HAHA NANOWRIMO HAHAHAHA
Yeah. I am doing it! But unlike last year, you are not going to see more of it than what is unscrupulously included below, not for a long, long time, at least. SO ENJOY! Or. Don't. I have included two beginnings that I tried before settling back on my original idea, because I am awesome like that, and I plan to add the other two that I came up with as well once I am Not At The Library.
In her last week of rehab, her brother sent her a letter, the stark white envelope addressed in meticulous cursive. She ripped it open with her thumb and shook out the single folded sheet, which was quite blank. After some thought, she went back to the envelope, and while it is true that she had to tape the envelope together to read the ‘address of sender’, she was pretty sure it still counted as permission, nay, invitation to come crash on his couch for a few weeks while she was getting things together.
Which was how she found herself in front of a scrawny brick building wearing a miserable expression spelled out in large low windows. Her brother’s apartment number was 406, which meant, she realized, with a faint pang of regret for what she was about to do to her basically innocent legs, that she’d have to venture onto the treacherous wooden stairway slouching against the wall like an underfed teenager worrying at a cigarette.
The minutes following were long minutes. And by the end, the wobbling ache in her thighs felt stronger than any of the surrounding sinews. She decided to take a breather on the top step. It was only sense: the bluish evening air, thin as broth, ought to soothe her burning lungs enough that she might even be able to say something to Henry, after all the effort that'd gone into locating him. What she really needed was a fire extinguisher with a nozzle that fit down her throat, but she’d make do, and did, sitting down hard. Collapsing, really, folding up like a cheap lawn chair, a complicated process that ended with her head framed comfortably by her round knees, so that she found herself eye to eye-- or, rather, eye to empty eye socket-- with the thing stapled to the underside of the warped and rotting wood.
At which point she forgot about her brilliant plan to put the ‘breathe’ in ‘breather’ entirely.
"Christ on a crutch," she hissed, bracing herself against the railing as the details of the sight laid out before her penetrated her skull.
The thing was a cat. A dead cat. A very, very dead cat.
Its swollen pink stomach was a mass of stitches, the sparse remaining tufts of fur hedged by ugly seams, like grass in February; there was something fundamentally wrong with the broken curve of its ribcage under the loose raw skin. Its eyeballs had been scooped out, quite neatly, though the eyelids were ragged from, she guessed, being peeled back with too much force.
And there was something familiar about the arrangement of its legs, something that seeded suspicion inside her. The sort of suspicion that is a close cousin to hope. Against her better judgment, she sniffed at it, nostrils flaring.
The reek of garlic hit her like a blow.
She pulled herself up, slowly. She was conscious that her face hurt because she was grinning, and had been since the idea occurred to her in the first place. So Henry had taken up the family trade while she was in Mexico, after all. Well, well, well.
It is an undeniable fact that few sentences are as sweet to pronounce, as pleasant to think through from curled end to curled end, as I told you so: China was by her admittedly deplorable standards being quite kind by going so far as to school her mouth into a marginally subtler smile before knocking on the door.
There followed a woolly skin of quiet that lay uneasily over staccato footsteps, and Henry opened the door.
His face was not precisely as she remembered it; his skin had dried from brown to white while she was gone, like driftwood does, and all the blood had pooled in the bulbous tip of his nose and in his long chin and along the curves of his high cheekbones, bringing out the shape of the underlying skeletal architecture with touches of that delicate pink that flares up at the heart of certain seashells.
He said, a distinct note of accusation in his voice, "You came.”
She bounced up and down on the balls of her feet until the welcome mat squealed for mercy, and she grinned at him. “I did,” she said. “Long time no see, Henry. Are you going to let me in or what?”
"Well," he said, eyes slanting over her, "all right." He stepped back and sideways. China sidled in after him and helpfully slammed the door shut after her with her elbow.
“So how are you,” he went on, when the echoes had died down. The inflection ran a shade too straight for it to be a question.
Which didn’t stop her from answering, after a moment spent contemplating the low crusted white ceiling. “Pretty great,” she said, and added the first truth that came to mind. “I lost weight, you know?”
She did not add: fat is lighter than muscle. She didn’t need to.
"Rehab agree with you, then?"
"No," she said, "leaving rehab agreed with me."
He said nothing but his face flattened out a little and she could see the smugness starting to flow. She didn’t begrudge him it; there was no way to begrudge him it, really, for he was an extension of the faint funny-shaped shadows that dominated this pale hallway and if she let her indignation leak out he'd probably dissolve entirely and leave her apologizing, as only hermit crabs and squatters can, to the things he’d left behind him.
“Did it now?”
"There were too many nice people," she said.
He snorted, rough and bubbling; it turned into a cough halfway through. “Don’t know how you lasted as long as you did.”
“Pills are amazing things.”
He shoved his hands deep into his jean pockets. She wondered idly what instinct he was quelling. “I guess that’s about right,” he said. “And I guess my dear brother-in-law made sure you popped a lot of them, huh?”
“Yes indeed,” China said, and then, slower: “Yes indeed.”
He raised his eyebrows in a way that gentled the lines of his face, and for once his irises were as clear and dark a gray as her own. There was nothing like shared hatred for making people kind, China thought, and tried unsuccessfully to remember a time when they had been closer, as siblings, for any reason that was not a bitter silence indistinguishable from this one.
On the other hand, they could be bonding over much less enjoyable things. It might make them petty but it also made them happy! And that was what counted.
“Well,” he said, that penny of a word balanced on the tracks derailing her whole train of thought. “We can talk about that after dinner. Eh?”
“Quite,” she said.
“I hope you like macaroni and cheese,” he said, crackling away. She followed him, head cocked to catch his knees’ complaints, and didn’t look straight ahead until they were stepping across the line that divided the hallway’s hardwood floor from the kitchen’s glistening yellow linoleum.
It didn’t look like a room that had any relation to Henry’s existence, with its thick greenish glass countertops and inexplicable bits of brass about the corners. But he slid through its heavier atmosphere easily enough, even if there was a fishlike quality to his movements, and his arms seemed to trail shadows like streamers as they swung back and forth past his sides.
“I do,” she said.
He stared at her.
“Like macaroni and cheese,” she said.
“Right,” he said, expression unreadable. “You know what, why don’t you go look at your room. It’s through the red door in the living room. You can get settled in and things.”
She nodded, and noted that he hadn’t asked how long she’d be staying, and went.
The sun had barely reached its zenith when Ansa’s husband clattered in, hours earlier than he should have. At first her reaction was one of mere flickering, irritated embarrassment: that morning he had asked her to see about his order of spices at the docks, and here she was still curled up on the hearth, because here at least the merciless heat came hand in hand with the pleasant smell of burnt peat, unlike in the steaming streets of the outer city. Wasn’t her fault: the child growing in her belly that had reduced her to a dizzy, useless mess, she groused, in the privacy of her own head.
Then she sat up and saw his face.
Thumb-shaped, plum-dark bruises were blooming on his jaw, and fistfuls of hair had escaped its leather ties to flare up around his pointed skull like a frightened cat's.
She hissed in sympathy, pushing herself to her feet and wiping her gritty palms on her skirt. “Trip on someone important’s foot again, did you?”
“Yes,” Mamic said roughly, and slapped away the hand she lifted to prod his swollen cheek. “Ansa…”
“What?”
“His Lordship suspects me of treason.”
She became aware that he’d left the door ajar, that light was slanting across the rushes on the floor. Anyone could be listening. Anyone probably was. The fact that it didn’t appear to matter at this point-- well.
“Does he now,” she said, ugly terror rising in her stomach. “Why?”
“Probably because he found the scion of the old dynasty hiding in my kitchen.” He barreled on before she could even work up a little honest incredulity. “Look, we don’t have much time. He’s going to release a warrant for your arrest. Yours, you understand?”
“Ah,“ she said, and, with a touch of bitterness, “He must be really, really fond of your cooking.”
Mamic winced. “Yes. Well. If he weren’t we’d both be dead right now.”
“Believe me, I’m grateful. Not as grateful as I’d be if you’d had the sense to keep your nose out of that nest of traitors who call themselves the resistance, but oh, yes, grateful!”
He gave her a crooked, fragile smile that looked odd on his sagging face, and pushed her towards the door. She dug her heels in.
“They’re a nasty bunch, all right. But they’re going to get you out of it.”
She studied his mouth.
“What? How?”
“Come on.”
He pushed harder. Ansa stepped outside, barely conscious, now, of the reek that had so disturbed her stomach earlier, and the weight of the sticky warm air, like a washcloth on her face. He ran and she ran after him, but her legs were awkward, stayed that way even after she hitched her narrow skirt up until the hem was bunched inappropriately high about her knees. The weird alchemy of mud and dung, which recent rain had slathered over the cobblestones like a marinade, sucked at the soles of her boots.
“This way,” he said; she chose not to mention that she might possibly have followed him out on his midnight skulking more than once, and knew at least the first few turns well enough.
They were heading toward the inner city. Specifically, the hollow half of it that had spent the last ten years of the Yellow Lord’s rule decaying, its sprawling manors eaten away by winds and thieves and strains of mildew. It occurred to her that the troublesome scion might, in fact, have been living in the ruins of his ancestral home, not far from here, up until he was found.
“Hello, O unappetizing one,” said the dragon. It was older than he’d expected: the folds of glistening wet flesh on the insides of its outermost eyelids were lined with a translucent yellow liquid like white wine. Maybe as old a dragon as he was a human; it was hard to say for certain, since it lay curled in the shade at the mouth of the cave. Its voice, though, its voice sounded precisely as it ought to have. It was a deep, sweet voice, and it had nothing to do with that alien architecture of jaw and throat; it came rather from some secret organ in its distended gut, the words shaped with blood and bile, not air.
He remembered his instructions belatedly and crouched, wondering how in hell he was meant to echo a reptile’s grace with my stiff spine and swollen joints and twisted leg. But then imitation had looked easy, in the casual lean lines of the helpful hunter who had recommended the method. Imitation was easy, he told himself. It had to be after all these years of making a living off it. It was true that his knees disagreed, but he’d learned to ignore his bones if it meant saving his skin.
The dragon tilted its head like a dog and kept tilting long after the dog’s would have twisted right off. “You stink of dust.”
“Thank you,” he croaked.
“And you’ve studied us. Or studied someone who’s studied us. Or studied someone who’s studied someone who’s--”
“Yes,” he said, hastily, because he didn’t fancy a slow death. (He used to begin stories by saying that there was nothing more dangerous than a dragon’s sense of humor. He regretted it now, but not because it wasn’t a kind of truth.) “I tried to learn a little of you before coming.”
“Did it work?”
“I have no idea.”
Its pebbled lips uncurled, covering the teeth so that only the fine murderous points were left bare, and the line of the mouth stretched, broadened. It took him a desperate heartbeat to see the movement for what it was: a clever facsimile of a smile.
“Hm,” it said. “Well. What do you want?”
He swallowed, or tried to. “I want to be protected.”
“From?”
“The Yellow Lord’s hounds.”
The dragon laughed. “They hunt you? Why?”
“See, the old king was my half-brother,” he said.
It slithered out on its belly from the cave, until its nostrils were mere inches from his face, and the heat of its breath made the air hazy, and its skin was barred by sunlight. The rough scales, he saw, were like old copper, greenish around the rough edge; but the frill of smoother skin fanned out around its cheeks was gold. “Yes, it’s there under the dust. Old gold. In your blood, hm? Go on,” it said. There was a sharp slant of curiosity to its inflection, and having once heard it he could hardly help falling into the rhythms of a storyteller.
“He tolerated me in his house, because I was a cripple, and young. And when the Yellow Lord came, with his army, I was spared, because I was a cripple, and middle-aged.” He paused for breath. The dragon’s innermost eyelids slid shut, a gauzy shield for the eye, and it lowered its head, its beard brushing the earth.
It was inspecting the frog-white meat of his leg.
“Useless?” it said, at last.
“It is now,” he said. “Or as good as. I will not be spared a third time because I am a cripple, or because I am old. The Yellow Lord’s son has loosed hounds athirst for royal blood, and they do not know the newly born from the nearly dead.” He stilled the trembling in his wrists; he spread his hands. “So I need. To be protected.”
“From hounds,” the dragon said, chewing on the word. “Which is why you came to me rather than hiring a bodyguard.”
“Yes.”
“Was that wise?” it said. “How, exactly, do you propose to pay me for my services?”
He took a deep breath. “With stories.”
“Ah."
Hessa liked summer, liked her work in summer, although heat made handling the bodies a messy business, and it could be a long time between graves during that generous season. The look of the forest under the empty sky, open-mouthed and thirsting for light, and the feel of old, deep green shadows on her skin while she dug, after the city‘s high clay walls and stinking streets-- oh, yes, Hessa liked summer, Hessa liked it very well.
That was what she was thinking while she slung her shovel over her shoulders and worked her feet into her boots, anyway. Once she was walking through the flower of summer, she concentrated on the broken, blackened pavement of the old road, and watched for certain landmarks among the more interestingly shaped ruins, which marked the parts of the city that had stood here or here until the wave of trees rolled over them. City that had been swallowed, back in the days before the church had been built on the fracture line of the city‘s half-eaten heart, and the priests had learned vigilance.
What little sky showed through the branches was white as a baby's teeth, and she did not look at it, for all that she’d given it such pleasant names while still tangled in her bed. Underbrush crunching under her solid soles, she tried instead to remember the dead man and his dead wife that she was due to bury.
She'd seen and greeted them before, which was more than could be said for many of the people whose corpses she dealt with: that was because they had lived in the forest. They, alone of their neighbors, hadn’t moved when the trees spread roots and cracked cobblestones around them. They were very old, and looked similar in the way that very old couples do, and they kept their own counsel, and they lived in the forest. A vague mental image of flat, fine-boned faces. And that was all she could dredge up.
After breathing in enough of the air that pooled, cool and old and still, in the hollowed woods, she decided she would rather do her job with an empty head and full lungs. She walked on. The spirals of light filtering through leaves warmed her back.
In her last week of rehab, her brother sent her a letter, the stark white envelope addressed in meticulous cursive. She ripped it open with her thumb and shook out the single folded sheet, which was quite blank. After some thought, she went back to the envelope, and while it is true that she had to tape the envelope together to read the ‘address of sender’, she was pretty sure it still counted as permission, nay, invitation to come crash on his couch for a few weeks while she was getting things together.
Which was how she found herself in front of a scrawny brick building wearing a miserable expression spelled out in large low windows. Her brother’s apartment number was 406, which meant, she realized, with a faint pang of regret for what she was about to do to her basically innocent legs, that she’d have to venture onto the treacherous wooden stairway slouching against the wall like an underfed teenager worrying at a cigarette.
The minutes following were long minutes. And by the end, the wobbling ache in her thighs felt stronger than any of the surrounding sinews. She decided to take a breather on the top step. It was only sense: the bluish evening air, thin as broth, ought to soothe her burning lungs enough that she might even be able to say something to Henry, after all the effort that'd gone into locating him. What she really needed was a fire extinguisher with a nozzle that fit down her throat, but she’d make do, and did, sitting down hard. Collapsing, really, folding up like a cheap lawn chair, a complicated process that ended with her head framed comfortably by her round knees, so that she found herself eye to eye-- or, rather, eye to empty eye socket-- with the thing stapled to the underside of the warped and rotting wood.
At which point she forgot about her brilliant plan to put the ‘breathe’ in ‘breather’ entirely.
"Christ on a crutch," she hissed, bracing herself against the railing as the details of the sight laid out before her penetrated her skull.
The thing was a cat. A dead cat. A very, very dead cat.
Its swollen pink stomach was a mass of stitches, the sparse remaining tufts of fur hedged by ugly seams, like grass in February; there was something fundamentally wrong with the broken curve of its ribcage under the loose raw skin. Its eyeballs had been scooped out, quite neatly, though the eyelids were ragged from, she guessed, being peeled back with too much force.
And there was something familiar about the arrangement of its legs, something that seeded suspicion inside her. The sort of suspicion that is a close cousin to hope. Against her better judgment, she sniffed at it, nostrils flaring.
The reek of garlic hit her like a blow.
She pulled herself up, slowly. She was conscious that her face hurt because she was grinning, and had been since the idea occurred to her in the first place. So Henry had taken up the family trade while she was in Mexico, after all. Well, well, well.
It is an undeniable fact that few sentences are as sweet to pronounce, as pleasant to think through from curled end to curled end, as I told you so: China was by her admittedly deplorable standards being quite kind by going so far as to school her mouth into a marginally subtler smile before knocking on the door.
There followed a woolly skin of quiet that lay uneasily over staccato footsteps, and Henry opened the door.
His face was not precisely as she remembered it; his skin had dried from brown to white while she was gone, like driftwood does, and all the blood had pooled in the bulbous tip of his nose and in his long chin and along the curves of his high cheekbones, bringing out the shape of the underlying skeletal architecture with touches of that delicate pink that flares up at the heart of certain seashells.
He said, a distinct note of accusation in his voice, "You came.”
She bounced up and down on the balls of her feet until the welcome mat squealed for mercy, and she grinned at him. “I did,” she said. “Long time no see, Henry. Are you going to let me in or what?”
"Well," he said, eyes slanting over her, "all right." He stepped back and sideways. China sidled in after him and helpfully slammed the door shut after her with her elbow.
“So how are you,” he went on, when the echoes had died down. The inflection ran a shade too straight for it to be a question.
Which didn’t stop her from answering, after a moment spent contemplating the low crusted white ceiling. “Pretty great,” she said, and added the first truth that came to mind. “I lost weight, you know?”
She did not add: fat is lighter than muscle. She didn’t need to.
"Rehab agree with you, then?"
"No," she said, "leaving rehab agreed with me."
He said nothing but his face flattened out a little and she could see the smugness starting to flow. She didn’t begrudge him it; there was no way to begrudge him it, really, for he was an extension of the faint funny-shaped shadows that dominated this pale hallway and if she let her indignation leak out he'd probably dissolve entirely and leave her apologizing, as only hermit crabs and squatters can, to the things he’d left behind him.
“Did it now?”
"There were too many nice people," she said.
He snorted, rough and bubbling; it turned into a cough halfway through. “Don’t know how you lasted as long as you did.”
“Pills are amazing things.”
He shoved his hands deep into his jean pockets. She wondered idly what instinct he was quelling. “I guess that’s about right,” he said. “And I guess my dear brother-in-law made sure you popped a lot of them, huh?”
“Yes indeed,” China said, and then, slower: “Yes indeed.”
He raised his eyebrows in a way that gentled the lines of his face, and for once his irises were as clear and dark a gray as her own. There was nothing like shared hatred for making people kind, China thought, and tried unsuccessfully to remember a time when they had been closer, as siblings, for any reason that was not a bitter silence indistinguishable from this one.
On the other hand, they could be bonding over much less enjoyable things. It might make them petty but it also made them happy! And that was what counted.
“Well,” he said, that penny of a word balanced on the tracks derailing her whole train of thought. “We can talk about that after dinner. Eh?”
“Quite,” she said.
“I hope you like macaroni and cheese,” he said, crackling away. She followed him, head cocked to catch his knees’ complaints, and didn’t look straight ahead until they were stepping across the line that divided the hallway’s hardwood floor from the kitchen’s glistening yellow linoleum.
It didn’t look like a room that had any relation to Henry’s existence, with its thick greenish glass countertops and inexplicable bits of brass about the corners. But he slid through its heavier atmosphere easily enough, even if there was a fishlike quality to his movements, and his arms seemed to trail shadows like streamers as they swung back and forth past his sides.
“I do,” she said.
He stared at her.
“Like macaroni and cheese,” she said.
“Right,” he said, expression unreadable. “You know what, why don’t you go look at your room. It’s through the red door in the living room. You can get settled in and things.”
She nodded, and noted that he hadn’t asked how long she’d be staying, and went.
The sun had barely reached its zenith when Ansa’s husband clattered in, hours earlier than he should have. At first her reaction was one of mere flickering, irritated embarrassment: that morning he had asked her to see about his order of spices at the docks, and here she was still curled up on the hearth, because here at least the merciless heat came hand in hand with the pleasant smell of burnt peat, unlike in the steaming streets of the outer city. Wasn’t her fault: the child growing in her belly that had reduced her to a dizzy, useless mess, she groused, in the privacy of her own head.
Then she sat up and saw his face.
Thumb-shaped, plum-dark bruises were blooming on his jaw, and fistfuls of hair had escaped its leather ties to flare up around his pointed skull like a frightened cat's.
She hissed in sympathy, pushing herself to her feet and wiping her gritty palms on her skirt. “Trip on someone important’s foot again, did you?”
“Yes,” Mamic said roughly, and slapped away the hand she lifted to prod his swollen cheek. “Ansa…”
“What?”
“His Lordship suspects me of treason.”
She became aware that he’d left the door ajar, that light was slanting across the rushes on the floor. Anyone could be listening. Anyone probably was. The fact that it didn’t appear to matter at this point-- well.
“Does he now,” she said, ugly terror rising in her stomach. “Why?”
“Probably because he found the scion of the old dynasty hiding in my kitchen.” He barreled on before she could even work up a little honest incredulity. “Look, we don’t have much time. He’s going to release a warrant for your arrest. Yours, you understand?”
“Ah,“ she said, and, with a touch of bitterness, “He must be really, really fond of your cooking.”
Mamic winced. “Yes. Well. If he weren’t we’d both be dead right now.”
“Believe me, I’m grateful. Not as grateful as I’d be if you’d had the sense to keep your nose out of that nest of traitors who call themselves the resistance, but oh, yes, grateful!”
He gave her a crooked, fragile smile that looked odd on his sagging face, and pushed her towards the door. She dug her heels in.
“They’re a nasty bunch, all right. But they’re going to get you out of it.”
She studied his mouth.
“What? How?”
“Come on.”
He pushed harder. Ansa stepped outside, barely conscious, now, of the reek that had so disturbed her stomach earlier, and the weight of the sticky warm air, like a washcloth on her face. He ran and she ran after him, but her legs were awkward, stayed that way even after she hitched her narrow skirt up until the hem was bunched inappropriately high about her knees. The weird alchemy of mud and dung, which recent rain had slathered over the cobblestones like a marinade, sucked at the soles of her boots.
“This way,” he said; she chose not to mention that she might possibly have followed him out on his midnight skulking more than once, and knew at least the first few turns well enough.
They were heading toward the inner city. Specifically, the hollow half of it that had spent the last ten years of the Yellow Lord’s rule decaying, its sprawling manors eaten away by winds and thieves and strains of mildew. It occurred to her that the troublesome scion might, in fact, have been living in the ruins of his ancestral home, not far from here, up until he was found.
“Hello, O unappetizing one,” said the dragon. It was older than he’d expected: the folds of glistening wet flesh on the insides of its outermost eyelids were lined with a translucent yellow liquid like white wine. Maybe as old a dragon as he was a human; it was hard to say for certain, since it lay curled in the shade at the mouth of the cave. Its voice, though, its voice sounded precisely as it ought to have. It was a deep, sweet voice, and it had nothing to do with that alien architecture of jaw and throat; it came rather from some secret organ in its distended gut, the words shaped with blood and bile, not air.
He remembered his instructions belatedly and crouched, wondering how in hell he was meant to echo a reptile’s grace with my stiff spine and swollen joints and twisted leg. But then imitation had looked easy, in the casual lean lines of the helpful hunter who had recommended the method. Imitation was easy, he told himself. It had to be after all these years of making a living off it. It was true that his knees disagreed, but he’d learned to ignore his bones if it meant saving his skin.
The dragon tilted its head like a dog and kept tilting long after the dog’s would have twisted right off. “You stink of dust.”
“Thank you,” he croaked.
“And you’ve studied us. Or studied someone who’s studied us. Or studied someone who’s studied someone who’s--”
“Yes,” he said, hastily, because he didn’t fancy a slow death. (He used to begin stories by saying that there was nothing more dangerous than a dragon’s sense of humor. He regretted it now, but not because it wasn’t a kind of truth.) “I tried to learn a little of you before coming.”
“Did it work?”
“I have no idea.”
Its pebbled lips uncurled, covering the teeth so that only the fine murderous points were left bare, and the line of the mouth stretched, broadened. It took him a desperate heartbeat to see the movement for what it was: a clever facsimile of a smile.
“Hm,” it said. “Well. What do you want?”
He swallowed, or tried to. “I want to be protected.”
“From?”
“The Yellow Lord’s hounds.”
The dragon laughed. “They hunt you? Why?”
“See, the old king was my half-brother,” he said.
It slithered out on its belly from the cave, until its nostrils were mere inches from his face, and the heat of its breath made the air hazy, and its skin was barred by sunlight. The rough scales, he saw, were like old copper, greenish around the rough edge; but the frill of smoother skin fanned out around its cheeks was gold. “Yes, it’s there under the dust. Old gold. In your blood, hm? Go on,” it said. There was a sharp slant of curiosity to its inflection, and having once heard it he could hardly help falling into the rhythms of a storyteller.
“He tolerated me in his house, because I was a cripple, and young. And when the Yellow Lord came, with his army, I was spared, because I was a cripple, and middle-aged.” He paused for breath. The dragon’s innermost eyelids slid shut, a gauzy shield for the eye, and it lowered its head, its beard brushing the earth.
It was inspecting the frog-white meat of his leg.
“Useless?” it said, at last.
“It is now,” he said. “Or as good as. I will not be spared a third time because I am a cripple, or because I am old. The Yellow Lord’s son has loosed hounds athirst for royal blood, and they do not know the newly born from the nearly dead.” He stilled the trembling in his wrists; he spread his hands. “So I need. To be protected.”
“From hounds,” the dragon said, chewing on the word. “Which is why you came to me rather than hiring a bodyguard.”
“Yes.”
“Was that wise?” it said. “How, exactly, do you propose to pay me for my services?”
He took a deep breath. “With stories.”
“Ah."
Hessa liked summer, liked her work in summer, although heat made handling the bodies a messy business, and it could be a long time between graves during that generous season. The look of the forest under the empty sky, open-mouthed and thirsting for light, and the feel of old, deep green shadows on her skin while she dug, after the city‘s high clay walls and stinking streets-- oh, yes, Hessa liked summer, Hessa liked it very well.
That was what she was thinking while she slung her shovel over her shoulders and worked her feet into her boots, anyway. Once she was walking through the flower of summer, she concentrated on the broken, blackened pavement of the old road, and watched for certain landmarks among the more interestingly shaped ruins, which marked the parts of the city that had stood here or here until the wave of trees rolled over them. City that had been swallowed, back in the days before the church had been built on the fracture line of the city‘s half-eaten heart, and the priests had learned vigilance.
What little sky showed through the branches was white as a baby's teeth, and she did not look at it, for all that she’d given it such pleasant names while still tangled in her bed. Underbrush crunching under her solid soles, she tried instead to remember the dead man and his dead wife that she was due to bury.
She'd seen and greeted them before, which was more than could be said for many of the people whose corpses she dealt with: that was because they had lived in the forest. They, alone of their neighbors, hadn’t moved when the trees spread roots and cracked cobblestones around them. They were very old, and looked similar in the way that very old couples do, and they kept their own counsel, and they lived in the forest. A vague mental image of flat, fine-boned faces. And that was all she could dredge up.
After breathing in enough of the air that pooled, cool and old and still, in the hollowed woods, she decided she would rather do her job with an empty head and full lungs. She walked on. The spirals of light filtering through leaves warmed her back.