Beneath Stained Glass Wings Page 3

  “But he listens to you, birdie.”

  I grit my teeth. “Do you even comprehend what he is? What a dragon is to something like us?”

  “Oh, I knew this would come up.” Her mouth twists into a scowl as the centimare stops moving. “Yes. Dragons are the most powerful beings, the ‘pure’ among us. They can control their animal sides, right? But that doesn’t make them gods. This dragon right here is a living thing, he breathes and eats and has a heartbeat, just like you and me. We even share blood with the beasts. Have you ever wondered: if they’re gods, what does that make us?”

  She turns from me. “What do you think, dragon? What does that make your precious little toy?”

  He snarls, loud enough to vibrate the wooden structure.

  Carita leaps forward, slamming his jaw shut and snapping him out of it. “Fine. Be stubborn. Just stay quiet.” Then she says to me, “Change your shirt.”

  “Fine, then. Get out and I’ll do it.”

  “You’re in a situation where you very well could die and you’re afraid of me seeing your chest? Is it some dragon’s treasure that no one can lay their eyes upon?” My cheeks flush red, but before I can retort, she continues, “Fine, fine. Come out when you’re done.” She jumps out of the wagon, distant murmurs slipping in from outside.

  Giving Vito a look until he averts his eyes toward the roof, I finally take off my torn shirt.

  Yanking the new one on, it’s a pleasant surprise to find it wraps around my neck and leaves a convenient opening for my wings. I get to my feet, having to bend over in the small space.

  Vito glares at the ceiling, gnashing his teeth. He’s never quite accepted his inability to turn back to human form, the fact always grating against him.

  “It’s okay, all right?” He doesn’t react, so I toss the old shirt at him. “Though, you know, maybe if some stubborn dung-colored dragon hadn’t followed me, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  He turns, narrowing his eyes at me and snorting the shirt into my face. Not funny.

  I place a hand on his cheek, a quiet apology, before hopping out the door and onto the centimare’s back, nearly slipping off the great beast.

  “Finally.” Carita strides over, waving to a distant Bricius. A whip cracks and the centimare drags itself forward again, having trouble finding a grip on the bridge we’re crossing.

  The moat stretches on for nearly a half-mile, and wooden planks arch the whole way over it. Our gift to the ground dwellers. We keep it full, so there’s always enough water for them.

  She clucks her tongue as I get closer. “Come on, use a mirage to hide those appendages of yours.”

  I bristle at her words, but still bite the inside of my mouth, using my pain to focus on the large body of water below me. I draw mist from the moat, pulling my wings tight against myself. I spread the water in the air around me, shifting the light slowly, distorting the reality of my wings and horns. It’s tough, like turning a rusty wheel. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to practice this.

  There.

  Peering at the distant water, I’m pleased to see that my reflection shows no wings or horns coming from my short, roughly shorn hair.

  “Hmph.” Carita crosses her arms. “Not bad. But you’ll need to work on that—you’re still giving off ripples.”

  With a glance at the water, I scowl to find she’s right.

  When I look up, she’s already heading toward the centimare’s head. I scramble to catch up.

  “At this time of night?” a man’s voice whines, definitely not Bricius’.

  “Come now, this isn’t Durand. You don’t have any gates to open.” There’s Bricius, gruff and irritated.

  Carita and Bricius are close together, blocking my view of whoever they’re talking to. I push between them, trying to be careful of my hidden horns and wings. Sure, you can’t see them, but they’re still there.

  Carita looks down and grins, a shock of normal teeth. Then I glance at the two men in front of me.

  I try to keep my jaw shut.

  They…they’re more hybrids than men; half-human, half-dragon beings that fall under the title of illusionists. Or, at least, sort of.

  One man’s face is half-covered in scales, one pupil slitted while the other is round, though both are bored as they take me in. The other man has a stub of a tail, and a mutated crest of horns poking from his scalp.

  I’ve never seen anyone who looks this wrong. Never such a hodge-podge of half-grown, mutated bits stuck onto a human body. It isn’t right.

  “Come, boys,” Carita purrs, wrapping a lazy arm around my shoulders. “I promise, in the long run we’ll make it worth your while.” She can’t be doing what I think she’s doing. “My friend here’s never seen an illusionist before, you know. Comes from a desert family, like me. Just look at our skin, the color alone says we’ve obviously spent too long in the sun. But I’m sure she’d love to get to know you more…intimately.”

  Anger flushes through me and I squeeze my hands as fists against my side. I’m a bargaining piece? She’s going to throw me to the hounds, expecting me to go without a fight? I open my mouth to protest when her mirage slips, for a half a second, to show a snarling array of pointed teeth.

  It’s gone before the others notice. But it’s enough to shut me up.

  The two men—only boys, really—appraise me. I want to crawl out of my skin but fillet them out of theirs first.

  “Well,” one says, voice like grease on my skin. “When you put it like that…”

  “Wonderful,” she says huskily. “I’ll catch you boys inside, then.”

  “S-sure,” the other answers, his stub of a tail practically between his legs.

  Carita winks, carting me along. The whip cracks as Bricius moves the centimare forward, and I flinch again at the noise.

  The bridge turns to hard soil, and we’re in Mercatus.

  Carita keeps her arm around me like a leash as we move forward through the tilted buildings. “Pigs, the lot of them,” she snarls. “But I can’t complain how easy it makes it for us.”

  A protest about how nothing is worth that comes to the tip of my tongue, but I can’t stop looking around. It’s strange, the thin fence around the severe drop into the moat almost reminds me of my home in the sky, but more…crude. The buildings are all made of clay, a few with bits of stone or wood, all topped with yellowed straw. No stone and brick towers, no metal rooftops that glitter like gold in the sun. There aren’t lamps to light the way, there isn’t mist crawling along the road. There’s hardly a trace of greenery in sight. How do people live here?

  “You learn to love it, eventually. I did.”

  I nearly jump out of my sandals. Bricius.

  “You weren’t born here?” I have to tilt my head awkwardly to see the mountainous man past Carita’s arm.

  “Hell no.”

  “Then…are you an illusionist?”

  He snorts. “I was born on the other side of the desert. I was the son of nomads who were slaughtered by illusionists like Carita. My home no longer exists.”

  Slaughtered? I suppose they are living outside the towns, which is against the law, but it feels like too much for something that hurt no one. Just like being forced to run from my home and save my own life at the cost of others, simply for caring about my best friend.

  I shake my head, stomach churning. “Why would you travel with Carita, if she’s like the people who…who did something that awful?”

  “Why does your dragon travel with you?”

  My eyes snap to him, my heart about to hammer out of my chest. He can’t know why Vito shouldn’t travel with me, the atrocities that stain my hands. But what if he does?

  He raises an eyebrow. “Dragons are no kinder to illusionists than illusionists are kind to humans. Carita saved me. That’s all that matters.”

  I force myself to relax, let relief tickle under my skin. “How—”

  “Shut up, both of you.” Carita’s tone has a way of biting you into
obedience.

  A girl walks down the road toward us. Her face is round like most ground dwellers, like some of my features. But my sharp cheekbones and thin nose come from dragon-kind. She’s only in a dirty smock, so smothered with stains I can’t tell the color, so ripped it barely covers her. Chains tie her wrists, and more run up from her ankles to connect them all together. She looks like she can barely stand straight, her arms weighing so much.

  Why would she walk around like that?

  Carita looks around as we approach the small girl, who’s maybe twelve at the most. She’s gorgeous, with light eyes, skin almost as dark as mine, and her hair shaved off.

  As we pass, Carita somehow slips something into the girl’s hand, not breaking a step. Still locked in her arm, I can’t even look back to see what it was.

  “What happened?” The question bursts out, despite getting the glare I anticipated from Carita. “Why was she dressed like that?”

  “You can’t so much as guess?” Her eyes might as well burn holes into my face. I cringe away. “You truly know nothing, birdie. That girl is a slave.”

  I miss a step, barely catching myself before I fall. Slavery doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing as horrible as that exists under the dragons’ rule. She has to be joking. I snort.

  Carita stops walking. “And you don’t believe me. Even after seeing her wrapped in chains, so thin she can barely walk down the street. What else could she be? Please, I’d love to hear your explanation.”

  There’s no way she can be telling the truth, but…there’s no way she could be lying, either. If it is true, that little girl is walking back to a life I can hardly understand. With how pretty she is, I can imagine what she was sold for.

  I shiver, wrap my arms around myself. Selling humans, treating them like livestock— sometimes worse than that. The sort of people that sink to the level of treating innocents like this, like they’re less than them. And the dragons supposedly allow this?

  Carita’s lips press together. “Good, you get it.” She keeps marching down the street.

  I look behind us, the girl a tiny form almost too far away to make out. My stomach churns as I catch up, trying and failing to focus on something else. “What did you give that girl, then?”

  “A coin.”

  I nearly trip again. “Like…money coin?”

  She gives me that look of hers.

  “But, why? What if her…owner,” the word is odd on my tongue, “catches her? Won’t she be punished?” All I can think of is father’s house, when I learned the books he kept were forbidden knowledge. I tried to convince him to hide them. He wouldn’t believe that the hunters would do anything to us, or maybe he didn’t care.

  She looks ahead. “I suppose you would know, wouldn’t you? You’ve had to live under the rule of your captors your whole life. Tell me: was there anything you would risk having despite it being against the rules? Something you’d give anything for?”

  “I—”

  “Remember that you’re risking not only your life, but your dragon’s, for simple freedom.”

  A chill runs down my spine. My father’s books are so small compared to this. I’m sure the hunters have already rifled through the entirety of our little library in our cozy little house.

  No, it isn’t my home anymore. I’ll never see that place again. I’ll never see my father again. A sickness seeps through my veins, making me achy and sleepy and nauseous. My mind swims with the thought of my hands covered in blood, the sound a blade makes when it sinks not only through flesh, but dragon scales. The great immortal beasts can be killed, easier than I ever would have expected. I know firsthand.

  Carita grabs my shoulder, shoving me into the doorway of a run-down building—not that there are many great-looking structures here.

  I grab the doorframe, steadying myself. “Where are we?”

  “Where you’ll be sleeping.”

  I grip the frame tighter, my fingers sinking into the rotten wood. “I’m not going anywhere without Vito.”

  She gives me that look again, then she glances toward Bricius. “Tell the beast to go to the second floor.” Her attention shifts back to me. “Happy?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she pushes me farther into the black building. I stumble, nearly tripping up the staircase. I crawl to the top, careful of the crumbling holes in the clay.

  There’s a hallway, moonlight spilling into it through an open doorway. Pushed forward again, I stagger into the empty room. There’s a huge gap in the wall, moonlight streaming in from outside. A massive form causes streaks of shadows to litter the room as it rises, and Vito dives into the room. What were they thinking, letting him fly up in full sight like that? Then again, I suppose they don’t know about his limitations, that he can barely cast the most basic of illusions.

  Sprinting ahead, I jump and wrap my arms around his neck. He bows down to curl around me.

  “Please, you two weren’t separated for that long,” Carita comments from behind.

  For a second, I have to fight the urge to pull away from him, hide that we ever touched. But that’s not the life I’m living anymore. I only unhook one arm, turning to throw one of her glares back at her. “What now?”

  “Now, you sleep.” She takes the door handle. “But don’t wander off. I will find you.”

  The door shuts behind her, a click echoing in the silence.

  Finally, I let my own mirage fall, relief shuddering through me. Weariness follows in a wave all its own, making my eyes ache and pulling at their corners. I try to shake it off, but with no luck.

  Vito nudges me.

  “Hey,” I grumble, pushing him back. The room is small, barely big enough for maybe two dragons to curl up in. In one corner is a pile of ratty blankets, but it seems to be the only thing in here with us.

  Vito moves from behind me, floorboards creaking and moaning as he shifts across them. He plops onto the straw, the entire house shaking violently. Rolling my eyes, I use my wings to follow quietly. The building already looks like it’s going to crumble. Who knows if it’ll hold up after his nonsense.

  After a short hesitation, I curl into the crook between his torso and elbow, and Vito winds his long neck around me. Though we’re so far away from home, the heat of his familiar scales against my skin is a comfort, a semblance of safety. How was any of this ever so wrong that it deserved punishment? I know dragons are smarter than I’ll ever be, that their rules mean more than I can comprehend, but the only thing wrong about touching Vito is that it was ever a taboo.

  I press my cheek against his smooth scales. He smells of warm spices, of the incense they sometimes burn in the dens. He smells like that last night in Caelum. I can almost taste the iron in the air.

  He heaves a great sigh and I nearly jump out of my skin. Does he know how easy it is for anyone to stop those breaths? Does he know what I’ve done?

  No. He can’t. If he knew, he wouldn’t stay.

  Sleep pulls at my eyes, my racing thoughts barely keeping me awake. Most of me wants to stay up, keep an eye out and make sure Carita doesn’t kill us in our sleep, doesn’t bring in the hunters—who knows what she even wants us for. But I haven’t used a mirage like today’s in years. Exhaustion rolls through my muscles, my body relaxing against the warmth of Vito. I didn’t realize how much of me it would take to pull that off.

  My eyes flutter shut, and I don’t stop them.

  4

  The Ground Dwellers

  A door slams and I jolt upright. Where the hell am I? And why is Vito here, curled up with me?

  Carita waltzes in, a smirk across her lips that crinkles her jagged scar, and everything comes back to me like a brick to the face. “Good morning, birdie, beast. Glad to see you slept well.”

  Hefting myself to my feet, I mutter. “Yeah, just wonderfully.”

  Her smirk creeps into a grin. “Of course, only the best for our esteemed guests from Caelum. Now, get up. We’re heading out, birdie. And beast, if you feel so benevolent as to grac
e us with your human form, you’re welcome to come as well.”

  Vito stays almost expressionless, only giving away his irritation with a twitch of the lip. He would come if he could. It isn’t his fault; he shouldn’t blame himself. But I can’t say anything, not with this woman here.

  “What are we doing? Where are we going?” I ask instead. “And what do you want with me?”

  “All very good questions, and none of them are going to be answered right now. Unless you don’t want breakfast, of course. Or any meals for the rest of your sorry life if Mercatus’ ambassador catches up with you.”

  I scowl.

  “Good, then. Let’s get moving.”

  She turns, striding down the stairs.

  “I’ll be back.” I rest a hand on Vito’s snout before running after Carita and slipping into my mirage. There’s enough water to maintain it, but how? We’re far enough from the moat that this place should be as dry and dead as the rest of the desert. There’s a thin trail of it, hard to focus on, coming from…underground. Pipes? Or—

  Carita stops and I nearly walk into her.

  “Clumsy. Not a morning person, hmm? Figures.” She sighs, turning and striding down the street. Fighting back the urge to spread my wings, I jog after her. “But I need you to pay attention, birdie. Today is your first lesson on ground dwellers. And you’d better learn quickly, because you may not have the opportunity later.”

  We turn through the maze of buildings and streets, absolutely no sense to the mess of them. Carita navigates them like she has a map on the back of her eyelids, leading me deeper and deeper into thronging crowds. There are so many people, so many different skin tones. It’s like looking at the desert from the sky, from the sunny golden peaks to the dusky, cool shadows. No one quite has the warm sepia tones that Carita and I have, though. And if Vito was able to turn back like Carita ordered, his dark umber skin and sharp features might give us away. Assuming these people have seen a dragon. What that must be like, not seeing the rainbows of their wings every day, their curled horns jutting against the horizon as they enjoy the setting sun on the metal roofs of Caelum.