“There is,” I said. “We help her remember.”
“Remember?” Callum sheathed his sword. Then, moving closer to me, he took my hand. “Are you saying—”
“Yes.” I used my free hand to cover his. “She must be part of your family. She’s trapped just like you were.”
“Callum, it must be mother!” Elias blurted. “It must be!” The hope glistening in his eyes nearly brought tears to mine, but I forced myself to remain stoic. I could process all of what was happening later. This wasn’t the time.
“Do you think so?” Sebastian said, his gaze returning to the dragon. “Such a beast could really be her?”
Callum bit his lower lip, his eyes hardening. He looked as though he’d aged in the few short hours since I’d met him. And why wouldn’t he have? The last he remembered, he was a young man surrounded by his family and his subjects, waiting for adulthood, waiting for marriage, waiting to be a man. It was all gone. His family and subjects were cursed. His betrothed was long dead. And manhood had been thrust upon him whether ready for it or not.
“We were goblins,” he said. “Whatever lunacy made that possible could also do this to our mother.”
“Talia,” Amir said, “Can you fix her? Like you did the princes?”
I turned on the spot to better consider the dragon. Her scales continued to glisten in the light, her spiny tail curled around one of her legs as she watched us with suspicion. I closed my eyelids so I could see her with my mind’s eye. Deep within me, I willed her scales to melt. Her tail to wither. Her eyes to shrink. The vision of the dragon broke, cracked, and shattered until an intelligent-looking woman with green eyes and auburn hair stood in its place. Her cheeks were stained by dried tears, her hands drawn together as she begged me to help her.
The woman’s soft face left no doubt she was the Queen of Oldpass. Though she was more pale than her sons, they possessed the same facial structure. I reached out for her with my spirit, trying to grab hold of her, to pull her free of her prison. Something barred my way. Gusts of hot and cold swished around me like a tornado. My spirit was lifted from the ground and flung into the wall. I’d never experienced such a thing before. The shock forced me back into my body. I opened my eyes and gasped for air.
Amir had his arms around me tightly. “Shhh. Are you hurt?”
“No. No. I’m fine. But—” I pulled back from him and looked to the brothers. It felt like every time I spoke to them I had to chip away more small pieces of their hearts. “I’m sorry. I can’t release her.”
“Why not?” Elias’s voice sounded more childlike than before. “You did it earlier!”
“The magic is too strong. There’s some hope, though.”
“What do you mean?” Sebastian said.
“She’s still in there. She wants to be free, but she is so deep inside, I can’t reach her. I think that, maybe…maybe you can.”
All four of my companions frowned.
“What do you mean, Talia? You’re the only one with the power to even see the worlds beyond ours, let alone the power to interact with them,” Amir said.
“Surely, you trust me by now?”
His serious eyes softened. “You’re right,” he said. “I should know better after the last few weeks.”
“Could you two explain what’s going on?” Sebastian huffed. “If that dragon is my mother, I want her back.”
“Of course,” I replied. “She needs someone to remind her who she is. My incantations alone won’t be able to break through the curse. Not this time.”
“How do we do that?” Callum asked, more stoic than his younger brothers, who seemed agitated and impatient. “Just tell us what to do.”
I took a few steps back to increase the distance between myself and the watchful dragon. There was no need to risk antagonising her. She might have been another innocent trapped by dark magic, but just like the goblins, she would destroy us without a second thought. The brothers and Amir followed my lead.
“The three of you should hold hands,” I instructed. Without a word, the brothers formed a triangle. “It isn’t necessary, but closing your eyes may help you ignore the distraction of your mother’s form. You need to remember who she is. Her face. Her smell. Her voice. Anything at all.” I did my best to sound confident, capable.
The truth was, I had no idea if it would work. I’d never tried to reverse such a powerful spell before. Without a specific, tested technique in my arsenal, I returned to my early training. I thought of my first tutor, the woman who’d mentored and cared for me after my parents had left me indentured to Grimvein’s royal family. Not quite a prisoner, not quite free either. Nazli’s lessons had helped me find purpose in an unfamiliar world.
“You could learn every incantation and every spirit-trick known to humanity,” she’d told me, “But when you are the Caster of Grimvein, something will arise one day. You’ll find an adversary or a challenge unlike anything we could anticipate in these lessons.”
“How am I supposed to come out of something like that alive?” I’d asked her.
Nazli had stroked my cheek with the back her leathery fingers. “You think. That’s how. Remember three philosophies, child. First, no dark magic can hold back the force of love. Real, experienced love can break through anything. Second, with the exception of love, there is no such thing as unfaltering truth. Like history, truth is a construct, a distortion built of our own concepts and beliefs. Magic rearranges concepts, it challenges beliefs, it can reshape the way we view ourselves and everything around us. Sometimes for the better and sometimes not.”
“What’s the third thing?”
“That,” she’d said with wild eyes, “is not something I can ever teach you.”
By the gods, that woman had been frustrating! She’d taken the third philosophy with her to the grave a few years later. If there’d even been a third. Nazli never did teach me anything in a particularly direct fashion.
“Now what?” Elias’s frustrated voice returned me to the moment.
“Can I do anything to help?” Amir said, standing awkwardly next to the triangle of brothers. I shook my head, and his gaze dropped to the polished checkered floor. Inaction always frustrated him, but he had no role to play in that particular moment. He’d come there to slay a dragon. To be a noble hero and save a princess with the might of his sword. Not to remain idle whilst others fought a battle he could not even see, let alone contribute to. The fact was, the story wasn’t playing out the way either of us thought it would. For a start, we were still alive.
“Think about your mother,” I told the boys. “Choose an image you have of her. No. Not just have. An image you can feel, that you can experience with all of your senses.”
Their foreheads wrinkled as they concentrated. I waited until their breathing slowed, an indication they’d settled into the meditation of memory, before taking up a position between the twins. I covered their joined hands with my own, clasping their wrists. Neither of them reacted, a good indication they’d disconnected from the ballroom with their minds. I felt Amir’s attention on me as I breathed deeply and closed my eyes. I gasped as my projected self was abruptly pulled into another time and place. The boys had somehow managed to align their thoughts, to create a shared space. They’d all been drawn to the same moment in their past, pulling me into it with them. I allowed myself to hope that the spirit-trick could actually work.
In their memories, the Queen of Oldpass sat sobbing in the centre of a dimly lit room on an oversized wooden chair covered in ornate carvings. She was completely alone. I could see the hopelessness she felt contracting and expanding in bright bursts of black smoke around her aura with every heaving sob.
“Mother!” The excited collective squeal of her four sons prompted the queen to wipe her face and straighten her spine before turning towards her children as they charged into the room. She forced a smile as the two youngest burst onto her lap, the older twins taking up position on either side of the chair. Callum and Anton were near identical, but it wa
s clear the ten-year-old on the left was Callum, his slender nose slightly hooked. His eyes were also more serious, more mature. Even back then, he’d considered himself the protector.
“What else can you remember?” I said. The young boys ignored me because, for them, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t see their older counterparts, the young men meditating in the ballroom mere metres away from a dragon, but I could feel their nostalgia and their melancholy. This was one of those childhood moments that one reflects on when older, realising their youthful innocence had coloured their understanding of the moment.
“Are you quite well, Mother?” the young Callum asked. I could smell his mother’s perfume as though I were the one standing next to her, lavender with a hint of orange.
“Yes, darling boy,” the queen replied, hugging the younger twins tighter. Elias and Sebastian remembered that hug as clearly as though it’d happened yesterday.
“You have to be happy today!” Elias grinned, looking up at her with a loving expression.
The queen smiled again, more genuinely than before. “Why is that, dear boy?”
“Because,” Sebastian answered for him, “today is Aurora’s birthday!”
Her smile dissolved, replaced by a deep sorrow the boys hadn’t understood at the time, but did now. Their sister was one birthday closer to being taken by Tanit’s curse. Every year, the queen had cried on her daughter’s birthday, alone in that chair tucked away in a shaded, dusty room left untouched every other day of the year. Except for this one occasion when her sons had found her.
How could Tanit do that to their family? The curse was only part of the torture. The rest was the waiting, colouring all the years of Aurora’s life. When her parents ought to have loved and embraced every moment of her childhood, they mourned them instead, for each passing day frightened them beyond measure. Even before her younger brothers knew why their parents felt such constant lamentation, they knew it was there, lurking in every hug, every kiss, every birthday.
“Talia. Please. Do something,” Callum urged, his voice floating on a wave of despair. I’d almost become lost in the bittersweet beauty of their shared memory. I nodded, more to myself than anyone else, preparing for what came next.
I stretched my arms out as if to grab hold of the entire room the memory existed within. I curled my fingers around the edge of the image and lifted it as though it were a framed painting that hung on a wall. Is that not what all memories are? The people within it, the four young boys and their heartbroken mother, all froze in place.
“What are you doing?” Elias’s voice wavered as he felt the shaking of his mind. Sebastian grimaced, but Callum’s spirit remained silent.
“I’m sorry,” I replied. “I need to take this from you, just for a moment. Please don’t fight me.” I pulled at the image with all of my strength, but it wouldn’t come away from their joined consciousness.
“I-I’m trying to let it go,” Elias said.
“But I can’t,” Sebastian added. “We don’t want to leave.”
“Red,” I breathed. My core always felt warm when she touched me, whether physically or spiritually. Warm in the way the twins felt when their mother’s arms engulfed them. Totally safe and completely trusting. She struggled to stay connected, her presence flickering like a candle caught in a crosswind. As though throwing herself into the task, she grasped my shoulders for the briefest of moments, and then she was pulled away again. It was just long enough for her to energise my arms, allowing me to tear the frozen memory free from the boys.
In the ballroom, I released the hands of the young twins but kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t disconnect from the space between worlds. I turned on the spot until I could see the essence of the dragon in front of me. After our inactivity, she’d curled up like a sleeping cat. The picture in my hands, imbued with the sounds, smells, and emotions of the three who’d conjured it, pulsated as though alive and breathing. No spell can withstand true, experienced love. I hurled the picture at the stagnant dragon. It expanded into an enormous sheet and descended upon her, engulfing her. It thinned and tightened until it became a second skin. Her long, spiky neck uncurled as she reared up. I opened my eyes.
“What did you do?” Amir yelled, trying to be heard over the dragon’s ghoulish wails. Something was happening to her, and unlike the moment the goblins had remembered who they truly were, it caused pain.
“We reminded her who she is,” I replied, not blinking as I watched the dragon flap her wings in panic. Her flat head butted against the ceiling. She cried out and fell back to the floor, sending shards of broken tiles about the space as her wings retreated into her body.
“Mother!” Callum raced past me toward her.
Amir leapt forward and wrapped his arms around the young prince, keeping him out of harm’s way.
“Let go.” Callum struggled against Amir.
“I can’t,” he replied. “She could hurt you. Just stay back.”
Callum balled his hands into fists, the muscles in his forearms throbbing beneath the skin, but he stopped struggling and stood still. His brothers seemed equally frustrated that they could do nothing, but they stayed behind us.
The dragon’s skin started to melt away, revealing purplish, bloody flesh. We could see her bones shrinking and migrating underneath, the meaty tissue contracting, becoming smaller as its skeleton was rearranged. The sight was far bloodier than the transformation of the goblins, the potency of the magic much stronger, and harder for the victim to endure. The animistic wails gave way to humanlike shrieks, a woman’s voice breaking through. As the heap of bones and muscle started to take the shape of a person, new skin spread from the soles of her feet, gradually encasing her body. She fell to the floor, panting. I rushed forward to cover her with my cloak as she shivered. The scent of burnt flesh wafted through the air around her.
“Your Majesty,” I soothed, tucking a thick curl of red hair behind her ear. “You’re home. You’re safe.” I rubbed her back, and she started to cry. Her sons were upon us within seconds, and I pulled back, allowing them to embrace their mother. When she’d recovered, she would notice Anton’s absence, a moment I had no business being involved in.
Amir stepped up beside me as I stood to full height. “Look.” Nearby, a plain wooden door creaked open. “The princess,” he said flatly.
“It must lead to the tower stairs,” I replied. “Are you ready?”
He turned to look at me, his thoughtful eyes wide. “Talia—”
“Don’t,” I asserted. “Please.”
“You need to know some things before we go up there.”
I said nothing but nodded. I knew what he was about to say. I’d not hidden my feelings very well. No doubt he had sensed my affection, an affection I’d being trying my best to quieten since we found the entrance to the tunnel beneath Oldpass.
“You don’t need to. I can deal with this,” I told him, looking him directly in the eyes. Surprising to even myself, I meant it. I could cope with what was about to happen. Oldpass felt so familiar to me somehow. Being inside its ancient, fortified walls had helped to mitigate the intensity of my admiration. No, not mitigate it. Transform it.
“I don’t want you to think that you’re not wonderful,” he said. “You are. I’ve admired you since I was an adolescent, when my parents first sought the right to employ you.”
He’d noticed me back then? We’d seen one another during the years of my training, but never spoken. I’d had no idea he even knew my name all those years ago.
“That means something. Thank you,” I replied.
“It’s difficult to explain why I don’t feel for you what I think other adults feel for one another sometimes.”
I searched his worried face for more information, trying to understand what he meant.
“I…” He hesitated before continuing. “I love many people, but I’ve no desire to be intimate with any. I feel happy, I feel fulfilled, by my friendships, by the wonderful connections I share with others. Includ
ing you.”
My stomach clenched for a moment, but as it released, a flood of relief swept through my limbs and torso. “Amir,” I said, taking hold of his hands excitedly. “I understand! You’re just like Nazli.” My voice sounded childlike as I remembered an almost identical discussion with my former tutor. “She had no desire for physical love either. Thank you. Thank you so much for being honest with me.” The hint of tears glistened in his eyes as I spoke. “I didn’t realise it until just now. You and I are special to one another, but not in the way that the world expects men and women to be important to each other.”
He grinned. Brilliant white teeth contrasted the smooth, dark skin of his face as he leaned toward me, kissing my cheek. “That’s exactly right.”
My own smile dissipated as a chilling thought occurred to me. “But that leaves us with a considerable problem,” I said, looking toward the door behind him. “How do we wake up the princess?”
Chapter Seven
THERE WAS NO mistaking the moment Briar Rose realised her son had died. There being no more we could do for them, Amir and I had left the queen with the princes so they might be alone. The corridor beyond the ballroom led to a narrow staircase that curved upward in a clockwise direction. The steps were coarse and uneven, clearly not designed for visitors or officials, and so we made our way with care. The staircase was lined with torches, and at a touch of my fingers, I lit each one as we passed, sending gaunt and twisted shadows splashing across the dirty walls. It seemed like such a depressing and characterless space compared to the other areas we’d seen. Perhaps the north tower was a defensive position, designed as a kind of safe room should the castle come under attack.
As we passed an opening in the outer wall, we stopped to take in the cool, fresh air. Amir and I looked out over the city of Oldpass. It was the first time we’d seen anything beyond the castle itself, and it was beautiful. Though about the same size as Grimvein, the architecture was entirely different. Paths were wider, some of them lined with magnificent jacaranda trees, others by squat, flat-topped homes. I rested my head against Amir’s shoulder, and he wrapped his arm around me. It was the most comfortable I’d ever felt with him. Our closeness was immutable. It was real, and it didn’t need to be anything other than what it was. I’d convinced myself that my attraction to him was romantic because of its intensity. Its purity. He—clearly wiser than I—knew that did not have to be the case, not at all. We breathed in unison as I took in the sad silence of Oldpass.
Once Upon the Rainbow, Volume Two Page 20