She lingered against the moon, heading northeast, for what seemed a very long time, before I lost sight of her altogether. There are so many images, so many book-cover paintings of dragons flying across the moon that I sometimes think they must favor being seen in that light, the same way that horses will gather on a hilltop just at sunset, to be silhouetted there. I’m sure it’s deliberate. I closed the window, picked up the chairs and little tables that had been knocked over in her passage, washed our coffee cups, and let myself out. The doorman eyed me, but said nothing.
It took a good bit of googling and scouring the Internet for the next couple of days, but I finally found a few lines concerning a particular motorcycle accident near Quebec City. A French-language newspaper even gave some details of the funeral; but whether in English or French, there was no mention of a dragon’s mourning the very last descendant of the oldest de Lusignans. But she was there. She would have made it there.
I have not seen her again, nor do I expect to, for all that I ride the same bus every day, and make a point of walking by her apartment building now and again. For all I know, she may have moved away, having no more reason to be in this country at all; though she did suggest that she might stay on, for the sake of the weather. But I do think that if she wanted me to see her, it would have happened by now. Still, I am not unhappy, nor haunted, nor even particularly wistful. I am more like the donkey in Chesterton’s poem, who remembers having borne Christ into Jerusalem. I have also had my hour, “one far fierce hour and sweet,” and who else can say that in the Berkeley High history department?
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
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La Vitesse
Kelly Robson
Kelly Robson (www.kellyrobson.com) grew up in the foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Her novelette, “A Human Stain,” won the 2018 Nebula Award, and her novella, “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, John W. Campbell, Aurora, and Sunburst Awards. Her most recent book is Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach, which has been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo Awards. After twenty-two years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A. M. Dellamonica, now live in downtown Toronto.
March 2, 1983, 30 kilometers southwest of Hinton, Alberta
“Rosie,” Bea said under her breath, but the old school bus’s wheels were rumbling over gravel, and her daughter didn’t hear. Rosie was slumped in the shotgun seat, eyes closed. She hadn’t moved since Bea had herded her onto La Vitesse at six fifteen that morning. She wasn’t asleep, though. A mother could always tell.
Bea raised her voice to a stage whisper. “Rosie, we got a problem.”
Still no reaction.
“Rosie. Rosie. Rosie.”
Bea snatched one of her gloves off the bus’s dashboard and tossed it. Not at her kid—never at her kid; it bounced off the window and landed in Rosie’s lap.
“Mom. I’m sleeping.” Big scary scowl. Bea hadn’t seen her kid smile since she’d turned fourteen.
“There’s a dragon right behind us,” she said silently, mouthing the words. None of the other kids had noticed, and Bea wanted to keep it that way.
Rosie rolled her eyes. “I don’t read lips.”
“A dragon,” she whispered. “Following us.”
“No way.” Rosie bolted upright. She twisted in her seat and looked back through the central aisle, past the kids in their snowsuits and toques. “I can’t see it.”
The rear window was brown with dirty, frozen slush. Thank god. If the kids saw the dragon, they’d be screaming.
“Come here and look.”
Rosie crawled out of her seat and leaned over her mother, hanging tight to the grab bar behind Bea’s head. Her too-tight black parka carried a whiff of cigarettes.
Bea flipped open her window and adjusted the side-view mirror for Rosie. Behind the bus, a long, matte-black wing beat the air in a furious rhythm. The pale winter sun glinted on the silver scales that marked the wing’s fore edge.
“Wow,” Rosie said, her voice so low it was almost a growl.
Bea stepped on the gas. La Vitesse surged ahead, revealing the dragon’s broad chest, rippling with flexed muscles. It lifted its taloned forelegs as if reaching for the bus, and showed them the barest glimpse of a lissom neck and triangular, snakelike head before it caught up to the bus and disappeared into the mirror’s blind spot.
Rosie pushed her ragged bangs out of her eyes and leaned closer to the mirror.
“No fire. Why isn’t it trying to roast us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s breathing too hard,” Bea said. “But, honey, you got to help me. Herd the kids into the front seats. Pack them in tight.”
Rosie wasn’t listening, though. She stared at the mirror, transfixed, watching the dragon’s wing flexing from hooked tip to thick shoulder.
“Rose, please.” Bea slapped the wheel with both hands. “Get the kids up front.”
“Yeah, okay.” Rosie straightened, then leaned over her mother again for one last look.
Even Bea had to admit her kid looked scary, especially lately, with her death metal T-shirts and her angry slouch. Not yet sixteen, but so big and tall she looked twenty. Add all that to the black eyeliner Rosie melted with a match and applied smoldering, and the spiky haircut she’d given herself in grade ten and kept short with Bea’s only pair of good scissors, and yeah, Bea could understand why other mothers gave her hell for letting her kid look so rough.
Bea couldn’t do anything about it. Rosie had always been more trouble than Bea could handle. But as long as she came home on the bus with Bea every day, nothing else mattered.
But Bea didn’t like the way her daughter looked at the dragon. She wasn’t scared, not even a bit. Maybe she was even glad to see it.
Bea drove the longest and most remote bus route in the school district. Starting at her trailer south of Cadomin, she headed north and picked up kids along the Forestry Trunk Road all the way past Luscar and the Cardinal River coal mine, then turned east on the Yellowhead Highway, and hauled the kids through town to drop them off at all three schools.
The round trip took five hours—two and a half each way. La Vitesse was a fast bus with a big V8 engine but Bea drove slow. She had to. The Forestry Trunk Road was gravel, heavily corrugated with washboard created by runoff from the surrounding mountains. The soft shoulders on either side of the gravel-road bedding could easily pull a vehicle into the ditch or off a cliff, and moose lurked around every corner—often right in the middle of the road. Bea had seen what hitting a big bull moose could do to a bus, and she didn’t want anything to do with it.
So Bea drove slow. She was kind, too. School bus drivers were allowed to leave kids behind if they weren’t outside on time, waiting by the road, but Bea never did. Bears were common fall and spring, and cougars hunted year-round. A kid waiting for the bus made a nice warm snack.
And lately, Bea worried about dragons, too.