Carrie Vaughn: Voices of Dragons

“We have stories,” the dragon said. “Of people with swords. They hunt us down. Seek us out. Wicked deeds.”

Kay wondered what stories the dragons told about human beings. Saint George—Silver River High’s mascot was Saint George—must be like the devil to them.

“Foolish, maybe,” he said. “But I want to see for myself. To understand. We used to talk to people. Maybe we should again.”

How unlikely was it that they even met at all? People and dragons weren’t supposed to meet. They weren’t supposed to walk around on the same planet. Except for old stories from China where dragons represented good fortune and luck, there’d been only conflict between them.

But there were those stories of Chinese luck. Somewhere back in history, maybe something like this had happened before. Pure chance had brought them both here: her to climb rocks and him to fish her out of the river. That was luck. And it gave them something to talk about.

“If I hadn’t fallen into the river, what would you have done?” she said. “I had to talk to you because you saved my life. But if you had tried to talk to someone who was just walking along, and they saw you and ran screaming, what would you have done?” Kay could see it: That someone, seeing a dragon so close to the border, would have fled, reported to the Federal Bureau of Border Enforcement, maybe even her mother, and there would have been evacuations, more jet patrols, maybe even bombing—everyone would have assumed the dragons planned an attack. But that wasn’t why he was here.

“Thought, the stories about humans are true. But you didn’t scream. Didn’t run.”

In spite of herself, unconsciously almost, Kay smiled. No, she hadn’t run away. And the dragon hadn’t tried to eat her, and she had to rethink a lot of the old stories. She liked the idea that everyone had been wrong all this time. This wasn’t just an adventure—it was an adventure no one else had even thought of before.

The dragon tilted his head, peering more closely at her. Like a bird might.

“That—smile? Why?”

“Because this is good,” she said.

They met again the week after that.

The dragon, it turned out, knew how to read. Dragons had scholars and writing. Using soot on stone, working with their claws, they made marks and symbols. They had also collected human books, and some of them, peering very closely to make out the tiny (to them) letters, could read human words. So at the dragon’s request, Kay brought him books, and they read them together.

“How can you read?” she asked him early on. “You’re huge. The print’s so small.”

“Very good eyes. Like hunting prey. We see rabbits while flying.”

She wasn’t sure what to make of the image, of reading being like hunting.

During that same meeting she asked him his name. He tilted his head, a quizzical, curious movement. It meant he was thinking. When he spoke, he made a trill and click, dragon noises, deep in his throat.

“That’s your name?” she said, and he nodded. “I can’t say that. What’s it mean in English?”

He paused again, still bemused, and she wondered what dragons called themselves, what their names meant. But she thought about what her name meant and what she’d say if she had to translate it, and how she would have been just as perplexed.

“I can choose a name.” He looked at the book they’d been reading, The Faerie Queene , a thick edition with clear print she’d found in the library. She’d brought it because the picture on the cover showed a knight battling a dragon. “Artegal. Call me that. Your name?”

“Me?” It seemed surreal, trading names with a dragon. “Kay.”

“The letter?”

She knew she wouldn’t be able to explain it. “Kind of.” He simply huffed in response.

He wanted to talk about the books with dragons in them, to see the human stories of dragons and people fighting. To try to understand why they fought. She figured her just standing in front of him would explain it.

“You could swallow me whole. That scares people.”

“People fight when scared?” he said.

“Of course they do.” He still seemed confused by the whole idea. His gaze narrowed. She was learning to read his expressions: the arc of scales above his shining dark eye, the curve of his lip. The way his head tilted when she spoke too quickly, and he didn’t understand.

She asked him, “What scares dragons?”

He cocked his head. “Nothing.”

The answer didn’t surprise her. But after a moment he added, “Each other.” That did surprise her.

“Dragons fight with each other?”

“Rare. We fight to defend. But there has been no fighting in my lifetime.”

At first she was shy about asking questions. One of them might make him angry and finally inspire him to eat her. But he was more interested in the books, in the stories, and in asking questions himself. He really was interested in talking. She grew braver.

“Where do you live?”

“North,” he said.

“No, I mean, do you live in caves? Like in the stories? Do you make them, or do you find them?”

“Caves. There are always caves to find. But we make them larger. We carve. Decorate.”

“How?”

“Stones. Ones that shine in the light. Gold. That story is true—dragons love gold.”

“How many of you are there where you live?”

“You’ll tell this to your army?”

Stricken, she shook her head, denying it. But then she recognized the curl to his lip, a rumble that was a chuckle. He’d been joking. He understood: She couldn’t take this information to anyone without admitting that she’d crossed the border and spoken to a dragon.

He asked her many of the same questions. Where do you live? What do you do? The dragon understood school—they had something like it. Each dragon was taught by a mentor, an elder in the family.

He said, “My mentor was a…speaker. After the last battle. The one who spoke to make the treaty.”

She remembered seeing pictures, old black-and-white photos of a trio of dragons crouched in an open field, surrounded by tanks and soldiers with guns, and a handful of unarmed, tiny-looking people standing before them.

“Like an ambassador,” she said.

He tilted his head and ducked his chin, something like a nod. “Yes. Ambassador. Then he taught me. I learned language from him. But had no one to speak to after he left. Many years ago now.”

“Where did he go?”

Artegal settled, a shiver passing along his neck that made his scales ripple. “East. Not sure where. But…he did not like that we kept silent.”

“And so you came looking for someone. Won’t your people get mad if they find out about this?”

He snorted at this. A hint of steam curled from his nostrils. “An acceptable risk.”

The same acceptable risk she was taking, for the sake of adventure. She understood.

She turned her phone off during these Sunday afternoons with the dragon. Reception was spotty out here anyway, but she didn’t want to have to explain it to him if it happened to ring. And she certainly wasn’t going to talk to someone in the dragon’s presence.

Usually, she had missed calls when she reemerged into what passed for civilization in Silver River. This time, a text message from Tam screamed at her: Where RU?

Kay called her back. Tam didn’t even say hello.

“Kay, where are you? We’re supposed to go looking for dresses, what’s up?”

Kay winced. She’d forgotten. “I just went out for a little while. I’m driving into town right now. I’ll pick you up at your house.”

She didn’t go straight to Tam’s house, because she had to change out of her hiking clothes and take a shower to get the dirt and sweat off. How could being out in the woods for an hour get her so grubby? By the time she got to Tam’s, she was an hour late, and Tam wasn’t happy.