the two men, the one who always forced the blood into my mouth, sniggered. “See,” he said. “She’s learned to like it, just like I told you.”
“Give me the blood,” I told them. “I will take it.”
Both the men sniggered. Lord Hei frowned. “Are you sure, Laela?” he said. “You still seem weak. You won’t drop it?”
“No,” I said. “I won’t. Give me the blood.”
“Here.” Lord Hei retrieved a small cloth-wrapped vial from the pocket over his heart. “It is the last dose. Let me...will you let me give it to you, Laela?”
“I will. I will let you give it to me. But you can’t take any more of my blood. You’ve already taken enough.”
Lord Hei looked over at the other two men, who shrugged. “She’s right,” said the one who always handled the blood. “We’ve already taken more than enough. Just give her the last dose, and be done with it.”
Lord Hei stepped into the cell with me. He had to reach up to pour the blood into my mouth. He stroked my cheek with his other hand as he did so.
“You feel so warm, Laela,” he said. “So warm. And soft. I thought you would feel hard, like stone or bone. What color do you think you will be?”
“Black,” I told him. “Like a curtain of midnight. Or red as blood. White as bone, green as grass, blue as the sky.”
He nodded. “All will be beautiful.” He slid his fingers through the tips of my hair. “What do you think?” he asked. “Are you ready to come out? Come out and meet my court?”
“I am,” I told him. “But I should wash first.”
“It shall be done.” And in short order three women came and got me and led me out of the cell and up—I wavered and clutched at the wall as I climbed, but I did not fall—to a bedchamber, where they bathed me in steaming hot water and put me in a clean gown, finer than anything I had ever touched before, and changed the dressings on my wrists. The wounds were healing cleanly and quickly, faster than they should have. The healing skin shimmered in the light like snakeskin. When they were done washing and dressing me, my head was as light as air, and I floated after them back down the stairs and into the keep’s great hall.
The keep’s great hall was not that great. It was in keeping with the size of the rest of the keep. Lord Hei was a small lord of a little valley. What did he want with a dragon? To have one, and no longer be the small lord of a little valley. I floated after the serving women to the head of a small table at one end of the hall, and sat down beside Lord Hei.
“You are so beautiful, Laela,” he said. “So beautiful. I did not even realize how beautiful you are. This gown”—he fingered the velvet gown I had been dressed in—“is not fine enough for you. You should be in the finest silk and jewels money can buy. And you will be.”
“You are too kind,” I said.
“We will only be a small, intimate”—his eyes gleamed—“group this evening. But that is fitting, do you not agree?”
“It is fitting,” I agreed.
“And, look! A guest. An admirer of yours, come to ensure your safety.”
The men who had cut me and forced the blood down my throat came into the hall, dragging someone between them. It was Joki. He looked even shabbier than before, and his puffy face was bloody and swollen with bruises as well as drink.
“You see what ardent devotion you inspire, Laela,” said Lord Hei, and stroked my drying hair, which had been left to float free like a shimmering curtain down past my waist. He ran his fingers through it all the way to the end, his hand coming to rest on my hip.
“Get your hands off her!” screamed Joki.
Lord Hei kissed the side of my neck, as the two men punched Joki several times in the stomach.
“She prefers me to you, doesn’t she? She spurned your touch, but she won’t spurn mine. Will you, Laela? Do you have anything to say to your former captor?”
“Yes,” I said. “Have him brought up to me.”
“He is dirty, my love.”
“Soon you will wash me clean. Have him brought up to me.”
The two men dragged him up to me, letting him sag to his knees at my feet.
“I think you have something for me,” I said. “A wand. Give me the wand.”
“Laela! You don’t mean to stay with these...bandits.” Joki groaned as the men kicked him in the ribs. “And it’s not yours to take anyway.”
“Give it to me, and I will free you.”
“See what a queen she is already!” said Lord Hei, squeezing my hip and running his hand down my thigh. “Give it to her, old man, and I will let you live.”
“Give it to me,” I repeated. “And you will live, and go free. I need it, so that you can go free.”
“Laela...” Joki gave me a long look in the face. Then he shrugged as best he could, pinned as he was down on the floor. “Very well. Let me up, you two, and I will give it to her. Consider it a gift,” he said, as he struggled to his feet and pulled a slender bundle out from under his shirt. “A gift to mark your transformation. I can see it has already taken place.” He placed the bundle, which was warm from where it had rested against his breast, and warmer still from what was inside it, in my hand.
“What is it?” asked Lord Hei, leaning over my shoulder with bright-eyed interest.
“A dragonbone wand,” I told him. “Only those with the blood can touch it.”
“Oh...” Lord Hei clutched at my thigh in excitement as I unrolled the faded piece of velvet and took out the wand.
“It is beautiful, but we will make it more beautiful,” he told me. “So that it will be fit for you to wield.”
“Truly?” I asked. His eyes were shining. I let my eyes shine back at him, and bit my lip. My teeth were sharper than they had ever been, sharp enough to draw blood just from their touch. “Truly? Then kiss me, my love. You have given me so much; I would repay you.”
He bent his head closer and pressed his lips eagerly to mine, his tongue seeking to part them. I let him, and then, when he stiffened, held him hard against me. When he tried to pull away, my sharp fingernails dug into his arms and pulled him close, and when he tried to scream, I kissed him harder. The others in the hall laughed and cheered at his passion.
When I released him, he fell to the floor, his mouth scalded and blistered, blood running down his chin. “Kissing dragons is a dangerous business,” I told him. I stood. “Come, Joki. Let us leave. I have somewhere I must be.”
Lord Hei tried to shout orders with his burned and bitten tongue. The two men tried to grab me, but I pressed the dragonbone wand against them, and they fell back, skin blistering. Servants came running up, looked at me, and stopped, making no move to detain me.
The wand felt so right in my hand. Warm and alive and an inseparable part of me, as hot as the rage inside me. I thought about spitting the blood that was still filling my mouth onto Lord Hei, onto the men who had held me down and hurt me, onto the servants who had fetched and carried and done nothing to help me. The rage said that would be right. The rage said there was more than dragon blood rising within me: there was dragon fire too, and the wand would help me unleash it. I could point the wand wherever I willed, and fire would leap fro
m blood to bone and then explode into air, burning all in its path. I would burn down this keep of Hell and all those who lived inside it, till there was nothing left but ash that would float free in the wind.
“Run, Laela,” said Joki. He had gone down on one knee, and was clutching at his side. He spat blood on the floor. His blood was not the shimmering, glowing red of mine, but it was red nonetheless, red as fire as it slid over his sharp teeth. “Don’t wait for me, just run. Run, Laela, RUN!”
“You run too,” I said, and grabbed him by the collar and hauled him to his feet and ran, dragging him behind me, down the keep and out the door and across the yard and out the gate to the cold, free, clear open air.
“To the left,” he gasped as we cleared the gate. A guard made to stop me, but I raised the wand, and he jumped back behind the wall before I could even attempt to use the wand against him.
“To the left,” Joki gasped. “Tähti is waiting for us there.”
We ran down a small slope to a grove of trees, where Tähti was waiting for us, still harnessed to the cart.
“I came for you, Laela,” Joki said. “I came for you.”
“You did,” I said. I lifted him up into the cart and thrust the reins into his hands. “Now drive! And I will keep up with you.”
10
We went as fast as Tähti could go, with me easily keeping pace beside the rattling cart. We stopped only when Tähti’s sides were heaving, and dark had settled over the road. I found us a resting place, and unharnessed Tähti and rubbed him down and fed and watered him, and prepared food for Joki and myself, and treated Joki’s wounds as best I could.
“You know,” he told me as I cleaned his bruises and bound his ribs, “dragon blood has healing power.”
“You already have dragon blood within you,” I said.
“But you could give me more. Do to me what you did to Lord Hei. For me it would be healing, not burning.”
“Where’s the vial?” I asked. “The one you were using on me. Take some for yourself.”
“There’s not enough.”
“There’s still a swallow or two left, surely.”
“No. I mean in the whole world. There’s not enough dragon blood left in the whole world for me to waste what little we have on me. But you could change that, Laela! I saw your blood as it ran from your mouth. It shimmered like the true blood of a real dragon, not the watered-down version that I and the rest of us are.”
“So what?” I asked. “Are you going to milk me for my blood?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. “No, of course not, Laela, of course not!” said Joki, a little too late.
“Very well,” I said, after another uncomfortable silence. “Hand me that knife.”
My wrists were still only half-healed, and I did not want to give Joki more than a drop of my blood anyway. I pricked my thumb and placed it in his mouth, and he sucked it as eagerly as a babe at the breast until I pulled it away.
“Go to sleep now,” I told him, binding up the cut. “Sleep is healing. I will keep watch in case they come for us.”
Joki fell asleep without even attempting to object. I sat by the fire and looked out into the darkness.
11
When morning came, Joki arose fresh and hale as a man in the first flush of youth, and helped me into the cart, where I shivered and shook and gripped the sides, convinced I was flying or falling. My fever lasted all that day, and the day after that and the day after that. When it broke, the wounds on my wrists were gone as if they had never been, and my strength was the same as it had always been, no lesser, but no greater either.
“Was it all for nothing?” I asked Joki, looking at the smooth tan skin of my wrists. “Was all that pain and fear and change for nothing?”
“The blood is still within you, Laela,” he assured me. “Something like that always leaves its marks. The change has already taken place, and you will never be the same person you were before, even if you no longer bear the signs on your skin. It is still within you, and you will carry it with you forever.”
“I will,” I agreed, and got out of the cart and walked beside it on the uphill in order to spare Tähti my weight.
We climbed and climbed and went over passes where winter had long left autumn behind, and down into deep dark valleys that had an evil shadow to them even at midday, and wound back and forth on serpentine paths barely wide enough for our cart, watching as the rocks we dislodged went tumbling down into the depths below.
One day, when the air was keen and thin and smelled of snow and danger, we came to a little stone settlement in a small cleft between high peaks. There was a gate across the path, and a man stepped out of the squat tower that was guarding it.
“Joki,” he said. “Whom have you brought us?” He squinted at me. “Pretty isn’t enough,” he said. “They have to have the blood too, to be allowed up there.” He waved at a long line of stone stairs, leading off into heights hidden from our eyes.
“Show him, Laela,” said Joki, and handed me the dragonbone wand. I twirled it between my fingers, feeling its warm lightness, like a living feather, straining to fly away and take me with it.
“I see,” said the man. This time his squint had an air of respect, and he stepped back and opened the gate. “Welcome to Dragon’s Forge,” he said.