by James Comins
Chapter Three
Dragon and Empress
or, Where One Gift Lies, Another May Arise
It was a night full of rushed running and tripping on tough juniper branches in the dark. Brugda began to call out quick orders, her reedy voice slung up and away by the howling winds. She sent the servants off to find the runoff creek. Lenna and Binnan Darnan stayed beneath the flabby embrace of her shawled arms. Watching through branches, they saw the dragon breathe streams of white fire into the melting windows of the big house, saw the white fire turn orange as curtains and furniture came alight, saw walls and shelves fly apart beneath skinny flexing claws. A flash of deja vu. It was, Lenna realized, the exact sight she had seen in Brugda’s magic circle. It was also the end of all her paper dolls, all her toys, her bed, her sheets, her private world. Burnt. The sound of destruction rang through the ground itself, unbearable and scratchy and constant.
Aitta found the bag. Lenna and Binnan Darnan followed the housekeeper’s soprano voice through the dark. They called out for direction, stumbling along the shallow creek, toeing the almost-familiar stones and ice-crusted rushes and slippy water that bubbled beneath their quick footsteps. It was a tense, slow game of Marco Polo as they followed Aitta’s calls. Lenna reached the housekeeper’s slim silhouette and stood beside her.
A canvas bag, knotted loosely at the top, had washed astream in the old runoff brook in the wood.
“Au, Brugda,” she gasped. “This is the vision I saw! Exactly it!”
“That’s nice. Now take the bag.”
Inside was a heavy pile of black dragon scales.
“He wants them back,” observed Kaldi, creeping up behind them. Lenna eeped.
Brugda sniffed the scales. “The working is clear. Touch them, child.”
When Lenna picked up one of the one-pound muddy-black scales, she felt her mind fizz. A picture appeared. A maniacal Joukka Pelata was stealing into a dragon cave with a pair of pliers. “I think Momma tore them off the dragon,” she murmured. “But why would she do that?”
“Set it down,” Brugda instructed.
Thwink.
Lenna’s mind cleared instantly.
“And if Mother did not?” Brugda went on.
“A spell to confuse,” said Lenna, staring at the starlit pile of enchanted clinky things. “The dragon was only shown an illusion. But why?”
“Someone sent the creature to stop Mother from spending her magic on a Change,” Brugda explained. “They are come too late. By bringing you into the family, Mother spent the last of her magic and hastened the Change. If there was time now, we could bring the beast its scales and reclaim its friendship. Instead,” she said, sighing at the purple and green zigzags of the aurora sky, “we wait awhile till midnight. Stay awake and you’ll see the Change. A rare thing.”
The moon had a scoop taken away. Stars twinkled one by one through clouds. Trees hung blue around them. Lenna shivered.
The Change fell just when she found a comfortable place to sit. Like ice on a griddle, the world shillyshallied and dripped away. Her vision went soft. Birch trees melted into the ground. In their places were faint wisps like the armatures of unfinished sculptures. The moon fell out of the sky like a wristwatch’s reflection on a wall. The sky tumbled after it. The darkness dropped away, leaving behind glaring blinding white. The world became black and white. Thin.
A splash of new darkness grew out of the light. Lenna’s new ruffled dress tickled as it got replaced for the second time today. It became a strappy-shouldered leather dress with a cloth sash cinched around her waist. The fancy elkhide boots Momma Joukka Pelata had bought her became tall green leather boots buckled up her calves.
Eyelets and frills grew out of the servants’ pajamas. Brugda’s bonnet went from white to pink, and her shawls grew bangles. Spectacles crawled out of Kaldi’s temples, thick and octagonal. Talvi acquired brass epaulets, like an admiral, and Aitta spun with twinkles.
The wisps of trees solidified slowly. The new tree trunks were thin like insect legs and were polished into skinny walking-sticks. Each trunk was capped with a complex brass hinge mechanism which hooked into adjustable, spring-loaded branches. The stick-thin limbs fractured into more and more branches, each of them a straight, polished arm socketed to a flexing brass mechanism.
The sky regrew itself into blue origami paper. The night became simple patterns in bright flat colors. Clouds were white spirals sliding across the painted navy blue sky. Around Lenna’s feet, twisty cedars sprouted, short red hexagonal branches. The cedars were tufted with loose-hanging, tasselled paper lanterns. The moon grew back, a spinning disc of ivory and shadow in the painted sky. Along its sides were rings of carved scrimshaw. Half of it was scooped out, and the scoop turned out of sight and back into sight as the moon spun.
Lenna blinked, staring, dazzled.
“Will the empress follow us here?” whispered Aitta, dressed in her blue glittering nightrobe.
“Empress?” said Binnan Darnan suspiciously. She wore a black Victorian dress layered with black lace and ribbons. Lenna wondered how much of the old dragony world she would remember.
“Should we bring it the bag now?” Kaldi asked Brugda.
“The dragon’s an empress?” interrupted Binnan Darnan.
“Dragon?” said Talvi, puzzled. “No, the empress is an empress.”
In a worried voice, Binnan Darnan said, “But I don’t speak empress. I don’t raise empresses.” Puzzled, she went on: “I’ve never even seen one.”
“Binnan Darnan,” said Brugda sorrowfully, embracing the elfin girl, stroking her feathery black tangled hair, catching a ribbon as it came loose. The little girl shooed the hand away.
“I remember having a voice,” Binnan Darnan blurted. “But that’s gone now. I had--I had found something. But I’ve lost it. Brugda, I hurt so much. I hurt all over.” Shaking, she looked up into the sympathetic eyes of the pink-bonneted woman above her. “What have I lost, Brugda? I can’t even remember.”
“A gift. You’ve lost a gift,” Brugda replied. “Where one gift lies, another may arise.” She smiled. “You only need find it.” Kissing Binnan Darnan on the top of her head, Brugda picked up the knotted bag. “Come along. Let’s comfort the empress. Perhaps you’ll find something as well.”
The walk through the wood was towering strange. Lenna looked in every direction at the new world around her. She took Binnan Darnan’s hand and followed the grown-ups across scrunchy snow that felt nothing like snow, beneath trees so thin they looked like they might snap in half, through wind that blew glittery rectangles and sparkling twinkling shapes through the air. Puffballs landed coldly on her bare shoulders.
The big house came into view. She could see it had once been a pyramid of glass balanced on the tip of a larger pyramid of glass. A tangle of spiral staircases had been strung between them. Now it was torn down and smashed and melted by fire.
Fire was different, too. It was a throbbing web of triangles, flickering orange and white, hot from afar, smokeless, bright in the night farmyard.
She looked around the expanse of the ruined farm. The barn was a three-story stack of red glass pyramids. The tarpaulin roof of the pigpen was gone. The pigpen itself was gone, too. A mechanism of metal stood in its place. Beyond, through the skinny leafless trees, the dragon tower was wondrous, like a magnificent tinker’s shop. All the walls were see-through colored glass, and everything was mystery.
The empress, Lenna saw, was a wooden machine shaped like a rhinoceros beetle. It was painted brightly in reds and blues and golds, the paint flaking like an old-fashioned child’s toy. Glowing chunks of crystal were socketed to its forehead, humming, protected by a red railing. Its enormous back was lined with seats that flapped like movie theater seats as it moved. A stylized flower was painted on the back of each banging seat. Doilies folded and unfolded but never slid. Three thin jointed pairs of metal legs moved in pairs like beetle legs. Two telescoping arms zigzagged from under the front portico.
Brugda led the way up to the edge of the triangular firelight. She stood quietly behind the wagging thorax of the creature. Piston-fingers rummaged in the remains of the big house, picking through shattered walls. Up close, the fire looked like stained glass dancing. It curled the glass like butterfly wings and scattered it puffily onto the snow. The frame blackened, leaving a checkerboard of ash.
The snow wasn’t melting. Mystified, Lenna bent down and picked up a handful of freezing cotton balls. Pinching the dense white fibers, squeech squeech, she dropped them in a tumble as her hand got cold. She brushed the cotton away from the top of the ground to reveal taupe silk grass. The dead cloth grass was hemmed neatly, brown at the tips and starch-stiff, woven over the ground in plentiful blades. Tugging, she drew out a brown root. It was a single nubbin of fabric, the color of winter straw on one side and a scraggly brown root on the other.
Brugda took Binnan Darnan’s hand and led her up the hill to the scrabbling empress. She gave the canvas bag to the girl, who clutched the thick drawstring nervously with two lace-cuffed hands. “Go on,” said Brugda. “Give an unhappy creature some peace.”
Clearing her throat, the tiny girl held the bag up. “Mister empress? I have--” She dipped a hand in and pulled out “a spring! I have your lost springs, mister empress!”
Clunking wooden gears brought the huge segmented thing face to face with her. The crystal eyes behind the red picket fence goggled at the metal widget. A look of recognition. Excitedly the machine stomped the vegetable garden flat and clicked its crabclaws in anticipation. Collapsing its legs and sinking to the ground with a bump, it flung open a small pair of ornamental doors at the top of three steps.
Binnan Darnan set her feet on the first step timidly. “You want me to fix you?” she asked. The empress nodded its great body, tossing the girl askew. She climbed up and began threading a spring into a rickety wooden seat. “It must have hurt so much, running with your seats banging,” she said to it. The empress clicked its piston-pincers.
Lenna spotted her attic bedroom. Everything she knew had burnt away to ash. Brugda laid a hand on the criscrossing green straps of her dress. “Nothing of importance remains,” the old woman whispered to her.
In quiet they stood. The rhythmic crackling of the new fire burned castle walls out of the glass walls. The silk of the new grass bubbled and melted, giving off the scent of burnt sage. Kaldi and Talvi and Aitta flanked Brugda, held back by her proud arms. They all waited, listening to the squeak of springs being wound into the wood hinges of the empress’ movie-theater seats.
After some time, Binnan Darnan finished threading the springs and climbed down the steps. Each seat now stood upright and kept still as the wooden empress wiggled its thorax, testing. Deferentially, the machine faced the lacy blackhaired girl, spread its multijointed arms and bowed. Binnan Darnan curtsied back.
Binnan Darnan returned to Brugda elated. “I’m mechanically inclined!” she beamed.
The old woman appraised her. “With such ease you find your gifts,” she murmured tonelessly. “I wonder what you could do in airplane-land.” She winked at Lenna. “Perhaps this beast would bear us?” she asked.
“Where are we going?” Binnan Darnan replied.
“One of the rival Powers attacked us. I would know who. A wondering-well lies to the East.”
Kaldi frowned, thinking. “The Pit of Old Magic isn’t the same as it was, Brugda.”
“Where would you rather go, potscraper?” she barked. To Binnan Darnan, she said sweetly, “Ask the thing if it will carry us there.”
Binnan Darnan asked the empress, and it lined alongside the household, thudding on the snow-cotton.
“Wait,” said Lenna. “What about the pigs? Who’ll feed them?”
“What pigs?” said Talvi.
“See,” said Brugda, pointing out across the delivery road.
Lenna ran down the hill, squinting across to where her pigsty used to be. There was no pigsty. In its place, a considerable mirror was pointed toward the dragon tower, balanced on a complex gear system. A gyroscope and a heavy flywheel spun relentlessly in its guts.
Returning, she asked, “What’s in the tower now?”
“The refractory? Crystals, like always,” said Talvi. “They’ll wait for us.”
“Then what’s Binnan Darnan been doing all this time?” Lenna asked.
“I weave the crystals in the refractory,” the girl answered. “Look at your waist, silly. Have you really ignored me this whole time?”
Lenna’s green dress was circled by a chartreuse sash. It was secured at its loop by a woven crystal, like the ones that had spun on tables in Joukka Pelata’s room. It shimmered in the moonlight.
“Child,” Brugda said, “come sit beside me. You and I will talk as we travel. ” She climbed the steps of the empress. The household shuffled after her. The plank floor of the animal’s back clumped under shoes and slippers. A spring-loaded seat in the back row whined satisfyingly as Lenna unfolded it and sat. Brugda joined her.
“To the Pit of Old Magic,” Binnan Darnan said to the empress, leaning over the railing in front. The beast stood and ran. Its scuttling strides were as smooth as a flying dragon.
“May I ask you things, Brugda?” Lenna began, resting in the back beside the old woman.
“Ask.”
“What happened to my parents?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who they were. Adrift. Lost or found,” Brugda answered.
Stupid Brugda always made everything sound so mysterious. It was annoying. Lenna wished the woman would answer questions properly.
“How about your parents, Brugda? I bet you aren’t Momma’s real daughter, either.”
“No,” she said.
“How old were you when Momma took you?”
Brugda watched the pattern that was painted across the sky. “Grown. Quite grown. She needed eyes like mine, and I needed a place to live.”
So the old woman hadn’t been a little kid when she became Joukka Pelata’s daughter. Maybe she’d even chosen to live on the farm. But Lenna had only been a toddler. She wondered how Momma had gotten her away from ... whoever her other parents were. The ones on the flybe airplane. Had they given Lenna away, or had the Lady stolen her? Were they looking for her? She stopped that line of thought. It hurt.
“Did you have to look after the pigs when you were a girl?” she asked Brugda.
“It was sheep, then,” said the old woman. “The pigs came with the dragons.”
Hm. She wondered whether there were pigs at all in the world before the dragons came, or whether they were invented for the dragons to eat. The way the Changes worked was still confusing.
“Did you forget anything when you became Joukka Pelata’s daughter?”
“Not then,” sighed Brugda, “but I’ve forgotten enough in my time.”
“Did Momma ever have kids of her own? You know. Real kids.”
From the row ahead of them, Kaldi whispered back: “I don’t think they can.”
“Oh. Um. Brugda, did you really always think I was magic?”
“Oh yes,” Brugda replied. “We thought, and we hoped, and we waited.”
“Hm. I don’t hate you anymore,” Lenna sighed. “Maybe I never did. I hate not knowing, Brugda.”
“As you should. Sleep, Little Len.”
And she did.
