by James Riley
She purred again, then turned over to her back, releasing the book, and stretched to about twice her length, making the table creak below her.
“K’paen,” he said quietly, staring at the book. Was it possible that he could just use that magic word to learn everything in its pages, instead of doing it word by word? It’d certainly be a lot faster.
For a moment, he almost considered using it then and there. It’d be so easy, just cast the spell and see what happened. But even though this wasn’t a spell like “fio,” it still wasn’t just some straightforward word. “Learn” could end up meaning a lot of things, and he’d have to make sure he knew how it worked before taking in an entire language at once.
On one hand, if it worked, he wouldn’t need Ember’s magic to send her to safety. He’d have all the spells he needed to get her into the care of the Avalonian dragons. Not to mention he’d have the power to help his friends against the Timeless One, and not mess everything up.
On the other hand, who knew what kind of side effects the spell might have? After setting himself on fire, maybe some experimenting was in order. The spell might not even work the way he needed. He’d have to test it first, before figuring out what he wanted to do.
“You really are smart, aren’t you?” he said to Ember, grinning at her.
“Sa,” she told him, giving him a knowing nod. “Rexe sa.”
- TWENTY-TWO -
GIVING UP FOR THE NIGHT after learning his Learn spell, Fort brought Ember home—making sure she was back in her cat form—and spent as much time as he could with his father, watching some television. He hated not having more moments like this, what with everything that was going on, but maybe once Ember was safe, he could spend more time with his dad, before everything happened with the Timeless One. After all, that was still so many months away.
Finally, his father forced him to go to sleep, since it was still a school night, not to mention that Fort had passed out a few times whenever there was a moment of silence, given how exhausted he was. He reluctantly agreed and stumbled into bed, where Ember curled up around him protectively, which was nice, considering how warm she was.
* * *
Fort woke up the next morning with Ember sleeping at his feet, only instead of a furry cat, she had reverted to her dragon form and was now even larger than she had been the night before. The bed was tilting in her direction, she was getting so heavy.
“Hey!” he said to her, and she looked up at him lazily, then yawned, showing him far too many razor-sharp teeth for his comfort. “What are you doing? Ember, ma’cae in the house!”
Fortunately, one word he had learned was the one for cat, and she obediently changed back into her cat form, now easily the size of a tiger. Merlin had been right… even when she was in cat form, Fort couldn’t let his dad or aunt see Ember now. And worse, Ember was probably too big to even live in the room anymore by herself, though he wasn’t sure what other choice he had. What if Xenea came back for dinner again, and Ember knocked down the door? The faerie girl would see through Ember’s magic in seconds, and that’d be it.
But maybe this Learn spell would solve all of his problems. He could learn Ember’s language and send her to Avalon, while also locating Damian for Xenea, and let those two fight it out. That’d solve his biggest issues, and Merlin might even change his mind about letting Fort help with the Timeless One, if he had actual magic to back Rachel and Jia up.
Thankfully, he’d already thought of the perfect way to practice it today: He’d just use it on one of his textbooks at school, and he’d be able to test it instantly by checking what he now knew against the book. What could go wrong with that?
For the first time ever, Fort wished he’d had homework the night before, just so he’d have taken one of his schoolbooks home to begin with. He did have some fiction books, but he wasn’t quite sure what learning one of them would do. Besides, using the spell on a textbook would help with his grades anyway.
After Fort took a quick shower and got dressed, he found a strange sight in the kitchen: Xenea was sitting at the table. And even worse, she was speaking softly with his father, and neither looked happy. But when Fort walked in, his heart now racing from terror, his father smiled widely, even as Xenea continued looking annoyed. “Good morning, Mr. Future President,” his dad said. “What can I get you for breakfast? Today’s special is some farm-fresh, organic cornflakes, along with my own personal recommendation, toast.”
“Cereal’s fine,” Fort said, too worried about Xenea’s presence to even roll his eyes at his dad. He poured out a bowl, followed by the milk, as he watched Xenea closely. What had she been talking to his father about? She must have been using her glamour on him, which explained why his mood had matched hers. Did this have something to do with their first meeting, when both had been all awkward?
“What are you doing here so early?” he asked her, trying to sound casual.
“Waiting for you,” she said, fiddling with some half-eaten toast. “By the way, my recommendation would be the flakes of corn. This toast stuff tastes like grilled bread.”
Fort just stared at her. “That’s… what it is.”
She held up the toast on her plate, giving it a close look. “Oh, really? Hmm.” She poked at it, her finger going right through the bread, then dropped it back to her plate. “I was offered some sort of translucent red glob to put on top of it, apparently to make it sweeter?” Her face showed exactly what she thought of that. “Needless to say, I passed.”
“That’s called jelly,” Fort told her. “And you should try it. It’s made of fruit.”
She raised an eyebrow, then reached for the jar of jelly and sniffed at it tentatively. “Lies,” she said. “I don’t smell real fruit anywhere in there.”
Fort sighed, but at least that explained her mood. “Fair enough,” he told her as he spooned cereal into his mouth as quickly as he could. “We should get going, so we’re not late.”
“Agreed,” she said, “if just to get out of this smell.”
Fort had never been so happy to be insulted in his life. He ended up almost choking on his breakfast, he ate it so fast, but at least managed to get Xenea out of the apartment before she said anything too odd to his father, or worse, gave Ember any reason to come out.
“Listen, I’m not sure how effective I’m being about finding your dragon, spending all day in this school place,” Xenea said as they waited for the bus. “I think maybe we should try another one of those ‘move vee’ things, just in case it shows up there.”
Fort just blinked at her, wondering if she really thought she was tricking him. “Was there a movie in particular that you thought the dragon might show up to?”
She stared off in space as if to think about it. “Yes, I believe we should try the one where the aliens eat everyone again. It seems like a natural temptation for any dragon, given how much they like to eat things.”
This time, Fort couldn’t help but laugh. “Just admit that you want to see it again. You don’t have to lie to me.”
“Lie?” she said indignantly. “I would never! Though I do admit the alien story has made me think about a great many things, Forsythe. What would I do if those monsters attacked me or my queen? Would I attempt to ‘flame throw’ them like the hero lady? Or would I run? I don’t know, and it disturbs me!” She grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him closer. “Now take me back so I can figure out what to do!”
Fort stared at her in disbelief. “You just like watching the lady kill all the aliens, don’t you.”
“Yes!” Xenea screamed at him, a fire in her eyes. “It makes my heart race, and I want more! More explosions, more chases, more thrills!” She shook him by the shirt now, getting a little too violent.
“Whoa,” Fort said, backing off. “If we don’t go to school, we’ll get in trouble, and then there won’t be any movies for anyone, okay? I’ll take you again, but not tonight. I’ve got something I have to do.” Just use magic to learn an entire book of dragon
language, if the spell worked. Nothing big.
The fire in her eyes turned into a wild, raging stare, and she looked like she might take a swing at him. “Tell me you’re joking. Tell me that the bargain you made with my queen isn’t less important than some… human task. Because if we don’t go to the move vees, I will march right back to my queen, and—”
“Fine!” Fort said, as the bus pulled down the street. “I’ll take you, but I can’t stay for the whole thing. And don’t try to make this about the queen’s bargain. This is all you wanting to see the movie again.”
She looked away, crossing her arms. “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
Fort closed his eyes, sighing deeply. “Anyway, I may have a way to fulfill the queen’s bargain. I can’t really tell you everything yet, but I have a spell that might help you find Damian. And then you can leave this world, take him back to your queen, and I’ll be done with all of this!”
She gave him a suspicious glance but tentatively backed off, allowing him to climb up into the bus. It wasn’t full today, which meant they had a little room to themselves at the back, so Fort was able to explain his plan to use the Learn spell, to help her learn Damian’s location. “You’d find him immediately!” he told her, only to pause at her horrified look. “What?”
“Have you lost your mind?” she shouted, loud enough for the entire bus to look at them. Fort turned bright red as he slipped down behind the seat, but Xenea didn’t seem to even notice. “Do you know what that spell could do to you?”
“Help me learn?” he whispered. “And you have to be quieter! They don’t know about magic, remember?”
“Oh, it’d help you learn, that’s for certain,” she said, sounding a lot less positive about it than he had. “It could also wipe out your mind if you learn too much! You people don’t have that much room in there.” She rapped her knuckles on his skull, which hurt, frankly, but was insulting to boot. “Do you know what kind of damage you could do?”
“I’m not going to just use it randomly,” Fort said, still blushing, but now more from her comments. “I’m going to try it out on one of my textbooks at school!”
She groaned loudly. “Like you could even take in that much information. Just watch: You’re going to forget your own name, but more importantly, you’ll forget who I am, and then I’m going to have to explain it to you all over, but all you’ll know is what an egg-naceous rock is—”
“I think it’s igneous,” Fort told her.
“I’m surprised you already know that much!” she said, throwing her hands up in frustration. “Fine. Do your experiments. But if you forget about taking me to see the move vees, I’m going to tell the faerie queen that you humans want to invade Avalon, and see what she does.”
Fort laughed again, then trailed off as she glared back. “You’re not actually serious, are you?”
“You want to test me?” she asked, and he really, really didn’t.
Still, all of her worry about the spell seemed to come from the fact that she thought humans weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, so Fort didn’t let her warnings bother him too much. Besides, the whole point of school was to learn everything in a textbook, so his brain had to be able to hold that much knowledge… right?
- TWENTY-THREE -
AS IT TURNED OUT, THERE wasn’t any time during school that Fort could sneak away to try his Learn spell experiment. Lunch was another nightmare, with Xenea holding court over everyone, only this time getting movie suggestions from the other kids, which didn’t bode well. She ended up with a list of films that would take days to watch.
After lunch came another monster-attack drill during class, which set Fort’s anxiety racing. He found himself staring at his classmates with guilt, unable to stop himself from thinking about how so much of this was his fault. Not Damian summoning the Old Ones the first time, no, but too much of the rest of it. In a normal world, these kids wouldn’t be doing safety drills, and Fort knew he was at least in part to blame.
But more than that, he kept coming back to not being good enough to help. Merlin, Rachel, Jia… they all had made clear what Fort kept trying to forget, that he’d never have the talent, the power to really fix things, to stop the Old Ones, to help the world.
“I just wish I could do something,” he whispered to Xenea as the alarm blared, not really sure why he was telling her, maybe just because he couldn’t tell anyone else.
But instead of sympathy, her eyes grew wide from anger, and she turned on him. “Was that a joke? Is this some poor human attempt at humor? You wish you could do something?”
“Quiet!” their teacher yelled, but Xenea ignored her.
“Are you powerless here?” she continued, getting more and more angry as Fort got just as confused. “Are you chained up so that you can’t act? Because I don’t see any chains!” She glared at him, her eyes burning with rage. “This is just like you humans, complaining you can’t help, when the reality is you choose not to. Especially you, who actually can do something!”
Fort just blinked in surprise. What was she talking about? What had he said that set her off like this?
As she kept yelling, more faculty members came into the room, thinking it was an emergency, since they were supposed to be silent for the drill. Somehow, Fort had worked Xenea up so much she’d completely forgotten to use her glamour and ended up almost getting them detention for her outburst.
Ironically, the only thing that saved them was that their teacher assumed this was all due to Fort being present for the D.C. attack. But she made it very clear there wouldn’t be talking during the next drill, no matter what.
Xenea went quiet after that and didn’t talk to Fort for most of the rest of the day. And while he normally would have welcomed that, considering the faerie girl wouldn’t be saying anything too alien to the other kids, for some reason, he felt like he’d done something wrong and wanted to make it right. Even for someone trying to steal his dragon.
It took until he and Xenea went to the movies later that Fort finally had some time. He pulled out his textbook as they sat almost alone in the theater, Xenea watching the screen impatiently.
“Enough with these product descriptions!” she shouted, waving at the front of the theater. “I want to see the woman destroying aliens again!”
“They’re just ads,” Fort said, opening the textbook and placing it on his lap. “The movie’s going to start soon enough. What was with you earlier, anyway?”
She glanced over at him. “You’re a fool.”
He immediately looked up from his book. “I’m a what now?”
“You’re a fool,” she repeated. “This is what I was trying to calmly explain to you that—”
“You screamed so loudly that the principal came in!”
“I was calmly explaining to you that you’re out of your mind if you feel helpless when you have so much power!” she said, her voice getting louder again. Though the movie hadn’t started, Fort could still feel the eyes of the couple of teenagers in the seats a few rows back, and he sank down in his seat, just like he had on the bus.
He should have just let it go there. But with everything happening between Rachel and Jia, and Sierra being off somewhere out of reach with Damian, somehow Xenea was the only person he could actually talk to about this.
“I don’t have any power,” he said to her, trying to keep his voice down. “I wasn’t born on some specific date, so I’m not as good at magic as others. I’m just like those other kids at school, except I know how bad I am at magic. I’ve got two spells—that’s it! I’m not even allowed to fight an Old—to be with my friends when they’re facing something bad. How sad is that?”
“Oh, it’s incredibly sad,” Xenea said, narrowing her eyes. “Sad that you’re letting someone else tell you all of this. ‘You’re bad at magic; you’re useless; you’re weird-looking.’ Is that what they say?”
Fort blinked. “Not that last one—”
“Who cares!” she shouted, and F
ort ducked down even farther. “I’d never let anyone tell me if I was good enough. Of course there will be people with more magic than you, but why would you ever let that stop you? My queen has more power than anyone, and we break her rules constantly when we want!”
Fort raised an eyebrow. “You do? I thought the whole reason you were here is because you were afraid of her.”
“I’m being punished for breaking her rules!” Xenea hissed. “Yes, when we get caught, we do what she says, but only so we can be free to do as we choose later. How is this hard to understand, Forsythe? You have magic, the ability to change things in your world. Why would you care if it wasn’t as good as others’? Use what you’ve got the best way you can!” She growled in frustration and shook her head. “Humans! You amaze me every day with how wrong you can be!”
Fort started to respond, then stopped, his mouth hanging open. Was she right? He’d let everyone from Dr. Opps to Colonel Charles to Merlin tell him he wasn’t good enough because he was born on the wrong day. But that hadn’t stopped him from rescuing his father or facing down William, not when he was needed.
Maybe things could have gone better if he’d been more powerful. But he and his friends had gotten his father back, safe and sound, and prevented a world war, not to mention helped create a new dragon! If he were going to judge himself so harshly for all the mistakes, shouldn’t he take into account the good things that had happened too?
“Okay, you could have a point,” he whispered to her as the lights began to dim for the trailers. “I should help when I think I’m needed, do what I think is right, even if other people disagree.”
“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Xenea told him as she turned back to the screen. “I don’t know that you’re smart enough to figure out the best thing to do. Just ask me—I’ll tell you.” And she patted his hand, and then went silent as the trailers started, her face lighting up with joy.
Well, that was irritating. But it didn’t keep Fort from thinking about what she’d said all through the trailers, and even the first half of the movie. Even with the little magic he had, he’d managed to fix some pretty big problems. And there were hundreds of millions of kids just like him, not born on Discovery Day, all of whom could learn magic too. Who cared if they weren’t as good as the millions born on the right day? Did that mean they couldn’t accomplish as much good?
