by Lea Doué
She didn’t have to guess what had stopped them, having had a recent experience with a similar sort of invisible wall. Sorcery. She glared at Baz. “How extensive is this barrier?”
He blinked as if unsure what to say.
Her face burned with anger. He may have saved them from being torn apart by razor-tails, but he’d also led them into a trap, just as surely as Tharius had led her and her sisters into his own trap months before. She pushed aside the fact that she’d willingly walked into Greenway and essentially offered herself to them.
She sheathed her daggers and then smacked Baz’s shoulder. “Did you hear me? How big is our cage?”
He answered, his words hesitant. “My entire kingdom, except for that one small village, has been isolated behind the barrier.”
“Your entire kingdom? How does an entire kingdom become cursed and no one else knows about it? How could you drag us inside this place with you?”
“The curse isn’t on the kingdom. It’s… on me.”
Vanda pointed to the lurking dragon. “And him.”
Mel’s head spun. “A cursed prince with a pet dragon. And a kingdom behind a barrier….” The moon forgot how to shine, and she grasped for something, anything, before she fell.
*
Mel woke to hushed talking and firelight. Someone had built a small blaze a few yards away and had bandaged her wrists. The stinging had eased. She sat up, and Orin handed her a water skin. It wasn’t the pool of water she’d been hoping for, but it was cool and she guzzled it gratefully.
Everyone watched her. Even the dragon, whose scales flickered with orange in the firelight. True raised her head from her blanket nest a few feet away and then went back to sleep.
“Now that you’re awake,” Orin said, “we can get some explanations out of the way and find out what’s going on.”
“Let’s get on with it, then.” She stood too quickly and swayed on her feet. Nothing a little food wouldn’t fix. Orin slipped an arm around her waist, and she leaned into him as they walked to join the others. He’d grown taller since she’d first met him and was now only days away from his eighteenth birthday. But it wasn’t just physical changes. What he’d done in the clearing to free and protect her—he really wasn’t a boy anymore. Tears of gratitude stung her eyes. She could have lost him, and it would have been her fault. She should have made him leave.
Vanda passed over some strips of dried meat once they sat.
Mel bit off a chunk and talked with her mouth full. Gwen would have scolded. “Before we do anything else… I want to thank you for getting me out of there.” She swallowed. “Could you please tell us why those villagers thought sacrificing me to a razor-tail dragon would end whatever is going on here? Especially since I was there to help them in the first place.”
Baz and Vanda exchanged glances. They sat close, but not as close as she and Orin did, as if they knew each other but were still working out their relationship.
Gaze focused on the fire, Vanda shook her head slightly. “The villagers… found out about the curse and misunderstood the sorcerer’s words about how to break it.” She paused as if collecting her thoughts. “Free your red dragon girl and you free yourself. They already had a history of getting rid of any sorcerer in the area by using dragons—no one wanted blood on their hands—so they decided to sacrifice the first red-haired girl they could find in the same way. ”
“But it wouldn’t have worked,” Mel said.
Vanda glanced up. “I know, but I didn’t dare correct them. I’m an outsider, a stranger who’d settled in the nearby woods with my Gram and my Da a few years back. They might have done the same thing to me if they’d suspected I was involved. I had to get inside the barrier and undo the curse. I never expected a red-haired girl to show up this far north.”
“How are you responsible for undoing the curse?” Orin asked.
Vanda lowered her head, and her hair swung forward, hiding her face from Baz. “I’m the red dragon girl.”
“But I thought….” Mel frowned. Going by the gossip, she’d assumed her red hair was the key. And then the maids had mentioned dragons and the soldier-king. She’d been uniquely suited, or so she’d thought, even after Vanda had warned her she wasn’t the one. Free your red dragon girl and you free yourself. She pointed to Baz. “So you’re his red dragon girl?”
Vanda glanced at him without lifting her head. “Yes.”
“Wait,” Orin said. “How does the red dragon part fit into this? The one sitting over there is black. It’s nothing like the wingless ones native to Xafila.”
Mel wondered the same thing. She spoke to Baz. “You haven’t said much.”
The prince sighed, pulled up his left sleeve, and held out his arm. A piece of red fabric circled his wrist much like the bandages on her own.
Vanda’s head snapped up, and her eyes widened.
He unwrapped the cloth and spread it across his knees. It could have been a shirt or a cloak or a skirt in its former life, but now it was too ripped and shredded to be called anything but a rag. A few embroidered dragons remained around the edges.
“This belonged to Vanda.”
“So that scrap of fabric makes you his red dragon girl?” Mel asked.
“It’s as good an explanation as any.” Vanda lifted the cloth from Baz’s knees. “The villagers called me Red because of this scarf… which has dragons on it.
“And as far as the sorcerer knew,” Baz said, “I’d already claimed her as mine.”
And Mel had thought no curse could be as tangled as the one she and her sisters had been caught in. What had she gotten herself into?
“We think the sorcerer’s original goal was to gain Vanda’s trust and use her to get to me,” Baz said. “He found out that she wanted to move her family away from the village, but they had no money to resettle. When she refused his offer of help, he cornered her in her grandmother’s cottage, clearly intending to use Vanda as bait. When I went to rescue her, he cursed me. We’re still not sure if it was intentional or not.”
“A curse can only be placed when you take something directly from a sorcerer’s hand,” Orin said. “Did he think you were stupid?”
Baz’s voice hardened. “He held Vanda at knife point and wanted me to take her from him. My friend Keir intervened, and Gram’s little weaver dragon attacked him, as well.”
Vanda worried the cloth between her fingers. “Gram said it’s the most tangled thing she’s ever encountered. She walked away from sorcery herself as a teenager, but she can still see its threads, even if she can’t figure them out. At one point during the chaos, we must have all been touching, and that’s when the sorcerer placed his curse, including the barrier, although that took a few minutes to fully form. It was rushed, and we think that’s how Keir ended up as a dragon.”
“As a… what?” Mel said.
Vanda pointed towards the black dragon. “That’s Keir over there.”
Orin sat up straight, his gaze roaming the darkness as if expecting a man to walk out of the shadows, until finally settling on the dragon.
It took Mel a second to understand, until she considered the dragon’s behavior and how it seemed to do things without being told.
Keir was the dragon.
She’d complained about being stuck inside an invisible barrier, all while he was stuck inside the skin of a dragon. She’d only ever heard of such a thing happening once before. Her own ancestor, the soldier-king, had been cursed in a similar way, but his dragon form had been much smaller.
“He’s only a dragon at night,” Vanda explained. “He turns back into himself during the day.”
The dragon—Keir—watched them silently. Mel chewed another piece of dried meat, waiting for Vanda to continue.
“Can he understand what we’re saying?” Orin asked.
“He can,” Baz said. “And we can understand him. The curse gave the three of us the ability to mind-talk while Keir is in his dragon form.”
Speaking mind to mind expl
ained some of the looks and broken bits of conversation that had passed between Baz and Vanda earlier. They’d been talking, but no one else could hear.
“It took Keir and I a few weeks to figure out we could speak to each other, and then I reached out to Vanda and found it worked with her, too. Our goal was to get her inside the barrier through the tunnel, and then turn around and set her free.”
“So why didn’t Keir turn into a weaver dragon?” Mel asked. “Why does he change only during the night? And why can you all talk to each other in your minds?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Vanda said. “Our best guess is Keir’s own size as compared to a weaver influenced his form, along with our location, since black dragons are native to Mazereon.”
“A red dragon of Xafila might have made more sense, considering that’s where he’s from,” Baz added. “That or a rock dragon, since they’re both wingless, but who ever said sorcery made sense?”
Vanda nodded absently. “The mind-talking is from the weavers’ method of communication. The day-night switch Gram calls amateur—the sorcerer didn’t finish tying off the threads.”
Mel’s head ached from trying to make sense of the details. She leaned into Orin’s arm and stretched her legs out in front of her. She pushed aside any more questions about the curse, reminding herself that sorcerers had to apprentice for decades to learn what they knew. “It’s possible your plan might have worked. Interpreting how to break curses isn’t always straightforward, but it’s not always as complicated as you might think.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” Vanda handed the torn scarf back to Baz. “The escape route is closed.”
“Can’t we dig another one?” Orin asked.
The dragon growled and snorted a puff of air that scattered sparks and ashes from the fire.
Baz tied the red scrap around his wrist again. “It took us these two months to dig one good tunnel, after countless other tunnel attempts that collapsed or ran into solid rock or didn’t go deep enough to get under the barrier.”
No doubt a dragon could dig better than a dozen men, but Baz’s father had a hundred times a dozen men at his disposal. “Why hasn’t your father mobilized whole teams of people to dig tunnels?” Mel said. “At least to keep trade going. Get people in and out.”
Baz didn’t answer immediately. His face clouded. “Father has sent out a number of teams, but man-made tools just aren’t as effective as a dragon’s talons.” He cleared his throat and shifted in the grass. “Besides that, he doesn’t think freeing Vanda will work until I’ve… claimed her as mine through marriage. He said if it will help break the curse, he’ll agree to let me marry a commoner.”
Vanda stood abruptly, lips pursed, gaze darting around the field.
Baz stood, too, his words tumbling out in a rush. “Those were Father’s words, not mine. I never meant to tell you like this. I wanted to ask properly, whether Father approved or not. That’s why I wanted to set you free first using the tunnel, so I could ask you and you could make your decision with no pressure.” He ran a hand through his curls. “I was surprised when Father gave his approval. Shocked, actually. But I would marry you no matter what he said… if you would have me…”
Orin let out a long breath, as if he’d been holding it in while Baz spoke. He leaned close and whispered in her ear, “Was that a proposal?”
She shrugged. If so, it had to be one of the most awkward ones ever uttered.
Vanda replied, jaw tensed, “If I travel with you to the palace, it will be because that’s where Gram is. I’m not marrying anyone.” She stalked off into the shadows.
Baz paced and muttered to himself. “I didn’t mean to upset her. I can’t do any of this right.”
Mel shooed him off with a wave. “Go talk to her, you goose.”
“Out loud,” Orin said. “Enough of that mind-talk. It’s creepy.”
Baz hurried away without a reply.
“Poor guy.” Orin put an arm around her.
“Mm.” She leaned her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, thankful not to be faced with such a decision. Thankful to have her friend beside her, despite being no good for him.
She stirred from a light doze when Vanda returned, shoulders slumped but face no longer glowering.
Baz followed a few moments later. “We’re returning to the palace. Father knows we were close to breaking through, and he’ll be expecting us. If we don’t show up, or at least send a message, he’ll send people to fetch us. He should meet Vanda, if nothing else, and Keir could use a proper rest before we do any more digging.”
“Will we reach the palace tonight?” Orin asked.
“We’re hoping to make it to Cliffside before morning. It’s a small mountainside castle, sparsely manned. Two or three more nights of travel after that should get us home. I hope. It’s hard to say how fast Keir can go with such a burden.”
“You don’t need to take me and Orin all the way to the palace, do you?” Since she was no longer needed to break the curse, why fly any more than necessary?
The dragon—Keir—grumbled and twitched his wings.
Baz exchanged a long look with him, no doubt mind-talking, and then sighed. “He doesn’t want to leave you behind.”
She stared at Keir—what she could see of him. The moon had set, so he’d all but disappeared into the night. Why would he care if they stayed? “What exactly did he say?”
Baz glowered at the fire. “He says when we rescued you—when I rescued both you and Vanda by whisking you away on my dragon—I may have claimed you as my red dragon girl…”
“What?”
“…because you’re the red-haired descendant of the soldier-king, who was once cursed to live in the form of a dragon. The villagers may have been partly right in their misunderstanding.”
She sat up quickly. “I knew it!”
“Wait a minute.” Orin put a hand on her shoulder. “You said yourself that sorcery isn’t always straightforward. How do we know for sure they need your help?”
She took his hand off her shoulder and held it. “I know you don’t want me to get involved in this. But, Orin… what if there’s some truth to what Keir says? What if they need me, and I’m not there? I need to finish what I started.” She paused for a moment, heart sinking, and then added. “You don’t have to join us. It would have been better for you if you’d stayed in Ituria. In fact, maybe you should—”
“No.” Orin squeezed her fingers. “I told you I’d follow you anywhere. Don’t ask me to say goodbye again. Not now. I always travel with whatever I can’t do without.”
Her heart thumped and a small smile betrayed her weakness. “Fine. You still have my chocolate in that basket, anyway.”
He chuckled and pulled her to her feet.
She didn’t want to fly again. She didn’t want to visit another palace and meet King Lotario and be Princess Melantha, Fourth Daughter of Ituria. While that very title might help break the curse, it was also the thing that had gotten her trapped in one yet again.
No. She’d gotten herself trapped by thinking she could handle things on her own.
She helped Orin secure True and the eggs in the basket, and then they all climbed onto Keir’s back and settled in as they’d done before, with the added luxury of being able to take their time. Sandwiched between the two princes, Mel tucked the end of her braid into her belt and then closed her eyes tight. Keir ran across the field, the sound of his wing beats drumming in her ears. The moment his feet left the ground, her stomach flipped in protest, but she concentrated on keeping her seat. Finally, he leveled out, and the smooth soaring was marginally less frightening than the frantic chase earlier.
She almost wished she could talk to Orin the way the others did, mind to mind, but not if it meant dealing with sorcery. Not even if it were freely handed to her with no curse attached. The thought of using such unnatural powers turned her stomach more than flying.
Her head ached too much to count or rein in her imagination, which had
run wild picturing all the different ways she could fall… and the horrible landings each would entail. She refused to open her eyes and give her imagination more fodder.
The air grew moist, and thunder rumbled in the distance. With the wind in her ears, judging direction was difficult, but the gathering storm seemed to be approaching behind them from the south. The Burnt River Mountains would be below them by now, some of the smaller peaks that surrounded the southern edge of the kingdom that had been built in an ancient volcanic crater. Keir flapped, climbing higher, probably trying to outrun the storm.
More thunder rumbled, followed quickly by a drenching rain that fell like someone dumping buckets over their heads. She tensed at another boom, and light flashed beyond her eyelids. How long could they stay in the air before being struck down by lightning? The dragon’s scales grew slick under her legs.
Orin’s grip tightened painfully. “I’m slipping,” he yelled. “The wind is pulling the basket!”
Her arms already squeezed Baz in a death grip, so she moved her legs up and wrapped them around his waist in the space where the saddle separated him and Vanda. She yelled over her shoulder, “Bring your knees up!”
Orin wiggled into position, pressing his knees into her hips.
They needed to land, but where would Keir find space on top of a mountain?
“Hold on!” Baz warned a split second before they plunged downward.
Mel screamed.
Chapter Six
Icy raindrops stung Mel’s cheek as Keir descended. Hopefully, his dragon eyes could see through the storm. Thunder and lightning crashed behind them, fiercer than any storm she’d ever experienced, driving them before it.
She risked a peek. The heavily forested mountain loomed straight ahead, and Keir banked, circling above a rocky outcropping that appeared fairly flat. A bolt of lightning slashed the air. Keir roared into a peal of thunder and plummeted so suddenly, Mel’s backside lifted off his back for a moment. Orin’s grip tightened, and he tucked his face into her neck.
