by Patricia Bow
“Dragons.”
“Oh. I … I guess, then, I can see why you hate them.” He wished he knew what to say. “But you see, in this country, when you have no family, they, um, they give you one. I mean, if you’re still a kid.”
“And that is why they hunt me? It is simple, then. You will tell them I want no other family.”
“I don’t think that’ll work. There are laws. Kids can’t just live on their own.”
“I am the Seeker.” She sat taller. “I am not a kid. I am twelve and a half.”
“Really? I thought you were only eight or ….” He bit it back. Such a look!
“I have studied with the seekers for four years now! I can take care of myself!”
“Okay, okay! Only, I don’t think the police’ll see it that way.”
Pier turned around to face the north and closed her eyes. After a moment, she opened them again. “I try to fix on it and all I can see is those terrible pictures in those boxes.”
“Those what?” Simon thought back. “Oh. The TVs. The war. That was, um, a newscast.”
“A true thing, was it?” Her forehead was rucked up in worried creases.
“Well, yes.” He was puzzled. “But you must know all about war. I mean, all your life —”
“Those were people killing people!” She swivelled around and scowled at him as if he was to blame.
“Yes, but that’s wa—”
“Is this what happens when you have no dragons to fight? You fight each other?”
“Well —”
“Gram was right! There must be dragons here, only you can’t see them — they are inside the people. This is a terrible world, worse by far than our Earth. We were right not to come here.”
She turned around again and faced north.
Simon had no idea how to explain about war. Especially since he didn’t really understand it himself. “Maybe things are simpler when you have dragons to fight,” he said at last. “Maybe if you had no dragons you’d have been just like us.”
Pier shook her head sharply.
He waited a minute or two to let her simmer down, then tried to get her to talk about what life was like on her Earth. But her answers, when they came, were all along the lines of “Yes,” “No,” “Sometimes,” “Not really,” “I don’t know,” and “What’s gunpowder?” After a while he stopped asking.
Half an hour after they’d left, Ike and Amelia slipped back into the garage, carrying a plastic shopping bag and a bundle of cloth.
Fifteen minutes after that, four kids filed out into the lane. Simon, Ike, Amelia, and a small girl dressed in jeans and an oversized white T-shirt and brown sandals. She looked completely ordinary except for an amazing mop of poppy-red hair.
CHAPTER 10
FIELD OF STRANGE DREAMS
The Dunstone and Area Weird Games were one of the high points of Dunstone’s year, as Simon had tried to explain to a disbelieving Amelia a few weeks ago. The block of parkland and sports field between Queen Street and the high school was crammed with people. Not just kids who were competing — the nine-to-twelves (junior DAWGs) and thirteen-to-sixteens (senior DAWGs) — but parents with cameras and lawn chairs, sisters and brothers, cousins, neighbours, teachers.
There were also people selling hot dogs, ice cream bars, silvery Mylar balloons, and red T-shirts printed in white with “Proud to be a DAWG” under a cartoon of a goofy-looking hound with its tongue lolling out. And other people painting kids’ faces. And still other people handing out leaflets promoting everything from Tarot readings to guitar lessons. And dozens of people who were there simply because everybody else was.
“Look, even some of those punks from King Street are here,” Ike said.
They arrived twenty minutes late, but that didn’t matter, because the games never, ever began on time. Lysander Manning was still talking into the mike. He had started the games nearly forty years ago, after he came to Dunstone to teach high school English and Latin. He was retired now, but every year he still organized the games.
He looked like a heron, Simon thought: tall and thin, with a sharp nose and crest of feathery white hair and white summer suit. He wore a red tie with the DAWG cartoon on it.
“The Dunstone and Area Weird Games are, I believe, unique.” Mr. Manning spoke so close to the mike that it squealed unbearably. “Unlike most athletic competitions, these games are meant to challenge the mind, stretch the imagination, and stimulate the inventive faculty, while also testing the body.”
He was up on a wooden platform near the school, with a huge DAWG banner hanging across the brick wall behind him. The platform was closed in below with white vinyl sheets stapled along its front, back, and sides. Massed behind it were the Dunstone Dukes Drum and Bugle Corps in their turquoise and gold uniforms.
Now Mr. Manning was going on about how he had created the Hec Manning Trophy in memory of his father, Hector Manning, and how the cup part of the trophy was the very same cup that his grandfather, Albert Manning, had dug from the cooling lava of the volcano Vesuvius following the eruption of 1872.
It was always the same speech. Simon had heard it so often he knew it almost word for word, so he didn’t listen as he edged through the laughing, chattering crowd towards the sign-in table at one end of the platform.
“One good thing,” Ike said behind him. “In this crowd, nobody will notice Pier. Specially if they’re looking for a white-headed kid.”
“All the same, we’d better watch out for Celeste. She notices things.” He looked down at Pier, who was walking close to his elbow. She was trying to look relaxed, strolling with her hands in her pockets the way Amelia did. But he could tell she was wound up tight.
“What is it?” he said in her ear. “Can you feel it? Is it close?”
“Close. But not here.” She was looking at faces. Her eyes never stopped moving. Suddenly, she stopped and gripped his wrist. “There is danger!”
“Danger?” He looked around for the police. No sign of them.
“So, where’s this famous trophy?” Amelia elbowed in between him and Ike.
“They keep it under cover till the games actually start. One year some kids tried to kidnap it for a joke, and since then Mr. Manning hasn’t taken any chances.”
“But look here, on the table,” Ike said. “There’s a picture of this year’s grand prize. It’s a Spacer 9800 laptop with 240-gig hard drive. Woo hoo!”
Kids were crowding around, pushing in ahead of them, scrambling to sign in before the deadline. Which would be in just a minute or so.
Mr. Manning was winding up. “Although there are goals, there are no limits,” he said, making the mike squeal again. “You may use any legal means to achieve those goals, and extra points will be awarded for especially creative solutions. Of course, if you break any laws or injure …”
Simon had his gel pen out and ready, and his hand on the sign-in sheet, when another hand closed on the paper. He blinked into Dinisha Rajeev’s smiling brown eyes. She slipped the page out of his fingers and signed her name with a flourish.
“Good luck, Simon.” She waggled her pen at him. “You’ll need luck. Me and Kevin are gonna demolish you!”
Simon cleared his throat. “You and, um, Kevin? Kevin Purcell?” His heart sank. He’d hoped Dinisha would be cheering for him. Instead, she was paired up with his chief rival.
“No fear!” Ike sneered. “Me and Simon will wipe the floor with you two!”
“Yeah, likely.” Dinisha giggled and slid away with a flip of silky black hair.
“… individual or team with the most points,” Mr. Manning was saying, “will win the grand prize and, still more glorious, will have their names engraved on …”
Ike captured the sign-in sheet and he and Simon scribbled their names down. Then Amelia grabbed the pen and signed in below them. Simon couldn’t believe his eyes. “You? You never do games.”
“So? Maybe today I feel like it. It would be fun to beat you guys. And that queen bee Dinisha.”
>
“Dinisha’s not …,” Simon began. Then, “Beat us? What makes you think —”
“I feel good!” She stretched her arms above her head and went up on her toes. “I feel like I could do anything today. So watch out!”
Ike elbowed Simon. “Here we go!” A Dunstone Dukes bugler was climbing the steps behind the platform.
Behind them came a jingle of metal and a strange, sharp, spicy smell. A black leather-covered arm reached past Simon and long fingers closed on his pen. The wrist wore a leather band with steel spikes glinting all over it. Ike started, “Hey, that’s Simon’s ….” Then he shrugged and backed off.
The bugler blew an off-key fanfare. Mr. Manning waved his arms wide. “Let the games begin!” he shouted. The Dukes began blaring out the theme from Rocky.
The punk flipped the pen back and turned away, but not before he met Simon’s eyes. It was the same guy who’d told him about the back way out of the tattoo parlour. This time Simon didn’t notice the hair or the teeth, although those were still startling. He noticed the eyes. He stepped back on Ike’s foot. Ike yelled. The guy turned and shouldered away through the crowd.
Simon stared after him. “Did you see?”
“Ow! Yeah. The eyes? They’re contacts.”
“What?”
“Contact lenses.” Ike rubbed his foot. “You can get them on the Internet. All kinds, all colours. I’d like to get some with little lightning bolts down the middle, but my dad says no, they’d be bad for my eyes.”
Bright yellow irises with slit pupils like a cat’s. Simon shuddered. And teeth filed to points. “Some guys will do anything to look tough.”
“Which means he isn’t, really, I bet. In fact, he’s probably okay. He helped us when we were on the lam from the police, remember?”
“Probably only because he thought we were criminals.”
“Wait here,” Ike said.
Mr. Manning was sitting on the platform in a lawn chair under a big red umbrella with beer logos on it, borrowed from the Stone Lion Pub. He was feeding copies of the events program to dozens of clutching hands. Ike burrowed into the crowd.
Celeste, dressed in a long, white, cotton caftan and a vintage East Indian pith helmet, sat beside him and handed bottles of water to everyone who took the program. If anyone walked away without their water she called them back and tucked a bottle in their hand. “Don’t you know people die of heat exhaustion?” she said sternly.
Simon looked at the sign-in sheet. The last name down was such a scrawl, he couldn’t read it. It didn’t even look like real writing. He looked around. “Pier, what — Where’s Pier?”
Pier wasn’t anywhere. Neither was Amelia.
The moment she saw him on King Street, standing in front of that tattoo parlour, Amelia knew he was different from the others. It wasn’t that just he was taller. Maybe it was the way he moved, not slouching or clumping along like his buddies, but striding, shoulders back, head high. He wore that blue-green mohawk like a crown.
She couldn’t stop wondering about him. Didn’t feel like saying anything to the others, though, not with Pier there.
The eyes, when she got a look at them, sent a shock up her spine. What had Mara told Simon, last December? “The eyes are the last thing to change.”
What clinched it was the voice that hissed in her head, the moment before he turned away from the sign-in table. Watch your back, ardin child.
The last time she’d heard that voice, she was dangling in mid-air under Mythrin’s sequin moon. What was he doing here?
She whirled around and there was Pier, giving her a razor-edged look. The kid backed away, never taking her eyes off Amelia’s until she was out of sight in the crowd.
Amelia looked at the sign-in sheet. Uh-huh. She elbowed into the crowd in the direction where he’d vanished.
“All right!” Ike pried himself out of the crowd below Mr. Manning’s deck chair. His copy of the program was only slightly torn. “Simon? Look here. First event, Water Carry.” He looked up, then around. “Simon?” The crowd was thinning out, kids racing off in all directions. No Simon, nowhere.
Ike rolled his eyes. “What a time to have to go and pee!”
I was wrong to wait. Pier zigzagged through the crowd. That two-faced Amelia would stop pretending to be nice now that she had help from the other side.
I should have moved, as soon as it came through last night! I should have gone and got the Prism right away and gone straight back. But I was so tired!
Never mind, there was still time. She stopped and closed her eyes. Wayland’s Prism floated there in the darkness, more than ever like a great crystal sword. Where? She pivoted, she found the direction — it was unmistakable, like sunlight beating on her forehead. That way. She took a step, still with her eyes shut. Somebody ran into her and bounced her to the ground. “Sorry!” they yelled as she picked herself up.
Pier limped on in the direction of the pull. Her right knee hurt. She left the noisy field behind and crossed a hard-paved road. People raced past her this way and that, but little by little the street emptied. The noise of the games dropped away behind her.
The street curved and rose up a long hill. The houses here were big and old and sprawly, and there were trees around them that made the air cooler. In front of the houses were little meadows of short grass like green rugs, and flowers thick as snowdrifts. She wished she knew their names. One kind smelled like roses, but the blossoms were too big and had too many petals.
Still the Prism pulled and pulled, and Pier followed. She no longer had to close her eyes to feel it, even to see it, thank the heavens, because she’d already tripped and fallen twice. As she limped up the street, the direction of the pull changed. Now it came from the northeast. Now … a few more steps … it came from the east!
What was going on? Was it moving again?
Then she understood, and laughed aloud. “I have found it!”
A house stood just off the roadway. It was even bigger and more sprawly than the others, with peaked windows and porches and little towers sticking up. And so much wood! Even the roof was made of rounded wooden shingles instead of slate. She shuddered, thinking of dragon fire.
The Prism Blade was in that house.
Pier walked up the stony path to the front door and turned the handle. The door was locked. She tried sinking her mind into it, but knew at once this was just an ordinary lock, the kind you can’t think your way through.
She circled the house, looking into the windows. The bright sun outside made the inside of the house dark. Strange, you’d have thought the Prism being there would fill the place with light. Perhaps its light was the kind you could only see with your mind.
But it was there, all right. No doubt at all.
Around the back there was a low platform of square stones next to the house, then another meadow of short grass stretched back, and more flowers grew in patches, and more big trees arched overhead.
It was nice here, sweet-smelling and cool, not stinky and choking like those streets down near the bridge. She would have liked to lie down on the grass and look up through the stirring leaves, up into this soft, hazy, blue sky — a sky where metal machines might fly, but never a dragon.
There was something special about this garden, too. Something in it called to her, sang to her. But there was no time now to listen. The other song was stronger.
On this side the house had tall, wide windows that went down to the ground. They looked like doors all of glass, although Pier couldn’t imagine why anybody would want a door so easily broken. She put her face close to the glass and cupped her eyes to screen out the glare. And there it was, right in front of her. If not for the glass she could have taken three steps and put her hand on it.
What her eyes saw was a box. Just a plain, polished, wooden box — about three feet long and half that high and wide — sitting on a table. It looked as if it would open like a chest. A small metal lock kept it closed. Hard to believe something that ordinary-looking
could hold the opener of doors, the unanswerable riddle, the sword that would pierce Wyrm’s heart.
When she closed her eyes, her mind filled with rainbows. She opened them again. She pressed her hands together to stop their trembling. Gulped air. She’d been holding her breath.
Now. All I need is something to …
She looked around, reached down, and picked up a little stone statue that was standing at the edge of the stone platform. It was meant to be a dragon, but plainly the carver had never seen a real one. Such silly little wings!
She stepped back to the window, took firm hold of the dragon’s neck, and swung her arm up and back.
CHAPTER 11
TY
It took Simon ten minutes, running around on the sun-baked field, asking people if they’d seen a little kid with bright red hair, before he picked up Pier’s trail. For ten minutes more he sweated up and down the hilly streets north of the high school, looking this way and that for a flash of that particular shade of brilliant red. Twice he thought he’d seen her and darted into a backyard only to find roses climbing a wall or poppies swaying in the breeze.
At last he glimpsed, off to one side and behind trees, something poppy-bright that moved along like a person, not a poppy. Up Hill Street he raced, hung a sharp right at Elgin Crescent, shot past the first house, across a close-mown lawn, along a brick wall, and round the corner of a house, sneakers skidding on grass.
And there she was. All set to smash a window and get herself in terrible trouble.
“Pier! No!”
She looked at him, then back at the window. Instead of dropping the statue she took a firmer grip and restarted her swing.
And froze. Eyes wide and startled … and unfocussed, as if listening. Then the statue fell and clattered on the stone patio. At the same instant, Pier dropped to the ground and vanished.
Vanished. Simon drew a long, slow breath. He let it out when he remembered. After a moment he also remembered to shut his mouth.
