Dragon Fire

by Lisa McMann

Frieda shifted in the tree and drew her legs up out of sight when Simber flew a little too close for comfort. But he wasn’t looking for her, and Frieda’s time to shine hadn’t come yet. So her mind wandered back to her nemesis.

  Immediately after seeing the sparks, Frieda had reported Nadia to the governors, explaining that the new pirate girl was possessed. “Her eyes spark fire and birds follow her around,” she’d told them. Sealing Nadia’s fate, or so Frieda had thought.

  It was such a strange claim that the High Priest Justine had called Frieda into the palace shortly before the Purge that year to question her. Frieda had felt a swell of importance. Surely she would be rewarded for this. But High Priest Justine grilled her with icy questions. And in the end, no matter how Frieda tried to defend herself, Justine declared that Frieda was telling tales. An illegal offense.

  At the Purge, Nadia was declared a Necessary. And Frieda was named Unwanted.

  It had been a terrible shock. The trauma of being declared Unwanted when she’d never been caught doing anything creative had scarred her. The shame of being shackled by the governors and the nightmares about being thrown into the lake of boiling oil lingered for years, even though she found herself in beautiful Artimé. It had been a horrible experience. She couldn’t seem to get over the wrong that had been done to her. And it was all Nadia’s fault. Later, Frieda often imagined Nadia’s reaction to Frieda being called Unwanted. She knew the pirate must have been smug. The girl had been performing actual creative acts in plain sight, and she’d gotten away with it.

  Frieda felt fresh anger bubble up. She’d hidden it for a long time. Tried to forget it and managed to do so for years. And when Alex became head mage, Frieda found that he possessed none of his awful mother’s traits, so she accepted him. A few years later, when Nadia had died saving Thisbe and Fifer, Frieda felt a tiny bit of satisfaction. But over time, Nadia was considered some sort of hero. That burned. But Frieda held in her feelings then, too. At least there was Alex—the only good thing to come out of Nadia’s existence. She steered clear of Aaron and the girl twins, warily watching them grow up.

  But when Alex was killed and Artimé appointed Justine’s successor, Aaron Stowe, to take his place, something had exploded inside Frieda. Not only were the twin girls a constant and growing reminder of Nadia, especially with Fifer’s birds and Thisbe’s sparking eyes, but Aaron was a constant reminder that the only decent one of them was dead. This time there was nothing Frieda could do to stop the rage inside her. She’d taken all she could handle of the Stowes. And she refused to live the rest of her life under the rule of people like Nadia.

  The twin girls and Aaron would be the end of Artimé. They’d brought danger to the magical land already, and a great deal more was looming. And people had wanted to put their trust in Aaron? It was absurd. Frieda had to take matters into her own hands to save Artimé. She’d made it her mission to teach everyone about who the true dangers to the island really were. And it was working. Frieda was going to get rid of everything remotely related to Nadia Stowe once and for all, and save their world in the process.

  Maybe not everyone saw it the way Frieda did quite yet, but most of them did. And her supporters were growing in number every day. In time all of Artimé and Quill would thank her, once all traces of the Stowes were erased from their island for good. There would be no one left for the evil dragon-monster, the Revinir, to come after. And Artimé would be at peace once more—this time for good.

  Devastation and Loss

  Astrid, the ghost dragon, and Dev, who now decidedly identified with the Suresh family of rulers, carried an air about them as they began their journey to the land where the palace stood. It was an air of distinction, perhaps. Or one approaching deservedness. They were going on an adventure to reclaim this closed-off, forgotten corner of the land of the dragons and the black-eyed rulers. They were going to see the shining palace of Dev’s people.

  As they flew, Dev let his imagination go wild. He pictured scenes in which his newfound family would run out of the purple-and-orange palace to greet him and welcome him into this beautiful place, saying lovely things like, “Our long-lost boy is home at last!”

  The thoughts made his insides hurt a little. It also made him feel foolish that he’d spent any time imagining such a scene, which he knew in reality wouldn’t happen. No one in the world cared a whit about Dev—the Revinir herself had said so. And not a soul in that palace would know him. If there even was anyone there. Dev would be a stranger barging onto the scene. The thought almost made him uncomfortable enough to tell Astrid to turn around and go back to the cavelands.

  If not for the images, he might have. But somehow they seemed like proof of ownership. Why else would those scenes pound in his mind every time the Revinir roared, if the memories of such places didn’t belong to him? What was his connection to them? He had to find out.

  He wondered if Thisbe and the others had seen these same pictures. Thisbe had said something reassuring about them after his mind had first cleared. But so much had happened in those moments immediately afterward that Dev had been totally overwhelmed. Discovering Thisbe’s return, being summoned to the castle, and Thisbe wanting him to act like he was still under the Revinir’s mind control—it had been a lot. Enough that he couldn’t remember any details of that part of the conversation if she’d given them.

  Not long after that flurry of events, the Revinir had roared, and he’d been blinded with the images. Since then, the more ancestor broth he’d ingested, the less intense the images had been. And now, whenever the calls came, the pictures didn’t totally overtake his senses.

  Dev remembered his time in the tower. He recalled the look on the Revinir’s face when she’d realized that the ancestor broth really did have an effect on him and the others. How he wished he hadn’t inadvertently revealed it before she’d flung him out the window.

  He shuddered.

  “Everything all right back there?” Astrid called out. “Warm enough?”

  “I’m all right. Do you remember where we’re going?”

  The dragon was quiet for a moment. Then she cleared her throat. “Errm. Not… quite.”

  Dev smiled and told her. Most of the time it didn’t bother him that she and the other ghost dragons forgot things. It wasn’t annoying unless the thing was very important or urgent. And at this point, Dev had nothing urgent on his agenda, which felt strange but nice. “Just don’t go to Grimere,” he said. Then he added, “My name is Dev, by the way.”

  “Short for Devastation, no doubt,” Astrid joked.

  Dev tilted his head, thinking about that and liking it. “Yes,” he said with a laugh. “Short for Devastation. And don’t you forget it.”

  “Ha-ha!” said Astrid with a glorious cackle.

  The terrain below was desertlike until they reached a mountain range, where a stream passed through that was lined with trees. Dev was glad he’d asked Astrid to take him. Climbing the mountains would have been a challenge that Dev might not have been up for. His aching ribs seemed to be a pain that would never go away, and he’d only just learned to tolerate it.

  The mountains below looked sharp and rugged and difficult. That explained why Ashguard’s palace and the surrounding village was so closed off. There was no way to approach on foot from the north because of these mountains, and the crater lake was a barrier to the east of the land.

  “What’s to the south and west of the palace?” Dev asked presently.

  “I don’t recall,” said Astrid, not surprisingly. “I’m feeling like it could be… water. Maybe? An ocean?” She paused, sniffing the air. “Or land. I don’t know.”

  “Interesting,” said Dev, trying not to laugh. “And beyond the oceans or… or land?”

  “I doubt I’ve ever known that,” said Astrid. “But clearly there are dragons beyond, if what you say is accurate about them having come from far and wide in response to the Revinir’s call.”

  “They definitely have done that,” said Dev. “Can y
ou tell me why the ghost dragons aren’t affected?”

  “We hear the roar,” Astrid said. “We just don’t care. The only call we are willing to respond to is that of the black-eyed rulers.”

  Dev blinked. “What, you mean like me? Please. That’s not even funny.”

  “You are the Devastator, after all.”

  Dev didn’t tell her she’d renamed him wrongly from earlier. The two bantered a bit more to pass the time, and then Dev slept, but not for too long in case Astrid forgot where they were going again.

  When she woke him, he sat up and looked down at the terrain. The mountains were behind them. Below, the remains of a city covered rolling hills. Bits of green growth showed through. There were some buildings and houses still standing, like a city that had been destroyed by a natural disaster. Dev glanced to the east, seeing the crater lake in the distance, and beyond that, the tree line of the forest and the promise of Dragonsmarche and Grimere. Astrid dropped lower and circled above a hill that had some sprawling structures on it. She had no problem finding a place to land.

  “Are you sure this is right?” Dev asked her, bewildered. “You went to the place where Ashguard’s palace was, right? The purple-and-orange bulbous castle with the—”

  “With the gilded roofs,” Astrid said. “Yes. This is the correct location. I’m sure of it. See over there?” She pointed through some tall, thick overgrowth, but Dev couldn’t see anything orange or purple or gilded.

  “I… don’t… understand,” Dev said, his voice faltering.

  “I’ll show you.” Astrid landed smoothly and took several steps as Dev continued to try to make sense of what had happened here. The dragon pushed through the brush, trampling it down to make a path. When the last trees parted, Dev spied a large building, mostly gutted but with a few enclosed spaces. And five smoke-stained towers with bulbs on top that were definitely not gold. Astrid continued toward it. “This is the palace,” she said gently.

  Dev’s lips parted as he stared. When Astrid stopped in front of it, he slid down her wing and stood quietly for a long moment between two of the towers, looking into the deserted covered courtyard before him. No one came out to welcome him home.

  Putting a Lid on It

  Back in Artimé, above the mansion’s new open-air, sunlit second floor, Quince and Gorgrun circled, ready to torch the place at a moment’s notice, but trying hard to remember that, after accidentally setting the mansion tubes on fire, Florence the warrior trainer had asked them not to burn anything else down if possible.

  Additionally, no matter how hard they tried, the ghost dragons couldn’t tell which people running around the mansion and lawn were friends and which were foes. They were a smattering of good and evil. Some were more good than evil, others more evil than good, but the dragons knew full well that that wasn’t an indicator of anything regarding being on the right side of the war. It was never that easy. Even the black-eyed people were a broad variety of levels, so there was no putting humans into groups based on that.

  So they decided to refrain from killing anyone unless called upon by the leaders they trusted: Thisbe, Maiven, and the great warrior woman. Instead they looked to help in other ways, like rounding up escapees, or assisting the black-eyed children and Maiven Taveer in hunting down dissenters in the maze of rooms on the second floor below them.

  Since the doors to each Artiméan’s personal room were locked, the dragons used their tails like ropes and ladders for the Grimere children, lifting them up over the walls to access the ones hiding in their rooms. And if the children were struck by a spell, Gorgrun and Quince picked them up and put them on their backs for safekeeping until the effects wore off or until someone was able to release the spell. Whenever one of the black-eyed fighters scared up a dissenter and identified the person as such, the dragons either chased them down the stairs to the spell casters working below, or they snatched them up in the curls of their tails or gripped them in their claws. Then they delivered them to the lawn for Simber to take care of.

  Far down the lengthy hallways, the children from Grimere went in pairs from room to room, blasting fire at anyone hiding in order to flush them out. They used their fiery breath and the few spells they’d learned to defend themselves against dissenters who reached for a component and tried to fight. They shooed the people out into the hallway, and when a room was fully checked and cleared of all hiders, they cast glass panes in front of the doors so the dissenters couldn’t easily get back in. Faced with the threat of fire, most of the confused and frightened dissenters put their hands in the air and pleaded for mercy as they backed down the hallway.

  “We’re going!” cried one. “Please don’t hurt us!”

  “We didn’t want to have this war in the first place!” cried another. “I don’t even like Frieda, and I hate fighting.”

  “She abandoned us hours ago!” the first accused. “What kind of leader does that? She was staring out the back door.Then she took out an invisibility paintbrush and applied it. I haven’t seen her since. I’m sure she took off running into Quill like a coward.”

  The children from Grimere didn’t understand much of what was shouted at them, but Asha thought she understood the part about Frieda running to Quill, so she tucked the information away in case it would be useful to share with Thisbe later. She and the others held back from harming anyone who was going willingly to the staircase to be wrangled by the actual mages. For the most part, only a few fought back, and the rest surrendered… at least until they got to the main floor.

  Down there, Fifer and Thisbe were whipping off freeze spells as more people were evicted from their hiding places and trying to make a run for it. Those who succeeded in getting outside without being hit by spells were stopped and corralled by Panther or the dragons. Florence continued to transfer the frozen ones from the mansion windows to the area around the rock outside, since his mouth was full by now.

  Once things started to calm down, Florence called Gorgrun to assist on the ground. First she had him uproot a section of trees in the jungle and bring them to the lawn. Then she instructed him to lay four trunks lengthwise in an imperfect square around the dissenters. He stacked more logs on top of the first ones, building walls. They formed a pen with space at one corner for a door.

  Once the structure was solid, Gorgrun and Quince picked up the mansion’s roof, which they’d removed earlier, and set it on top of the pen to keep the dissenters from climbing out. Panther and Simber guarded the openings and methodically put more and more fleeing Artiméans inside, despite their cries of surrender and pleas for freedom. “You’ll get yourrr chance to speak,” Simber snarled at them. “But forrr now, I advise you to be quiet. Orrr else.” His words were frightening enough to silence the group, at least for a while.

  * * *

  Combing through the entire mansion took hours, and Fifer and Thisbe’s team didn’t work without sacrifice. Every human among them at one point or another had been frozen or scatterclipped or backward-bobbly-headed or fire-stepped by dissenters who were still putting up a fight or trying to defend themselves from the small but increasingly effective army. Fifer and Thisbe did what they could to release the spells or revive each other and continue doggedly on, despite their growing number of bruises. Always at the back of their minds, keeping them going, was the reminder that their dear friends were suffering just a simple tube ride away. If only they could get it to work.

  By the time they expelled and contained what seemed to be the best hiders and last of the obstinate stragglers, they had still not found Frieda Stubbs. With the place clear, though, there was no time to waste in trying to get to the remote rooms. They’d have to take the chance of running into a surprise meeting with the dictator and hope their training was enough for the best outcome. And who even knew if she was still in the building? Chances were great that she’d abandoned ship a long time ago. No one would expect anything else.

  Thisbe and Fifer found themselves together with no one left to fight. Each offer
ed a curt nod of congratulations, then went their separate ways, still unable or unwilling to address their differences with so many other things to tend to. While Thisbe took a minute to collect herself and check in with the others, Fifer slipped outside to see how things were going there.

  “We’re putting the last of them into the cage now,” said Florence. She and Simber were extracting dissenters from the rock’s mouth and making them go into the pen.

  “I’ll get started on Ol’ Tater,” said Fifer. “If we get him placed just right, he can serve as a door to the pen.” She ran at the mastodon and jumped around to get his attention, then ran back toward the opening in the pen. Ol’ Tater followed as expected, trying to stomp on her. When he was nearly in the place where Fifer wanted him, she began the spell that would put him back to sleep. Simber tossed the last dissenter into the pen, then helped to position the mastodon. Fifer sang, and the statue fell into a permanent sleep right in front of the opening to the log pen, his massive hindquarters blocking anyone from leaving.

  With the dust settling and everything appearing to be under control, Fifer and Florence thanked the rock and Panther. The two took their leave and returned to the jungle. Simber stayed on the lawn to watch over the pen and the grounds and search for Frieda, and the dragons joined him there to keep the restless captives from trying anything.

  Fifer and Florence hurried back inside to survey the damage to the tubes and try to get them to work. There they found Thisbe already tinkering with the tube that had suffered the least amount of fire damage. Rohan and Maiven stood just outside the glass, offering to help, but when they saw Fifer and Florence approaching, they parted and moved aside.

  “Any sign of the Stubbs?” asked Fifer.

  Rohan gave her a grim smile. “Asha overheard some of the dissenters say Frieda snuck out early and left Artimé. She abandoned them all.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” muttered Thisbe. She gripped a small screwdriver between her teeth, and she was using both hands to pry up a corner of the control panel. She wasn’t having any luck. “Time will tell.”