Ember and the Ice Dragons

by Heather Fawcett

  He had said similar things before, and Ember wished she could believe him this time. Lately, though, she had begun to fear the opposite: that the spell would grow more and more threadbare until it fell apart entirely, returning her to her dragon form. She sometimes had dreams in which she was turned back into a dragon. In those dreams, she was lost and alone, soaring over gray countryside or chased by men with bows. She had no memory of being a dragon, and no desire to become one again. And what if she became something bad, something evil? Ember shuddered. Sometimes her own body felt like a cloak that could be shed or lost at any time—but what was beneath it, not even she knew.

  “Ah, there’s old Eli now,” her father said, waving at a man approaching through the crowd. It was Professor Rosenberg, a Magician friend of her father’s, and her appointed guardian for the trip. He was a heavily mustached man who wheezed alarmingly when he laughed, as if it was at risk of choking him. Ember liked him. Unlike most people, he was comfortable with mysteries—he knew there was something unusual about Ember, but he never pressed her father to explain it. “You’ll be safe with him.”

  “Quite safe, my friend,” Professor Rosenberg said. Like most Magicians, he wore an elaborate midnight cloak and walked with a divining stick, which detected storms, and cut an impressive figure on the grimy dock. He wasn’t a Stormancer, though, someone who could wield magic—Magicians only studied it, as an astronomer studies stars. All Stormancers were Magicians too, but not all Magicians were Stormancers.

  The crowd around the demiship was thinning. Ember tried to imagine that she was an intrepid Scientist heading off on an expedition of historical significance, and wondered if intrepid Scientists ever left home feeling as if they’d swallowed a stomachful of rocks. Her father gave her one last hug, and Ember breathed in the familiar smell of his cloak, a mixture of magic and ginger biscuits. Forcing a watery smile, she took Professor Rosenberg’s hand and let him lead her up the gangway.

  Ember squinted into the icy mist. The Orpheus had just passed through a storm—the ordinary kind—and the wind carried an echo of its fury. The ship’s hull thunked gently against chunks of ice that speckled the sea. She wore a wool coat and hat, though she didn’t need either. The coat was new, and like her dresses, had been enchanted to pass through her wings. In her pocket was a shard of broken flagstone from one of Chesterfield’s paths (Magicae et Scientia), because she had thought leaving home might be easier to bear if she took a piece of it with her. She squeezed the flagstone against her palm until the letters made little indentations in her skin.

  Before her, somewhere in the mist, was Antarctica.

  Ember shivered, and not because of the cold. The frosty wind felt wonderful against her skin, though the burly sailors manning the deck of the HMS Orpheus were bundled in so many coats and scarves you could barely tell they were human.

  Her three weeks aboard the Orpheus had passed slowly. She would have liked to go up to the deck on the days the demiship surfaced, but it was far too dangerous—particularly as they passed the equator and the sun grew even stronger. She was glad, at least, to be traveling aboard a demiship, one of the fastest and most advanced vessels in the British navy. She had fallen asleep each night watching sharks and seals and manta rays and fish of all description drift past the window of her undersea passenger cabin. She felt certain that she had discovered at least one new species of jellyfish, and made careful sketches, in the event that she became a famous zoologist one day and wrote a book about cnidarians. She tried to bury her sadness by reading, and memorized several new animals from Takagi’s Compendium: the cheetah, the crenellated chimera, the alpine chipmunk, and three types of chickadee (black-capped, gray-collared, and African).

  She wondered if there would be other children at the research station. She wasn’t good with other children. She found them strange—loud and chaotic as a magical storm, shouting and darting around playing games without proper rules. She didn’t have much experience with children, of course. Given the risk that she might set her classmates on fire, Ember had never attended school.

  She pictured Chesterfield, perched on its lofty hilltop; her small bedroom with the windowsill she liked to curl up on. What was her father doing now? Was Puff napping in her favorite spot beneath Ember’s bed?

  Her homesickness swelled. It was like swallowing ice, cold and sharp.

  “Eager to get your first look at it, are you?” said a voice behind her. First Officer Jack, a tall, bone-thin American with a permanent smile, stepped up to the railing.

  “Yes,” said Ember, who had often found that the best way to limit unwanted conversation was to agree with everything the other person said.

  “Nervous?” First Officer Jack examined her. “Some get nervous, their first time here. Wouldn’t think it’d bother you much, what with that famous pa of yours.”

  Ember didn’t see the connection between having a famous father and being a nervous traveler, but then most people were awed by Lionel St. George and looked for ways to bring him up with Ember whenever they could. “I’m a little nervous,” she agreed.

  The man gave her back a thump—Ember only barely moved her wing in time. “It’s all right. It’s a strange place, make no mistake. Far side of the world, isn’t it? I’ve been an officer of the empire my whole life, seen places you couldn’t imagine, but I prefer to stay on deck when we stop here.”

  “Why?” Ember said. “It’s just a lot of ice and snow, isn’t it?”

  First Officer Jack gave her a long look. “Ice and snow—yes, there’s plenty of that. Too much, you might say. Enough to drive a man mad.”

  Ember’s brow furrowed. She had little experience with snow—a few inches fell a year in London, enough to make the city look like a frosted cake for a few hours, until it grew sooty and hoof-beaten. She didn’t see how it could drive someone mad.

  “I expect you’ve been warned about the dragons,” First Officer Jack said. “It’s almost summer—which is to say, winter in these parts—and they’re starting to roam again.”

  Ember shivered. The vast, icebound lands of Antarctica were home to the last known dragon colony in the world. Ice dragons were elusive and strange, breathers of frost rather than fire. Ember doubted she would get a glimpse of one—ice dragons avoided people as skillfully as leopards did—but the possibility filled her with dread and excitement. Would they recognize her? Would they see her as one of them, or as an enemy?

  “Don’t worry,” First Officer Jack said. “The dragons don’t go anywhere near the research station.” He sighed. “It’s a shame the queen doesn’t allow hunting here. I thought about trying my hand at dragon-catching in my youth. Would be an exciting way to make a living, don’t you think?”

  “No,” Ember said.

  First Officer Jack gave her a strange look. “What have you got there?”

  Ember started. She had been absently toying with her fireglass ring. She tucked her hand back in her pocket. “Oh . . . that’s just—”

  “Don’t need to play coy, girl.” The sailor gave a laugh that sent up a cloud of breath. “I know fireglass when I see it. Not that I’ve ever owned a piece myself—cost me a year’s wages! Little present from your parents, eh?”

  Ember nodded silently.

  “Well, just you keep it out of sight. Thieves, you know. Not that there’s any among our crew, but you get some strange types at the station. Place like that attracts those as don’t fit anywhere else, if you catch me. I remember the first time—”

  “Ahoy there!” a voice shouted. “Approaching Great Bother Bay! All hands prepare to ground!”

  Ember started. Sailors clomped past, calling to each other in their sea language, as incomprehensible as the language of birds. First Office Jack turned to the rigging, his smile replaced by a look of concentration. The mists were parting, and she laid eyes on it for the first time.

  Antarctica.

  Ember drew in her breath. It was a world of black and white, towering over the sea. The coastline
was made of mountains of dark rock that folded into one another like crossed arms, steeped in snow and ice. It went on forever.

  Ember had spent her life in London, where everything felt crowded—the winding streets, the messy skyline of rooftops and chimneys. Even the air was full of the jostling smells of horse and smoke and bakeries. Ember could hardly believe she was still in the same world—it was as if the ship had sailed through a door to Fairyland.

  Ember sometimes had fanciful thoughts like this, and wished for someone to share them with. Her father traveled so much, and the shadow in the corner was too moody most days to carry on a proper conversation. She longed for a companion her own age. Not a human child, of course—Ember always pictured another dragon, also transformed into a boy or girl like her. If only her father had found two eggs that day in the Welsh mountains! She often wondered what that dragon child would have looked like, and whether they too would have invisible wings, or perhaps an invisible tail. You could go far in life with an invisible tail.

  They sailed toward a bay with a small, snowy beach and a huddle of what looked like single-room huts. Then a figure stepped out of one, and Ember realized they were massive wooden warehouses. In this vast canvas of snow and ice, there were no trees, no streets lined with sooty houses, to help her eyes work out the distances.

  An ice floe as large as a London city block scraped against the ship, prompting a flurry of shouts. The Orpheus was a huge vessel, its bow lined with mortars with enough firepower to sink a small navy, yet even it was vulnerable to Antarctica’s fearsome seascape. Ember watched as Captain Llewelyn himself took the wheel and steered the demiship through the labyrinth of ice, his calm gray eyes narrowed in concentration.

  “What’s that?” Ember said to no one in particular. The mist was lifting to the east, revealing a row of towering sea cliffs. Atop one was a stone fortress clothed in shimmering frost.

  “It’s a castle,” one of the sailors said.

  “Oh, really?” Ember said. Unfortunately, the man seemed as impervious to sarcasm as the shadow in the corner. “I meant, what’s it doing here?”

  The man gave a short laugh. “You don’t expect the prince to kip with the Scientists, do you? He had all them stones brought in from France. Took about ten years. More than one of those ships sank with all hands lost, even after they were magicked—not that he let it put him off.”

  Ember knew that the Prince of Antarctica was a man named Cronus, the fifth child of Queen Victoria, who was the true ruler of Antarctica and the rest of the British Empire. Cronus would likely never inherit the throne, and so had been sent to govern the farthest and, in the eyes of the nobility, most useless piece of the empire, being ill-suited for anything besides Scientific research. Antarctica had only been claimed by the British to prevent the Spanish or the Germans from having it, which seemed a silly reason to Ember. But she supposed that, being a dragon, she was unlikely to understand the thinking of human kings and queens.

  “Is Prince Cronus there now?” Ember said.

  “Doubt it. He’s not around much. Prefers his country estate in Devon, he does, with his hunting dogs and fancy kiteships. But Prince Gideon’s usually about.”

  “Prince Gideon?”

  “Prince Cronus’s young son,” the sailor explained. “Future lord of Antarctica!” He swept his arm mockingly at the empty expanse of sea and ice in a way that made Ember wonder if he liked the princes much. “He’s a bit of a bookworm, from what I hear.”

  The man said “bookworm” in a smirking way that instantly reduced Ember’s estimation of him, while increasing her curiosity about the prince. She squinted at the castle. It was pretty and stern, completely out of place in that pale wilderness. Flags fluttered ambivalently from the turrets, startling splashes of blue and red.

  She wondered what sort of boy Prince Gideon was. She pictured him at the window in his icy castle, surrounded by books, gazing at the ship as it passed. She felt a tug of connection—the prince would surely understand what it meant to be alone.

  Ember shook herself. Prince Gideon had a legion of servants at his beck and call, and a home at Buckingham Palace that he could return to whenever he liked. They could have nothing in common.

  The castle faded into the mist.

  One of the sailors brushed against her wings, and Ember retreated to a safer spot in the bow. Then there was more shouting and hurrying, and Ember and her belongings were bundled into a rowboat, and then they had reached the shore of Antarctica.

  Three

  The Firefly and the Doorknob

  The fire dragon’s fierce temperament is well documented. Even when mortally wounded, the beasts have been reported to fight until the last breath leaves their body. Perhaps it was this that prompted William Shakespeare to write, “Come not between a dragon and his wrath.”

  —TAKAGI’S COMPENDIUM OF EXOTIC CREATURES

  Ember’s heart pounded as she treaded the narrow dock, which rolled under her feet. A big swell came in, and she grabbed at the railing. The sea was deepest, darkest gray, and the land was snow and shadow. Ember felt as if she had stepped into a daguerreotype of another planet. Then she was clambering onto a rocky beach, and taking her first step in Antarctica. The snow was hard-packed and slippery, and she nearly lost her balance.

  She had little time to marvel, however, before Professor Rosenberg appeared behind her to hustle her along, his divining stick tapping smartly on the snow.

  “Is that the research station?” Ember said, gazing at the dingy warehouses. She was relieved when Professor Rosenberg shook his head.

  “This is Port Gloaming. Come along, and don’t speak to anyone, child.”

  This surprised Ember, until she took a closer look at the people loitering about the warehouses. Some were rough and sailorish, which was expected, while others looked rough and wealthy, which in Ember’s experience was a bad combination. They were all men, apart from a pair of women oddly clad in enormous white coats that, on closer inspection, turned out to be polar-bear skins, complete with heads. Fireglass flashed from necks and wrists and fingers, in all its shades: lemon yellow to sunset crimson. Several men had rifles or bows slung over their shoulders.

  “Who are they?” Ember said to Professor Rosenberg.

  “Seal hunters, I suspect. It’s clear this is a rough place.”

  “Here to register, storm walker?” one of the men, lounging on a barrel, called to Professor Rosenberg. He had a mane of reddish hair and a pointed chin. He put Ember in mind of a well-fed fox. “Bit past your prime, don’t you think?”

  Several of the men laughed. Professor Rosenberg looked at the man, his face as impassive as an old log, and kept walking. His cold hand tightened around Ember’s.

  “What are they registering for?” Ember murmured.

  “I don’t know. I suggest we refrain from making conversation.”

  Ember looked into the face of each man she passed. She had never met a professional hunter before. Some leered; others smiled kindly, seeming surprised by her presence. Even those who smiled sent a current of fear through her bones—many wore fireglass jewelry. One smile revealed a glittering red tooth.

  Ember touched the back of her neck through her scarf. Her own heartscale was there, a scarlet diamond roughly the length of her thumb. It was the only other part of her that her father hadn’t been able to transform. Oddly, he had also been unable to make it invisible like her wings; the heartscale seemed resistant to magic. As a result, Ember wore scarves at all times of the year, indoors and out.

  Along the coast beyond the warehouses was a slope of rock, slippery with ice and seawater. At first Ember thought the rock was dotted with black-and-white lumps. Then she realized—

  “Penguins!” she exclaimed.

  So it was—hundreds of them, perched along the ridged stone. They were Adélies, which were much smaller than their cousins, emperor penguins, and would not have reached Ember’s waist. As she watched, a parent led a chick toward the edge of the rock. The adu
lt hopped into the water first, followed by its chittering offspring.

  Ember was fascinated. Takagi’s Compendium had drawings of penguins, but these didn’t begin to capture the strangeness of them—the clumsy way they walked, like a child taking its first steps, or the honking sound they made, which was rather like a donkey imitating a crow. She yearned for her notebook and sketch pencils.

  She was just turning to ask Professor Rosenberg if they could stay awhile when a shot rang out.

  Feathers exploded. The birds honked madly as they ran to and fro, a black and white pandemonium. Ember’s heart dropped through her stomach. She couldn’t see which bird had been struck—not until one of the hunters walked calm as a cat into the melee and lifted a motionless penguin by its foot. He turned to his two friends, who stood a little ways back, laughing.

  It was the foxlike man from the dock, his orange hair stark against the snow. He strode across the beach as if he owned it, raising his hand in greeting to Ember and Professor Rosenberg.

  Ember glared. She wished the professor was a Stormancer who could turn the red-haired man into an insect. One of the man’s companions lifted his rifle and took aim at another penguin.

  “Stop,” Ember said, startling herself. She shook off Professor Rosenberg’s hand and marched into the chattering horde, stopping a few yards from the man. A young penguin, still covered in gray down, wandered up to her, peeping worriedly.

  The man held up a hand. The other man lowered his rifle—as Ember had guessed, the redhead was their leader.

  “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” he said politely, as if they were sitting down to tea. Ember couldn’t stop staring at his hand—it was covered in blood, but that was not the only thing that drew her eye. The man wore a fireglass ring on each finger, even his thumb. “Lord Norfell.”

  Ember’s eyes narrowed. She doubted this man was a seal hunter—more likely, he was just a bored nobleman on a world tour. It was common for rich lords and ladies to go gallivanting about the British Empire, though most skipped its polar territories.