The Language of Spells

by Garret Weyr

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Yakov said. “Tell me, what do they call you?”

  “Grisha,” Grisha said. “I am Grisha, short for Benevolentia Gaudium.”

  Yakov laughed and threw his arms around Grisha. Outside, a church bell rang out ten times.

  “How did you do it?” Grisha asked. “I hope you didn’t have to give up anything too precious.” He hated to think that he had caused Yakov to give away time, money, or something he loved.

  “Magic demands that you give up what you love. It’s the simplest art and the most difficult to practice,” Yakov said. “But with a potion, all you do is find the right one and use it.”

  Grisha was sure that wasn’t true, but didn’t want to press as Yakov seemed nervous. His friend was adjusting his cuffs, which did not need any adjusting. Grisha himself was nervous, worried that if Leopold were still alive, he might sense that one of his spells had been reversed and come looking for revenge. A sorcerer was always connected to his magic; he lost strength and power when any spell he’d cast came undone. Sometimes the only way a sorcerer could weaken or kill an enemy sorcerer was to reverse his rival’s biggest spells.

  “What do you eat?” Yakov asked. “I fear you must be starving.”

  “Well, I am rather hungry,” Grisha said. His body was warming up and starting to make its needs and wishes known. Thoughts of Leopold and his magic vanished as the demands of being alive came into focus. “Do you have any acorns? Or even pinecones?”

  There was nothing Grisha liked to eat less than a pinecone, but he was so hungry he knew he’d be happy to eat anything.

  Yakov didn’t have any, of course. But he made a big plate of mashed cabbage, potato, and apple and poured hot mulled cider over it. Grisha almost wept with pleasure. It had been over a hundred years since he’d had a meal. Food, he decided, was one of life’s great joys along with the ability to move and breathe.

  “We have to get you to Vienna,” Yakov said. “Can you fit on a train?”

  “I can scale to any size, but I have wings,” Grisha said. “It’s been a long time, but with some practice, I should be able to fly there.”

  “How much practice?” Yakov asked.

  “I don’t know,” Grisha said. “I’ve never flown to Vienna after being trapped in a teapot before.”

  Yakov started to laugh. “I suppose you haven’t.”

  “How soon must I be in Vienna?” Grisha asked.

  “As soon as possible,” Yakov said. “My uncle said they’ll ship any dragon stragglers to Siberia.”

  “Please tell the girls how much I wanted to meet them,” Grisha said. “And Esther.”

  Yakov nodded and said, “Go to the house where they stayed during the Blitz. You can practice and rest there.” He rolled out a map and Grisha laughed.

  “I don’t need a map,” he said. “It will smell like the girls.”

  “Could you smell when you were a teapot?” Yakov asked. “If I’d known that, I would have brought leaves from the forest to make you feel more at home.”

  Grisha was touched. “I couldn’t smell in there, but I can now,” he said. “Of the four human smells in the house, two have more strength. It means that they belong to youth.”

  Yakov still looked concerned. “Are you sure I shouldn’t go with you?”

  “I’ll be all right on my own,” Grisha said. “I promise.”

  “Of course,” Yakov said. “Of course.”

  He and Grisha stared at each other, not knowing how to say either goodbye or thank you.

  “Perhaps you will come to Vienna,” Grisha said. “And we can see each other.”

  Yakov cleared his throat and wiped his eyes. “Wherever you go, you’ll take a part of my heart,” he told the dragon.

  Grisha knew the reason he still had a heart after so long under Leopold Lashkovic’s spell was entirely due to Yakov and the whole Merdinger family. He knew he would never forget them, even as he stepped outside into the city’s gritty air and let his wings soar him back toward his true dragon self. He scaled up in size to match the strength his wings needed for flight. Breath moved effortlessly in and out of his lungs and through his mouth.

  The higher up and the farther away from London he got, the more Grisha grasped that, at long last, he was able to move, to breathe, and to be. He was, once again, truly alive.

  CHAPTER SIX

  VIENNA

  TEN DAYS OF REST IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE and a number of excellent meals consisting of acorns, twigs, and leaves helped Grisha and his wings easily make their way to Austria. Dragons always aim for water at the end of long trips. Any flight over three hours makes their breath heat up to such a degree that their blood starts to simmer. The heated blood makes scales feel like burning hot sand, and so cooling off is key. Which meant that Grisha aimed his landing in the Danube.

  After splashing around for a bit, Grisha made the short flight to Vienna. There he found dragons in all of the city’s fine hotels, just as Yakov’s uncle had written. The soldiers assigned him to a room at the Bristol Hotel, where he immediately spoke to the first dragon he’d seen since leaving the forest.

  “I don’t know you, but your scent tells me I should,” boomed a large, imposing dragon standing in the lobby. “You’ve a very peculiar smell, but there’s a hint of the Breg under that aroma.”

  The Breg was one of the two small rivers deep in the Black Forest that crossed each other exactly where the Danube began. It pleased Grisha that a bit of the forest’s smell had stuck with him after all these years.

  “I grew up near the Breg,” the imposing dragon said. “I suspect you did as well.”

  “I did, yes, hello!” Grisha said. “I’m Benevolentia Gaudium, but please use Grisha. Apologies for the peculiar smell. I was an enchantment for many years.”

  “Indomitus Ignis, but please, I am known as Kator,” Kator said.

  The two dragons bowed and then touched tails, which was how dragons who were meeting for the first time behaved. When not on the battlefield, dragons are exceedingly polite.

  “I’m older than you, but only by seventy or so years,” Kator informed Grisha.

  The older a dragon was, the longer his tail’s tip became. Each added inch reflected thirty-three years, and Kator’s was two inches and a smidge longer than Grisha’s.

  “Maybe that’s why I don’t know you,” Grisha said.

  “That, and the world of magic sent me out to fight in the world of men when I was very young, and so I hardly even knew the dragons my own age,” Kator said. “Until recently, I had never lost a fight.”

  For those of you interested, Indomitus Ignis means “ferocious fire.” Kator had more than lived up to his name and had fought in many a battle. As a young dragon, Kator said, he’d even been chosen to serve as a protector of four enchanted cats. Kator reminded Grisha of the young dragons who’d bragged about all of the battles they would fight when they grew. However, this spirited, battle-scarred dragon with a splash of black along his neck already had done many marvelous things worth boasting about.

  Kator took it upon himself to introduce Grisha to the other dragons in the city. Not all of them were from the Black Forest, and each was older than Grisha. He bowed with everyone and learned that the dragons who’d fought in Japan preferred not to touch tails, but left front paws. The dragons all commented on his peculiar smell, but were welcoming. It was good to be among his own kind as he slowly adjusted to his new life in Vienna.

  Even without Kator pointing it out, Grisha understood that much had changed in both the world of magic and that of men. Dragons had once been part of how people brought magic into the world, but now the world, it was plain to see, had no use for either. Both the soldiers and the city’s people ate, spoke, thought, and moved faster than seemed possible to Grisha. Anything or anyone that threatened to be time-consuming but not immediately important was pushed aside. American and British soldiers, having been put in charge of sorting out all of Europe’s refugee trouble, treated the dr
agons not as fellow warriors, but as problems involving no solution and too much paperwork.

  While the dragons didn’t think of themselves as a problem, they knew that being in Vienna was problematic. The challenges that had started with the steam engine, railways, and light bulbs had, with the passage of time, become impossibly difficult facts of life. There were lights everywhere, even at night, and people behaved as if the sun never set. The dragons developed severe eyestrain. Their small, sensitive ears, while used to blocking out battle sounds, were totally unprepared for the din of modern daily life.

  Much to their embarrassment, the dragons found themselves so stressed that they frequently lost control over when they would exhale flames instead of air. The curtains in the Bristol’s front dining room caught fire often. Watching the soldiers douse the curtains with water for a third time, Grisha asked Kator why on earth he and the others had left the forest. “I came here because Yakov said this was where the dragons were,” Grisha reminded him. “But you were safely at home.”

  “There was a sound in the forest that called us to follow it,” Kator said. “It sounded like the leaves moving or a stream rushing, and it carried a clear message: Either we left the forest immediately for Vienna, or we would find ourselves in northern Siberia.”

  Northern Siberia is a vast stretch of land that is all ice and chill and freeze. Dragons in exile there would not only be cold and hungry, but hopelessly isolated. They would all die of starvation or frostbite. It would be far worse than life in the teapot, Grisha thought, and was glad he hadn’t heard the sound.

  “It’s so strange,” Kator told him. “The sound made us rush to the city, but when we got to Vienna, it was clear no one wanted us here.”

  Grisha looked at the tattered remains of the once-elegant curtains and said, “It’s hard to blame people who think we’re a nuisance.”

  It was right around then that Kator pointed out to everyone that no new dragon had been born since the year of Grisha’s birth. At a hundred and forty-odd years, Grisha was the youngest dragon in Vienna.

  “Our time, like that of magic itself, has come and gone,” Lennox said. He was the eldest amongst them and their unofficial leader. He was almost entirely silver, which was a color few dragons ever turned, as most of them died in battle well before their four-hundredth birthdays.

  When he and Grisha had touched tails in greeting, Lennox had sniffed deeply as if wanting to figure out where the strange dragon was from. “I was sorry to hear of your troubles,” he’d said. “I fought side by side with your father once. Although he was very young I could see greatness in him.”

  Lennox was no longer as strong as he once had been, but his voice was still a typical military-sounding mix of thunder and trumpets, even when he kept it soft and low. “We will end our days in this strange city,” he continued now.

  Grisha didn’t like the sound of that. To end one’s days surely meant Lennox thought the dragons would all die in Vienna. If that were true, then Grisha very much wanted to see his forest again and drink from the small streams that crossed where the Danube began.

  “Can we ever go home?” Grisha asked.

  “They have guns,” Kator said, meaning the soldiers who kept watch over them.

  “And they are willing to use them outside of battle,” Lennox said. “So we can do nothing they will not allow.”

  Grisha, who had never heard of a dragon facing down a gun in the world of men unless on the battlefield, had quizzed Kator on why the soldiers were so quick to threaten to shoot. “We’re in a hotel,” Grisha had said to his friend. He was deeply puzzled about why a soldier had pointed a gun at him to keep him from leaving the hotel. “We aren’t fighting them, but they’d shoot us for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  Kator had taken him back to their room and tried to answer. He told Grisha of changes that had happened in the forest even before the last war. It wasn’t simply the steam engine and the railways. “Men were everywhere in the forest, but not for hunting,” he explained. “They cut down trees! So many trees were killed, and then they built houses and stores.”

  It was sad enough when a tree died from disease or lightning, Grisha thought. He was even more heartsick at the thought of so many beloved trees dying at the hands of an ax. “We had to hide all the time, because the men shot to kill whenever they saw one of us,” Kator said.

  “But there was no battle,” Grisha said. He couldn’t quite believe it.

  “We thought it was because they weren’t soldiers or hunters and didn’t understand about the rules of a fair fight,” Kator said. “But they shot us simply because we existed.”

  When the dragons arrived in Vienna, Kator explained, the soldiers had let it be known that if the fire-breathing creatures refused to obey orders, they would be shot. The days of fair fighting between the world of magic and the world of men was over.

  “Isn’t it dangerous for us now that none of the old rules apply?” Grisha asked.

  “Dragons were created because life is dangerous,” Kator said. “I’m more worried that none of the soldiers fear anything at all.”

  Grisha wasn’t sure if that was true, but he knew his friend had far more experience with all things military. He understood that the other dragons were full of resentments and grudges toward the soldiers because of their guns, but Grisha tended to feel sorry for them. They were such young men—younger than Yakov had been when he’d purchased Grisha—and they seemed just as confused and frightened as he himself was.

  After all, although it was wise to fear a human with a gun, Grisha had spent his captivity observing humans and their sometimes odd behaviors. His habit of observation allowed him to see past the guns and the uniforms. He could tell that the soldiers were homesick, as well as scared of the lumbering, fire-breathing beasts in their charge. They meant well without knowing what to do. So Grisha tried to understand them as best he could.

  Over several days, he repeatedly heard the soldiers discussing a man who was coming to solve everything by his processing. “What do they mean by ‘processing’?” Grisha asked one night in the Bristol’s dining room, where the dragons sat hunched over meager plates of wilted lettuce.

  “It means there are too many of us,” Lennox said. Too many of us for what, Grisha wondered.

  The answer was made most horribly clear when the man whom the soldiers had been waiting for finally arrived. There were too many dragons, it turned out, for all of them to be free.

  The man who arrived in Vienna did not belong to the world of men, but to what remained of magic. His magic had diminished over the years, and he’d grown bitter over the way his powers were no longer in high demand. He was determined to show these soldiers that he could do what they could not. Perhaps he was older and weaker than he once had been, but he still had more power than the soldiers with their many guns.

  The man saw at once that there were too many dragons for the city. So he divided them into two groups: those with gold eyes and those without. Grisha, Kator, Lennox, and about thirty-five others had gold eyes, so they were each assigned a job and a place to call home, a warm bed, and food to eat. The jobs were simple, but designed to give the city’s historical buildings an interesting addition. Museum dragons found lost children, palace dragons guarded jewels, and others made sure to report needed repairs in old yet still grand buildings.

  The seventy-five or so dragons with violet, red, or brown eyes did not get homes, beds, food, or even jobs. Instead, the dragons without gold eyes were nowhere to be found. They were alive, but victims of an enchantment far worse than being trapped in a teapot.

  For almost a year, the luckier golden-eyed dragons brooded and worried about what had happened to the other dragons. But soon enough they decided it was best to focus on what was good in their new lives, and not on what had gone wrong. The forest had taught them to stay alive, and sometimes forgetting what was unpleasant was the best way to live.

  At least, Grisha thought, every dragon who’
d come to Vienna still was alive.

  Grisha was assigned to live and work in one of the most beautiful and decrepit castles on the Danube. At first, he tried hard to remember the fate of the unlucky dragons. After all, he knew too well what it was like to be unlucky. Eventually, however, he too felt forced to accept that there was nothing he could do to change what had happened. Soon, he no longer thought about it. Instead, he let a fog grow over the memories of his first year in Vienna.

  Anxious to put all reminders of a destructive, cruel, and violent war behind them, the city and its people also forgot.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  GIRL IN A CITY

  ABOUT FORTY YEARS AFTER THE DRAGONS ARRIVED in Vienna, a girl child was born there. These days, of course, a girl child’s birth is a common event. However, as this girl grew, she refused to ignore what her city had forgotten. As a result, we must thank her for all that is known about Vienna’s dragons.

  For the girl, Vienna was not simply a place, but an old friend who helped raise her. She was a city child through and through; until she was eleven, she had never seen or walked through a forest.

  In the strange and mysterious ways of grown-ups everywhere, her parents named the girl Anna Marguerite, but agreed to call her Maggie. These particular parents, Alexander Miklós and Caroline Brooks, had never planned to have a baby, just as they had never planned to fall in love or marry. Each of them, before meeting the other, would have told you that getting married and having children was a plan only for other sorts of people. Not for a famous poet (Maggie’s father) or an even more famous painter (her mother).

  And yet somehow it had happened, in the strange and mysterious way that it often does.

  One day when Maggie was three, her mother, the tall, beautiful, and talented Caroline Brooks, packed a bag and caught a train out of the city. There was a gallery in Germany that was showing her paintings. She planned to be back in two days, she told Maggie, and with chocolates.