She was a dragon.
Her body was a mass of lines and lumps and at first Summer could not make sense of it, and then she realized that under the wax lay chains: dozens, hundreds, chains as thick around as Summer’s chest, chains as narrow as a strand of hair.
Summer stood rooted to the spot with dragonfear. Her tongue pressed against the roof of her mouth. In the back of her mind, in the chambers of her heart, she was a tiny animal in the undergrowth, and a predator moved overhead.
The dragon could move her head only a few inches. Metal wrapped her muzzle and wax and honey had sealed her eyes shut.
She opened her mouth an inch or two, setting the chains rattling, and said, “I cannot see you.”
Summer drew in a deep, gagging breath, and then another. The dust was thick and she was not sure if she would choke on it first, or on the fear.
The dragon’s voice was quiet and surprisingly high pitched, with a hiss of breath under it.
Wasps began to land on the dragon’s closed eye. They picked at the crystalized honey and chewed away at the wax. Summer stood and breathed and her racing heart slowed while the wasps cleared the film from around the Queen’s eyelids.
She can’t get me. She’s chained down. Someone’s chained her down. Of course. She’s the Queen-in-Chains. It must have been Zultan, he must keep her chained up here, but why would he, she’s a dragon, she could burn everything, not just set little fires, he was afraid of a wolf and he’s got a dragon—
“Why are you chained up?” croaked Summer.
“Ahhhhhh…” The Queen shivered. There were more crackles of wax and rattling chains. The wasps rose up for an instant in a buzzing cloud, then settled back down to their task of cleaning.
“Did…did Zultan do this?”
“Yesssss…” breathed the Queen and the hiss was louder now. Summer could smell the dragon’s breath. It smelled of honey and sulfur and wax.
She had read all the fairy tales in the library. She knew how the stories went. It was utterly mad and she knew it was mad—positively dicked in the nob, Reginald would say—and she said it anyway.
“If I set you free, will you stop sending wasps to sting the wondrous things?”
The dragon screamed.
It was a shrill, childlike scream, backed by a dragon’s lungs. Summer took a step back, horrified, and the sound struck the paper walls and wax and died away without echoes.
“No!” sobbed the dragon, thrashing as well as it could in the confines of the chain. “No, no, you can’t! Don’t touch them! Don’t unlock them! Don’t touch me!”
“I won’t!” said Summer. “I won’t if you don’t want me to!”
This had not been in any fairy tale she had ever read.
“Odds and eggs,” whispered the weasel in her pocket, “it’s scared!”
He’s right.
The dragon is frightened.
The dragon is frightened of…me?
It made no sense. It was like being told that a skyscraper feared a snail. The dragon was vast, impossible, ancient, built on the scale of whales and mountains. It would take a hero to slay one.
I would not wish that on you, the Forester had said, and Summer understood why at last. How monstrous a thing it must be, to be that hero. Like being the wasp that stung the Frog Tree to death. To be so small and to singlehandedly unmake a great and wondrous thing.
Summer was an eleven-year-old girl with her hair in tangles and her shoelaces untied. She felt tiny and fragile and…young.
“I’m not a hero,” she said. She said it to reassure herself as much as the dragon, but the dragon quieted.
The wasps pulled away from the Queen’s eye and she blinked.
The eye underneath was gigantic. It was easily as big as Glorious when he curled himself up.
It was hazel-brown with flecks of green and it looked human and that was impossibly wrong in that great draconic head, which should have had eyes like a lizard, eyes like—
—the Forester—
Memories crowded back. A story told around a fiery hedgehog. A woman with dragon’s eyes in a human body. How did I forget? How did I ever forget?
“You’re the one,” said Summer. “You’re the girl that took the dragon’s body. You’re a human, like me.”
The eye rolled, and Summer learned what very few humans of her world would ever know, that the whites of a dragon’s eyes are nearly gold and they glow like foxfire in the dark.
“How did you know?” cried the dragon, and this the wasps took up—hhhhow hhhoww hhhhhow—in a terrible sibilance from all directions, reflecting the terror of the Queen-in-Chains.
Wasps began to land on Summer’s shoulders, their stingers poised above her skin. The weasel in her shirt pocket became utterly still, but she could feel his heart racing through the thin fabric.
“I met the dragon,” said Summer. She didn’t dare swat at the wasps, for fear that they would sting. She looked in the dragon’s frightened human eye and determinedly did not look at the wasps.
If I don’t look at them, I won’t panic. If I don’t panic, I’ll be okay. She could feel the panic coiled in her chest, waiting to spring, but she jammed it down into the hidden room and wrote, I WILL STAY CALM across the walls.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I mean, she’s all right. She isn’t mad.”
The dragon shuddered again. “Mad,” she said hoarsely. “Mad! She should thank me. This body…this horrible body…you don’t know. Oh god! Why did you wake me? I want to sleep. Why won’t they let me sleep?”
And suddenly, like a bone snapping back into the socket, Summer understood.
She did not know why the Queen did not want to be unchained. She did not know how Zultan had gotten the chains on her in the first place. She did not know why the Queen couldn’t sleep.
But she understood at last why, out of all the girls in the world, Baba Yaga had come to her back gate and sent her in search of her heart’s desire.
She was not a hero. She could not snap a man’s throat out like a wolf, nor soar through the air like a bird. But there was one thing that she could do well.
She sat down cross-legged on the floor of the cathedral, very carefully, so as not to startle the wasps on her shoulders.
“It will be all right,” she said to the Queen-in-Chains. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the dragon,” said the Queen in Chains. “This terrible dragon. I was so small before. I lived in the city, in the temple city…I think it must have been far from here, I don’t know. I was young. The things they did—no, I won’t tell you!”
“It’s all right,” said Summer. “You don’t have to.” Her voice only shook a little when she said it, as she tried not to think of what the dragon might mean.
“A woman needed to get into the temple. I knew the side door. It was by the trash-heaps. I hid there most days. I could get her in. She offered me a gift. She wore a headdress but she had horns like a demon. She meant to kill the ones inside. What did I care? I took the gift. It was a wish tied up in cord and alligator skin. I wished to be a dragon.”
Summer nodded. It would not have occurred to her to ask why someone would make a wish like that. Such wishes were entirely sensible, if you did not know what they would lead to.
“Then I was here,” said the Queen-in-Chains. She made a hissing, keening noise, and Summer bit her lip, because she had not known until that moment that dragons could not cry. “In this body. Oh god! It was terrible. It wanted to kill and fight and burn and I was so small, I couldn’t stop it. I burned everything around me. I burned the city. I smashed stones until I had ground half a mountain away and even a dragon would be exhausted. And I fell down and slept and when I woke up again I was hungry and I ate…I ate everything…cows…people…” She opened her mouth as far as the chains would let her and keened again.
“It’s all right,” said Summer, even though it wasn’t and perhaps never would be again. Her part in this play wasn’t to tell the truth, it was only
to be soothing.
“If the dragon is very tired, I’m almost big enough to control it,” said the Queen. “It doesn’t think. It just kills and is hungry. I made it go fishing.” She gave a hiccupping laugh. “If you dive very deep, it’s easy to get tired. I crawled out on the beach. I slept. Sleep is good. But then you wake up. I don’t want to wake up and burn the world. I just want to sleep for a thousand years. Forever if I can.”
“That’s why you’re chained up,” said Summer slowly, understanding. “So you don’t get out and burn things.”
The Queen nodded until the chains clanked together like bells. “I asked,” she said. “I was exhausted and I wanted to sleep and the dogs found me. They didn’t kill me. They thought I was a real dragon and I told them…you have to tell the dogs when they ask you…it’s their eyes. And then they asked what they could do, and I said chain me up, don’t let me do this again. And I slept and when I woke, I was chained down and the dragon couldn’t break free.”
She closed her eye and shuddered with remembered joy. “It was...wonderful…”
The cathedral was silent for a long time. The wasps on Summer’s shoulders lifted off and settled along the dragon’s spine. Summer felt her stomach unknot just a little.
“What happened next?” she asked finally.
“Zultan,” said the Queen mournfully. “Zultan came. He unchained me. I begged him not to. He knew what would happen. But he said that if I took down the Tower, he would chain me up again and let me sleep. He fed me first. The body ate them. It wasn’t me. I didn’t want to!”
“I know,” said Summer, as the Queen’s voice rose to a wail. “I know you didn’t.”
“Once it wasn’t hungry, I could follow him,” said the Queen dully. “It wasn’t far away. The Tower of Dogs. I tried not to. They’d helped me. The ones that ran, I didn’t chase. I could do that much. I kept beating the body against the stones. I thought it might get tired. The Tower fell down instead. And then I was tired and I flew back to my chains. When I woke up, Zultan had chained me up again. He said I could stay chained until he needed me again.” She shuddered.
“Why not kill him instead?” asked Summer. She was amazed at how calm her voice was, suggesting someone’s death.
“Then there would be no one left to chain me,” said the dragon. She shuddered. “I have to stay chained. It’s the only way. The body doesn’t really wake up, you know. It’s mostly asleep now. But if they come off, it flies—it burns—I burn—“
She has trapped herself in a prison that will never grow old, the Forester had said.
“Where did the wasps come from?” asked Summer.
“They found me,” said the Queen. “My friends. They needed a queen. They swarmed from another place…somewhere else…a narrow place between worlds. Oh, I don’t understand it all! But they came and they built on top of the remains of my prison.”
“They’re poisoning things,” said Summer, fighting to keep her voice steady. “Out in the world. Great things. Wondrous things.”
The dragon shifted. Dust and wasps moved through spots of light on the floor.
“I know. I asked them to do it,” said the Queen-in-Chains.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Summer swallowed several times. Her tongue felt dry. She wished that she had brought some water.
She thought about how thirsty she was very determinedly, so that she would not scream at the dragon. The dragon who was wretched and pitiable and who had been destroying the world.
When she thought that she could speak again without yelling, she licked her lips and said, “Why did you ask them to sting things?”
“Only big things,” said the dragon. “Only magic. Only things that Zultan might want destroyed. If they’re gone, he doesn’t need me. When they’re all gone, he’ll let me sleep.”
Summer counted to ten in her head. “They aren’t just destroying dangerous things,” she said. “They’re stinging anything big and magic. There’s a tree that makes frogs, and a giant turtle, and a cactus city.”
“If the wasps don’t do it, I will,” said the dragon simply. “He’ll make me. And my body will burn cities and eat the people, even the ones like I was, the little ones in trash-heaps and the ones who just want to get away, even the dogs who helped me. This way, some of them survive.” She closed her eye again.
“If we stopped Zultan for you—” began Summer, with no idea how she would do such a thing, or if it was even possible to do so.
“If not him, then another,” said the dragon. “Someone will come. Someone will find me and take off my chains.”
“You could tell the wasps to keep them out,” said Summer. Astonishingly, she found herself getting annoyed at the dragon’s cowardice.
I shouldn’t be. It must be terrible to have a body that goes mad and destroys things. Chaining herself up is responsible. She’s doing the best she can do.
But the best she could do had her poisoning every wondrous thing, so she’s not exactly blameless!
“It will be over soon,” said the Queen. “When all the magic’s gone, it’ll be over. No one will need a dragon then. I can sleep. Really sleep. Not like this, where I keep waiting for the sound of a key in the lock.” She shuddered.
Summer shifted her weight, and her jeans pulled a little, and she felt the objects in her pocket poke against her skin.
Waiting for the sound of a key in the lock…
She reached into her pocket and drew out the lock to the garden gate.
This is mad. This is stupid. It’s a little tiny lock. Zultan could probably snap it with his bare hands.
“What is that?” asked the Queen.
“It’s a lock,” said Summer.
But it isn’t about the lock, is it? This is about the Queen. The wasps could stop Zultan easily, I bet. And if not—well, we’ll find a way to stop him. The important thing is that the Queen thinks she’s safe.
“Where is the key?” whispered the Queen, and the wasps dropped from the ceiling and repeated the question with their wings…whhhhhere isss isss isss the keyyy…
“There is no key in this world,” said Summer.
The chains shook as the Queen trembled.
“If you call back the wasps,” said Summer, “I will lock your chains.”
There was movement behind the Queen. Two great shapes formed out of the wasps, puppets nearly as large as the dragon. They looked like nothing Summer recognized. Things, perhaps, from a narrow space between worlds.
They blinked their great winged eyes and…nodded.
It had never occurred to Summer in her wildest dreams that perhaps the wasps themselves had no desire to destroy the wondrous things.
She said the wasps are her friends. Maybe they’re doing this for their friend. Can they think like that? If they’re all together like this?
Are they like the valet-flock somehow?
In her mind’s eye she saw the chasm and the swirling and heard her friend say, “A flock of starlings that big would be a god.”
The Queen-in-Chains closed her eyes. “Will I be able to sleep?”
Summer opened her mouth, not sure how to answer, and the wasps spoke.
“Yyyyesssssss....sssssleeeeep….”
Summer closed her mouth again.
The wasp puppets leaned down and stroked the dragon with hands made of insects. “Sssssleeeep…” they said. “Ffffriennnnnd….ssssleeep…”
Summer held up the lock.
“Will it work?” whispered the dragon.
“Baba Yaga sent me,” said Summer. And that was true, even if it did not answer the question.
She had learned, many years ago, that all you really needed was to sound comforting, when the other person wanted so very much to be comforted.
A wasp landed on her palm. It was very large, much larger than the one they had followed. It looked at her with ruby eyes. Its stinger was longer than her thumb.
Summer bowed her head to the wasp.
It reached out with
two striped legs and plucked the padlock from her fingers.
The hive went quiet. The humming of wings stilled, as if they held their breath.
In the vast silence of the cathedral, Summer listened to the wasp fly almost silently over the dragon’s back. It landed on the great mass of chains.
Another wasp joined it. Her angle was too low to see what they did, but she heard the sound of metal rasping metal, and then, very quietly…
Click.
The wasps led her out of the cathedral. She stumbled once on the uneven ground and they caught her held her upright, a grip made of hundreds of legs. Summer did not recoil. She, and they, were beyond that.
Had they done it? Had she and the wasps quieted the Queen-in-Chains?
The wasps released her halfway down the slope. She looked up at the wasp-puppet and it blinked at her once, slowly.
“Will it be all right?” she asked.
The wasp-puppet fell apart into a cloud that buzzed around her, and in the cloud she heard “zzzzall rrrrightzzzz….”
Mimicry? Or promise?
The cloud of wasps flew back to the paper nest. The light from the pale sky shone on their wings and turned them into ivory and scarlet and gold.
Summer thought, I have done the best I can. I fixed it for now. I can’t fix it forever. That’s someone else’s job, maybe.
Don’t worry about things you cannot fix.
She turned away and looked down the slope to the chasm.
There was a tall shape on the bridge, and her friends were nowhere in sight.
Zultan’s scarred face had gone very red. At first Summer thought that he must be flushed with rage, and then she realized that without his mask, his fragile skin had burned. The white hairs stood out against the scarlet like snow.
He did not look angry. He looked very calm, though he was swaying a little, but perhaps that was simply the motion of the bridge.
“What did you do with my friends?” demanded Summer, standing at the edge of the bridge.
“I did nothing,” said Zultan. “They hared off chasing someone else without any help from me.”
“The antelope woman,” said Summer, almost inaudibly.
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