Dragon Soul Read Free Page A

to reappear months later in the Arlemagne countryside, and I
definitely
didn’t care that this was where some Ramanthine revolutionaries had made their last stand.
    “Perhaps some of Ghislain’s relatives,” Thom’d said, in that hesitant way he had that made me want to smack him.
    “Sure,” I’d said. “Whatever.”
    I didn’t want to think about Ghislain’s relatives—or Ghislain himself, to be perfectly honest, since then Thom’d wonder why I wasn’t “keeping in touch” or whatever the fuck it was he thought he was doing with that cindy Balfour. I couldn’t see much point in thinking too long on things that’d already passed, and everything that I’d had in common with the other members of the corps had gone out with our girls.
    What I really missed these days—what was really getting under my skin—was how quick things used to go. How quick you could get from one place to the next when you weren’t stuck to the ground. When you were flying.
    Horses were fucking slow, and they felt all wrong beneath you. The sounds they made were animal sounds—the kind of noise you had to tune out just to hear yourself think. Horses never asked you for an opinion and they never told you where to fucking shove it when you were going the wrong way. Fuck that. I was so tired of looking at horses, buying horses, trading horses, putting horses down for the night, shucking fucking pebbles out of horseshoes, and making sure horses didn’t see snakes on the road that I was this close to leaving and doing things by myself, trusting my own legs and no one else’s. The only fucking problem was sitting outside the bath, eating the local gravy, and writing about it in some idiot book he thought about more than he did about real people. That fucking problem couldn’t move like I could, and wouldn’t ever if he kept eating the way he did.
    Yeah, I’d made a big mistake. And now I was suffering for it.
    That made it even fucking worse—knowing it was my fault and not knowing how to get rid of it. Sure, I could just fucking leave him where he was. He’d probably find his way back to Thremedon, eventually, where all the walkways were paved and you couldn’t spit without hitting a building, and there were as many books in the libraries as there were people in the city. He’d be in his element again, talking to professorsand experts, coughing up theories, and never going to any of the places he was chattering about.
    I closed my eyes. The water was starting to get cold and I was starting to get pruny. The fucking braids in my hair took forever to dry, especially in the countryside, and especially at night, when everything got damp as—well, as fucking horses.
    But I didn’t want to go outside and deal with the gravy, and I certainly didn’t want to go downstairs and deal with the bitch who’d made the gravy. I had an itch that fucking couldn’t fix and fucking would only aggravate it. And it wasn’t thinking of Thom getting in my way, or thinking of the problems it’d cause, or thinking of anybody’s
feelings
that was stopping me, either.
    Point was, I just didn’t fucking want to. And that’d never happened before.
    “Don’t expect you to believe me, but one day, Airman Rook, you’ll appreciate things beyond rutting with the loudest girls Our Lady has to offer,” Chief Sergeant Adamo’d said once, back when he was still Chief Sergeant and before he turned into some kind of fucking professor on us. Or so Thom’s letters said; I hadn’t wanted to stick around long enough to see what the boys did with themselves after the war, and Chief Sergeant Adamo turning professor on us was one of the reasons. At least it didn’t bother me to think about Adamo the way it did some of the others, and anyway I had bigger fucking problems right now than feeling squirrelly over the guys who were long past feeling anything at all. Anyway, I didn’t see as how what Adamo had said could be it at all, since I wasn’t even halfway