Dragon (24 page)

Eudora’s eyes light up like she’s about to blow.

It’s now or never.

I open the door partway and, using the door as a shield, duck past it just enough to get the shot off. Eudora opens her mouth and I take aim, watching the fire gather deep in her throat even as I let the arrow fly.

Then I duck back behind the door, slam the drop bar down behind the catch plate, and peek up through the glass.

The sickly yellow dragon is staggering back, her eyes round and rolled back in her head. She’s pawing at her mouth, her throat, and I catch a glimpse of fletching sticking out of her mouth as her body seems to shrink away, receding.

I’d love to stick around for the show, to see how well my plan worked, but even if I did everything right and she shrinks back to human, she’ll still be after me. And she’ll have fingers that can pull a trigger then.

For that reason, I don’t feel it’s safe to dart outside and attempt to run past her.

I race up the stairs to the top of the tower, peeling off my wedding gown because it’s really too nice to let it get torn to shreds as I morph into a dragon. I toss it aside on the stairs as I climb, and focus on turning into a dragon, which I’m still not very good at.

But I really, really want to be a dragon right now. I need to be a dragon. Ram and my father and my people need me.

I burst through the door at the top of the tower and unfurl my purple wings. Dropping the weapons where I can fetch them if I need them later, I leap between the parapets and take to the air.

Below me, Eudora is shrieking and spitting blood, but she’s not a dragon anymore.

She may never be a dragon again.

I fly back toward the town square, scanning the horizon. Where’s Ram? My dad? Ion? They’re stonking big and bright in dragon form, so they shouldn’t be too difficult to spot.

I see smoke rising up from a building near the square. Since the village is built on hard mountain rock where it’s difficult to lay underground pipe, a lot of buildings have their own water towers on their roofs. I fly over to one of these, lift it carefully from its perch, and dump the contents on the flames.

Then I return the vessel because, let’s face it, at this point I’m just flying in circles looking for Ram or my dad or any other fires that need to be put out.

The village is eerily silent, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should check the caves or something. I’m starting to worry, too. Remember how, when Ram first told me he was the dragon king, and I was engaged to marry him, and happiness was possible and all that, how I suddenly felt certain it couldn’t work out, that something would go wrong and all my hopes would be jerked out from under my feet like always?

Yeah. I can’t help thinking this is it, then. The happiness-jerking moment I’ve feared all along. Then I hear a cry and see Ion flying back toward the village from the other side of the mountain. He’s surely seen me but he doesn’t make any move to attack me.

Maybe he’s looking for Eudora, but that’s the least of my worries right now. Because beyond the craggy cliffs that jut up around our village, from the other side of the mountain, the direction Ion is flying from, smoke is rising.

Where are my father and Ram? Are they over there? Are they hurt?

Panicked, I fly toward the smoke. The mountains are little more than sheer jutting rock thick with treetops in between. I can’t see anything but rock and trees, rock and trees, and then—village.

The rooftops are similar to those in my hometown, but this place is more fortress-like, with stone walls surrounding the village itself and many of the larger dwellings. There’s a series of concentric circles fanning out from the mountain, and tucked in the most secure point, carved in parts from the mountain itself, is a fortress. A castle.

And smoke.

I fly closer and I can see orange and yellow flame, and then my father’s orange dragon back bent over something sapphire blue lying in the courtyard. My father has a big white sheet of fabric something, and he’s tugging it over the dragon, almost like the way they cover corpses in movies to signal they’re dead.

I don’t want it to be Ram. I really, really don’t want it to be Ram, because it’s not moving, and there’s a dark red pool growing around it, more blood than we spilled in a day at the butcher shop. And it’s all coming from the dragon.

It’s Ram’s blood.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I fly like a streak and land in the courtyard, running as I land until I’m next to Ram. My father gives me a haunted look, drops the sheet, and flies off.

I want to shout at him not to worry about Ion, but what do I know? Maybe he should worry. I grab the sheet and lift it up, realizing a number of things all at once. One, I’ve turned back into a person. Two, Ram is still breathing, though they’re shallow breaths. And three, my father was apparently trying to use the sheet to bind the wound, or something, because now that I’m close I can see it’s twisted around Ram’s arm and chest. Dark red blood is soaking through it.

“Ram! Can you turn into a human? Maybe I could put a tourniquet on you if you were human.” But even as I make the suggestion, I wonder if it’s true. Can you put a tourniquet on a person’s chest? What would that stop the blood flow to, anyway—their head or their body? Neither of those are probably a good idea.

I’m no nurse. I’m a butcher, which is quite near the exact opposite of nurse. But it also means I’m not usually squeamish around blood, except for when it’s the blood of the man I love, and it’s spilling from his body.

I have to stop the blood flow. My dad’s improvised bandage job doesn’t look like it’s doing the trick anyway, and tons of extra sheet are just hanging off doing nothing, so I take one of the daggers from my thighs and use it to slice a bunch of the sheet free, and slice a long strip like a bandage. Then I wrap the rest of the sliced-off sheet around my chest like a bath towel, partly to keep it off the bloody cobblestones of the courtyard, and partly because, other than my daggers and the torn remnant of the slip I was wearing under my wedding dress, I’m naked.

Okay, now for the scary part. I gingerly lift up the wad of blood-soaked sheet that my dad had stuffed over the injury, and inspect the wound underneath. There’s a ton of blood, but I don’t see any particular major vessels that need to be sewn back together.

While I’m inspecting it, a shadow falls over the courtyard, and I look up to see Ion flying past with Eudora in human form on his back. She looks rather pale and limp, but she seems to be holding on of her own volition, so I don’t think I hurt her that bad.

My dad’s flying after them, blowing fire their way, not so much like he’s trying to engage them in a fight, but more like he’s trying to tell them to go away and not come back.

I see all this in a glance and then return my attention to Ram’s injuries. I’m not sure if I should attempt to sew the gash shut, but I don’t have anything to sew with, and right now I just want to put enough pressure on the injury to stem the bleeding. I press the bloodied sheet back over the injury and then bind it in place with the long strip of cloth, wrapping it around and around as tightly as I can, and when it’s all wrapped up, tucking the end underneath the previous layers.

While I’m busy with that, my dad flies out with a water tower and dumps it on the part of the fortress where the smoke was rising. Steam billows up, but he seems to have taken care of the smoke. He lands beside me and transforms into a human, with some scarlet-orange pleated shorts on that I can only figure he had made for the express purpose of leaving him less than naked when he transformed back from being a dragon.

“How’s he bearing up?” My dad asks, his face pale with concern.

“I don’t know. I tried to bind his wound, but it should really be sewn shut, I suppose. What happened?”

“Ion gored him with his horns. There’s not much in the world that can pierce a dragon’s armor. For that reason, you won’t be able to stitch his wound until he’s human—although I agree, stitches would help.”

I nod. Ram had explained to me that our softer underbellies are strong enough to resist most weapons, but I hadn’t thought about them being needle-proof, as well. Too strong to allow for healing stitches, but not strong enough to resist our own horns. We’re our own greatest enemies. And Eudora knew it.

“Ram?” I step around near his head and place my hand on his dragon forehead. “Can you change into a human? I think it might help.”

But Ram doesn’t respond, doesn’t open his eyes or give us any indication he’s still with us at all.

My dad puts his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll fetch a healer to come have a look at him. If you can get him to change, they’ll have a much better chance of helping him. It will take some of his strength to change, but once he’s changed, his body won’t have to work so hard to support him. He’ll be able to pour his energy into getting better.” With that, my dad turns back into a dragon and flies away, leaving me alone with the dragon version of the man I was so close to marrying.

This feeling is too similar to what I felt digging Ozzie’s grave. Hopelessness, helplessness, a loss so big it smothers me. I can hardly breathe.

“Ram?” I’m not sure if he can hear me—probably not, but I have to talk anyway. There are so many things I haven’t had a chance to say, and might never get a chance to say, if I don’t say them now. Ram has always been the strong one, the invincible talking beard who knew all the secrets but wouldn’t tell me, who was in charge while I sometimes followed along, but mostly opposed him.

But now I’m in charge and he’s the weak one. If Ram had been mortally wounded a week ago and I’d had to do something to try to save him, I don’t know what I would have done. Freaked out and called the Jitrnickas? I would have been absolutely undone, because Ram was the one link I had that connected me to my father, my homeland, and everything I am.

As a dragon, Ram’s head is big—bigger than a horse’s head, as big as my torso. His chin is resting on the cold cobblestones in a sticky pool of his own blood, but his forehead is quite a bit higher than that just because of his sheer size. And I sort of kneel in front of his face and hold on to the sides of his horns (which are smooth and rounded and not dangerous—it’s only the pointy tips of the horns that are sharp) and I press my small forehead against his big blue scaly one, and I explain things to him as fast as I can sort them out.

“You need to become a human now, Ram. You really do, because if you don’t, the healer won’t be able to sew your wound up, and you’ll probably bleed to death. And I don’t want you to bleed to death.”

By this point I’m totally sobbing because guess what? Today was supposed to be my homecoming and my wedding day, the happiest day of my life. And even if I wasn’t one hundred percent sure and for certain I was completely ready to get married and start making dragon babies, I also know I didn’t want the day to end like this.

So my tears are running down my face and splashing onto his face, and I just keep going, reduced to a sobbing mess while my dad tries to find a healer, which could take a while I suppose since the whole village was hiding in the caves, and the healer might even be busy healing other people. But I try not to think about that as I sort through the big soggy mess of my emotional state.

“I don’t want you to bleed to death because I love you. That’s different than needing you. A week ago and all summer before that, I needed you. You were my ticket home. You were the door and the key to my homeland, and going home was the one thing I thought I wanted more than anything.”

About that point I stop talking, because making words takes a lot of effort and I’m pouring most of my strength straight through my forehead into Ram, as though I can make him turn into a human the same way he tried to get me to turn into a dragon.

And besides that, I realize Ram was never into verbal communication anyway. So I just mull my thoughts and sob my big fat tears onto his face, and realize how far I’ve come.

I found out I’m Azeri, but that doesn’t make me who I am. It’s part of me, and nice to know, but it didn’t change much, not really.

I found out I’m a princess, too, which is something I might have almost wanted to be, way back when I first started school, until I got to know some of the princesses and found out their title didn’t make them any better than anyone else. In fact, sometimes they acted like it gave them an excuse to be selfish and mean and petty. I intend to be the best princess I can be, but it doesn’t make me who I am.

In fact, this whole trip has been a lot like butchering a carcass, except I’m the carcass. Things I thought were important to me got cut away. Like I thought my home was important, or my ethnicity, or whatever, but being here hasn’t made me whole. And I thought maybe there was something between me and Ion there for a bit, but he was only ever trying to use me.

And Ozzie. Or Azi, however you want to spell her name. She was important to me. So important. She was comfort and understanding. She kept me from being alone. And she saved my life.

And she got peeled away, the shank from the brisket, the arm roast from the chuck, and everything got whittled away. Everything I cared about or thought I was.

And now Ram is getting cut away, too. I realize it with a horrible sense of loss, along with the bittersweet knowledge born of all the other losses I’ve been through.

I know I can survive.

If Ram dies, I’ll be okay, just like I kept going after I lost Ozzie, and all those other things that cut away my image of who I was and replaced it with something unfamiliar.

In the end, at my heart, I know who I am.

I’m Ilsa.

I’m a dragon.

I’m a butcher.

I’m the protector of my people, just like the wedding symbols said. I’m the keeper of the fire. I don’t need Ram to make me who I am or take me home, any more than I need my home to tell me who I am.

And so I tell him that, through choking sobs. “Hey, Ram? It’s okay if you’re tired and you have to go now. I want you to know you’ve been a gift to me and I treasure everything you are and all you’ve taught me.