The Mark of the Dragonfly Read online

  “I forgot—your parents aren’t home yet,” she croaked. They didn’t know their little boy was hurt, that they might never see him alive again.

  “They won’t be back until tomorrow,” Jory said. Gently, they laid Micah down on his bed. Jory covered him with a blanket.

  As soon as Micah was tucked in, Jory headed for the door. His face was still deathly pale, but he spoke calmly. “You’ll stay with him, won’t you, Piper? I’ll be back as soon as I find a healer.”

  Mute, Piper nodded. She wouldn’t leave him alone. When Jory left, she stood beside the bed, looking down at Micah. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I should have looked after you better.” She was older, stronger; she was supposed to protect him, but she’d failed. What would Micah’s parents think of her? They always said Micah looked up to Piper like a big sister.

  She stared at Micah for a long time, willing him to open his eyes, to point and laugh at her for crying and carrying on like this. But he never moved. There was only silence in the room until the door opened and Jory was back with one of the healers in tow.

  The older man was much more finely dressed than Piper and Jory, his tailored suit as nice as any worn by the Trade Consortium representatives. He elbowed Piper aside and pulled up a chair beside the bed. Jory stood on Micah’s other side, watching anxiously as the healer examined his brother.

  Piper wanted to stay to hear what the healer would say about Micah’s injury, but she suddenly remembered the girl. If she woke up while Piper was gone, she wouldn’t know where she was or what had happened to her.

  “I have to go,” she told Jory. “There was a girl unconscious in the caravan wreck. I brought her back with Micah and left her at my house. I need to check on her.”

  Jory nodded. He looked like he was still in shock. “Does she need a healer?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Piper said. “But … will you tell me if Micah—if anything changes?” She didn’t want to think the worst and tried to block the thought that Micah could die from her mind.

  “I will.” Jory had already turned away, his attention fixed on his brother.

  Piper wiped her face. There was nothing more she could do. Reluctantly, she slipped out the door.

  Piper’s steps got heavier as she trudged back to her house. Her ankle still ached, but she didn’t think it was a bad sprain. When she was finally home, she locked and barred the door behind her, pressed her back against it, and slid to the floor in a quivering heap. Through her tears, she saw that the girl was still asleep by the stove, her chest rising and falling in a regular rhythm.

  Exhausted, Piper curled up on her side, burying herself deep in her dad’s coat. The worn fabric used to smell like him, his warmth, but now all she smelled was her own sweat and sour echoes of the green dust. She closed her eyes and tried to shut it all out, to bring back her father. Eventually, she fell asleep.

  She woke to a mewling cry. Piper sat up stiffly, her back against the door, hand reaching instinctively for her knife. Her mind was still fuzzy, but through the haze, she saw the girl thrashing and twisting under the blanket. Her eyes were closed. She must have been having a nightmare.

  “No! No, keep it away!” she cried. Her voice was terribly hoarse—Piper barely understood the words. The girl pawed the air frantically, reaching toward the hot stove.

  Piper scrambled across the floor and got hold of the girl’s hands. That only made things worse. The girl fought back with wild punches. Piper took a hit to the eye and saw stars. All the while, the girl’s cries grew louder. The house had thin walls; Piper was glad all the townspeople were out in the fields. If they’d been at home, someone was bound to think she was beating the girl.

  “Stop it!” Piper hissed as the girl continued to thrash in her sleep. “You’re safe, do you hear me? Listen, the scrapper you’re punching is the one who saved you!” She dodged another blow. “One more like that and I swear—” Flailing knuckles glanced off her jaw. “I should have left you in that field!” Piper was too tired and worried to deal with this mess.

  For all her wild terror, the girl was still weak and Piper finally got a secure hold on her. With soothing motions, she rubbed the girl’s trembling hands, trying to show her that she wasn’t dangerous. Gradually, her cries grew fainter, and Piper began to relax her hold. She pushed up the sleeve of the girl’s dress, intending to check her pulse, and gasped.

  Inked on the girl’s forearm was a tattoo roughly the size of a matchbook. The design was a dragonfly, but instead of a normal insect, this one was made of mechanical parts. Transparent wings veined with iridescent wires and minuscule springs curled around the girl’s arm. Gears and cogs composed its multifaceted eyes, and the dragonfly’s metallic green body was a piston that tapered toward the bend of her elbow. A skilled artist had painted the dark-haired woman on Micah’s music box, but whoever had done the dragonfly design was a true master. The inks alone had to have cost a fortune.

  It was the mark of the Dragonfly.

  Piper had never seen one, but she’d heard of the famous tattoos. The mechanical dragonfly was the symbol of Aron, the king of the Dragonfly territories, which lay directly to the south of the Merrow Kingdom.

  The two powers had been rivals for as long as anyone could remember, competing over resources and land, with the Merrow Kingdom usually being the more aggressive. In fact, rumor had it the Merrow Kingdom had been making and stockpiling weapons and had been plotting to try to take over part or all of the Dragonfly territories—until Aron caused the iron shortage.

  A well-known inventor and explorer, King Aron had set up factories all over the Dragonfly territories in the last five years, with the sole purpose of building a fleet of airships and ocean steamers to explore the uncharted lands of Solace. The world’s future lay in exploration and expansion, he claimed. But for the longest time, that expansion had been halted by a range of impassable mountains to the north and west, and by oceans to the south and east. Expeditions that tried to cross the mountains were stopped by avalanches and peaks so high and cold that they froze the blood in a person’s veins. And the wooden sailing ships that set out to find new lands across the sea were battered by storms and vicious currents. They returned in failure—if they returned at all.

  King Aron intended to change all that, with steamships that would weather any ocean storm, and airships that would pass over the highest mountains in safety and comfort. But to accomplish his goal, he needed iron—lots of iron. Lucky for him, most of the iron mines in Solace were located in his kingdom, but to ensure he had a large enough supply, and at the same time to prevent the Merrow Kingdom from building mass quantities of weapons to attack his country, Aron had stopped trading iron to the Merrow Kingdom. Instead, he funneled it all into his factories. Ending this trade had left the Merrow Kingdom with a shortage that put thousands out of work and soured relations between the two kingdoms to the point that many feared a war would erupt anyway. But King Aron continued with his shipbuilding, claiming that finding new lands and resources was the key to lasting peace. He built the largest factory of all in Noveen, his capital city—the place where Piper’s father had gone to work, and died.

  The dragonfly tattoos were only given to two groups of people: Aron’s advisory council, of which there were four members, and those who were under the king’s protection. This usually included the rich and powerful, although no one knew exactly how many bore the mark. The symbol itself had originated with Aron’s family. One of his oldest family crests was a pair of sabers crossed to look like the wings of a dragonfly, which had started the tradition of the people referring to the reigning monarch as the Dragonfly. Over the years, the symbol had changed as technology evolved, but Aron was still called the Dragonfly. Done in a mixture of rare inks, the tattoos were almost impossible for outsiders to duplicate. Piper could tell by the swirling metallic colors—emeralds and coppers so vivid they sparkled like jewels—that the mark was genuine. Whoever this girl was, she must be under Aron’s protectio
n, so she was obviously very important. Her king was one of the most powerful men in Solace.

  And Piper’s father’s murderer.

  Not directly, of course. But King Aron had built the factory in Noveen, the monster that had swallowed Piper’s father up and made him breathe poisonous black smoke until his lungs couldn’t take it anymore. After her father died, Piper had spent many sleepless nights imagining her journey to the capital, how she would burn Aron’s precious factory to the ground.

  And now look at her, still living in the scrap town, tending and comforting a spoiled capital girl. Yet the girl couldn’t be more than eleven or twelve years old, and in the grip of the nightmare, she’d seemed much younger, terrified half out of her mind.

  Carefully, Piper adjusted the girl’s sleeve to cover the tattoo. What was a girl under Aron’s protection—one so young!—doing on a caravan in the harvesting fields during a meteor storm? Who else might have been on the caravan with her? Was she with her family? Had any of them escaped? Piper sucked in a breath—surely not Aron himself? No, she couldn’t believe that. The scrap towns didn’t get much news except what the traders brought with them, but they talked plenty about Aron. Rumor had it that he didn’t condone scavenging from the scrap fields. He even encouraged people to come from the Merrow Kingdom as her father had done, to work in his factories, shaping iron for his fleet.

  He wants us poor, Piper thought—poor and working for him.

  “That still doesn’t explain where you came from.” Piper spoke softly to the girl, nudging her a bit. “Can you hear me? Can you wake up?”

  No answer. The girl had drifted into a deep sleep, but whatever nightmare she’d been having hadn’t let go of her yet. Her eyelids twitched, and every so often, her body stiffened as if she expected an attack. Piper started to move away, wanting to give the girl space, but in her sleep, she clutched at Piper’s wrists and made an unhappy little mewling sound. Piper sighed and settled down next to her. The floor was cold. She freed one of her hands long enough to reach for more wood for the stove.

  Outside, she heard the first stirrings of the townspeople coming back from the fields. Voices raised in agitation drifted past her door. She caught snatches of their conversations—mostly about Micah and the caravan, how neither of them had any business being out there in the storm and how the Consortium was going to punish the survivors. Anger swelled in Piper’s chest. They had no right to gossip about Micah. He was just a kid. And none of them had run out of that shelter to help him. They’d stayed huddled in the dark like rats.

  That was the problem with this town. Nobody really cared about helping anybody else. They were all drifters, scavengers hoping to make a fortune or at least some quick coin. Nobody ever thought about trying to build a real life here. Even the houses were temporary structures built as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In some ways, Piper knew she was just as bad as the rest. After her father died, she’d stopped going outside unless it was necessary. She kept to herself and rarely talked to anyone except Micah and his family. Now even that connection might be gone for good.

  And what would happen when the girl woke up? Piper didn’t need another mouth to feed, and a girl from the Dragonfly territories wasn’t likely to want to stay in the scrap towns any longer than she had to. She could go to the Consortium and tell them what happened, but they were already going to be looking for Piper to answer for the stunt she’d pulled escaping from the shelter. Why hurry that process along? Still, as someone marked by Aron, the girl was obviously important. Someone was bound to be interested in where she was and what had happened to the caravan.

  Piper lifted the girl’s sleeve and looked at the tattoo again. Outside, the shrill call of a distant steam whistle caught her attention. It was the 401. The train came through the scrap town once a month, ferrying goods and passengers on a north-south route through the Merrow Kingdom and the Dragonfly territories, where it originated. It was scheduled to come in at midday. Piper hadn’t realized it was so late. A gnawing hunger clawed at her insides. She hadn’t eaten anything since her quick breakfast of bread and tea.

  “I bet you’re going to be hungry too if you ever decide to wake up,” Piper grumbled at the girl. “Well, we can’t sit here cuddling all day, and I’m going to need my hands if you want food.”

  She eased out of the girl’s tight grip and breathed a sigh of relief when the girl didn’t make a fuss. Piper took the rice balls out of her satchel and ate both while she fetched another bucket of water from the well. Then she got out an old dented pot with a bent handle and set it on the kitchen table. Micah’s parents had returned from their last fishing trip with a bundle of sturgeon for her. She kept it in an ice chest in the corner farthest away from the stove. She took two fillets from it and a bunch of leeks and potatoes that she’d bought at the trade market. Altogether, she thought she had enough to make a decent fish soup for her and the girl.

  Piper hadn’t cooked for two in a long time.

  A little while later, she had fishy-smelling fingers and a blister on her thumb from peeling potatoes, but her ingredients were chopped and simmering in the pot on the stove. The aroma of cooking vegetables and fish broth brought a raw ache to Piper’s stomach. She tried to ignore the sensation and washed her hands and face in the water bucket. Her brown hair fell in wet spirals against her temples, and she caught a strong whiff of brimstone and sweat. Wrinkling her nose, Piper stripped off her coat and shirt. She kept a bar of soap and a few other toiletries in a small cabinet at the foot of her bed. She used the soap to wash her hair and her upper body, scraping the dirt and dust remnants off her tan skin. After she’d finished, she changed into a spare shirt and stripped off her pants to wash her legs. When she was satisfied that she no longer smelled like the meteor storm, she hung her coat on a hook on the door and went to check on the soup.

  Piper didn’t realize the girl’s eyes were open until she was standing right next to the stove. The girl had woken without a sound, and she lay silently where Piper had left her, clutching Piper’s knife in her hands.

  Piper went straight for the knife on her belt, but of course, it wasn’t there. It must have fallen out of its sheath while she was washing, she realized. And now the girl held it in both her hands as she watched Piper’s every move with huge brown eyes.

  When she was little, Piper used to bring home stray cats and beg her father to let her keep them. He always said no, not only because they couldn’t afford to feed them, but also because of their temperaments. The townspeople called them devil cats because they were half crazy with hunger and fear of the humans. They’d leave scratches and bites up and down Piper’s arms every time she tried to pick them up. The look in their eyes was the same look the girl was giving Piper.

  I should have learned my lesson back then, Piper thought. No more bringing home strays.

  Piper held up her empty hands. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said softly. “You were in an accident. Your caravan—” She hesitated. Now probably wasn’t the best time to tell the girl that the rest of her companions were gone. For all Piper knew, her parents might have been among the dead. Her stomach twisted at that thought. “I brought you here to get better,” Piper said at last. “Are you hungry?” She pointed to the bubbling broth on the stove. Tempt it with food—the best way to tame any wild creature.

  Against her will, the girl turned her attention to the food. Piper saw the naked desire in her eyes, and the hands holding the knife trembled. “I’ll get you a bowl and spoon,” Piper said, turning slowly to a shelf on the wall. She made sure she could still see the girl out of the corner of her eye. “But you’ll have to put the knife down to eat.”

  The girl watched as Piper took a wooden bowl and spoon off the shelf. Her eyes followed Piper to the stove, where she carefully ladled out soup from the pot. Herbs floated on top of the broth and steam rose from the bowl in fragrant clouds. Piper ignored the growls of her own stomach and held the food out to the girl.

  After a moment�
�s hesitation, the girl dropped the knife and snatched the bowl from Piper’s hands. She plunged the spoon into the broth and shoveled it into her mouth.

  “Careful!” Piper said. “Blow on it first, it’s—”

  The girl’s eyes widened an instant before she spat out the scalding mouthful. A shower of broth and leeks hit Piper in the face.

  “—hot,” the girl said in a small, croaky voice.

  Silence fell. A log shifted in the stove, and the pot of broth continued to simmer. With a detached calm, Piper reached up, picked a leek out of her hair and dropped it back in the pot. Waste not. She took the bowl from the girl and blew on the broth several times to cool it, then she handed it back and smoothly retrieved her knife from the floor. The girl was too busy eating to notice.

  Piper watched her for a long time when she should have been eating her own meal. She was absorbed in trying to figure out how, in the space of a few short hours, her life had gone so completely lopsided that she found herself standing in her house, fish broth dripping down her face, watching her dinner be gobbled up by a girl who was protected by King Aron, the person she hated most in the world.

  Try as she might, she couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer, so Piper ladled up some soup and ate it at the kitchen table while the girl stuck close to the stove. When Piper finished, she stood and went to get her coat. She used the sleeve to wipe the rest of the broth off her face. She knew without looking that the girl was watching her. “I’m going out,” she said, “but I’ll be back soon, and then we’ll talk about … what happened. Eat as much as you want, but don’t go outside, you understand? I don’t want you getting lost while I’m gone.”

  The girl didn’t answer, and Piper wondered how much she understood. Piper herself spoke in the Trader’s Speech, and the girl had used the same tongue just now. Was she a simpleton, or just afraid because she’d woken in a strange place to an unfamiliar face? Either way, it didn’t make any difference to Piper. She needed to get the girl out of here, find a way to send her back south to the Dragonfly territories. The first step would be to get a letter out on the 401, let the king know what had happened to the girl. She could look into doing that much now. Then she needed to check on Micah. She couldn’t stand not knowing how he was.