by Patricia Bow
She opened her eyes and the blue light and the sighing sound went away.
“Ammy, what are you doing?” Simon looked scared. She could see that even in the dark and through the layers of dirt and dried blood on his face.
“It’s Amelia. I’m turning into a dragon, I think.” She felt strangely calm, as if this was a dream. There was a reddish glint on her wrist. The patch felt rough when she moved her fingertips over it towards the hand, smooth when she stroked towards the elbow. “Look, I have scales!”
Simon grabbed her hand and touched it, then brought it close to his eyes. “No, you don’t!”
“Maybe they’re on the inside, not the outside.” She stood up.
He jumped up beside her. “You’re not a dragon! Forget what Pier said.”
“Never mind Pier. Ty said I’m changing. It’s from sharing Mara’s dreams.” She gripped the hilt of the sword and pulled it out of the lawn. “And on Mythrin I was a dragon, for a little while. Remember how I flew, how I carried you?” That memory blew through her again like a warm wind. It buoyed her up on her toes.
“Yes, but this is Earth. And you’re human, not dragon! You can’t just go changing because you want to.”
“Bet?” She listened again for the distant sighing, and it was stronger and nearer. She closed her eyes and pictured the gate. It glowed in the darkness behind her eyelids — tall, arched, a slab of glowing sapphire, its glassy surface a mass of braided shapes. She reached into the space inside the arbour, and it was icy cold. She opened her eyes, and there it was: the sapphire gate. It fitted the shape of the arbour exactly.
Simon was staring at her, not at the gate.
She raised a hand and touched the glowing slab, and it dissolved into the passage between worlds.
“Ike’ll kill me if I go without him,” Simon said.
“Stay here, then.”
“No way! Can’t let you go alone.”
He looked back over his shoulder. “Somebody’s watching us from Mr. Manning’s house. From the window.”
Amelia turned and yes, somebody tall and thin was standing at the patio window. She smiled and waved, grabbed Simon’s hand, and stepped forward.
CHAPTER 19
MOONRISE
The dusk-blue passage tipped them out into the crisp air of Mythrin under a golden sky. This time they weren’t sitting in a bruised heap in that tall, narrow building like a cathedral. Instead, they stood on a hillside knee-deep in small bushes with yellow flowers all over them. Boulders stuck up like islands in a yellow sea.
To their left rose a slender tree, and to their right another. Their branches arched and met overhead. They were the only two trees on the hillside.
In front of the gate, and in a wide trail down the hill, the yellow bushes were crushed and burned. Amelia closed her eyes and imagined two huge, scaly bodies bursting from the gate in a fury of claws and wings and boiling flame. Ty! She listened, but no answer came.
“We’re in the right place, anyway,” Simon said.
The valley of the Casseri lay below them. Westward rose the cliffs, black and jagged against the brightness of the hidden sun. The church-like building stood three-quarters of the way up, at the back of a stone shelf. Below sparkled a little river bordered by trees. Far to the east, in a gap between low hills, an orange disk sat on the silver line of the sea.
“Full moon rising. So Ike was nearly right on.” Simon gazed back and forth. “Where is everybody?”
Nothing moved in the valley, except the river. Nothing on the cliffs. Amelia grounded the sword, point down. “Have we missed the day? Or did they already have the showdown? Did they already….” She didn’t want to say it. Is there anybody left alive down there?
“You’re thinking Mara might ….”
“No! Mara would keep her word. But suppose Zeph got at the other dragons. He wouldn’t stop till all the Casseri were dead.” She started down the hill. “I need to find Ty. And Mara. Ow!” The yellow-flowered bushes snagged her ankles and whipped her legs with stems like bristly wires. Smaller rocks were hidden under the bushes, some small enough to roll underfoot, the others big enough to trip over.
“Actually, it’s worse than that,” Simon said, right behind her. “What Zeph would do, I mean.”
“How do you know what Zeph would do?”
“The Prism Blade showed me.”
As they picked their way down the hill, Simon told her what really happened when he wielded the cup and it became a sword. Wayland’s Prism had carried him into the dragon’s heart and mind. “I saw everything he ever thought. I knew everything he wanted.”
“We already knew what he wanted.” She stopped to pry her sandal from between two stones. “He wants to be chief. Ty told us that.”
“Yes, but Ty never guessed the worst. Ammy, listen.” He waited until she was looking straight at him. “Zeph was planning to use the Prism Blade against his own people!”
“But why? And how ….” She blinked. “Oh. Erwin. Or you.”
“Right. He was going to use Erwin — or me — to wield the Blade and kill Mara and anyone who followed her. See, he thinks just like Pier. He thinks that’s what the Blade does: kills dragons. He was all set to kill half the dragons on Mythrin just so he could be chief of the rest of them.”
She felt sick. “And the humans?”
“Oh, they’re nothing to him. Bugs to step on.”
They set off down the hill again. Near the bottom the slope levelled out, the snaggy bushes gave way to long grass and then to thick-limbed trees like willows, with roots that snaked around the boulders and into the water. The river chuckled and sang.
Still, nothing else moved. The air was sun-warm and motionless. Even the birds were silent. In fact, the only noisy things around here are Simon and me.
“So that’s how the Prism Blade is a sword in the heart.” Simon stumbled over a tree root and slapped a hand on a boulder to stop his fall.
“Okay, and I get it about opening doors. But what about the riddle that can’t be answered?” Amelia turned on one foot. She’d been walking along the tree roots, using the sword like a hiking pole. “Oh, wait. He called you riddle!”
“Right. The dragon can’t get inside your mind, even after you stop using the Blade. He can’t make you do anything. He can’t even use fire on you. That makes you the riddle he can’t read. See, most humans are clear — dragons can see right through them — but the Prism makes you like a … like a stone.”
“How do you know all that?” She felt a bit jealous. Until now, she’d been the insider, the one who knew about dragons.
He shrugged. “Dunno. I just know.”
“Well, I can see how Mara wouldn’t like it — humans being able to read dragon’s minds — but —”
Something cracked on the boulder next to Simon’s hand. Metal flashed and bounced. Something else thunked into a tree trunk behind Amelia’s head and stuck there. They stared at it: a thick, steel shaft that looked like it could go through an elephant without stopping.
They dropped. Steel flashed through the space where they’d been standing. “Hey!” Amelia yelled. “Stop! It’s us!”
“Why are they shooting at us?” Simon burrowed into the long grass between two boulders.
“Pier told them to, probably. She hates me.”
Amelia peered out from behind a tree trunk as wide as a fridge. She ducked back. A bolt grazed the trunk and fell behind her.
Keep your head down!
Amelia choked. That voice in her head! She could almost see the blazing emerald eyes.
“Mara! Where are you?”
“Uh?” Simon propped himself up on his elbows.
Look up. Look around. “Look up, she says.”
“The cliffs!” Simon pointed.
Amelia looked, and saw. One of the jagged points on the western cliff poked up another pointy bit. A dragon lifting a wing. Now she remembered that the top of that cliff was actually smooth. All the jagged bits were dragons.
“There mu
st be hundreds!”
Simon rolled over on his back so he could look up the yellow-flowered hill. “Thousands.”
The hill had a jagged crest now too, like the cliff — only, not black on this side, but glittering like jewels as they caught the last of the sunlight. Wherever you looked around the rim of the valley — dragons.
“Where are the humans?”
“They’d be in the caves,” Simon said.
“Mara! What about Ty? Is he all right?”
He will live. Which is more than his foolishness deserves. The voice was grimly amused. Now, hush! You have come at just the wrong time. Everything hangs on a claw’s tip.
“But Mara, we did it! We saved Wayland’s Prism from Pier, and —”
And brought it here. I know. I feel it. All the dragons feel it. The little pale ardin feels it too, no doubt. This is the worst thing you could have done.
“But it’s not —”
Hush! A door slammed in Amelia’s mind. She stared helplessly at Simon. “She’s gone. She says we messed up.”
“Something bad is going to happen,” he said quietly. “There are only … what did Pier say? Two hundred and thirty-one people in the caves. A lot of them kids.”
“Mara wouldn’t hurt them.”
He just looked at her.
She closed her eyes. Mara! No answer.
One of the jagged bits on the cliff moved again. A voice like a cello swept the valley. It was Mara’s dragon voice, but grown so big that it might have come from a cello the size of Founders Tower.
“Strangers!” sang the cello, immense and sweet. “We kept our word. All these days we left you in peace. But now the round moon rises. And you have not gone.”
The voice vibrated in the tree trunk under Amelia’s hands, and then it died. Then: “Strangers, this is our world. You cannot stay here. You must go.” Silence, but for the liquid song of the river. Then again the deep, sweet voice: “If you stay, you will stay in your caves like worms. And you will starve. We will wait, and watch. We can wait forever.”
“This can’t be happening! Mara wouldn’t …”
“Sh!” Simon said.
“We do not hate you,” sang the cello voice. “And we do not love death for its own sake. But you must go from here. Perhaps you have lost the way.” A long silence, and Amelia thought there would be no more, but then: “Come to me. I will go down.”
“Come to me!” Simon sat up, open-mouthed. “Is she crazy? They won’t ever —”
“Oh, good glory!” The largest jagged bit on the cliff lifted off, spread wide wings, and floated down to the meadow across the river. “Mara, no! They’ll kill you!”
Forgetting danger, Amelia started to squeeze between the boulder and the tree to the river. Simon scrambled up and grabbed the back of her T-shirt. “You’ll get yourself shot! Besides, Mara isn’t stupid.”
He was right. Mara wouldn’t do anything dumb. “But I have to know what’s going on!” She looked up at the tree she’d been hiding behind. It had limbs like an old coal furnace. Five seconds later she was halfway up the tree, gazing through a gap in the leaves.
The great crimson dragon settled in the meadow across the river. She folded her wings and curled her tail around her like a cat, and then kept getting smaller. In a moment, Mara stood there looking just as Amelia had last seen her. Again she had shaped the jeans and red-sequined jacket they’d found for her that time she was a refugee on Earth. Guess she really liked them, Amelia thought.
I really did. Mara’s voice had a smile in it now.
Steel winked beside her head and a strand of her long dark-red hair lifted. She didn’t move an inch.
“Get down! They’re shooting!”
They are missing.
Another bolt flicked past Mara’s shoulder. It left a sequin hanging by a thread. She didn’t stir. Someone — Yulith? — called out sharply. After that no more bolts came.
The gold faded from the sky. The dragon shapes along the valley’s eastern rim stopped glittering. The river caught a glimmer from the rising moon. Amelia had a dozen questions, but something in Mara’s perfect stillness told her to shut up.
“I’m getting cramps in my legs,” she whispered to Simon.
She was just beginning to think that nothing would happen till next morning and she might as well climb down, when someone came out of an opening in the valley wall across the river. One after the other, three people walked down the slope to the meadow. They were just visible in the thin moonlight. One was very small. About two yards away from Mara, they stopped and stood in a row. Then the smallest one took a step forward.
They talked. Amelia heard and saw it all as if she was sitting inside Mara’s head, right between the eyes.
“It’s like I’ve got a seat in the front row at the movies,” she told Simon. “Mara wants to help the Casseri move on to a world of their own. She says the dragons can work with Pier to find the right gate.”
“And what do the dragons get out of this?”
“They get rid of the humans. See, there are lots of gates, and the dragons can fly around and find them. And they can open them right away, which the humans can’t. Then Pier and the warriors can check them out. Then, once they find the right one and all the people are through, the gate will be buried so nobody can come back that way.”
“That makes sense,” Simon said out of the darkness below. “Why didn’t they do that right at the start?”
“Because the Casseri couldn’t imagine ever working with dragons, I guess. They thought they’d find the right door by themselves, or else Pier would find Wayland’s Prism and kill all the dragons. But Pier was gone for a couple of weeks, Mythrin time. And now time’s run out.”
“But ….” Simon’s voice went low. “We have Wayland’s Prism. What’s to stop them from coming over and grabbing it from us?”
“Dragons,” Amelia said. “Mara’s told the Casseri that if they send anybody over here the dragons will attack.”
“We’ve made things worse, then.”
“I only wanted to save Ty!” But Simon was right. “You’d think the Casseri would be happy, okay? But they’re not. They want Mara to promise that the world they move to has no dragons. Funny, it seems there are a lot of dragons in the universe. I never would’ve guessed that. And Yulith wants a world with no people so they won’t have to fight other humans. Mara says she can’t promise any such thing.”
“Doesn’t sound like things are going so good.”
Things are going badly, Mara said in Amelia’s head.
“Now Mara’s saying she’ll promise only that the dragons will search for the right door and they won’t attack during the search. That should be enough. Pier says, how can we believe you? Mara says …”
I give my word.
The whole valley went still.
“Oh, Mara!” Amelia groaned softly.
A breeze sighed from the cliffs, a breath exhaled from a thousand dragon throats.
“What is it?” Simon whispered. “What’s happened?”
Four words that were rarer and more magical than dragon’s blood, stronger than the strongest iron. She felt the terrible strain in Mara’s mind, and the shadow of fear. No wonder they did their best to never give a straight answer.
“She gives her word. And now Gram is saying that’s not good enough. The idiot! Don’t they know?”
Amelia. You and Simon must go home. Now.
“But it’s not over!”
It is all but over. This will fail. What follows will be bad. Go now!
Amelia dropped the Prism Blade to the ground and climbed down after it. “She says it’s failed and we have to leave.”
Simon looked back across the river. “We can’t just go away and leave all those people to die!”
“Well, how are we going to save them? It’s all their fault because they won’t trust Mara!” She wanted to bash something. She picked up the Prism Blade and hacked at the tree. It bounced off. The blade wasn’t even sharp.
“Trust? How can they, after what happened to them? Dragons killed Pier’s whole family. What are they saying now?”
“Don’t know. Mara’s cut me off.”
Simon balanced on a rock at the edge of the river. “We have to do something.”
“Mara gave her word!” Amelia said bitterly. “If Pier knew Mara — I mean, really knew her. If ….” She looked at the Blade in her hand. She took a breath. “Simon!”
“What?” He turned around, wobbling on his rock.
“We have to get this thing to Pier, and fast!”
“The sword? But ….” His eyes widened. Then he leaped from his rock to the grass. Not so dumb, Simon. “But how?”
“Like this,” Amelia said. She wasn’t sure she could do it. She’d done it before, but never on purpose. Mara had never told her how. Maybe Mara couldn’t have explained. To a dragon, it must be like breathing.
She closed her eyes tight. Inside herself, she saw reddish-brown scales creeping over her hands and up her arms. She saw her nails growing out strong and curved. Saw her bones growing longer, her muscles stronger. On her shoulders, wings sprouted and unfolded. Hot air gusted in her lungs. She sucked it back down.
She felt light. Funny, you’d think I’d feel heavy with all this extra body, but I don’t. I feel like I could …
Could ride the wind.
She opened her eyes. Simon was scowling at her. She remembered how much he hated her being a dragon. Maybe he was afraid she wouldn’t want to change back.
She looked down at herself. Grinned with all her teeth.
He took a step back. “How will you get over there without getting shot?”
“Can’t worry about that!” She grasped the sword and bunched her hind legs beneath her. That felt right. You leaped, and out with the wings, and then —
She sank down again as Simon scrambled onto her back. “What are you doing?”
“Coming with you.”
“You’re nuts! Get off!”
“You’ll need me,” he said calmly. “Let’s go!”
CHAPTER 20
