The connection between dragons and Dragonsworn has not been formally studied. No such connection exists in other schools of magic. The link is both physiological and psychological; energy flows from dragon to person, and no Dragonsworn reaches combat readiness without forming such a bond with their dragon—the exact nature of which warrants further study.
—Excerpt from “On Dragons and Dragonsworn” by Professor Chao Mei-En, unpublished
• • •
wakeupwakeupwakeup
Feng woke. The muscles in her legs and arms reminded her of the day’s labour. Her thin bedroll did nothing to protect her back from the uneven ground. She shook the sleep from her mind; she thought the professor had woken her, but the other woman was still asleep, mouth agape and broadcasting the unfettered snore of one who’d never had to share a bed with another. Da Kai was nowhere to be seen. The mist seemed even thicker at night, obscuring anything more than twenty chi away from the campfire the ranger had assembled out of the strange wood that fell in this place.
theyarecomingtheonesthatshotmearecoming
The voice seemed to be coming from a distance. The professor slept on, blissfully unaware of the sound. Who was talking? Feng couldn’t quite make out the words, but their tone conveyed urgency. Something wasn’t right. She struggled to her feet, wobbling as her city-trained muscles took her weight.
captain ma is chasing the others but there is one behind you
As the cloud of sleep retreated, Feng parsed more of what the voice had said. Wait—something was behind her? Feng spun. Just as the voice had said, a man stood there, weather-beaten and with the thin and hungry look of one from the countryside. He was dressed in workman’s attire, wearing the belts and harnesses of an airship sailor, but with the worn tunic of a soldier, faded cloth medals sewn above his chest. All of that Feng took in secondarily. The first thing she noticed was the gun he had pointed at her.
He gestured at the professor, still blissfully snoring, a finger to his lips to signify silence. Feng shook the professor awake, cupping her mouth when her eyes widened at the sight of the intruder. A shot pierced the nighttime silence, and for an instant, Feng thought she had been struck. She felt her own belly for a wound, then checked the professor. Neither of them had been hit. Their aggressor, on the other hand, seemed calm, almost amused.
“Very good, ranger! Drop your weapon. I have your two friends here at my mercy. You have until the count of ten to surrender.” The man’s challenge cut through the fog like a drill sergeant’s bark. “No hard feelings,” he said to Feng, taking aim.
“They are academics, not soldiers. Hold your fire,” said Da Kai from the other side of the dragon. It appeared that the interloper had friends, dressed like him, but without his military accoutrements. One was limping; the other two roughly pushed Da Kai to the ground with the two women. His wrists had already been bound.
“Colonel Zhang,” said Da Kai.
“Captain Ma. Strange that we should meet again, after all this time. Around dragons again.”
“This is what’s become of you? Running a poaching racket? Haven’t you done enough to them already?” Da Kai’s voice was higher and faster than Feng remembered. The big man was furious.
“It’s just business, Captain. Do you have a full belly every night? Do the rest of the soldiers—those who survived? Do the generals take care of us? Our families? They used us and forgot about us.”
A vein throbbed on the captain’s forehead, but his voice had gone soft, and when he next spoke, it was as flat as the unsheathing of a blade. “That night, at the Pearl City, you knew.”
“What if I did?” asked the colonel. “They used all of us, and they forgot about me as soon as it was convenient. I’m just using what they gave me to make a living.”
“I remember you,” said the professor. “You were the one who would take the children from me.”
The colonel snorted. “The university lady. Scouring the countryside for more Dragonsworn for the meat grinder. Is that still what you’re doing?”
“I’m a full professor now. I study dragons, just like I did before the war.”
“A ranger and a professor. Ha. You think the stink of what you did in the war will wash off? It doesn’t.”
“Better than being a criminal,” said the professor.
“We’re all criminals, Professor. Are we any better than those the armistice tribunals executed? Except the winning side has no criminals.”
The dragon groaned, a rumble that shook the bones of all present, and his claws trembled. One of the men had taken a long knife to the scales at his side and had already pried off two. Colonel Zhang clicked his tongue at the man, who stopped—even far from the war, diminished and emaciated, he was still in command. The other two set to digging in the ground around the neck of the beast.
“Explosives. The charge will snap its neck, and we can take our time with the spoils. Which reminds me: you shot one of my men.” With that, he fired a round into Da Kai’s gut. Feng screamed at the sound of the gunshot. The professor, far calmer, ripped the sleeve off her blouse, wadded it, and pressed it against Da Kai’s stomach.
The colonel will kill you all. I know him.
“These men are not soldiers. Not like you, the hero of the army of the glorious empire. You should have seen him on the battlefield, ladies. He could make it rain lightning from a greater distance than any other Dragonsworn. The enemy feared him more than any other. Why, the rumour of his presence could stall an entire advance while they brought in heavy cannon to ward him off!” Colonel Zhang leaned down and dropped his voice. “My men will want to hurt you as payment for killing one of them. I will not have it. Your deaths will be clean. And quick.”
• • •
Captain Ma Da Kai and Colonel Zhang pored over a map of the Pearl City. Like all of their equipment, the once pristine map bore the ravages of a long campaign, of ground taken and lost, of entire regiments—friend and foe alike—wiped out, their blood only memorialised by half-erased scrawls of charcoal marking former troop positions. Both men stared at the lay of the battlefield as though they could shift the lines of war by sheer willpower alone.
Prince, are you seeing this? Da Kai asked the dragon, who was never far from him.
The colonel is right. The only way the dragons can attack is straight down the valley.
“Let’s go over this again, sir. The generals want us to take the Pearl City with the troops we have here?”
“Any longer and winter will set in. The Pearl City is surrounded on three sides by mountains, too high for dragons and troops.”
Not true—dragons could make it over the mountains, but not with any Dragonsworn on our backs. The air is weak up there.
“If they know the exact route our attack run will take, they will lay cannon fire all the way down the valley.”
The colonel marked various points on the map with a thin piece of charcoal. “Already done. Their generals are most competent.”
“Besiege the city through winter and into spring. We’ll starve them out.”
“We’ll lose half our army to frostbite. Our supply lines are stretched far enough as it is. If you haven’t noticed, the airships coming to the front are lighter and lighter.”
Even though the Dragonsworn were entitled to the best rations and quarters, Da Kai had seen the shrinking portions at the mess tents, the prominent ribs of the war horses, and worse. The Pearl City would weather a siege; the empire might not.
A siege is terribly unsporting. It is also boring.
“It’ll be a massacre, Colonel.”
“Of the Pearl City, to be sure.”
“And us.”
“We move within the week. All of us, even the tenth flight.”
“Ling’s squad? He’s just a kid.”
“And so are his Dragonsworn. They’re all we’ve got. You go up there with what you have and the cannons will chew you up and spit you out. With the tenth, you’ll have a chance.”
“How’d he make lieutenant anyway?”
“Field promotion.”
“You could have promoted one of the older soldiers. Sergeant Lee, for instance.”
“Lee’s dragon couldn’t hit an elephant at two hundred chi. Ling can do it at two li, and you can pick which eye you want his dragon to hit. And he’s got heart—dumb kid thinks he’ll win the war.”
“Then the slaughter up there is the last thing you want him to see.”
“No more buts, Captain. Your flights will take the vanguard.”
The colonel seemed sure of himself, but Da Kai pressed him anyway. “They’re just children, sir. Put them at the back and maybe some of them will go home after the war.”
Colonel Zhang continued to mark out formations on the map. His hand lingered over the lead dragons for the attack but moved on. “The window is closing. We take out their defences, and we’ll be heroes forever come spring. You’re the best—hopefully you’ll be able to outrun the cannon fire.”
“Aerial bombardment by heavy airships from high altitude would soften them up for us.”
“The air navy can barely put two squadrons of bombers together, and they’re spread across the front. Our orders are to move within the week. They’re moving up some geomancers to give the Dragonsworn cloud cover.”
Da Kai left the command tent, tactics and manoeuvres on his mind, calculating ranges for Dragonsworn lightning and anti-air cannons. The battle could be won, but only if he took the flight straight through a gauntlet of shrapnel.
There’s no way of doing this, is there, Prince?
Your tactics are sound. With cloud cover, some dragons may even survive.
Why don’t the dragons go? This isn’t your war.
Some have thought about it. We are governed by our nature, after all. Dragons are creatures of wind, lightning, and storm; of violence. And you people have created the storm of this age, have you not? You marshall magic, nature, all manner of beasts around you—how could we not come?
Prince, I believe your arrogance is in believing that dragons will survive this age.
Ah, Captain, the arrogance of your people is that you think you are the ones who define ages.
• • •
Wind whipped Da Kai’s hair behind him, and drops of water stung his face and pinged off the glass of his goggles like small pebbles. Behind him, in a formation resembling a broad arrowhead, the rest of the Dragonsworn cut through the air, sinuous waves rippling down their muscled bodies. Beneath them, a sea of clouds threshed and boiled, flashes and booms cutting through the roar of the wind. It was not a storm below them but the crash of cannon fire, so voluminous that it seemed that the heavens were opening up. Empire geomancers were still holding the line, and the cloud cover shielded the dragons from the scouts below. They were fast approaching the dive point; the geomancers had left a patch of wispy clouds where the Dragonsworn were due to start their attack. Already wild shots were penetrating the cloud cover, exploding into bursts of screaming shrapnel and fire.
Get them to hold here.
Da Kai felt the call go out from the Prince of the South; he sensed the confusion of the assembled dragons. A few, following their original orders, vanished through the cloud cover. Da Kai watched as pulses of light from the guns below homed in on them, the random scatter of explosions coalescing about the dive point. The pain of their deaths jumped from dragon to Dragonsworn; a few of the younger dragons let out a soulful keening. Others held back—the time for mourning had not yet come, and far fewer would make it through the night. The captain sighed. Are you sure we can do this, Prince?
We are at a stalemate. The cannon fire cannot reach us above the clouds, but neither can we hit them from up here. Any dragon below the clouds will be torn apart in seconds.
But not a Dragonsworn.
Famously incapable of flying.
There’s enough time in free fall to take out enough of our targets to even the odds.
A task which requires inverse amounts of skill and good sense.
Thank you for your endorsement. Tell the rest of the squadrons to set up a holding pattern. Don’t come for me until I call.
With that, Da Kai unhooked the chain linking his belt to the chains looped around the horns of the Prince of the South, checked his rifle, and took a running leap off the dragon’s head. The cool embrace of the clouds held him for a scant handful of heartbeats, and when he emerged from the other side of the cloud bank, he understood the depths of the empire’s betrayal. The cannon positions were at least twice as many as their maps had shown; even under the original plan, the Dragonsworn would have had no chance. Da Kai knew in that instant, surveying the shimmer of the Pearl City nestled into the shell of the surrounding mountains, that the empire had understood exactly what it was doing when it sent the Dragonsworn in—that it would gladly expend the lives of men and dragons alike for this victory.
There were too many targets; they were too spread out. As Da Kai fired, the clouds turned dark above him, and he felt the magic of the dragons converge on the Prince of the South. Lightning lanced down from the heavens, focusing where he fired: turning night into day, taking out emplacement after emplacement, wiping out low-flying skiffs and other airships. He fired as no one in the army had ever fired before, and yet it was not enough—the ground was approaching too quickly, and there were still too many targets. Above him, he saw the dragons beginning to fall; first one and then another, trailing smoke from eyes and gaping mouths, burnt out by the lightning they wielded.
Lightning struck again as he was reloading, and he was not alone. Another Dragonsworn was firing. Someone else had plummeted through the cloud cover and was taking out their own set of targets. Da Kai squinted. A lieutenant’s regalia. It had to be Ling: none of the other officers were near enough, or skilful enough. But did Ling’s dragon know the plan? There was no time for doubt, only action. Da Kai went back to work, controlling his breathing and holding his rifle steady, aiming for himself and for the dragons above. The air was thick with the smell of ozone in the lightning’s aftermath, the strikes so frequent that it seemed like day. Below, he could see the twisted metal of shattered cannons; powerless airships, burning and drifting to splintered doom on the rocks below.
Da Kai felt Prince’s strength ebbing as he sent more magic down to the ground. If one with Prince’s strength was so affected, others surely would not survive the ordeal. In response, he saw more dragons plummeting from above; he could likewise make out their riders clinging onto them, together until death. This was the end, he realised; the Dragonsworn would never recover, nor would the dragons, all by the empire’s design. The empire had a mind of its own—a gestalt of the greed and hunger of its rulers, its court officials, its generals—and it would eat the world if it could. The dragons were just an appetiser. The ground was coming to meet Da Kai, and it was coming fast.
Prince?
I am coming, my friend.
He could hear the exhaustion in the dragon’s voice, ragged and raw. He felt it, the ache where they had drawn and released too much power. But the Dragonsworn had won the day; they’d cracked the shell of the Pearl City, and all that remained was a war of numbers. The ground troops of the empire were like the tide; it could take a day or a week, but inexorably, the Pearl City would drown. All because of the boy. They couldn’t have done it on their own.
Ling from the tenth flight jumped as well. I don’t think his dragon can make it. If you can save anyone, save him. Do you hear me? Save—
• • •
Da Kai struggled to sit up. Even in the ghostly light of the moon, streaming through cloud and mist, Feng could see that blood loss had reduced his ruddy complexion to ash white. “You rode along with me. You knew how much we took from them. You had a dragon that survived the war. Could you…” Da Kai swallowed and winced at the effort. “Could you still hear him after?”
The colonel’s face hardened further, if that was even possible. His expression was so flat that it could have been carved from wood. “I didn’t need to. That was the first dragon I took.”
Girl, you hear me. Tell the captain he never needed my forgiveness to hear me. Tell him to forgive himself.
The dragon’s head was far away, behind the sinuous coils of his length, his eyes wide and unblinking at death’s approach. But one pupil focused and met Feng’s gaze.
Panting with effort, the other men came back, casting baleful looks at Da Kai that promised more suffering than the wound he had already sustained. Colonel Zhang sighed and broke open the cylinder of his gun, counted the rounds, and snapped it shut. “I’m sorry it came to this, old friend,” said the colonel.
“Wait,” said Feng.
“Don’t bother begging, university girl. Oh, don’t be surprised, I saw your equipment. Just like I knew from the sound of the rifle earlier today there’d be a soldier here with you. No bargaining. What we’ll get from the carcass far outweighs anything you can offer.”
Feng was not going to beg or bargain. Her heart felt like it was trying to hammer its way through her ribcage. Once the smartest child in her village, now an indentured research servant, and soon to be a corpse, her life was a sequence of dominoes, each mistake triggering the next. She might go to her grave a debtor, but she could help someone else settle what they owed.
“I have nothing to say to you, murderer. I have words for the captain. The Prince of the South says the only forgiveness you need is your own. Hear him again.” Da Kai looked up, meeting Feng’s eyes as though seeing her for the first time. In a way, he was.
The colonel burst out laughing. “I thought the beast looked familiar. You both are favoured by fate. We end two legends tonight. It would be fitting for any Dragonsworn, let alone the greatest.” He stopped. Da Kai had heaved himself to his feet. The effort left him panting, but he shrugged off the professor’s hand, blood staining his old uniform from waist to leg.
“Come on, Captain, there is no life left in that dragon. No magic will flow from it to you,” the colonel sneered, his face settling into old lines that betrayed overuse of the expression. Da Kai staggered towards his old friend: one of the poachers raised his gun, but Colonel Zhang held his palm up to stop him. The captain was clearly in pain, his breathing ragged, each exhalation a spray of spit flecked with blood, but his face was calm. When he was an arm’s length from the solid wall that was the flank of the Prince of the South, his legs gave way. He would have crashed to the ground if the coils of the dragon hadn’t shifted, impossibly, to catch him. The assembled men made noises of alarm and raised their guns, and this time the colonel didn’t stop them; Da Kai pushed himself up, his back against the dragon’s flank, leaving a smear of blood on the brilliant scales. “Your mistake, sir, was that you always saw them as something to take from. We are sworn to them, and them to us. True, their life flows to us.”
There was a smell in the air—sharp, as though something was burning. Feng gasped: the dragon’s body wasn’t on the ground any longer, but floating a little above it.
Da Kai, Captain Ma, war hero and ranger and Dragonsworn, continued, and his voice was as thunder. “But the bond is a bridge, and bridges can be crossed both ways.” The men screamed, for the Prince of the South had risen, and they were staring down death itself, in jaws as large as a horse carriage, in eyes that blazed with the crackle of electricity. They picked up their own weapons, firing haphazardly against the great beast. They might as well have been fighting a hurricane with pebbles. Colonel Zhang, tactician that he was, did the wiser thing. Two more bullet holes appeared in Da Kai’s torso, but still the man stood—stood and smiled, the dragon at his back roaring.
Then the lightning came. Once, twice, thrice, illuminating the entirety of the Mountains of Heaven. And then there was silence. Where once there had been poachers and a disgraced colonel, only burned limbs that crumbled like charcoal and a bubbling puddle of molten metal that once might have been an officer’s sidearm remained. The Prince of the South was once again on the ground, and like the captain, the dragon was still.
The lightning had pierced the clouds, and the moon illuminated the valleys of Tian Shan. The world held its breath for a moment, for what else can it do when so great a creature crosses?
“Look,” said the professor, pointing. “We’ve always known: dragons aren’t quite just creatures of flesh. They are creatures of magic, and like all energy, magic cannot be destroyed, only transformed.”
Feng could see it as the mist started rolling back, an echo of a shape, as though the gods had painted it in the sky with the lightning’s afterimage: the outline of a mighty dragon, long as the longest street in the capital, mane and whiskers trailing as it uncoiled and took to the skies above the two bodies below. Perhaps it was hope or a trick of the light, but she thought that she could see a figure on the head of the Prince of the South, grasping his horns for support as they flew off together to realms unknown.
• • •
Chao Mei-En fled the raucousness of the post-ceremony party, finding herself above decks on the capital’s largest pleasure barge, requisitioned for the emperor’s victory celebrations. She’d sat, stiff-backed, while military honours were given out to rows and rows of soldiers standing straight as posts, reminding her of so many wooden funeral tablets. Even the dean of the university had gotten an award. After the ceremony, there had been a feast with delicacies from every corner of the empire: roast pig with glistening, crispy skin; fruit carved into triumphant displays; sweet rice wine from the first harvest after the war. It was not for her—she needed air. In the distance, as the barge circled high above the capital, fireworks started going off to commemorate the evening.
She found her way to the bow, far from the drone of the airship engines, with only the distant boom of fireworks and rush of air to keep her company. Or not: there was another at the front of the ship, a broad-shouldered man wearing a military tunic. A captain, if she remembered the rank insignia correctly. She joined him at the bow and saw that he had a rotund earthen jar of wine at his feet, a bowl of wine in one hand and a fistful of medals in the other.
“If you’re lost, the party’s back that way,” said the captain.
“I have no need for the party. Besides, the dean of the university gets frisky when he’s drunk,” she said, doubly happy to have made her escape.
“We’ve not met, Miss—?”
“Professor. Professor Chao.”
“Ma Da Kai. I know you. You’re the one who brought the children to training.”
“And you’re one of the Dragonsworn. That’s a big medal you have around your neck.”
“For the Pearl City.”
“And those in your hands?”
“For those who didn’t come back. Ling and the others.”
“Did you say Ling?” It felt as though the airship had lurched and dropped ten chi, but when Chao looked at the captain’s steady hands on the guardrail, she knew that the ship had flown steady. She gestured at the captain’s wine bowl. The big man shrugged, handed it to her, and topped it up with the jar, sloshing wine over the edge and onto the sleeves of her good gown.
“Sorry,” he said.
Chao didn’t answer. She just tipped the bowl back, swallowing most of the wine and splashing the rest down her front. It burned going down, and her eyes watered, mostly from the wine. Mostly. The captain raised the heavy jar to his lips and drank straight from it. “Was Ling one of yours?”
She nodded.
“Good kid, saved a lot of us at the Pearl City. This was supposed to be his.” The captain dangled a medal as shiny and large as his own. “What are you a professor of? Kidnapping children?”
“I don’t think I want anything more to do with hunting Dragonsworn. I’m going to study dragons.”
“Good luck,” said Da Kai. “You’ll have a long way to go. I hear the government annexed part of the enemy’s territory and are going to convert it into a reserve for dragons.”
“That’s where I’ll go, then. And you?”
“First I thought I’d go around the country. Give these medals back to families. Now I’m not so sure. See those?” Da Kai tilted his head towards the outskirts of the capital, far below. Chao could see pinpricks of light in the fields around the city, slowly moving in the breeze.
“Lanterns for the souls of the dead, while we’re partying up here.”
Another burst of fireworks went off. Celebrations in the sky and death down below. The glow of the fireworks glistened on the captain’s cheeks. Maybe the wine was too strong for him, too. He made as though to hurl the medals off the airship—Chao saw him cock his arm backwards and tugged at his shoulder, losing the wine bowl over the edge of the railing. Both of them stumbled backward.
Da Kai sighed. “They deserve better than that. They deserve better than me, anyway.” He took another swig from the jar, more wine splashing on him than into his mouth. He held out the jar. Chao took it with both hands and took a sip, lowering the jar to see the captain frowning at her. She took a fuller mouthful and set the jar down. The captain sat, his back to the railings, and she joined him. “Say, Professor, you’ve studied the Dragonsworn. Have you ever heard of one of them losing the ability to talk to dragons?”
Chao leaned back and eyed the captain. “The Dragonsworn’s ability is inborn. Maybe if there was a severe enough injury to impact the flow of qi—or maybe the dragons just aren’t speaking to that particular Dragonsworn.”
“Figures,” he said.
“Look, I think I’d better get back to the party, make sure the dean hasn’t gotten into trouble. Shall I send someone up to help you?”
“No, professor. I’ll be fine. I’m sorry about what I said about the children earlier. You shouldn’t stop looking. With the dragons gone, the villagers will forget the old ways. Maybe you’ll be the only one in the country who knows how to find Dragonsworn. You should. They need us, too, you know. The dragons.”
Chao got to her feet, wobbling and hanging onto the rail for support. “The empire is in bad shape—the war was long and expensive. I think the dragons may need someone to protect them.”
“Forestry Service?”
“It’s either that or the university,” she said.
The captain got to his feet. “The reserve is a long way from the capital.”
“All the more reason the dragons will need the Dragonsworn.”
“Don’t forget what I said, then.”
The captain turned away from her, facing the bow—and the starbursts of fireworks above, and the lonely drifting lanterns below.
• • •
It took another three days for the next airship to the capital to reach the village where they’d launched their expedition. The local magistrate’s questions were few and perfunctory: poaching was rampant in the reserve, and few noted the passing of a park ranger, even one as decorated as the captain. Feng and the professor holed up in the cleanest room the local inn could offer; Feng spent most of her time staring back at the reserve, while the professor began writing up her findings.
The roar of the airship reminded Feng of the civilisation to which she felt she’d never be able to truly return, not after the mountains. Professor Chao paused at the top of the gangway and looked back at Feng, who lingered on the ground.
“It seems that you would prefer to be in the field,” she said after some time.
“I’ll send back samples. And sketches. Even reports, if you can read my writing. Though I think field research will be a part-time job at best.”
Nodding, the professor untied a long cloth-wrapped object from her travelling trunk and hurried back down the walkway to Feng. “You’ll be on the books as my assistant so long as you keep up your end of the bargain.” She stared into Feng’s eyes and went on slowly, deliberately, as though not for Feng, but to address ghosts that haunted only her: “You heard him, didn’t you? The dragon. The reserve will be richer for having a new Dragonsworn, unburdened by war.”
Feng didn’t answer, and didn’t ask how the professor knew. The professor unwrapped the parcel she carried—the captain’s rifle—and handed it over to Feng, who slung it across her back. Something felt right about it. Da Kai had said that the army managed to find those who could speak to dragons. Feng wondered anew what her professor had done in the war: perhaps, like Da Kai, she had a debt to repay. There would be other rangers in the Tian Shan Reserve, other old soldiers, other Dragonsworn with stories to tell and advice to give.
Other dragons.
The Dragonsworn had long been a legend to her. Now they were something more, something real. Feng had a lot to learn, and perhaps something to pay back. She pulled the sling of Da Kai’s ancient rifle close to her chest, feeling the comforting weight of it at her back, and watched as the airship took to the skies, watched until the clouds took it. Then it was Feng, and the mountains, and the mist, and more.
• • •