“How far is it?” I asked. “And how can we help?”
“I don’t know!” Viridity cried in anguish. “But without Brianna here, I don’t know what to do!”
We didn’t even have to exchange a look; I already knew what we would say. “We’ll try,” I said, and I caught the others nodding in agreement out of the corner of my eye.
I won’t list all the machinations we endured to get our horses into the garden and out the door without anyone noticing. I was thankful that I could persuade the door to enlarge enough to fit the horses through. It took longer than I would have liked, given how frantic Viridity was, but finally we were following the unicorn at a gallop on a road through the forest that branched off before we got to Brianna’s cottage, a road I had never traveled before. And all I had going through my head were questions—and fear that when we got there, there would be nothing we could do to help.
And in the back of my mind, as we urged our horses to keep up with the surprisingly fast unicorn, was the nagging question: Would we be able to get back before we were missed?
The dragon did not look right.
It was broad daylight, and he should have been sunning on some rocks. According to the books I had read, the reason dragons didn’t need to eat as much as you would think they would for their size was because they “ate” sunlight. They absorbed it somehow. I suspected that it had something to do with magic; like Fae, dragons are inherently magical creatures, so they don’t work exactly the way normal creatures do. Like I did with so many other things, I had intended to ask Brianna about dragons, but it hadn’t seemed to be all that urgent compared with learning whatever was relevant—whatever could protect Aurora—so now all I could go on was my memory.
But this dragon certainly didn’t look right.
The valley he was in didn’t get a lot of sun, so the trees were higher up on the sides, and the bottom was mostly covered with bushes and shade-tolerant plants. From where we were, we had a pretty good view of him. He was blue, but his scales looked more gray than blue. Instead of sunning himself on the highest part of the hill, he had wedged himself into the back of this dead-end valley where the sun wouldn’t touch all day long, as if he was trying to avoid it. In fact, it looked as if he’d dug himself a partial cave in the end of the valley to hide in.
The six of us, plus Lobo and Viridity, lay prone on the top of the hill and looked down at him. We had left our horses tethered in the next valley, and with Lobo’s help and instruction, we had managed to crawl up here without the dragon noticing us. Now I motioned to the others that we should crawl back down again so we could talk.
“That’s Serulan, all right,” Lobo said thoughtfully. “Although his color doesn’t look right. It might be me, though; we wolves don’t see color the way you humans do.”
“Well, his color looks bleached and grayed out,” Giles replied. “I thought all dragons were supposed to be very brightly colored.”
“They are.” Elle spoke as if she was an authority. “Every single mention of a dragon in any book I’ve ever read, or any story I’ve ever heard, says how brilliantly colored they are. And I think I’ve read every book in the palace except the ones Wizard Gerrold keeps up in his tower.”
“So if it’s Serulan, then he’s seriously ill or the Dark Fae did something to him that also affected his color. Or else it’s a stranger.” I didn’t like any option, but I liked the notion that one of our dragons had been subverted even less.
“It’s Serulan,” Viridity moaned. “I’d know him no matter what happened to him. But he doesn’t know me anymore!”
“Beyond not knowing you, he’s not acting like a normal dragon at all, so I think we can probably assume that he’s been bespelled.” I gritted my teeth. “I think I have an idea. It all depends on my sword.”
“Miri!” everyone said, absolutely aghast.
“Shh!” I hissed, before they got the dragon’s attention. “I’m not going to fight him. That would be stupid. But my sword cancels out Dark Fae spells, so what if I could touch him with it? Wouldn’t that break the spells on him?”
Viridity pawed a hoof in the ground in distress. “I think you’re right,” he said. “And I think he’s fighting it. I think that’s why he burrowed himself down in the bottom of that valley, so he couldn’t fly or do anything terrible.”
“You know him better than I do,” I told the unicorn. “But if he’s fighting a spell, doesn’t that mean that I’m the only one here who can break it?”
“I… guess,” said Giles. “But how are you going to get close enough to touch him before he turns you into a cinder?”
“Got any good ideas?” I asked.
So that was how I ended up creeping down the steep side of the hill just above the dragon’s excavation with a rope tied around my middle and all five of the others braced on the hill and paying out the rope a little at a time. And that was why Lobo and Viridity appeared at the mouth of the valley and approached the dragon.
“Serulan?” Viridity called. “Is that you? It’s us. Your friends. Lobo and Viridity.”
The dragon’s head rose, but it said nothing. It also didn’t do anything, which suggested that he might be fighting something.
Lobo and the unicorn drew nearer. “Serulan?” Viridity said again, which completely focused the dragon’s attention on him. “If there is something wrong, we can help you.”
The dragon began to tremble. Small rocks tumbled down the hill on either side of him as he shook. Was our guess right? Was he fighting a spell?
Only one way to find out. I silently unsheathed the sword, gathered myself, aimed, and jumped.
I landed astride the dragon’s neck, the flat of the blade hitting his spine at the same time as I landed. We’d all come to the reluctant conclusion that with something as big and armored as a dragon, the only way for the sword to break any Dark Fae spells that were on him was for it to be in direct contact with his body. It wasn’t as if I could wave the sword at him and expect the magic to work.
And I stayed there on his back for about as long as it took to draw three breaths. The dragon froze, with not even a twitch to show it was alive.
Then in the middle of my fourth breath, the dragon convulsed, and I found myself in the air. There wasn’t any warning. I had only a glimpse of heaving back, then I was falling.
And then I was swinging. Swinging, not flying. He’d bucked me off, but that was why I had five Companions hanging on to the other end of the rope around my waist. Instead of arcing across the valley and cracking my skull open on a rock or breaking my neck, I got thrown up and off, then with a jerk of the rope around my waist that made me grunt with pain, the fall turned into a swing, and while I did end up crashing into the side of the valley, it was more controlled and nowhere near as hard.
And I managed to keep the sword in my hand too.
Beneath me, the dragon had fallen on his side, spasming and twitching. I shook my head to clear it, and half climbed, half staggered, down the side of the valley. Whatever the sword had done in that brief contact looked as if it had accomplished something close to what we wanted, but it wasn’t enough. And the only way I knew to do “enough” was to hold the sword against him some more and hope that he didn’t roll over on me. That was a lot of dragon. I’d end up squashed like a bug.
Unless, of course, the Companions managed to pull me out of the way while he was still rolling and I was trying to scramble backward. I had to count on them.
No time to think; I scrambled back down the slope to where he was thrashing; there seemed to be the least amount of movement halfway down his back, so that was where I aimed for, and I slapped the sword against his scaly hide as soon as I got there. His convulsions turned into spasms and twitches, and though it looked as if I was in no danger of being squashed, it was hard to keep the sword in place.
Everything came into sharp focus: the sword, which was faintly glowing again; the dragon’s back, which was covered in scales the size of my hand that kept c
hanging from a dull blue gray to an iridescent blue green and back again in ripples across his hide.
But we seemed to be at a standstill. I tried helping the sword with human magic, but that didn’t change anything, although I could sense the draining feeling in my chest that meant that the magic was going somewhere. Plus, I couldn’t for the life of me think of a rhyme to trigger anything, and I couldn’t use Fae magic because the sword would negate it.
“This isn’t quite working!” I shouted. “Anybody have any ideas?” Inside, I was a wreck. I hoped that I sounded better than I felt, which was absolutely frantic. We had to save this dragon from the enchantment he was under because he would eventually become so exhausted that the spell would take over—and then something horrible would happen or he could turn on us. Maybe we could get away from him. But the odds weren’t good.
I hadn’t really expected an answer to my question, but suddenly I heard hooves scrabbling up beside me. “I have an idea!” called Viridity, who was behind a pile of churned-up dirt; and a moment later, he jumped over it, landed next to me, and butted his tiny horn right into the dragon’s side.
I sensed the tremendous flow of magic out of him into the dragon, and the pulses of color changed again. The grayed-out color didn’t last as long. The iridescence stayed longer. And I felt my human magic building up to be used—finally!
I leaned all my weight onto my left hand, which was holding the sword against the twitching dragon, freed my right—which I put on Viridity’s back—and let the human magic flow into him. And then a chant finally came to me.
Help Viridity to fight! Help us all to make this right!
I concentrated on that, putting my entire will and mind into it. Dimly, I sensed some of the others scrambling down the hill to stand next to me and put their hands on my shoulders. Just two—one on each side. Giles and Anna, I realized after a moment. I hoped that they had ropes around their waists too. Otherwise, if this didn’t work…
It has to work!
Help Viridity to fight! Help us all to make this right!
I heard shouting. First Lobo, then the others, encouraging Serulan to fight back against the magic that was trying to control him. “You can do it, Serulan! Fight it! Don’t let the Dark Fae control you!” And anything else they could think of to cheer him on. I was drenched, with sweat running down my face and my back and beneath my hand. Viridity’s silky coat was soaked with sweat too. We were both near the limits of our endurance, and I felt a sick uncertainty. I had been so confident that this would work, but the dark magic was so strong! If this spell didn’t break soon—
The world went white, and I lost track of everything.
The next moment, I was lying flat on my back in the churned-up soil, half on top of Giles. To my right, Viridity sprawled in a decidedly undignified position, covered in dirt.
And a gigantic blue dragon head loomed over me, the great beast becoming cross-eyed as he attempted to focus both eyes on me. I was too stunned to think, too stunned for the moment to even feel fear.
All I could do was stare into those golden-yellow eyes like a rabbit caught in the gaze of a serpent.
For a very long time, nobody moved and nobody spoke.
Then the great jaws opened.
And a sweet, gentle voice, quavering with concern, emerged from them.
“Are you all right? Oh, please tell me you are all right!”
I blinked at the dragon stupidly as little rocks and bits of dirt fell in my hair from the three scrambling down the hillside behind me. Elle got there first and shook Anna, who seemed more stupefied than I was. Nat got his hands under my armpits and hauled me to my feet; Rob did the same with Giles, then helped poor Viridity to roll over and get up. Lobo came trotting down the hill a moment later with the sword’s hilt in his mouth, holding the whole thing high up off the ground like a dog with a tree branch too big to carry easily.
Meanwhile, the dragon continued to gaze down at us with an absolutely unreadable face. If I hadn’t heard it speak a few moments before, I would have thought it was about to eat us, flame us, or both.
“Serulan, are you all right?” asked Lobo, after depositing the sword at my feet. Cautiously—because my head was swimming—I leaned down, picked it up, and sheathed it properly. “We thought we would never break you free of that spell.”
The dragon coughed, and hot breath scented with something not very pleasant that I couldn’t identify washed over us. “As all right as I can be, after being ensorcelled like that, thank you for asking, King Wolf.” Serulan ducked his head in what looked like an apology. “I beg your pardon, but other than Viridity, I don’t know any of you.”
Viridity shook himself violently, and all the sweat and dirt shook right off him, leaving his coat pristine again. “Serulan, this would be Lobo. And the humans are Miriam, Giles, Susanna, Raquelle, Robert, and Nathaniel. They are Princess Aurora’s Companions. They are here because I found you here and you didn’t seem to recognize me, and I knew something was wrong.”
“Oh…,” Serulan said, then I suddenly felt heat coming off him in waves. “Oh!” he exclaimed in dismay. “Oh no, what have I done? What have I done?”
Gingerly, I reached up and patted the end of his nose, which was very hard and metallic. It was also extremely hot, so I wasn’t tempted to leave my hand there long. “Nothing yet. You were fighting it as hard as you could. You had even wedged yourself down here so you wouldn’t be able to do anything if the spell did take over.”
“Oh!” Serulan replied, now sounding stricken with guilt. “Oh no! Oh, I am so horribly, horribly sorry! I will never forgive myself!” He collapsed limply down into the little valley and sobbed brokenheartedly. “Oh, this is horrid, horrid, horrid! I am a disgrace to dragonkind! I should be tarred and feathered and driven from the kingdom! And I’ll deserve it! And all because I saw that beautiful statue there and… and I shouldn’t have touched it, because it obviously belonged to someone else, but I thought that I’d just take it back to my hoard and find out who it belongs to and pay them… and how could I have been so stupid? And greedy? It was such an obvious trap! Oh, what a fool I am!”
And sure enough, lying a little way away from him was a truly amazing marble statue of a mermaid surrounded by swirling water and her own swirling hair. It was breathtakingly lovely. If he collected statues, well, it was the perfect bait. I unsheathed my sword and slapped it against the statue—but nothing happened. The spell was gone, and with it, any way to tell it had ever been there.
Well, what could we do but try to comfort him? We surrounded him, patting and reassuring him, Viridity, Lobo, and I at his head, the rest at his neck, as he sobbed, huge steaming tears splashing down into the dirt from his eyes.
Finally, Lobo had had enough. “Serulan!” he barked. “Calm yourself. You were foolish to fall into such a trap, but now you know better. Enough.”
Serulan stopped and looked up for a moment, but burst into tears again. “I could have done horrid, horrible things!” he wailed. “Horrible things! And I’m sure you’re here to punish me now! I’m sorry! I’m just so sorry!”
Then he dropped his face into his claws and went back to hysterical weeping. Now, in the time that Mama has been Queen, I have seen quite a lot of hysterical weeping. But most of all, I have seen a lot of faked hysterical weeping. This sounded and looked absolutely genuine.
But Lobo was right. I drew myself up and put on my best imitation of Mama chastising her ladies. “Serulan, that is quite enough!”
This time the dragon gulped audibly and took his claws away from his face to look at me.
“Everything’s all right,” I said. “There is no point in crying about what you could have done because you didn’t do it. Serulan, you actually did all the right things—you hid yourself, you fought off the spell with your will, and you managed to last long enough for one of your friends to find you and bring you help. Right?”
Serulan gulped and nodded slightly.
“No one was hurt.
The only damage was to your self-esteem and the bottom of this valley.” I glanced up at the sky. “And if we ride like the wind, we can get back home before anyone notices we’re gone.”
Now Serulan glanced at me shyly. “But I hurt you,” he protested. “I can see the bruises.”
That actually made me laugh. “And Sir Delacar has given me much worse.” Then it occurred to me. Serulan had been in this kingdom for more than a hundred years. Maybe he knew who my father’s mother was! Or could guess! “There is something you might be able to help me with, though.”
Serulan raised his head and gasped. “Anything! Anything in my power!”
“Is there any chance that you know or have heard anything about a Fae child left at the palace in Tirendell about thirty years ago?” I asked, and held my breath.
For a moment, the expression of intense concentration on his face gave me hope.
But then those hopes were dashed.
“No,” he said sadly. “There have been no Fae children born, Light or Dark, in the last fifty years to my knowledge. And if there was a Fae child born in secret, there would have to have been a good reason to keep the birth unknown, the child hidden, and an equally good reason for the child to have been left among humans. Not even a Dark Fae mother would abandon her child.”
“But if the mother died?”
Serulan sighed. “I don’t know of any Fae deaths, Light or Dark, in the last half century.”
I didn’t betray my disappointment, but Rob wasn’t so controlled. “Three nights! Three perfectly good nights we wasted going over all those musty old records!”
Serulan looked crestfallen. “I’m so sorry—”
“This is definitely not your fault,” I said firmly, because the dragon looked as if he was going to start berating himself all over again. “And we didn’t waste that time. There might be another explanation. My father might have been only half Fae.”
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