The Dragonbone Wand

hand in the air, vaguely in the direction of the mountains that could be seen on clearer days. There was a rumble, whether of thunder or a fresh eruption of fire, I couldn’t say.
“Why do you know my name?” I asked him. “You don’t remember anyone else’s name.”
He smiled a tired smile. At one point, probably before I was born, he must have been handsome. I imagined him as he would have been when he was the same age as the boys he had just turned away, fresh and eager, catching the eye of every girl who saw him with his good looks and the air of power and good fortune that must have suffused him as soon as he was chosen. Now the air that hovered around him was mainly suffused with disappointment and too much drink. A good advertisement for dragon magic he was not. But maybe he was the best they had. Maybe the bad things they said about the mountain and the forge and the order and the training were all true.
“Every year you come here and stare at the wand, and every year you refuse the test,” he told me. He looked me up and down. “And you’re easy to remember,” he added. “A head taller than everyone else, and hair like a curtain of midnight.” His lips twitched. “You didn’t think I was a poet, did you? Come on, Laela. Let this year be the year. What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid,” I told him.
He looked me up and down again, but this time, for the first time, with the shrewd eyes of someone who did know things that other, ordinary, mortals did not. “Yes, you are,” he said. “You want to be chosen, and you’re afraid you won’t be, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t want to be chosen,” I said.
“Everyone wants to be chosen, Laela. Wealth and health, knowledge and power, remember? Who doesn’t want that?”
“I don’t.”
“So prove it.”
“I already have. By not taking the test.”
“You can’t prove yourself by not taking a test.” I thought he might be trying to hide a smile. Perhaps he was cleverer than I had always thought. “You can only prove yourself by taking it, and seeing whether you pass or fail. Take the test, Laela. And then you can tell me which of the riches we offer don’t appeal to you.”
Somehow I had ended up standing right in front of the rickety folding table he always set up on the edge of the market square, which held the faded square of velvet and the unassuming little piece of bone.
“I don’t need to take the test to know the result,” I told him. “I’ll fail, just like everyone else.”
“And since you don’t want to be chosen, you have nothing to fear,” he said. “Take the test, Laela. Get it over with and stop hovering on the edge of the crowd whenever I come through, looking like a raw recruit at a whorehouse.”
“How charming,” I told him. “You make me want to join you even more.” But my hand reached out of its own accord anyway. He was right: I needed to put an end to this. And maybe, just maybe...
My hand seemed to separate from my body and float downwards on its own. Surely this couldn’t be happening, surely it couldn’t be me who was doing this. I had always said I would never take the test. I had always broken out in a cold sweat of fear at the thought.
My hand continued to float down towards the wand of bone. I had heard from many others what it felt like when the bone rejected you, and sometimes treated their wounds. A slap, a bee sting, a scorching burn...for some it was more painful than for others, but for everyone it was more pain than they cared to withstand. Failing the test was its own rite of passage.
The air felt damp and strangely warm as my hand passed through it, but there was no pain, no sudden sharp attack as the dragon magic repelled those for whom it felt no kinship. My hand came down smoothly to rest on the bone.
“Well,” said the man. “What about that? What does it feel like?”
“It feels warm,” I told him. “Like it’s still alive.”
“Pick it up,” he told me.
My head told me not to, but my fingers closed around the wand on their own, lifting it off the velvet. It was surprisingly light, like the bone of a bird, and as warm as blood.
“That doesn’t hurt?” asked the man.
I shook my head.
“Hand it over.”
I tried to, but my fingers clutched instinctively at the wand, refusing to give it up.
“That’s how it is, is it?” said the man. His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “Then hold onto it for the moment. Come on, let’s go.”
“Go where?” I whispered, my throat as dry as if I had suddenly awoken in the middle of the night from a bad fever.
“To take the second part of the test,” he told me, still speaking gently. “Come, Laela. You can hold onto the wand for now. But you have to take the second part of the test, and it’s best to do that in private.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because sometimes it makes you vomit,” he told me, and with those heartening words, folding up his rickety table and began walking away from the market square.
I trailed after him, still clutching the piece of bone. I was now holding it in both hands, I noted, and pressing it to my heart, where it felt like the rightest thing that had ever happened to me. Sometimes when I held newborn babes and they fell asleep against my chest I had the same feeling, but this was stronger. This must be what it is like to hold your own child, not someone else’s. Only this was not my own flesh and blood, but the bone of someone else who was not even human, and long dead.
“What do you know of the training?”