The Language of Spells

by Garret Weyr

  “Yes, the memories are yours,” Leopold told her. “But letting you see them is up to me.”

  The memory of her mother had felt as if they had actually been together. She had known her mother and had loved her. The grief she always said she couldn’t have for someone she didn’t recall was, Maggie saw now, an endless sorrow over not having had the chance to save those memories.

  Someday, her father would die, and all she’d have left would be her memories of him. Wouldn’t she do anything in the world to keep them? Should she, then, do anything to gain access to memories of her mother? Maggie felt her mouth go as dry and scratchy as her eyes. And then suddenly her eyes, throat, and nose were full of smoke and heat. A blast of fire shot across the piazza, incinerating her cookies and Leopold’s brandy.

  “Get away from her.” Grisha’s voice boomed, thick and menacing. “Get away!”

  The dragon was loping across the square, snorting balls of fire that landed all around Leopold’s wheelchair. Leopold put his hand over each ball and Maggie watched them fizzle out as if doused with water.

  She stood up and placed herself between Grisha and Leopold. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s not threatening me.”

  “I don’t want him near you,” Grisha said. “It’s not safe.”

  “Benevolentia Gaudium,” Leopold said. “My lost friend.”

  “Not one word,” Grisha said to him. To Maggie, he said, “He’s not to be trusted.”

  “He showed me my mother,” she said. “I remembered her.”

  “You could remember her touch,” Leopold said softly. “How much is that worth to you?”

  “I know you,” Grisha said to Leopold. “You are just as likely to take away what you promise to give.”

  “Calm yourself and come sit,” Leopold said. “The three of us share a bond. That makes it likely we can reach a bargain.”

  Grisha forced himself to remain calm. What would be best for Maggie? For their quest? He took a deep breath and then scaled down considerably; he’d been almost as big as the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. He sat down in a chair between Maggie and Leopold.

  “We do not have a bond,” he said, his voice still bigger than Maggie had ever heard.

  “You and I certainly do,” Leopold said. “We are exiled from the lives we once had and from a world that no longer exists.”

  Maggie knew that was true for Grisha and all of Vienna’s dragons. She realized that it must also be true for the old man with strange eyes and waning powers.

  “Leave Maggie out of it,” Grisha said. “Whatever it is you want, bargain with me.”

  “I’ve nothing to offer,” Leopold said. “I can never return the years I stole from you.”

  “You could make up for it by telling us how to find the dragons you buried,” Maggie said.

  “Young lady, if I help you with that, I will hasten my own death,” Leopold told her. “And I still enjoy being alive.” He leaned across the table and touched Maggie’s arm. “I will give you your memories if you stop looking for Tyr.”

  “I will not let you cast a spell that involves her memories,” Grisha said.

  “I have nothing else to offer her,” Leopold said. “And I want to live.”

  “Everybody wants to live,” Maggie said. “For example, the dragons you buried would much rather live than remain buried and forgotten.”

  “You would have your memories of your mother and not have to rely on knowing her through the paintings.”

  Something about that nagged at Maggie. It reminded her of something her father often said, but she couldn’t think what.

  “All you have to do is stop looking for Tyr,” Leopold said. “Do the wise thing and give up. Let an old man live in peace. It’s the easier way for you both.”

  “We’re close to finding Tyr, aren’t we?” Grisha asked, realizing. “We must be very close.”

  “I’ve no idea,” Leopold said. “I’ve always assumed that she died.”

  The old sorcerer spoke with such forced lightness that Grisha knew he must be lying. “If we weren’t close to finding her, you wouldn’t be trying to blackmail Maggie into giving up.”

  “Caroline Brooks was your mother, and you have the right to remember her,” Leopold told Maggie. “Consider carefully what you choose to do.”

  Just then Maggie remembered what it was her father often said—that someday she would come to know Caroline through her paintings. And he was right, of course. It had been while in front of the blue-and-silver paintings that she’d had her first real feelings about her mother. The word—Mama—had come as if it were a gift, straight from the paintings.

  “I won’t take your bribe,” Maggie said. “She was my mother, so those memories aren’t yours to give. Knowing I have them is enough for me.”

  Dark sparks shot from Leopold’s very dark eyes. “You are a stupid, stupid girl, and your friend here is just as worthless,” he said. And with those words, Leopold and his wheelchair turned into seven cats. It happened as smoothly and quickly as when the brandy and cookies had appeared on the table.

  The cats were skinny things; hungry looks in their coal-black eyes with thick greenish-yellow rims. Two rubbed up against Maggie’s ankles and the other five circled Grisha.

  “Run!” Grisha called out, but it was too late—both cats had sunk their teeth into her heels.

  A sharp stinging spread across her feet, feeling like the worst scrape imaginable, but even more dismaying was the sight of blood oozing from Grisha’s back paws and tail.

  Grisha shot fire at the two cats who’d bitten Maggie. Immediately, all seven cats scampered away across the piazza, in a single file line.

  The stinging at her heels gave way to a warm, wet feeling as blood made its way out of the puncture marks. “Crap,” Maggie said, because what else could you say after being bitten by an ancient artisan in the shape of seven cats?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  FIRSTS

  GRISHA HAD IMMEDIATELY PUT HIS PAWS AND THEN his tail into his mouth to remove whatever poison the cats might have transmitted. He quickly did the same with Maggie’s feet. She thought it was disgusting and ticklish in equal measure. Since no one could see Grisha (in this way, Rome was a lot like London), no one saw why she was standing on one foot, holding up the other one. She was torn between laughing at what he was doing and crying at how much her bites stung.

  She asked him if it wasn’t an old wives’ tale about curing snakebite by sucking out the venom. “Not if a dragon does it,” he said. “My mouth has so much fire going in and out that it’s as close to sterile as you can get.”

  “Do you think Leopold wanted to kill us?” Maggie asked.

  “He certainly didn’t want us to live,” Grisha said. “But he’s too weak to kill us.”

  Grisha had been shocked to see how much Leopold had changed. His spotted, wrinkled hands, which had once been porcelain smooth, betrayed how much power the old man had lost. Unlike men, sorcerers did not age, but they decayed as their power faded. Once he knew Maggie was okay, he listened to her argument that they tell Alexander an angry stray cat had bitten her.

  “I don’t want to tell him about magical cats and people being turned into bugs,” she said. “He’s a bit vague about the whole Leopold part of our quest, and if he finds out everything I’ll get a huge lecture.”

  “We don’t lie to your father,” Grisha said. “Our quest is an honorable one. Lying is for cowards.”

  “Yes, of course,” Maggie said. “But it’s hard to live up to things like honor when you are only eleven and need permission to go to Germany.”

  “You do have a point,” Grisha said. “He won’t let you go anywhere if he thinks you’re in danger of another attack.”

  “I’ll tell him it was one cat, which is a small lie,” she said. “But it’s a lie for a good reason.”

  “We have to find Tyr before we can plan to go to Germany,” Grisha reminded her.

  “I thought you said we must be close to findi
ng her,” Maggie said.

  “Close is not the same as finding,” Grisha said.

  “Did you get any clues from talking to cats?”

  “No,” Grisha said. “No one has seen or smelled a cat with an odd tail.”

  When Alexander met them, he looked long and hard at the table with its charred remains of a brandy glass and a plate of cookies. “Anyone want to tell me what happened?” he asked, his voice both quieter and calmer than usual.

  Grisha watched the poet’s face as Maggie stuttered through her story of an angry stray cat. She was not a terribly good liar and kept switching back and forth between it being one cat and then three cats. In one version, she had accidentally kicked one of the cats, and in the other, a single cat had bitten her for no reason at all.

  “That’s not it,” Grisha said, very uncomfortable with the lying they were doing.

  “I didn’t think so,” Alexander said, and sat quietly while the story of Leopold, the offer of retrieving lost memories, and the seven cats spilled forth. “I see,” he said at one point. Also, “Is that so?”

  Grisha, like Maggie, knew that when Alexander was very calm, he was the most upset.

  “I’m certainly glad Leopold is not that powerful anymore,” Alexander said, once he was sure he understood them. “But let’s get you to a doctor for antibiotics and a proper exam.”

  Maggie tried to explain why that was unnecessary because of Grisha’s sterile mouth, but her father was insistent, saying, “I believe in taking little girls who have been bitten by a seven-cat-sized sorcerer to the doctor.”

  Grisha saw with relief that Maggie was too tired to argue, though he knew that if any poison had reached her blood, no antibiotic would help. Still, he was glad to have a doctor take a look at her bite marks, which were very red and swollen.

  Unfortunately for Maggie, the doctor decided that she did need a rabies shot, which Grisha whispered to her was going to hurt and that he was so sorry but there was no getting around it.

  The two separate shots, delivered by very long and alarming needles, went right into her heels. Although Grisha could see that Maggie was trying to be brave, she burst into tears and pressed her face against her father’s shoulder.

  “God forgive me,” Alexander said. “Until right now, I have always liked cats.”

  “You can still like them, Papa,” Maggie said. “Just not enchanted ones.”

  Enchanted.

  And all became as clear as glass to Grisha. The importance of Leopold’s changed hands and the yellow-green in his eyes fell into place.

  All this time, Grisha had been asking cats about a cat with a short, bushy tail. But Tyr had given up her powers beforeThisbe gave up ever seeing her again. So Thisbe had never seen Tyr after she no longer had powers.

  Bells, Grisha thought, using the worst word he knew. Tyr was no longer enchanted, he realized, so she’d have a perfectly normal tail. I should’ve asked if there were a cat who didn’t seem to know how normal cats behaved. Or who was heartbroken.

  Alexander had been heartbroken when his wife died, and what had he done? He’d remained in Vienna and, every chance he had, he had visited Caroline’s paintings, which hung in museums, galleries, and homes. In other words, he’d stayed close to what reminded him of what he’d lost.

  Grisha couldn’t believe he hadn’t figured it out sooner. That’s why Thisbe had said to ask Kator where Tyr was. It wasn’t because Kator knew where she was, but that Tyr would have stayed close to the dragon who had once guarded her.

  He and Maggie had been looking for a needle in a haystack, when they should have seen that the needle had been near them all along. They weren’t looking for an unknown cat, but for the cat he’d seen with Alexander at the library: the one who was occasionally at the Blaue Bar.

  Grisha decided to wait until they were safely home in Vienna before telling Maggie of his suspicion. He saw no point in taking a chance that Leopold might still be skulking around them in the form of some cat or another, listening and watching.

  Once she returned to her room at the Sacher, Maggie pinned up a postcard of her mother’s blue-and-silver paintings. She didn’t want to dwell on her dead mother, but neither was there any point in pretending that she didn’t miss her. The postcard would be a reminder of what she wished she remembered about the mother she’d lost.

  Memory was such an odd and unfair thing, she thought. She’d never need a reminder of Grisha galloping across the piazza, shooting fire at Leopold.

  “We might never find Tyr,” Maggie told Grisha, “but you have already done a heroic deed.”

  Grisha’s whole body glowed like the dying embers of a fire with embarrassment and pride. Even though Maggie wasn’t a princess in a prison, he had confronted danger to protect his friend and ally. That was something a dragon could boast about. Finally, Grisha could brag at the bar along with the others.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Grisha started. “What if Tyr has found us?”

  “What do you mean?” Maggie bounded across the room until there was hardly any space between them. “Did you find something out?”

  “Well, it was more what I didn’t find out.”

  “Tell me!”

  “I think Tyr is the cat who follows your father,” Grisha told her. “The one who lives at the Sacher?”

  “That scraggly thing?” Maggie asked. “She has a perfectly ordinary tail.”

  “So would Tyr,” Grisha said. “When I first knew Leopold, his eyes were completely black and his hands looked like they were made of porcelain.”

  “Well, Leopold’s hands are old because now he’s old,” Maggie said. “But those eyes are really dark, Grisha. They’re darker than Thisbe’s.”

  “But the part around the edges is no longer all black.”

  That was true, Maggie thought, thinking of the icky greenish-yellow color she’d seen in Leopold’s eyes. “So you think Tyr might look normal now?” she asked.

  “Maybe not normal normal,” Grisha said. “But as normal as an enchanted cat who lost all her powers can be.”

  Maggie thought about the little cat she’d spent years ignoring. The creature never accepted any affection and only ate food if Kurt put it on a white-and-gold cake plate. She’d seen the cat at the hotel and at the university and just sauntering down the wide boulevard behind the Opera House. That cat was as normal a part of her day as the Hotel Sacher itself.

  “But I thought each of Leopold’s cats had that odd tail.”

  “Since Tyr had given up her magic, she won’t show any signs of being enchanted. And that’s all the tail is.”

  “But wouldn’t Kator have seen Tyr at the bar?” she asked. “And then told all of you that one of Leopold’s cats was now quite harmless?”

  “It’s possible that the spell Thisbe cast to keep Tyr safe was so strong that no one who knew her can see her anymore,” Grisha said. “Remember that Thisbe was trying to save her friend’s life. And the strength of that spell could have infected anyone who had known Tyr as an enchanted cat.”

  “But we never knew Tyr,” Maggie said. Her face split into such a wide smile that she could feel her skin stretching. “So we can see her!”

  And with that, she was off, Grisha close behind, down eleven flights of stairs to the Blaue Bar in search of a cat who might be their last clue.

  Tyr was not there or anywhere in the lobby. Kurt said he hadn’t seen her in weeks. She wasn’t at the university or in the library or any place that Alexander went. Over the next few afternoons, Maggie and Grisha walked throughout the streets surrounding the hotel looking for Tyr.

  It wasn’t until all of the dragons were at the Blaue Bar that they saw the white cat with colored markings. When Maggie and Grisha arrived at the bar, the “scraggly thing” was already curled up near where Alexander sat.

  Maggie crawled under the table. The cat’s green eyes blinked at her.

  “Hello,” Maggie said.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time for you to find me,” Ty
r said.

  Maggie wanted to throw her arms up in victory, but said, “Thisbe told me to look for you, only it took us a while to figure out where.”

  “It certainly did,” Tyr said. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t be bright enough.”

  Maggie tried not to laugh or smile. A cat, she now realized, was rude just because. It wasn’t personal.

  Tyr was curious about Germany and, upon hearing the explanation, said that using water from the Black Forest was not the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. Maggie knew this was high praise coming from a cat. “Come meet my friend,” she said. “He’s been waiting.”

  At the sight of the elusive cat, Grisha let out a wisp of smoke. “We are very glad to finally meet you,” he said. He had pulled up another chair and piled cushions on it so that Tyr could easily see over the top of the table.

  “Thank you,” Tyr said. “When you saw me in the library, it was the first time a dragon had looked at me since the night I gave up my powers.”

  Tyr looked over at Kator, who was loudly arguing with three other dragons about the best way to take a sword away from a man on horseback. “When I rubbed up against him, he couldn’t feel it,” Tyr said. “That’s when I understood that Thisbe had done something.”

  “You were caught,” Maggie said. “The guards were going to kill you.”

  “I figured as much,” Tyr said. “And I know Thisbe meant well, but her spell to protect me has had a serious blowback.”

  “A blowback is the unintended consequence of a spell,” Grisha told Maggie.

  “Giving up my magic to free the dragons only worked halfway because Thisbe didn’t give up her magic as well,” Tyr continued.

  “Does that mean that half of the dragons went free?” Maggie asked. She hadn’t known that any part of Tyr’s spell had worked.

  “Not exactly,” Tyr said. “I’ll have to show you.”

  “Tonight?” Maggie asked.

  “I can take you now,” Tyr said.

  Grisha told Maggie to get permission from her father. Certain that after what had happened in Rome, Alexander wouldn’t let her go anywhere with a cat, Maggie simply interrupted her father’s conversation and told him she was going to bed. She had never successfully told him a lie and was amazed at how easy it was.