The Real Folktale Blues (Beyond Ever After #1)

by Random Jordan

  “Me? I can’t do anything, Gnidori. Charms, sure. A little bang-bang magic, sure. I don’t even know where to start with breaking this… expanse spell. I can’t do it.” Ettie nearly backed out completely from my line of sight, continually one step after the other. I could see the fear ringing around her dark brown eyes.

  If I hadn’t stepped forward twice, leaving Roberts behind me a couple of steps, she would have been lost as a foggy silhouette.

  “What did I teach you about magic, Ettie? Come on.” My voice rose, probably a little more annoyed and hasty than it should have been, considering this was still something Ettie had never done. Which meant it would be difficult for her without me getting on her case.

  She lowered her head, I could see the worry flashing across her eyes and face but then she looked back up at me with at least a mild determination.

  “If you don’t believe in the spell, there is no spell.” She fervently spoke, her voice shaky but her dark eyes were solid and strong. I nodded to her, and smiled weakly.

  “So then why are you telling me you can’t do it? You are better than this.” My tone was hasty, but honestly we were in a bit of a rush. Not only did Ettie have to knock away this spell, but then she personally had to eliminate each of the sylphs causing trouble. It was a lot of work for one solemn witch, but I had to trust she would do it. I knew she would. I had been the one to first teach her magic after all.

  She nodded sharply, but her mouth fell open and the fear returned in her eyes. She still managed to ask though, “What do I do?”

  “Spell breaking is harder than Spelling. Elves being the best at it, because it has to do with returning nature back to what it was. This fog isn’t supposed to be here. You have to make nature realize something is not in the right place so it can put it back.” I explained carefully, dropping a hand firmly to Ettie’s fingers, wrapped around her guns. She still looked scared and I couldn’t blame her.

  “How?” She crisply asked with a weaker voice.

  “I can teach you the basic incantation, but you have to be in the right state of mind. Think Ettie, why do elves have an easier time with spell breaking?”

  “Love.” She spoke even softer, to the point that it was hard to hear her over the wind smacking around. The way she spoke the word though, with such focus and radial energy in her eyes, staring at me so intensely, made my cheeks burn with heat.

  She must have noticed when she snapped out of it, because she drew her hand back from mine and glanced down as she finished. “They love nature as it is, not the way someone else is making it.”

  I nodded, trying to find my voice.

  “Then to break the spell I need to love the air as it was before the attack.” Her eyes darted back up to me, the fear lingering away as she seemed to sparkle more somehow. She gripped her fists tightly around her guns, and closed her eyes.

  I was kind of glad I didn’t need to say anything. At least for a good minute, while I felt Roberts saunter behind me.

  “What is she doing? Is she okay?” Roberts asked, right up against my ear.

  “Magic. One of the purest and oldest kinds of magic in the world.” The smile on my lips had grown as I watched her. Her breath shallow and controlled, her lids flickering lightly like she was dreaming but she was really focusing, the only way she knew how. People all focused differently, and hers was always so peaceful.

  “Pure magic? Magic is evil. How can it be pure?” Roberts squeaked, his voice actually rising high for once like he was still going through puberty. Maybe he was for all I knew; he looked old enough to be a man though.

  “Magic is what you want it to be.” I groaned. The magic is evil and dangerous propaganda was something the fairies instilled in the majority of people across the worlds. It was just another way of controlling the magic for them. They’d say only faeries had good magic. It’s hard to conceive that at one point I actually believed all the non-sense the faeries promoted.

  “It’s the very will we possess imposed on the world. It’s not evil. It’s life. It’s love. It’s what made you join Charming’s militia, and get caught up in all of this. What you felt for Ashley; that was the beginning of magic. Don’t call that evil. Dangerous, sure. But magic is only evil if you make it that way.”

  My brows furrowed, the rage seething in me at the way the fairies had been manipulating the world, controlling it. So that people like Ettie, would be convicted and shipped off to their academy or eliminated to keep that control. It was disgusting.

  I didn’t look at Roberts though, even if I wanted to, to tell him not to be an idiot with following everyone’s opinion, and instead make his own. My attention shifted back to the peaceful blonde instead. The wind blowing against us helped me catch that lily scent she had. I breathed it in and let it relax me. My body unclenched, and my eyelids fluttering, as she finally opened her eyes.

  “I’m ready. The Incantation?” She breathed, gently, almost like she was speaking but still holding in some air. Her eyes were crackling with energy. They reminded me of Bonny’s constantly crackling eye. And I wondered if my eyes did the same when I used to invoke spells.

  I nodded to her and told her the incantation. She looked at me skeptically, which was way freakier than I would like to admit, with the way her eyes were pulsing and charged.

  “Mother Nature,” Ettie began, before shaking her head and mumbling under her breath. Her eyes returned to looking at me. “This can’t seriously be the incantation?”

  “Uh…” I started, glancing away from her.

  “You made it up on the spot didn’t you?” She prodded with a raise of her voice, certainly more confident now that she could prostrate me.

  “Mostly.” I finally affirmed.

  She shot her head down to look at the ground, lulling it to the side as she seemed to be thinking. After a moment her scary eyes were staring knives into me. It didn’t last though, and her body seemed to relax. “Then I’m making my own.”

  “Good.” I said, as she skewed an annoyed but playful sneer at me before closing her eyes again. She should have known by now the majority of incantations are specific to the person when used.

  “I don’t know why I put up with you.” She mumbled before starting a new incantation of her own. I could feel the clouds around us bubbling even before she spoke the first word. Unfortunately I didn’t understand a damn thing she said when she did say her own incantation. It was in her language again, I knew I should have bothered to learn it.

  The clouds seemed to peel away almost instantly. The ice crystals in the air seemed to hum with the cadence of Ettie’s voice and scatter away from directly around us. I mostly watched Ettie though as she did it, to make sure she didn’t push herself too hard. She had been firing magical bolts of energy earlier.

  Her eyes opened after a trice, the air pushing further out and clearing the clouds. She got the hang of it down fast and I had to wonder if she was teaching herself these days since I wasn’t around as much.

  My thoughts died away though when her crisp, non-crackling eyes had returned but looked like tiny specks; and she had sucked in a deep breath of surprise.

  Of course, I had to turn around to see what had just put the living fear into her so easily when she should have been proud.

  There, directly behind us in the air, was the entire length of a scaly red dragon. The same one Kit had changed into when I had been inside the mirror. Except this one didn’t look nearly as friendly as Kit had.

  I glanced back at Ettie. The fear was still trimming her eyes into narrowed specks, but they focused on me.

  She spoke so defensively, “I didn’t do it.”

  Thirteen

  Dragon Fodder

  The wind was harsh and it didn’t let up a single bit, despite the miasma clearing up around us so we could see the ship in the more defined features it had before. At least six other pirates were in my visual range, along with Ettie and Roberts.

  And every last one of us was staring in awe-struck glo
ry at the dragon that floated just off the stern of the ship.

  You don’t exactly run into dragons very often. It’s not like they just patrol the skies looking for things to burn or eat. In fact, they were so rare that it was possible to go an entire legendary lifespan without ever seeing a real one.

  It has nothing to do with them being extinct, because they certainly aren’t. They are just rare sights, up there on par with phoenixes and unicorns. There are all sorts of rumors as to why. Some people say they just like to keep to themselves, others say they are tasked as guardians and keepers of all sorts of usually hidden things, a few believe that they only visit our world and then go somewhere else, and the majority believe that they take on a human shape to hide amongst the world.

  I think it’s all of them. And I had this conversation with my Grandmamma about how so many things seem to be able to take a human shape when they don’t normally look human.

  She said it was for their survival. Humans always seem to have problems with people who were different from them. So the non-humans learned to change to look human to survive. Similar to how some of the Pixie race had eventually learned to change into the tall, lengthy, beautiful race of the Sidhe. Although I speculate that might just be a case of pixies not liking being small.

  I asked her why they would change for other people and she simply said, “The need to survive makes people do crazy things.”

  I think she had made a gross underestimate.

  The need to survive makes people do impossible things.

  And I was no exception.

  “Hey,” I began with the loudest voice I could muster up against the tumbling winds, taking a single step forward. “You won’t be taking the Mirror spirit if that is what you came for.”

  Maybe I should have amended my Grandmamma’s saying to: The need to protect makes Gnidori do stupid things.

  The dragon’s long crimson neck stretched and tugged as he or she twisted its head to the side curiously, like a puppy wanting to investigate something. It was almost cute, if the giant gaping jaw with sharp ivory teeth and pristine diamond-like talons on his or her hands weren’t obviously staring me in the face.

  “I have no need for a mirror spirit.” The dragon bellowed with a voice that made me think it was male. But for all I knew dragon female voices were low and male voices were high.

  I’m a dragon virgin. What can I say?

  My shoulders lightened though with the relief that I wouldn’t have to deal with Kit being stolen away or anything. Not that I cared if he had to be taken. He was mostly a pain in my side the whole time. Okay, maybe I cared a little but not enough to fight a dragon over.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Midnight Magic.” The dragon replied with such simplicity and sharpness to his or her tone that I didn’t think it was cursing.

  “Uh… Gnidori?” I heard Ettie call worriedly from somewhere behind me.

  I half-glimpsed back while replying, “Yeah? Kind of busy with a dragon here.”

  But the wisp and brunt force of wind nearly toppled me from where I stood, while I heard Ettie grunt. I looked over to see her hands pressed to the floor and her knees dug into the wood. Her head was lulling about like she was drunk and about to puke.

  She must have been wet-sylphed.

  I dropped down in front of her, both for my sake and hers. “You okay? I need your help still.”

  I realized when she looked up at me with spinning eyes that it probably wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to have dropped to my knees right in front of her. I leaned on my axe, and scooted to the side, but she managed to keep her body from retching anything up other than words.

  “Yeah.” She breathed heavily, her head still lulling but her body was stiffening, which I figured meant she was gaining control. “Just had the wind knocked through me, is all.”

  I met her smile with my own, before the wind picked up fiercely, whistling against us again.

  Making sure she could steady herself, we both stood up, and I gazed toward the dragon still floating in peace. The sylphs didn’t seem to bother the dragon, probably because they were just as afraid as I was.

  “I need you to blow the sylph up. You are the only one that can do it.” I explained, leaning closer to Ettie to make sure she could hear me. The commotion around the ship was steady as ever, and the ship gave another belch that wrenched us a few steps away and forced us to lean against each other to stay up.

  The other pirates around us seemed to be slowly filing away, toward the now visible ladder, despite the few trip ups from the wind spirits. I looked to Ettie, and she just nodded softly, despite her face still looking rather flushed.

  “It’s always you need this. You need that. You never fulfill my needs Riri.” Ettie mocked, her voice sounded strained as she gently pulled away from me and held both of her guns near her face like a boxer ready to jab with them.

  “I promise, after this. I’ll get right on that.” I played along, my eyes briefly flitting to look at her before falling back on the dragon.

  “Maybe if you help us out, I can help you with your magic problem?” I asked the dragon, thrusting a hip out to sit my fist on, while leaning the rest of my weight on the axe pointed to the ground in my other hand.

  “No. I believe burning the ship and the air around it is the best course of action.” The dragon bellowed with such plain expression. I have to say, I would never want to go up against a dragon in a game of chance. They were completely unreadable.

  “Well, unfortunately I can’t let you do that. So we have a problem.” I shrugged, taking a few steps forward. I heard Ettie’s guns fire off a few magical shots near me, wondering if she managed to hit any of the little wind-gnats.

  “No. You have the problem.” The dragon continued, opening its gaping jaw like it was yawning; except this was the kind of yawn that could demolish capital cities. I could feel my whole body want to lurch forward as the dragon drew a breath in. The energy seemed to tingle around me, as the winds changed to blow from behind me and toward the overgrown serpent.

  Midnight Magic! The dragon was seriously going to torch the place.

  I dashed forward with the wind pushing all around me, my axe swinging up at my side as I did the only damned thing I could do.

  I slammed my foot into the short wall at the end of the ship, stepping up on it and jumping. I wanted to close my eyes as I shot through the air and reached high enough to swing the side of my axe directly into the jaw of the dragon, before I started to drop down again.

  The crick of the dragon’s neck could be heard, but it didn’t sound like I had actually broken anything. All I did was pretty much slap a dragon with a very blunt metal object that would have disenchanted illusions. At least I knew I was going to be charred by a real dragon.

  The creature of legend had its head forced to the side just as the life energy known as brimstone leaked from its nostrils and maw to scorch the place.

  The brimstone coiled like a blob of jelly seeping out, some of it leaked straight on the deck under the dragon’s mouth. But the cloud that managed to hold together in some kind of flame form shot through the air to catch pretty much everything above my head on fire.

  Luckily Bonny had pulled down the sails already, in fear of how far we would get blown off course from the chaotic winds. But the wood in the area ignited like a firework cord. Things didn’t just melt. They evaporated like they were made of ice.

  One moment the blob of brimstone was cruising across the top of the ship and then there was nothing there but bits of fiery ash falling down and cries of what was normally giggling sylphs.

  I hit the ground and rolled, barely missing the glob of brimstone that was leaking through the floor of the deck right around me. There was no way this ship was going to survive.

  The dragon had managed to shift its head, purple eyes gleaming with such putrid annoyance and frustration, like I was a bug that just flew into its porridge. But at least it was clearly looking at me.<
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  “Try that again and I will slap you into next week!” I mused before my face went pale, remembering I had lost a week from being knocked out. I had literally been knocked into next week, so at least I knew it was possible.

  The dragon hollered a booming laugh, the wings it possessed flapping gently, as its tail coiled and then shot forward to wrap around me and squeeze. I was lifted from the ground with my grip barely maintained on the axe.

  The tail lifted me to the dragon’s face, stinking heavily of brimstone, especially as its hot breath poured over me when it spoke. “You smell of the magic I seek, fire spitter. Did you conjure the wind-people to prevent the search for what I came for?”

  I blinked, trying to keep my eyes from popping out and the stench from making me bleed through them. I looked up through wet eyes at those crackling purple eyes. The same as Bonny’s one eye, though slightly different. There seemed to be more raw power behind these.

  I couldn’t understand what the dragon was even remotely talking about though. “I conjured nothing. I use no magic. I don’t know why you are here.”

  Okay so one of those was a lie, kind of. But still, the rest stood firm.

  “I seek my legend keeper. And you reek of the magic I found there.” The dragon continued, eyes flickering with sideways eyelids.

  I had no clue what a legend keeper was. But if I smelled like a magic a dragon was looking for, the only thing that came to mind was being doused in the dragon magic Kit told me about. It couldn’t have been anything else, unless it was someone I bumped into, or Ettie wasn’t telling me she had decided to tack on dragon hunting to her list of things to do.

  “Dragon Magic?” I asked, my breath rasping in my throat.

  “No, a very rare and dangerous magic that only my kind possess; Midnight Magic I believe some of your kind call it.” The dragon answered quickly, pulling me back from its face slightly.

  “Faerie Fudge… then a faerie has to be involved in this. Rare magic is something they monitor constantly.” I swore, glancing away from the dragon, and trying to inhale something other than its breath.