Shadowed By Wings (4 page)

Someone snickered. A few of the youngest exchanged uncertain looks.

The oaf’s eyes widened and he stared in the direction of my groin. Lust flared across his overlarge face. My paralysis shattered and I scrabbled to my feet, heart in my throat, and drew Kratt’s cape as best I could about myself, ignoring the pain caused by the touch of fabric upon my wounded back.

“So you
are
a girl,” the oaf breathed, not looking away from my groin. “What’s it look like, where you’ve been cut?”

“Why don’t you go see, hey-o?” the same voice suggested from the shadows. “Go on, Egg.”

Imperceptibly, the apprentices drew closer to one another, forming a tighter circle. Grins broke out onto faces. Expectant, unfriendly grins.

“Don’t touch me,” I said hoarsely.

“Why not?” the shadow-voice said. “Go on, Egg, spread her legs. Show us what she looks like.”

“Yeah, go on, Egg,” someone else said. “Mount her while you’re at it.”

Snickers, jostling, an exchange of tight grins.

The brawny oaf stepped toward me. “Show me,” he said, voice thickening. “Let me see.”

“Stay back!”

“C’mon, I just wanna see. Don’t make me hurtcha. Come on.”

“Go on, Egg,” someone called out. “We’ll hold her down if she gets too much for you.”

Laughter.

“Come on, Egg! Spread her legs!”

“Mount her, Egg, mount her!”

“No!” I cried. “No one touches me. I’ve got pustules, hear?”

The oaf stopped in his tracks and frowned mightily. “Pox?”

“Why else would I throw my life away defying Temple?” I croaked the lie with credible conviction. “I’m dying. Any who lie with me will soon join me in death.”

The expressions around me changed and the youngest boys unconsciously backed up a pace or two.

The oaf made a noise of disgust. “
I’m
not gonna touch her.”

“She’s lying, Egg. She doesn’t have pox.”

I turned toward that voice, still hidden in shadow. Half maddened by fear and intoxicated by the dregs of venom still lacing my blood, I gasped, “What manner of coward are you, that you hide in shadow and goad others to do ill?”

The room itself drew a breath and held it.

A shifting of bodies as the owner of the voice pushed forward, and I cursed my impetuous nature that had, yet again, only furthered my trouble.

I recognized him then, the lean, muscled youth that came toward me. I recognized his face, even though it was pocked and healed over from adolescent acne, and I recognized the manner in which the brown hair half hid the familiar quick, shrewd eyes set above an equally familiar aquiline nose. That face, now prickly with unshaven stubble and weathered by a hard adolescence, had once nursed alongside me from my mother’s breast.

Before me stood Yeli’s Dono.

Dono: an orphan of danku Re, the pottery clan in which I’d been born. Dono: a playmate of my youth. Dono: the would-be lover of my ill-sold sister.

“Dono,” I said, nonplussed.

He stood before me, as beautiful as a lost ruby discovered, chipped and filthy, upon a forsaken road.

“I know you,” he said, eyes narrowing. “What’s your clan?”

It was then that I realized that Dono had mastered his speech impediment, so obvious in his youth. As a seven-year-old, he’d claimed his manhood by yanking out the remainder of his milk teeth. The subsequent infection had rotted his budding adult teeth and had all but killed him, and marked his speech with an obvious lisp. I could envisage him grimly practicing words each night in the early days of his apprenticeship, forcing himself to enunciate clearly and eradicate his lisp while hiding somewhere in the dark stables.

Irrationally, the knowledge that he had succeeded heartened me.

“It’s me: Zarq. Danku Re Darquel’s Zarq. We grew up together.”

The apprentices about us exchanged startled looks at this revelation.

Dono stared, incredulous. “Zarq? What in the name of Re are you playing at?”

“I’ve joined the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship. Like you.”

“You’re a woman.”

“I’m circumcised.”

He frowned. “You
can’t
.”

“I’ve served the bulls already in a convent—”

“A holy woman serving a retired bull is completely different than an unclaimed girl serving a fertile bull. You know it.”

“I don’t see the difference at all.”

“You can’t serve Re.” He clenched his hands into fists; veins protruded on his forearms. “If you turn Temple against the dragonmaster, they’ll revoke his title. All the apprentices under him will lose their status then. I’ll be thrown out of here. We
all
will.”

His fellow apprentices muttered amongst themselves; a few swore and flicked their earlobes to ward off bad luck and evil. One spat in my direction. His spittle landed at my feet. “Dono, listen. There’s a scroll that says one such as I can serve—”

“Get out of here, Zarq.” Dono’s anger was feeding off the unease he’d created amongst his peers. “Get out of here
now
.”

“The dragonmaster chose me to serve!”

“You ruined my plans once before, Zarq; I’ll be ass-screwed before I let you ruin them again.
Now, get out
.”

“Ruined your … ? What are you talking about?” I cried. “I haven’t seen you since we were nine. I’ve done nothing to you.”

“Out!” he bellowed.

I looked again at the faces gathered about me. Some were poised on the brink of physical violence; others flushed with angry unease. Biting back futile argument, I pushed my way through the mob and staggered from the hovel.

Despite my oozing whip welts and a fever provoked by venom’s ebb, I didn’t return to the empty dragon stall designated as mine, lest Dono incite the apprentices into bodily forcing me from the dragonmaster’s domain. Instead, I staggered across the courtyard and disappeared into the next, then the next, rapidly losing myself in the maze of adjoined stable yards. I moved as the wounded boar does when it crashes and staggers through the jungle, seeking blindly to escape the very pain of the spear embedded deep in its side, yet carrying the pain with it wherever it goes.

My pain was not just from the ragged welts across my back, understand.

As the venom dissipated in my blood, a maelstrom of emotion clashed and howled within me, unleashed not just by the retreat of the dragons’ fire but also by Dono’s hostility and the pulsating, persistent memory of Kratt’s pleasure in whipping me senseless the day previous.

Both were equally unsettling.

It burned that I had allowed Kratt to injure me, see. It smarted that I had so readily
submitted
to him, he whom I had been about to murder. I had planned it so carefully, had schemed for years over how I might exact vengeance upon the man who’d ruined my clan and my childhood. Up until the moment when the dragonmaster had singled me out from the crowd lining the Mombe Taro lane, I had been resigned to execution for killing Waikar Re Kratt.

Now the madness that had gripped me upon receiving that outrageous hope from the dragonmaster seemed just that: madness. Here I was, suffering excruciating pain when I could have been plunged into the nether-blackness of the One Dragon’s Essence. Instead of enfolded in the numb oblivion of death, here I was, horribly alive and reeling from the shocking hostility of a milk-brother who had no desire to realize that I had joined the dragonmaster’s apprenticeship, defied convention, and allowed my sworn enemy to live, all so that those such as Dono and myself might one day be free from the tyranny of Temple, aristocrat, and Emperor all.

I collapsed onto my knees on the cool dust behind a grain silo.

I knelt there, swaying in the meager shade, buffeted by pain both physical and emotional, as the bloated sun rose hot and pulsing into the sky.

I thirsted. I dreamed.

I dreamed of a carrion bird, the carbuncles on its wattles obscenely red. It stood before me, its narrow gray head cocked to one side. How brilliant and cruel those glass-bright eyes as they stared at me!

“I can stop it, hey-o,” the buzzard cackled. “I can stop your pain.”

I ignored the hallucination, concentrated on breathing, on not toppling face-first onto the ground.

“A bargain, yes?” the bird croaked. It lifted a wing the length of my arm.
Flick-flick;
its beak darted in and out of its bedraggled plumage, snapping at lice and dust motes. The bird looked at me again and tucked its wing back into place. It held a feather in its beak. A blue feather.

Of course. No fever-dream was this, and no ordinary carrion bird. This was my mother’s haunt. I hated and feared the thing almost as fiercely as I was glad to see it.

“Mother,” I gasped.

The haunt placed the feather on the ground, carefully.

“A bargain,” it croaked. “Health for service.”

I stared at the feather that shimmered in the heat, and I reminded myself that this was
not
my mother, but Mother’s obsession with finding Waivia made manifest. Whatever dregs of my mother that remained within the creature were sunk deep beneath layers of madness, magic, and dire intent.

“You know this can heal you, yes?” The bird’s scaled claw shifted the blue feather slightly in the dust.

Yes, I knew the feather could heal me. It had done so once before. And I needed to be healed to not only survive the enmity of Dono and his peers but also tackle the daunting task of living life as an apprentice.

“If you take it, you agree to leave here and find Waivia,” the bird croaked. “Health for service.”

“Agreed,” I said, and I lurched for the feather, as swift as an adder’s strike. With a squawk, the buzzard jumped into the air, wings beating clouds of dust into my eyes and mouth. My hand closed around the feather; it burst into an effervescing cloud that settled over me as soft as mist, as tender as a mother’s caress. A moist scent delicately laced the air, that dainty fragrance that bespeaks dew sliding slowly down an orchid’s petal, moisture adorning spider silk.

My head was at once clear, my senses sharp. While the wounds upon my back still pulsed, the pain was vastly muted and quite bearable.

The buzzard alighted upon the ground again, several feet away. It regarded me with wary defiance.

You will leave here now,
the creature said, its voice embedded in my skull.
You will keep your part of the bargain.

I hesitated, envisioning a life of fruitlessly wandering Clutch Re in search of my long-dead sister.

The buzzard clacked its beak at me.
You won’t throw your life away over a madman’s vision! No. A mere fantasy, that is, one you scarcely believe yourself.

It rankled, that she could so swiftly, so facilely, pinpoint my weakness and doubt. As is the case with all daughters of the age I was then—seventeen, and immensely world-wise, or so I believed—I was immediately determined to deny the truth of my mother’s words, just because she had had the gall to notice the obvious about me.

“I believe what I saw in his eyes!” I cried. “I can do it. I must, I will!”

To follow the dragonmaster is to set yourself on a course of slow suicide.

“And what would you instead have me do? Throw my life away seeking a sister most likely dead.”

Cheat! Liar!

“No! I’ll keep my word; I’ll leave here.” I took a quavering breath. “But not now. You didn’t stipulate when I should leave, and I’m not ready to leave yet. I’m good with dragons; maybe I
can
do this thing that I saw in the dragonmaster’s eyes.”

The buzzard shrieked at me, both wings widespread.

I clapped my hands over my ears, though that didn’t prevent the bird’s angry cries from ricocheting around the inside of my head.

Never again! You won’t ever receive one of my feathers again.

“Leave me, then. Begone!”

With one last angry squawk, the enraged bird sprang into the air, flapped ponderously into the sky, and disappeared over the stable rooftops. Trembling, I sank back into the shade of the silo.

I had sorely angered the haunt. What repercussions might I suffer?

I did not know, and the not knowing worried me.

Exacerbating the worry was a twinge of guilt at my use of sly trickery to obtain the healing feather from the creature that had been, in another form, my mother. After all, was not that very lack of compassion exactly what goaded the haunt into its relentless, deplorable stalking of me? Re prevent me from turning blind to empathy and grace in my quest to obtain that which I desired. Re prevent me from turning into a mirror-image of my mother as she was in her last mad years of life.

But what
was
it that I desired most now?

Muddled not by pain and fever but by twisting thought only, I dozed.

Susurration laced my sleep, much the way the lapping of waves against the hull of a boat insinuates itself into your slumber without really rousing you. The noises I heard provoked no instinct to bolt upright, no desire to run, hide, or pray for deliverance.

Womb noises, they were. The sound of industry, of others hard at honest work. Rasp of rake, chink of pitchfork upon stone. Burble of water, trundle of wheel, squeak of axle. Bantering voices, answering voices, voices directing and organizing. Soothing sounds. Combined with the heat of the day and whatever magics imparted by the feather that had dissolved into my skin, those sounds cradled me in convalescent sleep.

Magics. Yes.

Make no mistake, something unearthly occurred when that luminescing feather exploded into mist and lit upon my skin, for when I woke at twilight, neither hungry nor thirsting, neither stiff nor sore, the bloody ribbons on my back were the slightest of weals, itching fiercely from the healing process.

I dared roll my back carefully against the silo behind me: No flare of pain, no agony when my skin connected with the silo’s sun-warmed wood.

A chortle, though.

My head snapped round to where the dragonmaster was crouched in shadow, precisely where the buzzard had stood many hours before at noon. He rubbed his hands together and his eyes gleamed in the dusk.