Ember and the Ice Dragons

by Heather Fawcett

  After an interminable time, the wind died slightly, and Ember could see again. The cold was so ferocious that even she was shaking. She squinted into the whirling dark, trying to find Nisha. But she saw no movement, and all evidence of her trail had been swept away.

  “Nisha!” Moss shouted. He stood, his pale hair a smudge against the darkness. “Nisha!”

  “We have to go after her,” Ember said. She fumbled around in the sled, finally locating a length of rope. “Here.”

  They knotted the rope around themselves, then tied the other end to the sled. “Stay here,” Ember murmured to Finnorah, who was huddled with the other dogs in a miserable pile. The husky licked her hand.

  Ember and Moss set out. They walked to the end of the rope—about thirty feet or so—then traced a wide circle around the sled, shouting Nisha’s name. Disoriented by the storm and the tricks it played, she could have gone in any direction.

  “What now?” Moss said, once they had shouted themselves hoarse. Ember opened her mouth to reply, but a thundering laugh, only vaguely human, drowned her out.

  Moss gave a cry. The wind knocked him off his feet, and his weight on the rope took Ember down with him. She felt the rope catch on something sticking out of the ground—a rock, or a sliver of ice—and then it suddenly went slack.

  “No,” Ember gasped. She pulled the rope toward her until she reached the frayed, jagged end.

  They were no longer tied to the sled.

  There came a shout in the distance—it was impossible to tell which direction. “Nisha!” Moss yelled. Then he was charging into the storm.

  Ember was on her feet in a heartbeat, racing after him. She grabbed his arm and spun him around. “What are you doing?” she yelled. “We have to stick together!”

  “But Nisha’s out there.” Specks of ice clung to Moss’s face—tears.

  “We don’t know if that’s her,” Ember said. “And even if it is, we won’t be any help to her if we get ourselves lost.”

  She looked around. She thought she knew where the sled was, but she wasn’t certain. In this weather, they could walk right past it. How long would the storm last? How long could Nisha and Moss survive in this bitter cold, without blankets or shelter? As if in response, the storm howled louder, and the visibility dropped again.

  Moss’s eyes darted this way and that. The visions had him again. Acting on some instinct, Ember lifted her hand to the scale around her neck—

  The scale.

  Ember raised it to her eye with trembling fingers. There, on the snow—a faint glimmer of light. Or rather, two faint glimmers, one silver and one golden—a path that led to where they stood. The wind had swept away their footprints, but it seemed that it could not destroy this.

  Ember let out a relieved breath. At least she could find the way back to the sled! But that didn’t help Nisha.

  “What do we do?” Moss said through his tears.

  Ember swallowed. There was only one thing she could think of, and it frightened her more than anything. But Nisha . . . She thought of her warm laugh, their hands twined together. How she had fought to save Ember from Lord Norfell. Ember couldn’t abandon her. She wouldn’t, not without trying everything.

  She stepped away from Moss. “Stand back,” she warned.

  She looked down at her hands and concentrated. Flames flickered on her palms. Moss drew a sharp breath, but she ignored him. Ember let the fire travel from her hands up her arms. To her amazement, she found that she was able to tell it not to burn her clothes, and it obeyed, shimmering over her coat and hair like harmless heat haze. She let the fire spread until she was entirely alight, clothed in flame from head to toe.

  “Brighter,” Ember whispered. Would the fire obey? Or would it extinguish itself in a blinding burst, melting everything in the vicinity?

  But the fire listened. It brightened, burning white-hot in the darkness. Moss threw an arm over his face with a shout.

  “Brighter,” Ember said, her heart thundering at her success.

  She was a living torch, the flame reaching up a dozen feet into the sky. The storm raged, but it couldn’t touch the fire, which gobbled up any snow tossed its way with a vicious hiss. Finally Ember heard a girl’s voice shouting, and then a moment later, Nisha charged out of the storm. Nisha, flesh and blood and not an illusion, her face streaked with tears. She was clutching their lost tent.

  “I saw the fire!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I thought I would never find my way back! How did you—”

  She froze, her gaze shifting from Moss to Ember, standing at the heart of an inferno.

  Ember extinguished herself with a single sharp gesture. A plume of steam engulfed her, and when it cleared, both Nisha and Moss were staring at her with identical expressions of shock—and fear.

  “It’s all right,” Ember said. She wanted to run from the look in their eyes, but she forced herself to stand her ground. “I’m . . . I’m not dangerous. It was the only thing I could—”

  She couldn’t finish, for Nisha had leaped on her, wrapping her in a fierce hug. And Moss, to Ember’s astonishment, was laughing.

  Seventeen

  Misfits

  The fire dragon’s flame was a mystery until 1799, when entomologist Priscilla Hencefort argued that it is, in fact, a superheated form of bioluminescence similar to that found in fireflies. Her studies proved once and for all that dragons are Scientific, not Magical, beasts.

  —TAKAGI’S COMPENDIUM OF EXOTIC CREATURES

  Ember led them back to the sled, following the glowing trail she and Moss had left in the snow. There they erected the tent in the shelter of a boulder, and dived inside to wait out the storm.

  It was a long wait. Ember didn’t like to think about what would have happened if they hadn’t found Nisha—as it was, even wrapped in blankets in the relative warmth of the tent, the other girl was shivering. Moss, as usual, seemed unaffected. The three of them huddled together in the darkness, as beyond the tent, voices called their names and wicked laughter rang out. Finally the wind’s howl died to a moan, and the voices faded to whispers.

  They crept outside. Small patches of sky floated between the clouds, and the snow had dwindled to a few fat, lazy flakes. Nisha immediately dove back into the tent, yelping in the icy wind. She didn’t reappear until Moss and Ember had built a blazing fire and boiled water for tea.

  “What other spells can you do?” Moss asked.

  Ember blinked. “What?”

  “Well, you’re a Stormancer,” he said. “I don’t know why you didn’t tell us. No wonder you weren’t afraid to go after the prince!”

  “Er,” Ember said. This was the moment, then. Nisha and Moss would either hate her after this, or they would not. But even if they didn’t, it was hard to imagine them trusting her as they had before. She sat frozen, her heart thudding. How did real spies reveal their aliases? She imagined they did so in a dramatic yet nonchalant fashion. She doubted it involved being sick all over their own boots, which was a real danger in that moment.

  “She’s not a Stormancer!” Nisha rolled her eyes. “She’s a dragon. Obviously.”

  Moss stared. So did Ember.

  “I . . . ,” Ember said. “What? How?” Sentences seemed to have abandoned her.

  “Oh, please,” Nisha said. “Do you think I’m dense? Your father is renowned for his ability to transform animals—my parents used to scare me and Aditi into being good by telling us that the monster frog of Merseyside would come and get us. And then there’s the fact that you feel like you’re on fire all the time.” She snatched at Ember’s hand, holding it between her two cold ones like a mug of cider. “Ah! That’s better. Oh, and did you know you smell of smoke? Just a little. It isn’t that noticeable.”

  Ember flushed, for she hadn’t known that. “Still,” she said. “That could hardly be enough to—”

  “Well, there’s also the invisible wings,” Nisha said. “That’s a bit of a giveaway. I suppose your father thought they would come in handy, did he?�
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  “Well, no.” Ember was completely befuddled. “He made a mistake with the spell.”

  “I wondered if that was it,” Nisha said. “But I didn’t want to say anything. That would be rude, wouldn’t it? Imagine pointing at someone’s arm or ears or something and asking if their parents had made a mistake. Still, your father does have that reputation. Did you hear about Lady Trembleworth’s nose?”

  “I don’t understand.” Moss’s brow was furrowed. “If you’re a dragon, why did your father send you here? Surely it’s dangerous with all these hunters around.”

  “It’s more dangerous in London,” Ember said. “On account of my bursting into flames.”

  “Interesting!” Nisha cocked her head at Ember as if she were a geometry problem on Madame Rousseau’s blackboard. For a moment, the intelligence in her eyes was intimidating, and Ember remembered every time that Nisha had recited an obscure fact from memory, or made a complex calculation in her head in seconds. She began to wonder why she hadn’t guessed that Nisha might have figured out her secret. “Is it because of the climate? I read that fire dragons are more dangerous in the summer.”

  “What happened to your parents?” Moss said. “Why did Lord St. George adopt you? Is he a dragon too?”

  “Of course he’s not a dragon!” Nisha said exasperatedly. “They can’t do magic.”

  “How do you know?” Moss said. “They’re extinct—well, almost. And ice dragons have barely been studied.”

  “Dragons are Scientific,” Nisha said. Everything about them can be measured and explained.”

  Ember felt numb. She watched Nisha and Moss argue without hearing them. Finally she said, “Aren’t you angry that I lied to you?”

  Nisha seemed to think. “A little,” she admitted. “But I just figured you had a good reason not to tell us.”

  “You probably thought we’d be afraid,” Moss said.

  Ember nodded silently.

  “I can understand that.” He looked away, and Ember remembered that there were people back at the station who were afraid of him. She felt again the thrum of the invisible thread connecting her and Moss, and though she didn’t understand it, some of her tension melted. Suddenly she wanted to share everything, to sweep away all the secrets like cobwebs.

  She drew the heartscale from her coat and handed it to Moss. “This . . . this was my mother’s,” she said softly. “You were right—you can see things through it. I think what you saw before is the trail left by the ice dragons.”

  Moss’s eyes grew wide. “Of course!”

  “Then that means we can find Prince Gideon!” Nisha said. “That’s a relief. I didn’t want to say anything, but our chances weren’t very good before. About one in two hundred and fifty, if we were lucky.”

  “Look through it again,” Ember said to Moss. He did, tilting the scale toward the sky. “Look at me.”

  Moss did, and gasped. “You’re all lit up!”

  Ember watched nervously as Moss held up his own hand. He blinked, staring at it through the scale. “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you see it?”

  “Yes, but—” He turned the scale toward Nisha. “But that doesn’t make any sense. You and I look different, but not Nisha.”

  “Let me see.” Nisha snatched the scale from his hand. But she could see nothing that they described—not the dragons’ trail through the sky, nor Ember and Moss’s mysterious glow.

  After examining himself through the scale again, Moss handed it back to Ember. He was even paler than usual. “I don’t understand,” he said again.

  “I don’t either,” Ember said softly.

  “I’m not a dragon,” he said. “So what am I?”

  Nisha threaded her arm through his. “You’re Moss,” she said. “And you don’t have to look so grim. There’s all sorts of things that could explain this.”

  “We could ask my father,” Ember said, then stopped. She thought of the falcon’s cage on the beach, the door she had closed to Chesterfield. “I mean, when we get back,” she added quietly.

  “That’s right,” Nisha said. “And until then, there’s no use worrying. We should just be happy that we have a trail to follow.”

  Moss didn’t look convinced, but his face had lost its sickly aspect.

  “Are there any others like you?” he said.

  Ember shook her head slowly. “I’m the only one.”

  “I think we should keep going,” Nisha said. She gave Ember a pointed look, and Ember understood: Moss needed something else to think about. Ember realized that she did too. She felt overwhelmed. Nisha and Moss didn’t hate her. Nisha sat in the sled, looking at Ember expectantly, as she always did. How was it possible that everything could feel so different, while still appearing the same?

  Moss’s face was very pale as he climbed onto the sled. Ember touched his arm as he went by, and smiled. After a short hesitation, he smiled back, and seemed to understand. They were misfits, but at least they were a they. Somehow, that made her feel lighter.

  They traveled on through vast valleys and fields of snow so light it scattered under the sled like sugar. But after a few miles, the sled gave a crack, and then a wobble. Ember called for the dogs to halt.

  One of the narrow strips of wood that formed the base of the sled had separated from the others. It hung loose, causing the sled to drag. Worse, some of the other boards were cracked, and creaked ominously when Ember put her weight on them. The top rail had separated completely from the handlebar, and the nail was missing.

  “It must have been damaged in the storm,” Ember said. Panic washed over her. They couldn’t very well walk to the South Pole.

  Nisha examined the sled, chewing her lip. Then, wordlessly, she untied one of her ribbons and looped it around the loose piece of wood, tightening and knotting it until it was secure again.

  “Good thinking,” Moss said. “Just like when you fixed Professor Wentworth’s wheelbarrow.”

  “So that’s why you wear all those ribbons!” Ember said.

  Nisha frowned. “I wear ribbons because I like ribbons. Still,” she added with a grin. “They do come in handy sometimes.”

  They set off again. Every time a piece of the sled came loose, they would pause, and Nisha would secure it with a ribbon or two. Soon the sled began to resemble some sort of strange purple-furred creature, ribbons streaming as it trundled along.

  The mountains sank into the distance, little more than folds of darkness at the hem of the starry sky. Ember breathed in the frosty air, relishing the chill against her skin. In spite of everything, excitement stirred within her. She had used her fire to save Nisha, fire that had only ever destroyed what she cared about. She felt oddly light. The vast sweep of snow before her could have been the back of a cloud.

  As the hours went by, she began to lose track of time—had they just eaten dinner, or breakfast? Was it time to sleep yet? It was worrying, because she knew that every passing hour only decreased their chances of finding the prince alive. Her eyes craved light. The stars were beautiful, as was the green of the aurora, but she wanted more. When they stopped, they huddled around the fire, gazing hungrily into the flames.

  “What I wouldn’t give for some hot chocolate!” Nisha sighed. “Do you think the prince has any in his supplies?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ember said.

  “That idiot,” Nisha said. “How much farther, do you think?”

  Ember looked through the scale. She was beginning to worry. The trail of light left by the dragons, while not susceptible to the wind, did not seem to be permanent. She now had to squint to see it, which meant two things: the dragons, traveling at a much quicker pace, were now far, far ahead—and the trail might not survive long enough for them to locate their destination.

  “What’s that?” Moss said suddenly. Ahead of them was a pile of rocks on a low hill, silhouetted against the southern lights.

  The dogs had seen it too. Finnorah gave a yip and jerked sharply to the right, drawing
the other dogs with her. Ember had to pull them to a stop—they wouldn’t go near the rocks, and seemed to want to charge off in the opposite direction.

  “What’s wrong?” she murmured to Finnorah after dismounting from the sled. The dog whined and nipped at Ember’s coat.

  Ember gazed at the rocks. They were an odd shape, piled in the middle of an empty expanse of undulating snow hills, and something about them made her shiver. She lifted the heartscale to her eye, and saw nothing.

  She froze. Nothing. When she looked through the scale, the stones vanished like fog.

  Slowly Ember strode toward them. “Stay there,” she said to Nisha and Moss. Moss nodded, but Nisha let out a snort, and seconds later Ember heard her boots crunching after her.

  “What is it?” she called.

  “I’m not sure,” Ember murmured. Behind her, Finnorah let out a long, low howl.

  Ember trudged closer. She looked through the scale. Again, the rocks disappeared—through the glass, she saw only the flat top of the hill.

  “What’s so interesting about a pile of rocks?” Nisha complained.

  Ember stopped. A terrible chill settled in her stomach. “Those aren’t rocks.”

  They were bones.

  The rib cage of a massive dragon loomed before her. It lay on its side, the bones of its tail curled around its body. Beyond it, visible through the white ribs, was a second skeleton, just as clean as the first. The wings, made of more delicate bones than the rest, seemed to have been broken by the elements, and lay in pieces beside the bodies.

  Ember closed her eyes. She had hoped never to see another dead dragon in her life—and here were two of them. She held the scale up to her eye with shaking fingers, and watched the bones disappear, apart from a faint smudge. Given that the scale could pick out living dragons easily enough, its inability—or refusal—to show the bones struck Ember as ominous.