by Joseph Lallo
“You've been following my family for a very long time?”
“I have.”
“What happened to them? To the ones before me?”
“Most that I guarded lived long lives. I could only protect one small branch, the strongest I could find, but in the years that I stood guard, only one died by the hand of another before he could continue the line. His death severed the line, and sent me looking for you.”
“Who was he?”
“He was a man named Conner Celeste. Someone killed him with a poisoned dagger. I do not know why, but by the time I arrived, he was too far gone.”
“Connor . . . I don't know the name. Tell me more. More about my family . . .”
#
In time, the story did its job, chasing away the dark thoughts in the young girl's mind, filling in pieces of her family and past. No longer plagued by nightmares, Jade did everything she could to fill her time. Every now and then she would venture off into the woods, but such expeditions seldom lasted long. The woods were dangerous, a fact that Halfax never missed a chance to repeat, and when she wandered too far, the dragon would simply snatch her up with his teeth or his tail and deposit her back in the cottage. It became something of a game to see how long she could evade him, but Halfax soon became far too good at it for her to get very far. Instead, she found things to do around the cottage. A garden was planted and tended, furniture was arranged and rearranged. Every inch of the cottage was searched and explored.
It was during just such an exploration one day that something very curious happened. She was leaning on a stone below one of the windows in the tower when it suddenly slid out of place. She scrambled backward, afraid she would fall through the hole left behind. When she looked where the stone had been, though, rather than daylight and open air, there was a dark chamber with a mound of dusty sacks. Jade stuck her head out the window and looked on the other side of the wall. The stone she had pushed aside was still in place from the outside. There was no sign of, and certainly no room for, the massive crawlspace she had seen. Yet, sure enough, when she looked through the hole, there it was, a veritable warehouse mounded with bags. Quickly, she pulled one of the sacks from the impossible room and looked inside . . .
“Hal!”
Barely a heartbeat after the call came, Halfax came sliding out of the frozen forest and into the summery clearing.
“What!? What's wrong?” the beast demanded, scanning the glade for threats.
Jade appeared at the door of the cottage, struggling with a heavy sack.
“Nothing's wrong, silly. But look what I found!” she said, brimming with excitement.
The bag was filled with books of all sizes.
“There's lots more, too. There was a false wall in the tower that led to a whole big room full.”
Halfax eyed the tower, then the little girl.
“It's magic!”
She dropped the bag and lifted a heavy tome from inside, pulling open the cover and flipping to a random page.
“What's this say?” she asked, eagerly jabbing the page with a finger.
Halfax peered down at the faded writings, brow furrowed as he hoisted the seldom-used skill of reading from the depths of his memory.
“The . . . primary methods and means of . . . expediting poison . . . expulsion and--”
“What does that mean? Ex-ped-iting.”
“It means speeding up.”
“Why didn't it say speeding up?”
“Because a wizard will never use a small word when a larger one is available.”
“Wow. Read more!”
“No. This is a spell book. It is dangerous to read from one if you don't know magic.”
“Oh. Well, what about this one?” she asked holding up a thin green book.
“That is a spell book, too.”
“Well, help me find one that isn't,” she instructed, pulling out the books one by one and laying them in the grass, “There's a bunch more if we can't find one here.”
With a slight growl of irritation that Jade had long ago learned to ignore, he looked over the covers, twisting his head to read the several that were upside down. Finally, he reached out and tapped a cover with a claw.
“This. This is about wildlife.”
“Read it, read it!” she squealed, bouncing up and down.
“No.”
“Please?” she begged, drawing out the word to make it several syllables long.
“I will show you how to read, and you can read it yourself.”
Jade's eyes could not have opened any wider. A look of incomparable joy saturated her every feature.
“Really?” she trilled.
“Yes. Put the books away for now and come back here.”
Jade hastily gathered up the books and sprinted off. As she did, Halfax began to methodically etch the alphabet into the gravel of the cottage's pathway. This was a trait shared almost exclusively by the extraordinarily long-lived. Halfax tended to work toward the very long term. Teaching the girl would take time, but it would only have to be done once. More importantly, knowing how to read would help her when she finally chose to rejoin her own kind. And so he would teach her, just as he would teach her how to hunt. Just as he would teach her how to track. He would teach her every language he knew, every skill that could aid a human, and with each new skill and each new year she would need him less.
And then she would be off again, on her own, and he would be in the shadows. As he should be.
Halfax paused. He'd thought of that moment many times. The day she would leave. It was never far from his mind, his constant goal. This time, though, there was a glimmer of something else. For just a moment, his heart sank.
“Ready!” Jade chirped, shaking Halfax from his thoughts.
Halfax pointed to the first letter with a claw.
“This is Ay. It goes ay . . .”
Steadily the dragon guided her through the alphabet. Jade was a ravenous learner, and seemed able to remember each letter perfectly after only a few repetitions.
“That is Bee, it goes buh,” Jade said, when Halfax pointed randomly to a letter some time later.
“Yes, now. What is this?” he asked, tracing a shape out on the ground.
“Jay, it goes juh.”
He traced a second, and a third, and a fourth.
“Ay, it goes ay. Dee, it goes dee. Eee, it goes eee,” she recited.
“Just the sounds now.”
“Juh, ay, duh, eee.” she said.
“Pretend the eee doesn't make a sound.”
“Juh, ay, duh.”
“Faster, fast as you can. Over and over.”
“Juhayduh, jayduh, jayduh . . . Jade! Is . . . Is that how you spell my name!?”
Halfax nodded.
“I can read my name!” she said, leaping up and down, “Why doesn't the E make a sound in my name?”
“Because you have a strange language, and it does strange things. Most are far stranger.”
“So it is like a code, almost?”
“I suppose.”
Jade squealed with delight, clapping. “Keep going! I want to know it all!”
#
The days and weeks that followed were filled to the brim with as much instruction as Halfax was willing to provide. Though Jade was willing and eager to learn, progress was slow. They had very few books that were written with a new reader in mind. Nonetheless, she kept at it, all the while glowing with pride, as though she were being let into a very small and very exclusive club.
In truth, she was. Books were anything but plentiful these days, and those who could read them were thoroughly distrusted. Too much knowledge, it was believed, could have terrible consequences. A long war and the terrible foes who fought it were the result of magic, and by extension knowledge. Thus, steps were taken by society as a whole to see to it that such a thing was not allowed to occur again. If that meant burning books and exiling those who knew how to use them--or, worse, knew how to create them--then so be it
. It might not always have been the case--but it had been this way for as long as anyone could remember. These books were almost certainly hidden so well specifically to spare them the same fate.
The veritable library hidden within the wizard's tower was, not surprisingly, mostly on the subject of magic. There were still dozens and dozens of books on a wide variety of other subjects, however, and slowly but surely she began to piece her way through them. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months.
Jade learned much, and her interests grew well beyond the resources the tower and its clearing could provide. Reluctantly, Halfax agreed to take her to the edge of Ravenwood nearest to a city, a place called Rook, so that she could buy supplies and feed her curiosity. As she had no money of her own, and no way to earn any, these trips were financed entirely from the dragon's meager hoard.
The pair arrived back at the tower after just such a trip, and Jade leaped from his back.
“Here you go, Hal,” Jade said, dropping a single gold coin onto the top of his hoard.
The dragon looked at the coin upon the greatly diminished pile of gold. A glimmer of disappointment showed on his usually impassive features. This most recent trip had seen three gold coins leave with Jade in exchange for replacements for the clothes she was rapidly growing out of, some tools, and the odd necessities like rope and flour. Only one coin had returned. Jade felt a pang of guilt. It was her fault that the gold was being spent, after all. And it was very important to him that he have it. There must be something she could do to make him feel better.
She looked to the gold, then the bag of tools. An idea dawned.
“Wait, I need that back,” she said, snatching up the coin.
She scurried to the doorway and into the cottage. A chorus of clanks, with the occasional yelp of pain, began to ring out. After a few minutes, she scampered back, something conspicuously held behind her back.
“Bend down.”
“Why?”
“Just bend down, I have something for you.”
The dragon complied. A loop of rope was thrown over his head. He snatched the end of it and twisted his neck to see what she'd hung there.
It was the large gold coin, pounded a bit thinner and larger. A hole had been punched near one edge and a bit of rope threaded through. On the face was a collection of marks roughly pounded into the surface that spelled out HAL.
“Now you've got one piece of your hoard that will always be with you.”
“One piece of gold is no hoard.”
“Well . . . Well, maybe not, but look at the back of it!” Jade defended.
Halfax flipped the piece to find, crudely rendered, the word JADE.
“That way you know you've always got me. And I'm better than a pile of gold, right?”
Halfax looked the smiling little girl in the eyes. Dragons all had an almost inexplicably accurate sense of value. It helped them to build their hoards. It motivated them to protect their hoards. Most had an affinity to gold, but they were quite able to root out precious stones and other precious metals. There were even, Halfax knew, those able to appreciate the value of human things like art.
The one blind spot was sentiment. Only the most enlightened of his kind understood the incomparable value even the most common objects could take on when associated with the proper memories. But in that moment, Halfax understood. No human had ever given him a gift. That made this crude amulet--and this little girl--one of a kind. Treasures of the very rarest sort. And they both belonged to him.
“Thank you,” he uttered.
#
More time passed. As Jade grew, so too did her knowledge and her skills. Her garden flourished, as having a dragon to help do things like till the ground made the speed and ease of maintaining it remarkable. She learned to mend her own clothes, and even tailor them. Books taught her to repair and improve the cottage, another task made immeasurably easier with the help of a dragon. The beast could push in nails the way a smaller being might push in tacks. She learned ways to preserve her food, make her own medicine, and use the tools she did have to craft tools she did not.
When she exhausted the books written in her own language, Halfax taught her the other languages he knew, and she read on. As the months turned to years, the journeys to the city became less frequent, less necessary. Life fell into a pleasant, predictable routine. It was a sort of life Halfax was not very used to, but one that was very, very welcome.
#
Such a comfortable life, and being a dragon with the wisdom and duty of Halfax, made Halfax sensitive to even the smallest changes. After several years of uneventful bliss, something felt wrong one day. Hunting had been difficult. The forest was a good hunting ground, and Jade never ate much, but the animals had been more alert this time. Something had them frightened even before he'd arrived. It was difficult to place, but whatever it was that had spooked them, he felt it, too. Something was near. Its presence hung like a fog in his mind.
As he dropped the day's kill, Halfax focused upon a specific point among the trees at the edge of the clearing. There was nothing there . . . and yet . . .
He took a step toward it . . .
“Hal, thank goodness! You took a long time, I thought something had happened to you,” Jade said from the doorway.
She was almost fifteen years old now. She'd worked her way through most of the books, and each new thing she learned, she tried. The recent book on farming had led her to expand her little garden, and she was very proud of her efforts.
“Come around the back, I want to show you how good the strawberries are coming in.”
The dragon cast a final glance into the trees before following.
At the edge of the clearing, like a wisp of smoke caught in the breeze, a patch of forest seemed to sweep away, leaving a tall, lean figure where before had been nothing. It was an elf, and by virtue of his race, based on his appearance, he could have been age twenty or two hundred. He held in his hand what may once have been a walking stick. Now it was covered so utterly with intricate emblems and sigils that it seemed too delicate to support its own weight, let alone his. His face bore the vague look of irritation.
“I do hate the lucky ones,” he muttered with a slow shake of his head.
With that he turned and, with the same flourish as he appeared, vanished.
#
Far to the south, many days later, an aging woman looked to the door of her apothecary shop. It had been a busy day, and there would be no one else at this hour. She poured the contents of the mortar she'd been grinding at into a small glass jar. Carefully, the container was placed beside the dozens of identical ones that lined the shelves behind her.
The air was thick with the scent of dried herbs and boiling potions, and every available surface was cluttered with scales, burners, glassware, and other tools of the trade. She made her way to the heavy door, pushed it shut, and drew the bolt.
“Quite a business you have here,” came a voice from behind her.
The woman turned to find the same tall, intellectual-looking elf from the forest inspecting one of the vials from the table. In his hand was the excessively carved walking staff.
“How did you get in here!?” the owner cried, brandishing a heavy glass bottle from the nearest counter.
“I don't intend to be answering many of your questions, so for your sake, I shall ignore that one. A far more pressing one shall present itself shortly.”
“Get out of my--”
“A useful service you provide the people of this town. A treatment for cutleaf poisoning. A tricky thing to treat.”
“I . . . I do what I can,” she said nervously.
“No, no, you don't. You do what you want to. The treatment is tricky. The cure much less so. It was difficult to find, but once you know what it is, it is simply a matter of taking enough of the right ingredients. In order to merely treat the poisoning, you would have to measure far more precisely.”
“H-how do you know that?”
“That is
the question you ought to be asking, Damona. How do I know what I know? First let me tell you what else I know, then I'll tell you how. I would put the bottle down, if I were you. You are perilously close to making me feel unwelcome.”
Shakily, she lowered the improvised weapon.
“Your name is Damona Tienne, no middle name. The fact that you have been able to concoct both a functional cure and modify it into merely a treatment shows that you have a firm understanding of magic. The fact that you call yourself an apothecary rather than a healer or alchemist shows that you know that letting people know it is magic that you work would be hazardous. The fact that you reached for a bottle rather than a gem, wand, or staff shows that you are at best a talented amateur in the mystic arts. Further evidence of that fact can be found here.”
The intruder crouched behind the counter, moved a floor board, and retrieved a thick and ancient tome.
“You found this in a wizard's tower in Ravenwood. It, and some mystic paraphernalia, were all you could sniff out before you were chased out by the usual mob of angry villagers. The fact that you allowed yourself to be chased proves that you are a coward. This little scam you are running here proves something else. It isn't about helping people, because were that the goal you would have cured them. And it isn't about money, because even someone with your entry-level knowledge of magic could easily find more profitable pursuits.
"No, this little game is about power. You like holding their lives in your hand. Power is why you ventured into that tower in the first place. And I know all of this simply by paying attention . . . which means anyone else with half a mind could do the same.”
“But how did you find the book!?”
“Ah, yes. That, I concede, required a measure of training. For future reference, there is a material called scatter-cloth which you ought to employ if you hope to conceal mystic items from the mystically adept.”
“So you are a wizard, too.”
“Yes. And in anticipation of your next question, I came with an offer. You want power? I've got a few tricks and trinkets I would be willing to give you.”
“Like what?”
“Well, this, for one,” said the stranger, tossing his stick in her direction.
