Dragon (3 page)

Ram has been teaching me to be a butcher.

To defend myself against my enemies with such effective swordwork my blade never touches theirs. To fell them before they ever have a chance to hurt me. To defend myself and my people from an attack such as the one that banished me from my homeland, should the enemy ever visit us again.

And they will visit us again.

I just don’t know where, because until it is safe for me to return home, I am here.

There’s a part of me that sort of hopes, twisted hope though it may be, that it’s now too dangerous for me to stay here. Because if it’s dangerous here—as dangerous as it is there—then there’s no longer any reason for me to stay away.

Twisted, yes. But nonetheless, that’s how I feel.

“Yes. They are the reason you must learn to fight.” Ram releases me slowly, testing my ability to stand on my own before fully letting go.

“I need to know my enemy.” I’ve stated these words before, but never with such conviction. “If they’re at my doorstep, I need to know so I can defend myself. I can’t afford to hesitate, but I’m so jumpy now I might attack anyone.”

“Don’t face them alone. That would be foolish and unnecessary. I will fight them for you. That’s why I’m here.”

“Then why are you teaching me to fight?” I stare at him through a long silence.

Just as I’m beginning to think he’s not going to say another word, Ram answers with an unfamiliar strain in his voice. “If all else fails.”

It takes me a moment to match his response to my question, to realize his words are the unexpected answer I’d asked for.

He swallows, the bobbing hairnet the only sign he’s moved at all. “If I fail.”

Chapter Three

Anger and fear fuel my work. I can’t shake my dread—what if they come upon me suddenly?

Am I quick enough?

Strong enough?

I imagine the beef carcass in front of me as the enemy, and try to make each blow the one that defeats them.

We don’t butcher like most butchers, with knives and saws, on tables, neat and methodical. We butcher with swords and daggers, standing upright as though facing an enemy. We start from the bottom of the carcass (that is, the neck—it’s hung by a hook through the hind legs) and work our way up.

The heavy curved end of my cutlass frees the shank from the brisket, the arm roast from the chuck, and my saber makes quick work of the short ribs.

I set two pans on a low wheeled cart below the carcass, pull the daggers from their sheaths on my thighs, and slice crosshatches, carving out cubes of meat for stews or kabobs until I get to the ribs, the ones we turn into ribeyes, one of my favorite cuts of meat, second only to T-bones and, of course, porterhouse.

Okay, now I’m hungry.

Most days, I pull the long swords from their sheaths on the double baldrics that make an X across my back, and use the blades to cut ribeye steaks by first gently placing the edge of the blade in the precise spot where I’ll need to make the cuts, making sure I’ve got the exact angle and proper alignment between the rib bones. Then I pull both arms back and bring the swords together swiftly, one on each side, cutting inward and downward toward the spine, slicing two steaks simultaneously, drawing the swords through and out toward me so that the two blades never touch. I then align my swords and make the next cut, and align them again before the next.

But today, I face the carcass like an opponent. I pull my swords out so swiftly the metal sings. I swing the blades wide, then bring them down and together, down and together, like a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke, like a butterfly fluttering its wings, except my wings are blades. This is how Ram always does it, how he’s encouraged me to do it, but I’ve always been too careful before. I wanted my steaks to be pretty.

Not today.

If the enemy is after me (whoever they are, the ones who killed my mother and chased me from my homeland) I need to be quick far more than I need to be pretty.

I slam the razor-sharp metal through the meat, slice after slice, working my way past the ribeyes to the T-bones, the porterhouse, the sirloins, pausing only to free the flank steak with my saber.

When there’s nothing left but the hind legs I stand back, panting from the effort, to evaluate the meat piled in the pans below.

Ram has stopped working and is watching me. He is grinning.

This is most unusual, and, dare I say it?—a little unsettling. He has very white, straight teeth, and his smile—at least as much as I can see of it through his beard—is handsome.

Weird. I really didn’t expect that. Ram is a giant looming force, singing blades and cloaking hair. On some level, I’ve always assumed he’s hair all the way down, that if you shaved him you’d end up with just a pile of hair, swords, and shoes.

Not this grin that’s watching me as though I’ve done something dazzling.

Probably I am only imagining the handsomeness. I mean, he did rather save me from whatever Ozzie was growling at last evening, so perhaps my perception of him has gone fuzzy. I must remember, this is the man who makes me work like a slave twelve hours each day, who refuses to help me get home, who won’t even tell me where home is, though I know he knows.

I glower at him. “What?”

He is supposed to take the hint and stop grinning, but instead he steps toward me, his smile still broad. “You’re doing it. You’ve got it.” Crouching, he plucks a couple of steaks from the pans and holds them toward me, flat on his palms. “Very good. Even thickness. You’re still cutting at a bit of an angle, though. See how these are parallelograms?” He tips his hands to exaggerate the flaw.

“They’re still even thickness. They’ll cook fine.”

“But you’ve got to get the movement right.”

“Why?” I’m out of breath, panting even, from the exertion of cutting so many steaks so swiftly. Maybe I make it look easy, but it is hard work, just the same.

“It’s important. Besides, if you do it wrong, you’ll get a cramp in your shoulders. Here.” He shoves the dangling hindquarters aside and grabs the next carcass in the queue, scooting it along the hook track above, positioning it above the waiting pans.

“I wasn’t done with that.” I point feebly at the hindquarters.

“I want you to get this right. You’re so close.” He swings his cutlass, with one mighty blow lopping the shank and brisket free from the rest of the cow. After returning his sword to its holster, he plants me in front of him and guides my arms in a swooping motion, so similar to what I was doing moments before, but with a flatter angle and more of a twist at the end. “See there? Feel that? Good form reduces your odds of getting injured and cuts better steaks. It also helps ensure your blows are accurate.”

“Okay. Stand back.” I can feel the difference in the swing. As Ram steps back, I step toward the carcass and bring the blades together just as he showed me. Two steaks fall atop the mountains of meat. Two more. Two more.

Still tired from my marathon effort with the last animal, I pause, replace my swords in their scabbards and pick up two steaks, holding them out to Ram for his inspection.

What is it with this guy? He’s still grinning. Seriously, Ram never grins and Ozzie never growls, not until the last ten hours or so. At least Ram’s smile isn’t quite so big right now, but I still study his face to prove to myself he is not actually handsome, that it was just a trick of the light or my overwhelming shock at seeing him smile in the first place.

Hairy and goggley, yes, but also sort of good looking.

Weird.

“Much better. I think you’ve got that down.” He hoists the heaping pans of steak from the floor cart and carries it to the table. I grab the nearest wheeled rack and help him load the pans.

The cut meat goes to the next room, where Michal’s teenage daughters, Zusa and Tyna, wrap what needs to be wrapped, further process anything that needs further processing (like the ground beef and sausages) and arrange it attractively in the windows, all while smiling and giggling and flirting with the young men among the customers who come to the shop.

In a logical sense, Zusa and Tyna are probably a lot like me. I mean, I’m eighteen and they’re both right around there, sixteen and nineteen, I think. But I feel like we have little in common, and I’m not just talking about the language barrier. I may not know much Czech, but they know a bit of English, and all three of us have conversational German, enough to chat together—which we’ve done for a few moments now and then, mostly when I first came here.

Not that I can blame them for not befriending me. I’m probably a little freakish, with my swords and blood-stained coveralls. And I admit I don’t linger too long in the doorway when I shove the meat cart their way. “Děkuji, Tyna. Děkuji, Zusa.” I let go of the cart and wave.

“Děkuji, Ilsa!” They wave back, friendly enough, but that’s the end of it. Tyna grabs the cart, turns her back to me and navigates the narrow walkway of the front room.

The door closes.

And that’s the end of my normal peer interaction. To be honest, I didn’t fare much better at Saint Evangeline’s, even without the swords and bloodstained coveralls. I went to school with real princesses, with girls whose families had so much money they could buy themselves a country, if they wanted (or so girls claimed whenever someone of noble birth tried to pull rank).

Since I didn’t even know where I was from, I was at a disadvantage from the start. Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to gain acceptance. The last time I can really recall having friends was in the village.

Homesickness wells up inside me again, and I turn to face the carcass I still need to finish.

My enemy.

The ones who stole my childhood and killed my mother.

My blades sing again as I pull them from their sheaths. This time, I get everything right—the angle, the force, the speed, the cut. Steaks fall in piles in the pans below. This time I finish everything, right up to the hind shank and hock.

When I finish this time, I’m panting. I grab a spray bottle and clean the lenses of my goggles while they’re still on my face, mopping up sweat along with blood.

I glance at Ram and he’s looking my way.

Grinning, again.

What’s up with that?

*

By noon I’m starving.

Ram must have guessed I’d be hungry after all that work, because I see him carry five large porterhouse steaks through the back door as I’m finishing the hindquarters.

This is the best part of my job, the best perk in the history of job perks. We get to eat all we can of whatever meat we want.

My first day working here, I was a little weirded out by the hanging carcasses and the swords (I think swords are smashing, and all, it was just a big adjustment getting used to their sharpness and using them on flesh and all that). In fact, by lunchtime that first day, I was starting to think my father had brought me here to punish me, which was sort of devastating on top of my crushed hope that I might finally get to go home.

Then Ram went outside with the steaks, and minutes later called me to join him in the anteroom. There’s a table in there and a couple of big plates—platters, really. No silverware. No steak knives or anything remotely civilized like that.

Ram pushed a platter of seared steak my way and grunted something vague that might have been, “Here,” but also could have been a belch. Then he picked up one of the steaks on his platter and tore into it with his teeth.

Okay, big confession: I like meat.

This was a huge no-no at school, where something like two-thirds of the girls were vegetarians, and even those who ate meat only did so in tiny amounts. I used to offer to clear the tables on the nights when we had chicken, and I’d eat the bones all the way back to the kitchen, with my body turned sideways so no one could see. Fortunately most of the girls were in a habit of ignoring me, so I rarely got caught.

And when I did get caught, I denied it. “Who eats chicken bones?” I’d scoff. “That’s disgusting.” They never pushed the issue—I think they were scared of what they saw, so I got away with it.

Deep down, though, I knew the truth. I am a disgusting person. Normal people don’t eat chicken bones, no matter how delicious and crunchy and irresistible they are, and no matter how long it’s been since they got a good meal with real meat in it.

So, seeing Ram pick up the steak and tear into it with his teeth made me stare, gobsmacked, unsure how to proceed. For the past ten years I’d had to exercise strict self-control around meat, going to elaborate lengths to scarf down scraps in secret. And here was this hairy mountain of a man, openly eating a beautiful steak with no compunction and no silverware.

Then—I can still picture this vividly—Ram sort of sucked in a long strip of fat and flesh he’d torn from the steak with his teeth, and with the food still dangling against his beard, he asked, “What’s the problem?”

I’m sure my mouth was hanging open.

In fact, I was probably drooling. I stammered something about utensils, and he told me there weren’t any, and gestured to the steak and told me to eat.

And I did. I picked up the porterhouse and tore into it and loved it.

Lunch has been my favorite time of day ever since, with the possible exception of supper, which is my other favorite time. Ram flash-grills the meat—I don’t know how he does it, exactly, but he sears the outside crispy while the inside is bloody and cool.

It is the best food ever, made even better by the fact that I can eat it openly, without restraint or embarrassment, even sucking the marrow out of the bones.

So today, Ram grills five steaks—three for him and two for me. And that was just lunch.

We ate the same again for supper, and then Ram made cookies for dessert. Meat cookies—which are basically hamburgers, sometimes with chunks of onion or mushroom and seasonings inside. Meat cookies are my favorite kind of cookies.

In all, it’s a great day at work, other than the part where Ram smiled at me, which was unnerving. I mastered the butterfly maneuver and cut up more meat than ever before.

Satisfied, once I’m finished helping Ram clean up for the day, I step through the door to the anteroom and freeze.