The Dragonbone Wand
E.P. Clark
Copyright © E.P. Clark 2018, 2020
Cover art copyright © E.P. Clark 2020
All Rights Reserved
Published by Helia Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters in this publication are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
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1
It was just a piece of bone.
Dull white, the width of my finger and twice as long as my hand, it lay on a faded piece of velvet. Young men and the occasional young woman gathered around it, laughing nervously and pushing each other with their elbows to be the first to touch it.
“Are you finally going to try this year, Laela?” one of them called out to me.
“No,” I said. But I walked over and joined the crowd anyway.
I was the oldest amongst them by a good ten years. Back in the foolish first flush of youth, when young men run off to war and young women run after young men, I had stayed at home and apprenticed to the village healer, and then to the village scribe. Now I was both. While my age-mates chased after their growing families, shouting at their children and nagging their husbands in order to feel loved and needed, I sat in my quiet cottage, copying out wills and tending to those whom others could not help. Loved I was not, but needed I certainly was. It would be wrong to walk away from that. No one else in our village could so much as set a broken bone, let alone write a letter. I couldn’t leave them to go chasing after adventure, and, I’d always told myself, I’d never really wanted to anyway. The mountains on the edge of the horizon that pulled at others so strongly had never provoked any feeling in me other than a vague but nauseating fear.
Red-haired Arne, whose right arm was still in a sling of my fashioning after yet another ill-advised climb up a tree, stepped forward and stretched out his left hand towards the piece of bone. The others laughed when he stopped, his hand hovering a foot away from the wand, and then cheered when he suddenly made to snatch it off the velvet. The cheers turned to laughter again when he yelped and jumped back, sucking on his fingers.
One by one, the other young men tried to touch the piece of dragonbone. Some got closer than others, but none were able to get within a hand’s breadth of it.
“Come on, girls,” said the man who was running the show. He was puffy-faced and unshaven, in robes that might have once been rich but were now mainly dirty, and he was obviously bored. If I had to imagine a dragon-sorcerer, he would be the opposite of the picture my mind would form. But he had been coming through our village every year ever since I could remember, growing shabbier and shabbier and more and more bored as he exhorted us to test ourselves for the talent and maybe, just maybe, prove ourselves to be the possessors of that most precious prize: dragon magic.
“Come on, girls,” he said again, staring off at the sky as he spoke, as if too bored to even bother looking at his potential future acolytes. “Don’t you want to try? Wealth and health, knowledge and power beyond your wildest dreams, could all be yours. And for you it would come easy. You know we need more women.”
He told us that every year. Dragon magic was more common in men, he told us, and most women who had the talent couldn’t learn to do much with it, but they still needed them.
“Why do you need us?” I had asked, the first time he had told me to test myself. “Why do you need women, if we can’t use the magic?”
“In women the talent always breeds true,” he had told me, and then quickly cut his eyes away, embarrassed. I hadn’t had to ask any more, and I hadn’t tested myself either. I hadn’t wanted to become an ordinary broodmare of ordinary children here at home, and my desire to be dragged off to the mountains and turned into a broodmare for dragon-children was no greater. At least let them court me properly if that was what they wanted from me. But instead I was expected to prove myself to them as worthy of exploitation, and thank them for the privilege. I was glad that most of the other girls seemed to feel the same way, and didn’t even bother to present themselves for testing.
A couple of raindrops fell down from the gray sky, spotting the faded velvet but not touching the bone itself. Giggling, the girls who had come all quickly tried to put their hands on the wand. Two could not get within a foot of it and retreated with sulky faces. The third brought her hand down to hover no more than an inch from the wand, but when she tried to close her fingers around it, she shrieked and jumped back as if burned.
“Hard luck,” said the man, not sounding as if he cared one way or another. “You must have half a drop of the blood, though. When the time comes, be sure to send your children to us for testing.”
The third girl retreated to join the others, who were all shaking their hands and saying in loud voices that they were glad not to be chosen, glad not to have their lives overturned and turned over to others.
“And what about you, Laela?” asked the man. “Is this finally to be the year? Will you finally see if you can come join us at our forge in the mountains?” He waved his
