by Jaime Samms
“So they’ll learn someday?”
Do the young ever learn? The dryad shuffled sideways and lifted the veil of branches to reveal the source of the golden light flooding the secluded area.
Sunny blinked into the brightness. The gold was shot through with every colour, the magic sparking lightning in his soul and heat in his veins. He could feel Emile on the other side.
“Wish me luck.”
The dryad remained stoic.
Heat and chill passed over Sunny’s skin as he pushed through the thickened air beyond the tree. He breathed in fire and exhaled ice. Tiny sparkling jewels of his frosted breath fell and shattered at his feet, only to melt into a river of molten light that flowed over his toes, sending tendrils of fire up his legs. Burning cold gripped his heart, constricted his lungs, froze the moisture on his eyelashes as flaming breezes fluttered and frizzled the tiny flyaway hairs that escaped his curls.
Then he was through and standing just under the eaves of enormous cedar trees. The boles of the trees, as thick around as that old dilapidated shed, marched back into the ancient gloom of a forest that had stood for centuries. Branches moved in the windless interior. Deep green eyes stared at him from the depths of mossy faces that vanished just out of sight as soon as he turned to look at them head-on.
At his back the glow remained, veiled once more by the branches of the willow. The creek flowed behind him, laughing and sparkling in the light of the magic, and his feet sank into moss that petered out as he stepped under the trees.
A thick pall of unfriendliness pushed against his will to enter the forest.
“Emile?” The sound was swallowed in the damp and dark, muffled by the weight of the years that hung from the branches and dripped from the flat leaves of the trees. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“Emile!”
Branches creaked. Magic thrummed through the air and clogged his lungs. He swallowed.
“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” he whispered. “I only want Emile back.” He peered into the shadows. Nothing met his gaze directly, and yet the shimmer of movement teased his peripheral vision. The glitter of eyes flashed but disappeared when he tried to find the source.
Roots groaned. The ground shifted under his feet.
The will of the forest urged him not to enter, to take a step back out from under the canopy and into the light of the mossy verge behind him. He breathed in the resistance, and it clogged his lungs. He had a feeling that if he turned away, he’d be back through the Fold and the way would not open for him again. He couldn’t take that chance.
Something hard butted up against the sole of his foot, and he looked down to find roots pushing up out of the dirt. He kicked off his flip-flops to stand barefoot in the loamy earth. The cool soil grounded him, and he took another breath, clearer this time.
“You think I don’t belong here.” He studied the forest, searching out the smooth, tan faces under the mossy beards. “You think I have no magic, or that I’m here to hurt you.” Crouching, he dug his fingers into the rich soil. “I’m a gardener. I nurture things from seed to fruit.”
Around his hands, tiny roots tickled and searched like they were sniffing out the truth of his words. “I would never take what wasn’t given freely. Nor should anyone ever do that. A friend of mine was brought through here recently.” He waved over his shoulder at the junction between worlds and the fluctuation of magic that throbbed at his back. “I think he was brought here against his will, and I want to find him. That’s all.”
Leaves shimmied against each other, like the softest susurration of voices he couldn’t be sure were real.
“His name is Emile. At least, that’s the name he told me.”
The shifting of sound grew.
“He’s a dragon.”
Twigs snapped and tree trunks moaned and creaked. Branches screeched; wood tore. A dryad whistled like a gust of wind whipping through the branches of a tired, brittle tree, and went silent. The woods emptied as a majestic cedar tree shuddered, leaned, then toppled, shaking the ground and sending Sunny sprawling.
A dragon roughly the size of Sunny’s house and deeper green than the forest gloom crawled up over the trunk of the fallen giant. It slithered on its belly, its enormous snakelike body helped along by four thickly muscled legs near the rear. Two more limbs, longer and lither, emerged from broad shoulders, and a long, sinuous neck snaked down so the dragon could peer closely at Sunny. Yellow eyes glared at him from under bushy grey-green brows.
“This, brother?” The dragon’s voice was as overwhelming as its size. “This is what you fled to?” It—he—laughed, and Sunny’s bones creaked under the derision.
“Leave him, Hakko.” A smaller dragon, glowing with all the colours of the most brilliant sunset, slipped out from behind the huge one. Pink and yellow feathers adorned this dragon’s ruff, forearms, and shins. A row of spikes, perhaps made from stiff hair, swayed along its back and tail. Its sides glowed in the light emanating from the Fold, and it moved with all the speed and agility of a dragon not sporting hard, heavy scales.
“Emile,” Sunny breathed. His dragon was breathtaking.
There was no mistaking the connection that jolted Sunny when Emile met his gaze. Nor could he ignore the shrouded light in those normally brilliant blue eyes. “Go home, Sssunny.” The soft hiss of resignation shrivelled Sunny’s momentary relief.
He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the mud and moss that stuck to him. He took a few steps closer to Emile, but Emile reared back, lips curled.
Hakko moved his head to intercept Sunny. His eyes had a fire deep within their amber depths. “He came back to me, human. He belongs to me.”
“He fled you.” Sunny took another step, then another. When Hakko didn’t move out of his way, Sunny sidestepped so he could get a better look at Emile. “Come home.”
“Thiss iss… my… home.” The words dripped with uncertainty. Emile gazed at him a long time.
“You know that’s not really true,” Sunny argued.
Something rippled on the air that Sunny didn’t quite see or hear, but he felt it, like the graze of static over his skin, lifting the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck.
Emile’s eyes lit with all the fire of the brightest summer sky. His nostrils flared and he took another step back, away from Sunny.
“No.” Sunny reached for him.
Hakko growled. The sound rattled the trees and shook Sunny to his core.
“You crossed the Fold to escape this life, remember?” Sunny pleaded with Emile as his dragon shuffled back another step, claws gouging the soil, as though he was trying to hold his ground but couldn’t find purchase.
“I am dragon.” Emile lifted his head, straightening like he was bracing himself. “This is my place.” He glanced at Hakko, then back at Sunny. “Hakko is my Sire.” Even as he said that, he looked to Hakko again, and his eyes hooded. His tongue, long and forked, came out to taste the air. He shivered, and the momentary resistance in his limbs slackened. He crouched, hunkering down and making himself small in Hakko’s shadow.
“You see?” Hakko preened, using his head and neck to tuck Emile against his side. “Emik-kik has made his decision.”
Emile shivered again, crowding Hakko’s side and staring at Sunny, confusion in his eyes.
Was he under some kind of spell? Sunny had to believe that was the case, but even so, what could he do to stop it? He closed his eyes to feel the air, wiggled his toes to feel the earth. He could sense the trees watching, the dryads, hidden but listening, waiting… hoping? For what? If Hakko was using magic against his lover, Sunny couldn’t feel it. Not like he could feel the flux of the trees and plants rising like mist all around him or the distant waves of converted magic that meant somewhere, salamanders thrived. And if he couldn’t identify it, how could he counter it? How did he fight something he didn’t understand and couldn’t see or feel?
“Come, Emik-kik.” Hakko shifted and swung his body around. “We have eggs to co
llect. A new generation to nurture, yes?”
“Of course.” Emile shook himself. A flutter of feathers drifted down around him as he turned and, stuck to Hakko’s side, retreated into the woods with his Sire.
“Emile!” Sunny started after them, but Hakko swung his tail, catching Sunny in the side and lifting him off his feet. He sailed across the clearing to land on his back in the cushioning moss and dirt.
“Fuck that,” he wheezed, staggering to his feet. “Emile. Wait!”
Both dragons stopped. Hakko remained motionless, but Emile turned, crept back a few paces, and crouched, side still pressed to Hakko. “What?”
“What are you doing? You fled this. Don’t you remember?”
“I wass… wrong.” His nostrils flared. He breathed in a deep breath, flicked his tongue out. Once more his eyelids fluttered almost closed. “I have a purpose here.” If dragons could smile, that was what he did, though it appeared dreamy and far-off. “I should never have left. I should never have taken my human form for so long and forgotten what it was to be scaled and true.”
“Your human side is true too.”
“His human side is flawed. It interferes with who he is. Stops him feeling his true self,” Hakko rumbled. “This is who he truly is. Go home, human. He isn’t for you.” Hakko began walking again, and Emile slowly turned to follow.
He paused once to glance back over his shoulder. “I am dragon, Sunny.”
“You’re human too!”
“Come, Emik-kik.” Hakko swished his tail, a forceful swipe that snicked the sharply spined tip against Sunny’s cheek, drawing blood, while the thick of it thudded into Emile’s side hard enough to echo between the tree trunks. Emile grunted, then turned back to the forest and walked away.
“His name is Emikku,” Sunny called after them. “Your name is Emikku. Your choice is yours to make! You don’t have to stay here. It is your choice, Emikku. Never forget that.” The dragons were gone. “Never forget who you are,” Sunny whispered as he sank back down into the moss.
He’d been so sure Emile had been dragged back here against his will. To see him calmly walk off with Hakko broke his heart. He had to believe this was somehow Hakko’s doing. To believe anything else meant there was nothing for him here.
And yet he knew. If he went back to his own side of the Fold now, he would spend the rest of his life regretting it. He would die trying to find his way back to Emile, knowing Emile had refused him, but never really being sure it had been Emile’s will and not Hakko’s.
Long after the damp of the mud on his legs had dried and the scratch of the moss should have driven him to his feet, he remained. His eyes burned, his jaw ached from clenching it around the pain of realising he’d only been a convenient place for Emile to hide for a while. That the lure of magic and his home, of opening up to Hakko again, was more than Sunny could fight.
“Will you come home?”
The voice floated on a wave of light and energy, and Sunny took a long time to place it. The instant he did, the willow dryad stepped out of the light of the Fold and settled next to him.
“You don’t belong here,” she reminded him.
“Do you have a name?”
The creature considered this a long time. “There are so many,” she sighed at last, her voice sounding like wind through silvery leaves. “In your tongues, such mundane ones. Willow. Salix.”
“What about your own language?”
“What language do trees speak?”
“Huh.” Sunny pursed his lips. “Good point.” He settled with his back against the dryad’s sturdy torso. “Which side of the Fold do you belong on?”
“Neither.” After a moment she amended, “Both.”
“So dryads can cross the Fold whenever they want?”
“Anyone—anything—can cross. Where you belong is where you decide to stay.”
“Are there humans here? On this side?”
“Is a dragon a human when he wears no scales?”
“I thought—” Sunny gulped and fell silent.
“My tree straddles the Fold,” the dryad said after a while. “Therefore I am never far from it, no matter which side I step into. Other dryads do not have that luxury. Your dryads are sweet and young and much more like their trees than the dryads here.
“But even here, the magic of their life is tied to the life of their tree. It grows with the tree, diminishes if the tree falls ill or is felled.” The dryad gazed sadly at the downed tree whose top branches, already beginning to wilt, fluttered at the very edges of the light cast by the Fold. “The flux is thinned when such a mighty tree falls. The dryad will diminish. Perhaps it will find an offspring of the tree to share its magic and knowledge before it fades completely. The salamanders who live here will suffer for the blow dealt to this forest today. Some may die. The magic they produce will falter for a time.
“Eventually the forest will find a new balance. Your salamander came from those woods.” It pointed to the darkness that had settled across the clearing and dipped the trees there into inky shadows. “He thrived on the flux those ancient trees produce. He was strong. Happy.”
“Until Hakko drove him across the Fold into a poplar grove where the flux poisoned him. I figured that out. I need to get him across the river to the cedar grove.”
The dryad hummed.
“What?”
“You want to help him, though he isn’t part of your world.”
“Hakko made him part of my world. Glimmerleaf didn’t do anything to deserve that. He was just following his instincts—either obeying his master or fleeing a threat, I don’t know. But just because it wasn’t his choice doesn’t mean I can ignore that it happened. He doesn’t deserve to suffer because someone else used him. Once he’s better I’ll figure out how to get him back here. Or how to keep him. Whatever he wants. He’ll know he’s safe and he can make up his own mind.”
“He is an animal.”
“More instinctual than dragons, but not unintelligent. That’s what Emile said.”
“And just how instinctual are dragons?”
“They’re not instinctual. They’re people.” Sunny sat up straight. “Except when they aren’t.” He turned to the dryad. “But he spoke to me. As a dragon, he spoke to me.”
“And do you not speak when you are in the throes of mating? Of pairing? Of courting?”
“Of course.” But everyone knew what hormones and lust did to a person’s brain. “But that doesn’t always mean we make the best choices. Sometimes we act on instinct, and that isn’t always great.” He hadn’t always been as thoughtful as he could have been about decisions made in the heat of the moment, and none of the men he’d ever been with had the advantage of enticing Sunny to transform into a creature who acted more on instinct than intellect to get their way.
“I’m an idiot.”
“You are in love,” the dryad helpfully pointed out. “Emikku is not the only one letting instinct drive his decisions.”
Sunny rose. “I have to go after them.”
“You will not get through the woods at night, human.”
“But—”
“You will be no good to anyone lost in the magic or torn under a wild tatzel’s claws. Wait.”
She was probably right. Sunny gazed at the black void where he knew the forest stood, hidden by the night he was sure had crept on faster than it would have at home. Lights appeared among the tree trunks—glittering pinprick brightness, foggy globes of blue iridescence, wisps of pink and orange that trailed in sinewy drifts close to the ground, and steady, staring pairs of green or purple high in the trees.
As his eyes adjusted to the strange night and his ears to the sounds he didn’t recognise, he realised that in a world of magic, he was the odd one out. No one here was like him, and no one would understand him. Was it so surprising Emile had come back to the place where he was family? The place he was understood? Of course it wasn’t. And maybe Sunny shouldn’t be quite so determined to rip him away from that.<
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Chapter 30
THE SMELLS of home still overwhelmed him. More than the huge dragon at his side or the soothing wash of magic over his skin, more than the cool shade of the trees under which they travelled or the sounds of wildlife that didn’t exist anywhere else, the scent of it all went straight to his head.
He’d first noticed it in the glade near… near…. He shook himself, trying to think back. On the other side of the Fold, this heady scent had been all but absent. He hadn’t even realised he missed it until he’d smelled it again. He’d been in the woods, close to the stream. The water sprites had been angry about… something.
Emik-kik shivered. They had been rising ever higher. Something had riled them, though now he didn’t remember if he’d ever known what that something had been. And this had hit him, the smell going straight to his brain. He’d already been in his scales by then, soft and light, but now he didn’t remember why.
“Are you chilled?” Next to him, Hakko puffed his sides. A warmth emanated from him, heating his near-black shimmering scales and transferring the warmth to Emik-kik. He leaned closer. The scrape of sharp, hard scales against his softer flank drew his attention.
Gently, he flicked his tongue over the hurt. The soft scales felt wrong. He was too exposed. Too weak.
No, not weak. But vulnerable.
“You will get used to the change, Emik-kik. There is much to be enjoyed in these scales that you never could have before.” As if demonstrating, Hakko ran one of his talons along the mane of stiff hair on Emik-kik’s nape. Under the touch, Emik-kik’s scales flittered up. His feathers ruffled and his skin undulated, causing him to gasp. It did feel good, that touch, that sensitivity absent when he had harder, more protective scales.
Was that all he’d been doing, refusing to try this form? Protecting himself? Putting on armour against the chance he could be happy like this?
“Perhaps you will learn to swim….”
Emik-kik shivered once more—not from cold this time, just the thought of water. But he had enjoyed it once. Not in this form. A dragon was not built to swim, not even in soft scales. But his human form—that, he remembered—immersed in the stream, the heat and security of a body supporting him. Of… a human?