The Language of Spells

by Garret Weyr

  In Vienna, dragons were a fact of city life, as basic as streetcars and rude waiters. They hardly ever scared anyone and often people were simply too busy to notice them. But the hotel’s manager didn’t want to take a chance that one of their out-of-town guests would wander in and be terrified. It was one thing for a tourist to look forward to seeing a dragon walking through a palace or giving directions in a museum and quite another to see one unexpectedly in a hotel.

  Thus the late hour for the weekly gathering of dragons was arranged so that the bar would be empty. However, when Grisha and his friends arrived, there were often people still at a large table in the back. According to the bartender, they were all of Vienna’s artists.

  “None of them are sensible enough to be scared of you lot,” he said.

  “No one is scared of us anymore,” Kator said, sounding both sad and confused.

  Annoushka, a dragon who had once held an entire army at bay for five months in order to save a queen locked up in a tower, joined in. “If only the law allowed,” she said, “I would teach everyone how to fear us.” When she grinned, Annoushka revealed several broken teeth, a sure sign that she had removed swords from men with a single bite.

  Grisha, who had never wanted anyone to be afraid of him, returned to watching the people at the table. The opera singers were loud, the artists had paint on their shoes, and the poets were quiet. There was sometimes a young girl sound asleep under the table. She looked like a tangle of arms and legs that had collapsed in utter exhaustion. He noticed that her brown hair had usually slipped away from a poorly tied ribbon.

  On one particularly cold and wet February night the girl woke up, untangled herself from under the table, and wandered over to the bar. She moved as if her body were graceful and clumsy in equal parts. She had large brown eyes full of quiet observation and she was neither beautiful nor plain. Instead, her long face looked as if it might break into either a giggle or a yawn at any moment.

  Since most of the dragons were busy boasting about their amazing deeds, only Grisha noticed the girl. Of all the people who came through his castle to climb the turrets and descend into the dungeons, the children were his favorites. They never asked boring questions like “In what year was this structure built?” or “Which king was it that the emperor held prisoner?” Instead, children wanted to know where people who’d lived in the castle had gone to the bathroom (outside) or how many soldiers could fit into the turret (Grisha had no idea, but always said seven, an answer that seemed to satisfy, although one girl had insisted it must be thirteen).

  This girl, however, did not seem like the insisting type, so Grisha introduced himself and asked her name.

  Maggie hesitated, remembering the last time she had told a stranger her name.

  “I’m Anna Marguerite, which is a little silly,” she said. “So people call me Maggie.”

  “It’s not at all silly,” Grisha said, and was rewarded by a huge smile. “Grisha is short for Benevolentia Gaudium.”

  “Kindness and joy!” Maggie exclaimed, happy to encounter Latin outside of a book. “How does Grisha come from that?”

  “It just does,” he said.

  “Well, it is shorter,” she said.

  They looked at each other shyly, each happy to have met the other, but not sure that the other person (or dragon) wanted to be bothered.

  “Would you like to eat?” Grisha asked. “Are you hungry?”

  He knew that the Blaue Bar had a late-night menu and that people, unlike dragons, often ate their meals together (dragons crave company, but rarely enjoy eating with one another).

  “Oh, yes, I’m starved,” Maggie said. “Do you think I could get some strudel?”

  Grisha asked the waiter to bring a plate of warm strudel with whipped cream as well as a mug of hot chocolate, for he was under the impression that human children liked to drink that. He was also under the impression that human children did not fall asleep under hotel tables unless they had a grown-up with them.

  “Which one belongs to you?” Grisha asked, looking at the group of Vienna’s artists, who were all talking, laughing, arguing, drinking, and eating.

  “With the pipe,” Maggie said, pointing to a tall man in a tweed jacket. “He’s my papa, but you would call him Alexander.”

  Alexander was listening to several people at once. He also had a long, serious face that looked, Grisha thought, like it had fallen out of the habit of smiling. That is the sort of thing dragons see, although they are never sure if they are right. People are odd creatures and sometimes they cry when they are happy, so it can be hard to tell if what you see is what you think it is. Even if you are a dragon who has decades of practice watching people.

  “He’s a very famous poet,” Maggie said. She said this matter-of-factly, as if stating that he was tall or busy or at the dentist.

  “I see,” said Grisha. He was not at all surprised that someone’s father was famous, as fame in the dragon world was a given. After all, each dragon was famous to all the others because of their particular battles, adventures, or exploits.

  “If you know about things like poetry, that is,” Maggie said.

  “I don’t know anything about poetry,” Grisha said. “Is it fun?”

  “Fun,” Maggie repeated slowly. No one had ever asked her that before. Fun and poetry were words like “delicious” and “espresso,” she thought. In theory, they could be one and the same, but it probably depended on the person. She tried to imagine her father’s students having fun, but couldn’t. “I’m not sure it’s fun,” she said. “Probably not.”

  “That’s too bad,” Grisha said. He was glad she’d given her answer some thought, for fun was not a topic to be treated lightly.

  Even though they are born to spend their lives scaring people, guarding them, or haunting their dreams, dragons are deeply devoted to fun. When dragons boasted of their epic adventures, what they were really proclaiming was that their lives had been fun. It was an open secret in the world of magic that if the world of men had known to tell a joke or invent a game at crucial moments, a lot of famous battles would never have taken place. The dragons would have been entirely too distracted to fight.

  The food came, and Grisha and Maggie carried it to one of the little tables right next to the bar. Maggie took a huge bite of strudel and then asked the waiter for extra whipped cream. “The only thing I like more than whipped cream is butter,” she explained to Grisha after the waiter had said, Certainly, miss.

  “So what do you do for fun?” she asked, once it had been established that he was not interested in having his own pastry.

  “I nap in the sun,” he said. “Or my friend Kator comes to visit.” He pointed to the bar where Kator was talking.

  “The one with the velvet covering his scales?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes,” Grisha said, impressed she had noticed a detail like that. “He claims that in one of his big battles a prince used a poisoned blade to burn away seventeen of his scales.”

  “But you don’t believe him?”

  “Well, when I first met him, he didn’t have any velvet scales, so I am not sure.”

  “Why would anyone lie about that?” Maggie asked.

  “It’s not a lie, exactly, but a fake injury will make a battle story sound better,” Grisha explained. “Dragons love a good story.”

  “He seems very loud,” Maggie said. “Do you spend a lot of time with him?”

  “He is much quieter when he and I are alone.”

  “That’s good,” Maggie said, sounding relieved. “Where do you live?”

  Grisha told her about his castle, and Maggie said she would be very jealous if she weren’t living in the hotel.

  “This hotel?” Grisha asked her. “The Sacher?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I didn’t know people lived in hotels,” he said. “I thought they stayed in them.”

  “Well, when my mother was alive, we all lived in an apartment,” Maggie said.

  Gris
ha, thinking of his own father, felt a sudden stab of sadness for the girl seated opposite him.

  “It was behind the Rathauspark and City Hall,” Maggie said. “I don’t remember living there. I don’t actually remember her either, but she was more famous than my papa.”

  Grisha knew how hard it was to have no memory of someone important from your life. The grief he’d felt when he discovered his mother had died while he was trapped in the teapot had been big and solid. The sadness about his father, of whom he had no memories, had been small and quiet, but just as real. What he missed, he’d discovered, was not the older dragon himself, but the chance to have known his father at all.

  “I think the Sacher is an excellent place to call home,” Grisha said gently.

  He had been alive for a very long time and he knew when people wanted to talk and when they didn’t. He understood that Maggie did not want to talk about her mother or the apartment or anything she didn’t remember. It would be rude to ask about what wasn’t any of his business. Dragons are not rude creatures.

  It had gotten late and Alexander’s friends were putting on their coats. At the bar, the dragons were finishing their stories. Soon it would be time for Grisha to return home to his castle on the Danube.

  Alexander walked over to the table where Maggie and Grisha were sitting. Maggie introduced them, and Grisha, who didn’t like to shake hands with humans (he worried his scales might scratch them), bowed in her father’s direction. There were white hairs all along the hem of Alexander’s trousers, as if a furry creature had been resting against him.

  “Thank you for keeping my daughter amused,” he said. “I fear my friends and I can be boring company for a little girl.”

  Grisha could see that Maggie did not like being referred to as a little girl, and so he quickly said, “She was amusing me. She was kind enough to keep me company while my companions all told stories I have heard many times already.”

  “Will I see you again next week?” Maggie asked Grisha.

  “That would be very pleasant,” Grisha said.

  “You mustn’t feel obliged,” Alexander said. “I know I shouldn’t let her stay up so late, but I can’t bear to—”

  “I don’t feel obliged,” Grisha said, interrupting, but wanting to be clear. “I very much meant that it would be very pleasant.”

  The dragons were beginning to make their way to the lobby. Alexander and Maggie walked with Grisha to the hotel’s heavy front doors.

  Maggie, in spite of having seen Grisha bow to her father, decided against such formality. She put her arms around as much of his middle as she could reach. Grisha remained as still as possible, not wanting to cause a rip in her pretty, if fairly mussed, velvet dress.

  “Good night,” she said, turning to take her father’s outstretched hand.

  The beginnings of dawn were creeping through the big windows on either side of the Sacher’s front door. Grisha thought it was a very fine thing to have met such a charming girl. One with such serious eyes and who said good night just as the morning greeted you.

  CHAPTER NINE

  STORIES

  MUCH TO GRISHA’S PLEASURE, HE WAS ABLE TO spend time with Maggie at the Blaue Bar the next week and the one after that, and after that. She would be, as always, sound asleep, but she had clearly arranged with her father to wake her as soon as the dragons arrived. Then she would greet Grisha and they would sit at a table by the bar. Over hot chocolate with extra whipped cream (for her) and fermented Apfelsaft (for him) they would talk about their week and about what they knew or hoped to know someday.

  They gossiped about Alexander’s friends crowded around the back table and about the dragons at the bar. Maggie would tell Grisha about the other children staying at the hotel, invariably with two parents and on a holiday from school. Grisha would tell Maggie about the children who visited his castle and the large family of mice who lived in what was left of the crumbling dungeon.

  One evening, they discovered that they each thought the Stadtpark was the most beautiful place in Vienna, but that Maggie had never been to it at night. Grisha, thinking that she would like to go, asked her father for permission to take her there.

  “Just bring her back once she’s seen the sun break through the trees,” Alexander said.

  “Yes, certainly,” Grisha said, grateful that the poet understood how important it was to see the Stadtpark under its darkest sky, but also how it looked turning all of its early-morning colors.

  Maggie led Grisha to her favorite corner of the park. It was the one from where she had once seen a large number of peacocks.

  “They’re not peacocks,” Grisha said, surprised that she didn’t know this. “They are descended from the children of winged horses and camels in Mongolia.”

  “How did they have babies that look like birds?” Maggie asked. “Wouldn’t a winged horse and a camel have a baby that looked more like a horse?”

  “It was a punishment,” Grisha said. “The winged horses weren’t supposed to be in Mongolia, and back when the world of magic had more power, it was against the rules for any of us to fall in love with any creature from the world of men.”

  “Why?” Maggie asked.

  “Creatures from the world of magic were used whenever the world of men fought for power, not when men fought for love,” Grisha said. “We went to the world of men to work with soldiers, not to fall in love.”

  “But soldiers fall in love,” Maggie said. “Everyone does.”

  Grisha realized she’d never even seen a rabbit with a small black dot on each ear. Explaining magic, its rules, and how it was connected to the world of men was going to be hard. Maybe like trying to describe flying to someone without wings.

  “It’s different when love happens across two worlds,” he said. “Bad things happen.”

  He told her how when a unicorn and a deer fell in love, hunters would invade the forest, intent on killing magical creatures.

  “Oh, then the rule about love makes sense,” Maggie said, wrapping her long arms around herself. “Papa thinks rules should only exist for physical protection. He says a rule that exists for any other purpose is the result of sloppy thinking.”

  Alexander had said exactly that on her last day of school. He’d had to explain why he allowed her to read anything she wanted, but wouldn’t let her play with his Japanese sword.

  “Are you cold?” Grisha asked, as she continued hugging herself.

  “I am,” she said, “but I don’t want to leave.”

  The dragon went over to some nearby bushes and gathered some slender branches. He picked up a few stones from the pathway. In no time at all, and with just one well-placed breath, he had a small but steady fire going.

  He scaled up in size a bit and curled his body around Maggie’s bench. “Now I can block the wind,” he said.

  Together they sat in silence, watching for the sky to streak purple, pink, and pale blue as signs of the rising sun.

  It had been almost forty years since Grisha had lived amongst humans, and until he met Maggie, he had not realized how much he had missed the company of a creature from the world of men.

  Maggie, so long used to having only Alexander for company, was delighted to have a companion who hadn’t been hired to take care of her. While listening to Grisha’s breathing, she realized that he was her first friend. It’s good that I didn’t make any before, she thought. Playing football couldn’t come close to how perfect it was to sit with Grisha and watch the sky.

  One night—or rather one morning—just as Alexander was saying goodbye to his friends and the dragons were slipping away toward the lobby, Maggie asked Grisha why he never joined in any of the loud boasting at the bar about heroic and dastardly deeds.

  “The others never stop talking and bragging,” she said. “But you never start.” She’d wondered about this for many weeks before deciding it was best to ask him.

  “Well, I don’t have a story,” he said, fear entering his heart the way cold mornings crept
through his Danube castle. He realized that over the past few months all thoughts of his teapot life had been banished while he enjoyed his new companion.

  “Of course you have a story,” she said. “Everyone does.”

  This was something Maggie had heard her father say many times. She had even read an article about her mother’s career in which he was quoted as saying that Caroline’s paintings didn’t just show her story, but reminded everyone who looked at them what their own stories were.

  “I’m not everyone,” Grisha said, dreading her reaction. He pointed to the bar and said, “While they were all having adventures, I was trapped.”

  “Where?” Maggie asked. “When? How come? How long?”

  Grisha had been expecting disappointment or boredom. Most of the dragons knew the bare details of his captivity, but none of them had ever expressed any interest in knowing more. Kator, in whom Grisha might have confided, had simply shuddered upon hearing the barest of details and said, “How very dull. I’m so sorry for you.”

  Maggie did not look the least bit sorry for him. Instead, excitement was shooting from her eyes. “Did you have guards?” she asked. “What were they like?”

  Alexander, who had come to collect his daughter, put a restraining hand on her shoulder. “Don’t badger him, darling,” he said. “It is customary, if you want something, to ask politely. Remember our talks about using please and thank you?”

  Maggie could feel her face and neck turning red with mortification. Of course she remembered how to be polite, but sometimes she forgot. She looked up at Grisha, intending to explain, but no words came. That happened to her sometimes when what she wanted to say was too important for any language at all.

  So she placed her hand against an orange scale on his left side. For some unknown reason, orange dragon scales are the least scratchy to a human’s hand. The one she put her hand over was her favorite, for it was at just the right height for her to reach. She hoped he would understand.