Talking To Dragons

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “What is it?” Shiara said. “Come on, hurry up!”

  “It’s this key,” I said as I unlocked the door. “It feels almost like the sword, except—”

  I stopped as the door swung open. The room inside was very large and very high. It was fall of light and not dusty at all. In the center of the floor was something like a shallow iron brazier, about three feet high and nearly five feet across, full of glowing coals. On the other side of the brazier was a couch, and lying on the couch was a man.

  He was dressed in expensive-looking clothes, but there were tears in them, as if he had been in a fight. He didn’t look old, even though his beard was long and grey. His head was bare, and at his side was a jeweled scabbard, empty. He was asleep.

  Shiara took a deep breath. “That must be him; come on, Daystar, let’s get this over with.”

  I stepped into the room and walked slowly toward the couch. As I came around the brazier, I saw that there was another wizard’s staff lying beside the couch. I slowed down even more; something felt wrong. I stopped, standing next to the couch with the key in one hand and the sword in the other.

  “Well, now that we’re here, how do we break the spell?” Shiara said, coming up on one side of me.

  “Something’s wrong,” I said, and as I spoke I realized what it was. The key was still pulling at me, but as soon as I had stepped into the room, the pulling from the sword had stopped. All I could feel from the sword was the jangling of the magic in the wizard’s staffs.

  “Maybe if you lay the sword on him it’ll work,” Shiara said, ignoring me. “Come on; you have to try something or we’ll be here all day.”

  “I wouldn’t try anything at all, if I were you,” said a voice behind us. Shiara and I spun to look backward. The doorway of the room was full of wizards.

  20

  I STARED AT the wizards for an instant, then turned and jumped for the couch, hoping I could break the spell before the wizards could do anything. I didn’t make it. As I brought the flat of the sword down, the sleeping man vanished. The sword clanged softly against the couch, and I spun back to face the wizards.

  Something hit me as I turned, and suddenly I couldn’t move my body at all. I could turn my head far enough to see Shiara, but that was all. Shiara looked as if she were concentrating on something, so I turned my head back to the wizards. They were standing around the sleeping man, who was now lying on the floor in front of the doorway.

  “Well done,” said one of the wizards to another.

  “Thank you,” the second wizard said. “It was a mere trifle.”

  There was a stir at the back of the group of wizards, and a moment later Antorell pushed forward to the front. He had a bandage around one arm, probably where the dragon had bitten him. “I want the boy!” he said. “Now!”

  The wizard in front, who seemed to be the leader of the group, looked at Antorell coldly. “You were permitted to join us in order to give you an opportunity to repair some of the damage you did seventeen years ago. Not to further your private ambitions.”

  “But you said I could have the boy!”

  “Antorell, you’re a fool,” the leader said. “You may have the boy, but after we have possession of the sword, not before.”

  “I’ll give you the sword, then!” Antorell said angrily. He strode around the edge of the brazier and reached for the hilt of the sword, just above my hand. I wanted to jerk away, but I still couldn’t move.

  There was a flash of blue-and-gold light as Antorell touched the sword, and he was flung backward onto the floor; if he’d fallen a few inches to the other side, he’d have gone into the brazier. I found myself wishing he had, then found myself staring at the brazier. There was something about it that nibbled at my mind, but I couldn’t make it come clear. I didn’t have time to think about it, because the wizards started talking again.

  Antorell was picking himself up off the floor, and the leader of the wizards smiled at him nastily. “You see?”

  “You knew this would happen!” Antorell said furiously.

  “Of course I knew,” the leader said. “Had you spent your time hunting that sword instead of trying to get some sort of ridiculous revenge on Cimorene, you, too, would know.”

  “Then demonstrate the proper method for me,” Antorell said sarcastically. “If you know so much, you take the sword.”

  “I am not so foolish,” the other wizard replied. “No one save the King of the Enchanted Forest can take that sword from a Bearer who is not willing to give it up, especially not inside this castle.”

  “Then how do you expect to get it?” Antorell said even more sarcastically than before.

  “We kill the King,” the wizard said, gesturing at the sleeping figure on the floor in front of him. “When the line of the Kings of the Enchanted Forest is ended, one of us can take up the rule of the castle.”

  “What good will that do?” Antorell said. “The boy will still have the sword. And, as you have reminded me so many times in the past two days, he seems to be able to use it.”

  The leader shrugged. “If your tale is true, I shall admit to some surprise; I thought no one but the King could use the sword. Which is why one of us must become King.”

  “You accuse me of lying?”

  “Why should I bother?”

  Antorell scowled and started to raise his staff, then seemed to change his mind. “When the boy blows your own spells back at you, perhaps you will see what I mean.”

  “Nonsense!” the leader of the wizards replied. “You obviously know little of what you speak.”

  “No, of course not; I have only seen the boy in action,” Antorell said with awful sarcasm.

  The leader shrugged again. “What the boy has learned matters little. The power of the sword passes to the ruler of the castle, and there is nothing he can do about it. He will be easy enough to take care of then.”

  Out of the comer of my eye, I saw a flicker of movement; Shiara was edging toward me. I had to force myself not to turn my head. The wizards seemed to have forgotten both of us, and I didn’t want to remind them. I hoped they wouldn’t remember until after Shiara had done whatever she was planning to do. I also hoped Shiara was planning to do something; I certainly couldn’t, and I didn’t think Nightwitch would be much help against all those wizards.

  “Stop talking and let’s get on with it,” one of the wizards in the back said.

  “An excellent suggestion. That is, if you are quite satisfied, Antorell?” said the leader.

  Antorell glared and stalked over to the rest of the wizards. The leader looked around and nodded. “Begin.”

  Under other circumstances, the spell-casting would have been very interesting to watch. The wizards spent quite a bit of time arguing about where each of them should stand, and exactly what the correct angle was for each staff, and in what order the spells should be said. The leader seemed particularly concerned that things be done right; evidently there was something about the castle that would cause problems if everything wasn’t perfect. Finally, they agreed on what they were going to do, and they got started.

  As the wizards started chanting, something touched my arm; if I could have moved, I’d have jumped. It was Shiara. “Do something before they finish!” I whispered.

  “I’ve been trying!” Shiara whispered back. “But it isn’t working.”

  “Oh, no.” I was so upset that I spoke the words in a normal tone of voice; fortunately, the wizards were too busy chanting to notice. “You haven’t been polite to anyone since you apologized to Telemain, and you used that up on the last bunch of wizards.”

  Shiara looked stricken. “Daystar, I’m sorry!”

  “There isn’t anything we can do about it now,” I said. “If you—”

  I stopped, because the wizards had stopped chanting. Shiara and I both looked at them, but the wizards didn’t seem to be finished with what they were doing. They looked more like they’d been interrupted in the middle of things. The leader was bending over t
he man on the floor, who was still sleeping. A moment later the wizard straightened with an exclamation and stretched his staff out over the man’s body.

  The figure dissolved into sparkles, leaving a little blob of mud on the floor, and the wizards stirred in surprise. “A simulacrum!” said someone at the back of the wizards.

  I let out my breath in relief. Simulacra are very hard to make; like most major spells, earth, air, fire, and water have to be properly mixed in order to get a good one, and that’s fairly tricky. A really good magician can make a simulacrum that looks exactly like someone, but it doesn’t have any connection to the actual person at all. As a result, a simulacrum can’t be used against someone the way other types of magic can; what they’re mainly good for is confusing people.

  This one seemed to have done an excellent job. The wizards were glaring at each other accusingly. “If that was a simulacrum,” one of them said finally, “where’s the King? Who put it there, anyway?”

  “Old Zemenar, probably,” an older-looking wizard said. “It looked like him, and setting up a decoy is just the sort of thing he would do.”

  “That doesn’t make sense! He started this whole affair in the first place; why would he put a false King in the castle to distract us?”

  “Zemenar never trusted anybody. He probably wanted to do this himself, so he made it as hard as he could for anyone else to finish the job. Or maybe he was just being ornery.” The older wizard shrugged. “Either way, I doubt that he expected to get eaten by a dragon.”

  “We have wasted enough time here,” the leader of the wizards said with sudden decision. “Silvarex, take three others and begin searching for the King at once. We cannot allow him to escape again.”

  He went on giving instructions, but I stopped paying attention. He wasn’t talking to me, and I had other things to worry about. I was still holding the key in my left hand, and as soon as the simulacrum disappeared, the key stopped tugging me and started getting warm. My other arm, the one with the sword, was tingling under the jangling of the wizards, and my head felt very light. I had a sudden, strong feeling that there was something important I ought to remember, but the jangling of the wizards’ magic kept distracting me just before I could figure out what it was.

  “Daystar!” Shiara hissed, practically in my ear.

  I jumped a little and realized that the wizard’s spell holding me was beginning to weaken. I couldn’t move very much or very fast, though, and if the wizards noticed, they’d just throw the spell at me again. I decided not to move at all until I was sure I could move the sword fast enough to block another spell if they threw one at me, then whispered to Shiara, “Don’t do that. They might notice.”

  Shiara snorted. “If you don’t want them to notice, you’d better try to notice sooner. That was the third time I called you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So am I. What are we going to do?”

  “If you could— Nightwitch!” I broke off in mid-sentence as a small black streak darted toward the group of wizards. One of them raised his staff; Shiara cried out and Nightwitch dodged. The spell hit the marble floor in a ball of light, and a moment later the kitten was among the wizards’ feet. I couldn’t see what was happening, but I could hear the wizards shouting.

  “There it goes!”

  “Stop it!”

  “It got away.”

  “Find it,” the leader of the wizards commanded. “You, Grineran, go after it; it may lead you to the one we seek.”

  One of the wizards nodded and left, and I blinked. There were only three wizards left now: a short, round wizard, the wizard who was giving orders, and Antorell.

  Antorell was staring at Shiara and me. “What about them?” he said suddenly. “They may know something.”

  The leader of the wizards looked thoughtful. “For once, Antorell, you may have made a useful suggestion. Persuading them to explain what they know may be difficult, however.”

  Antorell grinned nastily. “I think I can manage it.”

  “Really.” The leader sounded skeptical. “The girl is a fire-witch, and the boy has the sword, remember.”

  “Sword or no, he cannot be immune to spells or Silvarex would never have been able to bind him,” Antorell said.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Something like this.”

  Antorell waved his staff casually in my direction as he spoke. Even if I’d been able to move, I wouldn’t have been able to twist the sword into a position to block the spell before it hit me, especially since I didn’t realize what he was doing until the pain struck. It felt as if I were fighting the fire-witch again, only this time the pain was all through my body instead of just in my arms. It was worse than anything I’d ever felt. I think I screamed, but I’m not sure.

  Beside me, Shiara shouted, and a long ribbon of fire shot through the air in front of me, straight at Antorell. The pain stopped abruptly and the key in my left hand got even hotter. Antorell was on fire; he was slapping at his clothes and his staff, trying to put out the flames. Neither of the other wizards was helping; they were staring toward Shiara and me.

  The ribbon of fire still hung in the air above the brazier, making a curtain of flames between us and the wizards. Slowly, reluctantly, it began to fade, and as it died, the heat from the key in my left hand faded along with it. Fire, I thought. Fire in the brazier, fire in the key; Kazul had said something about the key and fire....

  I lifted my left hand, fighting the remnant of the wizard’s spell, and threw the key forward into the brazier.

  There was a whoosh of flame that leapt all the way to the ceiling, then died. I thought I saw something in it, but it vanished before I could be sure. The brazier began to glow, and the whole room was suddenly full of magic, the magic of the castle and the Enchanted Forest. It seemed to be getting ready for something, or perhaps waiting; I was sure there was something else I should do, but I couldn’t think what.

  “Stop them!” the leader of the wizards shouted.

  “Move, Daystar!” Shiara cried, and ducked down behind the brazier.

  I tried to follow her, but I couldn’t move fast enough because of the remains of the binding spell and because I was worrying about what else I was supposed to do in order to finish the spell I’d started with the key. I saw Antorell and the other wizards bring their staffs up, and I tried desperately to move the sword far enough to block whatever they were throwing at me. I made it, but only just.

  There was a flash as the wizards’ spell hit the sword, and a tingle ran through me. The spell that had been binding me vanished; I could feel what was left of it flowing through the sword along with the rest of the magic the wizards had thrown at me. It felt a lot like the jolt of power I’d gotten in the forest, when I’d used the sword on the spell the wizards had tried to throw at Shiara, except that this time I could tell where the power was going.

  The power was flowing through me, into the magic of the Enchanted Forest itself. Back where it had come from in the first place, if Kazul was right about where wizards got most of their magic. Back to...

  I felt my eyes widening and almost missed blocking the next spell. Then I saw more wizards appearing behind the three in the doorway; if I didn’t do something soon, I wouldn’t be able to do anything except block spells. There was no way to find out whether I was right except to try.

  I stepped up to the edge of the brazier, took a deep breath and said loudly:

  “Power of water, wind, and earth,

  Turn the spell back to its birth.

  Raise the fire to free the lord

  By the power of wood and sword.”

  As I spoke the last word, I thrust the Sword of the Sleeping King into the middle of the coals in the brazier.

  As the sword touched the coals, I felt the magic of the forest surge forward around me. Fire shot up to the ceiling, the same way it had when I threw the key into the brazier, but this time the flames didn’t fade. They got brighter and brighter unt
il all I could see was fire. I heard a rumbling sound like the roof of the Caves of Chance falling in, and the floor shook under me. A voice said loudly, “All hail the Waker of the Sword! Hail!” and voices all around me shouted, “Hail!”

  Echoes from the shout rolled around the room, like thunder rolling back and forth across the sky. I felt very lightheaded; I couldn’t see anything except fire, I couldn’t hear anything except echoes, and I couldn’t feel anything at all Then something in my head seemed to snap into place, and the noise stopped abruptly.

  I let go of the sword and stepped back a pace. The light in my eyes started to dwindle into flames again, but now I could see things in them, outlined in fire: dragons fighting wizards outside the castle, and dwarves fighting elves, and elves fighting wizards and other elves. I couldn’t tell who was winning; sometimes it seemed to be one set of fiery little shapes, and sometimes it seemed to be the other.

  As I stared at the fire, I realized that I could feel the jangling from all the wizard’s staffs and the deep rumbling of the magic of the Enchanted Forest and the purring of the castle itself, even though I wasn’t holding the sword any more. I could even feel the shape of the wizards’ spells inside and outside of the castle, including the one around and over the brazier. I could feel the magic of the sword, too, weaving a bright pattern through all the other types of magic. I followed the pattern until I saw how it worked, and then I reached out toward all the different kinds of magic and twisted.

  The jangling of the wizard’s staffs stopped abruptly as the power of the Enchanted Forest swallowed up the power of the staffs. Immediately, the flames in front of me swirled and pulled together, so that the pictures I’d been watching disappeared, and I found myself staring at a crowd of very angry ex-wizards through a shifting curtain of fire.

  At least two of the wizards were wearing swords, and they were reaching for them. The leader started to point in my direction, and I ducked instinctively. Almost every wizard who’s any good carries a spell or two outside his staff, just in case the staff gets stolen. The wizards at the castle didn’t have any magic in their staffs anymore, but they might still be able to make trouble with their spare spells.