by Dante King
“In layman’s terms, yes,” said Penelope. “Wards take a lot of time to weave, and a lot of magic to complete. They are intricate and costly spells.”
“So, we can assume that that trapdoor doesn’t just lead to Cade’s porno stash then?” I said.
“Probably not,” Tamsin said, her face deadpan. “But then the male brain has always been a mystery to me.”
Penelope guided us back outside. Above us, the sky was fading from a deep plum to pure black at its edges. Stars pricked the firmament like light shining through a threadbare rug.
“Right,” I said, my thoughts suddenly turning to Elenari, Saya, the dragonlings, and the mysterious crystal that was still in my room. “I’ve got to get going. Things to do, people to see, and all that.”
I gave Penelope a significant look, hoping that she would get what I was talking about and tactfully find a way to guide Tamsin away—an invitation to a friendly knife fight, I thought, would be a good way to snare the hobgoblin’s attention.
Thankfully, Tamsin either knew how to take a hint or had plans of her own. She turned as if to walk off. Then, she turned back abruptly and said to me, “Mike, what with all the fun we had in the Windy Belt, it would seem that we have the rest of the evening off, yes?”
Tamsin squared her sinewy shoulders and stared at me down her perfect nose.
“If you find yourself at a loss for something to do this evening,” she said, “perhaps I will sniff you out and we can do something together? I could show you how to use that spear of yours properly, hm?”
I looked at Penelope, and she was smiling like she knew something that I didn’t.
I turned back to Tamsin. She was a hard one to figure out; the very epitome of hot, cold, hot, cold treatment.
“Sure, we can hang out tonight,” I said, seeing her nonchalance and raising it to indifference. “Why don’t I meet you back here a bit later? I have something I want to do first. Keep your eye to the sky, and I should be back here in two hours.”
Tamsin’s teeth gleamed in the dim light. She inclined her head.
“Librarian,” she said to Penelope as a way of farewell, and then the hobgoblin was gone.
Once Tamsin had vanished into the shadows, I turned to Penelope.
“You’re going to see Saya and Elenari and the dragonlings?” she said at once, in a low voice.
I puffed out my cheeks. It was a tricky situation I was in. I wanted to keep this as under my hat as possible—every mention of Wayne and Garth made me feel as if I had betrayed the Seer in some way, even though Penelope had found out on her own—but I also didn’t want the Librarian to think that I was snubbing her.
“I am,” I said, “but you’re the only person who knows that, Pen. I need you to keep it to yourself, please, as I said before.”
The Knowledge Sprite looked slightly hurt at the insinuation that she couldn’t be trusted to keep it to herself.
“I told you that your secret was safe in my possession, Mike,” she said.
“Great,” I said, smiling.
I turned and summoned Noctis. The Onyx Dragon dropped a shoulder so that I could climb onto his back and then stopped, his piercing amber eyes locked over my shoulder.
I spun on my heel.
Penelope had summoned her distinctive Rooster Dragon, Glizbe, and was climbing onto her back.
“Where are you off to?” I asked.
Penelope looked surprised. “I’m coming with you.”
“Oh, no no no no,” I said. “That’s not what’s happening. Noctis and I can blend into the night sky like a shadow, but Glizbe… Not so much. This is a stealth visit.”
“You need someone to watch your back, Mike,” Penelope pressed, with her patient politeness that always wore away at my protestations like a glacier at a cliff face. A cliff face might be tough, but the glacier always wins.
“Don’t you have any Librarian stuff to do?” I asked hopefully.
“Because of the mission, I’ve been excused from those duties for this evening,” Penelope said.
“Goddamn it,” I said, though with no real fire. “Fine.”
I recalled the crystal, the one that I wanted to test on the dragonlings to see whether it was one they could use to become real dragons.
“I gotta grab something from my quarters,” I said. “Wait here.”
I jumped back down from Noctis, placed him back inside his crystal, and took the transportation hub to the dormitories. I ran into my room to grab the spare crystal from where I had it stowed behind my headboard. I also grabbed a fresh set of threads while I was at it, thinking that I might be able to wash myself at the Seer’s place and remove, at the very least, the worst of the blood and grime from my body.
When I returned, Penelope was looking at me curiously.
“What was it that you needed?” she asked as I summoned Noctis and climbed onto his back.
“Just some clothes and something else that you’ll doubtless see in due time,” I said.
Chapter Nineteen
I was excited to see the mothers of my offspring when Noctis touched down in the moonlit orchard of Augury Grove, in which the Seer’s cottage was located. Warm, cheerful firelight shone out from the windows set into the lime-washed walls.
The coming of Noctis and Glizbe sparked a chorus of excited squeaks and minuscule rasping roars from Garth and Wayne. The two dragonlings were so excited that they actually smashed through one of the top windows of the cottage like a couple of rogue cannonballs.
“Hey, guys!” I said, laughing as the baby dragons flapped around me and zoomed under Noctis’ chin and through his legs.
For his part, Noctis snapped lazily at them in a good-natured way. This seemed to be just the sort of game that Wayne and Garth were keen on playing, because they began zooming backward and forward between Noctis and Glizbe, while the mature dragons snapped and clicked their teeth at them.
As delighted and excited as Garth and Wayne were, the same could not be said for the three women who came out of the building behind them. When they caught sight of Penelope, they stopped in their tracks and glared accusingly at me.
“What?” I said, sliding off Noctis and walking toward Claire, Elenari, and Saya with my hands up. “What did I do? Is this about the window? Because that was totally the fault of the two little jackasses over there.”
I pointed at Wayne and Garth who were trying to goad a bored-looking Noctis into playing tag with them. The dragonlings were tugging at Noctis’ wings in an attempt to get him to join the fun they were having.
“It’s not the window that matters,” the Seer said, waving a hand disdainfully at the broken pane and causing it to fly back into a whole window again. “It’s the fact that you brought Penelope here to see the dragonlings! We already talked about the significance of keeping this secret within as select a group as possible to minimize the chance of any slips of tongue.”
Penelope was standing at my shoulder, but I heard the rustle of her Librarian’s robes as she shuffled her feet awkwardly. I could practically hear the sizzle of her characteristic navy-blue blush.
I looked from Claire to Saya to Elenari.
None of the women appeared overly pleased with what I had, seemingly, done. Saya, unsurprisingly, looked especially annoyed.
“Now, let’s just get a couple of things straight before you bend me over and give me a good, hard spanking,” I said. “Firstly, Penelope already knew about Saya and Elenari being knocked up. She already knew about the dragonlings. She saw enough on the day that she came here to warn me I was going to be late for my first class. She’s a Knowledge Sprite, for crying out loud. She knows shit.”
I saw Claire the Seer weighing these words.
“Still, how do we know that we can trust her?” Saya said.
From what I could make out in the light cast by the full moon, both Saya and Elenari had lost the golden glow that had suffused their skin last time I had seen them. I wondered how long it would be until they were both back training with the r
est of us.
“Respectfully,” said Penelope in her polite voice, “I must remind you that I am not just some raw dragonmancer recruit picked up yesterday. I am a qualified and trusted Librarian of the Grand Library of the Drako Academy.”
The challenging, tough look on Saya’s face—which reminded me so strongly of the day we had met that it almost made me smile—softened somewhat.
“That is true,” Elenari said.
Penelope looked at her gratefully.
“Besides,” the red-headed elf said, “there is nothing that can be done now. We must all trust each other to keep this a secret.”
“Right,” I said, eager to capitalize on this change of mood, “which brings me to the second thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
I pulled the roughly hewn crystal from my pocket.
The Seer’s face suddenly stilled. Her eyes were glued on the crystal in a way that made any doubts I had as to its significance vanish.
“Is that…?” she said, her mismatched eyes glued on the rock in my hand.
“I was hoping that you could tell me,” I said.
I tossed the crystal across to her, and she plucked it deftly from the air. She ran a single finger over it and then held it to her ear. Her eyes looked far away for a moment, back into some distant past memory, then they back snapped to mine.
“It is,” she said softly.
“Is what?” Saya asked. “What is that thing, Mike?”
“It’s a crystal,” I said. “The kind of crystal that we talked about last time I was here. I’m hoping that it’s the very crystal that we need to bring one of our dragonlings to maturity.”
“To ensure the survival of one of our young, you mean?” Elenari asked. Her pale face was even paler under the bleaching light of the moon.
“That’s right,” I said.
Penelope clapped a hand to her mouth. She looked completely astounded.
“So long as the Seer reckons it can be done,” I said.
“But where did you find this?” Claire asked, turning the crystal over reverently in her hands. “I never really held out much hope of seeing another one of these ever again.”
I pointed at Elenari and Saya. “I found it with these two, on the night that we fought with those we suspect of being the Bloodletters.”
“Wait, what?” Saya said. “You never mentioned this to Elenari or me.”
I was hoping we might skirt around the whole me keeping the crystal a secret part, but it seemed like that was just wishful thinking.
“No,” I said. “No I didn’t.”
“Why?” Elenari asked.
“Because I didn’t know what I had,” I said. “I didn’t know what that thief was carrying. I was worried that it might be some sort of weapon, you know...” I fished around for the words that I thought might make them understand my reticence at mentioning the crystal.
In the end, like any reasonable and level-headed dude who knew his fantasy, I quoted Gandalf—well, paraphrased him, I suppose.
“I was worried that it could be the sort of magical item that, in the wrong hands, might help some prick wield a power too great and too terrible to imagine,” I said.
Saya and Elenari looked slightly placated by this excuse.
Tolkien, you wise SOB, I thought.
“Anyway,” I continued, “Noctis seemed to think that keeping it under our hats was the smart move. What kind of man would I be if I didn’t take the advice of a centuries old dragon that I was bonded to through the old-fashioned methods of pain and blood?”
Saya snorted. “A fair point. Maybe,” she added.
“Anyway,” I said, “I think that there’s a more pressing question here. Not about how I got a hold of this thing, but where the woman got it from. You know, the one the thief—that Saya killed—stole it off.”
“That interests me also,” Claire said. “It interests me most acutely. For there is only one place that this crystal could have come from, and that is the subterranean realm...”
The only sound for a few moments was the forlorn wind playing through the long grass of the orchard.
After a time, I cleared my throat and gestured at Garth, who had come to roost on Saya’s shoulder.
“Look, there are some questions that we need answering here,” I said, “but how about we get one of these guys sealed into this crystal, or whatever it is that has to be done.”
“Yes,” Penelope said, breaking in. “That, at the very least, will make sure that one of these fine new dragonlings survives to be bonded to a dragonmancer.”
The Seer nodded. “Quite so, Librarian,” she said.
“Is it a hard thing to do?” Saya asked.
Claire smiled one of her luminous, otherworldly smiles.
“No, not especially,” she said. “It just all depends on whether or not one of the dragonlings is hungry.”
“Garth is always hungry,” Saya suggested. “Honestly, if it were not for our dragonmancer regenerative abilities, I feel like my breasts would look like a couple of deflated bladders!”
Elenari laughed at the face that I pulled at that description.
“Alright then,” I said. “We’ll make Garth the chosen one for today. Wayne, unfortunately, will have to wait.”
Elenari seemed a little disappointed at this, but she gave me a resigned nod.
“Now, what has to happen?” I asked the Seer.
“I will show you,” Claire replied. “Bring Garth over here.”
She led the way to an open patch of ground between three bent apple trees. Here, she knelt, and Garth carried the little gray dragonling over and placed him on the grass.
“Here, little one,” Claire said. She placed the crystal in the grass in front of the dragon and leaned backward. “This may be quite bright.”
Garth sniffed at the crystal in front of him, his whole attention riveted on the thing. Nearby, his half-brother, Wayne, squirmed in Elenari’s iron grip.
Abruptly, and with no warning at all, Garth let forth a beam of concentrated white fire at the crystal.
As Claire had said, the beam of light was so bright that all five of us were forced to narrow our eyes against the glare. Garth’s fire struck the stone, and at once began to melt into it, penetrating it to its center.
Once the beam of white-hot flame had reached the crystal’s core, the whole stone began to melt and bubble and liquefy in on itself.
Within a minute, it was no more than a bubbling mess on the grass.
“Was that meant to happen?” I asked.
“Wait,” the Seer said.
Garth, crooning happily with the mess he had just made, stretched forth his scrawny neck and, with surprising vim, began to suck the liquid crystal up off the grass. It must have taken the greedy little guy all of thirty seconds to hoover up the liquidized rock.
We all stared at the dragon. I had no notion as to what should happen next. It seemed that neither did Garth, because the little fellow curled up and went to sleep.
“Um…” said Saya.
“The transformation will take at least half an hour,” Penelope said matter-of-factly.
I clapped my hands, eyeing the pool of clear water that stood nearby. “In that case,” I said. “I’m going to clean up.”
I washed myself vigorously in the pool, leaving my armor and clothes by Noctis. When I was done, I changed into my fresh clothes and joined the others in the space between the trees once more.
“Holy shit!” I said.
Garth was no longer there. Where the curled-up dragon had been there was now only a pinkish white stone.
I reached down and picked up the stone.
“Is he all right?” I asked the Seer as I peered into the stone.
Claire gave me a warm smile and said, “Why don’t you call him forth and find out. You’re his father after all.”
I looked down at the little pink stone. Then I said gruffly, “Okay, Garth, you better get up now.”
In an instant, taking up a
lot more room than the dragonling that had lay down to sleep, a large pinkish-white dragon appeared in front of me.
“A Pearl Dragon,” the Seer breathed softly.
Penelope stifled what sounded like a sob of delight.
Garth looked as smooth and sleek as a skink, although no skink that I had ever seen had managed to grow to the size of a cow. He was, as previously noted, a beautiful shimmering pearlescent pink, with only three toes on each foot, which were tipped with two-foot claws. Around his pointed head was a fan of delicate looking fronds, which pulsated with a red light, echoing his heartbeat. His eyes were all-black with silver slitted pupils that ran diagonally.
“Good gods, what a sight you are!” Elenari said.
I beamed proudly. “Yeah,” I said, “he’s a good-looking boy, that’s for sure.”
Garth let out a hiss of delight at the compliment, and a large black tongue flicked out and tasted the air.
“So, when will we find out who is going to be bonded with?” I asked as I pocketed the pink crystal.
“What are you talking about?” said a young, cocky male voice. It bounced around in my head in the same way that Noctis’ did when he was chatting to me telepathically.
“Garth?” I thought back.
Garth blinked at me and rolled one black eye.
“I definitely got mom’s brains,” he said cheekily.
The Seer was looking at me in wonder.
“He’s talking to you, isn’t he?” she said.
“You can hear?” I asked her.
“Just the faintest murmur, the remotest echo,” Claire said.
“Why can’t anyone else hear?” I asked her.
“Hear what?” Elenari and Saya said together.
“It would seem,” said Noctis, cutting in, “that the youngling has automatically bonded to you and, subsequently, to me.”
I relayed this message to the others.
The jaws of all four women dropped as if they had been working on a synchronized routine.
“There were legends of dragonmancers who could be bonded to more than one dragon,” Penelope said. “Legends… Unconfirmed reports… Rumors…”
“Yes, but they were literally thousands upon thousands of years ago,” said Claire. “During the Age of Fire, when the only dragonmancers were the Celestial Elves.”