Voices of Dragons (3 page)

That didn't really convince Kay. She didn't know how many more questions she could get away with before her mother got either frustrated or suspicious. “They talk, right? Why don't we still talk to them?”

“That's the way they wanted it. They thought we'd all be safer if we stayed isolated from each other. Don't they teach you this in history class?”

“A little.” They did cover dragons in history class, especially in Silver River, but mostly with broad strokes. There wasn't much detail to go on, and the dragons came across as this distant, mysterious enemy.
What else was there to know?
seemed to be the attitude. Kay wished now that she'd been paying more attention. “No one seems to know much about
it. Couldn't we have, I don't know, told them we wanted to keep talking?”

Her mother said, “At the time, I don't think it occurred to anyone to argue with something that can breathe fire.”

It wouldn't have occurred to Kay either, until yesterday.

Kay had an atlas, one of those picture-book-type deals for kids that she'd gotten one Christmas, with a world map across two pages, all the countries shown in different colors. She'd marked places all over the world she wanted to go. Climbs she wanted to conquer: Yosemite National Park; Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa; Trango Towers in Pakistan. She didn't quite know how she was going to do it, besides making a lot of money somehow. Winning the lottery, maybe. She wasn't the best student and didn't see herself in a fancy high-paying job. Never mind that many of those dots she'd marked on her map were in dangerous places. The regions of Dragon were in the north, shaded gray. Shadowy, unknown, off limits. “Here be dragons,” the
map may as well have said. So wasn't crossing the border another adventure? But rather than seek this one out, it had come along and plucked her out of the river.

Crossing the border by accident was one thing, and she hadn't crossed very far then. Just washed up on the riverbank. No one could blame her; no one could punish her. But crossing intentionally?

Kay stood on the human side of the creek and looked across. The other side didn't look any different. Going over there shouldn't have been such a big deal. And why did she have to be the one to cross anyway? Meeting like this was the dragon's idea. He should be the one to cross. Except she was a little easier to hide than he was, wasn't she? Her tracks would be easier to cover up on his side of the river than his would be on her side.

The log he'd dragged across for a bridge was still in place, maybe wetter than it had been. It would hold up.

She ran across it before she could second-guess herself. Her hiking boots didn't slip on the wet bank, and the log didn't budge. This could have been any makeshift bridge across any creek, and the forest on the other side was just the same: tall pines, earthy smell, calls of distant birds. The only difference was in her mind, knowing she had crossed the lines on the map. It was enough to make this another world. She stayed by the side of the creek, perching on a smooth boulder. She pulled her knees up and waited. No dragon appeared.

Half an hour, she told herself. That was how long she'd give him. If he didn't appear by then, she'd run back home and pretend that none of this had happened. Then again, maybe it hadn't happened. Maybe she'd been knocked on the head and imagined the whole thing. But she wanted to know. She hadn't thought about how the dragons had their own side to the story; now that she had, she wanted to know what that side was. And she would never, ever get another chance at this. This was another impossible rock face, and her uncertainty was the usual fear vying with exhilaration. Sure, she might fall. But she'd rather reach the top.

She heard the dragon's breathing first. A short gust of wind rustled nearby trees, then another, and the gusts, like those that sometimes came suddenly from the mountaintops before letting the forest fall still again, were too regular. These gusts didn't rustle, murmur, and startle. They breathed.

How could something so large move so quietly? Trees creaked all the time, branches rustled, so when he wound his way around the trunks, the sounds were no different. His steps were silent on the soft earth.

Her heart pounded hard, and she almost ran back across the log. She didn't remember standing, but there she was, ready to take off like a rocket.

And there was the dragon's head, right in front of her, his neck lowered almost to the ground so it was at eye level—with his eye nearly as big as a car window. The large, black,
glistening surface showed her stricken face back to her. His body stretched out behind him, nestled among the trees.

“You came,” he said softly.

She nodded quickly, feeling like a mouse—a mere bite of food—caught in his gaze.

“Wondered,” he said. “Thought you might not.”

“I almost didn't,” she said, backing away a couple of steps. Every time he spoke, warm, smoky breath brushed by her.

He gave a small growl, and her heartbeat sped up to a jackhammer rhythm. Was he angry? Maybe he was angry. She glanced over her shoulder, but didn't think she could run fast enough to escape that long neck and lithe body.

Or maybe he was chuckling.

“Not hurt you,” he said softly, like a roll of distant thunder.

“Won't. Won't hurt you.” She winced at her own tone of voice. She sounded like an English teacher.

The dragon flexed his neck in an expression she couldn't read. “See? Practice.”

Almost, it was too much. “But
why
?” she said, her arms spread, pleading. “You're not even supposed to be here.
I'm
not supposed to be here. We're not supposed to be talking to each other. If anybody finds out about this, they're going to be so pissed off, it might start a war like the last one. So why do you even need to learn to talk to people? Why?”

“Too fast,” he said. “Again. Slow.” His expression shifted,
the scales around his mouth turning downward. A frown, she realized. She'd been talking too fast, and she'd confused him.

She took a deep breath and started over. Slower, this time. Simple.

“Why do you want to talk to people, when there was a war between dragons and people? When dragons haven't talked to people for sixty years?”

He sat still as a rock, the bulk of his body resting motionless. He could fall asleep and be mistaken for a pile of boulders—shimmering, silvery boulders, but still boulders. However, tiny flickers of expression—a twitch around his eye, a stretching of scales around his mouth, a tension in his neck—revealed that he was alive, that he was thinking. Considering how to answer.

“To understand,” he said finally. “Both sides.”

He gazed at her. Kay tried not to think of how neatly she would fit into his mouth. Two bites, at most.

She said, “We have stories. Thousands of years of stories about dragons. They're always evil. They always destroy.”

Until sixty years ago, the stories were only stories. Over the previous centuries, the dragons withdrew to strongholds underground, beneath mountains and in unexplored caves, until people forgot they'd ever been real. Then the atomic blasts at the end of World War II brought the dragons out of hiding. When the shockwaves from the bombs in New Mexico and Japan reached them, they clawed their way
back to the surface, and humanity's nightmares came to life. The old stories—tales of Leviathan, of serpents and the evil they brought, of virgin sacrifices, warriors slain, and miles of land burned to nothing—had been history. Even recent sightings of sea monsters and lake monsters that had been discounted as legend may have been lone dragons, briefly reemerging into the world.

This time, though, unlike in the days of swords and armor, human technology very nearly matched the dragons' power. They'd gone to war, fire-breathing dragons against fighter planes and tanks. Both sides feared such a war would destroy them all, and the land they lived on, so they called a truce, made a treaty, and the dragons retreated to a territory carved out for them in the northern Rockies, Siberia, and the Arctic Circle. Each side promised to leave the other alone, so they could all live in peace. That taut, anxious, so-called peace had lasted since. People lived with the images lurking in the backs of their minds, of fire blasting from the sky, melting ships, tanks, and cities. Silver River, Montana, where Kay lived, was the closest American town to one of the dragon territories and home to the U.S. branch of the international coalition that monitored the borders of Dragon. Fighter planes from Malmstrom Air Force Base patrolled the border, the schools ran dragon-raid drills, and you lived with it because that was just the way things were.

“We have stories,” the dragon said. “Of people with
swords. They hunt us down. Seek us out. Wicked deeds.”

Kay wondered what stories the dragons told about human beings. Saint George—Silver River High's mascot was Saint George—must be like the devil to them.

“Foolish, maybe,” he said. “But I want to see for myself. To understand. We used to talk to people. Maybe we should again.”

How unlikely was it that they even met at all? People and dragons weren't supposed to meet. They weren't supposed to walk around on the same planet. Except for old stories from China where dragons represented good fortune and luck, there'd been only conflict between them.

But there were those stories of Chinese luck. Somewhere back in history, maybe something like this had happened before. Pure chance had brought them both here: her to climb rocks and him to fish her out of the river.
That
was luck. And it gave them something to talk about.

“If I hadn't fallen into the river, what would you have done?” she said. “I had to talk to you because you saved my life. But if you had tried to talk to someone who was just walking along, and they saw you and ran screaming, what would you have done?” Kay could see it: That someone, seeing a dragon so close to the border, would have fled, reported to the Federal Bureau of Border Enforcement, maybe even her mother, and there would have been evacuations, more jet patrols, maybe even bombing—everyone would have assumed the dragons planned an attack. But
that wasn't why he was here.

“Thought, the stories about humans are true. But you didn't scream. Didn't run.”

In spite of herself, unconsciously almost, Kay smiled. No, she hadn't run away. And the dragon hadn't tried to eat her, and she had to rethink a lot of the old stories. She liked the idea that everyone had been wrong all this time. This wasn't just an adventure—it was an adventure no one else had even thought of before.

The dragon tilted his head, peering more closely at her. Like a bird might.

“That—smile? Why?”

“Because this is good,” she said.

They met again the week after that.

The dragon, it turned out, knew how to read. Dragons had scholars and writing. Using soot on stone, working with their claws, they made marks and symbols. They had also collected human books, and some of them, peering very closely to make out the tiny (to them) letters, could read human words. So at the dragon's request, Kay brought him books, and they read them together.

“How can you read?” she asked him early on. “You're huge. The print's so small.”

“Very good eyes. Like hunting prey. We see rabbits while flying.”

She wasn't sure what to make of the image, of reading being like hunting.

During that same meeting she asked him his name. He tilted his head, a quizzical, curious movement. It meant he was thinking. When he spoke, he made a trill and click, dragon noises, deep in his throat.

“That's your name?” she said, and he nodded. “I can't say that. What's it mean in English?”

He paused again, still bemused, and she wondered what dragons called themselves, what their names meant. But she thought about what her name meant and what she'd say if she had to translate it, and how she would have been just as perplexed.

“I can choose a name.” He looked at the book they'd been reading,
The Faerie Queene
, a thick edition with clear print she'd found in the library. She'd brought it because the picture on the cover showed a knight battling a dragon. “Artegal. Call me that. Your name?”

“Me?” It seemed surreal, trading names with a dragon. “Kay.”

“The letter?”

She knew she wouldn't be able to explain it. “Kind of.” He simply huffed in response.

He wanted to talk about the books with dragons in them, to see the human stories of dragons and people fighting. To try to understand why they fought. She figured her just standing in front of him would explain it.

“You could swallow me whole. That scares people.”

“People fight when scared?” he said.

“Of course they do.” He still seemed confused by the
whole idea. His gaze narrowed. She was learning to read his expressions: the arc of scales above his shining dark eye, the curve of his lip. The way his head tilted when she spoke too quickly, and he didn't understand.

She asked him, “What scares dragons?”

He cocked his head. “Nothing.”

The answer didn't surprise her. But after a moment he added, “Each other.” That did surprise her.

“Dragons fight with each other?”

“Rare. We fight to defend. But there has been no fighting in my lifetime.”

At first she was shy about asking questions. One of them might make him angry and finally inspire him to eat her. But he was more interested in the books, in the stories, and in asking questions himself. He really was interested in talking. She grew braver.

“Where do you live?”

“North,” he said.

“No, I mean, do you live in caves? Like in the stories? Do you make them, or do you find them?”

“Caves. There are always caves to find. But we make them larger. We carve. Decorate.”

“How?”

“Stones. Ones that shine in the light. Gold. That story is true—dragons love gold.”

“How many of you are there where you live?”

“You'll tell this to your army?”

Stricken, she shook her head, denying it. But then she recognized the curl to his lip, a rumble that was a chuckle. He'd been joking. He understood: She couldn't take this information to anyone without admitting that she'd crossed the border and spoken to a dragon.

He asked her many of the same questions. Where do you live? What do you do? The dragon understood school—they had something like it. Each dragon was taught by a mentor, an elder in the family.

He said, “My mentor was a…speaker. After the last battle. The one who spoke to make the treaty.”

She remembered seeing pictures, old black-and-white photos of a trio of dragons crouched in an open field, surrounded by tanks and soldiers with guns, and a handful of unarmed, tiny-looking people standing before them.

“Like an ambassador,” she said.

He tilted his head and ducked his chin, something like a nod. “Yes. Ambassador. Then he taught me. I learned language from him. But had no one to speak to after he left. Many years ago now.”

“Where did he go?”

Artegal settled, a shiver passing along his neck that made his scales ripple. “East. Not sure where. But…he did not like that we kept silent.”

“And so you came looking for someone. Won't your people get mad if they find out about this?”

He snorted at this. A hint of steam curled from his
nostrils. “An acceptable risk.”

The same acceptable risk she was taking, for the sake of adventure. She understood.

 

She turned her phone off during these Sunday afternoons with the dragon. Reception was spotty out here anyway, but she didn't want to have to explain it to him if it happened to ring. And she certainly wasn't going to talk to someone in the dragon's presence.

Usually, she had missed calls when she reemerged into what passed for civilization in Silver River. This time, a text message from Tam screamed at her:
Where RU?

Kay called her back. Tam didn't even say hello.

“Kay, where are you? We're supposed to go looking for dresses, what's up?”

Kay winced. She'd forgotten. “I just went out for a little while. I'm driving into town right now. I'll pick you up at your house.”

She didn't go straight to Tam's house, because she had to change out of her hiking clothes and take a shower to get the dirt and sweat off. How could being out in the woods for an hour get her so grubby? By the time she got to Tam's, she was an hour late, and Tam wasn't happy.

“This is the most important dance of our lives. Shopping for a dress—you have to take it seriously.”

“Sorry,” Kay said, as Tam slid into the passenger seat of the car. “So what happens when junior prom comes along?
Then senior prom? Isn't that supposed to be the most important dance of our lives?”

That got a smile out of Tam. “What have you been doing all day?”

Kay shrugged. “It wasn't all day. Just a couple of hours. I was just out hiking.”

“You're always hiking.”

“I like hiking.”

“If I didn't know better, I'd say you had a secret boyfriend stashed somewhere.”

Kay stiffened and couldn't think of what to say, so she glared at Tam as if to say,
Don't be ridiculous
. But maybe Tam kept thinking it, and maybe that was okay, if it meant Kay didn't have to explain what was really going on.

 

The closest mall was fifty miles away and wasn't much of a mall. Only one department store, which made shopping for a dress either really easy or really hard, depending on your perspective.

“Maybe we should have stayed home and looked for dresses online,” Kay said.

Tam gave her a look. “That's not as fun.”

Easy for her to say. All the dresses Tam tried on looked great on her. Kay could barely bring herself to try on any. They looked so glamorous, shimmering with beads and glitter, tight and clingy. She didn't feel very glamorous.

She was glad Tam was there. Tam made her try on dresses
she never would have thought of wearing herself.

“Don't slouch,” Tam said, tugging at Kay's shoulders as they stood before a three-way mirror.

It was hard not to. The black, form-fitted dress had spaghetti straps, leaving Kay's shoulders and a big part of her chest bare. The tan on her arms ended where her T-shirt sleeves did. She felt self-conscious, and she slouched. Turning one way and the other, she studied the dress and herself. The minute she leaned over or tilted the wrong way, the front hung open, revealing way too much for all the world to see.

“I'm not big enough for this dress,” she said, grimacing at her small chest and the excess fabric. Tam, however, would fill it out nicely.

Tam grimaced right along with her, which meant she couldn't try to deny it. “Okay. We'll try something else then.”

Tam was still wearing the dress she'd tried on and was in the process of falling in love with. Royal purple, shot through with silver, it was a skintight sheath that showed off every inch of her curvy body. It had off-the-shoulder straps and a rhinestone broach between her breasts. Nobody else at school would have the guts to wear a dress like that; Tam looked amazing.

Shuffling through the hangers of the dozen or so gowns they'd picked, Tam pulled out the next one: spaghetti straps, snow white and silver, sparkling with beads, with a gather
in front that would make Kay look like she had more rather than less.

“That's too fancy,” Kay said, shaking her head.

“It won't hurt anything to try it on.”

Kay peeled out of one dress and squirmed into the other.

It was beautiful. It made Kay beautiful. Experimenting, she scrunched up her hair and held it on top of her head, letting a few strands fall loose around her face.

“Wow,” Tam said.

“I look like I'm getting married,” Kay pouted. This was too much. She didn't want a dress like this.

“No, you don't. You look like you're going to the Oscars.”

Tam may have been right, but Kay didn't recognize the svelte young woman in the mirror. Wearing a dress like this was…crazy. Like free-climbing a rock face or crossing the creek into Dragon. She wasn't hot enough for it, and she'd look like an idiot walking into the dance. Then again—maybe Tam was right. Maybe she really could be glamorous—and maybe she ought to try. An acceptable risk, as Artegal had said.

Kay didn't dare look at the price tag. She'd pulled a hundred dollars out of her savings from her summer job working for a river rafting company. Her mother had been adamant: “It's just a dance. It's not even prom. Don't break the bank on a dress.” Try explaining that to Tam.

“So what's the damage?” Kay asked, turning so she could reach the mess of tags hanging out the back. She braced. It was going to be too much. She couldn't afford it.

In the mirror, she could see Tam smile. “Eighty-nine ninety-nine.”