Dragon Soul (3 page)

That made it even fucking worse—knowing it was my fault and not knowing how to get rid of it. Sure, I could just fucking leave him where he was. He’d probably find his way back to Thremedon, eventually, where all the walkways were paved and you couldn’t spit without hitting a building, and there were as many books in the libraries as there were people in the city. He’d be in his element again, talking to professors
and experts, coughing up theories, and never going to any of the places he was chattering about.

I closed my eyes. The water was starting to get cold and I was starting to get pruny. The fucking braids in my hair took forever to dry, especially in the countryside, and especially at night, when everything got damp as—well, as fucking horses.

But I didn’t want to go outside and deal with the gravy, and I certainly didn’t want to go downstairs and deal with the bitch who’d made the gravy. I had an itch that fucking couldn’t fix and fucking would only aggravate it. And it wasn’t thinking of Thom getting in my way, or thinking of the problems it’d cause, or thinking of anybody’s
feelings
that was stopping me, either.

Point was, I just didn’t fucking want to. And that’d never happened before.

“Don’t expect you to believe me, but one day, Airman Rook, you’ll appreciate things beyond rutting with the loudest girls Our Lady has to offer,” Chief Sergeant Adamo’d said once, back when he was still Chief Sergeant and before he turned into some kind of fucking professor on us. Or so Thom’s letters said; I hadn’t wanted to stick around long enough to see what the boys did with themselves after the war, and Chief Sergeant Adamo turning professor on us was one of the reasons. At least it didn’t bother me to think about Adamo the way it did some of the others, and anyway I had bigger fucking problems right now than feeling squirrelly over the guys who were long past feeling anything at all. Anyway, I didn’t see as how what Adamo had said could be it at all, since I wasn’t even halfway toward appreciating any of the things we’d seen so far. We were moving too damn slow.

In fact, I didn’t remember any of our journey, excepting that time we’d taken the shortcut and the horse’d spooked and sent Thom straight into the blueberry bushes. Wasn’t the same as a handprint on his face and
he
sure as shit didn’t appreciate the memories as much as I did, but it’d kept me laughing all the way to that night’s inn.

But that “incident”—which was what he called it—had all been a couple of weeks back. After trading horses—what kind of an idiot could keep his hold on a
dragon
and not a horse, I wanted to know—I was getting mighty sick of traveling with the forgotten thirteenth wonder of the world: my fucking brother, the talking blueberry.

I twisted the braids back from my face—only thing more fucking
annoying than damp hair was that same hair hanging in my eyes—and braced myself for whatever barrage of questions lay waiting for me on the other side of the door.

On a full stomach, Thom’s brain was more daunting than the entire bastion-damned Ke-Han capital laid out bare and blue. I opened the door.

“She bring the food up yet?” I asked. Talking first was the only way to get the drop on him and it was near on fucking impossible to get a word in edgewise unless you came out swinging.

Fortunately, I had a lot of experience there.

He was writing, so of course he didn’t answer me right away, which was just another layer of icing on the fucking cake. We’d been through this before and he said it broke the flow of whatever he was writing and that he had to get his sentences down first before he forgot them, or the point he was making. Damn waste of my time is what I called it, and
he
was the one who got mad when I started throwing things to get his attention.

“Whatever,” I said, tucking in my shirt, then untucking it again, which pissed me off because I didn’t know why I’d done it in the first place. “Fine. Don’t let up on chronicling your fucking eating tour of Volstov’s piss-poorest inns. Guess you won’t miss me when I drop dead of starvation.”

The gobbler made a funny sound, almost like a snore, and his head drooped lower to the desk. I couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t been writing at all. He’d fucking fallen asleep.

“Guess you weren’t that eager for a bath after all,” I said, taking the liberty of moving the tray so he wouldn’t wake up with his face in it.

It took a special kind of witless moron to fall asleep with his head on a plateful of turkey, but that was my brother for you. At least he hadn’t gotten any gravy in his hair, except that saving grace was only because he’d taken the liberty of eating it all first.

I cracked my neck and pulled a jacket on over my shirt. Looked like I was gonna have to brave the wilderness of downstairs without him. What a fucking shame. With any luck the bitch’d stay in her room, waiting for my grand appearance—her getting ready for it was probably why she hadn’t brought us our second dinner—and meanwhile I could have myself a real night off.

She’d gone and told me where she’d be, after all, so I knew just what to avoid.

Of course, helpful little priss hadn’t told me anything useful, like where the kitchens might be, but unlike some people, I was resourceful. I followed my nose.

The common area was about as crowded as I’d been expecting, full of bearded men and their wives—who were less noticeably bearded, but not exactly picks of the litter, either. The conversation died down a little when I showed up, which was just fucking peachy by me since the last thing I wanted was someone striking up a conversation about my hair while I was trying to choke down a late fucking dinner.

I sat down on my lonesome, pretty set on avoiding anything that had both turkey and gravy since I’d seen and smelled enough of that for one night. I was far enough away from people that they’d know to keep their distance, but the whole place was small enough that I’d still have to listen to them talking.

That was fine. I’d tuned out raid sirens to sleep, so I could tune these bastards out.

“Let me
see
it, just once. I’ve always been so curious,” said one of the travelers’ wives. She was wearing some sort of bonnet over her hair, which was—according to the walking encyclopedia peacefully making drool stains on his travel log upstairs—a sign of chastity out here in the southern country. Her husband had a bored, red-faced look about him, and there were bits of turkey caught in his beard.

Not that I was interested, but after looking over it was pretty clear that most of the inn’s patrons were gathered together in a group, chattering among themselves like hens and roosters, and about that much brainpower among them, too. At the center of the group was some poor pockmarked bastard with milky-white eyes and drooping ginger hair. It made me laugh, since he looked about the same as if someone’d taken th’Esar and run him through a printing press. He moved like he’d had one bad fever too many as a kid and never quite bounced back, and every now and then his fingers twitched. A gruesome fucking sight if ever I’d seen one, but these country folk couldn’t seem to get enough of whatever story he was serving up. He was holding something in his hands, but I couldn’t see it over the top of somebody’s bonnet.

After that woman’d spoken up, asking to see “it,” a murmur of excitement
rippled through the crowd—whispered comments and the creak of chairs being pulled forward as people jockeyed for a better position.

Take the bonnet off, bitch
, I thought, and—despite how much I hated them all—I leaned a little closer myself. That was mob mentality for you, and even I couldn’t resist it all the time, even when I saw it coming. The trick to avoiding it was sticking to what was important. In this case, what mattered more than country gossip about people I’d never met was eating my dinner and getting out of here.

Turkey Beard muttered something and rolled his eyes. I was with him, particularly since the serving girl’d brought me a proper plate of food and I had something else to turn my attention toward.

Ginger Hair clearly felt differently. The more he was pressed by the squabblers around him, the more important he became to himself, making a big to-do of going through his pack, drawing out a smallish metal box, and unlocking it with a key he was keeping—like it even mattered, like anybody fucking cared what he was hiding—around his neck.

Someone gasped. I took an extralarge bite off of whatever poor animal they’d served me up instead of fucking turkey and let out a belch. Just to even things out.

“Only eyes, please, no hands,” Ginger rasped in a reedy voice, like straw breaking. “Not that I don’t trust your company, but I paid good money for this, so don’t muck it up.”

“From one of th’Esar’s
dragons,”
murmured one of the bonnets, only I didn’t really catch her face. It was what she’d said that mattered.

“I don’t believe it,” sniffed a little man, who wasn’t quite man enough to have sprouted his own beard yet. “Why would it be here? In the hands of someone like
you
, to boot? It ain’t real.”

“Jealousy’s disgusting in a child,” Ginger replied. “I’ll tell you what the peddler told me: Even if history doesn’t appear in the books yet, one should still be mindful of it.”

“Everyone knows the dragons went down in the middle of the battlefield,” the little man said, but he was just as interested as the rest of them. My teeth were so tight my jaw was about to crack.

“And then they were destroyed,” said a woman. “Everyone knows
that
, too.”

“Destroyed, or merely disposed of?” Ginger asked. These weren’t his lines; he was too gormless for that. Someone’d fed him a story—a story they were all eating up. Someone was out there selling bits of shit and telling country suckers they were off
my fucking girl
. All of a sudden, I could hardly hear anything over the roar of my pulse thumping away in my ears.

I stood up, leaving my half-finished dinner on the table, since I didn’t have anything even remotely resembling an appetite anymore.

“I’d like to fucking see that,” I said.

Everybody stopped talking, which had been the fucking point. The bonnets and the beards alike all looked at me like I was a barnyard animal suddenly asking them to please pass the fucking potatoes, their jaws hanging open and their eyes glazed over.

“Am I speaking fucking tongues?” I asked. “Last I checked, I was in fucking Volstov.”

Ginger must’ve known which way the wind was blowing—not in his favor—because he nudged the bonnet sitting next to him out of the way.
Damn right
, I thought, but I didn’t take her place, just shoved in to stand over him so I could see what the fucking deal was.

In the box was a scale. It’d been pretty badly burned, of course, but one side of it hadn’t taken too much damage, and on top of that, it’d been polished to look like it was pristine. Some of the gilding was worn away because of it, so it caught the light all wrong. Silver, so it wasn’t mine, but I’d seen that color before. I’d know it even if I was asleep.

“Chastity,” I said.

Everybody was looking at me like I’d gone crazy. Maybe I had. But I couldn’t take their gawking for another second. I was going to start knocking heads together, beards and bonnets alike.

“The fuck are you looking at—” I started.

“Rook!” Thom said, from across the common area.

“Rook?” a bonnet said.

That name was starting to be a fucking problem. I didn’t have time to be recognized or sign anything. I didn’t want to tell stories, or answer stupid questions; I didn’t want any of these idiots to know how things
really
were because unlike some people I didn’t know how to explain it. I didn’t know how to explain anything. The whole mess just was, and it wasn’t for anyone to know about but the people who already knew. It
was why I’d left in the first place. Maybe I’d been a hero for this country but now I couldn’t stay here one fucking second longer, and even
that
was starting to be too much.

Without thinking about how much Ginger paid for it or even how he’d shit his breeches, I elbowed him in the face and grabbed the box from him—everybody else still too dumbfounded to make a move against me or figure out what I was doing before it was too late. Someone in the crowd let out a shout, but I was already turning away.

Thom’s face was blotchy and horrified, with an ink stain under his nose like it was bleeding. I could’ve punched him right then, but I could’ve punched
anybody
at that point. Who it was didn’t matter.

“Are you
stealing?”
Thom demanded.

“Can’t steal something that didn’t belong to a man in the first place,” I snarled. Everyone was shrinking away from me now, but I didn’t care what they were thinking. “Someone’s selling
our
girls. Piece by fucking piece.”

It was twelve o’clock, of the midnight variety, when the Esar called me in to speak with him. I had not been at the same party as the others—not rubbing shoulders with those of high standing and high society, that is—but rather waiting for when I would become necessary.

I bowed my head before anything else. Protocol had to be observed, even in these more peaceful times. My liege was troubled; I could see it in his eyes, in the deep lines around his mouth, obscured for the most part by his reddish beard but recognizable to those who knew him best. I had a good sense about these things. When one could not speak, one listened very carefully to what everyone else had to say.

“Malahide,” the Esar said, after the formalities were over, “I have a favor I must ask of you.” His tone was weighty and somber, and the seriousness of the situation delighted me. There was something of great importance for which I was needed. Such occurrences were as rare as disasters were commonplace these days. I knew how it disturbed him, yet I could not help it when my nostrils flared.

It was always difficult—even for a ruler—to speak with someone who could not hold up her end of the conversation. It put most men
and women at a distinct disadvantage, and those who were not accustomed to the discomfort tended to ramble.