The Language of Spells

by Garret Weyr

“It’s morning,” Maggie said. “Why is it always morning?”

  Grisha kissed her forehead again and, instead of going back to the Blaue Bar, went home to his castle. He wrapped himself around the turret and tried to remember exactly what had happened after he’d arrived in Vienna.

  Where there should be memories, there was nothing but blank space. He knew it had been wonderful to reunite with other dragons, but whatever else he’d once known remained hidden. He let the fog roll back over his memories and watched as the sun spread against the sky and bounced across the Danube as far as the eye could see.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE DEPARTMENT OF EXTINCT EXOTICS

  FOR A FEW DAYS, MAGGIE WALKED AROUND IN HER own fog. It often happened that she had an idea before she had language for it. Over the years, she’d learned that searching for the right words, forcing the idea out, was about as useful as trying to make the sun move. She simply had to wait. The words would make themselves known by pressing against her mouth and head. This time, when the words finally did make themselves known, her idea was so obvious that she wondered why she hadn’t known it right away.

  I want to see Grisha more than once a week.

  The dragon worked at his castle every day until three, which was just about when she stopped her studies. In theory, Maggie was free to pursue what interested her and to think her own thoughts, but in practice, her schedule was up to her father. After three or four hours of morning lessons, they had lunch. He then left her with assignments and went to the university. If and when she finished her work, she was allowed to wander the city.

  If there was a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument for any deviation in Maggie’s schedule, Alexander had promised he would always consider it. What she had now was not an argument, but a wish. She hoped that would be enough.

  Instead of waiting for her father to look up from his desk, she stood right next to it and tapped on his arm. “I want to see Grisha more than once a week.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” Alexander said, as if her request had no unusual importance. He was organizing her lessons. “I’m sure we can go out to his castle one afternoon.”

  “No, not at the castle,” she said. “Maybe he could come here after I’m done with assignments and he could . . . well, he could just be with me.”

  “Oh,” Alexander said. He pushed his notes aside. “I should have realized. You don’t want to be alone.”

  “No, I like being alone,” she said. “But I like being with Grisha better.”

  “I suppose we could ask the D.E.E. if Grisha could be, say, your teacher, for lack of a better word.”

  “Grisha is my friend,” she said. “I don’t want him to be my teacher.”

  “I understand that,” he said. “But the Department is not known for letting the dragons lead much of a life outside of their assigned jobs. And they aren’t fans of such friendships.”

  Maggie thought about the pained expression on Grisha’s face when he’d told her about registering with the D.E.E. It made sense that the Department was strict and forbidding.

  “What do you say we skip lessons this morning?” Alexander asked. “We can go talk to someone there.”

  Normally, Maggie never got to skip lessons. Learning at home meant there was no such thing as a school holiday.

  “Yes!” She ran to the hall closet and grabbed both their jackets.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” her father said. “The D.E.E. is very odd and full of unusual rules about what the dragons can do.”

  “Unusual and odd,” Maggie said. “That’s perfect for us.”

  Two guards armed with guns stood at the huge front entrance of the D.E.E. Their uniforms were military in style (trousers, tailored shirts, matching hats), but oddly festive in color and detail (instead of medals, their shirts and hats were festooned with large blue feathers). As Maggie and Alexander started to walk past them, the guards reached for the long swords hanging from their belts.

  Without meaning to, Maggie smiled. Her love of all things military made it impossible not to be happy when seeing a sword up close instead of behind glass at a museum.

  “You won’t think it’s funny if I run this through you,” one of the guards said, his hand on the hilt, but with the blade still safely tucked in its silver case.

  Maggie paused on the stairs, uncertain if she’d understood the man’s German. Had he just said he would stab her?

  “Excuse me, sir, what is it exactly that I heard you say to my daughter?” Alexander asked, using his most formal and elaborate German.

  “You heard him,” the other guard said. “Tell her to watch her expressions.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Alexander said, moving Maggie behind him. “Are you threatening a child?”

  She could hear the fury in her father’s voice. He never got loud when he was mad. Instead, he was quiet and still.

  “You have no business here,” the first guard said, “so be off with you.”

  Maggie knew what was making her father mad was that he so thoroughly disliked rudeness of any kind. Personally, she felt that the blue feathers on the guards’ uniforms made them look so ridiculous she couldn’t imagine that the men posed any kind of real threat. The biggest danger seemed that her father would lose his temper.

  “As it happens, I do have business here,” Alexander said. “I need to talk to someone about a dragon.”

  “As it happens,” the first guard said, “no one is available.”

  “Fine,” Alexander said. “Thank you for your excessive lack of manners and help.”

  “But Papa, what about—” Maggie started to ask, but before the guards could react, her father simply took her by the hand and walked her briskly around the corner.

  “What’s the lesson here?” he asked.

  “Be polite?” Maggie asked.

  “Never smile at a man who is holding a weapon.”

  Maggie, almost running to keep up with her father, didn’t feel like pointing out that she’d been smiling at the sword and not the guard holding it.

  “We’ll just look for the emperor’s entrance,” he said.

  Maggie knew that back when Vienna had been part of an empire, most of the city’s buildings were built with several entrances. There was always a secret entrance that allowed the emperor to come and go as he pleased without his subjects seeing him. It was never in the back or the front of the building, but tucked along one of the side streets.

  When he’d been a young man just starting out in the world, Alexander had been a lowly clerk at the D.E.I.V. (Department of Elevator Inspection, Vienna). As a result, he had many stories about all of Vienna’s regulations and decrees. Alexander had disliked the job, Maggie knew, but it had taught him a lot of useful things, like the location of the city’s secret entrances. It also taught him that for every rule and contract a department had, it had an exception to that same thing.

  Therefore, she was not at all surprised when her father stopped short in front of what looked like more of the building’s wall. It was, on closer inspection, a door with no handle, and Alexander pushed gently against it and ushered her through.

  A young, elegant-looking woman at a simple desk looked up from a book she was reading. Maggie was relieved that there were neither swords nor blue feathers in sight.

  “Hello,” the woman said, in English and with no trace of an accent. “She said you might figure that out.”

  Maggie and her father looked behind themselves, not sure if the woman was talking to them or to whom “she” referred.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” the woman said. “I know who you are.”

  “Is she one of your students?” Maggie asked her father, rather doubting that she was. The woman had a cheerful look about her, while most of Alexander’s students looked exhausted, worn out, and vaguely tragic. Plus this woman had excellent posture, and all of her father’s students slouched.

  “Goodness, no,” the woman told Maggie. “It’s my job to know everyone with whom the
dragons have contact.”

  “I see,” Maggie said.

  “I assume you are here because of one of the dragons at the Blaue Bar,” the woman said.

  “We are,” Alexander said.

  The young woman leaned back in her chair, looking very pleased. Maggie thought it was as if she were playing a game with them, but without their knowing the rules.

  “Is it the dragon who sits with your daughter?” the woman asked Alexander.

  Maggie wondered how someone she’d never seen in the Blaue Bar could possibly know about her sitting with Grisha. She felt her father’s hand grip her shoulder, the way he did in crowds when he was worried about their getting separated.

  “Yes, it is,” Alexander said, clearly having decided to behave as if it were normal that a stranger would know where and with whom Maggie sat at night. “And I’d very much like to hire him to look after her.”

  “Did you know the dragons have contracts that forbid taking any outside work?”

  Maggie saw something move in the distance and, for the first time, noticed that another woman was standing by a pillar several feet behind the desk, partly hidden in the shadows. That’s odd, Maggie thought, and tried to make out who the woman was and what she was doing. She looked older than the woman behind the desk.

  “We didn’t know that,” Alexander said. “But we hoped—”

  “Hope has no place here,” the younger woman said, and now her smile, just as bright as when they had first walked in, made Maggie angry.

  “We’re here for an exception,” she said, hoping that her father was right and that there always was one.

  The older woman laughed and moved out of the shadows. She wore a skirt and a rumpled shirt that was only partially tucked in. Her hair was pulled back in a loose bun and her spectacles were crooked. She looked brisk but tired, as if her own efficiency had worn her out.

  “Well, good for you,” the woman said to Maggie in German. “I’m impressed.” Her eyes were so darkly blue they were almost black, but they flashed with amusement and delight.

  “Does that mean you’ll give us one?” Alexander asked.

  “You are the first people in thirteen years to come here without wishing to file a complaint,” she said. “So, yes, I think I will.”

  “Thank you,” Maggie said.

  “Go down this hall, take the staircase on your left,” the woman said, “and tell them they are to do what you ask.”

  “Tell who?” Maggie asked.

  “My assistants,” she said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. “They’ll know I sent you.”

  It occurred to Maggie to ask the woman who she was, but before she could get the words out, the woman said, “I am Fräulein Felinum, also called Thisbe.”

  “How do you do?” Alexander said politely.

  “Go on now,” Fräulein Felinum said. “You haven’t got all day.”

  Maggie and her father went down the hall, turned left, and went up the stairs. They then found themselves in another hall. There wasn’t a soul in sight. They wandered past some desks into a room with big windows, an oak table, several armchairs, and two napping cats. It seemed to Maggie that every important-looking building in Vienna had cats in it. But there was no one else in the room.

  “Did we go the wrong way?” she asked.

  “She told us to turn left,” Alexander said, looking around. “But maybe she meant right?” They went back into the hall with the desks and were met by Fräulein Felinum, also called Thisbe.

  “My assistants are busy and it was easy to do this myself,” Thisbe said, handing Maggie a heavy, engraved envelope. “It’s what you need.”

  Inside the envelope was a long document with several signatures and a stamp at the bottom with an affixed seal. It concerned one Benevolentia Gaudium (known informally as Grisha and legally as DR87), currently of Greifenstein Castle.

  DR87, as a part-time employee of the poet Alexander Miklós, was to accompany the young Miss Miklós, currently of the Hotel Sacher, through her afternoon and evening activities. These activities were to include (but not to exceed) a meal, a walk, a story, and bedtime. Furthermore, henceforth, forthwith, and so on, all this was to take place during the hours after said castle was closed to visitors. And without a proper visa, Grisha would not be permitted to escort Miss Miklós out of the city.

  “Thank you,” Maggie said. “I am very glad for this.”

  “Now come,” Thisbe said. “I will show you out.”

  There was no sign of the woman with good posture who’d been behind the desk when they entered. Maggie looked to the pillar and wondered whether the women took turns standing behind it.

  “She’s on her break,” Thisbe said.

  Maggie tried to come up with a reasonable way the older woman could have known what she was thinking. There really wasn’t one.

  “Goodbye,” Alexander said. “Thank you for your help.”

  “Good day,” Thisbe said to them. “Try not to come back. You especially, young lady.”

  Maggie nodded as Alexander ushered her out. Her head hurt and her skin itched everywhere. She realized that she would make every effort not to return. Thisbe had been pleasant enough, but Maggie couldn’t shake the feeling that something more dangerous than strange was afoot.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FAVORITE THINGS

  BECAUSE THE PAPERWORK DICTATED THAT GRISHA be an official employee, Alexander borrowed a car and drove out to Grisha’s castle to formally offer the dragon a job.

  “Won’t he think it’s funny that you want to pay him?” Maggie asked. “Or be offended?”

  “I will try not to offend,” Alexander said. “But I am sure he is used to the D.E.E.”

  Maggie hugged her father goodbye, confident that he would handle it all. And handle it he must have, for the next afternoon, promptly at half past three, Grisha arrived at the Sacher.

  Maggie had had her lessons, eaten her lunch, and finished all the tasks Alexander had left for her. She’d put down her pencil and begun plotting out an afternoon of walking and finding the exact right café to listen in on other people’s conversations.

  Just as she was deciding which streetcar to ride and in which direction, the lobby porter called. “Visitor at the front desk for you, Miss Miklós.”

  When she saw Grisha in the hotel lobby, Maggie realized how much she’d been wanting his company during her long, solitary afternoons. She ran toward him and skipped the last three steps.

  Until Alexander asked Grisha to start spending his afternoons looking after Maggie, the dragon had dreaded the approach of three o’clock. The silence that would settle over the castle as the tourists left felt too much like the quiet that would fall over the shop in Budapest after it had closed and the sun had set. The fourteen hours between closing and opening held no hope of any distraction from the fact that Grisha was an unwanted teapot collecting dust.

  After the castle closed to tourists, Grisha would become restless and lonely, a combination which often just felt like sadness. He’d talk to the mice who lived in a corner of the castle’s dungeon, but they mostly ignored him.

  Maggie was not somebody who ignored anything or anyone. She spent two weeks showing Grisha all of her favorite places in Vienna. The seven best places that sold the best almond cake. Her five favorite buildings. Her absolute favorite café for eavesdropping. Her two most favorite ways ever to walk from the Hotel Sacher to the Belvedere Palace.

  “That’s where Lennox lives,” Grisha said.

  “He’s so close to the Sacher,” Maggie said. “How come he’s always the last one to arrive at the Blaue Bar?”

  “I guess being late comes with old age.”

  One afternoon, as they walked behind the Parliament, Maggie pulled Grisha down one street to show him a flower box hanging from the fifth floor of an apartment building. “Isn’t it pretty?” she demanded, and then, before he could answer, she was pulling him down another street so he could admire the awning of a café
. “The awning and the flower box are two of my favorite things in all of Vienna,” she declared.

  “Everything you see is your favorite,” Grisha said.

  “If I make something my favorite, I won’t forget it,” she said. “That’s how I’ve learned a lot of the city by heart.”

  Grisha, who’d heard Maggie’s stories about how many times she’d gotten lost in the city, smiled. “I was just like you when I first came to Vienna,” he told her. “I loved everything I saw. I tried to visit each thing I loved every day, but then I had to settle for visiting only five.”

  “Five is a good number,” Maggie said. “But why couldn’t you visit as many as you wanted?”

  “Partly because the list kept growing,” he said. “But mostly because the soldiers began to only let us out for two hours in the afternoon.”

  “I thought you were at the Bristol Hotel,” Maggie said. “Not prison.”

  “I was,” he said. “There were just strict rules about where we could go.”

  “Why?” Maggie asked.

  Grisha thought it was a good question, but he had no answer for her. Once again he had the uneasy feeling that something dangerous was pressing up against his memories.

  “How would you like to see one of my favorite things?” he asked Maggie, to distract her from questions he couldn’t answer. “It’s quite close by.”

  “Oh, yes, please,” she said.

  “It will involve a short flight,” he said, lumbering down on all fours. “You can sit on my back on that patch of orange scales.”

  “We have to fly?” Maggie asked. “I thought you said it was close by.”

  “You’ll see,” Grisha said, and waited while she scrambled onto his back.

  It was a bit tricky to fly in the city because a dragon had to go up without moving forward. It required a careful combination of moving one’s wings while keeping limbs and tail very still.

  Grisha unfurled his wings and he and Maggie soared up until they’d cleared the buildings, and then, with a short burst of forward motion, they had a soft landing on the roof of the Parliament.