Dragon Soul by Jaida Jones

Author:Jaida Jones [Jones, Jaida]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-52168-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

MADOKA

We stopped by the stream feeding the ruined village to stock up on water.

“Hey, Malahide,” I said.

She turned to look at me like she wasn’t expecting me to talk to her, and I didn’t know what to make of the smile she gave me. We weren’t friends, and I didn’t exactly beam at her like that when she tried to talk to me, but she was a magician and my impression of magicians so far was that they were all crazy as piss. So maybe that was a good enough explanation for it.

“You called?” she asked, while Badger looked on like he disapproved. Not for the first time, I was actually glad to have him with us. We weren’t having any more fireside heart-to-hearts like we’d done that first night, since we didn’t want to talk around Malahide any more than we absolutely had to, and I had to admit, I kind of missed it.

If it’d been just me and Malahide out here, I definitely wouldn’t’ve made it.

“Can I put this thing in water, do you think?” I asked, and then, because she’d probably want an explanation and I was too tired to keep hiding things from her when she was the only one of us who might actually know something, “It’s hurting.”

“How badly?” she asked. Her hands were gloved, and she took mine in both of them so delicately I felt uncomfortable just watching her. Nothing was that delicate where I was concerned, I thought, but I guessed she must’ve wanted to keep that compass pretty safe. And I guessed I didn’t blame her for that, either.

I didn’t really much want to look at my own hand anymore. Every time I did, it just got worse; if I knew that was the general pattern, then I didn’t have any reason to check it anymore. I had nightmares about it too, and I knew it was giving me this fever. Sometimes I imagined what’d happen if I just ripped it out—might make things worse, for a time, but after that it could’ve solved all my problems.

“It’s getting worse,” Malahide said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I replied.

Badger, who had finished filling up our skins with water, came over to join us; it was a good thing he had such keen eyesight and didn’t trust Malahide for a second, though I wanted to tell him he could relax just a little bit, save all his worrying for later when it’d really start to count. She wasn’t going to try anything out on us yet, and what good would all this vigilance do if it wore him out before she chose to strike?

Soldiers, I thought. They were all the same.

“We’ve been treating it with aloe,” I said, while Malahide continued inspecting the site of all my woes, like it was a code she was trying to break or a foreign language she was trying to decipher.

“Well that’s all wrong,” Malahide said. “It might get into the mechanisms, and stop the compass from working.

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