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  No one was quite sure how it happened. One moment her father was talking to the mining steward, the next the car was bearing down on the three of them at alarming speed and with amazing racket.

  The next part happened so fast it was confusing. As it was with thunder and lightning, she wasn’t sure if she heard Auld Smelt roar or saw his fire first. She hadn’t been looking at him before he warned them.

  But the roar hadn’t ended before the mining steward jumped away from the tracks in one direction and her father shoved her away in the opposite direction, diving on top of her. The blinding blast of furnace-hot fire from the dragon scorched across her face as he bellowed, and she felt the loaded ore car crash toward them. She was imagining herself crushed beneath it when it burst into flame not two feet away. The last of its clatter was when, with the frame gone, the half-fused ore spilled onto the track and across the ground. Only the wheels of the car remained, fused to the track, smoke rising from the wreckage.

  With spots dancing before her eyes, she followed the phantom of dragon flame back to Auld Smelt, catching his watchful eye before he turned his head away from them and aimed his next blast at his work-in-progress. He had somehow heard or sensed the renegade car and diverted his flame to destroy it and save them, then returned to business as usual.

  Overhearing her explaining this to her father, the mining steward shook his head in disbelief and said it wasn’t possible, that Smelt did not have the brainpower to react purposefully. “’E’s just not that bright, sir.”

  Later, the Queenston broadsheets even referred to the incident as a dragon malfunction, another one to add to an ever-lengthening list of such incidents that apparently had been happening quite often in recent months.

  But her father was convinced, as Verity was, that Smelt had deliberately saved them, and ordered that the beast be given a double ration of dragon kibble as a reward.

  On the train back to Queenston, Papa asked, “What do you think just happened, Verity? Am I unscientifically sentimental? Am I erroneously anthropomorphizing the beast?”

  “No, Papa. I had a bit of a headache already from the heat and dust, but when the mining steward said Smelt didn’t realize what he was doing, it grew worse. Smelt knew exactly what he was doing. He looked me in the eye afterwards and I know he was checking to make sure we were unharmed. I think dragons are a lot more intelligent than people give them credit for.”

  “I agree,” he said, and she hoped they’d have a nice chat about it, but Papa, troubled, busied himself with his paperwork for most of the rest of the ride home. She was disappointed. It was such a relief to have someone use her curse as a measure of the truth instead of some kind of social disease.

  Chapter 2

  The Balloon

  Verity scarcely knew her stepmother, but she didn’t like her. She didn’t really see why her father had to marry the woman, but he had done so unexpectedly, while on a business trip to Frostingdung, and seemed quite proud of himself for finally laying aside his grief over his first wife and finding a new mother for Verity. The woman had no sooner set foot in the house than she began sending Verity away to a series of schools. While Verity missed her father, she was glad to be away from his wife. She got headaches just looking at the elegant Sophronia.

  She also had the distinct impression her dislike was reciprocated.

  So Verity was surprised when her stepmother announced, during dinner, “I must take a small jaunt—just for overnight and tomorrow—to take some things to my cousin, whose wife is ailing. Their quaint little cottage is high in the foothills near the Mountains of Morn so it’s a bit of a journey. By the time you told me we were to have Verity back for her birthday, Gowen, I’d already made arrangements so unfortunately I cannot be with you.”

  Verity tried to hide her smile.

  “But I was able to quickly pull together quite a lovely surprise for your birthday, dear.” She showed Verity her teeth, which were sharp and gleaming white. “I’m sure you and your papa will find it great fun.”

  Verity was so relieved that she would not have to share her day and her father with her stepmother that she wouldn’t have paid attention to a headache if she had one. It sounded like fun already, whatever it was.

  True to her word, for once, her stepmother left that evening to catch a late train. Verity watched from her window to make sure Sophronia and her baggage actually left. Then she went to sleep in her own bed, knowing that when she woke up she’d be sixteen.

  After her very long day, she slept well in spite of her excitement and rose before anyone else was up. Only the cook was at work in the kitchen. Verity, still in her robe and slippers, sat at the table with a hot chocolate until her father came downstairs, then she hurried out to meet him.

  “Dress warmly,” he told her.

  She did, looking forward to wearing her own things again instead of the school uniform, but found to her disappointment that she was now too big for most of her clothes. Finally she pulled on woolen pants over the bottoms of her combinations, which served as both chemise and drawers, warm socks and sturdy boots for her feet, and a coat of soft tan suede with an attached woolen cape in a Loden green tweed trimmed in the same suede and fastened with little frog knots.

  The carriage was waiting for them by the time she galloped down the steps.

  “You’re going to like this,” her father said with a grin as the two of them climbed in.

  The carriage drove them outside the crumbling city walls to a meadow close to the bay.

  In the field were two men—well, a man and a boy, a woven basket large enough to hold them all lying on its side while a small dragon stood in the opening held wide by the men and beat her wings mightily, forcing air into the silken sack. This was attached by a great many ropes and two stout chains to an open framework clamped atop the basket. The framework bore a platform just big enough to hold the dragon atop it. With a great deal of unfolding and fanning out to enable more of the little dragon’s forced wind to enter the balloon, the men belled it out enough that she was able to blow flame into it without touching the silk, so that it bloomed into an enormous globe of gloriously hued silk, patterned in a rainbow-colored aurora design.

  Verity was charmed and clapped her hands appreciatively.

  “What a cute little dragon!” she said.

  “This is Taz,” the younger of the two men, who didn’t look much older than she was, said over his shoulder. He was busy helping set the basket on its bottom. Taz flapped aloft to perch atop the platform, while the balloon bobbed above them in a most impressive fashion.

  On the boy’s signal, the dragon once more lifted her head and began puffing a steady, gentle, orange flame into the narrowed base of the balloon.

  In less time than Verity would have thought possible, the balloon was fully inflated and tugged at the tethered basket, as if anxious to go.

  The basket had a door on the side, she supposed, to make it easier for ladies in long skirts to climb in. “How do you make it go up?” she asked.

  “Why, Taz blows a little harder and a little longer,” said the pilot.

  “And I suppose if you want to go down, you ask Taz to take a break?” she suggested.

  “Something like that.” The younger man grinned.

  The older man spoke then. He was wearing a cap over what looked to be a partially bald head more than made up for by a handsome handlebar mustache well waxed on the ends, fluffy burnsides and a neatly trimmed beard. “How do, Mr. Brown,” he said. “I’ll be your pilot this morning, name of Captain Helio Marsters. You’ve been introduced to Taz, and the lad here is Toby, her wrangler.”

  “Pleasure,” Papa said. “This is my daughter Verity. It’s her birthday.”

  “So the gentleman said when he arranged for the flight.”

  “What gentleman?” Papa asked. “I was given to understand that my wife had planned this.”

  “Then he was her representative, like, I’d guess, sir. Said it was the young lady’s sixteenth
and she was to be given a grand tour of Queenston, surrounding lands, and the harbor.”

  “That sounds splendid,” Papa said.

  Perhaps it was the very bright sun that stabbed Verity right behind her left eyebrow then. She ignored it at any rate, determined to enjoy herself.

  “Taz is so pretty,” she told Toby, admiring the blossoming of golden yellow, through orange, red and fuchsia along her body, “I’ve never seen such a pretty little dragon before.”

  “Has to be small for this job,” Toby said. “As you can see, there’s not much room between her platform and the balloon’s rim.

  “May I give her a stroke, before we get started?”

  “Go ’round to her front so you don’t startle her and show her your open hand first. Here, I’ll give you a bit of kibble to reward her between blows, then you’ll be great pals.”

  He dropped a few nuggets into her hand and she showed them to the little dragon, who batted her spiky eyelashes at the treat before snuffling it up. While she inhaled the kibble, Verity gave her a quick pat.

  “Enough of that,” Mr. Marsters said. “Take ’er up, wee Taz.” All the while he and Toby unfastened knots in the lines tethering the basket to the ground. Up they went!

  Later, when a sight, a sound, a word, or even the feeling of pressure in her ears brought back to her a fragment of the beauty of the ride, it was mordanted by the pangs that tore at her when she remembered the rest of what happened that morning.

  But at first it was beautiful and instructive regarding the lay of the land.

  Slightly to the east the burgeoning expanse of Queenston Town bristled with business. Although the historic maps showed the castle as the city center, these days the ship yards linking Argonian resources to Frostingdung industry and the train yard dwarfed the ancient fortress. The glass ceilinged station with its multiple tracks was the hub of the ever-expanding railway line stitching through the countryside, linking mountains to city to sea and onward, sending out shoots and branches to the iron mines and to foreign lands too distant to see, even from the balloon. The long-haul trains in Queenston carried passengers along with empty cars to be side-lined on feeder tracks and returned to the mines and fields to be filled with products the train would collect on the return trips.

  They flew above the thin white steam puffing from the chimneys in little clouds like a field of dandelion fluff over the city. One of the advantages of dragon-fired boilers was that no fuels aside from the dragons’ food were required. Verity had briefly attended a school in Frostingdung, and the city air was foul with the fumes of the mixture of dung and peat burned to keep the boilers fired and the machinery humming, clunking, and roaring.

  In the harbor below, sails drooped from the tall masts of obsolete sailing ships while dragon-fired steamships scuttled back and forth across the water like so many waterbugs. Three great long warehouses sat where herds once grazed, now near the center of town.

  Clouds billowed above and all around the balloon, mirroring the distant snowy peaks, the water reflecting the blue of the sky and the cracks of the glaciers slipping down the mountainsides. Green and golden meadows studded with little farmsteads spread across the land with the sharp black shadow of the balloon floating across the crops.

  Taking a break in the oohing and ahhing, her father gave her a gift, a set of metal working tools in a compact green leather case worked with knots, the whole slender enough to slip into her pocket or hang from her belt. She unpacked the lunch the cook had sent with them, including a small but lovely cake for her birthday. When she offered a piece to Toby, the wind blew his hair away from his ears so she saw that their tips were pointed. Most unfashionable these days, indicating some taint from one of the old magical races like elves or fairies or something, mostly killed off in the Great War. No wonder he chose a career in flying balloons if his ancestors had wings. He laughed when she held out a piece to the little dragon as well, pointing out with a wave of his hand that her mouth was engaged with the hissing gout of fire for the balloon.

  Later, the authorities and investigators claimed that what happened next occurred because of another dragon malfunction. But, as she followed Toby’s hand up to observe Taz firing the balloon, Verity heard above the rush of the flame a sharp crack, and saw a link in the chain break. She turned to show her father, who could under normal circumstances have mended such a problem, when the other side of the chain snapped as well.

  One minute they were sailing through the sky, a lovely inverted egg with iridescent rainbows stitched across the bubbling fabric, then with the first sharp snap, as she turned her head away to get her father’s attention, Taz, still flaming, screamed and slipped sideways on her platform.

  At the sound of the second snap, the chain connecting the dragon’s platform to the balloon parted and the lower half fell into the basket, throwing the dragon off balance, so her flame veered off-target, catching the silks on fire, before she could inhale it again. The balloon’s cheerful design was eclipsed by a terrifying streak of flame.

  Verity’s father leapt toward the platform to steady it, but Taz fell off of it over the side, her flame catching the woven wicker side of the gondola. The flapping of her wings as she tried to stay aloft only fanned the flames.

  As the bottom of the basket burned, Verity received a sharp shove from behind and she fell over the side of the gondola and plummeted into the silver-blue sea below.

  The water sliced into her as she hit, filling her nose, mouth, and her ears, so the cries of her father and the men in the basket were quenched in the bone-numbing water.

  She thought, very fleetingly, that this was it, that she was dead before she got started. But then one of her braids was yanked upward, an arm caught first her head, then under her arms, and she was on the surface, coughing and gasping.

  “Got you!” a male voice said. It didn’t go with what she was seeing, which was the dragon flying toward the flaming balloon, as if to break its fall. Before she could decide what was happening, the world spun away into darkness.

  Suddenly people surrounded her, a quilted blanket was wrapped around her, and she was placed in the bed of a wagon and carried back to town. Not until she was in front of a fire and her wet clothing was stripped away, the salt wiped from her face, hair, and body, and she was clothed once more in warm garments and allowed gradually to thaw from the inside out, did she start asking questions. “Father?”

  “Lost, child. Him and Mr. Marsters both, burned and drowned, no doubt, rest their souls. So sorry, dear, but at least you were saved. The treacherous beast and the wrangler have escaped but will be apprehended soon.”

  Pain shot through her head. “That’s no good,” she said.

  “What, dear?”

  “Obviously, that my father’s gone… but also that boy, Toby, the dragon wrangler. He saved me.”

  “He caused it.”

  “No,” she said, not really wanting to argue, though of course, she had to, but all she wanted was to go back to the morning before they ever climbed into the balloon and ask to do something else—anything else—instead. “It broke.”

  Their voices were just so much noise as she tried to imagine how it would be, never seeing her father again. Everything had changed utterly and yet, she couldn’t believe it and expected him to walk, perhaps wet but well, through the door at any time. But he did not. Nor was he found.

  Sinking into a shocked daze, she heard, all over town and seeming to echo through the fields, forests, and mountains, rising above train whistles and industrial noise, a prolonged dolorous howl from the throats of many creatures. She wanted to join in.

  Chapter 3

  After Disaster

  After the funeral, which was only a memorial service since—well, they hadn’t found him yet—she stopped expecting to see him again. Everyone said what a good man he was, and that was true, but to her it seemed they were saying how dead he was, because people rarely said that sort of thing about someone while he was still alive. She had as
ked him once why people always gushed over dead people and he said, “Part of it is relief, I think. The dear departed can no longer hurt them, disappoint them, compete with them, so… never so good as when they’re gone.” It was an unusually cynical thing for her papa to say, she thought, but it had not proved untrue.

  The general consensus seemed to be that he now was in a better place. Verity really could not understand that. While the bottom of Dragon Bay might be a better place for fish of the bottom-feeding varieties, she was quite sure it was detrimental to humans.

  She coughed and blew her nose all during the ceremony, and people probably thought it was grief but in fact her dunking had given her a terrible cold, pneumonia probably. She knew very few of the people at the temple or even at the graveside. The dark veiled woman standing behind the family attorney might have been a distant relative on her father’s side, one of the ones with the gypsy blood. Something about her was familiar, and yet Verity could not recall seeing her before. But then, her brain wasn’t working well at all what with the pounding headache that redoubled almost any time anyone—especially her stepmother—spoke, she was thoroughly sick by the time she reached home. The physical symptoms helped distract her from the bewilderment and sudden emptiness that made her feel hollow. She stayed in her room and didn’t leave. With her face turned to the wall, where her eyes, during the rare times when they were open, traced the pattern printed on the wall-cloth, she stayed, slept, coughed, and only when Cook came up with her soup and coaxed her to eat a bit did she see another person.

  To her disappointment, her strong constitution did not allow her to wither and die. That would have been the easiest thing to do. But after a week she had recuperated well enough to be bored to distraction. Surprisingly, she missed her father very little, which made her feel a bit guilty because she thought she ought to. She’d been away at various boarding schools for the last four years so he was no longer part of her everyday life, and that realization saddened her and made her feel as if she were not a very loving person. But the truth was, she was used to doing without him.