Chapter 14 King of Dragons
KING OF DRAGONS
THOUGH BAKER SURVIVED her meeting on the upper floors, no one seemed willing to believe it. Few had done it before.
The slaves looked at her as if they’d seen a ghost once she descended through the yellow gates. Without a word, she walked through the dining hall, into the slave living quarters and returned to her room where Marnie sat curled in blankets.
Baker nestled up to Marnie with the strangest sensation in her stomach as she relived her conversation with Peter.
It had been a true conversation at last, strange and intrusive in that he spoke to the very thoughts in her mind, but for the first time in her memory she’d had a full conversation with words.
Lying where Marnie was sleeping, Baker stared at the ceiling and then at last turned her head and stared at Jolie’s empty bed.
Baker had been afraid of that empty bed, but as she stared, she realized it no longer scared her.
She’d met Death now, and his words turned over and over in her brain as she looked back up at the ceiling.
She waited for morning, consoling Marnie as she turned in the bed, beckoning on occasion for something to drink which Baker fetched for her in the dead of night.
She’d once crept timidly into the dining hall by candlelight, but walked now easily as she filled a glass, lifted it to Marnie’s lips and laid down again.
When the earliest hours of morning came, she pulled herself out from the covers, kissed Marnie on the forehead, and left.
The entire city was sleeping, Baker wearing her brown cloth shoes and slaves garb as she moved between the quaint houses and left the city gates.
A path led her into the woods and up several steep hills, Baker turning once or twice to catch the sunrise as it rose over the opposite mountains. The world seemed immersed in silence.
At last she reached the top of the hill where a rocky outcropping of stones lined the ridge. Standing on the path, she turned back again, not a single bird’s chirp in the trees.
“How was the walk?” she heard, and turned to see Peter crouched up on a rock several feet above as he overlooked the city below. As if his presence were a room, she felt a welcome back like she’d returned to the location of their first meeting.
The morning light streamed through the trees, and Baker was reminded in his presence of how beautiful the woods could be. He was like a fixture among them, sliding down from the rocks in a long coat before coaxing her forward on the path. Without a word, she followed.
Walking behind him, Baker wondered at him like she wondered at the woods. She kept a measured distance until he stopped and looked back at her, causing her to stop short.
“You didn’t walk behind me then, don’t start now,” he said, “come on.”
Baker moved uneasy beside him, and as they walked again she glanced up, wondering where they were going as he waved a hand at a nearby carriage, the driver stopping. He tossed up a coin and they climbed into the back.
The driver started offagain.
“To a place I like to go when the days are nice like this,” he said, and Baker looked out at the woods, wondering why she didn’t feel more terrified in the presence that so many seemed to hate so much.
She had a hard time looking Peter in the face, offering sideward glances to see him looking up at the trees with those green eyes that were much like the forest themselves.
He didn’t seem like a Strike, much less like one that had lived for hundreds of years, and what was he planning to do with her?
Baker exhaled her anxieties and tried to avoid focusing on them, looking around at the trees and noticing how massive they were becoming as the ride continued.
“White pine tree,” Peter said, gesturing to a tree she’d been staring at behind him.
Wide-eyed, Baker pointed to another.
“Cedar. Back through those woods you’ll see a palm tree,” he said, “ever since Madness came into the world, nothing grows with any real predictability with climate.”
Baker pointed to another, and another. She gestured to plants and trees and stones. He could name them all, without so much as a pause to think.
How did he know so much? The thought bloomed as she watched him in awe.
“I’ve been around for a while,” he replied with a soft smile.
A strong and dormant curiosity came alive in her soul, one that had been buried under years of witnessing pain and asking the same unanswerable questions over and over again.
She began to ask him questions, one by one, filling her mind with them. He could see them, and he could see other questions she’d never known how to voice or express, things she’d thought about all her life.
His answers were clear, decisive, but kind in a way that invited more.
She no longer cared in the moment what kind of person he was, only that in doing her this kindness he was giving her something to drink in a desert she’d been dying in for a long time.
At last, feeling silly but nostalgic, she asked about love, if it existed, and where it was.
Along the ride, he’d never seemed to tire of her questions, but seemed to enjoy well-crafted explanations as much as she did.
At this question, he finally paused.
“Love,” he repeated aloud and she felt suddenly unsure, carried away by the ease of talking with him through the day, she realized she’d forgotten that wall that often kept her buried inside herself and safe.
“The kind you’re asking about,” he said, “there should be a better word for it, but what you’re looking for is fundamental, not romantic.
It’s the quiet fabric of life, and it’s everywhere.
Some Strike, the sloppy, impulsive ones, tear that fabric.
That’s what you call Madness, but I suppose that’s why we’ve been put together,” he said, “in a way, we’re looking for the same thing.
Love, life, there isn’t a perfect word for it.
I like to think of it as reality itself, beneath all of the mirages of the world. ”
The wagon stopped around noon and they hopped out into a small town. Baker slipped out of the wagon in disbelief that she and Peter might have anything in common.
“I’m learning how to create life, but I’ve hit a stalemate,” he said as they approached a tavern. Before he pushed through inside, he added, “I think your fresh perspective will help me return to the right questions.”
They walked into the tavern as music started to play.
The rest of the afternoon dissolved in a strange blur.
Peter approached a full table in the back, flashing the tattoos on his arm, before taking a seat and supplying a code that seemed to confirm to them that he was somehow familiar.
In minutes they were at a table of ROSE, Peter announcing with some pride that Baker had a great love for them, which the ROSE accepted with a smile.
For the rest of the afternoon and night, they mingled with people and by all appearances, Peter seemed to enjoy every conversation, no matter how simple.
Dancing filled the night, and Peter urged her out to dance with one person or another.
When Baker returned to the bench, she was next to several women who teased her about her brother’s handsomeness and charms. Baker didn’t understand it, until she realized the assumptions they’d made.
It was a strange world she’d fumbled into, but compared to what life had been, she didn’t quite mind it.
Peter’s effect on people was clearly magnetic.
Baker had heard stories all her life of the Strike’s cruelty. In a world of mythical proportions, they were dragons to be feared if not slain. Peter was Death, king of the dragons, with a smile like spring sun, and eyes that saw everything with the wholeness of a full moon.
In the presence of his abundant generosity there was an eerie sense that she sat between his open jaws. More surprising was his ability to coax out some desire to stay.
Even in the highest rooms of the Bleeding Grin, he’d been cordial and polite to the other Strike, several more entering the room during the short duration of their conversation to welcome him on his return to the Grin.
Strangely, there, no one seemed at ease in his kindness but no one seemed able to reject its warmth.
There was no doubt that he was Death, but to Baker’s surprise and undoubtedly the chagrin of everyone else, Death was a likable man.
On the way back from the festivities, Baker was exhausted and abuzz all at once.
Riding under the late sunset, Peter closed his eyes against the redness of the sunset and in such a way he looked feminine and beautiful.
His skin was luminant, his features refined, and even in the tavern Baker had thought him a woman on more than one occasion from the corner of her eye.
His mannerisms carried either his strength or his gentility.
For now he looked like a red flower, but in some expressions and teachings he reminded her of the strength of the mountains.
As they reached the Bleeding Grin, Baker paused on the path to the slave quarters. She didn’t want to go in.
Peter stopped at the start of the opposite path, watching as she glanced at him and looked over at the back entrance for the slaves. There was nothing missing in the symbolism of it.
“Following me will be harder,” Peter warned, but did not wish her farewell or encourage her to go back to the slaves.
Baker remembered what it had felt like before leaving Valentine, and now the slaves’ quarters was again like a silent casket where she would eventually go to die. She didn’t know what it meant to follow Peter, a force as blinding and intense as the sun.
She stepped toward him, and he started walking forward again.
She strained to walk alongside his long strides as they entered the main doorway and ascended the stairs.
Watching the town from a higher view with each passing staircase she felt a surge of fear and the strangest sense that she was untouchable in a completely different way than she had been before.
Peter stopped by a room, tapping the door with a gloved fingertip.
“You can have this one,” he said. “I’ll send Perilous to come see you tomorrow. It will be good for you to get to know each other.” Offering a final smile, he walked offand Baker entered the wonder of her new room.
It was a small, but beautiful space, set with its own bed, and simple but delicate clothes that materialized as if from nothing.
Baker ran back out of the room to thank him, but Peter was gone, and in his absence, the hallways seemed dark and unexplorable.
She eased back into her room, turning her head down the opposite hallway.
For the briefest moment in the darkness, she saw the flicker of eyes, and a black fox, mostly submerged in the darkness.
The purple rings blinked, and Baker eased back into the room, shutting the door and locking it behind her.
She backed away, sitting on her bed as she saw the shadowy footprints pass by, back and forth, prowling, through the duration of the night.
Sitting alone as she watched the door, she realized in many ways she’d lost nothing in following Peter, but had now gained something of an ally.
Downstairs, floors below, Amiel still prowled, only then it was in the back of her mind, in the back of everyone’s mind.
Downstairs, floors below, she had a room where she was alone.
Curling up in bed, she lay on top of the covers and stared at the door. She thought of Marnie and how she wouldn’t have anyone to read to her tonight.
She wondered if Marnie would notice, and missed her, but knew that if she were downstairs, she’d miss her anyway.