by Garret Weyr
Grisha was horrified and amazed. Horrified that Tatiana had died in such violence and amazed that Leopold had been so careless in his rage. In murdering one of his cats, he’d reversed one of his own major spells and lost yet more precious power.
“Killing her made him even weaker, of course,” Thisbe said. “He didn’t have enough power left to stop Tyr on his own, so he sent his guards after her. I knew the moment they caught her.”
Grisha had seen what the guards could do and could well imagine what they’d done to a cat who’d disobeyed Leopold and given away all her power for a spell.
“The minute her life was at stake, I abandoned our plan. Instead of doing my part of the spell to wake the dragons, I used my magic to erase the guards’ memories and they let her go.”
Grisha was reminded of the cats’ reputation for ruthlessness. Even, as in this case, in the face of real danger, to erase someone’s memories was a form of murder.
To make yourself forget something, as he had done about his early time in Vienna, was cowardice, or, if you were feeling kind, a sort of self-protection. But to do it to someone else could only be seen as murder. What we remember makes us who we are.
Grisha knew that remembering the forest’s lessons about staying alive had shown him how to do so while trapped in a teapot. Without his memories, he knew, he might as well be dead.
“Leopold was so enraged that I’d saved Tyr that he erased Theodora’s memories. He knew that would punish me even more than killing her,” Thisbe said. “She has no idea that he killed Tatiana. She doesn’t even remember her, or Tyr. She was such a brilliant, fun creature before Leopold destroyed her mind.”
Grisha thought of the graceful young woman he and Maggie had met. He might have called her elegant or even pretty, but certainly not brilliant or fun. Grisha felt terribly sorry for Theodora, who was walking around in a half-dead state with no memory of who she’d once been. He was also angry at all the destruction Leopold had caused with no harm befalling him.
“Leopold must have been very weak after he stole her memories,” Grisha said. “It’s astonishing that he took the risk.”
“He was just weak enough for me to cast a spell so that he could never harm Tyr.”
“What did you give up?” Grisha asked, although he could guess.
There was only the slightest of pauses before the cat answered. “Ever seeing Tyr again.”
There was no anger or sadness in Thisbe’s voice. Just the matter-of-fact tone of someone who knew the rules. Not for the first time, Grisha thought of how cruel magic could be.
“Tyr can tell you where the dragons are.”
So could you, Grisha thought. Why don’t you?
“Benevolentia Gaudium, you have no reason to trust me,” Thisbe said. “But to answer your unasked question, I can’t tell you where the dragons are because in order to protect my memories from Leopold, I gave up trying to free the beasts.”
Grisha curled and uncurled his neck. “But you are here at my castle,” he said. “Behaving as if you want to help.”
“I can relay facts,” Thisbe said. “One can’t argue with facts. But I can’t help directly.” Grisha not only heard the regret in Thisbe’s voice, he could see it in the intense darkness of her eyes. “You need a potion to finish what we tried to do.”
“You make it sound like finding a potion is easy,” Grisha said.
“No, I make it sound like it’s what you must do,” Thisbe said. “I am alone on the D.E.E. roof until four or five most mornings, should you need me.”
And then she vanished. Grisha did not think that was an act of magic so much, but rather the normal behavior of a cat. Who were, after all, odd and disturbing creatures even when they were not enchanted.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PERMISSIONS
MAGGIE THOUGHT THAT SINCE SHE AND GRISHA couldn’t go to the library, there was only one other thing that might lead them to find a potion.
“Let’s get cookies,” she said. “That always helps.”
They went down to the Sacher’s small and very red lobby. It was where Maggie had always done her most important thinking or game playing on rainy days. Finding a potion was going to require some combination of thinking and make-believe. But first she ordered two grenadine and sodas and eleven cookies neatly laid out on a gold-and-white plate.
Grisha looked suspiciously at the bright red liquid in his glass. “It’s really good,” she told him. “Plus, it smells a lot better than fermented Apfelsaft.” She was delighted when, after a cautious sip, he downed the whole glass in one gulp.
Maggie looked around the lobby. There was the usual sight of men and women dressed in business attire, collapsed into the lobby’s inviting chairs and reading the paper. More casually dressed people were enjoying afternoon coffee and cake. She loved the idea of plotting out a magical plan while surrounded by so many unsuspecting grown-ups.
“Let’s review what we know about how to reverse a sleeping potion,” she said.
“I know nothing at all,” Grisha said.
“Me neither,” Maggie said. “Not even Papa knows about reversing sleeping potions. I asked at breakfast.”
“The only person I ever met with a potion was Yakov,” Grisha said.
“That’s it,” Maggie said, sitting up straight and almost knocking over her empty glass.
“What’s it?”
“Let’s go to London and ask him,” she said. “Wouldn’t the potion that got you out of the teapot wake up buried dragons?”
“Maggie, Yakov was almost sixty-five when I left London,” Grisha said. It had been forty years since World War II had ended. Maggie did the math and accepted that Yakov probably hadn’t lived to be a hundred and five. But still the possibility existed that the same potion Yakov had used to free Grisha might also rouse dragons from a terrible, buried sleep.
Could she and Grisha find it? Yakov might be dead, but surely not everyone in the Merdinger family would be.
“Do you think the girls might still be in London?” Maggie asked.
“Rachel and Ella?” Grisha asked. “Well, yes, they might be. Much older, of course.”
“Don’t you think that Yakov would have left them his potion, you know, in his will?”
“I suppose,” Grisha said. Just thinking about Yakov’s daughters made him happy. He much preferred being able to smell, see, and feel the sun for himself, but he remembered when Rachel and Ella had brought the outdoors inside with them. In London, the girls were the sun.
“Will you be able to find where Yakov used to live?”
“London is a very big city,” Grisha said. “And they’ve probably moved. It might take me a day or so to track down their smell.”
“Then we can go?”
“Well, it’s the only idea we have,” Grisha said. “And it would be splendid to see the girls again. So, yes, we can go.”
Maggie promptly asked a waiter for another plate of cookies and Grisha looked at her quizzically. “It’s to celebrate,” she said. “I’ve only ever been to London with Papa and that was not so much fun.” It hadn’t been terrible, but there had been a very large number of art and history lessons involved. Travel, Alexander was fond of saying, is the world’s best classroom.
But apparently travel to London without her father was not the world’s best anything. “No, absolutely not,” he said. Maggie patiently listened to the reasons Alexander gave. It was dangerous and a fool’s errand besides. “You’ll miss lessons for no reason,” he said. “Plus you are only eleven. That’s too young to travel abroad without me.”
Normally Maggie would embark on a long campaign of wearing him down. After all, that was how she had finally been allowed to go to the Blaue Bar at night, which was how she had met Grisha, which was the best thing ever. But she didn’t have time for such a campaign. The sleeping dragons depended on her going to London. She’d have to think quickly of a way to secure her father’s permission.
How did you turn a quest into a
thoughtful, well-reasoned argument to skip lessons and fly to another country? Especially when it involved asking two strangers for a potion they might not even have. It was true, as Grisha pointed out, that the dragons weren’t going anywhere. But Maggie felt strongly that such an important quest should not be interrupted because of an unreasonable parent.
“He’s not being unreasonable,” Grisha said. “And we have a more serious problem. I will need a visa.”
“Do we have to go back to the D.E.E. to get it?” Maggie asked.
“I can go alone,” Grisha told her. “I know how to find her.”
He tried explaining how Thisbe was only alone in the early hours of the morning, but that made Maggie even more determined.
“I’m coming with you,” she said. “It’s not like Papa doesn’t let me stay up late anyway.”
Grisha waited up with Maggie until past one in the morning and then flew her across the city’s low, murky sky. They landed quietly on the roof of the D.E.E. and at first saw no one. Then, in the shadows, they spotted a small creature moving confidently atop the building’s edge.
“She’s there,” Maggie whispered, as the cat, its back to them, sat suddenly still.
Grisha, who did not believe in sneaking up on enchanted cats, coughed gently, and the black cat with white throat and paws turned. It tilted its head slightly before stretching and curling into a woman dressed in rumpled clothes and wearing spectacles. Her hair was in a ponytail instead of its usual bun.
“Hello,” Thisbe said, once she was no longer in cat form.
Grisha, thinking back to her visit to his castle, said, “I thought you had to have your clothes with you to make the transition from cat to a dressed human.”
“Of course not,” Thisbe said. “I’m enchanted. I can do as I please.”
“So you lied,” he said, feeling a bit aggrieved.
“Normally I prefer my cat form,” Thisbe said. “However, if the child intends to challenge Leopold, she needs to get used to the world of magic.”
Grisha looked over at Maggie and was glad that she looked far less astonished than when Theodora had changed shape.
“We need a visa,” Maggie said, and, before Grisha could stop her, she explained all about Yakov and his potions.
“I did not know this part of your history, Benevolentia Gaudium,” Thisbe said. “If you find the girls, I hope it will work.”
“Does that mean you’ll give Grisha a visa?” Maggie asked.
“Oh, he doesn’t need anything,” Thisbe said, waving a hand. “I say a visa is needed because I have to be certain no dragon leaves the city without my knowing it.”
“Why can’t they just go when and where they want?” Maggie asked. She was beginning to understand her father’s irritation with rules that made no sense.
“Because they’d be violating the spell Leopold cast to keep them in Vienna. He’d be alerted, the guards would go after the dragon, and I’d have a murder on my hands. Not pleasant for anyone.”
“So it’s for safety,” Maggie said.
All of Vienna’s dragons are connected to Leopold through the spell that had brought them out of the forest, Grisha thought. The sorcerer’s magic had kept them all in the city, above or below ground.
It struck him that he himself had never heard the sound that all the others had. He had come to Vienna willingly and stayed because of the soldiers with guns, but also because he craved the company of other dragons.
His head suddenly ached and all of the scales on his paws and tail began to itch. Thisbe was inside his mind.
“And you had nowhere else to go,” Thisbe said. “That’s mostly what kept you here.”
“Please don’t do that,” he said. “It’s rude.”
Thisbe laughed, but Maggie looked alarmed. “Grisha,” she said. “Don’t make her mad.”
“I’m not mad,” Thisbe said. “I just have the bad habit of walking into the thoughts of other creatures. It was the first power Leopold gave us. Tyr and I spent the whole day listening in on thoughts. We found out that all of Prince Einar’s horses had colic. His groundskeeper was stealing money by feeding the horses contaminated feed.”
“What happened to them?” Maggie asked. She loved horses and could almost picture Tyr and Thisbe, still maids in a castle, trying out their new power and stumbling onto a crime.
“Tyr told the prince that if he didn’t hire a new groundskeeper and buy some medicine for the horses, she would tell the king.”
“How could she possibly get to tell a king?” Maggie asked. She had very little idea about how a castle worked. A kitchen maid could change the course of a kingdom, especially if she knew how to read and write.
“Oh, put a note on his father’s bed or dinner tray or something. Quite simple,” Thisbe said. “Tyr was so clever that way. She could listen in on thoughts without causing the headache.”
“Or itching?” Grisha asked.
“Can’t avoid that,” Thisbe said. “Itching is the body’s natural response to another being walking into your mind and reading your thoughts.”
“I don’t even need anyone’s permission to leave the city, do I?” Grisha asked. “The magic Leopold used to bring the dragons to Vienna didn’t bring me here. He and I haven’t been connected by magic since I escaped the teapot, which reversed the spell that connected us in the first place.”
“Correct,” Thisbe said. “But to make sure, I will give up a memory and cast a spell of protection to keep Leopold from detecting what you are doing.”
Grisha, aware of how precious his own memories were, hesitated.
“I appreciate your concern, Benevolentia Gaudium, but I do it willingly,” Thisbe said, clearly knowing his thoughts, explaining why his tail still itched. “If it makes you feel better, I will use the memory of the day Tyr and I first used our power to listen.”
“The one you just told us about?” Maggie asked, and Thisbe nodded.
“We will take such good care of it,” Maggie said. “I will never forget it.”
Grisha, in that moment, did not think he had ever loved anyone more.
Maggie’s impatience to get to London grew along with her well-thought-out reasons for going. She was only willing to wait until lunch the next day before trying to change her father’s decision. Alexander ate the same meal each afternoon: grilled fish with green salad, a bottle of mineral water, and an espresso.
She waited until he’d taken his first sip of espresso and began. “Papa, I’ve given a lot of thought to why you think I shouldn’t go to London. And I was wondering if we could discuss it further.” Her father often said how important it was to discuss any disagreements.
“Of course we can,” Alexander answered. “I’m always delighted to hear your thoughts.”
“Well, Grisha will be with me, so it’s unlikely to be dangerous,” she said. “After all, if you didn’t trust him to protect me in a city, you would never have hired him.”
“I certainly trust him,” Alexander said. “But Vienna is a city you both know already.”
“You only trust him because we know the city?” she asked. “I wish we hadn’t walked so often in neighborhoods we’d never seen before. I didn’t know that I was only protected in our neighborhood.”
Alexander put down his cup and looked at his daughter. “That is a lot of thought,” he said dryly. “But listen, Maggie: You are only eleven years old. I will take you to London in the fall and we can go to the theater and the British Museum and have a great time. But I cannot let you and Grisha wander through London on some wild goose chase for a magical spell.”
“Potion,” Maggie said. “And—”
“Potion,” Alexander said, “but you cannot gallop around London—”
“On a fool’s errand, yes, I know. You said that yesterday,” Maggie reminded him.
“I was going to say on a whim, but fool’s errand will do just as well,” he said.
“That’s what I’ve thought of the most,” Maggie said. “I’m
a poet’s daughter—you always say that’s why I have an education based on freedom and responsibility and being creative and all that, right?”
“I do say that,” Alexander said, slowly. “And?”
“What sort of errand should I be going on, if not a fool’s? Did you hire Grisha so I could go on sensible ones?”
“Oh, God,” he said quietly. “I’m beat.”
“And as for being eleven, well, that’s true, and soon I will be twelve, and then fifteen and then—”
“Learn to quit while you’re ahead, Mags, my dear,” her father said, standing up. He had never called her Mags before, and she rather liked the sound of it. It reminded her of a short, fashionable haircut in a way that the name Maggie, which fit her long and ordinary hair, never could.
“If it weren’t the middle of the day, I’d need a drink,” he said. “You can go to London.”
“Oh, thank you!” she said, both deeply pleased and a bit surprised. It was the very first time she’d ever triumphed in a disagreement with him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
YAKOV’S DAUGHTERS
AS THEY FLEW OVER THE COUNTRIES BETWEEN Austria and England, Maggie grew warmer and warmer in spite of all the air rushing past them. She was glad for a chance to cool off when Grisha splashed down into the Thames. It was a very good river in which to land, as it ran through London in much the same way the Danube ran through Vienna. He placed her carefully on the riverbank and then swam a bit to get his temperature down.
Maggie was surprised that none of the hundreds of people she could see had paid any attention to their landing. It was true that in Vienna, people rarely noticed Grisha. But it was one thing to witness people not paying attention, and quite another to find that no one sees you when you fly in on a dragon.
“Once factories, railroads, and streetlamps were built, the world sped up,” Grisha said, hoping to explain. “After that, no one had enough time to see us.”