by Joel Ross
Except the guard didn’t flinch at the impact. Then another rock bounced off the male guard’s hat, and Ji’s relief died. Because stupid Roz was throwing stupid pinecones.
“Rocks!” Ji screamed into the woods. “Throw ro—” He caught himself. “I mean, someone is throwing rocks!”
“Don’t move!” the female guard shouted, while the male guard clambered onto the running board.
“What in the name of the Summer Queen’s perfumed pillowcase is going on out there?” the nobleman bellowed.
The driver cracked her whip at Ji. “An ambush, sir!”
“Earn your wages!” the nobleman ordered. “Kill the bandits!”
Another pinecone bounced off the female guard’s shoulder, and she fired her crossbow.
Ji’s fear burned that moment into his mind like a painting. He saw the scene from outside himself: an oversized coach, painted to look like a bookcase, waited in a forest, and a skinny kid in rags stood on the luggage rack, with blood sheeting his face and terror in his eyes. The driver’s whip blurred, the male guard lunged, the female guard’s crossbow bolt sped toward him.
Then a fuzzball launched itself from the woods and hit Ji like an ogre punching a piñata.
Pain burst in his arm. He was flung off the stagecoach and into the cover of the woods. He hit the dirt hard and smashed his head on a root. The world turned black and red. When his vision cleared, the fuzzball—Sally—was crouching over him, her eyes worried.
“Oh!” he said, his voice oddly cheery. “Hi!”
“There’s a crossbow bolt in your arm,” she growled, touching his shoulder gently.
“That’s what you think,” he said.
She loped toward the carriage road. “Stay here!”
“Maybe there’s an arm,” he called after her, “in my crossbow bolt.”
The world wobbled and dimmed. His head throbbed and his legs refused to move. His gaze drifted in and out of focus.
He caught a glimpse of the driver screaming at the sight of Sally and whipping the horses into a gallop. He heard the Royal Library Coach creak toward a bend in the road. The humans shrieked when Roz burst from the woods. She crouched in the road for the book he’d dropped, then bellowed, “Stop them! Backup plan, backup plan!”
“I can’t catch them!” Sally growled, chasing the retreating coach.
The emerald glow of sprite wings flashed between the trees. The horses veered from the light, the guards shouted, and Ji closed his eyes, his pulse pounding in his wounded arm.
His eyes opened three times before he fainted.
The first time, he saw Roz pounding alongside the coach while Chibo fluttered in front, slowing the horses. Sally appeared inside the library door, showing Roz book after book. Then Roz gave a trollish bellow and dove halfway through the door.
The second time Ji’s eyes opened, the coach was a tiny dot halfway down the hill, and Roz’s cloak and pink dress were fluttering in the wind, her slippered feet poking out through the door, and her head inside the library. The guards were shooting her legs with their crossbows, but the bolts shattered on her troll skin.
The third time, he stared longingly at the sack of avocados in the road.
4
THE WORLD SMELLED of pine needles and mud. Ji’s head hurt and his arm throbbed. He opened one eye and peered into the darkness. Nighttime. Hours since the attack on the coach. None of the moons shone in the sky, none of the stars twinkled.
Snores sounded around him: Chibo’s were surprisingly deep, while Sally’s were purrs. Ji listened for a moment, then frowned. Where was Roz? He opened his other eye and lifted his head—which made his temples pound. He still couldn’t see anything, but he heard Roz’s deep, steady breathing.
The band of fear around his chest loosened. She was there. Thank the moons. He touched the bandage on his biceps. Pain throbbed from his elbow to his shoulder. Apparently there’d been a crossbow bolt in his arm after all.
When he woke again, emerald light bathed the enclosed, tentlike space. After they’d roamed the thickets of the Isalida Forest for days, Sally had led them to a towering pine tree, as wide around as a house. The lowest branches swept the ground, and inside them an open space encircled the thick, knobby trunk. Once Roz had cleared the deadwood, Ji and Chibo carpeted the floor with moss, and they had the perfect hideout. Well, not perfect. They still hadn’t had any food. Also, they’d been living in a tree. Plus, Ji didn’t think he’d ever get the sap out of his hair, and Sally spent hours picking pine needles from her tail.
Dawn’s light seeped between tree limbs above. Still half-asleep, Ji watched the glow of Chibo’s wings and listened to an odd crunching sound.
From the other side of the trunk, Sally purred, “How can you eat those?”
“They’re quite tasty,” Roz’s voice said.
Ji blinked himself fully awake and touched his cheek. The cut had already closed, thanks to his transformation into a half dragon. Ji figured that he recovered from injuries five times faster than before the Diadem Rite. A cut that would’ve taken a week to heal now only took a day or two.
“They’re hard as rocks,” Sally said.
“Troll teeth,” Roz explained.
Ji pushed himself into a seated position. When he moved his injured arm, the pain brought tears to his eyes.
“Are avocado pits even eatable?” Chibo asked.
“Edible,” Roz said.
The green light shifted as Chibo moved. “Then are they edible?”
“They are if you ed them,” Sally said.
Ji watched Roz pop a pit into her mouth, and he smiled to himself. At least they’d gotten away with the sack of avocados—but what about the book? He didn’t see one anywhere. Instead, he saw the clay urn where Nin’s ant-lion colony lived in the dirt beneath a half dozen leafy seedlings. He looked past the urn and saw Sally nibbling on an avocado and Chibo twirling in a circle, his wings extended.
“Did you see me swoop?” Chibo asked. “I told you I’ve been practicing!”
Sally’s muzzle lifted in a smile. “You were fearsome, Chibo.”
“I’ve never seen swoopier,” Roz said.
“And Ji got the book,” Chibo trilled.
Ji smiled to himself. So there was a book!
“Not exactly,” Roz said, tapping something in her lap. “This is not Articles from a Splendid History. This is Artichokes from Stem to Heart.”
Ji stopped smiling to himself. The wrong book.
“Oh,” Chibo said, after a pause. “Well, at least we have food now. That’s good.”
“I prefer it to not having food,” Roz agreed. “But even better, while I couldn’t find anything to help locate the Ice Witch directly, I did read a curious passage about—”
“How did you read?” Chibo asked. “You were dangling from a coach!”
Roz rumbled a laugh. “Yes, but I was dangling from a coach for nearly ten minutes. And now I believe I know how to find someone who can find the Ice Witch.”
“He could’ve gotten away!” Sally blurted, her hobgoblin tail lashing across the moss-strewn ground.
“Who could’ve gotten away?” Roz asked.
“Ji!” Sally’s tufted ears flattened. “After he grabbed the wrong book, he stood there like a buttonhead, tugging on a box.”
“Maybe it was full of kimchi,” Chibo said.
“It was full of gems,” Sally said. “At least, it looked like a jewelry box. And Ji stood there like a big, greedy lizard.”
“Hey!” Ji said.
Sally turned to him, like she’d known he was awake. “Well, you did!”
“I could not have gotten away. The guards were too fast. They shot me with a crossbow.”
“Because you were standing there trying to steal jewels.”
His cheeks heated. “Maybe if you’d come in the first place, instead of whining about stealing things—”
“I don’t know why I bothered saving your scaly bum.”
“I didn’t need saving
.”
“They shot you with a crossbow.”
“That’s what I just said!”
“Well—” Sally bared her teeth. “Well, that part is true! I thought we weren’t supposed to let them see us.”
Ji grabbed an avocado. “I didn’t let them do anything.”
“You did too. And now that nobleman will tell the knights where to find us.”
“Fine. It’s all my fault,” Ji snapped. “We’d still be safe at Primstone if not for me; we’d still be human if not for me. And Nin”—he looked at the urn—“would still be alive.”
“Enough!” Roz growled. “Nin’s not dead! And I learned how to contact Lady Ti-Lin-Su.”
“No way!” Chibo piped. “You did?”
“Yes. Apparently there’s a method for speaking with mermaids across long distances.”
“I bet it’s ‘blow into a conch shell.’” Sally made a face when Ji snorted. “What? Ti-Lin-Su is a mermaid. Mermaids like seashells. It makes sense.”
“It’s not blowing into a shell.” Roz scratched her horn. “It’s an ancient method that hasn’t been used for centuries.”
Chibo’s green eyes sparkled. “Really? Wow.”
“If it works, Lady Ti-Lin-Su will tell us where to find the Ice Witch.”
Ji eyed Roz dubiously. “What’s the method?”
“It’s rather unusual.” Roz cleared her throat. “That is, it’s an uncommon or, erm, unexpected approach.”
“What are you talking about?” Sally asked.
Roz fiddled with the strap of her beaded handbag. “It’s a spell.”
“What?”
Ji made a face. “We’re not mages, Roz.”
“I know that! But this is a simple spell that ordinary humans used to cast before we lost our magic.”
“We’re not ordinary humans, either.”
“For once, that’s a good thing. The reason nobody’s used this spell for so long is that there’s been no human magic. But we have magic now, from the Diadem Rite—and from our nonhuman halves.”
“What does that matter?” Chibo asked.
“Humans never had much magic,” Roz told him. “Only enough to give us a knack with pottery or applesauce, or, um—”
“The ability to soothe frightened sheep?” Ji suggested.
“Exactly! Little things like that. But hundreds of years ago, the first Summer Queen gathered all the human magic into herself, to stop the hordes from invading. Since then, we haven’t had any at all, right?”
“But there’s still magic in hobgoblins and dragons and trolls and sprites?” Chibo asked, his green eyes shining.
“Precisely!” Roz said.
“I don’t know.” Ji scratched his healing cheek. “You really think it’ll work?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Because we’re not mages? Because we’re hiding in the woods? Because we don’t know what we’re doing?”
“We will contact Lady Ti-Lin-Su,” Roz told him, her jaw tight. “And she will tell us where to find the Ice Witch.”
Ji saw the determination in Roz’s face and sighed. “And she’ll break this spell and make us human again?”
“She’ll have to. We can’t live like this. Hunted and hungry and—” She took a shaky breath. “And horrible.”
Nobody spoke for a second. Ji prodded the pine needles on the floor with one of his thick, dragon-y fingernails. He knew how she felt. They all did. First they’d been turned into beasts, and now they were living like animals. They needed to be themselves again.
“Fine,” he said. “So what do we need?”
“Running water,” Roz told him. “The more complex the better.”
“Complex?” Chibo asked. “How does water get complex?”
“By going through something like a waterwheel, perhaps? I’ve only seen the spell for humans, not for . . .”
“Beasts like us,” Sally growled.
Sally kept grumbling, but Ji didn’t hear, because he’d taken a bite of avocado—and he’d never tasted anything better. His head swam with the feel of the avocado on his tongue, and his mouth watered with the sheer deliciousness.
When he started listening again, Roz was still talking about the ancient ritual: “. . . We envision the mermaid we wish to contact and send . . . bits of ourselves, it sounds like. Into the swirling waters.”
“Bits of ourselves?” Sally asked. “Like hair and fingernails?”
“Or fur balls, for you,” Ji said.
“I’m not giving up my wings,” Chibo said.
“I suppose we’ll have to experiment,” Roz said.
Even Chibo didn’t like the sound of that. He wrinkled his nose while Sally groomed her tail. Ji ate two more avocados, dropping the peels into Nin’s urn for the surviving ant lions to eat. If the Diadem Rite had turned Nin into a single huge ant lion, that would’ve been weird enough, but instead it had changed one ogre cub into hundreds of tiny ant lions. Dozens of the ant lions still built mounds in the dirt of the urn, but Nin’s unbroken silence made Ji worry that the ogre cub was gone forever.
“How’s Nin?” Sally asked Ji.
“I think there are more ant lions than before,” he said, chewing his lower lip. “That’s good, right?”
“If Nin hatches a queen, the colony will recover.” Roz rested a trollish hand on the urn, careful of the ant lions crawling on the side. “That’s what Ti-Lin-Su told us. The queen will strengthen the colony and Nin will return.”
Ji laid his hand beside Roz’s. “As doolally as ever.”
“What’s taking so long?” Chibo demanded. “Why doesn’t Nin just hatch a queen already?”
“I’m not sure,” Roz said. “Ti-Lin-Su didn’t write much about ant lions.”
After a short, unhappy silence, Ji looked at the light shining through the pine branches. “We’ll leave at sunset to find water for this spell. I guess we’ll try the stream.”
“A stream isn’t enough,” Roz said. “The book said we need a complex confluence of currents.”
“A what of who?” Chibo asked.
“I’m not entirely sure about that myself,” Roz admitted. “Something like a canal, I suppose. Or many streams coming together.”
“How about a waterfall?” Sally asked. “I heard one in the forest.”
“That may work!” Roz looked at Ji. “Perhaps we should leave now.”
“We can’t travel in the daylight,” Ji said. “We’re too visible.”
“Ugly, you mean,” Sally said.
“Speak for yourself,” Chibo told her. “I’m gorgeous.”
“Between Sally’s night vision and Chibo’s wings, we’re better off in the dark,” Ji said. “We’ll head for the waterfall at sundown. We’ll cast this spell. Ti-Lin-Su will tell us where to find the Ice Witch. Then bang, the witch will cure us. Unless anyone has a better idea?”
“I have an idea.” Sally bounded onto a branch overhead. “You can stop acting like a big jerk.”
The leaves rustled, and she disappeared into the treetop.
“What’s up with her?” Ji asked.
“She wants you to stop acting like a big jerk,” Chibo explained.
“My plan actually worked for once! Well, my backup plan.”
“Your jerky backup plan,” Chibo said.
“We even got food.”
“Jerky food,” Chibo said.
“We didn’t only get food, we also got that.” Roz gestured toward a sturdy wicker basket on the ground. “Before the coach wheels came off—”
“Wait,” Ji said. “What?”
“Don’t worry,” Roz assured him. “I took pains not to harm any of the books.”
“I don’t care about them! What happened with the wheels?”
“The coach sped along the hillside path,” Roz said, “with me still in the doorway—”
“Mostly in the doorway,” Chibo interrupted. “Your legs were outside.”
Despite her granite-flecked skin, Roz seemed to blush. “
It was quite improper.”
“So you were dangling out of the Library Coach . . . ,” Ji prompted.
“Yes, flipping through pages as fast as I possibly could. After I found the information, I dropped from the window and . . . scuppered the wheels.”
“‘Scuppered’?”
“Sally said she popped them off the coach like plucking petals from a flower,” Chibo chimed. “And flung them into the woods.”
“I’m afraid they’ll spend a whole day walking from the forest,” Roz said, “unable to raise the alarm.”
“Wow.” Ji grinned. “That’s some high-quality scheming, Roz. With you scheming and me reading, we’re basically identical!”
“Like artichokes and articles,” she told him, and pointed again to the wicker basket. “In any case, that fell from the coach. And happily, it’s full of linens. There’s even a needle and thread.”
“So what?”
“So you’re good with a needle and thread.”
“So are you!”
“I used to be passable at embroidery,” she told him. “Before my fingers thickened. My dress is tattered and horrible.”
“So is my arm,” Ji said. “Crossbow, remember?”
“Sewing will take your mind off the pain while we wait for sunset.”
“Fine,” he grumbled, and started sewing.
Well, sewing and eating avocados.
Well, sewing and eating avocados and listening to Roz read a book, an old favorite that she’d stuffed into her handbag back in the city. Even after the transformation, Ji liked Roz’s voice better than any music. And when she read tales of faraway places and ancient times, she seemed to wrap the stories around herself—around all of them.
A few pages into the story, Sally crept down from the treetop and straddled a low branch. And a minute later, they weren’t cold and frightened, huddled in the skirts of a pine tree. Instead, they floated underwater, surrounded by colorful seaweed, watching mermaids sing and swim. They joined a merchant caravan, smuggled cabbages to the ogres in exchange for gold, and watched mages struggle to master human magic.
“. . . and that is how the mages learned that magic always seeks Balance,” Roz said, as Ji patched the sleeves of her cloak and dress. “If a spell heals one person, it will sicken someone else.”