by Garret Weyr
Maggie looked very pale and wobbled a bit once she was on her own feet.
“Are you unwell?” Grisha asked.
“Just a little airsick,” she said. “I was afraid I might throw up on you.”
“No harm done if you do,” he said.
“I’ve never been airsick, and I’ve only ever thrown up twice,” Maggie said. “Both times I was angry, and it felt like being sick took the place of any shouting.”
“I’m glad you’re not angry,” Grisha said. “But I should have realized it might not be so nice for you to be so high up.”
“Oh, no, not at all,” she said, craning her head back and up. “This is beyond nice.”
“All of my favorite places in Vienna are rooftops,” he said. “And of those rooftops, this has the best view.”
They were on a slanted part of the roof, directly behind three of the marble statues that stood watch on the roof’s raised edge.
“I’ve always loved these,” Maggie said softly, staring happily at the roof’s many decorations. The Parliament building had bronze chariots drawn by winged horses on each corner of the roof and countless white marble statues along its edges. She spun around happily, no longer feeling at all ill. “I never dreamed I’d see them from up here,” she said.
“That was an unexpected benefit the first time I was here,” Grisha said. He remembered how happy he’d been to discover this refuge in a noisy, busy, and sometimes frightening city. Grisha had guessed that because of its many statues, the Parliament roof would have shade as well as sun. He’d needed a place to think and sleep without worrying about the soldiers.
But why had he been worried about the soldiers? After all, he definitely remembered liking the soldiers, even feeling a little sorry for them.
He shook his head, which was aching beyond reason. He had a sudden and unwelcome reminder of how fear had a smell (like an electrical fire) and a taste (like vinegar). Both of which were suddenly rushing through his bones, his skin, and his heart.
The fog that normally filled the blank spaces in his memories finally rolled out, and, in its place, there were soldiers. And behind them was Leopold Lashkovic, smiling at Grisha and calling him old friend.
And in that moment, all of Grisha’s memories came back.
His body responded as if he had been shot and he crumpled onto the ground in a ball. The sun, normally a source of comfort, felt like the stabbing of a thousand swords. Grisha spread a wing over his head, tucked his front paws up under his chin, and curled his tail around his shivering body.
His memories grew in clarity and detail. Oddly, so did his senses: He heard pigeons bickering on the roof of the nearby Palais Epstein and smelled the lunches people were eating in the Volksgarten. He heard Maggie moving toward him and felt her hand slip under his wing to rest lightly on one of his paws.
“Grisha,” she said, softly. “I’m here if you need something.”
He was grateful that she didn’t ask any questions. “I just need to rest my head for a bit,” he told her.
“I can bring you aspirin,” she said, “or water.”
Grisha, knowing that she could not fly off the building by herself, was surprised to find that he believed her. If Maggie said she would do something—even find a way off the Parliament roof and then return—she would do it.
“It’s not that sort of headache,” he told her. “But thank you.” The coolness of her hand seemed to seep through the scales of his paw and up into the burning ache behind his eyes, making it bearable.
“I hate those headaches,” Maggie said. “After those boys from America were so mean to me, I had a headache that aspirin couldn’t help.”
“Before or after they’d tasted their breakfast?” Grisha asked.
She laughed, and the sound was everything lovely. It didn’t ease any of his sorrow about what had happened to the dragons without gold eyes, but it reminded him that ugliness was not the only thing that defined the world.
Grisha pulled his wing back a bit and Maggie smiled at him. “Hello,” she said. “Your colors are all pale.”
“I remembered some things that I’ve tried to forget,” he said.
“Do you want to tell me?” she asked. “You don’t have to, but sometimes I feel better if I tell Papa what’s bothering me. Or even my rabbit.”
Grisha, picturing Maggie talking to her stuffed toy, felt his tail soften a bit. He sat up. “It’s not a nice story,” he told her.
“A lot of stories aren’t,” she said. “In the original Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off their heels and toes to try to fit into the glass slipper.”
“Well, in this story no one cuts up their feet and there are no princes,” he said. “But I can now answer your question about what happened when I first got to Vienna.”
“Oh, yes, please,” Maggie said. “Are you comfortable here? We could go back to the Sacher.”
“No, I like the view from here,” he said. “Dragons always want to be outdoors and somewhere high up.”
“Kator told me that,” Maggie said. “It’s so you can see the enemy coming in battle, right?”
“That’s probably how it started,” Grisha said. “It seems that we’ve all held on to habits we no longer need.”
He and Maggie looked up over the statues.
“Tell me,” she said, and so he did.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GOLD EYES
GRISHA WAS GLAD TO DISCOVER, WHILE DESCRIBING his early days in Vienna, that certain memories still had the sparkling sunshine gleam of something new and lovely. After spending ten days in the small forest behind Yakov’s house in the countryside, he had arrived in Vienna feeling new in the world. It was very similar to being a young dragon in the forest, just discovering how to scale to size, how to smell, and which parts of which trees were the best to eat. Things we all take for granted every day were, for Grisha, the most precious gifts imaginable.
Meeting Kator and Lennox as well as having a dragon community again had been marvelous in many ways. But mixed with his joy at being back in the world, Grisha could feel fear in the air. It was impossible to miss—with the hotel curtains catching fire and dragons so nervous that their tails constantly swished side to side, knocking over everything in their path. However, he’d put it down to everyone adjusting to life outside the forest.
“Kator said the sound the dragons followed to Vienna threatened them with being sent to Siberia,” Maggie said. “That would make anyone afraid.”
“I was so preoccupied with being free,” Grisha said. “The sound should have warned me that Leopold was the man behind it all.”
“Leopold Lashkovic?” Maggie asked, her voice going up shrilly. “Your Leopold?”
He smiled at the idea of Leopold belonging to anyone, let alone Grisha.
“How was he still alive?” Maggie asked. “People don’t live to be as old as dragons!”
“They don’t, that’s true,” Grisha said. “But Leopold stopped being a person a very long time ago. He’s like a dragon in that he is a creature of magic.” He paused, unsure of how to go on. He was struck once again with the difficulty of explaining magic’s rules.
“Leopold gave up money to practice magic, didn’t he?” Maggie asked.
She wasn’t sure she understood how someone could stop being a person. Magic was obviously the reason, but it was unclear how it had worked to make Leopold not a person. What was he, then?
“Yes,” Grisha said. “He loved money and so he never had any, just so that in return for giving it up, he could be a great practitioner.”
“Time, money, or what you love,” Maggie said slowly. “That seems pretty easy to follow. Why couldn’t Yakov do it?”
“Not everyone has time or money,” Grisha said. “And it’s hard to give up what you love. Think of your father giving up poetry.”
“Oh, I see,” she said. For she knew Alexander would never be able to do that.
“Magic demands its exact price,” Grisha said. “And s
ometimes that’s too high.”
“You must have been terrified when you saw that Leopold was in charge,” she said.
“I was,” Grisha said. He remembered how his fire breath had turned into a thick foam and how he had rushed out of the hotel to throw up in the gutter.
It hadn’t just been the memory of being turned into a teapot that had frightened him. In setting Grisha free, Yakov had undone one of Leopold’s spells, and nothing made a sorcerer angrier than that. They jealously guarded their power and would often go to great lengths to regain any power that was lost when a spell was reversed.
“But Leopold was kind to me. He said he was glad to see old friends after so many years of living alone.”
Kator had been as terrified as Grisha. The four cats he’d guarded as a young dragon had been enchanted into magic by Leopold. The cats were incredibly powerful, able to change their own shapes as well as that of any living creature. They could cast spells, make potions, read thoughts, and summon lightning. The cats, Kator had said, were dangerous, but not as dangerous as Leopold.
“What do you mean ‘enchanted into’?” Maggie asked.
“Somebody who isn’t born into the world of magic, but becomes magical because of a spell or an enchantment,” he said. “If you are enchanted into magic, you have been turned into a creature of magic.”
He sounded surprised that she didn’t already know that, and she was glad that he was willing to explain what was so obvious to him.
“So regular people can belong to the world of magic?” she asked.
“It’s never easy, but it happens,” Grisha said. “The cats were humans before Leopold turned them into cats. It’s why they’re so powerful. Magically speaking, that is.”
“Being human and then a cat made them powerful?” Maggie asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
What she really wanted to know was if she could have any amount of power, magically speaking, without becoming an animal. She knew how Leopold’s magic had hurt Grisha, but the possibility that she might practice her own magic was exciting. People who know nothing about magic often think it would be exciting to practice it. That changes once they understand what magic requires of them.
“Humans almost never choose to become animals,” he said. “So it’s a rule that they receive more magic once they are turned into animals. An animal can also be enchanted into magic, but it won’t be given as much magic as a human.”
The more Maggie learned about magic’s rules, the more it made sense to her that Grisha and the other dragons called it the World of Magic. It often did seem completely separate from the world in which she lived. Her world might have its own confusing rules, but at least she didn’t have to worry about being turned into a teapot.
“Did you and Kator warn the others about Leopold?”
“We tried,” Grisha said. “Kator told Lennox, and he told everyone not to look Leopold in the eye. He was also worried about Leopold’s four cats, and so told us to avoid any and all cats.”
“In Vienna?” Maggie asked. “But you were all staying in hotels!”
“Well, we knew we only had to fear the cats who had short, bushy tails and a black dot behind each ear,” Grisha said. “But just to be safe, we ran every time we saw any cat at all.”
“There were two cats at the D.E.E.,” Maggie said. “I didn’t notice their tails. I thought they were regular Viennese cats.”
“They probably were,” Grisha said. “Leopold’s cats are somewhere in Vienna, but they don’t like us.”
Maggie remembered how easily she and her father had walked in and out of the room the cats were in and guessed they hadn’t been Leopold’s, or else they would have been attacked.
“Kator told me that once some children were throwing rocks in a field where Leopold’s cats were playing tag,” Grisha said. “The cats turned the kids into mice.”
Maggie’s mouth went very dry. Leopold’s cats were definitely dangerous. “Why did he create them?” she asked. “What do they do other than eat children?”
“People paid Leopold so they could use the cats,” Grisha said. He told her of the famous stories from the seventeenth century, when there’d been a long, bloody siege the cats had been hired to finish. They’d turned everyone hiding behind the kingdom’s wall into wingless bugs. The attacking army had scaled the walls and then simply stepped on every bug in sight.
Maggie was silent. She wasn’t sure what to do with this information. The story was disgusting as well as unbelievable. But because her friend had once been a teapot, it was probably true that the D.E.E. was run by cats who had turned people into bugs.
“Why did Leopold bring the cats to Vienna?” she asked.
“He had to call in help because he hadn’t expected a hundred and fourteen dragons to arrive in the city.”
“I didn’t think there were more than thirty or forty of you here,” Maggie said, her whole body surging with excitement. “Where are they? Can I meet them?”
“No,” he told her, for this was the worst part of what had happened when the dragons arrived in Vienna. “They’re gone.”
Leopold had promised the soldiers he would find the dragons a peaceful role in the world. He had expected it to be easy, as he had thought there could be no more than fifty dragons left in the forest.
However, when more than a hundred dragons arrived, the old sorcerer quickly saw that the city only had room for about forty dragons in its castles and other grand buildings. This meant that seventy-five or so dragons would need to be eliminated. At the height of his powers, Leopold could have managed such a thing, but by the end of World War II, his powers had diminished, as no one was willing to pay him for magic. He needed the cats to help him impose order on the dragons he let stay in the city as well as the ones he wanted to banish.
Deciding who could stay and who must go was tricky at first. Leopold thought about using personalities or sizes as a way to sort out the dragons. Personality, however, was hard to measure and dragons changed size depending on mood or surroundings.
And then Leopold noticed that the frail white dragon, Lennox, who seemed to be a leader of sorts, had gold eyes. Most of the others had violet eyes, and a small number of them had red.
Leopold did an exact count of whose eyes were what color, and that was that. Thirty-seven dragons with gold eyes would stay in Vienna. All the rest would have to be “processed.”
“The soldiers separated dragons who’d been friends for centuries, and even dragons who were related,” Grisha said.
The sound of older dragons wailing as their children were taken from them was nothing like the battle roars they all knew. The cries sounded like cellos, harps, and flutes, all horrendously out of tune.
“But Leopold was a sorcerer,” Maggie said. “Couldn’t he have made Vienna big enough for all of the dragons?”
“Even when he had all of his power, Leopold would only have been able to change a building’s shape or purpose,” Grisha said. “Not create space.”
“So what did he do?” Maggie asked. “Did he send the other dragons to Siberia?”
“No,” Grisha said. “If he’d had all his power, Leopold probably would have been able to turn them into paintings or plates or teapots and store them in boxes until another solution could be found.”
But Leopold’s limited powers only allowed for a less powerful spell. Sadly for all involved, even the cats, that spell had gone wrong.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BURIED
MAGGIE COULD FEEL HOT LIQUID TRYING TO BURST up from her belly, but she ignored it. She kept her hands tightly pressed together as a way of keeping what she felt, a violent mix of sad and angry, from boiling over. The idea of dragons being torn from those they loved and then falling victim to a spell worse than being turned into a teapot was beyond horrible. She couldn’t believe that what Grisha described had happened in her city.
But it had happened.
After Leopold divided the dragons, the ones without gold ey
es were moved to an apartment building on Weyrgasse in the third district, where they cried loudly at night. Three of them were so unhappy that they tried to escape. People who lived on the street were irritated by all of the noise and commotion.
Leopold, still unsure of where he would put the redor violet-eyed dragons, cast a spell to keep them silent. He thought that would buy him some time while he figured out what to do with more than seventy unwanted dragons.
Instead of falling into silence, however, the dragons fell into an endless sleep, like the kind you might find in a fairy tale. It was a good spell, and one Leopold had used before, but it just wasn’t the right spell for the situation. And it wasn’t the spell he’d meant to use. One of the problems with having weakened power was that he couldn’t always control it.
“The dragons in the apartment building still made a lot of noise, mostly from snoring,” Grisha said. “Seventy dragons snoring meant a lot of smoke in the air. The neighbors complained more than ever.”
Maggie tried to imagine living near an apartment building full of crying dragons. Would you really complain? Wouldn’t you, instead, knock on the door and ask if they needed something? And if those dragons then fell into a deep, noisy sleep without waking up, wouldn’t you call a doctor?
Maggie was sure that was what she would do.
“So Leopold moved them,” Grisha said.
“Where to?” Maggie asked. Her thoughts were racing ahead, searching for ways to undo what had been done. Surely it would be a simple matter of waking up the dragons. “Where are they now?”
“I don’t know,” Grisha said.
It was one of the saddest parts of his memories. It was bad enough to have the dragons locked up, he thought, but not knowing where they were made it all more terrible.
“Did Leopold kill them?” Maggie whispered. Her belly roiled again.
“No, definitely not,” Grisha said. “If he had, we all would have smelled it. A murdered dragon releases a horrible scent,” he explained. “To get rid of the smell, the body has to be burned. It can take up to three days for the fire to go out, and then another five for the smell to vanish.”