Soul of Fire by Sarah A. Hoyt Read Free Book Online

children with them?”
    William blinked, involuntarily. “That large a danger?” he asked softly, afraid the words would scare him as he pronounced them. “A. . . plot?”
    Bhishma looked all around, as if to assure himself the room was quite deserted. He tiptoed into the ghuslkhanah and looked about. When he returned, he stepped close to William. “Sahib,” he said, leaning very close, his breath tickling William’s ear, “it is said that the local ruler of the Kingdom of the Tigers—”
    “The—?”
    “Kingdom of the Tigers.” Bhishma pointed vaguely west. “There are cities in the middle of the forest where it is said that the men who live in them by day all become tigers by night. Do you understand, Sahib?”
    William nodded and Bhishma sighed, as though he were absolutely certain that William did not, in fact, understand. “They have their own maharajah. It is said he’s very old, as weres live longer than normal men, and don’t die easily. And it is said that he’s used dark magic to extend both his life and his power.”
    “It is said,” William repeated, with a hint of impatience in his voice. He’d read his grandfather’s letters, true enough. And he’d learned from them, as well as from everyone else, that there were a lot more weres in India and China than anywhere in Europe. Because whatever Charlemagne had done all those years ago to concentrate magic only on his descendants had made it less likely a European would have the power—or the curse—of changing forms.
    The other continents were supposed to be lousy with it, filled with men who were half-beasts. William had heard it often enough, starting with his grandpapa’s spidery writing.
    But he’d been in India for three months and he’d not seen any more evidence of this than of any other legend.
    “Sahib,” Bhishma said. “Remember that before the last riots, the sahibs didn’t listen, either.”
    William started to respond, the words hot on his tongue. But he thought of the line on his grandfather’s last letter, written from the doomed barracks at Cawnpore and rescued from the ruins before the burning, sent to his grandmother by who knew what means.
    He remembered the scrabbling handwriting and the many-times underscored warning. My dear Harriet, I wish to God we’d listened to the natives.
    Feeling cold all over, he turned to Bhishma. “What can I do?” he asked.

 
     
    PROVIDENCE ON THE WING
     
    There were many things that Sofie had heard about weres, and far more that she was prepared to believe. But as she stood on the black marble of the monument to the Black Hole disaster, while the man who had been a dragon dressed himself with expedience clearly born of practice, she thought: No one told me they could be beautiful.
    It had been the beauty of the beast—fire-winged, luminescent-scaled—that had caused her to fall on the dragon’s back and not to fling herself from there once she had dropped on it.
    The scales, which should have been cold, had instead been warm and felt strangely soft beneath her body. And the wings . . . the wings rising and flapping on either side of her had been like captive fire. Like . . . a million fireflies captured within a frame of gold. But not even that, for where the fireflies would project white light, these were blue and green and pale gold, shifting and changing and looking now like jewels and now like stars.
    When the dragon had set her down, she’d meant to run. She’d heard and read stories—mostly in England, in the papers, and in the novels that all her classmates smuggled into their rooms and hid under their mattresses. Journalists and novel writers alike maintained that those people subjected to turning into weres were the basest of creatures, so crude as to defy belief.
    So, despite the beauty of the dragon, Sofie had thought the man whose other form it was would doubtless be an Indian servant, or else one of those drunken young men whose respectable families sent them