Ember and the Ice Dragons

by Heather Fawcett

  Aunt Myra looked as if she had walked into a wall. There was a small silence. “Ember, I . . . my research, I mean, isn’t something that would interest you—”

  “You’re studying dragons,” Ember almost shouted. “Why wouldn’t that interest me? Now I find out that you’re writing letters to Queen Victoria and trying to stop the Winterglass Hunt. Why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you know how much I want to help? It was hunters like those men who killed my parents!” Ember’s anger flowed through her like a river, wild and unstoppable. Only it wasn’t just anger at her aunt now—it was Prince Gideon, and Lord Norfell; it was Nisha and Moss, for their confusing kindness; and even her father, for not knowing how to unwrinkle the world with a wave of his hand or turn back time to correct a mistake he had made when he was a teenager.

  “You didn’t think of that, did you?” she said. “You didn’t think of me at all. Why did you invite me here, if you were going to treat me like some experiment you got bored with?”

  Aunt Myra actually took a step back. She stared at Ember for a long moment. Then her jaw quivered, and to Ember’s astonishment, she began to cry.

  She sank into the chair by the fire, burying her face in her hands. Ember, who had been so full of fury a second ago, now felt it fall from her like a weight, leaving only weariness and a dull, untraceable sorrow.

  “I’m sorry, Ember,” Aunt Myra said finally, brushing her tears away. “I’ve made a mess of everything, haven’t I? I don’t—I don’t know how to look after children! I don’t even know how to talk to them. You especially.”

  “Because I’m not a real child,” Ember said, her voice flat.

  “No!” Myra said it so sharply that Ember jumped. “No, Ember—because you’re Lionel’s child. Do you have any idea what my brother would do to me if I let any harm come to even one hair on your head?”

  Ember was confused. Though she had heard stories about her father attacking bandits or treacherous fellow Stormancers, she had never witnessed him hurt anyone (apart from insects, toward which he was ruthless). Myra seemed to guess her thoughts and gave a wry, shaky smile.

  “He would look terribly disappointed and give me one of his bumbling, nervous lectures,” she said, “then he would tell me he forgave me, and that I must take extreme care with all the other hairs on your head, and then he would give me a hug.” She sighed. “And through it all, without even meaning to, he would make me feel three inches tall.”

  Ember hadn’t been expecting this. She gazed at her aunt with new eyes.

  “Lionel always did have that way about him,” she said ruefully, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve. “Even when we were children. I remember one time I pushed him into a mud puddle at a party—I thought it would be a good joke! And what did he do? He apologized to our mother’s guests for not setting a better example. Then when I cried about it later, he found me and apologized to me for not being more delicate with my feelings. Now he’s the most celebrated Stormancer in the empire, and I’m—what? Still the embarrassing little sister he has to apologize for, while he can’t do anything wrong.”

  “He gets things wrong,” Ember said awkwardly. She chose the most recent example that came to mind. “Didn’t you hear about the spell he cast to restore Lady Trembleworth’s youth? She’ll have to go through life with an upside-down nose now.”

  Myra sighed. She blew her nose into a handkerchief.

  “Is that why you’ve been avoiding him?” Ember said. “My father said that since you got out of prison, you won’t see him.”

  Myra made an exasperated sound. “I’m avoiding him? That’s rich. He’s the one who always has some excuse not to visit. And would it kill him to answer a letter in less than three months? Or let me pay him back for bailing me out of prison?”

  These questions seemed directed not at Ember but at some invisible version of her father, and she wisely avoided answering.

  Aunt Myra rested her forehead on her palm. After a moment, her shoulders began to shake, and Ember thought she was crying again. But she wasn’t—she was laughing.

  “Upside-down nose,” she said.

  A smile crept across Ember’s face. “Yes. But better than sprouting two extra ears, which is what happened when Lord Flightley wanted to cure his bald spot.”

  Aunt Myra doubled over, and Ember laughed too, though extra ears were far less funny when you were actually confronted with them. Aunt Myra’s laughter was warm, and so loud it shook the floor.

  Into the surprisingly companionable silence that followed, Aunt Myra said, “Ember, I haven’t done this properly. I’m sorry. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk to you—the thing is, I didn’t want to risk treating you like some research subject. I’ve spent years studying dragons, and I thought I might . . . well, make you feel uncomfortable. I wanted you to feel like an ordinary girl.”

  “But I’m not an ordinary girl,” Ember said. “And in any case, why didn’t you think to ask what I wanted?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I was so caught up in keeping you safe, and getting your father to trust me again, that I forgot to find out if you were happy here.” She paused. “Are you happy here?”

  Ember considered. She thought of the icy mountains, begging to be explored, the curious penguins, the twilight sky. And all that Science! “I don’t know. I suppose I could be, if—if things were different.” If she was a normal girl enjoying a holiday. If she could return home whenever she wanted, without being a danger to anyone. She didn’t say any of that, though.

  “If you didn’t feel cooped up, I wager,” her aunt said, shaking her head again. “Is that why you went down to watch the hunters practice? I can’t imagine you getting any enjoyment out of it.”

  Ember swallowed. In her anger, she had almost forgotten about her plan. If Aunt Myra got angry at her for going near the hunters, she certainly wasn’t going to react well if Ember told her she was planning to join the hunt. “I—I didn’t know they would be there.”

  Aunt Myra expression softened. “I should have told you about the Winterglass Hunt. I’m well aware of how your parents died, and I shouldn’t have left you to find out about it that way. But, well—I hoped I wouldn’t need to. I’ve been trying to stop it, you see.”

  Ember remembered the letters Aunt Myra had written. “To stop it?”

  “Oh yes,” her aunt said darkly. “Come with me. I should have shown you this days ago.”

  Ember followed Aunt Myra to her room, which she had never seen before. Aunt Myra’s room was—well, calling it a mess would be kind. It reminded Ember of her father’s study, except that instead of books on Stormancy, used teacups, and piles of papers, it was crowded with scientific equipment—magnifying glasses and carbon paper; protractors and compasses. In the corner was a set of scales on which, unnervingly, two small bones were balanced. A single painting hung on the wall: Ember recognized her father, then a teenager, and her grandmother. There was also a girl who looked only a little older than Ember, who she recognized as Myra from her piles of hair and flushed cheeks, as if she had sprinted there. The painting was clearly old, but someone had cleaned and reframed it.

  Ember’s eyes went to a shelf in the corner. On it was a necklace of sapphires and gilded pearls, a silver hairbrush studded with sapphires, and another roughly hewn sapphire the size of a goose egg. Aunt Myra seemed to have a penchant for them. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.” Aunt Myra hastily stepped in front of the shelf. “Just a few, ah, mementos.”

  “Mementos,” Ember repeated.

  Aunt Myra glanced over her shoulder. Her eyes went a little misty. “From some of my more successful heists.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble for keeping them?” Ember said.

  “Well, as they’ve already sent me to jail for it, there’s not much else they can do. Bit of a loophole, that.”

  Ember didn’t think this was what “loophole” meant, but said nothing. Aunt Myra unceremoniously swept her arm across the desk, sending books and telesc
ope lenses tumbling down to join the chaos on the floor. “Sit,” she said, motioning to a chair.

  Ember sat. Aunt Myra perched beside her and flipped through a sketchbook. Once she found the page she was looking for, she handed it to Ember.

  Ember drew a sharp breath. She was staring at a blurry photograph of a dragon, spectral and magnificent, thinner than fire dragons and more sinuous, like water given form. Somehow Ember could sense the gleaming silver-blue of the dragon’s scales. She felt cold just looking at it.

  “This was done by Professor Walcott,” Aunt Myra said. “There are others, though.”

  “How did they get so close?” The image looked as if it had been taken mere yards away from its subject.

  “It was perfectly safe,” Aunt Myra said. “The dragons don’t attack. They ignore us, for the most part, once they’re sure we aren’t hunters.”

  Ember stared. “What?”

  “It’s true,” her aunt said. “The stories are wrong. They aren’t bloodthirsty beasts. And what’s more, I think they can speak to each other. We heard them using words—none that we could understand, but words nonetheless. They’re thinking creatures, not animals.”

  Ember’s breath caught. Did this also explain her own strange existence? Were fire dragons, too, cleverer than anyone thought? Ember’s father had often speculated that this was the case, though Ember’s own intelligence could very well have resulted from a quirk in the spell, much like Montgomery’s sense of self. (Unless, of course, all doorknobs had a sense of self that they never had the opportunity to express, which Ember supposed was impossible to know with certainty.)

  “I’ve told all this to Queen Victoria,” Aunt Myra said. “Unlike the rest of her family, she actually has an interest in this place—and I think I’m beginning to get through to her. Several senators are on my side. If I could just get more evidence . . .”

  “Do you really think she’d stop the hunt?” Ember said.

  “I do. She’s already placed limits on the number of ice dragons they can kill each year. Of course, even if dragons were little more than unthinking beasts, it would be wrong to hunt them to extinction. Dragonglass, though, is so profitable that most are prepared to ignore that. But if we can prove to the queen that dragons can speak and reason and feel just like people, I think we can convince her to protect them.”

  “But why would she?” Ember said. “Even if you can prove that ice dragons are smart, they’ve killed Scientists in the past. Torn them apart, Nisha said. Would the queen forgive them for that?”

  “Those Scientists were killed by something,” Aunt Myra said. “The dead tell no tales, and there are things in this world more dangerous than dragons.”

  “Like the grimlings?” A shiver went down Ember’s spine.

  Aunt Myra nodded and passed Ember a sketch.

  Ember squinted at it. The sketch showed a mountain peak under a starry sky. Before the artist stretched a field of ice, perhaps the edge of a glacier, and rising up out of a crevasse was—

  “What is that?” Ember said.

  It looked like smoke, but the smoke had mouths in it. Hundreds of mouths. They yawned open, round and hungry and sharp, as if trying to devour the stars.

  “That is the only documented sighting of what some have been calling the grimlings,” Aunt Myra said. “It’s possible this was the only time they’ve been observed by someone who lived to tell of it.”

  They fell silent, both gazing at the sketch. Ember looked away first. The sketch aroused a revulsion so deep it rattled her bones.

  “Who drew this?” she said.

  Aunt Myra gave a dark smile. “I did.”

  “You?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t ask one of my Scientists to take that sort of risk. That’s the first rule of leadership. When something threatens the lives of my people, I’m going to solve it, not ask someone else to.” She frowned. “As it was, I couldn’t get close enough to understand what I was seeing.”

  “Where was this?”

  “On the Tacroy Glacier. The same place several dragons were killed in the last Winterglass Hunt.”

  Ember frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Aunt Myra said. “I’m a Scientist, so I don’t assume two things are connected just because they match up. But it is interesting, isn’t it? Could the grimlings be drawn to places where dragons have died? If so, why?”

  “Nisha said they can take other forms,” Ember said. “Is that true?”

  Her aunt sighed. “Yes, Nisha has been listening to some of the more outlandish rumors. It’s true there have been sightings of strange . . . figures. They only appear after dark. Professor Binder has seen one. ‘Pale and thin,’ he called it. But I’m not convinced. The darkness here does things to the imagination.”

  Ember examined the sketch. “I don’t think Queen Victoria is listening to your letters. Prince Gideon said that—”

  Aunt Myra snorted. “Don’t tell me you spoke to the princeling.”

  Ember nodded. “He’s taking part in the hunt.”

  Aunt Myra shook her head darkly. “I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me. His father has always cared more about showing up his relatives than he does about his son.”

  Ember blinked. “Prince Gideon’s father doesn’t care about him?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, as he’s not plated in gold, or otherwise of value to him. Gideon’s mother was a Turkish princess—she was Cronus’s second wife, and every bit as rich as his first. She died in an odd sort of accident, just like the other one. Nothing to connect it to her husband, of course, though there were rumors I won’t go into. Cronus didn’t waste any time mourning her loss—remarried another rich princess right away, and had a batch of new sons. They all live in England, where Cronus spends most of his time, leaving Gideon alone here. I would say it’s a shame for a boy to be separated from his parents, but when that parent is Prince Cronus, I think it would be healthier for Gideon to spend even less time with him. That’s not the sort of man a boy should look up to.”

  Ember considered this silently. Prince Gideon was horrid, to be sure, but she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of compassion for him. She couldn’t imagine having a father like Prince Cronus.

  They stayed there for another hour or so, until the purple light brightened to deep aquamarine. Ember liked how Aunt Myra talked to her. It was as if she viewed her as an equal—she didn’t use simple words or a special voice the way many of the professors at Chesterfield did. Finally Aunt Myra glanced at the clock and declared that it was time for Ember to go to school.

  “Aunt Myra,” Ember said as they stood to go. “Do you really believe that your research can stop the hunt? Dragonglass is so valuable. And everyone is convinced that dragons are monsters.”

  Her aunt gave a slow nod. “It’s true that saving these dragons will be no easy task. But it’s also true that even the mightiest train can be derailed by a single penny. In my experience, most people confuse impossible with difficult. All we can do is try.”

  Ember mulled this over. She paused by the door, her gaze falling on an old tintype photo on the dresser. It showed a young woman in a rather short dress holding two wine bottles to her mouth, while around her crowded several men and women making faces or holding up their own bottles. One man appeared to be mooning the camera.

  “Where did that come from?” Aunt Myra slammed the photo facedown, her cheeks a brilliant red. “I say! I don’t know who any of those people are.”

  “Well, the one in the middle looks like you,” Ember pointed out.

  “I don’t think—I mean, Scientific gatherings can be a bit . . . you know.”

  Ember did not know, but she thought she was beginning to understand a few things about her aunt. “You don’t have to dress like that,” she said. “I won’t tell my father.”

  Aunt Myra nervously adjusted her hideously respectable jacket. “Like what, dear? Amos!” she called to the man leaving a room across the hall, who started. “H
ow are the soil samples looking?” And with that, she thundered away.

  Ember trailed after. She felt a whisper of guilt about not telling Aunt Myra her plan. But there was no way her aunt would allow her anywhere near the Winterglass Hunt. She thought of the captive fire dragons, and her resolve hardened. If she could do something—anything—to save the ice dragons from a similar fate, she would. No matter what her aunt thought.

  Eight

  Ember Gains Two Seconds

  Considering the former abundance of fire dragons, and their wide extent over the globe, it is surprising how little is known of their habits and behavior.

  —TAKAGI’S COMPENDIUM OF EXOTIC CREATURES

  Ember stayed up half the night, scheming. She discarded several ideas, such as setting fire to the hunters’ ship (risky, given that she’d have to be on board to do it) and setting off flares to warn the dragons that the hunters were coming (she didn’t know how they’d react to flares—what if they were curious and came to investigate?).

  Just as she finally drifted off to sleep, she had been awoken by a murmur of sound from the wardrobe, and the soft scritch-scritch of claws.

  She was out of bed in an instant, staring at the wardrobe door. Montgomery was asleep under her bed. Her thoughts turned to the Red Labyrinth between the worlds—had one of its creatures somehow escaped into her wardrobe?

  Heart pounding, she inched open the door. Puff uncoiled herself into the room, stretching first her front legs, then her back. “Eat!”

  “Oh, you naughty cat!” Ember said. “You found a way through the portal!”

  It was the only explanation. Cats had no respect for doors, and were good at slipping through the smallest of gaps. Puff must have used that talent to winnow her way through the portal, even though it was dormant.

  The cat purred, winding herself around Ember’s legs. She couldn’t take Puff back to London—at least not immediately, given the wrinkled state of the fabric of the world. So she tiptoed out to the quiet kitchen, which was empty, and gathered a saucer of milk, a piece of raw fish, and some of the liver and gravy left over from dinner. She took the smelly feast back to Puff, who devoured everything.