“Yes you are.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn't yell at you. That wasn't yelling,” he defended.
“Yeah, it was . . . But that's not why I'm crying.”
“Then why?”
“I miss my family,” she sobbed.
“I told you that you were better off in the city with--”
“Not them!” she shouted angrily. “My real family. When I had a bad dream, Daddy would hold me and Mommy would tell me a story and I knew everything would be fine . . . But--but everything wasn't fine! They died . . . and . . . I'll never see them again. Why did I live and they die?”
She buried her face in the blanket against the dragon's neck and cried. Halfax could do nothing but listen. He simply did not know what he was supposed to do. This tiny thing, curled up against him, was so fragile. Such a fragile body, certainly, but diligence and care was all that was needed to protect a body. Her emotions were just as fragile, and he had nothing for them. It simply had never been expected of him, and he'd never imagined it would be. He felt helpless, lost. Finally, a thought crept to his mind.
“Do you want to know why you lived?”
“You know?”
With effort, Halfax managed to fetch a coin from his hoard.
“Flip this with your left hand and tell me how it lands.”
She took the coin and flipped it in the air.
“It landed face-up.”
“Flip it again, and again. As many times as you like. It always will.”
Sure enough, half a dozen tries ended with the coin facing her each time.
“How did you know it would do that?”
“Because you are lucky. Because fate has great things in store for you.”
“Lucky? But . . . but my family died. I was thrown out of my town!”
“You survived the fire, and you were thrown to the one creature dedicated to your protection. Your bloodline runs thick with luck. Sometimes impossibly bad. In your case, impossibly good. The flip of the coin is one of the signs. Heads for good luck, tails for bad.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother. She did tell me one story,” he said.
“She did?” Jade sniffed.
“Yes. But it is a very long story . . .”
“That's okay. You can finish it tomorrow, or the day after.”
“And it happened a very long time ago.”
“Then it really happened?” she asked, fascination pushing fear and sadness aside for a moment. “Tell me!”
Jade sniffed and cuddled closer, wrapping the blanket tightly around her.
“Many years ago before you, or I, or even my mother was born, there was a woman. Her name was Myranda . . .”
#
The tale was indeed a long one. It was a story of heroes and heroism, of a great war and the trying times that followed, a story familiar to Jade and yet so new. There were familiar names, like Desmeres, but the roles were different. Names she knew as great men were sinister or unscrupulous. Creatures she thought were monsters were selfless defenders.
Halfax was not a storyteller, and it showed. He spoke of his mother, Myn, and the adventures of she and her friends. He called them "the Chosen," and spoke of deeds great and small, but he told it as a spy might deliver a briefing. Simple, efficient accounts of events. There was little flavor or life to the words, but that made little difference to Jade. She stopped him often, urging him for details and descriptions, and painted the scenes in her mind.
When she slept, the events sprang to life, easily forcing aside the bleak dreams of old.
He continued the tale for weeks, reciting it every night until she fell asleep. When it was through, she urged him to begin again. And so he did--and as he did, the story evolved. He remembered her pleas for detail, and with each telling he included all she had asked for during the last. The tale would swell with each pass until it was dripping with detail and teeming with adventure. And even so, each time it ended, there came the same request.
“Tell me more!” Jade piped.
“There is no more to tell,” Halfax grumbled.
“Sure there is. You said that your mother was Myn, the red dragon from the story, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what happened to her after?”
Halfax sighed.
“She found a mate.”
“Your dad?”
“Yes.”
“What was he like?”
“He was a green dragon.”
“Was he brave and smart like Myn?”
“He was strong. And loyal.”
“Did you have any brothers and sisters?”
“Yes.”
“What were their names? What happened to them?”
“Like me, they were given a line of Chosen to protect. Windsor was my brother, and he watched over the Lumineblade line, the line of Desmeres. Thorn was another brother, and he watched over the Chosen named Ether. Roka was my sister, she watched over the Chosen named Ivy. I was the youngest, and I watched over Myranda's line. Your line.”
“Where are they now?”
“Gone.”
“All of them? How?”
“The world changed. Dragons slipped from their brief place of respect and grew again to be feared. Men destroy those things they fear.”
“That's so sad.”
“It is the way of things.”
“It shouldn't be.”
She thought for a moment.
“You've been following my family for a very long time?”
“I have.”
“What happened to them? To the ones before me?”
“Most that I guarded lived long lives. I could only protect one small branch, the strongest I could find, but in the years that I stood guard, only one died by the hand of another before he could continue the line. His death severed the line, and sent me looking for you.”
“Who was he?”
“He was a man named Conner Celeste. Someone killed him with a poisoned dagger. I do not know why, but by the time I arrived, he was too far gone.”
“Connor . . . I don't know the name. Tell me more. More about my family . . .”
Chapter 5
In time, the story did its job, chasing away the dark thoughts in the young girl's mind, filling in pieces of her family and past. No longer plagued by nightmares, Jade did everything she could to fill her time. Every now and then she would venture off into the woods, but such expeditions seldom lasted long. The woods were dangerous, a fact that Halfax never missed a chance to repeat, and when she wandered too far, the dragon would simply snatch her up with his teeth or his tail and deposit her back in the cottage. It became something of a game to see how long she could evade him, but Halfax soon became far too good at it for her to get very far. Instead, she found things to do around the cottage. A garden was planted and tended, furniture was arranged and rearranged. Every inch of the cottage was searched and explored.
It was during just such an exploration one day that something very curious happened. She was leaning on a stone below one of the windows in the tower when it suddenly slid out of place. She scrambled backward, afraid she would fall through the hole left behind. When she looked where the stone had been, though, rather than daylight and open air, there was a dark chamber with a mound of dusty sacks. Jade stuck her head out the window and looked on the other side of the wall. The stone she had pushed aside was still in place from the outside. There was no sign of, and certainly no room for, the massive crawlspace she had seen. Yet, sure enough, when she looked through the hole, there it was, a veritable warehouse mounded with bags. Quickly, she pulled one of the sacks from the impossible room and looked inside . . .
“Hal!”
Barely a heartbeat after the call came, Halfax came sliding out of the frozen forest and into the summery clearing.
“What!? What's wrong?” the beast demanded, scanning the glade for threats.
Jade appeared at the door of the cottage, struggling
with a heavy sack.
“Nothing's wrong, silly. But look what I found!” she said, brimming with excitement.
The bag was filled with books of all sizes.
“There's lots more, too. There was a false wall in the tower that led to a whole big room full.”
Halfax eyed the tower, then the little girl.
“It's magic!”
She dropped the bag and lifted a heavy tome from inside, pulling open the cover and flipping to a random page.
“What's this say?” she asked, eagerly jabbing the page with a finger.
Halfax peered down at the faded writings, brow furrowed as he hoisted the seldom-used skill of reading from the depths of his memory.
“The . . . primary methods and means of . . . expediting poison . . . expulsion and--”
“What does that mean? Ex-ped-iting.”
“It means speeding up.”
“Why didn't it say speeding up?”
“Because a wizard will never use a small word when a larger one is available.”
“Wow. Read more!”
“No. This is a spell book. It is dangerous to read from one if you don't know magic.”
“Oh. Well, what about this one?” she asked holding up a thin green book.
“That is a spell book, too.”
“Well, help me find one that isn't,” she instructed, pulling out the books one by one and laying them in the grass, “There's a bunch more if we can't find one here.”
With a slight growl of irritation that Jade had long ago learned to ignore, he looked over the covers, twisting his head to read the several that were upside down. Finally, he reached out and tapped a cover with a claw.
“This. This is about wildlife.”
“Read it, read it!” she squealed, bouncing up and down.
“No.”
“Please?” she begged, drawing out the word to make it several syllables long.
“I will show you how to read, and you can read it yourself.”
Jade's eyes could not have opened any wider. A look of incomparable joy saturated her every feature.
“Really?” she trilled.
“Yes. Put the books away for now and come back here.”
Jade hastily gathered up the books and sprinted off. As she did, Halfax began to methodically etch the alphabet into the gravel of the cottage's pathway. This was a trait shared almost exclusively by the extraordinarily long-lived. Halfax tended to work toward the very long term. Teaching the girl would take time, but it would only have to be done once. More importantly, knowing how to read would help her when she finally chose to rejoin her own kind. And so he would teach her, just as he would teach her how to hunt. Just as he would teach her how to track. He would teach her every language he knew, every skill that could aid a human, and with each new skill and each new year she would need him less.
And then she would be off again, on her own, and he would be in the shadows. As he should be.
Halfax paused. He'd thought of that moment many times. The day she would leave. It was never far from his mind, his constant goal. This time, though, there was a glimmer of something else. For just a moment, his heart sank.
“Ready!” Jade chirped, shaking Halfax from his thoughts.
Halfax pointed to the first letter with a claw.
“This is Ay. It goes ay . . .”
Steadily the dragon guided her through the alphabet. Jade was a ravenous learner, and seemed able to remember each letter perfectly after only a few repetitions.
“That is Bee, it goes buh,” Jade said, when Halfax pointed randomly to a letter some time later.
“Yes, now. What is this?” he asked, tracing a shape out on the ground.
“Jay, it goes juh.”
He traced a second, and a third, and a fourth.
“Ay, it goes ay. Dee, it goes dee. Eee, it goes eee,” she recited.
“Just the sounds now.”
“Juh, ay, duh, eee.” she said.
“Pretend the eee doesn't make a sound.”
“Juh, ay, duh.”
“Faster, fast as you can. Over and over.”
“Juhayduh, jayduh, jayduh . . . Jade! Is . . . Is that how you spell my name!?”
Halfax nodded.
“I can read my name!” she said, leaping up and down, “Why doesn't the E make a sound in my name?”
“Because you have a strange language, and it does strange things. Most are far stranger.”
“So it is like a code, almost?”
“I suppose.”
Jade squealed with delight, clapping. “Keep going! I want to know it all!”
#
The days and weeks that followed were filled to the brim with as much instruction as Halfax was willing to provide. Though Jade was willing and eager to learn, progress was slow. They had very few books that were written with a new reader in mind. Nonetheless, she kept at it, all the while glowing with pride, as though she were being let into a very small and very exclusive club.
In truth, she was. Books were anything but plentiful these days, and those who could read them were thoroughly distrusted. Too much knowledge, it was believed, could have terrible consequences. A long war and the terrible foes who fought it were the result of magic, and by extension knowledge. Thus, steps were taken by society as a whole to see to it that such a thing was not allowed to occur again. If that meant burning books and exiling those who knew how to use them--or, worse, knew how to create them--then so be it. It might not always have been the case--but it had been this way for as long as anyone could remember. These books were almost certainly hidden so well specifically to spare them the same fate.
The veritable library hidden within the wizard's tower was, not surprisingly, mostly on the subject of magic. There were still dozens and dozens of books on a wide variety of other subjects, however, and slowly but surely she began to piece her way through them. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months.
Jade learned much, and her interests grew well beyond the resources the tower and its clearing could provide. Reluctantly, Halfax agreed to take her to the edge of Ravenwood nearest to a city, a place called Rook, so that she could buy supplies and feed her curiosity. As she had no money of her own, and no way to earn any, these trips were financed entirely from the dragon's meager hoard.
The pair arrived back at the tower after just such a trip, and Jade leaped from his back.
“Here you go, Hal,” Jade said, dropping a single gold coin onto the top of his hoard.
The dragon looked at the coin upon the greatly diminished pile of gold. A glimmer of disappointment showed on his usually impassive features. This most recent trip had seen three gold coins leave with Jade in exchange for replacements for the clothes she was rapidly growing out of, some tools, and the odd necessities like rope and flour. Only one coin had returned. Jade felt a pang of guilt. It was her fault that the gold was being spent, after all. And it was very important to him that he have it. There must be something she could do to make him feel better.
She looked to the gold, then the bag of tools. An idea dawned.
“Wait, I need that back,” she said, snatching up the coin.
She scurried to the doorway and into the cottage. A chorus of clanks, with the occasional yelp of pain, began to ring out. After a few minutes, she scampered back, something conspicuously held behind her back.
“Bend down.”
“Why?”
“Just bend down, I have something for you.”
The dragon complied. A loop of rope was thrown over his head. He snatched the end of it and twisted his neck to see what she'd hung there.
It was the large gold coin, pounded a bit thinner and larger. A hole had been punched near one edge and a bit of rope threaded through. On the face was a collection of marks roughly pounded into the surface that spelled out HAL.
“Now you've got one piece of your hoard that will always be with you.”
“One piece of gold is no hoard.”
“
Well . . . Well, maybe not, but look at the back of it!” Jade defended.
Halfax flipped the piece to find, crudely rendered, the word JADE.
“That way you know you've always got me. And I'm better than a pile of gold, right?”
Halfax looked the smiling little girl in the eyes. Dragons all had an almost inexplicably accurate sense of value. It helped them to build their hoards. It motivated them to protect their hoards. Most had an affinity to gold, but they were quite able to root out precious stones and other precious metals. There were even, Halfax knew, those able to appreciate the value of human things like art.
The one blind spot was sentiment. Only the most enlightened of his kind understood the incomparable value even the most common objects could take on when associated with the proper memories. But in that moment, Halfax understood. No human had ever given him a gift. That made this crude amulet--and this little girl--one of a kind. Treasures of the very rarest sort. And they both belonged to him.
“Thank you,” he uttered.
#
More time passed. As Jade grew, so too did her knowledge and her skills. Her garden flourished, as having a dragon to help do things like till the ground made the speed and ease of maintaining it remarkable. She learned to mend her own clothes, and even tailor them. Books taught her to repair and improve the cottage, another task made immeasurably easier with the help of a dragon. The beast could push in nails the way a smaller being might push in tacks. She learned ways to preserve her food, make her own medicine, and use the tools she did have to craft tools she did not.
When she exhausted the books written in her own language, Halfax taught her the other languages he knew, and she read on. As the months turned to years, the journeys to the city became less frequent, less necessary. Life fell into a pleasant, predictable routine. It was a sort of life Halfax was not very used to, but one that was very, very welcome.
#
Such a comfortable life, and being a dragon with the wisdom and duty of Halfax, made Halfax sensitive to even the smallest changes. After several years of uneventful bliss, something felt wrong one day. Hunting had been difficult. The forest was a good hunting ground, and Jade never ate much, but the animals had been more alert this time. Something had them frightened even before he'd arrived. It was difficult to place, but whatever it was that had spooked them, he felt it, too. Something was near. Its presence hung like a fog in his mind.
The Book of Deacon Anthology Page 136