Bad Faith Page 8

And gods, it was talking to her. And if it was not exactly friendly—she wasn’t even sure if dragons could do friendly—it was also very far from animosity. The things she could learn from this creature. The questions she could ask.

  And then, as the academic in her stirred, she placed what was different about the dragon’s voice.

  “You’re a female,” she said.

  The dragon turned both of its eyes on her this time. Black catlike slits in yellow orbs. Forward facing. Predator’s eyes. And it was small for a dragon, but it was also so very much larger than she.

  “Yes,” it said finally. “I am aware.”

  “I’m sorry. I just …” Quirk was dangerously close to gabbling. She was feeling light-headed. She wondered if she had lost any blood. She looked down. It turned out that she had. Though not so much that she should worry, she thought. And she wasn’t losing any more. All her wounds had clotted.

  Slowly she tried to haul herself into something closer to a sitting position. Her body shouted at her. Her head pulsed. She remembered being hit repeatedly above the neck. She wished people hadn’t done that.

  The dragon had found another body. She started to chew.

  Quirk lay back, panting at the exertion of movement. “I’m …,” she said, took a breath. “I’m Quirk.”

  The dragon didn’t look up. “Yorrax,” it said with its mouth full.

  “Hello, Yorrax,” said Quirk. The dragon ignored her.

  She leaned back. At least it was easy to fall asleep.

  Sound ripped her out of blackness. She struggled to sit up, almost bellowed at the pain in her head. She stared about wildly. It was evening, the light fading.

  “What in the Hallows was that?”

  After a long time, a husky dragon voice said, “Nothing.”

  Very slowly, and very carefully, Quirk rolled her head to look at the dragon. Its whole body seemed hunched around its broken wing. She could feel the tension coming off it in waves.

  “I don’t know if you know this,” she said, “because you’re not human. But most of us can pick up on bullshit that obvious.”

  “You cannot help,” the dragon said. The fire in her eyes seemed dull in the thin light.

  “Not if you don’t want help,” Quirk agreed, with a tone balanced between patience and petulance that she strongly associated with a nurse who had cared for her during her early days in Tamathia.

  Yorrax didn’t answer. The pair of them lay there in silence. Quirk lost track of time until her stomach growled.

  “Is there food,” she said, “that isn’t …” She hesitated, searching for a diplomatic word. “That isn’t people?”

  Yorrax continued to ignore her. Quirk gathered what strength and willpower she had and bunched her legs. With a grunt that became a shout and then a shriek, she stood. The world spun about her. She put out a hand to steady herself. Then the ground hit the side of her head. Then she threw up.

  Gods, she had to get out of here. She couldn’t just lie here wasting time. She had to … to … what? What could she honestly do besides lie here and slowly starve to death?

  Even if she could overcome the limitations of her flesh, what then? She had come at Barph with every scrap of revenge she had held, and he had simply laughed. He had torn everything apart. It hadn’t even been an effort for him.

  Despite her best efforts, a sob escaped her. She stuffed her hand into her mouth to try to stop the next one.

  She heard the dragon move, ignored it.

  Gods, she was a joke. Her whole life was a cosmic joke. Her whole struggle … How long had Barph been laughing at it?

  There was a dull scraping sound from behind her. She wanted to glance back, but knew enough now to turn her head slowly. Yorrax had reached out with her tail and was rooting in the rubble of the whorehouse’s walls. Quirk watched curiously, then looked at the dragon’s face. Yorrax was looking studiously away, as if her tail was operating entirely of its own volition.

  With a wrench the tail pulled free. Several large crates came with it, tumbling toward Quirk and spilling open as they came. Breads, cheeses, and bottles of wine spilled across the ground. Some bottles cracked, leaked their contents into shards of glass, but another came to rest against her thigh. A roll landed in her lap from the small explosion. Quirk stared at it. She stared at Yorrax.

  “I …,” she said.

  Yorrax wasn’t looking at her, was instead staring studiously at the stars as they began to appear in the sky.

  An unexpected warmth flooded Quirk. A gratitude so profound that it caught her off guard. “Thank you,” she said. “This is …”

  “Hmm?” Yorrax turned around, eyes wide and innocent. “What?”

  And despite everything, despite the fact that this was a dragon, Quirk couldn’t help but smile. “You are the worst liar I have ever met.”

  Yorrax stared at her a little while. “I will eat you tomorrow,” she said finally. “Once you have put on enough meat to be tasty.”

  The Tarramoners came for them in the night.

  Quirk was having trouble sleeping. Her head throbbed viciously. The wine had not helped. Moonlight painted the courtyard in a dim chiaroscuro. Jags of rubble seemed to loom out of a surrounding abyss. Yorrax shifted uneasily in her sleep.

  At first Quirk thought the noises she heard came from the dragon. Her tail shifting rocks in her sleep. Some scratching of her massive claws over the broken cobbles. But then she heard the whispers.

  Quirk tried to lie perfectly still. Tried to hold her breath steady.

  Each voice was too low for her to make out the words, but there were a lot of them. They were climbing up over one of the more intact buildings. She could hear metal rattling. Swords, perhaps?

  They would reach Yorrax first. And perhaps that was a good thing. Whatever else she was, Yorrax was a dragon. Dragons needed to be killed. Even if they did help feed you, and occasionally saved your life.

  She should definitely let these Tarramoners kill Yorrax.

  She didn’t let the Tarramoners kill Yorrax.

  She lit up the night.

  Her first swath of flame went over their attackers’ heads, a bright signal flare that boiled away the delicate light of moon and stars. She saw them in stark relief, poised with ropes against the wall of the courtyard, eyes suddenly wide with fear and surprise. There were shouts, bellows. Then darkness. She let the fire die, and in the blinking, blinding darkness she moved.

  Yorrax was grumbling, stirring, shifting her vast bulk. Quirk crawled, trying to move her head as little as possible. The men were shouting back and forth to each other, panic tearing through them like a plague through a village. Quirk could hear some of them scrambling to get up and away. Those packing more lunch meat in their britches were dropping to the courtyard’s uneven flagstones.

  Quirk sent out another jet of flame. A man screamed, twisted away, arms flailing. He ran, throwing up leaping shadows, eliciting shrill shouts from his comrades. Then he tripped, fell, lay twitching and screaming. Then he just burned.

  “What?” Yorrax’s voice was slurred.

  “It’s awake!” A voice clear in the cacophony of terror.

  Quirk flooded the courtyard with flame. She let it wash out of her. A great gout of flame. And it felt like freedom, and it felt like dancing, and it felt like a betrayal of what she had thought she and Afrit could be. But Afrit was no more, and her plans were no more, so maybe there was only this. Maybe there was only scouring the world clean of Barph’s infection. Maybe there was only leaving him with no world to rule.

  She was vaguely aware of the shouting, the screaming, the men and women running for cover, the gleam of firelight reflected on sharp steel. Of Yorrax rearing up on one leg, body twisted but head held high. Of Yorrax’s flame twisting with her own.

  And then … then it was over. She was gasping. She felt hollow. She could smell burned meat. She could hear men and women fleeing in panic.

  She lay on her back staring up at the stars. They seemed im
possibly distant in that moment.

  “Well,” said Yorrax, settling back down on the ground. There was a strain in her voice. “I suppose it was nice of you to cook them for me.”

  Then came a meaty crunching sound. Quirk closed her eyes and let exhaustion take her.

  The Tarramoners left them alone after that. They had sacrificed enough sons and daughters here, it seemed. No one came and bothered them. They did not go and bother the rest of Tarramon. She could barely move without her head’s threatening to detonate. Yorrax simply lay still and ate the dead.

  For the most part there was silence between them. Sometimes Quirk tried to plan. She tried to imagine returning to her resistance fighters at the estate. She tried to imagine whether they’d be surprised to see her or horrified. She wondered what they could possibly achieve. She wondered if she would finally give in and simply burn the world.

  Other times she meditated. She focused on the surface of the lake. She kept it calm. She held the wind still and silenced its deep currents. She found her head hurt less when she did.

  And sometimes, as the days ticked past, they talked.

  “Gods, please … That was somebody’s grandmother,” Quirk said once, as Yorrax slurped and slapped at a body.

  “Not mine,” said Yorrax.

  On another occasion Yorrax asked her why she was making “that irritating noise.” Quirk rolled away and tried to keep the keening sense of loss inside her quieter.

  And then sometimes they laughed. Yorrax had farted. A barrel, spilled from the whorehouse and caught in the blast, flew halfway across the square and landed in a clatter of spilling wooden uprights and metal hoops, and Quirk simply lost her shit entirely. Yorrax attempted an imperious stare that slowly dissolved into a rumbling, stumbling growl that Quirk had eventually realized was laughter.

  In another, more confessional moment, Quirk admitted, “I wrote a book on dragons once. A lot of people read it, actually.”

  It seemed a lifetime away to her. Before Afrit. Before dragons attempted to take over all of Avarra. Before Barph. It was less than a year. Gods.

  Yorrax turned to her. “You wrote about dragons?”

  “Yes.” Quirk avoided nodding still.

  “What did you say about them?”

  “Oh.” Quirk licked her lips. Now didn’t seem like the time to mention that the book had done so well because of her role in liberating Kondorra from the rule of dragons. “Their biology. Their musculature. Their diet. Their mechanisms of flight. Their dominance patterns.” She shrugged.

  “People liked reading this?” Yorrax’s head was cocked on one side.

  “Some, yes.”

  “We were a curiosity,” Yorrax said. “Like … some sort of bauble.” The last word sounded as if it didn’t quite fit in her dragon’s mouth.

  “Well …,” Quirk hedged. “Not exactly.”

  Yorrax didn’t seem to be paying attention. “Where I came from,” she said, “we didn’t have books. We had violence and fire and death.” She turned her vast head away from Quirk.

  “That …,” Quirk started, but realized she honestly didn’t have much of a comeback to that. She wasn’t sure she was supposed to. There seemed to be a point she was missing.

  And then … Gods, the enormity of the whole thing hit her. Because once dragons had terrorized all Avarra. But then, hundreds of years ago, they’d been driven away. And for hundreds of years there hadn’t been dragons. They had been a legend. Until thirty years ago, when they had returned and taken over Kondorra. They had come out of myth. And nobody—absolutely nobody—knew where the dragons came from.

  “So,” she said as casually as she could. “Where do you come from?”

  “The only place humanity left for us.”

  Oh … Barph’s balls. The dragons had been driven away. And of course that was a wonderful thing for humanity. But if you were a dragon it was a purging. It was genocide.

  A genocide committed by humans on dragons.

  Quirk decided not to push the subject.

  The next day, Quirk’s head felt a little clearer. She felt a little steadier on her feet. She scavenged deeper among the whorehouse’s spilled cellars and found salted meats, overripe fruit, and an almost innumerable stash of spare chains, leather straps, and whips.

  She sat out in the sun, enjoying the trickle of juice down her chin. She set a barrel of cured hams before Yorrax. She almost felt peaceful.

  Yorrax broke the silence. “You attacked Barph,” she said.

  Quirk paused, a tangerine segment halfway to her mouth. Quirk’s encounter with Barph was proving the slowest wound to heal. It still felt raw in her mind.

  “Yes,” she conceded.

  “Why?”

  Quirk thought hard about how to answer that. “He took everything from me,” she said. “My purpose. My job. My friends. My love. My world. Everything.”

  Yorrax nodded. “You hate him?”

  “With everything I have,” she said finally.

  Yorrax didn’t say anything. Then slowly she nudged a ham toward Quirk with her nose. “It is surprisingly good for human food,” she said.

  Quirk tried it. It was good. She made a decision. “Are you willing to admit that your wing is broken yet?” she asked.

  Yorrax snapped her head around, lips peeling back from fangs.

  The fruit in Quirk’s belly soured. She held out a placating hand. “I just want to help. I know how to heal it.”

  “I don’t need your help,” Yorrax growled.

  “I mean …” Quirk closed her eyes. And gods, she wished she knew more about dragon psychology. But … this had to be a pride thing, didn’t it? Yorrax hadn’t complained, because she couldn’t admit weakness. “I didn’t mean help,” she said. “I meant … I want to repay you.”

  Slowly Yorrax nodded.

  “I’ll need to set it with a splint,” said Quirk. And then, because she didn’t want it to be a surprise later on, “It will hurt.”

  Yorrax scoffed. “You cannot hurt me, human.”

  It turned out that Quirk could.

  Later, after night had fallen, they both lay in the square, staring up at the stars. The heavens were up there somewhere. Barph was in them. Their mutual enemy.

  “You asked me why I attacked Barph,” Quirk said. “Why did you do it?”

  Slowly Yorrax settled her head down on the rubble of the courtyard. “You asked me about where I came from,” she said. “And at first it will seem like I am answering that question. But I am not. I am telling you about my hate.”

  11

  The Backstory I’ve Spent Three Books Getting Around To

  “Once we lived in Avarra,” Yorrax began. “Once humans cowered before us and gave us our due, their all. Once this world was right. This is something every dragon knows. It is our legend of ourselves. I doubt your people tell the story this way, but this is how we tell it.

  “Times changed, though. Humans banded together. They scurried together like ants. They made cities and alliances. We, though, were complacent. If the humans built their wealth, then they built our wealth. Everything that belonged to them also belonged to us, and was to be taken whenever we desired it. We did not dream things could change.

  “But humans dreamt. They are ambitious creatures. They built machines of war. They built skins of steel to wear into battle. They built teeth they could fire from their bows to bite at our wings and throats. They built armies.

  “And still we were complacent. Even when they killed us. Even when humans cut us down from the skies. We thought these were anomalies, accidents, twists of misfortune. And by the time we realized the threat for what it was, it was too late. And so the world was turned upside down. The apex was inverted. We were laid low. We became the hunted, the prey. Our birthright was stolen from us.

  “The hatred humans harbored in their hearts for us—and for the tried and proper order of the world—knew no boundaries. It could not be satiated. They would hunt us down until the very last of us wa
s dead, and we were no more. Our very race ended.

  “So we fled. We took to the skies and flew west. Ever west. Looking for somewhere else to live. A refuge, a shelter, a home.

  “And so we found Natan. Our new home. An island in the endless blue of the Amaranth Ocean. But where Avarra had been a lush land of plenty and ease, Natan is a land of rock and hardship. It is jagged spires and hard-won food. Many more died there. We took long strides closer to the brink of extinction.

  “But the strong survived. Those with the willpower to cling to the precipice of survival. And those dragons mated, had young, raised the strong of mind and body. Despite all that was done to us, we did not give up. Even as the very land conspired against us, we survived.

  “We were few then. Extinction’s maw might have retreated, but it still regarded us from the horizon. We longed to return to Avarra, to reclaim our place and set the world to rights. But for century after century, our ambitions were kept in check by the very place we now called home.

  “Then from across the sea, for the first time in living memory, a ship came. It was aimed straight toward our shores. And it navigated easily past the rocks that lurk in the waters as if it had made the journey a thousand times before. In it, we knew, must be our hated foes. So we gathered to kill them, to vent a thousand years of pent-up rage upon the humans.

  “There was only one man inside the boat, though. And he looked upon us with no shock, no surprise, and no fear. He said he knew what had been done to us, and that he had come to right a great wrong. And I cannot explain why, but we listened.

  “He told us we had become legends, almost mystical. He told us that the gods had betrayed Avarra. He told us that man could learn instead to worship us. He told us that man would voluntarily put us back in our rightful place, if only we would follow his advice. We could tear the heavens themselves from the grasp of the gods. We could be gods ourselves. All the wrong done to us set right.

  “And so, of course, we argued. And argued. And argued. And the man grew impatient and railed at us, but he was just a man for all his words. And so, in the end, we sent just seven dragons. Seven ambitious dragons. Seven willing to risk their lives. Seven champions to establish a foothold and see how man responded to our rule. And the man called us a fool, and told us that we would see he was right. But he was just a man.