47 pages • 1 hour read
Jaleigh JohnsonThe Mark of the Dragonfly
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
The following morning, Piper awakens in the luxurious surroundings of her train cabin with a sumptuous breakfast waiting for her. As she and Anna eat, Piper says they will need to find some clothes that aren’t torn and dirty, but she has no money. At these words, Anna produces a money belt stuffed with gold coins. Piper is staggered by the small fortune now at her disposal. She finds a merchant on the train who fits them both for shirts, pants, and new boots.
Piper is struck by Anna’s innocence and realizes how easy it would be to take the money and abandon the girl, but her conscience won’t allow such a betrayal. Once they get to a town called Tevshal, Piper intends to consult a seer named Raenoll, who belongs to the amphibious sarnun species. They communicate telepathically with each other and are renowned for their keen intuition. Piper hopes that Raenoll can reveal something about Anna’s hidden past. When Gee learns that the girls will disembark briefly at Tevshal, he warns them that slavers are in the area and someone might abduct them. Piper scoffs at his fears and refuses to tell him the full story about why they are hiding.
Chapter 8 Summary
Two nights later, the train arrives in Tevshal and won’t leave again until after midnight. This gives Piper and Anna time to stroll into the well-lit city, where they are impressed by its prosperity. Anna begs to ride a carousel set up in the town square. Piper allows her to go on the ride and chats with the engineer who created the contraption, noting which mechanical parts aren’t functioning well. He comments on the girl’s keen understanding of machinery. After the ride, the girls make their way to Raenoll’s home, which is in a tunnel below the street level.
Meanwhile, back on the train, Gee mentions his concern about the girls’ safety to the fireman, Trimble. He is frustrated that Piper won’t confide in him since keeping all the passengers safe is his job. He says he has a bad feeling about allowing them to go into a dangerous town unaccompanied and decides to change his form and keep an eye on things from the air.
Chapter 9 Summary
When the girls enter Raenoll’s home, Piper is skeptical of the old seer’s abilities. Nonetheless, Raenoll demonstrates her skill by accurately giving the provenance of Piper’s cherished pocket watch. Afterward, the seer reads Anna. She projects an image of a fine mansion on a hill overlooking Noveen, which confirms that this is where Anna came from.
Then, Raenoll sends Anna to wait by the outer door while she speaks privately to Piper. She discloses that Piper will receive a great reward for bringing Anna home but that it will be horrifying as well. When Piper expresses frustration at this prediction, the seer assures her that she is strong enough to save her friend no matter what the vision shows. Piper goes to the front door to meet Anna, where they are both grabbed unexpectedly by slavers
Chapter 10 Summary
Two slavers tie the girls’ hands and feet and throw them inside a closed carriage. Piper overhears that someone paid them well to abduct the two. She assumes it must be the man who was pursuing Anna. The slavers find the money belt and take it before sending the carriage on its way. As they travel, Piper realizes that the slavers never removed her knife. She uses it to free herself and Anna. She then considers leaping from the moving carriage, but something swoops down from overhead, and the carriage stops.
Once outside, the girls discover that the driver and horses are gone. However, they see three more slavers moving across a field in their direction. Piper tries to draw them off and orders Anna to flee toward the lights of the town. One of the slavers continues to chase the fleeing girl while the other two grab Piper. One of them has a revolver. Before he can shoot her, Piper somehow makes the gun jam. In the distance, Piper sees something in the sky swoop down and carry Anna away before the slaver reaches her. By this time, the slavers’ boss has arrived to question Piper. This is the same man who pursued the girls from the scrap town, and the slavers call him Master Doloman.
Doloman almost chokes the life out of Piper, trying to get her to say where Anna has gone, but the dark shape returns and swoops down to fly Piper away. In the meantime, the slavers release bolas filled with narcotic dust that incapacitate the flying creature, which falls to earth. At the sight of the monster, the slavers run away in terror. Dolomon advances, intent on killing the creature, but Piper hurls a bag of the dust at him, knocking him out. To her surprise, she sees the creature gradually transforming back into Gee. Piper now realizes he is a chamelin and that he came to rescue her.
Chapter 11 Summary
By this time, Anna has arrived with reinforcements. Jeyne and Trimble help Gee and Piper back to safety on the train. Anna sleeps in the engineer’s quarters while Piper explains the whole story. When she says that Doloman is behind the attempted abduction, both Gee and Jeyne are concerned. He is the king’s master machinist and the second most powerful man in the Dragonfly territories. Jeyne says that he isn’t known to have any children, so Anna can’t be his daughter.
The engineer also says that she is obligated by law to cooperate with Doloman but devises a clever way to avoid getting herself or her crew in trouble. Jeyne assumes that whatever Doloman is doing is illegal since he didn’t use his authority to stop the train and seize Anna. She concludes that the girls will be safe until the train arrives in Noveen. At that point, she will find a way to hide Piper and Anna in the city. She will then claim that they slipped away and that no one told her they were running from Doloman.
Chapters 7-11 Analysis
As this segment begins, the Competition for Resources is foregrounded. Once aboard the 401, Piper is treated like royalty for the first time in her life, thanks to Anna’s dragonfly tattoo. She luxuriates in a private cabin and eats food that would be impossible to obtain in the scrap towns. Even more amazing, Anna produces a belt of gold coins and gives them to Piper. The latter immediately goes to find a merchant on the train who can sell her new clothing. Despite her scruffy appearance, the sight of all that gold guarantees her a polite reception.
As Piper led the way back to the suite, she wondered, was this what it was like to have money—every conversation so easy, everyone so eager to please? The rich people in the cities must be absurdly spoiled. They never had to work at being polite or try to convince others to take them seriously (127).
Anna’s money belt proves to be a potent temptation for the impoverished Piper. She briefly considers taking the money and abandoning her new friend. Fortunately, her conscience asserts itself before any damage is done. Significantly, the slavers later steal the money belt, drawing a distinction between their obvious greed and Piper’s temporary sense of desperation. The slavers themselves are another example of the struggle for resources. Even though slavery is illegal, they will risk imprisonment to get money by selling other human beings. Further, they aren’t above abduction and murder since Doloman pays them to kidnap the girls. One of them even tries to shoot Piper. Money seems to be the prime motivator for the underclasses in the Merrow Kingdom.
The theme of Hybrid Identities also emerges in this segment as two characters prove to be other than what they seem. Although the reader becomes aware of Gee’s chamelin heritage in the previous section, Piper isn’t yet in on the secret. When she sees him fly off with Anna, she assumes the worst.
In the moonlight, the creature looked equal parts lizard, bird, and man, with eyes that glowed green and leathery wings that stretched to a huge span on either side of its body. On the ground, it would walk on two legs, but in the air…As Piper watched, terrified, the creature dipped in a smooth arc and snatched Anna up in its claws (172-73).
Later, Piper is ready to kill the monster after it becomes incapacitated by slaver dust until Gee transforms back into his human shape. He is revealed to be an ally instead of a threat, while the reverse is true of Doloman. When he explains his connection to Anna, he seems benign:
Terrified of me? But I tried to help her. When she came into my care, she was half dead. I only wanted to heal her. When the storm destroyed the caravan, I thought I had lost her forever, and then I saw her with you—alive and well. It was a miracle (175).
For her part, Anna only vaguely remembers Doloman, but her associations are not pleasant. She says,
When I woke up, I tried to remember why he scared me so much, but it’s like there’s a wall around him that I can’t get through. I just know his voice. In my dreams, I hear it all the time. He’s dangerous, and he’s not…normal (109).
It will be many chapters before we understand that Anna’s frame of reference for normal is hardly normal itself. Nonetheless, Doloman is both benign and sinister and possesses yet another layer of complexity when it is revealed that he is King Aron’s master machinist.
A hint of Piper’s hybrid identity also emerges in this segment. The reader has already seen that she repaired a supposedly broken pocket watch, managed to disable the train’s flame defenses, and made a revolver malfunction. However, she is far from aware of her peculiar gifts. The best she will do is admit that odd things happen when she gets near anything mechanical: “I’ve always had a knack for knowing what’s wrong with a machine. I can tell sometimes before I touch it. Then, the more I touch it, the more I know how to fix it, and the machines always seem to respond to me” (140).
Of course, the ultimate hybrid identity in the novel is possessed by Anna herself. It is ironic that Piper seeks the aid of a seer named Raenoll, who specializes in describing the destiny of objects. She says, “The purpose of an object is fixed. Its destiny rarely changes, and so it is a simple matter to divine where it has been and where it is going. A person is mutable, an entity that changes and evolves” (148). Neither the seer nor the other characters nor the reader yet realizes that Raenoll has such an easy time reading Anna because she is foretelling the destiny of a hybrid object that is also a human being.
