Dragonfell Read online

  Setting the cup on the ground, I shake Maud’s shoulder to wake her.

  “Who’s that?” she asks in a muzzy voice, blinking in the darkness.

  “It’s me, Rafi,” I say.

  She turns her head toward my voice. “Do I know somebody named Rafi?” she asks.

  “Yes, you do,” I tell her. “Here’s some milk.” Taking her hand, I help her hold the cup, and then guide it to her mouth. “Mmm,” she says sleepily. She drinks half the milk and I catch the cup as it starts to fall from her hands. In a moment she’s asleep again. I finish the milk and climb under the coat again and sleep until morning.

  When I wake up, Maud is sitting against the wall of the shelter, reading and gnawing on a bit of cheese from my sack. “Good morning,” she says cheerfully, and sets aside her book. No, my book. Or Old Shar’s book, the one about dragons that Mister Flitch gave her.

  I sit up and brush the hay out of my hair. “Mornin’,” I say.

  She grins. “You’re Rafi, of course. I do remember. And I’m feeling much better.” The goats appear at the shelter opening. Seeing them, Maud’s eyes widen. “Oh, there are two goats.”

  I nod and point. “The little one is Poppy. The other one showed up last night.”

  “She’s so elegant,” Maud says. “What is her name?”

  “He’s a he,” I say.

  “His name.” Maud laughs. “Elegance. What do you think?”

  “It’s a good name,” I say. Elegance is a male goat and Poppy is a female. They are different breeds, but I wonder if they can make baby goats together. If they did, I’d have an even bigger herd.

  I milk Poppy and take the rest of the cheese, and Maud chatters about the shelter, and the goats, and then she picks up the dragon book and shakes it at me.

  “I have dire suspicions about this book,” she says, drawing her face into a scowl.

  I freeze with the cup of milk halfway to my mouth. “You do?”

  “Yes. I mean, what sort of title is this?” She glances at the cover and reads the title aloud:

  A Guide to the Dragons of the World

  Being a History and Study

  of the Appearance, Behavior, and Purpose

  of the Draconic Species

  by

  Professor Igneous Ratch

  of

  The College of Natural Philosophy and Technicrasty,

  Skarth

  “Have you read it?” she asks. Before I can tell her that I can’t read, she goes on. “I’ve read every book I could find about dragons, but I’ve never seen this one before. Wherever did you get it?”

  “A mill owner named Mister Flitch gave it to a friend of mine,” I tell her.

  She blinks quickly a few times. “Flitch. Really. How interesting.”

  “You know him?” I ask.

  “No, of course not,” she answers. “And now that I’ve seen a real dragon I rather think that the author, this Ratch person, doesn’t know the first thing about dragons.”

  I set down my cup. “But you do?”

  “I do indeed. You saw the Coaldowns dragon, too,” she says, and raises her eyebrows. “It’s nothing at all like his descriptions.” She flips to the back of the book, looks at a page, and finds her place again. “Or hers, maybe. Is Igneous a girl’s name? Anyway, listen to this.” And she reads aloud:

  In these modern times, unlike the days of old, dragons have become a rare species; yet they are not quite extinct, having retreated from the usual haunts, lairs, and dens where they once lived, and are now to be found only in such places rarely, and as such have become more like vermin and a plague upon human persons than the noble creatures they once were, living as they do now in the desolate and abandoned places of the lands.

  For the dragons have fallen into ignominy, having become huge, destructive, sly, thievering, greedy, foul, unnatural, selfish, contemptible, parasitical, and entirely treacherous beasts.

  “The Coaldowns dragon wasn’t any of those things,” she goes on. “It was wonderful!”

  “It was,” I agree.

  “And the writing style is simply horrible.” She reads to herself for a moment, then snorts. “Xanthodontous? Hah.” She reads some more. “Furfuraceous or pediculous. Oh really, Professor Ratch?” She flips through the pages. “I think he’s pretending he knows what he’s talking about, when he’s really just making it all up.”

  I can’t think of anything to say. As far as I knew, everything inside a book had to be true; I’d never thought of questioning it before. But Maud has that kind of brain, one that sees past the surface to the truth underneath.

  “My own book will be much more accurate,” she tells me.

  “You’re writing a book?” I ask. “About dragons?”

  She scrunches up her face. “Did I mention that I’m a scientist, Rafi?” She nods. “I believe I did. That’s what scientists do. I am learning as much as I can about dragons, and writing it all down . . .” Rummaging in one of her bags, she pulls out a little book covered in red leather. “This is my notebook. Once I’ve figured out what dragons are for, and where they’ve all gone, and why they left in the first place, I will publish a book.”

  While we finish our cheese-rind breakfast and she reads aloud what she calls some particularly egregious passages from the Ratch book, the clouds move in again and sleet begins to fall outside our shelter.

  The coat is spread over the hay, drying, and the goats are bedded down in the other corner. Maud puts down the book and goes to the edge of the shelter to look out at the view of the Coaldowns. “I think I’d rather wait until the sleet stops before moving on.”

  “Good idea,” I say. Goats hate being wet anyway, so we’re better staying here for now.

  And . . . we haven’t talked about it yet, but she really is a scientist, and she’s curious about dragons in the same way that I am, so I’m hoping she’ll come with me to Skarth, which is where the time dragon told me to go. But there’s something I have to get out of the way first, especially after what happened at the inn.

  I clear my throat. “Maud, what do you see when you look at me?”

  She turns and shrugs. “A friend.”

  For a moment I hold that word to me—friend—because it’s one I haven’t heard in a long time. “No, I mean my face.”

  Being Maud, she takes the question seriously and puts her brain to work on it. She crouches in front of me. “No, don’t look away, Rafi,” she says. “I’m not afraid of you.” She studies me carefully, leaning closer to peer into my eyes. I glare back at her, daring her to say anything.

  “Stop that,” she orders. Then she reaches out to touch a lock of my hair and rub it between her fingers. “Hmm.” She sits back. “I suppose what you’re asking,” she says slowly, “is why people know from the first moment they see you that you’re different from them. That’s what happens, isn’t it? Like at the inn last night?”

  “Yep,” I say. “That’s it.”

  “It’s partly the hair,” she says. “I’ve seen people before with some red in their hair, but yours is not that color red. It’s more like embers. When I first saw you up on the time dragon’s heap, you had the light behind you, and it seemed like your hair was on fire.” She gives me one of her grins. “Fiery hair alone would be enough to frighten some people.” She studies me again. “Then there’s your face.” I hold myself still while she brushes her fingertips along my cheekbones and then taps my nose and my chin. “Your face is sharp. Nice-looking, I think,” she adds quickly, “but not quite like anyone else. Fierce.” She gives a half shrug. “It doesn’t help that you look so serious all the time. You could try smiling now and then, you know.”

  “Hah,” I say, without smiling.

  “Would you care to explain that comment?” she asks.

  “No,” I tell her. If she comes with me, she’ll find out what happens when I smile at people.

  “Then there’s the way you move.” She jumps to her feet and takes a few light, quick steps. “Like that.” T
hen she shakes her head. “No, that’s not it. Even when you’re just walking around, it seems like you could fly away at any moment.” Then she goes on. “Now for the most obvious thing, which is your eyes. It’s not just that the centers are dark. Your eyes . . .” She shrugs. “I don’t know if I can describe it. The dark of your eyes isn’t just brown or black, it’s shadow. It’s almost like it draws the light in.” She leans closer, and her voice gets softer. I stay very still. I can feel the warmth of her breath on my face. “I didn’t notice before.” She moves, peering into my eyes from the side, then from a little farther away. “There’s something there, Rafi. Way deep in there. A spark.”

  I blink, and it breaks the spell. “I know.”

  “What is it?” she asks.

  I think carefully about my answer before I give it. Maud is a scientist. She’s obsessed with dragons. If she knows that I have the spark of a dragon inside me, she won’t think of me as a friend anymore. No, I’ll be something scientific to be studied—a specimen.

  “Well?” she prompts. “The spark?”

  I tell her a lie. “I don’t know what it is.”

  “I don’t know either,” she says, and then she gives an exaggerated frown. “I don’t like not knowing!” A flash, and she’s grinning again. “I think most people wouldn’t stop to categorize all these things, Rafi—eyes, hair, bones, face, and all that. It just adds up to wrong and different.”

  “And people don’t like different,” I say.

  “No,” Maud agrees with a sigh, and I realize that she’s different, too, and it’s turned her into a wanderer—like me.

  “Would you come with me to find the dragons?” I ask.

  Her smile is blindingly bright. “Rafi, you didn’t even have to ask. Of course I am coming.”

  Chapter 15

  It is good to have a friend, but the first thing we do is argue about what to do next. “We have to go to Skarth,” I tell Maud.

  She is rummaging through one of her bags. “Rafi, there are no dragons in Skarth. It’s a city. Remember what the Igneous Ratch book says about dragons?” And she quotes it from memory: “They have their lairs in the desolate and abandoned places of the lands. We need to do the opposite of go to Skarth—we should go north, where the land is actually, you know, desolate? And abandoned?”

  “But you said you had dire suspicions about that book,” I protest. “Now you think it’s telling the truth about where we can find the dragons?”

  She pulls a shirt out of her bag, looks it over, and tosses it aside. “Skarth is too far out of our way.”

  “Maud, Skarth is our way,” I argue. “It’s exactly where we have to go. The dragon said so.”

  She freezes. “The Coaldowns dragon said so?”

  “Certain sure it did,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says in a small voice. “What did it say exactly?”

  “I asked it questions about dragons,” I tell her. “The same questions you have. It said I would find the answers in Skarth.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “Well then.” She heaves a big sigh. “I suppose we do have to go to Skarth.” Then one of her quick smiles flashes out. She’s like the weather on top of the Dragonfell. Covered with clouds one moment, bright and shiny the next. “But we’re not going a step farther until you look presentable, instead of all ragged, as you are now,” she says, looking me up and down. “Your clothes are burned, Rafi, and awfully holey. It doesn’t help, you know.”

  “You’re right,” I admit.

  “Of course I am.” She digs in her bag for a moment, then pulls out a cap. “You can have this!” She plops it onto her own curly black hair. “Also, this.” She holds up the shirt she took out before. “And these.” She pulls out a pair of pants and a jacket. “Oh, and shoes.” She takes those out of the bag, too.

  “Why do you have all this stuff?” I ask. All of her clothes are too large for her, I notice, though well made, and the cloth is very fine.

  “When traveling, I am always prepared for any eventuality,” she says primly.

  “Or you stole it from somebody’s clothesline,” I tease, because I know she didn’t.

  “Rafi!” She takes the hat from her head and throws it at me.

  I duck and the cap flies past me and lands on the new goat’s head. While Maud laughs, I climb over the moldy straw and take the cap off of Elegance’s horns before he starts to eat it, and put it onto my own head, pulling it down to cover as much of my ember-red hair as I can.

  The clothes fit me well enough, even the shoes. I make sure to take the shard of teacup with the blue-painted flower on it, which I found on the Dragonfell, and put it into the pocket of my new pants. Then we pack our things, sling our bags over our shoulders, make sure the goats are ready, and set off. The sun is bright and the air is brisk and washed clean by all the rain, and we put dark, sooty Coaldowns at our backs and head east. Toward Skarth.

  We’re both hungry for more than a cup of goat milk, so when we get to the inn—the same inn that tossed me out the night before—we stop. At first Maud doesn’t want to see those horrible, horrible people again, but I tell her that I’m too hungry to care where the food comes from. I wait on the road while she goes in to buy whatever she can get.

  After a short while she stalks out of the inn. “I got the food,” she snaps, “and a lecture about being careful of the dangerous people I might meet on the road. They meant you of course. Idiots.” She hands me a paper-wrapped package. “Meat pie. Probably delicious.” Then she gives one of her sudden grins, like the sun coming out from behind a gray cloud. “On we go!”

  As we walk, we talk. Maud has cheerful opinions about everything, from the personal habits of Professor Ratch, who wrote the dragon book, to the way the road is constructed, to what sorts of crops grow best in the soggy soil of the land we’re walking through. She’s read hundreds of books, and it makes me wonder what she’s doing wandering on her own.

  “But I’m not on my own,” she answers, and pops a bit of dried apple into her mouth. “I’m with you, Rafi.”

  We’re sitting on a stone wall that runs along the edge of the road, watching the goats nibble grass. “Where do you come from?” I ask.

  “Oh, you know,” she answers, waving a hand. “Around and about. Like you.”

  I blink. “No, not like me. I’m from a village near the Dragonfell.” I get my bearings and point. “It’s about three days’ walk that way,” I tell her. It’s funny, but I always know exactly where my village is.

  “But now you’re a poor, homeless orphan, right?” She makes her face look long and sad.

  “No, my da still lives there,” I say, surprised. “Are you a homeless orphan?”

  “Not exactly,” she says, and looks away, blinking. “Tell me about your family.”

  “Just Da,” I say. She doesn’t want to talk about herself, that’s clear enough. So as we finish our lunch I tell her about my da, and how I never had a mother, and the high, rocky slopes of the Dragonfell, and the village and all the people there—John Smithy and his intricate iron weather vanes, and Tandy Thumb’s cottage covered with blue flowers, and Old Shar, and Tam Baker’s-Son.

  “You must love it very much, your village,” Maud says, and she sounds wistful.

  I nod. “I do.”

  There’s one thing I don’t talk about. Just like she has secrets, so do I. I don’t tell her why I had to leave my village, or how Stubb and Gringolet are after me. I don’t tell her about how cold and fire don’t bother me, or how I can see in the dark. And I don’t tell her what I learned from the Coaldowns dragon about who I am and what I am supposed to do. As far as she knows, I’m like her—I’m just interested in dragons because they’re wonderful.

  So we have those two big holes in our conversation. We both know they’re there. But neither one of us says anything about them.

  Chapter 16

  Maud and the goats and I walk for another day, and the road gets busier with other people walking, or riding horses, or in wagons
and carriages drawn by horses or mules. On the next afternoon I hear a low chug-a-chug-chug in the distance. At the sound, the people around us start scrambling off the road; a nearby horse snorts and shies away, and its rider speaks soothingly to it and rides it onto the grass. Poppy and Elegance scamper into the nearest field. Then I hear it, a rumbling noise growing louder.

  Dragon I think at first—there’s smoke and clouds of steam coming up the road behind us—but then it puffs closer, bumping on metal wheels over the ruts in the road. Rattling and snorting loud enough that it makes my ears hurt, it jolts by us, a kind of wagon with a fat-bellied copper tank studded with shiny rivets, rods going up and down, oily gears turning, and a short chimney belching smoke. I catch a glimpse of two women perched on a high seat, one of them holding a hat on her head, the other gripping a metal rod—for steering, I guess—and then they are past. A cloud of dust and smoke swirls in the road and starts to settle.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  Maud coughs and waves the smoke away. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?”

  I shake my head, staring as the thing rattles off into the distance.

  “It’s a vaporwagon,” Maud tells me. “It’s not going to hurt you, you silly goats,” she mock-scolds as Poppy and Elegance prance back onto the road.

  “What makes it go?” I ask.

  “It has a coal-fired, steam-driven engine. The coal burns and boils the water, and the boiling steam makes the engine go.” Maud shrugs. “I don’t really understand how it works. You don’t see vaporwagons out in the country like this very often because the roads are so bad, but there are loads of them in—I mean, in some of the cities.”

  “A steam-driven engine that runs on coal,” I repeat, remembering what Old Shar said about Mister Flitch’s factory mills that make cheap cotton cloth. “The factories are steam-driven too, aren’t they?”

  “Ye-es,” Maud answers, blinks a few times, and then starts talking about a yellow flower that is growing next to the road.

  As we get closer to Skarth, huge wagons drawn by the biggest horses I’ve ever seen start to lumber past us, long convoys of them; whatever they’re carrying is covered with stained canvas. Empty carts pass, going the other direction.