Memory of Dragons

by Michael G. Munz

  He kept his money belt with him, concealed as always beneath his jeans. Yet again, he took comfort from still having his passport, credit cards, and ticket home. He now had seven days before his flight departed, and wondered if he would be on it when it did.

  Keeping to the shadows, Austin walked out of the parking lot and up a grassy hill toward where he had seen a bench on their arrival. “Still there?” he whispered.

  “I am. You need not go far. Outside is enough.”

  “So, talk.”

  “I sense your trust in me is diminished.”

  “Can you blame me? Or are you saying Corinna is lying instead?”

  Austin had noticed too much of Rhi in her to disregard her story. Yet it was, he reminded himself, only a story. The pieces fit, but the pieces had fit in Boden’s tale, too. He couldn’t shake the thought that, aside from the magic he had witnessed, so much of both tales was anecdotal evidence only. Still, more and more, Corinna felt like Rhi.

  “Have you considered we are both telling the truth as we know it?”

  “How’s that?”

  “The possibility that I may be among the malevolent dragon strains of which she speaks is as much a revelation to you as to me. I did not lie about the gaps in my memories.”

  “Except you said Rhi wanted to set you free, and according to Corinna, that’s the last thing she’d want. Did you imagine that one, or are you saying Corinna’s lying, and you actually remember her trying to release you?”

  “As distasteful as I find it to admit, my perceptions — trapped, near-blind, and voiceless as I was at the time — were incomplete. I still recall nothing of her fallen companions. Of my previous assertions, I can only say I must have misinterpreted her desire to keep the crystal safe and hidden, that I mistook it for care about my own personal well-being. Yet I cannot help but suspect that perhaps she did, with her kind heart, feel some compassion for a trapped creature, regardless of circumstances. You agree of course that she fervently desired to keep me from the forces following her — which we now know to be this Maeron?”

  “That seems to be the case.”

  “Then of my mistake I can only say that, in my addled, limited state, I assumed Maeron wished to keep me trapped for his own purposes, and, if Rhianon wished to keep me from Maeron, it logically followed she would wish me free. Do you recall my stating the ‘belief’ that Rhianon hid me? You questioned that very word.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Further proof of my memory troubles. I did my best to amalgamate what evidence I possessed to form a coherent whole. I wished to alleviate your confusion, and did so to my utmost ability at the time. Dragons are not taken to apology, but I regret any errors I might have committed.”

  “Maybe. But if that’s true, why ask about the pendant? You wanted to know what happened to it, but then said it meant nothing and was just a keepsake. In hindsight, it sounds like you were worried about a data source that might contradict your story.”

  “You do truly believe it held Rhianon’s memories, then.”

  “You’re saying it didn’t?”

  “No, I trust this Corinna in that. As for my earlier inquiries of the pendant . . .” Boden trailed off, the depths of his voice momentarily replaced by a hesitant grumble. “I recalled the pendant’s existence at the time, and thought it might be important. Yet when you asked, I found I could recall nothing of its purpose. It was . . . embarrassing. Imagine yourself unable to recall simple things, Austin: your own name, how to feed yourself, things you learned and studied for years. My limitations within this crystal are humiliating. I did not wish to further admit my deficiencies. So, in that, I lied, to conceal the shame of my impotence. Do not deepen such shame with scolding for actions I already regret.”

  Austin considered the dragon’s words. He couldn’t disprove any of Boden’s explanation, nor was he ready to accept it as truth. Yet he could not deny that hearing it somehow lessened the weight on his shoulders.

  “So what would you have me do?” he asked.

  “What would you propose?”

  “That’s it? You’ve been telling me what to do since I found you.”

  “‘Counseling,’ I deem a more appropriate term.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “For the moment, I am willing to trust to your judgment. Perhaps this woman is correct that I am a danger without my knowing it, but I do not feel this to be the case. I am aware you have only my word on this. Nevertheless, I promise you I am conscious of no malevolence stirring within me. I believe that I have, in reality, been changed to the core by my imprisonment.”

  “Which could mean you might also change back if you’re freed, if that’s true.”

  “Of this possibility I am well aware. I can offer no definitive answer for what might happen, and so I leave the decision to you. I only ask that you make it with as much knowledge as you can acquire.”

  Austin sighed and tried to rub the sleep from his eyes. “I’m trying, believe me. You know, if you hadn’t told me to run from her the first time you might’ve saved me a lot of pain.”

  “And Maeron might have found you anyway, perhaps surprising you both, and she would not have been in a position to rescue you. What is done is done. I remind you I did not know what the pendant did. Her knowledge of the crystal was suspicious. I made the best decision I could at the time. And I remain leery of this Fefferman.”

  “Didn’t you just say you’d trust my judgment?”

  “I offer opinion, not ultimatum. I surmise you were sincere in your assertion that you will abandon neither me nor Corinna?”

  Austin nodded before realizing Boden might not sense the motion. He let the dragon stew.

  He did mean to stick with it. Despite the danger, the magic, and everything he didn’t yet understand, sometime along the way he had committed to finishing whatever it was that Rhi had begun. Now he simply held more information on what it was.

  But could he handle the details? Evidence of Rhi’s past bravery seemed to grow by the hour. Austin shuddered at the pain of Maeron’s magic slicing fire into his mind and hoped he had it in himself to live up to her example. Burning. Agony. Death.

  Fear . . .

  Austin struggled to tear himself away from the memory of it and found a question lurking to take its place: What might have happened if Corinna had not stolen the pendant? Would Rhi’s memories have gone into him?

  He supposed he carried such a cache of memories already, a tiny clone of Rhi in his mind forged from the time they had shared. It would make him smile at something she might like, or let him approximate how she might react to things, but it was filtered through his own perceptions. He couldn’t talk with his own memories, not in a way that felt genuine. But he could talk with Corinna.

  “I’m in Britain for at least another week,” he told Boden at last. “I’m not abandoning you yet.”

  “Would you, if this situation had nothing to do with Rhianon?”

  “Kind of a pointless hypothetical, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps, if Rhianon’s memories remain imprinted on this new woman’s mind. But consider the possibility that they are lost before we find some way to preserve them.”

  Austin stiffened. “Then we’ll need to make sure nothing happens to her, won’t we?”

  “Indeed, but you mistake my meaning. She of course can defend herself with magic, but the memories do not belong to her. I fear her mind may not retain them indefinitely.”

  Austin zipped up his coat against a chill that came more from within than without. “Are you sure about that, or just making another assumption?”

  “Intuition, perhaps based on forgotten knowledge. It is important, is it not? The pendant is no more. Once such things fade, Rhianon will be gone forever. You may wish to ask her.”

  THIRTEEN

  Austin didn’t find the opportunity to bring it up until they had checked out of their room the next morning.

  “So, what the pendant did to you,” he began on the sh
ort walk to the car, “is that permanent?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You don’t know, or you ‘can’t say’?“

  She unlocked the door and paused to regard him across the roof of the car. “I can’t say because I don’t know. If I — if she (bugger it all this is confusing sometimes) — if she did it right, it ought to be permanent, but she crafted the magic on the fly. I can’t really be sure.”

  She opened the door and disappeared down into the driver’s seat. Austin followed into the passenger’s side and then belted himself in.

  “Does it matter that it wasn’t yours originally?”

  “You mean will I forget how to do the magic at some point?” she asked while fumbling with the keys.

  “Something like that. I mean, having Rhi’s memories, it’s not just simple knowledge, is it? I see her in you. And then there’s the ‘I’ and ‘she’ thing.”

  “Ah.” She left the key in the ignition to cross her arms and stare out the window, then blew upward out of the corner of her mouth the way Rhi used to. “Well, we’re all the sum of our experiences, aren’t we? This sort of thing, it happens with mnemonicraft. Some back in Kish would say the person I am now ‘shouldn’t be,’ or something.”

  “And what do you think about that?”

  “I think the lot of them can sod off. I’m still Corinna, but I’ve got a deeper perspective now. And another set of opinions.” She flashed him a smirk. “And magic powers I oughtn’t use.”

  Her smirk ratcheted up and she turned the key in the ignition as if to punctuate the statement. The engine struggled to turn over. “Oh come on, fecking thing.” She tried again, smirk fading as the car refused to start. It sputtered, surged to life long enough to elicit a victory cry from both of them, and then died again. With a heave of exasperation, she popped the hood.

  Exchanging no more than a look, they got out, lifted the hood, and stared down into the crumple of oil-stained metal and grimy tubes.

  “See anything wrong?” Austin asked.

  “Everything looks in order to me. You?”

  Austin glanced around for any sign of danger, saw none, and looked over the engine again. “Nope. But then all I can do is fix a flat and fill the tank. It’s got gas, right?”

  “Petrol, and yes of course it has.”

  “It’s a fair question. Do you know much about cars?”

  “Well. On top of all that business you said, I can also open the bonnet.”

  “You mean the hood.”

  “When we’re in your silly country you can call it a hood.” She checked the oil as Austin failed to think of a good comeback.

  “Has it done this before?”

  “How should I know? This isn’t my car.”

  Austin stared. “We’re trying to escape in a stolen car?”

  “I beg your pardon? It’s not stolen, it’s borrowed! From a friend, before you ask.”

  “Did you? Ask?”

  “You think I’m in the habit of stealing from my friends?” She let the hood drop. It slammed closed.

  “Sorry, stupid question.” Or tactless, anyway. No, he amended, stupid, too. “Think there’s a mechanic nearby?”

  “Think we’ve time to wait for a lorry to take us there?”

  “I hate to abandon it without even trying.”

  “What if it’s not an easy fix? We ought to keep moving.”

  “Your friend won’t mind us leaving it here?”

  “Rather larger things at stake now, Austin.” Austin had to nod at that. “We’ll deal with this when we can. For now, onward.” A thoughtful smile spread across her face. “Maeron expects us to be in a car. Unless I miss my guess, there’s a rail station about a quarter mile that way.”

  “And if you do miss your guess?”

  “The point of that whole phrase is that I won’t. Which I’ve always thought makes it kind of a silly thing to say, but as I said — ”

  “Larger things at stake?”

  “Smart Yank.” She opened the door with a wink and retrieved her jacket. “For one thing, we’ve now got less time to find breakfast.”

  Corinna paid for breakfast: train station-bought pasties filled with eggs and bacon, which tasted mercifully good despite their source. Austin covered her train ticket, his own fare already managed with his tourist’s pass. They sat facing each other and munching as the sheep-dotted Welsh countryside sped past to the sound of the tracks.

  Neither spoke for a while, each focused on eating or introspection. After a time, Austin noticed her sitting with one ankle tucked under her and gently worrying one earlobe between her thumb and curled forefinger. Rhi often did both.

  “She really fancied trains, you know,” Corinna said out of the blue, still keeping watch out the window. “The sheer size of them — complex machines unlike she’d ever seen — not to mention the rail network, the whole system. She was in awe when she first saw them. I can still remember — ” She glanced at Austin with a little smile. “I can still remember rushing to study a map the first time they encountered a rail station, looking at the arrival times on the boards, eager to figure it all out. She found a lot of things extraordinary that I take for granted.”

  “She had a knack for that,” Austin agreed. “She always had this wonder about her whenever she learned anything new. I guess the whole world was newer to her than either of us realized.”

  From their first meeting, when Rhi had smiled across the bookstore’s information desk, she possessed an ephemeral quality to her that Austin had never been able to attribute rationally. It was something he might have called magic, had he known such a thing existed. The more he got used to the idea that it did exist, the easier it was to believe she had once been its master.

  He stopped short of thanking Corinna for shedding light on a side of Rhi that always attracted him. Now everything Rhi once knew sat across from him.

  “The magic she knew, that you know,” he said instead, “I can’t imagine what it’s like to have that knowledge. I’m envious.”

  “Are you, now.”

  “Well it’s part of what she lost, for one thing. And it’s an entirely new field I know nothing about! Even if I couldn’t make any of it work, I bet the theory alone is fascinating.”

  She grinned. “Aye, it is. Look at you, all wide-eyed. I wish I had time to teach you. It’s daft; in a sense it took me my whole life to learn, and in another, it all poured in there in a moment when the crystal burst.”

  “And you just knew it all, instantly.” He belatedly made it a question. “You didn’t even need to sift through it, get your bearings?”

  “Not unless you count being walloped unconscious for a couple of hours.”

  “I can’t imagine what that must be like.”

  “Being walloped unconscious? Like for me to wallop you?”

  He laughed as she winked. “The other part.”

  “Oh, I expect your imagination’s stronger than you give it credit for. We two are hardy types, or we’d have gone barmy by now with all these revelations.”

  “Can you try to explain some of it to me? Are there set laws, like in physics?”

  “What sort of laws? There’s not much study of physics in Rhyll, you know.”

  “Didn’t you didn’t get any in school yourself?”

  “School and I didn’t much get along. Oh, wipe that look off your face you git, I’m not a dullard. I loved history, but sooner or later mixing grades and tests up with the learning oppressed all the fun out of it.” She kicked his shin, but lightly. “Anyway, let your mum run off and leave you at fourteen and see how well you cope. I can figure most things out if I set my mind to it, but physics trundled along when I was tuning it all out.”

  “Well, okay,” Austin said. “But take gravity. You get two massive objects and gravity exists between them. It’s just there. Though we don’t really understand where it comes from yet, we know its magnitude is the product of their masses and the gravitational constant divided by the square of dist
ance between them. Is magic like that, just there? Or is it, I don’t know, more like crops you need to harvest?”

  “Metaphors are fun, aren’t they?” she teased. “It depends on the kind of magic. What you want to do with it. It’s not a single quantifiable ‘thing,’ and it doesn’t adhere to perfectly predictable rules in most cases. And it’s everywhere — at least in Rhyll. Another layer of reality, another color of the rainbow — ”

  “Literally?”

  “I’m only trying to express how ubiquitous it is.”

  “So it is like gravity, then.”

  “Yes.” She grinned. “And no.”

  He smirked. “In a sense?”

  “There you go.” Corinna nodded. “There’s a reason she had to study this stuff since she was a child. It’s hard to get a handle on.”

  Austin watched a stone tower pass on a distant hill and wondered at what Rhi could have shared with him if she had never needed to forget. Beyond the knowledge itself, he missed learning from her, and with her. What might it have been like for her to teach him about magic in the candle-lit safety of his apartment after a meal?

  “I guess these aren’t the best circumstances for a lesson,” he said.

  “Tsk.” She kicked his shin again, barely a nudge. “You give up too easy. I can try giving you my very first lesson, if you like.”

  The nudge turned his attention back from the window. For the briefest moment, he expected to see Rhi herself sitting across from him instead of the curly haired redhead who had stolen her pendant. His heart twisted.

  “Why do you steal?” he found himself asking.

  She blinked. “Bit out of nowhere, aren’t you?”

  “So were you, in Cardiff. I’m curious.”

  “Alright. I don’t do it all the time. Only when I see someone who looks like a tourist, and the mood hits me. If they can afford to travel, they can afford to lose a little cash.” She gave a wan smile. “Tourism tax.”