Soul of Fire (17 page)

CLOTHES AND FOOD; SYMPATHY AND COMFORT; MISS WARINGTON’S VERY PUZZLING EPISODES

Sofie felt horribly embarrassed. She had gone through
these episodes sometimes in London. She’d find herself outside Lady Lodkin’s Academy, somewhere on the streets of London, some place she couldn’t imagine and had never before visited in her waking hours.

Always, she felt tired and bewildered. Between herself and Lalita, they’d agreed that Sofie must be walking in her sleep. Often, they’d find a door unlocked—or someone would, leading to a lecture from Lady Lodkin herself. Lalita had advised Sofie to report it to her mother. In turn, this had led to her being called home. Or at least it was part of what had led them to that. Now she wondered if they’d sent for her because they thought she was defective—ill. If that was why they’d agreed to her marriage to the horrible creature.

But she was beyond that now. And as the two mountain girls scurried away, her only worry was whether Lord St. Maur would think she had walked away from him because she feared him.

She let go of his hand and hurried to the other side of the clearing, where, after rummaging through her bag and getting a bar of soap and a comb, as well as a set of clothing for the day, she went to the little rivulet that ran around the back of the clearing. The girls had jumped over it without much concern. To Sofie, the water—clear, pure, deep and running fast—seemed like a miracle. Everywhere around Calcutta, the rivers were sluggish and choked with mud—worse now than at any other time of the year. Water had become a precious commodity down at lower altitude.

Of course, the Earl of St. Maur had told her last night that the water here came from the glaciers high in the Himalayas, the same as the brisk air that allowed trees to grow more akin to the vegetation of Europe than to the lush tropical plants she was used to seeing in India. They were partway up one of the lower peaks, and around her the Himalayas climbed like the tops of a crown, majestic and overwhelming.

She washed in this unexpected water quickly, noticing small silver fish in the current, and hoping her soap wouldn’t harm them. But surely such a small amount in so much water wouldn’t. At any rate, they didn’t seem inconvenienced, though they did swim a rather wide berth around her hands as she splashed in the water.

Having washed herself and put her hair up as well as she could without a mirror, she dressed briskly and returned to the clearing. He had dressed, too, she noted. Though he had the gift of making it appear perfectly normal to be naked—an ability doubtless born of long practice—she confessed she felt better about his being dressed and looking like the gentleman he was. And how strange life could be. All the time, in novels, the hidden were was some chimney sweep or rough laborer. Never a peer of the realm. Much less a peer of the realm of such distinguished appearance as Lord St. Maur.

He was barefoot, and doing something with a small knife to the underside of his foot, so absorbed in his task that he did not look up as she entered the clearing. “Have some fruit,” he said. “I think you’ll have to content yourself with water with your breakfast, though, Miss Warington. I hope we can stop somewhere where there is a bazaar—though not in the city of Darjeeling itself, as I’d prefer not to fly that close to a place that is sure to have some British troops stationed—and buy some tea. Judging from the region we’re in, and how much tea I’ve seen growing on these slopes, we should be able to purchase something.” He paused a moment, then suddenly pulled what looked to Sofie like a finger-long thorn from his foot. A spurt of blood followed it, pulsing over the grass in long jets. St. Maur dropped his knife and pressed the palm of his hand hard against his foot, then looked at her. “Though, myself, I prefer Ceylon, Darjeeling is probably preferable to nothing. And while this water looks very pure, you never know with the water in these places. We should also buy a little teapot to boil the water, and something to brew the tea in. I suspect drinking only tea will save us from getting one of those mysterious fevers that everyone ascribes to the climate of India.”

The blood that had been gushing around the edges of his hand had now slowed down, and Sofie stood paralyzed by the incongruence of the conversation. How could he talk of brewing tea and what tea he preferred and other such drawing-room conversation when he had just extracted a huge thorn from his foot and was actively bleeding?

“Is anything wrong?” he asked.

It occurred to her that a gentleman who became a dragon must have a very high tolerance for contradiction and strange events, and she stammered out, “N-no. Not . . . Does it hurt?”

He grinned and shrugged, then removed his hand to look at his foot. “Not as much as it did while it was in. I suppose I should now go and wash, before I join you for breakfast.” And before she could answer, he got up, visibly limping, and extracted a silver-plated case from his luggage with his clean hand, before hobbling to the rivulet.

Sofie wished she understood what she was feeling. Why was it that the man who’d saved her from killing herself with a fall from that balcony should infuriate her so? Why was it that the fact that he could be perfectly amiable and at the same time show the kind of dark, sparkling humor that warned of dangerous depths make her angry or impatient? And why was it that she could admire his restraint and his self-containment as he tended to his own needs, and at the same time want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him?

It must be,
she thought as she nibbled on some orange pulpy fruit she didn’t have a name for, and which tasted almost sickly sweet,
because he is, ultimately, a zany. What need was there for him to do that to himself? Surely, he could have asked me to extract the thorn and assume I might do it without carving a big slice out of his foot. After all, most women are trained in looking after the sick.

The fact that she herself had been raised in India, surrounded by servants, and then sent to one of the most expensive academies in London—and had therefore never been exposed to the sick or to nursing directly—didn’t mean anything. True, if Sofie had been faced with his foot and asked to remove the thorn, she might have felt powerfully tempted to go into hysterics. Hysterics, she decided, would probably save her from having to remove the thorn—an operation she was sure she would completely fail at. But that didn’t signify. Any sane male would ask the woman with him to remove that thorn before attempting it himself. Of course, the question must follow if a man who spent a good portion of his time being a scaley, winged beast—no matter how sublimely beautiful that beast (or the man) might be—could, in fact, be sane.

“You are very pensive,” he said, walking up behind her.

She turned to see him—combed, washed, and wearing his shoes. And she blurted out the first thing she could think of. “Don’t those shoes hurt? Or at least one of them? On your injured foot?”

“Not a lot,” he said. “At any rate, I heal very fast, and I think wearing the shoe till I change shapes will prevent me from bleeding more, which is the only worry, as then I might have to let the dragon feed again before nighttime.”

She didn’t know what to answer and ate another piece of fruit to hide her confusion. He seemed to take it for an inquiry, and explained in a matter-of-fact way. “Bleeding always seems to weaken me. And when I’m going to be the dragon and fly all day, as I did yesterday—and what’s more, fly at a high enough altitude not to be easily visible from the ground or the stray flying rug or occasional carpetship—I must not be weak or tired. The greatest danger with the dragon is that it will get too hungry, and I would prefer not to allow it to feed before nighttime.” And then, as he sat down and reached for the fruit tray, he added, with every appearance of haste, “It’s not that you’d be in any danger, you know. But others . . . others might not be as fortunate.”

She wondered if he meant he’d eat people. Also why, if that was so, he thought she wouldn’t be in any danger. And before she could still her tongue, she found herself asking, “How does it work? Yourself and the dragon, I mean. How much are you him? How much is he you? It seems like you talk of him as being something quite . . . other.”

Immediately upon the words, she flinched, wondering how could she be so uncouth. In the back of her mind, she could hear Lady Lodkin growling: “Miss Warington!” in the tone she used when Sofie committed a social solecism in her presence. And yet, Sofie would challenge Lady Lodkin herself to navigate
this
situation correctly.

At any rate, St. Maur did not seem upset. He looked at her, more startled than shocked. “Oh,” he said. Then with a small chuckle. “You know, no one’s asked me that before.” He took a bite of his fruit and chewed thoughtfully.

“Other people know? What you are?”

“A few. My father, for one. My late father. He knew.” Something in the expression of his eye warned her this was not quite a safe subject. “And my friend Nigel and his wife—his
ex
-wife, Emily, and her new husband, Kitwana, and . . .” A sudden, startling smile. “A Masai girl somewhere in Africa at this moment. All of them know. But none of them ever asked me that.” His dark, well-delineated eyebrows lowered, and his eye looked troubled. “I don’t even know that I can answer.”

“You speak as though the dragon were an animal you own,” she said, emboldened by his calm acceptance of the topic. “You will let it do this, and you will let it do that, and—”

He shrugged. “Part of it is wishful, I think,” he said. “It’s just easier that way. You see . . .” He frowned harder—an expression that would be intimidating were it not so obvious that he was simply trying to comprehend, in his own mind, the whole process.

He sighed deeply and she thought that this thing he was doing, this searching of his mind and trying to understand something he’d prefer not to think on—by his own admission—might be very similar to carving up his own foot to extract a thorn. Then the thought that, like removing the thorn, it might be a needed and beneficial act surprised her, but before she could speak again, he continued.

“You see, I started changing when I was . . .” He looked up, as if struggling to remember. “Why, I guess when I was about your age. I’d just left school and gone home for the summer, to rusticate a while until I decided what to do with the various possibilities open to me. I was a good student and fairly adept at the social world and, I’ve been told, not wholly bad-looking.” A faint smile twisted his lips. “The army would have been happy to have me. The diplomatic service vied for me. If I’d had an interest in politics, there were any number of people in positions of power willing to sponsor me. Or I might have made an advantageous marriage. My father did, and he had little more to recommend him than regular features and a polite address. I also considered writing peotry and becoming the toast of fashionable society. It seemed to me, you see, as though I had so many avenues open to me that I was spoiled for choice and didn’t know which way to turn.

“I shouldn’t have bothered, because all those avenues were about to close. At first, I knew nothing of it, save that my father was missing sheep. My father knew nothing of it . . . nor did anyone else. I suppose if my father had ever suspected I might be a were, he would have thought of those English, or at least European, shapes that are common in the nobility—a wolf, a fox, a bear. But the creature eating the sheep was none of those, see. It was . . . something quite new to our rural scene. In fact, it ate everything of a sheep but the horns and some stray bits of bone.”

Sofie remembered him the night before—in dragon shape—eating the buffalo. The voracious mouth and those sharp teeth dripping blood and gore. Now his very human, well-shaped teeth glimmered at her as he smiled—a smile without mirth at all. “My father gathered his shepherds and his villagers, and me, of course, and we stood watch in the night. Hell’s own jest, isn’t it? Me keeping watch for myself?” He shook his head and his voice dropped and seemed somehow younger as he said, “This sickness came over me, like a wave of nausea, and I started coughing. I think it had only happened while I was asleep before. Or perhaps I was awake, but the mind refused to accept it. They say such things happen, that when something horrible happens, your brain erases all trace of it and you forget. At any rate, I went behind some bushes to cough, so I wouldn’t startle our prey. And next thing I knew I was a dragon and I was aloft, going for the sheep.