The Hunted

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. So the Valley wouldn’t miss them once they were gone.

In fact, losing the dragons would be better for her. Animals would flock here. Nature would flourish. And perhaps people would start to bring their towns and cities and commerce in. Imagine the possibilities, Marina! Just imagine!

Otto trots his monologue into its fourth hour, heroically unaware of the raging battle between its only audience and the summon of sleep.

Marina, for her part, has resorted to using her hand as a support for her head. Her defenses are down to their final gasp; the jostling of the carriage at each bump in the road sends her back from the precipice to something resembling consciousness.

Three weeks ago, she would have countered the young biologist. Dragons, as everyone knew, were preceded in this valley only by dirt, and maybe trees. She’d never seen so much nature as in the forest they were riding through, or heard so many animalian sounds. And besides, who apart from the Valleypeople themselves would move to this damp, dank place unless the empire actively forced them to?

But in the time she’d spent traveling with Otto, Marina had learned that he thrived on clever-sounding insights devoid of fact. That arguing with him could be fun for a day, but did nothing to stop the unceasing flow of speech. And that if she tried hard enough, she could reduce the sound of his voice to little more than an insect buzz in her ear. Otto’s talks never solicited a response, so she’d been spending the long days letting her mind wander, to home or the future or the journey ahead.

Home. It was four weeks ago that Otto had knocked on the shop door, with an imperial letter demanding the presence of Huw – capital botanist, master, surrogate father – in the next Valley caravan. But Huw had suddenly and inexplicably contracted a severe digestive ailment that, he assured his apprentices, was very permanent. Mustering his best long-suffering grimace, he had handed Maxwell a deck of cards and told him and Marina to fight among themselves for the privilege of going in his place. Darn him. He knew Marina had never been very good at cards.

Still, she can’t help but smile at the thought of him. She misses him. And Maxwell, rude winner though he is. And, perhaps most of all, the shop, with its bustle and noise and mingling scents of lavender and rosemary and old books and rosewood. Just a few more weeks until she can go back.

For now, though, she’s stuck with the smells of sweat and wood polish. The oppressive humidity and eternal twilight of the carriage. The drone of Otto’s voice. And, finally, the loss of her battle against the ever-pressing lure of sleep.

Marina starts awake as the carriage lurches to a stop. Checkpoint. She shakes her head and wills the lingering dreams from her mind as she drags herself to the floor and fumbles for her bag of surveying equipment. Still bleary, she misses the step out the carriage door, stumbling to the ground where Otto stands waiting.

The clearing is a blur of movement and energy. Ahead of them, uncountable numbers of red coats, chatter, endless important tasks. Behind them, more carriages lurching to a stop. And something different in the air.

Marina turns to Otto. There’s a light in his eyes.

“I just overheard – some of the soldiers – we’re here! – they said we’ve made it – and they’ve just set it all up! Leave the bag in the carriage. Everyone’s going up the hill to watch!”

Marina’s heart begins to race. Her mind, suddenly, has cleared. Is this really it? Is it actually happening? Can it be that somewhere in the trees, just a stroll away, are the bait, and the trap, and the silent soldiers who even now are expertly fitting arrows to bowstrings? Is this the day she will see a dragon die?

In spite of herself, she is excited.

“Are you serious?” she asks Otto, who already is pulling the bag away from her and throwing it into the carriage. “Like, you’re absolutely sure that’s what they said? This is really it?”

“Yes, Marina!” Otto says, pushing her along now. “Come on!” And Marina doesn’t bother to quell her enthusiasm as they join the throbbing trail of people snaking northward.

As they move farther away from the dusty caravan path, the trees become thicker and the woods fall into a dark and eerie hush. The talk and energy of the red-coated figures around them feel muted here, dulled somehow. And on the edges of their vision, noiseless figures appear and disappear, watching.

Valleypeople. The native inhabitants of these woods are ever wary, ever watchful, never speaking. Since the caravan arrived in the forest, its residents have hovered on the periphery of its path, watching silently from the edge of the trees.

Otto, always uncomfortable around them, shivers now so close to their presence, drawing in closer to Marina and lengthening his strides. The soldiers say to stay away from them, that they practice witchcraft and dark magic. There is undoubtedly something ethereal about these people. Yet, for some reason she cannot quantify, Marina cannot bring herself to be scared. Something about them, in their eyes, maybe, convinces her they are not dangerous.

The trees are thinning now, a little more light breaching to the forest floor. And suddenly, Marina and Otto and the people around them have made it to the clearing at the top of the hill, high enough to see the craggy mountain ranges that encircle the forest on all sides. The energy of the crowd, muted by the woods, explodes in this open space, and Marina gets the vivid impression of being on the edge of a pulsing, enthusiastic carnival.

A childhood with a cousin who shot rabbits for fun has taught Marina that hunting is a brutal, cruel sport. And whatever propaganda Otto may breathe out, she has her own cynical theories about the empire’s motives for this dragon-killing business. Yet the rush of excitement she felt in the forest has not waned, and is magnified here by the crowd’s contagious energy. So, swallowing her doubt, she plunges with Otto into the melee, talks, laughs, socializes, and listens to tall tales of dragons from people who’ve seen them before.

When the sun suddenly dims, then flashes bright again, everyone turns as one, arching their necks to see past each other as they drop into a sudden hush. Whispers slice through the air. Then, suddenly, from a man to the left: “There!”

Marina catches a glimpse of a shadow in the distance, too far away to see clearly but drawing closer.

The whispers fall away to an occasional murmur. Everyone watches, transfixed, as the animal approaches. Marina can’t pull her eyes away. It is enormous and long, like a lumpy tower turned on its side. And its color – with every movement in the midafternoon sunlight, its scales flash, cerulean, cobalt, sometimes periwinkle and violet. The effect is that of something shiny and reflective glimmering within a clear body of water. As the creature draws closer, Marina can hear the steady flapping of its thin, monumental wings in the still air.

A sound from the forest below makes her suddenly aware of the trap the dragon is flying into. And Marina finds memories from her childhood, unbidden, surfacing into her consciousness, images of rabbits walking unknowingly into the clever snares her cousin used to set, shivering recollections of the way he would shoot them as if he were brave. But there is no time for these recollections right now, not when a creature like this is so close she can almost touch it. Marina pushes the thoughts back down and redirects her awareness to the sky.

The dragon has almost arrived at the trap now, yards away, close enough for Marina to see the details of its reptilian face. Its scales somehow flash even more brilliantly here, a constant, shimmering rainbow of blue that makes its features seem almost magical. Its eyes, black orbs encased in that sparkling sea, seem to catch hers, to look at her, to see into and through her. And Marina is struck by a sudden desperate desire for the dragon to live. Feverishly, she prays for something to go wrong.

And then everything happens very quickly.

A blast, like cannon fire, reverberates from the forest below, rocking even the hill, and a plume of smoke and shrapnel and who knows what else flashes up toward the creature. It struggles to escape it, squirming, writhing upward. And though Marina knows already what will happen next, although all of Otto’s endless ramblings should have prepared her for this moment, she barely stops the scream from rising from her throat as a barrage of arrows strikes the dragon, hitting their mark in the center of its beautiful blue neck.

For a millisecond, time seems to stop and the creature remains suspended in the air, a dozen wooden shafts protruding from its throat. Then it lets out a shriek, high-pitched, bloodcurdling, and as it falls, it seems to look right at Marina, and the sunlight reflects off its dying scales and into her eyes, and she doesn’t know whether it’s the blast or the shrieking or the brightness of the reflected light, but her head is suddenly wracked with pain and she shuts her eyes to ward off a pounding wave of nausea.

Something inside her dies as the dragon plummets through the forest canopy below.

And then it is over. The air around her breaks into cheers. Marina, so consumed by the dragon and her own mind that she had forgotten she was surrounded by others, forces her eyes open. On all sides of her, people are smiling, whooping, clapping, laughing with each other. The soldiers on either side of her grin and chuckle and say words she cannot make out. No one else saw her pain. No one else is in pain. And at once, although she is surrounded by every member of the special imperial forces, Marina feels very alone. She longs for the smells of rosewood and rosemary and lavender and old books. She wants to go home.

Marina’s headache dogs her for the rest of the day. It weighs her down on the walk back from the hill, through the motions of unpacking the carriage, through her wildlife survey with Otto, through setting up camp and building a fire and getting in line for dinner.

Although the hunt lasted barely two minutes, the dragon still is the only thing anyone can talk about during the meal. Snippets of the conversation come to Marina as a faint echo, as if she is standing far away, at the end of a very, very long tunnel. The scene on the hill is all she can think about. She forces herself to swallow her soup.

“Hey.” A voice, very close to her. Marina forces herself back through the tunnel and into the present. The forest around her is draped in shadow. The breeze brings the cool of evening. Jetta, a young captain, is speaking to her. “Marina. Are you all right? You don’t look very well.”

“Oh.” Marina struggles to figure out whether she is. “Yeah, I’m okay. I just have a headache I guess.”

“Ooh, I think Barnaby might have some sort of headache remedy. He was talking about it yesterday. You should go ask him for some.”

Marina manages a smile. “Thanks, I might.”

She struggles to stay focused on the conversation through the rest of dinner, to not dip back to the scene on the hill. The bowmen who shot the dragon are going to be receiving some sort of special honor, apparently. Some people already have disobeyed the general’s orders and snuck out to go look at the dragon’s body. It’s huge, they say, even bigger than it looked in the air. Marina manages to keep up, to swallow her soup and contribute nods and mmhms. Still, she breathes a sigh of relief when it finally is time for bed.

But she cannot sleep. Every time she closes her eyes, her mind is filled with the creature’s face. And when her eyes are open, her head pulses with pain.

Finally, she decides to go see the body for herself. If she can study it enough, maybe she can ward the specter of its image away.

She stands up, quietly, trying not to disturb her tentmates. The night air is chilly, so she throws on her red imperial jacket, then slips on her boots and slips in to the silent campsite.

The moon is high in the sky and full, bathing the forest floor in a white-blue light. Marina doesn’t need a lantern tonight. She slips into the trees, where the footprints of people who’ve illegally snuck off to see the dragon’s body already have worn a path in the dirt for her to follow. Still pushing back the pain of her headache, she follows it carefully, glancing groundward every few seconds.

And then she sees someone.

A Valleyperson. A boy. Young, ten or twelve, maybe. Brown tunic washed white in the moonlight glow. She stops. He glides forward, pausing a few feet in front of her, and looks at her, fixating first on her jacket, then letting his gaze travel up to her face.

His eyes are so big. And so – hunted. They make Marina shiver. The longer he looks at her, the more she imagines that he’s pleading with her, that his eyes are asking for something vitally important that she cannot decipher. The boy’s mouth opens. His lip trembles, almost imperceptibly. And then he disappears, folding himself into the darkness of the trees.

Perturbed, Marina tries to warm herself by wrapping her jacket more tightly around her body. She attempts, unsuccessfully, to tell her imagination to stop running away from her. She keeps walking, more quickly now. And then – she’s there.

The dragon is somehow larger than it had seemed in the sky, a blue land mass dropped improbably into the center of a green and brown forest. Even in death, its scales glimmer, muted blue hues reflecting moonlight. The creature had taken everything in its path along with it when it fell, and now Marina has to pick her way among the shadows of downed tree trunks and wayward branches as she treads to the middle of the newly created clearing.

She stands for a moment in front of the creature, breathing, taking it in, feeling a sadness she cannot explain. Around her, the night air vibrates with a slow breeze and the buzz of invisible insects chirping from tree limbs. Marina cannot see any Valleypeople along the edge of the trees. She is, apparently, alone.

Slowly, she makes her way up the length of the dragon, running a palm along the scales of its enormous side. Once she reaches the middle of its neck, she stops. There are arrows here, still lodged in sinew and muscle and airways, broken shafts creating a maze of deathly wood. It doesn’t seem right to her, somehow, for something so beautiful to remain so ruined by the weapons that stole the air from its lungs and the life from its body. So, wincing as her head throbs, she drops to a kneel beside it.

Carefully, she lays one hand against the creature’s bloodied scales and grips the other around an arrow, as close to the arrowhead as she can get. Gently, as if the dragon is still alive, as if moving too roughly would hurt it, she presses on the scales and pulls on the arrow, moving it back and forth and back and forth until, with a tug, it comes free.

She takes a deep breath, then breaks the shaft and tosses the weapon aside. Good. Only eleven to go.

The exercise is cathartic. She moves systematically, dropping into a rhythm, as if she is just grinding herbs or chopping leaves or cataloguing books back at the shop. Her imagination flies, seeing this creature alive, soaring through the air, searching for food, sleeping soundly in its cave – or forest clearing? Where do dragons sleep, anyway? – at night, laying eggs, having offspring, growing old. She finds herself rubbing a soothing hand against the dragon’s scales, finds herself speaking aloud, in barely more than a whisper, her story of its life.

And then, suddenly, the forest around her goes strangely quiet. The breeze has stopped. No insects call. Marina realizes that, close by, only feet away, just on the other side of the hump of the dragon’s side, there is a sound. A chewing, maybe. A squelching.

Her heart pounds. As quietly as she can, she lets go of the arrow she is holding and pulls her other hand away from the dragon. She stands up cautiously, tries to invisibly back away.

But then her head throbs and pain sears through her and she is so dizzy and the world is spinning a little, and in front of her a figure emerges from the opposite side of the dragon and it’s wearing a red coat and smiling, or grimacing, and – is that blood on its mouth, is that flesh in its hand, what is he pulling from his pocket? – and somewhere behind her there is a rustle in the trees and the world is really spinning now, her body feels like its floating away, and – oh gosh – something shiny and large is coming through the air toward her – or maybe it’s just the dizziness or her imagination, really, she can’t tell – and she is falling and falling and falling and everything goes dark.

Something soft grabs onto her before she hits the ground.