by Anne Nesbet
21
HEART OF A DRAGON
“Oh, no,” she said, almost under her breath, her voice as small as the disaster was huge. “What do we do now?”
The shadowy Fourcroy snapped shadowy fingers under Maya’s nose.
“We do what I have bound you to do, little cousin-niece. The trace of the old me—you will give it here. Now! Then you will make me whole. As you are also bound to do. As your magic, your power, makes possible now. I think you begin to understand me. Do you?”
From beside her, Valko’s voice, a little shaken, but trying not to let it show: “Didn’t you hear what I said? She never took the letter with the bloodstain. She left it in the Salamander House. There is no trace of you!”
The shadow ignored him.
“Now, Maya!” said the dark remnant of Fourcroy. It tipped its head, almost as if amused. “You have done it all, everything you were bound to do, yes? The trace—”
“Yes,” said Maya, her heart sinking into some kind of hollow. She had wanted to find a way off the clockwork path, and all of her best efforts were coming to nothing. It had been her own self, feeding the strangeness as it swallowed her world. And now there was no way left to make things right! Oh, why hadn’t the poor, captured zmey been more careful! But it had been looking at her; it had been distracted by her; she had tripped it up, and it had not paid close enough attention, and now the terrible cold was marching up and down its stone body.
Her hand—like a puppet’s hand, like the hand of a machine run by wires and radio waves and cogs—was already pulling a little envelope out of her jacket pocket. Dominoes were falling all around: clickety clickety clack. She was bound to do this, she was completely trapped and bound, but the binding didn’t prevent her from turning her face to look at the horrified Valko standing there beside her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to him, and suddenly she was so sad about all of this—about having wanted to save the world and make everything all right again for everybody, and yet having utterly, stupidly failed to do so—that she couldn’t even quite see his face clearly. “I’m sorry about the poor world, about everything. And there was a lock of his hair in the Summer Box. I’m so sorry. I tried to burn it, but I couldn’t. I did try.”
“Oh, Maya,” said Valko. “Why didn’t you tell me—”
The shadow broke into Valko’s sentence with a shout, a strange and unsettling sound, half human and half something else, unclassifiable, but surprised. Its bright violet eyes were fixed now on the starlight dancing around Maya’s wrist as she held out that little envelope, the envelope that had come from the Summer Box, the one that held the lock of Fourcroy’s baby hair.
“Aaaah! And you’ve even brought my bracelet with you!”
“Excuse me!” said Maya, angrily swiping the back of her left hand across her leaky eyes. “Not yours. Leave it alone. My mother got it from her mother. And then it came down to me.”
The shadowy Fourcroy laughed (but did not lose its grip on the poor dragon’s neck).
“Don’t speak nonsense, girl,” it said. “It should have been mine. It was always supposed to be mine. There it is, in a tiny nutshell’s worth of stone: our magic and our power! Oh, she made a mistake, my poor mother, when she let it go—”
“She sent it far away from you. She sent it to my grandmother. That was the opposite of a mistake,” said Maya, but her mind was already circling around that one particular word: power. It was true, the opal on her wrist was alive with light. She looked at it more closely and saw how complicated that light was, how many colors were winking in and out of its tangled dance. Maybe there was a better sort of magic in that opal than the dangerous stuff that had kept bubbling up in Maya herself the last few weeks. And if there was magic there to be tapped into, now was the moment for that tapping-into to happen, wasn’t it? She gave the stone a pleading, impatient look and shook her wrist a little, but the light just brightened another notch, and Fourcroy kept laughing.
“Maya, watch out!” said Valko from not very far away. “What is that thing?”
“I think you must maybe throw it right at him!” said Pauline from much, much farther away than Valko. “Ka-boom!”
And then the stone of that bracelet did sort of explode, in its own strange way. They were standing in front of a tree: Maya with the radiant wrist held up before her face, and the ever more substantial Fourcroy with one hand clasped like a ring of shadow around the neck of the poor, struggling zmey, ice still spreading farther and farther down its neck and back. The tree stood behind them all, its branches spread wide and quiet in the mist. But as the light from Maya’s opal grew brighter and brighter and brighter, the tree trembled and split—not down the middle, though, not as trees split when an ax or lightning strikes them. Instead the image of the tree wavered and split, left and right, into two images, of two trees. Like an old-fashioned stereoscope card, where almost-identical scenes on the left and right wait to be brought together in a viewer to make one three-dimensional picture—with depth. Or the way tired eyes sometimes wander to the side and the thing you’re staring at doubles. Yes, like that.
There was the tree, and there was the double of the tree, and the two trees now stood before Maya’s eyes, one more or less to the left and the other more or less to the right. She turned her head, back and forth, looking at them. They were not, after all, exactly the same. The world seemed to have split in two with them: so strange. On the left-hand side the tree was dark and grand and mysterious, and underneath it stood a very powerful-looking Fourcroy, with his hand still so cruelly around the neck of the stone dragon; and Valko was there, looking appalled and concerned, his mouth open as he said something that seemed to be fierce; and Pauline was there, farther away, with a fist in the air; and even Maya herself was there, holding out her wrist with the star on it; and none of the people (or dragons) were moving. The split-apart world seemed also to have frozen.
It made Maya feel very strange, to be looking in on herself from—from—where was she? Outside. She tried to spin around, to see where she was, but she could not move that way. Or maybe there was nothing whatsoever to see. She could look only to the left, where everything, including herself, was frozen as it had just this moment been—and to the right, where again there was a tree, mist wreathing around its branches.
Under that other tree, the right-hand tree, a girl was walking. Maya thought at first it was herself again she was seeing, which still felt wrong, but when the girl raised her eyes to look at her, Maya saw that there was something odd about her edges. They flickered, somehow, like a candle flame. And the eyes did the same thing. Many eyes, many colors, flickering. It wasn’t restlessness, exactly. But it wasn’t until the girl opened her mouth and spoke that Maya finally understood.
“We told you: it comes with a choice,” said the girl, holding out her hand. Here was the thing about that voice: it wasn’t just one voice; it was a chorus of voices. The girl, Maya saw now, was not one girl at all, but many, many people, all at once and overlapping somehow, all holding out their one many-layered hand together, in which was one single opal, glittering.
Maya glanced back to the left, where the shadow of Fourcroy still had the dragon by the neck, and Valko was caught, mouth open in midshout. (What was he trying to say?) Valko’s lips moved just a hair; Maya jumped. The world over there wasn’t frozen, after all: it was just moving very slowly. Like molasses, as her mother might say.
She turned back to the flickering girl, standing there under the (now she saw it) flickering tree, which was also many trees, all at once.
“How does it work?” she said. “Quick. Tell me how to use it. He’s breaking the world. Or maybe I am—oh! The world’s breaking, can’t you see that? I have to stop him. I have to destroy him.”
The girl who was many people at once looked at her.
“That is one choice,” she said. “It is very powerful, our family’s magic, when used. You have it in you to be powerful. We can see that in you.”
To reach out wi
th a brilliantly starlit fist and crush the shadow! To crush him to nothing and make him finally, finally go away! It made Maya gasp, to feel how much she longed to do that—but the girl’s eyes flickered in front of her, watching her. Maya found herself twitching a little, under the pressure of so many layers of flickering eyes.
“What other choice do I have?” said Maya.
“Ah,” said all the voices in that one girl. They said it all together, and the leaves of all the many trees that were in that one tree spun a little in the breeze. “The choice is that: to use it, or to pass it on. We all reach this age, Maya, this age when the magic in us wells up and wants to be heard. It is being at a place where the path splits in two: where we can walk on in magic, under the trees, or take the other way, the bracelet’s way, and use our power to remake the world. We all choose. And one day that power will need to be used, we think. The choice is real: is it that day?”
Maya, impatient, turned to look again over at the world on her left, where she saw that something very strange was happening, inch by inch by inch. The Maya there had begun to lean sideways, had already begun to crumple, one inch’s worth so far, to the ground. Valko was still caught in midshout—but she couldn’t look at his face anymore: he was staring at the just-beginning-to-crumple Maya, and there was hopelessness in his eyes, and Valko was never, ever hopeless.
The purple-eyed shadow was already taller than when she had looked the last time. His violet eyes were triumphant and bright—one hand of his still clenched the dragon’s neck, and the other was now filled with the brightest starlight, leaking out in brilliant glimpses from between the dark, dark fingers of his hand.
“What’s going on?” cried Maya. It was horrible, all of it. “What’s that? Why does he have the bracelet? When did he get my bracelet?”
“Soon,” said all the many versions of that girl, and they leaned closer, urgently, like a forest of trees (in one tree) bending in the wind. “Soon! Don’t you see? Don’t you see? You are bound. . . .”
That was when Maya finally did see. She was still bound to make him whole. Apparently choosing power did not unbind a person. She could become the most powerful magician in the world, and still be bound to use all that power simply to do whatever that awful Fourcroy commanded. Like one of those genies in fairy tales: an all-powerful slave, trapped in a stupid clay jar or something. Oh! She took a step back deeper into the Nowhere where she was standing, full of horror at how close she had come to destroying, finally, everything.
She had been about to choose to use that power that was bound up, somehow, in her family’s old magic, and all that power would have flowed from her right to that awful, selfish, hungry Fourcroy, and there would have been no hope left, then, for any of them—for her, for Valko, or for her mother and the little bean. No hope at all.
“Maya!” said the girl-who-was-many-people, in warning. Maya knew them now, some of those faces that were in that girl’s flickering face. Even her own mother was there in those faces.
And that was when the two worlds came slamming together again, and Maya was on her feet in front of the shadowy Fourcroy, and the poor zmey had just screamed, and Fourcroy was gloating, gloating, gloating, and holding out his free hand for the lock of his baby hair and the bracelet, because of course what other choice could you make, when the world was breaking all around you? Of course, you would choose to fight with whatever power you had! And then, if you were bound—
“No,” said Maya, drawing back her wrist.
The shadowy Fourcroy shrieked, which was an awful sound.
“That’s it. I won’t. I choose to pass it on,” she said, gasping as she said so. Which had been her mother’s choice, and her grandmother’s choice, and long ago the choice of Henri’s mother, too.
“To me,” said Fourcroy, but he was already a bit shorter than he had been, and he sounded a little petulant. “Pass it to me—it is mine.”
“Never to you,” said Maya. “No way. To my sister.”
That was when the poor dragon trapped in Fourcroy’s hands cried out again, a cry that began as a clear trumpet call of a note (everything that dragon did was too beautiful for this everyday world of ours) and ended in the crashing din of a rockslide.
Wings! Beaks! Claws! And there they were: gargoyles.
For a minute the shadow of Fourcroy was buried in a stony blur. The gargoyles were not moving at merely human speed tonight, that was for sure. They nipped and pulled and poked, and it was a great racket they made as they harried the shadow. How they got the upper hand, Maya could not see, it was all happening so fast, but a minute later, there they were, Beak-Face with his claws deeply embedded in one side of the shadow, and Bonnet-Head grimly hanging on to his back—and the dragon had shaken itself loose and was twining itself around a branch of the nearest big tree, whimpering a little as it pawed at the dark frozen spot on its neck.
There was a moment of silence as the gargoyles caught their rocky breaths and Maya tried to steady hers.
Then Bonnet-Head looked over at Maya and said, “How bright your bracelet is tonight! Do it quickly, dearr. We cannot hold him forever.”
“Do what?” said Maya.
“Your magic,” said Beak-Face more sharply (but in his defense, his hold on the shadow’s side did not look all that secure). “Quick, girrl.”
But what magic did Maya have left? She had just chosen not to use it. She had just chosen to pass it on.
“Bound to make me whole,” said the shadow. After all this time and all this trouble, the shadow of Fourcroy was still hungry. She could see that however much it managed to swallow, it would always be hungry.
She tried hard to ignore the ground, still rippling underneath. She was a Lavirotte, and they really did walk in more worlds than one. Even if she had no magic left of her own, none of the powerful kind, that was still true.
“Bound,” repeated the shadow.
“Yes,” said Maya.
So she walked right up to the shadowy Fourcroy, there where the gargoyles held him so tightly between them, their stone eyes thoughtful as they watched her come, and she put her hand on the patch of darkness that was his arm. Valko protested, somewhere behind her, but she ignored him. It was not the same as being swallowed, not when you chose it yourself. She rested her hand on his arm as she had rested it so many times on the gargoyles’ egg in the weeks gone by, and it seemed to her the shadow became just slightly warmer under her hand.
“You bound me to make you whole,” said Maya.
“Yes,” said the shadow.
“I think I can still do that,” she said. “Even without my magic. But I’ve decided it doesn’t mean what you thought it meant, when you opened that awful emergency loophole in the wall. Just going on and on and on forever isn’t being whole.”
She could feel the shadow’s uncertainty like a chill wave under her hand, but she held on and thought warm thoughts, and the cold backed off again and quieted.
“You are hungry because you’re so empty,” said Maya. “But what could possibly fill someone like you? That’s the puzzle.”
She leaned her head closer to him.
“There’s a lot you’ve forgotten,” she said.
Maya turned to look up at the dragon, watching her so intently from its tree limb.
“Come down here to me, Egg, will you?” she said. She was almost shy, in front of that amazing, glittering creature. But it had recognized her a moment ago, she was quite sure of it.
“Egg!” said Beak-Face, shifting his wings around to see better. “Is that the besst she could do, naming our poor child?”
“Husssh,” said Bonnet-Head. “I rather like it.”
They did not loosen their grips on the shadow, though, not one tiny bit.
The dragon unwrapped itself from the tree and flew down to Maya with all the grace and loveliness of water flowing over a cliff somewhere, or ivy growing down some old rock wall, and tucked itself under her left arm, so that her hand was comfortably resting on the lacy st
onework of its side.
“Look, you—Henri,” she said to the shadow. “Do you see what this is? The gargoyles’ egg was also your memory stone, you know. That means this dragon holds a lot of summer in it, deep inside. I liked the you I saw in the stone.”
Under her hand she could feel the amazing skin of the zmey, stone as fragile as eggshell, knit together with light. It warmed to her touch as the egg used to. The dragon looked extraordinary and new, but it felt familiar, and that was comforting.
One hand on the zmey, one hand on the shadow’s still fairly chilly arm, Maya asked for the memories back, and they came, forest and field, sailboat, kite, and whistle.
The dragon’s skin rippled with images: Henri’s mother, smiling that wise smile of hers, her hands quickly folding paper, shaping and sewing some child-sized marvel.
“I went back to the Summer Box, Henri,” said Maya. “Look what I found there.”
She had put that in her pocket, too: not just the baby’s lock of silvery hair, but the colorful, raggle-taggle ribbons. She brought them out now (keeping her arm always close to that zmey).
“Do you remember what this was? It was a dragon once, you know—another kind of dragon.”
The zmey gave a little shimmy of pleasure (a meadow, all grass and wildflowers, and the mother unfurling a long spool of thread).
“She made it for you. I think maybe there was magic in it, the way it could fly. . . .”
A magical dragon of wind and fire and paper, a kite sailing fierce and wonderful above the meadow.
The shadow’s arm was changing under Maya’s hand. It felt smaller and sweeter now, the arm of a child who has wrapped himself in cold darkness only because otherwise he is so very alone facing the world.
And the dragon was glowing like a paper lantern, a knot of brightness deep within it and spilling out through the delicate tracery of its skin.
A shiver of longing went through the shadow’s small and tender arm.
“There!” said Maya. “That’s it, I’m pretty sure. That memory there: that’s the heart of the zmey. And you can have it. It’s yours. Only—”