The summer after she met Undauntable, she and Sky had traveled all the way to the north edge of the mountains, circling far around Talisman and the palace of the mountain dragons. They’d gone to the farthest point of the peninsula and discovered hidden villages there where people lived in relative safety, at least compared to the villages directly below the dragons’ wings.
Wren wasn’t interested in human villages, though, except as places where she could trade her old books for new ones. She didn’t trust people, especially the ones who made clucking noises and asked where her parents were and invited her to their houses for a meal. She never stayed near human settlements longer than a night, and she never went inside their buildings for any reason.
Once they’d reached the top of the continent, she and Sky had turned south and gone down the coast, looking out to the great bay and the distant islands. Sky liked to gallop along the beach and then gallop back, shaking sand off his wings all over her. He loved hermit crabs nearly as much as snails, and then he met his first baby turtle and nearly fainted with joy.
“Is this all because you wish you had your own shell you could hide inside?” Wren asked. They’d developed a sort of hybrid Human-Dragon language between them, shifting back and forth between the two, depending on which words they knew of each.
“SO CUTE,” Sky warbled, near tears. He lay down beside the turtle and rested his head on his front claws. “I looooooooooooooooooooooooooove it. Wren! Look at its little head. Look at its little feet! It is the sweetest, best little animal in the whole history of the universe.”
“Don’t let the snails hear you say that,” Wren teased. “They might get jealous.”
They’d camped on that beach for days so Sky could make sure the baby turtle made it to the ocean and survived and had a wonderful life ahead of it. Wren kindly decided not to tell him she was pretty sure the ocean dragons ate turtles. Hopefully they’d miss this particular one.
They saw the blue and green dragons often, soaring out over the water or diving into the waves. Twice Wren saw a sea dragon swoop down and then fly up again with an actual shark thrashing in its talons. She stayed a little closer to the tree line after that. The dragons of the sea didn’t seem all that interested in hunting for land animals, but she was quite ready to hide if they suddenly changed their minds.
The river delta and the swamps after it were tricky to navigate, plus potentially full of dragons hiding under the mud, so Wren suggested going back into the mountains. But then Sky had a wonderful idea.
“You could RIDE on me!” he announced. “And I could FLY over the swamps!”
Wren studied him dubiously. They had wandered into a cluster of mangrove trees and not being able to see what was in the water around her feet had made her nervous, so she was sitting up on one of the branches, deciding what to do next. Sky was perched on a tree beside her. He was still very small compared to all the other dragons they saw, but he was more than twice Wren’s size by this point, and the tree was drooping unhappily underneath him.
“That would be great,” Wren said, “but I’m not sure you’re big enough yet.”
She was politely avoiding saying, “And also you’re a rather dreadful flier.” Sky had enormous enthusiasm, very little sense of direction, and a habit of getting distracted by seagulls, forgetting to flap, and suddenly plummeting out of the sky. Wren thought he was very likely to accidentally fly her into a tree.
“Climb on!” Sky offered hopefully. “Let’s try!” He edged a bit closer, wobbling as the branch bowed lower.
“Well … all right,” said Wren. She had kind of been dreaming of this moment since Sky first managed to jump off a boulder and go up instead of down. After all, who would have a dragon for a best friend and never fly with him?
She scrambled onto Sky carefully, settling her legs right above his wings and wrapping her arms around his neck.
“This is weird,” she said. “This used to be the other way around.”
“Hang on!” he yelped happily, and leaped into the sky.
Five minutes later, they crashed into the ocean. Wren floundered back onto the beach, laughing.
“I’m sorry!” Sky yelped, splashing after her. “I’m sorry! Let’s try again!”
“We will,” Wren said, “when you’re a little bigger.” She waded over to him and hugged him fiercely. “That was amazing.”
So they went back into the mountains, but the next year Sky was a lot bigger and they were able to fly over the entire swamplands and see the peninsula and islands on the far end of the continent. They also saw another human city out there, as big as the Indestructible City, and just as likely to shoot flaming things at dragons, it turned out, so they flew away without investigating any further.
Later on they followed the Indestructible City’s river to the southern coast and flew east, along the edge of the rainforest, with Wren making notes on her map about the peninsulas and islands down there. They were both curious about the rainforest, but it made a lot of strange noises and looked very dense and hard to fly in, so in the end they colored that whole section of the map dark green, labeled it HERE BE TREES, and left it at that.
Sky practiced until he was a brilliant flier, according to Wren, and he was always very careful when he was carrying her. The only part of the continent they hadn’t really explored was the desert and the arctic tundra above it. Every time they looked at the desert, Wren got nervous. She didn’t like the idea of being so exposed, of having nowhere to hide from other dragons, or from other people.
Whenever Wren ran out of things to read or needed new clothes, they’d go back to their hidden valley and Sky would wait while she ventured down to the Indestructible City. There, Wren would climb a tree and watch the line at the cliff, for days if necessary — it was never more than two — until Prince Undauntable showed up. Then she would go down, give him another dragon scale, and get everything she needed.
Once, when Wren thought she was around twelve, Undauntable asked her to come into the city to visit his manor.
“It’s really big,” he said proudly.
“Mrow,” Cat agreed. Even though Undauntable had grown to be slightly taller than Wren (a fact she disliked), the cat was still much too big for him and he still carried it everywhere. And Wren still refused to call it Dragon.
“You’ll be very impressed,” he added. He swept his hair back in what he probably thought was a dramatic fashion. He’d grown it long, trimmed his eyebrows, and was wearing one of Sky’s scales embedded in a big silver ring. His robes were pale orange, perhaps to match.
“Meh,” Wren said with a shrug. She picked up another book. They’d found a family in line who had at least ten books she’d never seen before; she couldn’t carry them all, but she was having a hard time choosing between them. “A house is a house. Just a bunch of walls.”
“These are BIG walls,” he said crossly. “It’s way bigger than your house!”
“So?” said Wren. “Your city has far too many walls for me. I have a feeling if I went up there, I’d never be able to get back down.” She thought, And then Sky would try to come rescue me, and they’d shoot at him.
“That’s silly,” said the prince. “But you won’t want to leave anyway, once you see how big and amazing it is.”
“Oh?” said Wren. “And would I get to be adopted by a big, fancy family so I could have my own walls? And maybe a collar so everyone knows I belong to them?”
“You could bring your own family,” he said, in the voice he used when he thought he was being sly and gathering information. “How many would that be? I could tell Dad to find a place for you. Wouldn’t they be so pleased? Everyone wants to live here and hardly anyone can, but he’d listen to me. Ooh, you could live next door to me! I don’t like our neighbors anyway; I don’t mind kicking them out.”
“I do not want to live in the Indestructible City,” Wren said firmly.
“But then you could see me all the time,” he wheedled.
Sh
e arched an eyebrow at him. “What makes you think either of us would like that?”
“The — because — I’m the — everyone wants to be friends with me!” he blurted.
“If I lived next door to you,” Wren pointed out, “I wouldn’t be able to bring you the dragon scales you love. Just think about that, as you look around at all your hundreds of friends: I could have one more friend who barely tolerates me, or I could have the most unique dragon scales in the city. Then you’ll feel better.”
“You don’t understand anything,” he grumbled.
“I’ll take these five,” Wren said to the woman with the books. “You buy the other five,” she said to Undauntable, “and bring them to me next time I come back.”
“What — just carry them up and down from the city every day in case you show up?” he demanded indignantly.
“Don’t pretend like you ever walk those steps,” Wren said with a laugh. “You have your own fancy basket these days. I saw it.” A person basket had been added next to the cargo platform in the last few years. She wondered how many people used it besides the prince — and she wondered whether he came down often, looking for her when she wasn’t here.
She put her new books in the knapsack she’d just bought as well, pretending not to pay attention, but she was pleased to note Undauntable buying the other books behind her and handing them to his bodyguard.
“So when will you be back?” he asked, following her as she strolled to the end of the line.
“I don’t know,” she said, like she always said. “But we’ll both survive until then.”
“You’d better,” he said. Wren started toward the river and was enormously surprised when he grabbed her hand. She looked at him and he immediately let go.
“I was just going to say,” he said quickly, “that I’m very mad you won’t come see my house. But — but I hope you come back soon because you are not boring. Don’t stay away a whole year again this time.”
“Was it a whole year?” Wren asked. “Huh. Well, we’ll see.” He looked sort of wounded, so she added, “You are reasonably interesting yourself, I guess. Probably the second most interesting friend I have.” That seemed to cheer him up, so she did not add that she only had two friends, and that he just barely squeaked into the category at all.
This backfired a little, however, when two years later he asked her to marry him.
Leaf spread the blueprint on the table and Cranberry leaned over it with a gasp of awe.
“You did it,” Grove said. “Leaf! This is amazing.”
“You’re crazy brave, kid,” said Thyme.
It had taken him months of stolen moments to copy the blueprint, carefully penciling in every detail he could while his heart pounded and every noise sounded like Master Trout returning.
“This is really the mountain dragons’ palace?” Mushroom said skeptically. “How do we know? What the heck is this?” He pointed to a smudge in the top left corner. “And over here … ‘prison’? That doesn’t look like a prison. It looks like a bunch of columns.”
“I just copied it,” Leaf said. “We’ll have to trust that whoever made it — and all the people who added notes to it — knew what they were doing.”
Mushroom snorted, but everyone else nodded.
“This changes everything, Leaf,” Rowan said. “It was risky, but it means our plan might actually work now.”
He smiled up at her. Even though he was a tall fifteen-year-old, she was still taller than him. “I did it for Wren,” he said.
Sadness and something else flickered in her expression, and she looked away quickly.
“I don’t know,” Mushroom grumbled. “If this is even remotely correct, it means our plan is more stupid than it was before. Look at all the levels! Where do they even keep their treasure?”
“According to the notes, most of it is here,” Leaf said, pointing to a pair of rooms near the center of the palace. “But we don’t know how old this map is, or whether the dragons have moved it by now.”
“Great.” Mushroom rolled his eyes. “So we’re going to sneak into a palace full of dragons based on a kid’s scribbled copy of an ancient, unreliable drawing that might be a total fantasy.”
“Heck, yeah, I’ll do it,” Thyme volunteered. “I’m not scared.” He winked cheekily at his brother, which even Leaf could guess was a bad idea.
Mushroom scowled and stalked out of the room, muttering to himself.
“Thank you, Leaf,” Grove said, putting one hand on Leaf’s shoulder. “Go back to the dragonmancers. We’ll study this and decide what to do.”
* * *
Two days later, Rowan appeared at the gate of Master Trout’s garden in the middle of the day. This never happened, and Leaf had also never seen her face do what it was doing, which was something like trying not to freak out and something like falling apart and something like she was about to stab someone, all at the same time.
“Um,” he said, glancing down the row of beans at the other apprentice, who was out of earshot (he hoped), working on the flower beds near the house. “Hi?”
“Leaf,” Rowan whispered, clutching the gate posts and crouching down to talk through the slats. “We have a problem.”
Leaf deliberately spilled his basket of beans next to the fence and knelt to pick them up. “What’s wrong?” he whispered back. Master Trout was inside the house, but could be spying on them through one of the dusty curtains.
Rowan rubbed her fingers together nervously. “The map,” she said. “The blueprint, whatever. It’s gone.”
Now Leaf knocked over his basket for real. “What?” he cried. “What do you mean? Did you tear it? Can’t we fix it?”
“No, it’s really gone,” she said. “I mean vanished. Like … stolen.”
“By who?” Leaf’s body felt chilled, like icy fish scales were trailing over his skin. “The dragonmancers? Did they find out what I did?”
Rowan shook her head. “It was well hidden. It had to be one of us.” She hesitated. “And the only one missing … is Mushroom.”
“Missing?” Leaf echoed. Something bad was happening, but he didn’t understand it. Why would Mushroom steal the map they were all going to use together? Where was he?
“We think he’s gone to the dragons’ palace on his own,” she said. “So he can use the map to steal the treasure for himself.”
“Mushroom?” Leaf said. “But he’ll definitely mess it up! Especially by himself!”
“I know!” Rowan said.
“What do we do?” Leaf asked. “How far away is the dragon palace? Does he have a big head start? Can we catch up to him?”
“Catch up to who?” a nasal voice interrupted them.
Rowan winced, then looked over her shoulder as Leaf slowly got to his feet. The other two dragonmancers had snuck up on them and were now standing on the path behind Leaf’s sister.
The female dragonmancer, Crow, was tall and gaunt, with brittle hair in a gray toadstool-like shape around her head and wrinkles of disapproval permanently scored around her mouth. She always spoke as though she was the only person in the room whose opinion mattered. She also had a habit of repeating the last thing she’d said again more loudly, as if to stick it firmly in people’s minds.
The other one was Gorge, a man with a lizard’s face, terrible skin, and slick hair who couldn’t muster a natural smile to save his life. His perpetual expression was sly, insecure, and malevolently gleeful at the same time, as though he knew full well that everyone he met wanted to punch him but couldn’t because of his power.
“Yes, children,” he said. “Who were you talking about?”
“No one,” Leaf answered at the same time as Rowan said, “A friend.”
“He went hunting,” Rowan added quickly. “Alone, and he’s kind of clumsy, so we’re just worried about him. No big deal.”
“It is a terrible, terrible idea to lie to a dragonmancer,” Crow said. “TERRIBLE. I’m sure you will not make that mistake, apprentice.” She tu
rned a sharp eye on Leaf. “And while you frantically decide how much to tell me, I will generously mention that we heard you say dragons’ palace, so please, don’t leave that part out. Do NOT leave it out.”
Leaf knew that she was giving them a chance, and a second lie would have bad consequences. But he didn’t know how much they’d heard. Did they know about the map? He had to risk some of the truth … but maybe not all of it.
“We think our friend Mushroom has gone to the dragons’ palace,” he admitted hesitantly. “He — he’s always talking about stealing treasure and we think m-maybe he’s gone to try.”
“Even though we’ve forbidden it?” Gorge demanded. “What a doomed idiot.”
Crow’s eyebrows sank down and together and she sucked in air between her teeth. “This could be a disaster,” she hissed.
“I know,” Rowan said. “He’ll probably get eaten —”
“Much worse than that,” Crow interrupted. “If the dragons catch him, they could decide to punish the entire village for his crime. We could all be on fire by this time tomorrow! ON FIRE!”
“Perhaps,” Gorge said slyly, “someone could do something about this.”
“We can stop him,” Rowan said. “We’ll leave now and catch him before he gets to the palace.”
Leaf wondered what she was thinking behind that determined, helpful face. What would they really do if and when they caught Mushroom and got the map back? He had a feeling Rowan, Grove, and Thyme would still want to sneak into the palace. But was Crow right about what would happen to the village? Not if I kill the dragons first, his heart whispered.
“It’s been a long time since you or I had any new dragon treasure,” Gorge said in his slithering voice, sliding his hands together. “So many useless, weak apprentices. So prone to getting eaten before they can achieve their goals.”
Treasure smuggler, Wren whispered scornfully in Leaf’s head. That’s what they really want. More treasure, more power. They don’t care about the village.
Did they once send apprentices to steal treasure? Leaf wondered back. Is that why no apprentice has lived long enough to join the ranks of the dragonmancers?
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