The Language of Spells

by Garret Weyr

  Grisha took her hand from his scale and held it gently between his paws. She loved how his paw pads felt like scratchy carpets worn down until smooth. She saw in his soft gold eyes that he understood all she wanted to say, and that he would never think she was rude.

  “Next week,” he said, “I will try to explain the Where, the When, the How Come, and the How Long.”

  All week, Grisha brooded on the best way to turn his years in the teapot into a proper dragon story. The stories the dragons told each other at the Blaue Bar were often long and boring, but at least they contained mayhem, murder, and intrigue. Poor Grisha, who had never harmed a soul, didn’t see how he could tell Maggie about himself without her wishing she were listening to an entirely different sort of dragon.

  Maggie clearly thought he’d been in a real prison and had fought against strife and danger. How could he tell her that the biggest threat had been the teapot breaking? Or that his mortal enemies had been the cold and loneliness? He hated to imagine her sitting at their little table in the Blaue Bar looking bored and disinterested.

  He wondered if there were a way to make his story sound exciting. He remembered Maggie saying that her father often went to the Austrian National Library, called the ONB (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek), to write his poems. The ONB, she’d said, held every story in the world, and Alexander liked to sit amongst them all as he worked. So one afternoon, after his castle was closed to visitors, Grisha took himself to the library.

  Flying in the city was a matter of landing on a roof and then scaling down as close to human size as possible (usually about a foot or two taller and wider than most human adults). From there you could either fly down to the sidewalk to use the front entrance or simply look for a door on the roof. It didn’t matter which way Grisha chose, as one of the great advantages of people being too busy to notice any of Vienna’s dragons was that he could move about almost as if he were invisible. The D.E.E. didn’t allow for free travel, but if you did your job, stayed out of the way, and didn’t cause any trouble, an unscheduled trip was permitted.

  Sometimes it was odd to feel so big and out of place and yet have nobody really see you. If any of the dragons strayed too long from their homes, where they were sought out and seen by tourists, they would complain of feeling like they didn’t exist. Grisha, who tried to see the best in every situation, would point out that it was easier to observe people who never noticed you.

  Another advantage to nobody paying him any mind was that he didn’t have to ask to use the books. He simply walked through the library’s stacks until he came to a very old section labeled Europe’s Long Ago and Far Away. Right next to it were three sections on Long Ago and Far Away from East, South, and Southeast Asia.

  Grisha looked for and read every dragon story he could find in all four sections. No matter the geographic location, almost all the stories had battles, heroes, villains, and slumbering princesses. He looked at the pile of books before him and sighed. All he’d learned was that he hated any story that began Once upon a time.

  As he tried to think of ways to make his life sound interesting, Grisha couldn’t shake off the feeling that something more terrible than being trapped in a teapot had happened. Not just to him, but to everyone who had followed a sound to Vienna. He realized that he couldn’t recall why the dragons of the forest had followed the sound. Or what had happened when they arrived in the city.

  Trying to remember this gave Grisha the same sick feeling he got whenever he thought of his captivity. The only clear memories Grisha had from his first few years in Vienna involved meeting Kator, Lennox, and the other dragons. Images of worried soldiers and some burning curtains flashed through his mind. But the rest seemed murky, like looking at familiar trees when the forest was thick with fog.

  His bones were beginning to fill with the same chill he remembered from the emperor’s palace. He told himself that he’d been reading too much and needed to go home. Once there, he’d eat some warm mash and rest. But as he walked across the large reading room, he spotted Alexander Miklós at a table near a dusty window.

  Maggie’s father was reading and taking notes. Sitting by his feet was a scrawny white cat with colored markings and the alert expression of a guard dog. Well, that explained the fur, Grisha thought.

  It was odd how cats lurked here and there throughout Vienna. You’d see them moving about the city’s grand buildings or street plazas as if they owned the land they walked on. According to the mice who lived in his dungeon, Vienna’s cats felt they were too good to act as common kitchen mousers and preferred buildings that had staff in them, like hotels or museums. “That way, people bring them food,” one of the mice had explained. “The cats hate catching food, but if they decide to do it, watch out!”

  Grisha tried to remember if there had been cats at the Bristol, where he and Kator had originally stayed. In his mind there flashed another image from his early time in Vienna. It was of four cats with short, bushy, foxlike tails and a black dot behind each ear to distinguish them from normal cats. Grisha’s teeth started to shake and the chill in his bones began to spread. In the library, the scrawny white cat, who had a regular cat’s tail, merely blinked at Grisha.

  Normally, Grisha would have stopped to say hello to Alexander, but the illness behind his fogged-up memories turned him away. The chill carried a persistent dread, and when he got home, he avoided the turret where he usually watched the sunset. He went straight to the dungeon and curled up like a frightened rabbit. He slept well past sunrise, and only woke up when the mice pulled on his ears, reminding him of visiting hours.

  CHAPTER TEN

  FOG OF WAR

  WHEN THE DAY FINALLY ARRIVED THAT GRISHA WAS due back at the Blaue Bar, Maggie woke up and realized that she’d been thinking about him all week. Either wishing she could see him, or saving up things to tell him. There was a new waiter at the café where she spent rainy afternoons. Two American boys her age were staying at the Sacher, but weren’t very nice. Also, her father had spilled espresso all across some important papers and spent almost five minutes swearing in several different languages.

  It was odd that so much worth telling someone could happen in only one week. It was odder still that, until now, she’d only ever told her father her news. Which meant that some of it never got told. After all, he already knew about the espresso swearing. And she never told him about kids who weren’t nice to her because it upset him.

  But with Grisha, it was different. The dragon had a way of seeing clearly, taking her side, and yet empathizing with everyone involved. Maggie thought of the way he’d looked at her the last time he’d been to the bar. Grisha had known she hadn’t been rude, but he’d also understood why Alexander had told her not to badger him. Even before Grisha spoke, she’d felt better. When she was with him, she felt like her best self, and when she wasn’t with him she looked forward to seeing him.

  So this is what it feels like to miss someone, Maggie thought. Back when she’d been very little and just beginning to sort out what it meant to have a dead mother she didn’t remember, she’d tried to imagine what it felt like to miss someone. Once she’d gone so far as to picture her father dying in a car crash, but that was so awful she’d had to stop right away.

  Now, though, she could begin to understand without having to pretend there’d been a terrible tragedy. It would be like thinking about Grisha with the knowledge that he’d never be at the Blaue Bar ever again. That must be what missing Caroline was like for Alexander.

  No wonder he looked unhappy when people mentioned her mother: It just reminded him of what he didn’t have. Maggie was suddenly grateful that she didn’t miss her mother. It was much easier to miss someone she knew she’d see again.

  Maggie got dressed. In the sitting room where breakfast was always served, Alexander was having his first cup of coffee. He never spoke until it was finished, and Maggie normally appreciated the quiet as the day began and was usually busy with her own thoughts and plans. Today, thoug
h, she looked at her father as if seeing him for the first time. Alexander’s day, no matter how busy he was, would be shaped by not seeing Caroline. Every day was like that for him.

  Maybe he is used to it, she thought. Maybe he doesn’t ever think about it. That was unlikely. If for some reason she could never see Grisha again, she didn’t think she’d ever get used to it, and she and Grisha were only friends, not married.

  Alexander put down his cup and smiled at her. “Good morning,” he said. “How did you sleep? Any dreams?”

  It was his usual greeting, and normally she would say, “Nothing to report,” and the day would start. Grisha had said that Alexander looked like he’d fallen out of the habit of smiling and she’d replied, no, her father smiled a lot. But, as she opened her mouth to answer, she wondered what her father hid behind his eyes in those moments when he claimed he was trying to think.

  “I love you, Papa,” she said, and then she looked down at her roll, broke it in half, and crammed butter into it. “Nothing to report.”

  She added her usual response so he wouldn’t suspect that it had taken her eight years to start to understand how hard her mother’s death might be for him.

  Alexander helped himself to what was left of the butter and said, “Ich liebe dich ebenfalls.”

  In German, the way to say “I love you too” was Ich liebe dich auch. But Maggie had trouble pronouncing auch (too) and would always use ebenfalls (also) instead. Normally, Alexander would make her use auch.

  “Thanks for the ebenfalls,” she said, and they laughed.

  Their morning reset itself to normal and all was well.

  After swearing to herself that she wouldn’t fall asleep, Maggie woke up abruptly and crawled out from under the table. It was only half past one in the morning, so the dragons hadn’t arrived yet. She went to the bar to order hot chocolate and fermented Apfelsaft from Kurt. Then she sat down at the little table where she and Grisha spent their evenings and waited, pleased that everything was ready.

  When he walked in, it felt to Maggie as if the whole bar became lighter and happier. Grisha didn’t like hugs because he worried about his scales scratching her, but Maggie believed in hugging people instead of only shaking hands. As a compromise, they had decided that she would put her hand on the orange scale she could reach and he would settle a front paw on her shoulder.

  With that finished, he asked about her Latin progress because he knew that was her most difficult subject. Maggie told him that Latin verbs never got easier to conjugate. She described the new waiter at the café. “He’s younger than all the others, but just as rude as the others,” she said. “He’s losing his hair, though, so maybe he’s not that young.”

  “It’s hard to tell with humans,” Grisha said. “With dragons it’s easy. Our scales turn silver. But sometimes humans have gray hair without being old. It’s confusing.”

  “It is confusing,” she said, tapping her fingers against each other and thinking that she often didn’t know what to say to people she met. “People are just confusing.”

  Grisha had come to recognize that when Maggie tapped her fingertips like that, she was thinking about something other than what she was saying. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.

  “No, nothing anymore,” she said, looking up from her fingers. The way Grisha’s gold eyes softened into the color of lamplight when he smiled put her at ease.

  “There was an American family staying at the hotel this week,” she said. “A mother and three children. She travels for work and takes all of them with her wherever she goes.”

  “Do they have lessons the way you do?” Grisha asked.

  “Yes, but not from her,” Maggie said. “She hires tutors.”

  “Did you compare notes with them?” Grisha asked. “About what it’s like to learn outside of school?”

  “Not exactly,” Maggie said.

  She’d heard the two older boys struggling with their German translation and so had asked if they wanted help. By way of an answer, they’d told her she was stuck-up, in very bad German, and that they certainly didn’t need her help.

  Maggie had been too confused to respond, completely unaware that boys who were thirteen and fifteen did not appreciate offers of help from eleven-year-old girls. Why wouldn’t you want help from someone younger? After all, when she was nine, a seven-year-old boy from Spain had shown her how to do a handstand. They’d gone up and down the Sacher’s hallways on their hands until the boy saw that she could do it.

  Grisha, who also had no idea why two older boys would be unkind, said, “I’m sorry that happened.”

  “It’s just frustrating how some people are perfectly reasonable and others aren’t,” Maggie said. “I can never tell what it is I’m doing wrong. Or right.”

  “Maybe it’s just a question of practice,” Grisha said. “By talking to all types.”

  “Maybe, but I got my revenge,” she said, and explained that she’d arranged for the boys’ breakfast to be delivered burnt and cold during the rest of their stay. Having lived at the hotel for over seven years, Maggie had people on the staff willing to help her.

  At the bar, the dragons had started in on their bragging and boasting and shouting about how I saved him or I conquered an empire or I was conquered so that the kingdom was saved.

  “Are you going to tell me your story?” she asked.

  “I’m going to try,” Grisha said. “But I’m a little nervous.”

  “Do you want me to get my rabbit?” Maggie asked. “She helps when you’re nervous.”

  “You have a rabbit?” Grisha asked. “I didn’t think the hotel allowed pets.”

  “She’s not exactly real,” Maggie said, not feeling embarrassed the way she usually was when the subject of her rabbit came up. “I mean, I used to think so, and I carried her everywhere. And I saved her from Papa throwing her out, but now she’s in my pajama drawer and I know she’s . . . stuffed.”

  Maggie whispered the word, knowing it was silly but still worried about hurting the rabbit’s feelings.

  “I won’t be so nervous that we have to disturb your rabbit,” Grisha said, and Maggie nodded and leaned forward, anxious for his story.

  Grisha need not have worried that Maggie would be bored by his lack of battle experience. She had studied the Emperor Franz Joseph’s life in great detail because he had been born in Schönbrunn Palace, which was her favorite palace in all of Europe. She was thrilled beyond measure that Grisha had actually known Franz Joseph.

  “I didn’t exactly know him,” Grisha said. “I just spent a lot of time in his rooms.”

  “And in his pockets,” Maggie said, tucking her feet up under herself so that her whole body fit in the blue velvet chair. “Plus, you knew him from watching what he did.”

  As Grisha went on with his tale, she forgot all about the emperor and wished instead that she had lived in London with the Merdinger family. She was consumed with curiosity about Rachel and Ella, who also studied at home, but with a governess. Yakov, a banker from Budapest, seemed to be a little bit like her father, a poet from Prague; both of them spoke more than one language, cared about others, and knew of magic. I’d love to know someone whose papa was like mine, she kept thinking.

  When Grisha got to the part where he and Yakov said goodbye, she said, “I wish the girls had met you. Outside of the teapot, I mean.”

  Grisha, who had wished exactly that for many years, smiled at Maggie. Somehow telling her about his life in a teapot had made it, if not a pleasant memory, a less painful one.

  “For a while I hoped that Yakov would bring the girls to Vienna for a visit,” Grisha said. “But he never came.”

  “What happened when you got here?” Maggie asked, but instead of answering, Grisha fell silent and his eyes took on a faraway look. Sometimes her father got lost in his thoughts when telling her stories. So she looked across the table and waited. And waited.

  “Grisha?”

  The dragon heard her voice and looked at her face,
full of curiosity and concern. He wanted to tell her, but the usual fog that filled his mind whenever he thought of his early time in Vienna was obscuring his memories.

  “I registered with the Department of Extinct Exotics,” he said. After all, he must have done so. So why couldn’t he remember that?

  “And then?”

  “They . . . had me sign a contract, and I started my job here at the castle, and, well . . . here we are.”

  “Was it exciting to see all of your friends again?” she asked.

  “My friends,” Grisha said slowly, trying to think.

  “Kator and all the others,” Maggie said. She noticed that Grisha looked both sad and confused. “You know, once you got to Vienna and everyone was here to register?”

  “It was, um, yes, it was nice,” Grisha said, although he knew it must have been terrifying. After all, he would not have worked so hard to forget what had been nice. It was odd how part of him wanted to remember, but another part warned him not to try.

  “I think it’s time for you to go to sleep,” he said.

  “I am tired,” she said. And she was, but she also understood that Grisha no longer wanted to talk about his early time in Vienna. Still, she was curious. “Will you tell me all the rest another time?”

  Grisha nodded and then went to tell Alexander that he would take Maggie upstairs and put her to bed. He’d never put anyone to bed before, but Maggie said that she didn’t need much help. At the age of eleven, a kiss on the forehead was pretty much all she wanted before sleep.

  “Will you come back tomorrow?” Maggie asked, as she burrowed her way under the covers.

  “Next week,” Grisha said. “Good night.”