The Language of Spells

by Garret Weyr

  That’s impressive, Maggie thought. So even a dragon who was killed on the battlefield could still cause a lot of problems for the opposing army. But what if a dragon died normally of old age? Or in a car crash?

  “When we die of natural causes, we smell like pine-cones or roasted acorns,” Grisha said.

  “Okay, so Leopold didn’t kill them,” Maggie said. “They have to be somewhere. Seventy-five dragons don’t just vanish.” Her thoughts resumed racing around one thing: Find those dragons.

  “How about Siberia?” she asked. “Didn’t you say that was what he was going to do if the dragons didn’t follow the sound?”

  “That was just a threat,” Grisha said. “Leopold didn’t have enough power to do that.”

  Right, Maggie thought. The sorcerer hadn’t had enough power to turn the dragons into objects. He hadn’t even been able to make them quiet without mishap.

  “So where are they?”

  “The rumor I heard was that he put the sleeping dragons in an old cellar somewhere. When the cats came to Vienna, they found a better, bigger place to bury them.”

  “Buried?” Maggie heard herself shriek. “Where?”

  “We don’t know,” Grisha said. “Annoushka and I visited the apartment building every day, even after the spell was cast, but then the soldiers stopped allowing it.”

  Grisha remembered how powerless he and Annoushka had felt standing outside the building, unable to help their friends. Even worse had been the grief that flooded over them when the soldiers demanded they leave. Annoushka, the mighty warrior, had wept. The last time he’d seen a dragon cry was when his father had died. He remembered how his mother’s tears had singed her face.

  Maggie put her hand on his orange scale; Grisha covered her hand with the padded side of his paw. “The soldiers sent you and Annoushka away so that when they moved the dragons there would be no witnesses.”

  “But even if we’d been there, we couldn’t have stopped them,” Grisha said.

  Maggie felt a tremor move through his body. It was as if she could touch his sorrow. Her own head ached as she tried to understand why nobody had helped an apartment building full of crying dragons. Dragons who suddenly began to snore instead of weep and then, just as suddenly, vanished. Had anyone even noticed?

  There was something she needed to ask, some missing detail, but she couldn’t pinpoint the necessary question.

  “Someone has to know where all those dragons are,” Maggie said.

  “They’re somewhere in the city, he wasn’t powerful enough to move them anywhere,” Grisha said. “But no one would tell us where, not even the cats.”

  “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have asked Leopold?”

  “He’d gone back to his house in Italy,” Grisha said. “He left the cats in charge.”

  Given what she knew about the cats, Maggie wondered whether it was wise to feel relief at the news that Leopold was no longer in Vienna. But there was something else nagging her. What was it?

  “How is an endless sleep different from death?” she asked. It still wasn’t the missing question.

  “Breathing,” Grisha said. “As long as you can breathe, there’s hope. There are so many stories of princes or knights who left a bleeding dragon on the battlefield, thinking he was dead, only to have to face that same dragon the next day.”

  Maggie’s stomach twisted its knot a little tighter at the thought of dragons left bleeding on the battlefield.

  “What happened to the three who tried to escape?” Maggie asked, for that was the question snaking through her thoughts.

  “The soldiers shot them,” Grisha said. “No one tried escaping after that.”

  That did it. Maggie ran to the roof’s edge, but the throwup was faster than she was. Vomit splashed on her shoes, her dress, and the marble base of a statue as she retched up breakfast and lunch. Maggie hated throwing up for all of the usual reasons (the burning in her chest, the smell, the sound), but mostly she hated how it forced you to lean over a bucket, bowl, or bag. She’d never thrown up outside before and instead of crouching over a container, she bent miserably over the mess.

  As Grisha used the smooth underside of his tail to wipe her clean, she felt the city’s breeze move against her hot and damp neck. Slowly, she wiped her mouth and then leaned against the wall.

  Together, she and Grisha sat in silence.

  Maggie wondered how she had lived in Vienna for eleven years without knowing that seventy-seven—make that seventy-four—dragons were buried underneath. How had she loved Vienna so much—its trams, its palaces, and the cafés where you could eat almond cake—without ever realizing that something was very wrong? Was it possible that she could still love the city knowing it had turned a blind eye to so many despairing dragons?

  Closing her eyes against what was unanswerable, she leaned against her friend.

  “It’s time to go home,” Grisha told her.

  Maggie stayed still, trying to picture the faces of the people who had done nothing but complain when living on the same street as a building full of scared and weeping dragons. Clearly those people, who couldn’t have been that different from her, had forgotten what was right.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she said, but made no move to stand up.

  The key to sorting out what she’d been told was to not forget. As long as she and Grisha remembered what had happened, they would find a way to fix it.

  “Are you still feeling sick?” Grisha asked, and Maggie smiled at him because she’d just thrown up, but was, in some strange way, happier than she’d ever been.

  “Grisha, what would happen if you asked at the D.E.E. where the dragons are buried?”

  “Nothing good,” he said. “I broke one of the rules in my contract just talking about them.”

  “They can do that?” Maggie asked. “Tell you what to say?”

  “We aren’t even supposed to think about it and we definitely aren’t supposed to talk about it. Not even with each other.”

  Maggie remembered how odd the woman at the D.E.E. had been, and how, when leaving, she’d felt as if something dangerous was hidden there. She could easily see that the Department might be the kind of place that even told your thoughts what to do.

  “Is that why you forgot about what happened to the buried dragons?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I mostly forgot because it was easier than remembering. I couldn’t do anything about what had happened.”

  “Didn’t you want to try?”

  Grisha thought for a minute. Had he wanted to try to confront soldiers with guns? Challenge a legendary sorcerer who would do almost anything for money? Risk the famous tempers of four cats known to be as dangerous as the sorcerer who enchanted them?

  “I wanted to try to help the lost dragons in the way that I wanted to be free when I was a teapot,” Grisha said.

  “You felt stuck,” Maggie said.

  He looked at her, not sure if he could make her understand what it had felt like to be a dragon with gold eyes. You were at once profoundly lucky and overjoyed to be alive. But you were also terrified and heartbroken.

  “It’s like wanting something with all your heart,” Maggie said. She thought of how she wanted her father to be less unhappy when he thought about her mother’s car crash. “But with no idea of how to go about it.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like,” Grisha said.

  That Maggie understood made him feel lucky. And if he, of all dragons, was lucky, then perhaps he could discover a way to make those buried dragons lucky as well. Perhaps there was a way to take them out of their sleep and restore them to life, the way Yakov had restored him.

  “What if we could find them?” Maggie asked. She and Grisha knew Vienna well enough to find seventy-four buried dragons. “Couldn’t we try to help them?”

  “Oh, yes,” Grisha said. “Yes.”

  Deep in his bones he wanted nothing more than to change what had happened to the other dragons. And at the sam
e time, he wanted Maggie to be safe from the cruelty that had turned all of Vienna’s dragons into unwanted and unremembered creatures. He did not try to explain any of that. He would, instead, let his actions protect her and give them both the necessary strength to do what must be done.

  Maggie leaned forward to look right into the gold eyes that had saved her friend. “We will find those dragons and we will set them free,” she told him.

  Her words felt like a vow, and she hoped that they would be binding. She thought she understood what Leopold and the cats could do if provoked. She thought it would be worth the risk.

  Grisha looked at her and touched her face very gently with the pad side of his paw. He would never let anything bad happen to her.

  “I believe you,” he said.

  To free the dragons, they had to know where they were buried, and that was not the sort of information that was just going to present itself to her. For once, the library failed Maggie, no matter how many books and newspapers she checked out that mentioned anything about dragons.

  There was one small paragraph in Die Presse about the dragons arriving in Vienna, but nothing about so many of them vanishing. She found four books on the history of dragons in Europe, one on their lives in Asia, and two that discussed language formation and its relation to a plant-based diet. There was nothing about Leopold, eye color, or the invasion of the Black Forest by trains, homes, shops, and guns.

  It was as if history itself had fogged over its memories.

  “Someone has to know,” Maggie insisted to Grisha. They were in a café behind the Opera House, discussing what they hadn’t found. “Should I speak to the cats?”

  “Good lord, no!” Grisha said, and, as if to emphasize how much he meant it, fire flew out of his nose and mouth. “Excuse me,” he said. “But it’s a terrible idea.”

  “Why? You asked them, when Leopold went back to Italy.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Grisha said. “Those cats are reckless and possibly crazy.”

  Maggie paused briefly to consider the children who’d been turned into mice by the cats and then eaten. But if the cats were truly in charge, they would know things that no one else did.

  “We won’t find the dragons if we avoid danger,” she said. “Plus isn’t the whole idea of a quest sort of crazy? Do thoughtful people go off to slay a beast?”

  “No,” Grisha said. “Reckless, crazy people do. Stupid people do.”

  “Well, we aren’t stupid,” she said. “We will politely ask Thisbe if we can request a meeting with Leopold’s cats.”

  “Thisbe is not an easy human to get along with,” Grisha said. “She’s highly erratic, and Lennox says her judgment is not sound.”

  “That’s what people say about Papa,” Maggie said. “So she and I might get on well.”

  “You might,” Grisha said, because anything was possible. “We’ll go to the D.E.E. and find out what we can.”

  Normally, no dragon willingly went to the D.E.E. They had to be summoned before any of them would set a paw in the building where Leopold had once lived. But these were clearly not normal times.

  Which was how Grisha knew that, at long last, he was on a quest.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FIERCE LITTLE CREATURE

  AS THEY HAD EXPECTED, MAGGIE AND GRISHA WERE stopped at the D.E.E.’s front entrance by the guards. “You need an appointment,” one of them said.

  “Actually, I am allowed and encouraged to visit here whenever I need,” Grisha said.

  “Not with a citizen,” the guard answered. “Only on your own.”

  “I’m his job,” Maggie said, and presented the signed, stamped document that proved it. “He can’t leave me outside.”

  The guards conferred, as Grisha had told Maggie they would. He’d also said that it wasn’t the swords or the guns she should worry about, but actually the silly feathers on their hats. They were dipped in a poison that could vaporize your insides. Maggie watched the feathers wave in the slight breeze. She’d wanted to go to the side entrance and bypass the guards altogether, but Grisha had insisted on doing everything out in the open. “I’ve broken a number of rules by telling you about the . . . the others,” he’d said. “So I need to make sure I follow every other rule.”

  “Go on in, then,” said the guard who seemed to be in charge of talking that day.

  There was a table right by the front door, but no one was there.

  “We go up these stairs,” Grisha said. The stairs led to the same large hall with desks Maggie and her father had walked through. It was the hall that led into the room with the napping cats.

  “We’ll wait for Gregory here,” Grisha said, stopping. “He is Thisbe’s assistant, and we always have to speak to him first.”

  “Papa and I didn’t,” Maggie said, remembering how Thisbe had been hiding behind a pillar.

  “That’s because you’re not dragons,” Grisha told her.

  They stood in the dark, drafty hall for the better part of an hour. They could hear voices in the room beyond. Finally Maggie had had enough. Shaking off Grisha’s restraining paw, she headed into the room with the big windows, the oak table, the three armchairs, and the two napping cats. Only now there was just Thisbe and a young man in it. They were seated at the table, immersed in sorting through files.

  Maggie stood for a minute or two, watching and expecting one of them to look up and ask what she needed. Just then something wound round her leg and she jumped a bit. It was a cat with gray and white stripes. Maggie looked closely at the cat’s tail, thrilled and terrified to see that it was short and bushy. She couldn’t see behind its ears to check for a black dot.

  The cat hopped onto the table, making Thisbe say, somewhat sharply, “Yes, I know, but I’m busy.”

  Maggie made a sound that was a cross between a cough and a hiccup.

  “And you,” Thisbe said, finally looking up at Maggie. “I told you not to come back.”

  “I’m not here to complain,” Maggie said, feeling a bit like she wanted to sit down. “I need some information.”

  “Do you? Well, isn’t that interesting,” Thisbe said, and then turning to the young man, “Gregory, take these files down to my office, will you?”

  The young man—Gregory—stood up right away, putting the files in a leather satchel.

  “Theodora, go get presentable and then come back straight away,” Thisbe said to no one in particular, while putting papers into a drawer.

  The gray-and-white cat hopped off the table and vanished through a small, low door by one of the armchairs. Maggie briefly wondered how a cat made herself presentable. Given how sharply Thisbe had spoken, it was likely that if this was one of Leopold’s magic cats, they were no longer as dangerous as they had been.

  Gregory strode toward the door Maggie had come through and Thisbe called out to him to please send in DR87. Then, taking a file from the desk, she sat in an armchair and motioned for Maggie to do the same. Maggie could hear voices in the hallway.

  “So tell me what it is you want to know,” Thisbe said.

  “There are dragons buried somewhere in Vienna,” Maggie blurted, just as she heard Grisha coming in.

  “DR87, scale down properly and sit,” Thisbe said, pointing to the third armchair.

  Maggie smiled at Grisha, who was now only about a foot taller and wider than her father, and waited for Thisbe to continue. However, she simply cleaned her glasses on the sleeve of her rumpled blouse and remained silent.

  “I, well, we’d like to ask where the buried dragons are,” Maggie said.

  Thisbe blinked. “Your friend here is in a bit of trouble,” she said. “We don’t pay DR87 to dwell on the past, and we certainly don’t allow him or any of the DR Extinct Exotics to talk to civilians about it. Unfortunately, I can’t prevent you or anyone else from being at the Blaue Bar when the DRs are droning on about their past glories. But I can certainly reprimand anyone in my charge who breaks a rule.”

  Maggie was surprised at how cal
m she felt, because she was also really angry. The fact that Thisbe or anyone at the D.E.E. thought it was okay to dictate what people or dragons could talk about was infuriating. But instead of the anger making her feel ill or shaky, Maggie saw everything in sharp detail.

  The air in the room smelled of cedar and old paper. Dust scrambled in and out of the patterns the sun was making on the floor. Thisbe’s darkish blue-black eyes had a golden hue.

  Grisha leaned forward as if about to speak, but Thisbe cut him off. “There’s no point denying anything,” she said. “I have your file, DR87. For starters, you flew in the middle of the city in broad daylight.”

  “That’s not against the rules,” Grisha said, but Maggie heard the fear in his voice.

  “Excuse me,” Maggie said, looking at Thisbe and speaking in a loud, clear voice. “His name is Benevolentia Gaudium or Grisha. It is not DR87. And, yes, he did fly, but let me remind you that it isn’t forbidden as long as he doesn’t leave the city. And if any tourists had seen him fly, they’d have been thrilled.”

  “I see I will need a file on you, Anna Marguerite Miklós,” Thisbe said. “Right now, all I have is that you are a half-orphaned girl child of eleven years and a resident at the Hotel Sacher.”

  Half-orphaned? Girl child? Maggie wasn’t sure if she should be alarmed or just laugh.

  Before she could make up her mind, a young woman walked into the room, followed by Gregory, who was carrying a tray with a pitcher of water and two glasses. It was the woman Maggie and Alexander had met on their first visit. The one with good posture.

  The woman chose a stool next to Thisbe’s chair. She sat very still, radiating a graceful boredom.

  Gregory handed the woman a glass of water. Maggie watched with fascination as the woman peered into the glass and lapped at the water with her tongue. Then she stopped abruptly and looked up with an expression of displeasure.