Great and Mighty ducked around Cl’rnce, whose tail now had a fat bubble in the middle of it. The little wizard held up her arms and a pile of books appeared. She trotted past Hazel. There was no smile on her face anymore. “No. This time it wasn’t me. At least I think it wasn’t.”
With a “whoosh,” the tip of Cl’rnce’s tail blew up like a balloon, and his entire rear rose in the air. He tried to reach around and bat it down, but each time he moved, his tail bounced out of reach.
“Jeschen,” Silkkie muttered from her ball and then turned her back on them all.
Great and Mighty, eyes on her load of books, laid them carefully on the long granite table. They landed on top of five of the unopened scrolls that had come in marked “Urgent.” Two scrolls rolled off, but no one moved to pick them up. The parchments were part of the hard work of being a Primus, the part Hazel and Gaelyn had taken over for now.
Hazel watched Great and Mighty. The young wizard might not be perfect in her spell work, but she was plenty smart and the wiser half of the Co-Primus, which for the first time in history was a shared Primus between Dr’gon Cl’rnce and wizard Great and Mighty. Perhaps the cold feeling that hadn’t left the back of Hazel’s horns was the same as the seriousness in Great and Mighty’s eyes.
Though Cl’rnce looked like a clown, he snarled like an angry cat, and Great and Mighty once again had a white-eyed look of terror. She didn’t smile once as Cl’rnce turned and turned, trying to catch his bouncing tail. Which became harder to do when both of his front paws puffed out. Then his toes grew bulbous, and he tripped several times. Finally, he collapsed on the floor, shot them all a hateful look, and fell asleep.
No longer laughing, Hazel cocked her head at Great and Mighty.
“I didn’t do any of this, including putting him to sleep,” said Great and Mighty. “It’s really not funny. Something is badly wrong.” Her fingers knit a spell Hazel recognized as one Gaelyn had taught the little wizard for calming oneself when things were very bad.
“He’s just napping, and, look, he’s breathing fine. Why are you so upset? Why did you think he was poisoned?” Hazel asked, hoping they were wrong to be worried.
Without asking, Gaelyn hurried over to the cupboard where she kept an overflow of magickal items. She pulled out a purple crystal and a green rock. Using a leather thong, she tied the two together and trotted back to Cl’rnce. Hazel looked at Great and Mighty. The little wizard was even better than Hazel at sensing danger to Cl’rnce. But Great and Mighty was focused on Gaelyn and definitely doing nothing to stop her.
At first Gaelyn merely dangled the rocks over him. Then she shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. Next, she placed them on his heart. Easy enough to do since he had rolled over on his back, all four paws and tail floating in the air, two front and two back legs as fat as ancient tree trunks.
Hazel moved close to her brother and immediately clamped her snout holes closed with two claws. Her brother twitched, and a tsunami of stench rolled off him. “Good grief. Has he not bathed in the last year? He stinks! Probably his body is mad at him for being such a slob. Could dirt gases be puffing him up?” Even as she said this, she didn’t mean it.
Both wizards shook their heads. Great and Mighty said, “He bathes at least twice a day and swims in the river four or five times a day too. I don’t smell anything.”
“I don’t either,” Gaelyn added, watching Hazel.
Hazel didn’t have to ask why Gaelyn was staring. They both knew what a stench only Hazel could detect meant.
“This is a deathly poison after all?” Gaelyn asked.
Hazel nodded. When a Dr’gon had been poisoned only another Dr’gon smelled the poison. Hazel had never wished so hard that she had paid more attention in the classes on Dr’gon health. If only she could tell what poison this was.
Gaelyn plucked her rocks off Cl’rnce. “The stones don’t say it’s life threatening.”
“You mean for now,” Hazel said. “Can we be sure that his puffiness is only on the outside? What if his heart starts to grow and grow?”
Gaelyn stared once more at Cl’rnce. For the moment, beneath the earthquake-loud snores nothing new expanded. “Can you smell what poison is in him?” she asked.
Hazel shook her head.
Great and Mighty spoke up. “I can’t tell either, but surely one of my books has the answer.” She pointed to the pile.
Hazel took a deep breath, shaking her head. Gaelyn reached over and patted Great and Mighty’s shoulder. The little wizard had grown up too poor to ever have a book and now couldn’t resist owning or at least reading any book she could get in her hands. Even if her first tries at magick from her first magick book had resulted in bumbled spells, Great and Mighty believed knowledge was in books, and she meant to discover it all. Despite being part of the most important royalty in all of the Dr’gon Nations’ Island of Albion, she was still a very humble person. She still wore the ragged robe she had on when she and Cl’rnce first met. What magick she used always benefited others.
No matter how much Hazel claimed her brother was a dope, she admired Great and Mighty and thought Cl’rnce was incredibly lucky to have her, bumbled spells or not. But the truth was the little wizard was so very new to magick and did at times make catastrophic mistakes.
Hazel needed another, faster way to help Cl’rnce. “There is a Dr’gon in the high plains. Or is that the deep forests? Anyway.” Hazel cleared her suddenly shaky voice. “I remember there is a myth of a Wise Dr’gon who can cure what cannot be cured. I just wish we knew how Cl’rnce got poisoned and what kind. We can send a messenger to the Wise Dr’gon and get her here, but the more we can tell her the better.”
Gaelyn scowled at Hazel. Her Wizard Partner knew Hazel was making up this Wise Dr’gon, trying to distract Great and Mighty until Hazel could come up with something, anything. Gaelyn had always been a stickler about the truth, just like Hazel. Even though she clearly had lied to Hazel about being Fae for years, Gaelyn was irritated with Hazel, because she knew Hazel was making up stupid tales instead of accepting help from Gaelyn.
But the lie worked. Great and Mighty’s shoulders dropped from where she had hunched them up around her neck, and her face softened. Great and Mighty nodded and stepped closer to the table and her books. Her hand stretched over a book titled Magick Medicines and Cures. But the little wizard was not paying attention to where she stepped. Her foot came down on one of the fallen scrolls that had been pushed off the table by the books. The scroll ripped open as Great and Mighty fell to the floor.
Gaelyn extended a hand to help the little wizard stand. As Great and Mighty got to her feet, she scooped up the torn scroll. It ripped more and rolled out, exposing a short message. Great and Mighty gasped. “Oh! Did you see this? A plot!”
Hazel snorted, ready to dismiss the scroll. Almost every scroll sent by the clans was marked urgent, and at least a quarter of them mentioned plots against the Primus. After investigating a hundred, she and Gaelyn had decided they were all cranks.
Great and Mighty continued to read. “It says there will be an attack on the Primus on ... today! And here’s the time. I think that was when Cl’rnce first started to expand.”
Gaelyn shook her head at Hazel as they stepped behind Great and Mighty to read over her shoulder. “Those piles of scrolls are full of lots of threats and proposed plots. None of them turned out to be real,” Gaelyn pointed out.
But then Hazel smelled it. The scent of a stranger, maybe a Fae, seeped off the scroll. Had that Fae from the tower really escaped? Could it still be in Wiz-Tech? Might it have gotten to Cl’rnce and poisoned him? At least this couldn’t be the fatal poison of the Fang, but some other deadly source. The Fang was still in the secret chamber. Wasn’t it?
Was this Jeschen the cat genie had muttered about behind this? Why would the Fae Queen send an assassin and at the same time send a warning? Was it possible this was a declaration of war, letting the Dr’gons know they were under attack? How did the Fae or
the scroll get into the school? Fae couldn’t cross into the Dr’gon plane, at least not before today. Something about that picked at Hazel, but she had to figure out if the scroll meant anything.
“How do you know this isn’t a real threat?” Great and Mighty held up the unrolled bit of the scroll and peered at it.
Hazel thought of the Prophecy scroll in her pouch. She wanted to get it out, to read if there was anything there about how exactly the Fae Queen would attack the Primus. Was there anything besides the Fang mentioned? She worried that her difficulty with the Ancient Dr’gon tongue might have made her miss something important.
“I tested those.” Gaelyn waved her hand at the pile in the corner as she paced to her cupboard and opened a tiny drawer. She pulled the drawer out and carried it over to Great and Mighty. She pointed to the scroll. “Put it down on the table.”
Holding the torn scroll with her fingertips, Great and Mighty snapped her wrists and flipped the scroll so that it laid out flat on the table. The scroll rolled all the way down the length of the table, but only the top tiniest part had writing on it. “It’s silly that some Dr’gons waste whole scrolls when only a small parchment document will do.”
Hazel watched wondering if this helping was all an act by Gaelyn. Surely, she wasn’t covering up a real threat?
Gaelyn tapped the written-on portion. She took a pinch of a glowing purple powder out of the drawer she had carried over. Rubbing her thumb and forefinger together, she spread the powder over the scroll’s inked words.
Some of the words faded to white, and others became fiery orange.
“What does that mean?” Great and Mighty asked.
Gaelyn stared open-mouthed. “Fae. Summer and Winter.” She whispered the words so quietly Hazel almost didn’t hear.
Great and Mighty didn’t wait for Gaelyn to say them again. She read aloud tapping the orange words, “Jeschen. Is this who poisoned Cl’rnce? So many of the words faded to white, and I can’t see them. Is there anyway to make them readable again?” She looked up at Gaelyn.
Gaelyn shook her head staring into the space above the scroll. After what was too long, her lips silently formed the word “war.”
Hazel’s anger fired up. Gaelyn knew what Hazel suspected! This was the Fae Queens, two of them, declaring war once again. Was Gaelyn hiding the message on purpose? Was she as good as declaring war on Hazel?
But Gaelyn’s face was the picture of someone bewildered, someone betrayed. Her eyebrows were drawn together, and she kept shaking her head. It was almost as if she were arguing with someone else.
Gaelyn looked up, her eyes wide. “It’s a warning. The Queens of Summer and Winter Courts, something about war. Some of the words are missing. Something about the Primus.”
“But they didn’t poison me.” Great and Mighty put a hand to her forehead. “I feel okay. No fever. Yeah, I feel fine.”
“Perhaps this attack is only on Cl’rnce, because it is not widely known that both of you are Primus,” Gaelyn said.
“Not known?” Great and Mighty shook her head. “But there were all kinds of Dr’gons around when we became Co-Primus.”
“Yes. But how many Dr’gons outside the River Clan know? How many wizards or knights at school or outside it know?” Gaelyn asked. It was a curious question, Hazel thought. The Co-Primacy was no secret in Albion. Was Gaelyn trying to calm Great and Mighty? Why? Hazel waited for Gaelyn to say more.
Great and Mighty shrugged. “I thought everybody knew.”
Great and Mighty spent almost all her time learning magick, so it wasn’t really a surprise that she hadn’t paid attention to the outside world. When Gaelyn frowned but didn’t speak, Hazel spit out her suspicions, hoping Gaelyn would fess up. “No. Of course, most of Albion knows, every clan and kingdom, but we do not share our business across the planes. The Fae Courts were not informed.” She let that hang in the air for Gaelyn to comment on. When she didn’t, Hazel turned the scroll over, spilling the dust on the table when she looked to see if there was any mark identifying the sender. “It came in with a load of other scrolls. I wonder if anyone knows who sent this?” She paused, her eyes on the bewildered Gaelyn.
“A spy perhaps,” Gaelyn said.
Hazel flipped the scroll back over, writing side up. “I hope the scroll itself is not cursed.”
As it settled on the table, Great and Mighty winced. She put her hand under the scroll and propped it up. Peering under, she shook her head. “I thought I saw something. Maybe I’m seeing things. Anyone see a flash? Maybe I don’t feel so well.”
Gaelyn took the little wizard’s hand and held it for a minute. “You’re fine. I sense nothing out of order in you. If there is a curse on this scroll, only Cl’rnce is affected.” She looked at him then back at Hazel. “Did Cl’rnce touch this scroll?” She looked at her own hands.
Why was Gaelyn acting like she didn’t know anything? Hazel had heard her say Summer and Winter. Gaelyn knew who sent the scroll. And she knew something more that she should be sharing. Hazel wouldn’t wait much longer for Gaelyn to tell what she knew. For now, she said, “No. He never touches the scrolls. Remember his silly saying about ‘touch, touch, no take back?’ It’s how he thinks he makes me do all the work: by avoiding being here or handling any of the scrolls or anything else work-related.”
Gaelyn frowned, and Hazel waited. Her Wizard Partner wasn’t going to do the right thing and admit all she knew to Hazel.
“So back to where we started,” Hazel said watching Gaelyn. “Something made Cl’rnce an even bigger buffoon than he usually is.” He didn’t really look like he was dying, and what if the scroll was a hoax? She tried to sound more positive than she felt. She needed Gaelyn to speak up and say what she knew. If there was real danger to Cl’rnce, Gaelyn needed help before it might be too late.
Hazel continued, “All we have is some disappeared words on a mystery scroll. We don’t know if this Jeschen is the threat, but it’s all we have to go on. Maybe ‘Jeschen’ is made up.” She didn’t mean a word of it. She was certain this Jeschen was Fae, a spy at the least, and probably an assassin.
Gaelyn, sounding like her old practical self, added, “I wouldn’t count on it being a hoax. We have to act like the threat is bigger than just ‘blow up’ Cl’rnce.”
That was a good beginning. Hazel hoped her Wizard Partner would act like she always had, as a faithful citizen of Albion. While she waited for more, Hazel bent over her brother. “I don’t see anything but the bloating on him. What could cause this? Seems to me if we can find out about Jeschen, we’ll have an idea what happened to Cl’rnce. How do we find out?” As she finished talking, she heard a rattling, rolling sound come from under the table. It took only a moment to realize it was Gaelyn’s pesky Jinn-in-a-ball.
The snarky little pink cat gave Hazel an idea and a way to get Gaelyn to tell what she knew. “Doesn’t your Jinn know about every creature, magickal or otherwise?” she asked. The Jinn had come with Gaelyn when she first arrived at the school. No big deal then since several wizards worked with partner Jinns. But since Gaelyn was Fae, and Jinn rarely worked with Fae, this partnership was definitely part of Gaelyn’s secrets. A bad part for Cl’rnce? Hazel swore it better not be.
Gaelyn nodded. “She does know.” But then Gaelyn said and did nothing.
“Ask her!” Hazel ordered, then added grudgingly, “Please.”
Gaelyn scooped up the crystal ball and held her weighted hands stretched over the table and the scroll. As she balanced the ball, Hazel and Great and Mighty cleared the remaining scrolls, making an empty space near the end where they all stood. “Hold hands,” Gaelyn said. Great and Mighty and Hazel joined hands. “Wait. I need to stand inside your hands. I think it will be more powerful if I hold my crystal while I stand there.”
So instead of placing her crystal ball on the table, Gaelyn stepped between Hazel and Great and Mighty. They clasped hands while she gripped her crystal ball and looked into it. “I need an answer. It is very important. I need
to know, what is a Jeschen? And if there is one here?” Hazel felt a huge relief. Gaelyn surely wouldn’t reveal where her partner was if she was working with an assassin.
The ball immediately turned from clear, to cloudy, to filled with purple smoke, to filled with orange smoke, to filled with a rumbling and thumping. Gaelyn sighed. “That’s quite dramatic. Can you answer?”
The ball cleared again, and the small pink cat stood inside the ball. “I want to go for a walk,” she meowed in the Dr’gon tongue.
“Not funny. I’m asking for information,” Gaelyn urged in a soft voice.
“I’m serious about this. I want to go walking. And Flying. And ...”
“Really!” Hazel grouched. “I promise! You can have your dratted walk, just answer the dratted question!”
“I don’t like you!” the little pink cat said, the fur standing on her back and her muzzle peeled back in a snarl.
“Who does?” Hazel snapped back. She thumped the ball. “I don’t care. Now come on out and tell us about Jeschen.”
Before Gaelyn could finish her gasp, the cat was out of the ball and perched on Hazel’s shoulder. “Thanks. Maybe I like you a little. She would practically never let me out.” The pink cat settled down folding her front paws under her.
“Seriously?” Gaelyn muttered and sighed. “What’s done is done. It can’t get any worse.”
“Yes, it can,” the cat said. “Think about it. The Jeschen is a very slimy untrustworthy, lying, nasty creature. Sometimes. And it is poisonous. And I know how its poison got into Cl’rnce.” At that the cat smacked its lips closed and stared around.
Gaelyn looked totally shocked. “I’m not sure she’s telling the truth. Silkkie likes to play games.” She bent close to her Jinn. She sounded very irritated. “This is the wrong time for you to torment the Dr’gons. And you better not be making things up about Jeschen, because you think it’ll get Hazel to stop being mad at me. We need the truth. If you ever want your reward, you must help me.”
Dragon Bonded: A Bumblespells Novel Page 4
