Dragonslayer

by Tui T. Sutherland

  “Oh!” Rose said, her hands flying to her face. “Poor little dragon! She really might, she’s so scary. But we’ll save him, Wren. Don’t worry. You have me now.”

  “Could you take me to Smolder?” Wren asked. “Do you think he’d give the key to me if I ask nicely?”

  “Ask him?” Rose said, clutching her head. “You can speak it, too?”

  “I mean,” Wren said, “not well. I always mix up my grrroars and my grrawrs.”

  “Good heavens,” Rose said. “You do sound like them. Smolder would probably have a heart attack if you suddenly appeared speaking his language. He doesn’t exactly love surprises. Or change. Listen, I’ll get you that key right now, I promise. But can you please please stay and teach me Dragon?”

  “Oh, no, I can’t,” Wren said, alarmed. “That would take forever! We need to escape in a hurry as soon as we possibly can. Sky is in danger every moment he’s in this palace.”

  “Teach me anything,” Rose pleaded. “I can help you both hide for an extra day — even one day would be so helpful! Just teach me how to say ‘Smolder, stop putting me in places I can’t get out of.’ Or ‘Smolder, I want a tangerine today, not another boiled fish.’ Ooh, or ‘Smolder, it is unreasonable that any creature should snore quite as loudly as you do.’”

  “I could try to teach you a little,” Wren said, rubbing her forehead. “If I knew that Sky was safe.”

  “I’ll get the key,” Rose promised. “Describe it to me and I’ll go get it right now, and then we’ll hide and you can teach me for however long you can stay.”

  Wren’s instinct was still to try to get the key herself. But if Rose could get the key as easily as she thought she could, it would be the fastest way to save Sky … and meanwhile Wren could stay with him to keep him safe.

  I could teach her a little bit before we go.

  One human. I just have to trust this one.

  “All right,” Wren said. “Let’s do it.”

  The palace of the desert dragons was the biggest anything Ivy had ever seen: bigger than the entire area covered by the old village ruins, bigger than all the underground tunnels and rooms of Valor put together.

  It LOOMED. That was a word Daffodil had always found hilarious, but it was exactly the right one for what this palace was doing. LOOMING out of the sand in the moonlight like it was planning to squash any approaching humans beneath its giant talons.

  “It looks different,” Stone said. They’d reined in the horses on top of a dune, far enough away that Stone hoped they’d blend in with the cacti, if any dragons were watching from the towers.

  Also, this was as far as the horses would go. Even Ivy could smell the dragon fire and iron scent of blood in the air; it made the horses skitter and stamp their hooves. She slid off and helped her uncle tie them to one of the tall, multi-armed cactus plants.

  “Different how?” Leaf asked him.

  “From the last time I was here,” Stone said. He nodded at the palace. “There’s an extra wall now. Bigger, higher. I’m guessing that’s exactly why they built it — to keep us out, if we ever tried coming back.”

  “That seems fair,” Ivy said. “We build stronger defenses against them all the time. And you did kill their queen.”

  You, not my dad. That still felt strange, like her mind couldn’t quite fit anyone else into the word Dragonslayer.

  She wished they had the treasure. The plan was to sneak into the palace, but if they got caught, she would have liked to have something to offer the dragons. Something to distract them from the grand idea of eating them all.

  “So how are we going to get inside?” Leaf asked. He was looking at Ivy, but Stone answered him.

  “I’ll go in alone,” he said, pulling the long silvery-black chain out of his pocket. “With this.” He looped it over his neck and disappeared from view.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Ivy said, tackling the spot where he’d been. She collided with something heavy and warm that went “oof!” and toppled over.

  “Ivy, GET OFF,” Stone growled.

  “Take that off first,” she said. “So we can make sure you don’t run away.”

  “All right, all right.” He reappeared, holding the necklace in his fist. Ivy stood up, but stayed near him.

  “You can’t go in by yourself,” she said.

  “Why not?” he demanded.

  “Because we want to go with you!” Ivy said. She was not going to get this close to a dragon’s lair and not go inside!

  “And because we can help,” Leaf added.

  That, too. “Besides, we might find Rose and you might miss something,” she added.

  “I can hunt through a giant palace just as well as you can,” Stone said. “Better, because there is one of me, I am quiet, unlike you, and I am invisible.”

  “If you go in there alone and invisible,” Ivy said, “we are just going to follow you. Together and uninvisible.”

  Stone’s jaw worked in silence for a moment. “No,” he said, and he leaned forward to drape the glittering chain over Ivy’s neck. She looked down, surprised, and saw that she’d vanished. She could see right through her feet to the sand underneath.

  “Wait, no,” she said. “I didn’t mean to take this. You keep it.” She started to take it off and he stepped back, waving his hands.

  “If you insist on coming,” he said, “then you have to wear that. For me, Ivy. I’m not losing another family member to this place.”

  She let go of the chain with a sigh. She recognized this stubbornness. They could stand here arguing all night, or they could each take a half step sideways and move on.

  “Well, then, let me scout ahead,” she said. She looped the extra length of chain around her shoulders a few more times. “We’ll get as close as we can, and then I’ll check out the gate.”

  They ran lightly down the dunes, closer and closer to the strangely silent palace. Ivy got a fright when she looked up and saw dozens of dragons staring down at them — but after a momentary heart attack, she realized they were not alive. Those were dragon heads, defeated enemies mounted on spikes at the top of the walls.

  Remember that for Daffodil, she thought. That was the kind of gruesome detail Daffodil would love.

  She wished Violet were here, too — Violet would definitely be able to think of a clever way to get them inside the palace.

  Stone and Leaf stopped a few lengths away from the wall and lay down behind a wave of sand. Ivy ran on ahead toward the gate, which was as tall and thick as the walls, and flanked by two enormous statues of dragons roaring.

  A pair of dragon guards stood outside the gate, twitching and stamping their feet. They kept looking back at the palace as though they were more afraid of what might come from there than they were of anything out in the desert.

  Ivy crouched beside one of the statues and watched them carefully. She noticed that they held their wings tense and high, and they weren’t speaking to each other. In fact, if she had to guess, she’d say they were in a fight, or at least very close to angry with the other one. They had all the signs she’d seen in her father, or when Violet and Daffodil were about to have a serious argument — the way one narrowed his eyes, the coiled flicker of the other’s tail, the way one hunched her shoulders away from the other and quivered with rage when he coughed.

  Could she use that? Could she take her peacemaking skills and reverse them?

  Silently she reached down and scooped sand and pebbles into the pockets of her cloak. She climbed as high as she could get on the statue, then took out a handful of sand and blew it into the face of the dragon on the opposite side.

  “ROARGH!” the dragon snapped, sneezing and shaking its head. It snarled something grumpy at the closer guard, who growled back. They turned away from each other, glaring out at the desert.

  Ivy took another handful of sand and did it to the closer dragon this time. As he whipped around to snarl at his partner, she threw a rock at the other dragon’s ear as hard as she could.

&nb
sp; The guards started snarling furiously at each other. Each time one started to turn away, Ivy threw a rock to keep the fight going. Soon the dragons were face-to-face, hissing and lashing their tails. One of them roared something, turned to unlock the gate, wrenched it open, and stomped inside.

  To get a different dragon to guard in his place, Ivy guessed. He’d left the gate ajar behind him, as though he planned to return or send someone back in a moment.

  She leaped down from the statue and ran back to Stone and Leaf. “I know what we can do,” she whispered, making them both jump with her disembodied voice. “Come, quickly!” She unwound the chain from around her shoulders, then draped one end around Leaf’s head and the other around Stone’s, with her in the middle. The chain was long enough to encircle all of them — and make them all invisible.

  Arm in arm, they raced back to the gate. It was still ajar, but they could hear shuffling and muttering in the courtyard beyond. A new dragon guard would be there soon.

  Ivy pushed Leaf ahead of her through the gate and they bundled into the wide-open space on the other side. A soldier was stomping toward them, so they had to scurry out of the way as fast as they could. Ivy thanked the universe that the dragon was too sleepy and grouchy to notice their footprints in the sand.

  She wished they could stop for a moment to stare around the courtyard — she wanted a closer look at the obelisk monument in the center. But Stone had moved ahead of them now, making a beeline for the palace doors. With the chain still linking them together, she and Leaf had to hurry to keep up with him.

  They stepped onto the marble floor of the old palace, between billowing white curtains, and Ivy looked up, up, up to the dome overhead. A mosaic of jeweled tiles glittered back at her, reflecting the moons and the torches in opal and flame. In the deserted room, Stone paused to resettle the chain around only Ivy. “So you can run if you need to,” he whispered.

  They crept through halls where dragons slept beside overturned tables, with half-eaten antelopes and spilled flagons of agave nectar scattered around them. They avoided the small rooms where they could hear pairs or trios of dragons playing games with tiny bones or hissing secrets to one another in the dark of night. They climbed long flights of stairs with dragon eyes glaring down at them from the tapestries, and they tiptoed past a vast throne room where a dragon glowered alone over a giant map.

  The palace was so big, Ivy was starting to think they’d have to find a place to hide and stay for several days so they could search every corner of it. She could see the moons slipping across the sky every time they passed a window. It would be morning before long.

  They went down a tunnel and found themselves suddenly in a huge kitchen. Copper pots and pans hung from the ceiling, and ominous-looking jars lined the shelves all along one side of the room. Ivy saw something she thought was pears right next to something else that looked like eyeballs. Yeeergh. I pity the cook who mixes those two up.

  The room seemed empty, so they set out across the floor to the far doorway — but the room was not empty. A dragon was hunched over one of the counters, taking notes on a scroll, so absorbed and quiet that they didn’t notice her until they were out in the open and she suddenly looked up with a hiss.

  Ivy leaped forward and threw the extra length of chain around Leaf’s neck. He vanished as the dragon darted toward them, but before Ivy could reach Stone to make him invisible, too, the dragon swooped him up in her talons.

  “Oh no,” Ivy whispered, clutching Leaf’s arm.

  “GRRRROAR!” the dragon shouted. She shook Stone a little bit and waved her wings at the kitchen around her, roaring some more.

  Ivy half expected her to throw Stone into one of the jars, or set him on fire on the spot. But instead the dragon tossed him in a net bag, hooked the bag around her shoulders, and stormed out of the kitchen.

  “Quick!” Ivy whispered, nudging Leaf. They raced after the dragon, who was muttering and growling to herself as she charged through the halls. Around a few corners, across a courtyard, and up a few steps onto a roofed terrace lined with mirrored mosaics. Here the dragon stopped at a door covered in small jewel-colored tiles and banged on it furiously.

  Leaf and Ivy caught up as the dragon waited for a response. They crept close enough to see Stone, upside down in the bag and struggling to wrench one of the holes bigger.

  The dragon pounded on the door again, and it suddenly flew open.

  “ROARGRAWRARGRROARF!” the dragon holding Stone shouted at the dragon in the doorway. The new one was a sleek, sand-colored dragon with black diamond patterns on his scales and a ring of keys around his neck. He blinked at the other dragon with sleepy bewilderment.

  She growled something else and pushed past him into the room beyond. Ivy and Leaf sprinted over the tiles and skidded inside, into a lavishly furnished suite of rooms where everything looked expensive. Silk tapestries hung from the walls, most of them depicting dragon faces or dragons in flight over the desert. Emerald-green pillows were scattered across the woven rugs and low couches. A warm glow lit the room from bejeweled lamps in the wall sconces.

  The first dragon brandished the bag with Stone in it and waved it at the key-ring dragon. “GRRR ROAR ROARF!” she shouted, pointing at her hapless human captive.

  “Hmmm?” said the sleepy dragon with all the keys. “Roargrawf?” He gave a puzzled shrug and pointed to a large pile of pillows, surrounded by scraps of paper with drawings all over them.

  The corner was so cluttered, it took Ivy a moment to see what he was pointing at. But then it moved, standing up on the pillows and tilting its head, and she gasped.

  It was Rose, unmistakably Rose from the sketch — Rose, twenty years older, with longer hair, but with the same defiant spark in her eyes. She looked exactly the way she had in Ivy’s sapphire vision. Ivy couldn’t believe it. It was real and she was right and somehow Rose was actually, completely alive.

  The dragon from the kitchen saw her and nearly jumped out of its skin. It flung the net bag away from itself as though it had just discovered it was holding a poisonous spider. Stone crashed into one of the pillows with an “ooof!”

  The two dragons started arguing, but Rose sprang off her pillow and ran over to Stone. She pulled the net bag off of him and turned him over to see his face.

  “No way!” she cried, her eyes lighting up.

  “Rose!” Stone cried. He tried to sit up and reach for her. “Rose, it — it can’t be. Rose.” He burst into tears and covered his face. She knelt to wrap her arms around him.

  The dragons finally noticed what the humans were doing. The one from the kitchen growled something in a warning voice and stalked out of the room again. The other one shut the door and regarded Rose skeptically.

  Rose looked up at him and growled something that sounded like the language the dragons had been speaking. The dragon made a low chuckling kind of noise.

  Ivy gasped. Could Rose speak Dragon?

  Rose looked around in surprise, and Ivy remembered that she was invisible. She took a step closer to the reunited siblings. Beside her, she could feel Leaf’s warm arm brushing hers, but he was silent, and she couldn’t see his face to guess what he was feeling.

  “Why isn’t that dragon eating us?” Stone asked, lifting his head and grabbing Rose’s hands. “Are you in danger?”

  “Not at all,” Rose said with a little laugh. “This is my dragon, Prince Smolder.”

  “Your dragon?” Stone echoed.

  “Well, he thinks I’m his human,” Rose said. “It’s basically the same thing in the end.”

  “Why didn’t the other one eat me?” Stone asked.

  Rose laughed again. “I think she thought you were me. She’s driven me out of her kitchen more than once, and I think she’s also yelled at Smolder about keeping me away from her food. She thinks I’m a mouse, basically, who’s going to leave holes in all her cheese. I mean, fair, I do actually do that, sometimes. Anyway, so she saw you, thought you were me, brought you over here to yell a
t Smolder, and then discovered that I was already here. Which meant she’d picked up a wild human, which apparently gave her quite a fright.”

  Ivy couldn’t contain herself any longer. She dragged Leaf over to crouch beside them. “What did you say to him?” she whispered. “Were you speaking Dragon?”

  Rose jumped and twisted around to search the room with her eyes. “Um,” she said. “Stone? Did you just hear another human voice?”

  “There are two others with me,” Stone said. “Can you make that dragon go away?”

  Rose stood up, put her hands on her hips, and said something bossy-sounding to the dragon. He laughed again and pointed at Stone. She shook her head, stamped her foot, and repeated herself.

  Still laughing and shaking his head, Prince Smolder sauntered out of the room and closed the door behind him.

  Ivy whipped off the chain. “Oh my gosh! You do speak Dragon!”

  “Not really,” Rose said ruefully. “I only know a few phrases, and apparently my pronunciation is ‘abominable.’ Also, I’m pretty sure Smolder thinks I’m just an adorable mimic. He keeps laughing at everything I try to say! So I think I told him to get me some dried apricots, but we’ll see what he actually comes back with. Who are you, by the way?”

  “I’m your niece,” Ivy said. “I’m Ivy.”

  “Not my daughter,” Stone said as she turned to him. He looked a lot more relaxed with the dragon out of the room. “Heath’s.”

  Rose’s eyebrows shot up and she laughed. “Seriously? Heath had kids? Who was silly enough to marry him?”

  “Do you remember Lark?” Stone said. “Her. And just one kid, just Ivy.”

  “Aw, Lark,” Rose said. “She could have done so much better.”

  “Heath is the lord of the town now,” Stone said with a shrug. “And he’s the famous Dragonslayer. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

  Rose snorted. “You know what I mean. So, wow. I have a niece! Nice to meet you, Ivy. And who’s this?”

  “I’m Leaf.” He held out his hand to shake hers.

  “This is wild,” Rose said, grinning from ear to ear. “I haven’t seen another human being in twenty years, and suddenly it’s like the palace is full of them.”