by E. M. Foner
“Well, we’re in for it now,” Meghan informed him. “If you didn’t hear her, she put the whammy on us so we can’t lie to each other. What’s your name, anyway?”
“Bryan. Bryan Lazard. I didn’t catch your whole name.”
“You have two names?”
“Bryan is my first name and Lazard is my last name.”
“How strange. Are you sure you don’t want to add something in the middle?”
“Alexander Hamilton,” Bryan admitted. “Bryan Alexander Hamilton Lazard. Do you really just have the one name?”
“Of course,” Meghan replied. “If everybody had more than one name, how would anybody know who was talking to whom?”
“Nobody uses them all in—forget it. What did you mean about that woman putting the whammy on us?”
“Are you sure you’re strong enough to hear the answer?” Meghan asked, not unkindly. “I thought I was bringing over a war hero to be my dragon, but Hadrixia tells me you’re just a, a dishwasher.”
“It’s a job, not a career,” Bryan responded in irritation. “I dropped out of college because I got sick of everybody telling me how to live my life. Ever since I was a kid I always felt like I was being punished for something I didn’t do, like school was a prison I’d been sentenced to for a crime I didn’t even get to commit. I thought college would be different, but it wasn’t.”
“I don’t know what college is and I have the feeling that school means different things to us as well. In any case, dishwashing isn’t a high-status job here.”
“I started working at a fancy restaurant and banquet place when I was sixteen, as soon as I was legally old enough to have a job. When I quit college, I needed to make some money in a hurry and my gaming skills didn’t turn out to be as marketable as—why am I telling you all of this?” he interrupted himself.
“Happy truths,” Meghan replied. “She’s a healer, and part of her magic is being able to help people communicate. Hadrixia says that an honest discussion has cured more ills than every plant in the herbalist’s shop. Her magic won’t force you to answer a question if you’re not willing, but it won’t allow us to lie to each other until the next sunrise.”
“You want me to believe that lady put a spell on us?”
“It’s not a spell. It’s magic. It just works.”
“There’s no such thing as magic,” Bryan grunted dismissively. “Hey! If you believe in what you just said, that means I can’t be lying to you about magic not existing.” He crossed his arms and looked at her triumphantly.
“It’s true that there’s no magic on Dark Earth where you come from, because your ancestors traded it away long before either of us were born. You got to keep the contraptions and we got to keep the magic.”
“So you’re saying we’re not on Earth?” Even as Bryan asked, part of his mind wondered why he wasn’t getting angry or freaked out. Was that part of spell the supposed healer had put on them as well?
“We’re on Earth, the real Earth. You’re the one from the defective copy,” Meghan replied, her small, pointed chin jutting out pugnaciously. “You have inventions that let one man do the work of ten, right?”
“Along with lamps you can actually see by and iceboxes to keep food from going bad,” Bryan answered her, glancing around the room’s primitive furnishings. “Speaking of iceboxes, you wouldn’t have anything to eat around here, would you? I’m starving.”
“I brought you some bread and cheese from the kitchen.” Meghan quickly produced a broken loaf and a large wedge of yellow cheese from the daypack she had dropped earlier. “And there’s small beer in the stone bottle.”
Bryan hesitated for a moment at the dusty condition of the food, but then he decided he was too hungry to care. He bit directly into the narrow part of the cheese wedge, and then put it down so he could tear a piece of bread off the loaf with his hands as he chewed what tasted like mild cheddar.
“Did you say something about a small bottle of beer?” he asked a minute later through a mouth full of cheesy bread.
“Not a small bottle, small beer. The kind you don’t get drunk on. They make it for the servants because drinking the castle water without boiling it first can be tricky, if you know what I mean.” Meghan pulled the cork and extended it to him.
“And you’re a servant?” Bryan asked, reaching for the stone bottle.
“I’m a mage!” Meghan flared up.
“So why do you live in a little room and drink servant’s beer?” Bryan paused to wash down his first course with the warm, weak beer. He took an even bigger bite of the cheese the second time around.
“I’m in hiding,” the girl replied before she could stop herself. “I can make water safe to drink without a fire, of course, but not bringing home my allotment of beer would arouse suspicions.” A look of intense frustration rose on her face. “Oh, why did Hadrixia have to put the whammy on us? You can’t tell anybody what I just said or we’ll have to leave, and I’ve never been anywhere else. Wouldn’t that be ironic if the warrior I summoned to be my dragon ended up getting me expelled from the only home I’ve ever known.”
“Mmph.” Bryan nodded in agreement. He chewed for a moment and then chased down the second course with another swallow of beer. “Who are you hiding from?”
“Pretty much everybody,” Meghan admitted. “Look, you can’t go back home and I can’t just keep you in my room for the rest of our lives. We’re going to have to work out an arrangement so we can help each other until you transform.”
“Why can’t you send me back?” Bryan demanded. He tried to recall if he’d ever dreamt about magic and really bad beer before, but he couldn’t come up with a precedent.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Meghan replied. “You’ll go back when you die, if that’s any consolation.”
“Except my family and friends will have given me up for dead long before that.”
“You go back at the instant you left,” Meghan said, but she didn’t elaborate. “Can I get you anything else to eat? I’ve never had a dragon before, so I wasn’t sure what you’d like. I can sneak into the kitchens anytime.”
“I could eat a horse, but what did you mean about having a dragon?”
“You. You’re a dragon, or you will be,” Meghan said confidently. “What you just said proves it. Who else but a dragon could think about eating a horse?”
“It’s just an expression. I’m as human as you are,” Bryan protested. “Before your healer friend’s happiness spell wears off and I start freaking out, I want to understand what’s going to happen to me here. I’ve got no money, nowhere to live, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m really alive.”
“Oh, you’re alive alright,” Meghan reassured him. “Are you feeling sleepy again yet?”
“Sleepy and hungry,” Bryan confessed, leaning back against the wall.
“According to the scrolls, it’s going to take a few days to get adjusted. I’ll get you some more food, and then I’ll see if Hadrixia will let me sleep on her examination table tonight. Don’t you leave the room under any circumstance, and keep the bar on the door when I’m not here.”
“What if I have to go?” Bryan asked.
“Don’t go. Stay. Don’t you listen?”
“I mean, you know, go-go.”
“Oh, there’s a chamber pot under the bed. Put it outside the door after you use it. Washing dishes isn’t the worst job in the castle.”
Chapter 6
Meghan gave the secret knock they had agreed on, and Bryan let her into her room. “It’s all set,” she told him immediately. “I explained that you’re my third cousin twice removed from a village outside of Castle Trollsdatter, and you start work with me in the kitchen tomorrow.”
“What if somebody has been to Castle Trollsdatter and wants to talk to me about it?” Bryan asked.
“That’s impossible. I made up the name this morning. I told them that you’re a magical cripple like me, which they’ll believe since it runs in families and because a
man would never take a, uh, dishwashing job otherwise. But everybody is still going to expect you to at least understand what magic is, so I’m going to give you a crash course.”
“Why would they expect me to understand magic?”
“Because it’s all around us. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to take you outside yet, but you were always busy eating or sleeping when I wasn’t in work. Hadrixia warned me that if I don’t show you some basic stuff before we go out, you’ll jump out of your skin the first time you see somebody light a fire.”
“I’ve seen people light fires,” Bryan said, affecting a long-suffering look. Then she set her pinkie on fire and he jumped out of his skin. “What!”
“This is the basic fire-starter magic every child learns by the age of ten,” Meghan continued, turning her hand this way and that to admire the tightly bound flames. “Some people never get much past being able to hold a finger under something combustible until it catches fire. Others…” She made a fist and her whole hand burst into flame, then she opened her fingers and a ball of fire shot off to splash harmlessly against the stone wall.
As soon as he recovered from shock, Bryan demanded, “What do you need a dragon for if you can do that yourself? And exactly how did you do that?”
“I thought you dropped out of school because you knew everything.”
“I dropped out of school because I wasn’t learning anything,” Bryan retorted. “There’s a difference. So how did you make your pinky burst into flame and why didn’t it burn you?”
“Rule one. Magic is. Nobody makes magical fire, we just welcome it. And fire that you invite can’t burn you.”
“I don’t get it. How do you invite fire?”
“We learn magic the same way that small children learn a language. You show a baby a spoon and you say, ‘spoon.’ You give the baby the spoon and you say, ‘spoon.’ The baby says, ‘spoon,’ and then she throws the spoon on the floor and laughs at you. The point is, the baby learns what a spoon is without being told that it’s a handle attached to a small bowl that you use to eat soup.”
Bryan looked at her blankly.
“Maybe I could have picked a better example. It’s more like how you teach a baby what the moon is. You say, ‘moon,’ and you point at it. The baby never touches the moon, never uses it for anything, doesn’t understand that it goes around the Earth, but she still knows the moon when she sees it.”
“And what does that have to do with magic?” Bryan asked in frustration.
“With magic, once you recognize how something happens, you can encourage it to happen for you. Fire is easy to learn because of the way flames seem to leap and appear out of nowhere when you watch a fire burn. If you have any magical ability at all, you just repeat that moment in your mind, that feeling, and the fire appears for you.”
“So how did you bring me from my world?” Bryan pressed her. “Do people come popping out of fires here so you know how to call for them?”
“I started with honeybees,” Meghan explained. “Nobody knows why, but honeybees from your world are always appearing here lately. You can be staring at a flower and suddenly, pop, there’s a honeybee from Dark Earth sucking at the nectar. By the time I was twelve, I could bring them myself, though it used to make me dizzy. Most grown mages never develop that ability, and it took a lot of practice with Hadrixia to learn how to keep it hidden. I’ve been pretending for the last seven years that my magic burned out when I started to mature.”
“So your parents were powerful mages?”
“I don’t know,” Meghan admitted. Her face went from open to closed as if somebody had thrown a switch, and Bryan backed off on that line of questioning.
“So let me make sure I have this straight. You’re saying that magical events occur naturally on this world, and if you observe something magical happening enough times, you learn how to repeat it by imagining how it looked?”
“And felt, and smelled, and tasted, and sounded.”
“And I didn’t know about this because there is no magic on Dark Earth?”
“That’s right. Your ancient mages traded Dark Earth’s magic to our ancient mages in return for a world where everything worked according to a fixed set of rules. So you can create machines that fly in the air and grids of wire that somehow capture lighting, while our most advanced contraptions are windmills and catapults.”
“Flying machines are airplanes, and tame lightning is electricity,” Bryan told her. “But why can’t you have them here?”
“They just don’t work. Could your flying machines stay in the sky if little pieces reshaped themselves at random, or if the rules that kept them aloft didn’t work the same from one cloud to the next?”
“But I’ve seen birds flying outside of your window,” Bryan objected.
“It’s an arrow slit, and living things all have their own magic so they can naturally adjust to changes. It’s only machines that don’t work here. The more complicated they are, the quicker they will go wrong.”
“And you brought me here like I was some kind of giant honeybee?”
“It only started with honeybees. When I was just a girl and I saw them popping into existence in the orchard, I realized that I could catch a glimpse of where they came from as well. After Hadrixia taught me to read and got me a morning job cleaning the baron’s library, I learned from a scroll that I wasn’t really seeing Dark Earth, but each honeybee’s memory of it as they came through the passage. Eventually I discovered how to open myself to other impressions from Dark Earth and that’s how I searched for you. It felt like I was flying over your world and being drawn to scenes of war, but now I realize that I was also seeing dreams, and in your case, daydreams,” she concluded in an accusatory tone.
“I didn’t ask you to eavesdrop on my daydreams,” Bryan reminded her. “And I still don’t get why it was so important for you to bring me here that you spent years searching and saving up magic to do it.”
“Because I want to be free,” Meghan replied quietly. “Because I didn’t want to be forced into a marriage with some man who doesn’t care anything about me and just wants to steal my magic.”
“You said that before but you didn’t explain it. How can a man steal your magic? If you keep hiding things from me, I’ll never be able to help either of us.”
“It’s not the sort of thing that a girl should have to explain to a boy,” she told him, turning away as she began to blush. “I assume you know that married people sleep together to make babies.”
“You brought up bees and I brought up birds, and now you’re trying to put them together?” It was a lame attempt at a joke, but Bryan was hoping to ease the sudden tension between them. He’d never seen anybody so embarrassed before, and he was starting to feel uncomfortable in sympathy.
“I’m talking about something serious here,” Meghan insisted, keeping her face averted. “When a man and a woman get married and, you know, their magic equalizes between them. That’s why rich and highborn men and women always marry somebody with stronger magic. Most of the top mages never start families because they aren’t willing to give up that much power. After a person physically joins with another, their magic remains coupled until one of them dies, and then half of it is lost.”
“But what about dating and, uh, hooking up before you get married?” Bryan asked. “Do you mean to say that everybody here waits for marriage and then stays together like swans?”
Meghan turned back to look at him, her face still hot, but now she was curious as well.
“Do people where you come from do THAT before they’re married?” she asked incredulously.
“Pretty much everybody,” he replied, though now it was his turn to redden, and he hurried on. “So you’re pretending not to have any magic so that the men will leave you alone, like a beautiful girl cutting off her hair and wearing baggy clothes?”
“I don’t have any family to protect me,” Meghan told him sadly.
“But if you’re such a strong mage,
why can’t you protect yourself?”
“I think I could protect myself against some magical attacks, but nobody has ever tried so I can’t be sure,” she replied. “Against an older mage who has been practicing magic for hundreds of years or more I wouldn’t stand a chance. But your magic will be different, and nobody would think of attacking a person who had a dragon on their side without a serious reason.”
“Show me the fire trick again,” Bryan said. “I’m not much for theoretical discussions, but if I see something enough times, it usually sinks in.”
“That’s exactly how magic works,” Meghan said enthusiastically, causing her hand to burst into flames. “I knew you’d come around.”
Chapter 7
It wasn’t until Bryan met Meghan at the foot of the stairs to the courtyard that he realized he was a full head taller than the girl. The ceiling in her small room was so low that he couldn’t stand up without crouching, and he had spent all of his time sleeping in bed or sitting in any case.
“It’s like a movie set,” Bryan whispered to Meghan, bending to get his mouth close to her ear.
“I didn’t understand one of your words, so it’s probably not something that exists here,” Meghan whispered back. “Please try not to say anything we wouldn’t want overheard while we’re outside. You never know who might be listening, even if they’re a distance away.”
“You mean that some people can use magic to listen at long distances?”
“Of course, my simple-minded cousin,” she replied in a normal tone of voice. “We of Castle Refuge are highly advanced, so I’m sure you’ll see many things here that you never dreamed of back home.”
Bryan took her cue to act the part of a country bumpkin and pointed at a woman who was staring intently at a pair of men’s pants.