by Finley Aaron
“The yagi are going to catch up to us one way or another,” Ram argues the moment he’s swallowed his fish. “If we can reach the area before it gets dark out—”
“I think Felix is right.” Nia interrupts Ram. “We don’t want to endanger any dragons that might be on the Fijian island.”
Ram clamps his mouth shut. Silently, he kicks a pile of sand into a pillow, and smooths out a bed for himself, shooting me a sideways glance that says he saw what I did there, and he’s not happy.
I won.
Not that it means much in the big picture. If I had to guess now, I’d say Nia still likes Ram better than she likes me.
But she took my side—technically, more than once, even. She backed me up.
We’re going to do things my way, for the first time on this trip.
The thrill of victory lasts long enough for me to mound sand for a pillow and lie down to sleep.
Then I realize the catch.
Of course there’s a catch.
If we do things my way instead of Ram’s way, and anything goes wrong, it will be my fault.
*
I dream, again, of fire, but this time, the walls of fire are not simply barring me from getting anywhere, but they’re burning things I recognize. There’s my bedroom as it looked in my childhood, with the train set circling the room on a track built on shelves high on the walls. The train courses around, through a tunnel, across the bridge that spans the door, whistling in distress as the flames chase it and lick it up.
The flames devour my favorite park, the spy cabin we stayed in less than a week ago, the stable in our Azeri village where we keep horses, the village library, the homes of my friends.
The flames are hungry, burning, consuming, leaving charred blackness in their wake.
They are destruction. It’s the touch of destruction, made manifest in consuming fire. Even as I realize that, I see where the flames are coming from.
Me.
I started this fire.
I’m burning everything up, everything I care about, everything I love.
I hear Nia’s voice crying out from the other side of the flames. She’s calling for help, for rescue from the fire.
From the fire I caused.
I started this fire, but I don’t know how to make it stop.
“Shh! Calm down. It was just a dream.” Nia’s bent over me, kneeling beside me in the sand, her fingers cool against my flushed forehead.
“The fire,” I whisper. “It’s everywhere.”
“We didn’t build a fire.” Nia corrects me.
I shake my head and clear my thoughts. Glancing across our campsite, I see Ram is fast asleep. We’re in the second watch shift, then. Embarrassed by my behavior, I feel the need to explain. “I keeping having these dreams of fire surrounding me. I can’t escape. It’s burning everything.”
“I thought you said I was the Phoenix.” Nia gives me a look I don’t recognize. Is she teasing me? I haven’t known her to tease or to be anything but dead serious, like Ram.
Maybe I imagined the look. But no, it means something. I just don’t know what it means.
Whatever it was, I do know this: we’re closing in on Fiji and the possible end of our journey, and I haven’t wooed Nia with any success at all yet. This may be my last chance.
I smile what I hope is a charming smile, which I fear may instead be a groggy, I-just-woke-up-and-am-not-entirely-with-it-yet smile.
Judging by Nia’s wary eyebrow, it’s the latter.
I plunge on, regardless. The trick is to get her talking about something. About anything, really. We need to interact, pure and simple.
So at the risk of sounding stupid, I say the first thing that comes to mind. “But you are a phoenix. You were born of fire.”
“I didn’t choose to be.” Nia lounges in the sand beside me and props her head on her hand. She’s looking at me. I have her attention. We’re talking about something important—I know it’s important because her words seem to reach inside me and take hold of my deepest parts.
“Is that how it works?” I feel slightly breathless. “You have to choose the fire?” In my dreams, the fire was coming from me. Does that mean anything? Do dreams mean anything, or are they just the dross of our lives, the byproduct of our productive hours—waste, to be thrown away?
Is there anything valuable inside them, something we can mine as though for treasure?
Nia sounds reflective. “The way I understand the myth of the phoenix, it can only be reborn after giving selflessly. After dying selflessly.”
“A sacrificial death?”
“Exactly. That’s how I know I’m not one—I didn’t choose anything. I made no sacrifice. I hadn’t even technically been born.”
Nia has shared something precious, a confession, almost. I don’t know how to respond. I want to honor what she’s said, but how? Everything I think of sounds cheesy, unworthy of her brave admission.
She rolls onto her back again. Is she going to go to sleep? Is our conversation over?
No, I can’t let it be over. I haven’t won her heart yet. I’ve got to keep her talking—we were so close. But what can I say? Something, anything.
“Do you think it’s possible to make gold?” I blurt the question just as Nia rolls away from me with her back turned my direction. Her guard shift must be over. She looks like she’s going to go to sleep.
But at my question, she moves back toward me, guarded questions on her face.
I continue. “Do you think Eudora thinks it’s possible to make gold?”
Nia rolls onto her side beside me, propping her face in her hand with her elbow in the sand. “I told you about the books in her library.”
“About gold?”
“About gold, and other things.” Moonlight kisses Nia’s face and lips. The night is long spent. It will be morning before too long. Nia seems to weigh whether she should speak further.
I will her to, pleading with my eyes since I don’t know what words to use.
Nia makes a reluctant face, casts me a sideways glance, and then picks up a pinch of sand, letting it fall grain by grain from her fingers like so many twinkling stars. “One day there was a book. A book about gold. A book I’d never seen in the library before. It was very old. Handwritten.” She measures out the words like the individual grains of sand. Falling, spinning, catching the moonlight and glinting before landing and being buried by the others that follow.
There is something here. Something golden, if I can see its true beauty before it falls from sight.
Now she looks up and meets my eyes. Hers are lit with surprise. Had she forgotten I’m here? Or is she surprised to find herself speaking these words, a secret she had never expected to tell anyone? Sometimes, in the enchanted light of the moon, words are spoken that could never stand the light of day.
I’m afraid to push her further, to break the silence. I want her to say more, but I fear my words will only push her away. I proceed with caution. “An old book—about gold?”
She dips her head and closes her eyes. “The language was ancient.” Her eyes pop open and meet mine. “You know how old English books are hard to read? Beowulf, even Shakespeare? Language changes over time. There are dialects. This book was in Russian. I’d been using the Russian language program for several months with no real goal in mind, just learning the language to fill the time, and because I thought it might come in handy.” She falls silent and picks up another pinch of sand.
“The book was in an ancient dialect of Russian?”
Nia nods, and once again the grains of sand fall idly from her fingers. “I tried my best to read it, but between the sketchy handwriting and the strange dialect, and the fact that I wasn’t fluent in Russian yet.” She shakes her head regretfully. “I studied much harder after that so I’d be fluent, so I could understand the words in the book if I ever saw it again. But I never did. I think the white witch had brought it into the library from some hidden place. Maybe she wanted to cross-check a
fact from another book. Something like that. I only saw it that one time, and I didn’t understand it all then.”
“But what you did see—what you could understand—”
Nia sits up straight and brushes the sand from her fingertips. “I don’t know enough of what I read to know what it said.”
“But it talked about gold?”
“Yes.” Nia sighs. “I don’t know if the author was trying to preserve knowledge, or simply record theories. I don’t know if it was fact or musing. A theory, or a recipe.”
“A recipe?” I prompt when she falls silent again for some time. “For making gold?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Nia’s eyes widen as though she’s been caught or found out, or hadn’t realized she’d given away so much. The pre-morning dawn has begun to light the eastern horizon, and the night is losing its magic cloak of secrecy. We’re vastly closer to the equator here, so the day and night are nearly equally divided.
I don’t want to push her, but I fear Nia won’t tell me anything more once daylight comes.
“Gold is an element. It isn’t made, it exists.” She speaks as though correcting a child.
I close my eyes. This is the problem, then. She doesn’t want to tell me what she read because she doesn’t believe in it. She doesn’t think it’s possible to make gold.
But Eudora believes it. And plenty of magicians and scientists and experts and thinkers once believed it was possible, too.
I don’t know if it is, or not, but I want to know what Nia knows, even the parts she can’t admit to herself. If it’s possible to make gold, maybe old King Midas wasn’t just a myth. The golden touch part may have been an embellishment, but the part where gold was made where no gold had existed before?
Sure, it sounds like a dream, like a child’s fantasy. But there is such a thing as gold, even if we don’t know where it comes from, really.
It has to come from somewhere.
“What did the book say?” I whisper, fearing that to speak at full volume would be to close the tiny window that has allowed this conversation to take place at all.
Nia rolls onto her back.
Have I killed the conversation, then? Or perhaps I should be surprised to have learned as much as I did.
I puzzle it over, my thoughts dissecting every word Nia has spoken, as well as the gaps she left between, the telling omissions, clues hidden in what she didn’t say.
“What did the recipe call for, or the theory?” I speak hesitant words into the night, but they seem to dissolve in the open air, unheard, unanswered.
Then Nia rolls onto her side again. “Tears. Dragon tears. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but the word came up several times and I looked up the Russian later to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood.”
“Dragon tears have magical properties,” I remind Nia.
She blows out a huff of air that says she doesn’t agree with me.
“No, seriously. My father swears that’s how he survived when he was gored by the evil dragon Ion. My mom cried on him. He says her tears saved his life.”
“I have cried many tears.” Nia’s words are filled with the pain of them. “None of them ever brought anyone back from the brink of death. None of my tears ever turned to gold.”
My breath catches in my throat. This would be a great time for me to make a connection with Nia, some romantic thing that says I understand her like no one else can, and we should be together. What do I say? What can I say? Something profound. And moving. And loving. “I’m sorry.”
It feels so feeble.
Nia sniffs. “It was a long time ago.” She rolls onto her back again.
Now I’m sure I’ve blown it. She doesn’t want to talk about her old pain again, or gold, or any of it. But the conversation churns through my head, so many bits that don’t sit level with the others. “Why does the white witch have a Russian language learning program in her library, anyway?”
“Hmm?” Nia sounds distracted. My words must have tugged her back from the brink of sleep.
“The white witch—she lives in Russia. To my knowledge, she’s always lived there. Doesn’t she already know Russian? Why would she need to learn it?”
Nia sighs. “I don’t know.”
I try to answer my own question. “If she’s half as old as we think she is, I suppose the Russian she grew up with is as old as Beowulf is to us. Maybe she wanted to learn modern Russian.”
“Nah.” Nia dismisses my theory. “I think it was for her daughter.”
“Her daughter?” I sit bolt upright.
On the other side of Nia, Ram sits upright, too. “Eudora has a daughter?”
I don’t know how long he’s been awake, listening. Probably eavesdropping on my conversation with Nia to be sure I don’t woo her out from under him—the only reason he hasn’t cut in already was that I was doing such a poor job of wooing her, he didn’t need to interrupt. Even if he was only half-awake before, he’s certainly awake now.
“Eudora. She’s the white witch, right?” Nia clarifies. “The one who made the mamluki, or yagi, or whatever you want to call them? The one who made the water yagi and forced me to deliver them to lakes and the ocean?”
Ram and I are both nodding like crazy, assuring her we’re talking about the same person.
Nia confirms, “Yes, she has a daughter.”
I listen in shocked silence. Eudora has a daughter? She can’t possibly. She’s something like eight hundred years old, far past egg-laying age. Or so I’ve always been told. None of the dragons I know are nearly old enough to confirm any of that.
“How old is her daughter?” Ram asks.
“Last time I saw her, maybe ten or twelve.” Nia shrugs. “That was over a year ago. She’s been away at boarding school ever since. All the language programs in the library were for her, I think. She was the only one I ever saw using them.”
“Eudora has a daughter?” I repeat, still grappling with the idea, which doesn’t fit anything I ever imagined. “How? Ten years old—does she have a mate?”
“Her daughter? Or the white witch? Neither of them had any mate I ever saw.”
“The daughter must be adopted,” Ram concludes. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“But she looks like her mother,” Nia informs him.
“What’s her name?” I ask.
Nia raises her empty hands toward me. “I never learned the white witch’s name, and I wasn’t allowed to interact with her daughter. I can tell you very little about either of them. I was a prisoner. They let me use the library, at least, let me have a bit of freedom inside the castle, but I didn’t dare overstep those bounds, or I lost even those freedoms again.”
“Eudora’s over eight hundred years old,” Ram reminds us.
Nia raises an eyebrow. “She looks thirty, maybe forty. It’s difficult to say, because in some ways, she doesn’t look right at all. Sometimes I could have sworn I could see her skeleton right through her. She’s a ghost of a person, a corpse inside a body. Haunted.”
“And her daughter?”
“A little strange, too. But not as bad as the witch. She had an innocence about her, but she still seemed haunted. Or maybe it was the castle. Everything about that place was cold and creepy.” Nia shivers.
Ram has scooted over closer to us and is sitting cross-legged in between me and Nia, but a little off to one side. We make a triangle, almost, together. He gives me a look. “Our mother turned Eudora to only human before any of us were born. Twenty-two years ago, give or take.”
“The daughter would be, what, thirteen years old now, at the most?” I clarify.
Nia nods.
Ram continues. “Dragons don’t age past maturity. Physically, we stay twenty-something forever.”
“I’m almost two-hundred, but physically, we’re peers.” Nia gives Ram a tiny smile that makes my heart plummet inside me.
She and Ram are peers.
What am I? Not their peer, apparently. So, what, I’m j
ust a kid? A peer with Eudora’s daughter? I caught all the food on this trip. Ram and Nia would never have never met if not for me.
Ram returns Nia a tiny smile of his own, and continues talking. “But once my mother turned Eudora to only human, she was no longer a dragon.”
“She started aging again?” Nia fills in when Ram pauses.
He nods, his eyes alight with theory. “And any child she would have had would have been only human, especially if the father was only human.”
I’m listening, but I can’t talk. I can hardly process what I’m hearing. Ram and Nia are on some kind of wavelength together, and I’m not there. It’s like I’m not even here.
But while they’re having their little moment together, the sun is rising. In the distance, I can hear the waves beating the shores of the atoll. I smell the iodine tang of the sea rising up with the tropical breeze. But the scent is more than that of the sea. There’s something else along with it.
Something familiar.
And evil.
It’s my turn to keep watch, isn’t it? But I haven’t been alert, looking out to sea. I haven’t been asleep, either, and Nia never formally told me it was my turn to take over from her, but I should have been watching. I was the one who insisted we keep watch in the first place.
I leap to my feet and run toward the beach, peering into the pre-morning dawn, past the sand, into the water. The waves reflect the ambient light, and dark forms mar the white sand. Inhuman creatures stagger up from the waves.
The yagi have arrived.
I sprint back to our camp. “Yagi!”
For an instant, Ram and Nia look startled, as though they were so lost in each other they’d forgotten all about the part where we’re being hunted to extinction by mutant mercenaries. But then they blink and seem to come to their senses, and together we rise as dragons into the morning sky just as the yagi swarm the island, their armored feet scuffling the sand where only minutes before, we slept.
*
We fly hard through the day, across the equator and on toward Fiji. I’m kicking myself for all my mistakes. I let the yagi sneak up on us much too close. I was the one who insisted we keep a watch, and then I got caught with my guard down. It’s inexcusable.