The Passage to Mythrin 2-Book Bundle

by Patricia Bow

  Which was why he’d climbed this hill near the city. If there was any chance at all he would spot Ammy, it would be from here. Behind him, a tall boulder stood against a rocky bluff. He could get behind that for protection, if he had to.

  All the same, he kept his head down. Mara had said something about him to her followers, he hoped. Maybe none of them would eat him. But there was no way to tell who was on what side out there. They didn’t wear uniforms or markers of any kind. He wondered how they could tell. Were they all mind readers?

  More important: he wondered who was winning.

  A cluster of shapes swirled in his direction: one enormous green-black dragon with three smaller ones close behind, red and gold and black. He pressed flat to the rock. The four of them hurtled over his head with a sound like four trains bursting out of a tunnel at once.

  Simon clapped his hands to his ears, but he kept his eyes open. The cluster veered up the slope of the hill behind him and around its shoulder, and the roaring faded. Then a spout of flame shot up the sky from behind the hill. Three dragons, red and gold and black, flapped lazily back. They coasted down to join the hundreds of black shapes that swirled above the fiery plain.

  He wondered if Ammy liked being a dragon. He wondered if she was still alive.

  §

  Voices wheezed and rasped at her. They were inside her head and outside at the same time.

  “What is it?”

  “A monster. Look at its eyes.”

  “A changeling!”

  “A demon. Show us your true shape, demon!” Amelia tried to stand, but a clawed hand batted her back down. She sprawled on her back. The dragons whistled. She thought they might be laughing.

  She struggled up again. This time they left her standing. But she wasn’t sure how long her legs would hold her up. All she could see was their eyes and teeth.

  “Show us your true shape!”

  “This...” Amelia whispered. “This is my true shape.” She held out her hands, and then she saw.

  Her hands were crusted with scales, brown with a dark red sheen. And tipped with claws. Her feet.... She looked down at them. Scales, claws. She looked back over her shoulder and found she could easily gaze back along her own backbone, all the way to the long, curling, barbed tail.

  She must have made a sound, because the dragons were whistling again. Their eyes shone like emeralds and topazes.

  “Chase it back where it came from.”

  “Skin it!”

  “Drop it in the sea.”

  “Can it fly?”

  “Fly, demon!”

  “Quick! Or we’ll eat you!”

  The dragons crowded nearer. Amelia reared up on her hind legs and flapped her arms desperately. The dragons screamed with laughter. Wings! Wings, not arms! She tried to make her wings work, but nothing happened. It was like trying to flap her ribs.

  “Enough! We are called.”

  The circle broke up. The dragons loped towards the enormous archway. Amelia stared. Were they actually letting her go? She drew a deep breath for the first time since they’d dragged her from the tunnel.

  But two dragons still stood watching her. She took a small step back towards her bolt hole. One long arm flicked out and pinned her neck to the floor.

  “Ow! Let me go!”

  Each dragon grabbed one of her arms and leaped into the air. A sharp wind battered her. The floor sank, the cavern swung around dizzily, the ceiling rushed down at her.

  Suddenly the walls of the tube were streaming downward all around her. And then they were gone. The sky opened above her, dark blue on one side, orange on the other, with a crescent of red sun showing on the horizon.

  Tower tops dropped away below, and kept dropping. The grassy plain beyond the city sank into a red haze. She smelled a reek of smoke. Not wood smoke, more like a barbecue gone horribly wrong. The wind blasting downward all around her grew icy. The horizon spread wide, wider, and the sun crept up again.

  Amelia’s brain raced to figure how high she was, how many thousand feet. So what? she thought desperately. I saw something like this before, flying over Saskatchewan. I felt safe enough then.

  Yes, but then I was inside a plane.

  Both the dragons spoke at once. “Can it fly? Let us see!”

  Amelia was too numb with fear to understand what was happening, not until they let her go. Then she heard only the scream of wind in her ears. Spread out below, in detail that grew clearer every moment, was the plain, a giant flyswatter swinging up to crush her.

  §

  Simon had no warning at all. One moment he was lying on his stomach, studying the flight patterns of hundreds of fighting dragons and trying to decide if any of them looked like Ammy in any way whatsoever. The next moment a dragon was settling onto the ledge beside him. It was bronze or yellow — hard to tell in the red after-glow of sunset — and its eyes were amber. It opened its jaws in a wide grin. Hot air rolled over his face.

  Half a second after that, Simon was backed up against the bluff. Space gaped behind him: the crevice between the boulder and the hill. He pushed back into it as far as he could. His sweater stretched and ripped on the rough stone. It was farther than the dragon could reach, at least. It peered in at him but didn’t try to claw him out.

  Safe! And now what? Stay here till I die of thirst? Or... He remembered that hot breath. Will it burn me out?

  Something brushed across his mind, cobweb-soft. The dragon’s eyes brightened. “Simon,” it whispered.

  “How ... who...?”

  “Don’t you know me? Look!”

  The dragon’s outline melted. Its legs and body shrank, its head grew round, scales vanished into skin. What stood before him now was ... Ammy? But she was thinner and paler than he recalled. In fact, every-thing about her was more something than he recalled. Her black leather jacket was tight as a skin and glistened like a beetle’s back. Her boots were enormous. Her hair stood up in fluorescent red and yellow spikes. Yellow eyes stared like muddy pools from the white oval of her face.

  “Ammy?” Simon inched forward, but not all the way.

  “Of course it’s me. I’m not a dragon. See?” She held out her hands. “I need you to help me get home.”

  “Ammy! But you look so weird!” He struggled to pry himself from the crack. “Can’t ... seem ... to get my foot ... ugh!” He yanked, but only hurt his ankle.

  “Let me.” Ammy crouched, reached into the crevice, and pulled Simon’s foot free. Then she took hold of him under the arms and pulled him out like a cork from a bottle. She turned, lifting him, put her back to the crevice, and set him down on his feet. Being a dragon must have left her extra strong, he thought. She couldn’t ever have lifted him before.

  It occurred to him, as distantly as if somebody was shouting at him across a football field, that he wasn’t being very bright.

  Sharp nails dug through the sweater and into his skin. He shrank away from the hands and turned around. “Your eyes are all wrong.” He stared at them and felt dizzy. He wondered if he was being hypnotized. “Ammy has blue eyes. They should be blue.”

  The eyes are the last thing to change. “Those...” He couldn’t stop staring. “Those are your own eyes, aren’t they?”

  “Uh-huh.” She/it grinned and changed back to a dragon. The change gave Simon a moment to blink away from the yellow stare.

  But it did him no good, because now the dragon was between him and the crevice. He had nowhere to go but over the edge.

  §

  Later, Amelia thought it was simple instinct that saved her. She flung out her arms and legs, flung out her whole self against the fall. And her wings, forgotten until now, swept out and cupped the air.

  It was too sudden. She flipped, spun head over tail, and plunged downward.

  Then spread her wings again and slid sideways over air that seemed to have turned to clear jelly. Close beneath, pinnacles of rock swept past. Another couple of seconds and those teeth would have made a meal of her.

&n
bsp; Amelia trembled. She held her wings rigid, planing the air, but the rocks thrust up at her. She was sinking. Desperately, she beat at the air the way a drowning swimmer beats at the water. Up she shot.

  Then down she sank again, and again she struggled upward. Down and up, down and up. How do they do it? How did I do it in the dreams?

  She was on a downward slide when she cut into a column of warm air and felt it pressing up under her wings. She veered to stay inside it, and rose, spiralling up and up with magical ease.

  Thermals! Of course! Like a glider! Warm air rises and helps gliders — and dragons — to fly!

  She had it now. She banked and soared and circled. She swooped down at the red-lit hillside, veering off at the last moment. It was like a sky-sized game of pinball, with herself as the player and the ball. She whooped and shrieked and buzzed the hillside again.

  Then flipped over with shock and zoomed back. Even in this light her eyes easily picked out the two facing each other on the hillside. One of them was a dragon, and the other, the one teetering with his heels on the edge, was —

  “Simon!”

  Amelia folded her wings and dove.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHOICES

  Caught between the dragon and a sheer drop, Simon was ready to grab any way of escape. When the dragon suddenly leaped backward, he didn’t stop to find out what had startled it. He darted past it to the right and clawed his way up the slope.

  A hideous uproar broke out behind him as he climbed. Snarls, growls, shrieks. It sounded like the dragon had found an enemy more its own size.

  Good. Hope they both keep busy till I can get away.

  But it was over in moments. Simon poked his head out cautiously from his new hiding place, behind a fold in the cliffside where some small, scrubby trees had taken root. The bronze dragon was flapping off into the darkening sky.

  The winner perched on the edge of the chasm and stretched out its long neck to look down. It was smaller than the first one, with a dark red sheen on its brown scales.

  While it crouched there he didn’t dare move.

  “Simon.”

  It was croaking his name. He watched it without moving a hair. It was still straining to see into the darkness below the cliff. It seemed to think he’d fallen. Why should it care?

  Maybe it knows I’m up here. Maybe it’s trying to trick me into coming out. But fool me twice, shame on me, as Celeste says.

  He could have kicked himself for being so stupid. I should have remembered they can get into your mind! The bronze dragon had skimmed that image of Ammy from his memories, of course, and fed it back to him. It did it so badly, though. I should have guessed!

  “Simon! Where are you?”

  Strange, how forlorn it sounded. How familiar. He raised his head.

  Simon! The cry rang through his mind.

  As it crouched and leaped into the air, so did Simon. He vaulted over the fold of rock and skidded down the other side. “Ammy! Wait!”

  But Ammy was gone into the dark. One second too late, he thought. Just one second!

  “Ammy!”

  With a billow of wind and a scatter of pebbles, she was back. She looked exactly like a dragon as she crouched over him, clumsily folding her wings against her body. Exactly, except for the round, blue, human eyes.

  “Ammy! It is you, isn’t it?”

  “I thought you were dead!” A raspy, hissy voice, but somehow it still sounded like her.

  Simon wanted to hug her, which horrified him. What part of a dragon could you hug? He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I thought I’d never find you! Come on, we’ve got to get back to the gate.”

  “What, already? I’m just starting to get the hang of this! Simon, I can fly!” She spread her wings and wafted dust into his face.

  “Your real body,” he said distinctly, “is back home. In Founders Tower. Ike’s watching it. After half an hour, he’ll go get an ambulance.”

  “Half an hour. That’s...”

  “About five hours in this place. I figure we’ve been here four hours at least.”

  “There’ll be a big fuss.”

  “At least. They’ll want to find out what’s wrong with you. They’ll stick needles in you and take your blood.”

  She groaned. It sounded like a rusty gate creaking at the other end of a hollow tube. “But I’ll never have this chance again! To really fly! Simon, you don’t know how wonderful it is! Besides” — she held out her clawed front paws — “I can’t go back like this!”

  “Well... Hey!” He laughed. “You’re a dragon, right? That means you can change your shape! Just change yourself back.”

  “Change myself?” Her eyes brightened. “Of course! Um...” She set her long teeth and scowled, and for a moment she looked just like her old self. Simon held his breath. She strained, and strained, and then slumped. “I can’t do it.”

  “You could if you really wanted —”

  “No! Don’t you understand? I was like this when I came and I’m stuck this way! I can’t go back!” She crouched with her clawed hands wrapped around her head.

  “Okay, stay calm. When we go home, you’ll go back into your real body.”

  “But suppose I can’t get back in my body? There’ll be two of me. One of me in a coma, and the other one — They’ll shoot me or put me in a zoo!”

  Her head went up. A shadow swept over them and they both cowered.

  §

  A bubble of laughter broke into Amelia’s mind. And a voice: Why all the noise? The sky has not fallen yet! The shadow settled, folded its wings, and became an enormous crimson dragon. It shimmered in the sunset afterglow as if it was wearing a sequined coat.

  Amelia’s jaw dropped. It was her first really good sight of Mara. That glimpse back in Dunstone hardly counted. She’d forgotten, or never known, how big she was, how beautiful. “You’re all right!”

  “Are you winning?” Simon asked, from back against the cliff.

  “At first the battle hung on a claw. But we are gaining. We will win.”

  Simon edged forward. He seemed to think Mara might gobble him up. “How did you know we were here?” he asked.

  “Half of Sissarion knows you’re here!” Mara laughed. “Amelia was thinking as loud as a hatchling clinging to its mother’s back!”

  Heat crept up under Amelia’s skin. “I didn’t know I was doing it. And I was scared. Okay, I am scared. Why can’t I change back to my own body?”

  “To choose and change your shape, that is a thing you learn. It takes time. I can teach you.”

  “She won’t have time,” Simon cut in. “We’re going home now.”

  “Just a min—” Amelia began, but Simon spoke across her to Mara.

  “What will happen to Ammy’s body, at home, if she doesn’t get back?”

  “It will die.”

  Die? No! I can’t die!

  Of course you can. Everyone dies. But if you stay here, you stay as one of us.

  Oh... Amelia gazed at Mara, then glanced at Simon. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Why are you staring at each other?”

  “Mind talk,” Mara said aloud. “I will explain. Amelia has two choices. She can return to your demon world and put on her little, weak human body. Or she can stay here and share the life of the Urdar. As my more-than-sister, my friend, honoured by all.”

  “But she can’t!” Simon sputtered. “Ammy, you’re human! You can’t just turn into a dragon!”

  “Well, it looks like I just did, doesn’t it?” She shrugged her wings, then grimaced. Her stomach felt hot inside. “Mara, can I breathe fire?” She took a deep breath.

  “With teaching.” Mara’s long-taloned paw whipped out and clamped Amelia’s jaws shut. “Without teaching, you will burn out your throat. Promise not to try it.” She let go, but her paw hovered near.

  “I promise!” Amelia grinned at Simon, who had backed away again. “But as a dragon, I should be able to —”

  “Young dragons take y
ears to grow into their powers. Flaming, dreaming, changing shape, and all the rest they learn as they grow. You have learned nothing. As you are now, you are dangerous to yourself.”

  “That’s not the point.” Simon was back again. “Ammy, you don’t belong here!”

  “That’s for me to say, not you. And it’s Amelia!”

  “Amelia.” He flapped that away. “You’ll be dead. Your parents will have to bury you.”

  That hurt. She turned her head away.

  “You haven’t really thought about this at all, have you?” He waved his arms, taking in Mara, the dragons sweeping past, the fires spreading on the plain, the ruby pinnacles of Sissarion. “You really think this is all there is to being a dragon?”

  “I’ve flown, you haven’t.” She folded her arms across her scaly chest.

  “Well, it’s not all flying around and breathing fire. You think you could kill somebody?”

  “Of course she could,” Mara said. “Amelia is strong. Stronger than she knows.”

  “What’s strong for a dragon,” Simon said, “is not strong for a human.”

  “I honour a fighter.” Mara dipped her head at him. “Even if he is beaten.”

  I can’t decide. Amelia looked from Mara, huge and glorious and shining, to Simon, small and ragged and dirty. “I can’t make up my mind!”

  “There is one other thing.” Mara picked up a stone the size of Simon’s head and rolled it around in her paw, sharpening her claws on it. “The gate will soon be gone.”

  “What?” Simon’s eyes opened wide. “How?”

  “My people are destroying it. Not the gate itself, of course, that is beyond our reach. But we will ruin its housing and bury the passage between worlds. We want no more of us exiled ever again.”

  “But how will Simon get home?”

  “There is still time, if he goes now.” Mara smiled down at him. “I will take him there myself.”

  This time he didn’t back off. “I told you before. I won’t go without Ammy.”

  “Then stay here.” Her smile sharpened. “But I cannot protect you, and who of the Urdar will believe you are not a demon?”

  “That’s not right!” Amelia flared up. “Of course he’ll go home. I’ll take him to the gate.”