Secondhand Scales

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. For most, there still weren’t. There were only costumes, velvet fur dyed green and pink and purple, marble eyes embedded in headdresses staring you down in the street, tin claws clanging in time to the drums of the parade.

It was the month of the Ghost Festival and Wukong Valley was alive. The irony didn’t escape Ricieces that, for all the dragons humankind had hunted to extinction, not one had been used to reproduce a costume of any accuracy tonight. Their scales, flesh, hair and everything underneath had instead been churned into tea and evaporated into powder, anything ingestible so that one could be imbued with the same power that granted dragons their mystery.

Some people said dragons were stars that had blinked out of the sky and that, as long as the night still twinkled, they would one day return. Others thought they had slithered out from the blackness that lay at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean. However, in the end, no one knew where dragons had come from. One day, they had just appeared and so it could not be studied whether they hatched from eggs or multiplied in water. It was why they were so coveted.

Ricieces counted the lanterns punctuating each store that lined the road. Their amber glow warmed the scent of skewered possum sausages wafting from one storefront, manned by a pot-bellied gentleman dressed as a lion dog. The paper her mother had given her crinkled between her fingers as Ricieces made her way over to him.

“Hungry travellers!” he welcomed. His gaze caught on the foreboding figure behind Ricieces.

Kozu stared back. His eyes glinted like tourmaline against his black face. As illustrious as the animals were in this part of town, a larger-than-man monkey shadowing a foul-faced girl was not an easy thing to come by.

“Impressive costume …” the man muttered.

Ricieces flicked out her hand. “I’m looking for someone.”

Holding her wrist still, the lion dog leaned back to squint through his mask at the scribbled characters on the paper. “Try the tavern.” He released her and dragged his eyes up and down with disdain. “He’ll be the only other one in town without a costume.”

Ricieces nodded and left. As Kozu followed after, she said under her breath, “I told you you should’ve shrunk to a normal size,” but she knew he didn’t care. She didn’t need to look at his mouth to tell it was on the verge of a smirk. It was the only expression he seemed to enjoy making and only when they were alone, otherwise he was as stoic as terracotta. He was her best friend.

The dirt beneath their feet thudded the closer they got to the parade and the hum of the crowd buzzed in through one ear and out the other, so low did the murmurs become as they approached. Ricieces clutched her arm to her chest and slinked from side to side between the costumed humans, taking care that no one jostled her, but it became clear the deeper they ventured that she was not the one they were whispering about.

She gave Kozu a look over her shoulder. He refused to return it but a shade of sheepishness was cast over his eyes.

Ricieces held her breath against the mineral scent and smoke of the parade, swimming past rainbow feathers and cracked leather until—pop!—she was regurgitated out onto the other side of town. She inhaled the green night air, felt Kozu’s warm fur at her back, and scanned for the tavern.

Any other night, drunken men would likely have been spilling out of its entrance, playing games with black and white pebbles as more patrons inside gambled their money away, but tonight there were only two inhabitants: the barkeeper dressed as a fiery phoenix and her sole customer hunched over a wooden cup of clear alcohol.

“A shot of arrack,” Ricieces said, taking a stool.

The bartender stopped wiping down her section. “Aren’t you a little young?”

“No.”

The woman raised her eyebrows but glanced at Kozu, standing behind Ricieces, and nodded. “Will that be two?”

“Just the one.”

With the barkeeper’s back turned and busy, Ricieces glanced at the man on the other end of the bar. He was in silk robes. The ends were frayed from poor care but she could tell the stitching had been done by a skilled craftsmen, the plush shimmer of the material owing to its origin. It had probably started its life in the heart of the Baiju mountains where silkworms grew fat on the wet moss that sprouted on the inside of every cave and spun the most sought-after silk in all the worlds.

When the man downed the rest of his drink, his midnight hair fell back from his face, revealing a small cut on his cheek that had whitened with age. The skin covering the column of his neck was moon pale, a contrast to the villagers here who made a living under the sun and a starker contrast still to Ricieces who had inherited none of her mother Meng Po’s milk skin and every bit of her mother Kali’s, brown as baked earth like the rest of her people from the West.

His eyes, cloudy grey, sliced to hers.

She jerked her chin to the side, cutting eye contact, but it was useless.

“Want something?” he grunted.

It occurred to her then that she had not planned exactly what to say to him. Everyone in town was content to write him off as a drunkard and pariah, but her mother’s delicate handwriting said otherwise. Dashen. The banished god. The one who, after insulting the moon’s gatekeeper in a flirtation gone awry, was kicked out of Tienri and now lived the rest of his eternal days amongst fishermen and butchers and shopkeepers who no longer had time to worship him like their ancestors once did.

“Answer.”

Without her permission, the words flowed out of her. “I want to know about the dragon you saw.” She put a hand to her mouth and glanced in alarm at the man first, then Kozu, whose cindery brown fur now bristled to give him more menacing size. She looked down at her fingers as if the name of the spell had been transferred from her lips. She could almost taste the metal of how much he would have had to pay for such magic here in the mortal world. “Don’t do that again.”

He wasn’t looking at her but one of Dashen’s eyebrows ticked upwards. Humans never sensed when magic touched them.

She tried a different approach. “I believe you.”

“And why is that?” he drawled.

Her right arm flexed in its glove. She couldn’t let him use that spell again.

People shunned him for rambling about dragons after a shot too many. For her … she feared they wouldn’t stop there.

But how else was she going to gain his trust?

Eyes on the bartender, she spoke lowly. “My mother had a complicated pregnancy. She saw something and it scared her and that fear festered in her blood, in her baby.” It was more than she had told anyone in her life. Mortals passed on the superstition, she thought, as a way to keep women inside. With what was happening to her, she wasn’t so sure anymore. As much as she disliked it, she needed a god’s help, even if he had now been reduced to an arrogant slob who misused his power.

Dashen moved to speak, but Kozu was swifter.

His tail whipped out to slash across Dashen’s mouth before his voice expelled any more magic.

Ricieces jumped from her stool, letting Kozu shield her with his body. Dashen cupped his jaw where a thin stroke of blood was now beading on his skin. He smudged it away and fixed the two of them with a blazing glare.

“I’ll ask nicely. Who are you?”

A crash of glass shattered against her shins before Ricieces could reply.

“If you must, continue this outside,” the bartender snapped. Another bottle lay waiting in her hand.

Dashen clicked his tongue at the mess on the floor and pushed past Ricieces to leave. Ricieces looked at the bartender, mouth set down in apology, before tailing him. As the rickety door slid shut behind her, her eyes ravaged the parade of people stamping the street like weeds. It would swallow Dashen whole forever if she didn’t find him fast enough.

Mask after mask after mask flooded her view, screaming to the rhythm of crashing cymbals. Then she saw it, a flash of his eggplant-coloured robes. Without thinking, her hand shot out. She scratched until the silk was in her grasp. Dashen stopped, caught.

“Tell me about the dragon and I’ll tell Kozu not to kill you.”


They both knew it was an empty threat. She needed something much, much stronger to kill him, not that she was interested in doing so anyway. Not yet, at least.

Dashen’s eyes crawled down to where their bodies connected through her glove.

Too late, she realised her mistake.

She had used the wrong hand.

His fingers snapped around her wrist, nails digging but not finding the purchase of soft flesh. Kozu bared his fangs and the air crackled with his screech. The noise of the parade cut short. Hundreds of faces turned on them, raising the hairs on the back of Ricieces’ neck. This was exactly what she hadn’t wanted.

With her other hand, she motioned for Kozu to back down.

“It’s all right,” she whispered even though she was trembling. She looked up at Dashen. “Please. Not here.”

He studied her eyes, then moved to cover her body from the crowd with his broader frame. Gently, he tugged down her glove. It only gave an inch but it was enough to reveal the sheen of scales across her arm where there should have been skin. Each shard seemed to glow a different colour depending on how he angled it and where the light hit. Some scales sparkled like crystal, others sucked in shadow like a black fog, others still held no colour at all, frail and translucent as they were.

“This is why you’re so interested in the dragon,” he said, releasing her.

With a stiff nod, she fixed her glove and cradled her claw to her chest, moving to Kozu’s side to feel the protection of his body against hers. This was the first time she would admit it aloud.

“I’m turning into one.”