Smokey Coils dropped his camouflage and hung his head. The deep scar through his left eye had not grown fainter with time. In fact, there were growths beginning to form around it. His right eye, a single black orb, glistened with a tear. His wing claw worked around two coins—zeep, zeep. Plick.
“You’ve got two coins now, instead of just the one,” Winona noticed.
He ignored the observation and answered her initial question. “You need someone now, Winona. Someone helpful. I’m not that someone.”
“I suppose not. I still wish you’d stay, for Catherine’s sake. She needs a grandfather.”
“Let the Blaze help you. She’ll have plenty of family, in Crescent Valley.”
Winona shook her head. “I’ll raise her in Northwater. Like I raised Jada. I’ll find some help to watch her on crescent moons. She doesn’t need to know she’s a dragon until much later.”
He raised the coins to his eye and sighed. “Earlier today, I went up to Northwater . . .”
“Northwater? You never go there. And as a dragon?”
“I went camouflaged. I watched the people. Outside the supermarket. Mothers with children. Every now and then, a mom would stop out in front—her kid would stop her. You’ve seen them, I’ll bet, those gumball and toy machines? They’d put in a coin, out comes candy for the kid, kid gets quieter. I watched them and thought . . .”
After a while, she prompted him. “Were you thinking of Jada?”
“And of Catherine. I never gave Jada much, not even gum-balls . . .”
“Not even much of anything, Smokey. So you got Catherine a gumball? She’s less than a year old—she’ll choke on it!”
He scraped the ground with a claw and cleared his throat. “That’s not the point, Win. Once I heard about Jada, I needed . . . I needed . . .”
Winona deflated, losing her anger for this man. He had been entirely too absent from Jada’s life, but he could still feel loss. She stepped up to him and put a gentle wing on his.
“I wanted something,” he finally blurted. “To get Catherine, I mean. I found a quarter. It was on the ground, where some mother had dropped it. So I picked it up. It went in okay, but then nothing would happen. No gumball, no toy. I tried it again. The quarter just shot straight through. Again, and again . . .”
He began to rub the quarters together again, gulping with the effort to keep control. Zeep. Zeep. Plick. “I kept the quarter.”
“To go with the one you already had,” Winona said. She knew the story behind the first one, and saw no need to go over it here. He had suffered enough.
He patted her wing. “Maybe I’ll come back when she’s nearer her first change.” He motioned inside to the crib where the human baby wriggled. “She’ll need family then.”
“She will. And you’re always welcome to drop by before then, Smokey.”
“I know I am. Thanks.” He smiled at her. “It’s not that I don’t love you. I’ve just . . . seen too much.”
“I know how you feel.”
“I’d like to show you,” he added, walking out of the cave, “one last thing.”
She followed him. “What’s that?”
“Some illusions. And some reality.”
He began to shine, setting the entrance of the cave aglow with a golden light. Winona vaguely recalled something only elder creepers could do. What is it exactly that they do? she asked herself. Somehow, her memory was unclear. But her answer came soon enough.
The twilit fields around them burst with dark colors, as the moon elms sprouted impossible flowers and the stars began to streak through the sky. The ends of the crescent moon grew until a bright “O” rolled over the horizon. The distant buzzing of fire hornets gave way to the hooting of wooden flutes, and the scents around her recalled something prehistoric.
These are dreams of mine, she realized. From childhood, from adulthood, even from last night. They were all happening at once. These aren’t real.
Nothing here is, she heard his voice say. His outline, glowing brighter than the moon, was the only thing that stayed constant as the scene around them shifted. Elms disintegrated into grass, grass grew into animals, animals rotted into pools of tar. Massive flocks of birds drew a darker curtain over the world, spiders danced around a roaring fire that smelled of roast chicken, and shimmering streams trickled uphill by their feet. Winona looked around for a dragon, but beyond the still form of Smokey Coils, she saw no one. Given a moment, she understood why.
I never dream about them. About us. We are all too real.
But then he showed her one dragon after all, and her limbs froze as she realized what this last gift was that her estranged husband was giving her. He let her take it in for some time, and then the real Crescent Valley rushed in to replace the illusions she had seen.
Without another word, he kissed her scaled cheek, and left. Winona watched him leave. She could not make out the exact moment when his image faded into the twilight, or when the sound of his two quarters—zeep, zeep, plick—gave way to the strumming of insects.
All she could do was trust her third visitor would come, before she forgot all of this.
“Tasa.” The word came out like a gasp. “You’re here.”
“Winona.” He stepped forward and put a wing claw on her back. “It’s been too long.”
They sat together on the rock outside her cave in silence, watching the lichen shift from lime green to powder blue. Baby Catherine occasionally let out a yelp, but it was a pleasant sort of sound, one of interest and discovery. Finally, Tasa took a breath.
“Smokey’s gone.”
“Yeah, he left. I mean, I don’t think he left me. He and I were already . . . Anyway, he left . . . the situation. He’s out in the wild, somewhere.” She waved a wing claw indiscriminately. “I don’t think he’ll return. I can’t blame him. Everybody copes in their own way.”
Tasa let out a snort. “Don’t we know it.”
“You, for instance.” Winona reached up with a claw and rubbed her ear. “You’re always there for me, when something goes wrong. When Ma got hurt, and when she and Forrester died. When I hated myself as a young dragon, and at college when you thought I needed friends. The day Charles Longtail died.” She sniffed and chewed her lip. “And now, of course. You were there, every time. I always appreciated that, Tasa.”
“It’s what I’m here for, Winona. And I’ll be here again, I’m sure.”
Her blurry vision tried to take in the details of the moon elms, and the lichen, and the stars. “I don’t think so, Tasa. I don’t think that would help me anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
She wiped her eyes so she could see him clearly. “I mean,” she said carefully, “you’re only here because for the longest time, I didn’t learn to cope. Then, here in Crescent Valley, I found a sort of peace. Over the years, I’ve seen dragons at their best, not just at their worst. I’ve come to see beauty in them, and honor, and justice. And best of all, I’ve come to appreciate this place. Crescent Valley. This is a safe place. It makes us feel secure. Maybe we can start to feel secure enough to reach out to others.”
He shook his head. “Like Charles did?”
“Charles failed. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying. We’ve done our part to provoke them, Tasa. Ma provoked them. So did Forrester. Even . . . even Jada.” She sniffed, feeling her heart break all over again at the thought of her dead daughter. “We’re not all like that. Smokey’s been a peaceful soul.”
Tasa snorted. “Smokey. That’s your best example?”
“Crawford and Caroline Scales. They’re good friends, with a good son. As long as they and others can stay true, I can be true to myself. I can get through this grief without pretending.”
“I don’t think you can do it on your own. I think you’re going to wish I was here for you.”
“I think I knew,” Winona whispered, to herself. “Even before Smokey showed me. I think I knew from the beginning. That someday, I would have to come to terms wit
h it all. That I’d make myself whole again. Or at least I’d like to think I was that smart, that strong, all my life. Maybe I’m kidding myself.” She leveled her crimson eyes at Tasa again. “After all, I was kidding myself when you first showed up the night Ma was attacked.”
“I don’t understand,” Tasa said. Winona could see right away that he did.
“You were never a dragon who only had good timing. You kept me safe and sane when I was young. I’m not young anymore. I’m an elder. And elders need to do better than I’m doing. They need to set their imaginations aside, and focus on what’s real.”
“You’re going to get hurt without me,” Tasa whined, his outline fraying.
“I don’t think so. I think without you, I’m finally going to heal. My real friends will take it from here. Good-bye, Tasa.”
And like that, the illusion was gone.
CHAPTER 15
Following Footsteps
Of the three people who visited her the day she learned Jada died, Winona heard little from Smokey Coils afterward, and saw nothing of the “dragon” she had named Tasa. Unfortunately, Xavier Longtail was neither a recluse nor imaginary.
Xavier was there to bring Winona the news that Donald Swift had died in Eveningstar. Donald had been Eldest of the Blaze and the last surviving child of Jeffrey Swift, the last dragon Richard Evan Seabright had killed. Donald had been a massive, bright blue dasher with only a single prong on his tail—but the last six feet of that tail were pure, sharp, carved bone. The night werachnids attacked Eveningstar, led by Otto Saltin and armed with sorceries no living dragon had seen before, Donald Swift made his last stand in the town’s central square. According to the last few dragons who fled the city, nine bloated arachnid bodies felt his tail spike pierce their abdomens, dozens of bulbous eyes were clawed out of shrieking heads, and hundreds of jointed legs burned to a crisp before the enemy finally overwhelmed him with massive doses of poison.
Donald Swift, Xavier had told her with a deadly serious tone, died like a dragon.
Xavier was also there when the Blaze chose Donald’s successor. His own name had come up for consideration (Winona suspected he submitted it himself), but there were few votes for him. The winner, by a large margin, was Winona.
While she knew she was being considered—she was, after Donald Swift (and aside from the reclusive Smokey Coils), the actual oldest dragon among them—it was a mild surprise to learn of her election. She had thought the Blaze would choose someone more . . . well, dragonlike. Not the obsessive Xavier Longtail, to be sure—maybe Ned Brownfoot, or Crawford Scales. Sure, Crawford was a good fifteen years younger than Winona—so was Xavier, and sixty-year-old dragons were getting rarer and rarer. Hundreds of years ago, it was not uncommon for the Eldest to be ninety or a hundred years old, or more. There were tales of elders from the Scales and Brandfire clans who reached 150 years old! And that didn’t account for the first, ancient dragons like Seraphina, who lived for hundreds of years (and some were rumored to live to this day).
No longer, she told herself. Today, making it to seventy is an accomplishment.
Xavier was also there some ten years later, having turned seventy himself, about the same time Crawford Scales announced to the Blaze some interesting news about his granddaughter.
“Good news from Jonathan,” Crawford announced at the end of the day’s business. “His little Niffer had her first morph today. He asked me to clear the cabin and surrounding woods of all dragons. This’ll be her first trip up there under a crescent, and he doesn’t want to overwhelm her while he’s teaching her to fly and such. She’s not taking the change too well, I hear.”
There was some genial chuckling around the Blaze at this. Winona didn’t join in. She thought of her own first morph, and how she had hated it. Was young Jennifer Scales feeling the same thing? Did she hate her body, how she looked, how she could kill?
Lost in thought, she almost missed a question. “I’m sorry, Elder Brownfoot?”
“I’m sayin’, Eldest, perhaps we oughtta pull together a new set of classes for some of these young ’uns. I don’t think we’ve had much learnin’ in a while, n’some of these youngsters barely know what they are. I doubt they know much about stalkers, n’spiders, n’our traditions n’such. There’s ’nuff now to pull ’em together—Jonny’s girl now, n’your little Catherine’s been a dragon for some months, n’that Rosespan boy, ’n . . .”
“Yes, Ned. That makes sense. I assume you’ll handle any tramplers like Catherine. Are there volunteers among the dashers or creepers?”
The Blaze identified a couple of younger adults for tutors and then adjourned. Winona distracted herself for some time, turf-whomping through the moon elms on the way back to her cave.
What will Catherine learn about being a dragon? she wondered. Will she learn what Jada learned—to be impulsive, and aggressive, and overly adventurous?
The initial signs were not encouraging. When Catherine had learned last year what she was, she went completely berserk. Perhaps it was the manner in which she’d learned. There was no perfect way to tell a teenager what they were and what they would become. Winona had chosen what many called the “demonstration” method: She picked a calm, uneventful crescent moon to stay home, took her granddaughter out to the twilit backyard, assured her what she was about to see was perfectly safe, and let the crescent moon do its thing.
Catherine’s initial reaction had been bad enough—abject terror. Winona almost had her calmed down, almost had the girl reassured that because she had seen her own grandmother like this when she was a baby, this couldn’t be so bad . . . when Smokey had shown up as promised—though it would have been more helpful had he called ahead. Smokey simply unveiled out of thin air, and he looked much worse than the last time Winona had seen him. The bumps and warts around his wounded eye were now full-fledged tumors, and the “healthy” eye . . . well, what was growing in there . . . Winona couldn’t blame Catherine for running screaming into the night. They found her later, in a ditch by a state highway, her runaway attempt foiled by the unfortunate coincidence of her own first change, which left her scared and exhausted.
Recalling how furious she had been and how she had dressed down Smokey that night, she allowed herself a grim chuckle. She neatly halted her turf-whomp at the entrance to her cave and crawled inside. The pythons inside had already arranged a small cooking fire, probably with the help of the newolf pack that lived nearby.
She found some strips of smoked meat in the back of the cave and chewed on them thoughtfully. Catherine loved the Scales farm, but she would have to leave this time around, along with everyone else. It was Jennifer’s family’s place, after all. They deserved the chance to have it to themselves for a few days. Catherine could stay with family friends in Northwater, and lie low. Winona could join them in a day or two.
Why not bring her to Crescent Valley?
Winona dismissed the thought. Catherine had not experienced fifty morphs. Bringing a dragon here earlier than that was dangerous. Rules existed for a reason.
She’s been here before! She lived here as an infant!
This thought, too, was waved away. Catherine had not been in Crescent Valley since she was two years old. Plenty of dragons kept newborn children here, since leaving them with sitters at such a young age during crescent moons wasn’t practical. As long as kids left before the age of four, they would likely remember Crescent Valley as no more than a twilit dream.
The truth was, Winona was not sure she ever wanted Catherine to see Crescent Valley. Because if Catherine came to Crescent Valley, then . . .
Then what? You’d have to face the fact that she’s a dragon? That she’s old enough to make her own choices? That she may make choices you don’t care for?
Had she not dispelled the illusion of Tasa years ago, Winona would have sworn it was the obnoxious red creeper whispering in her ear again. She waved at the air by her ear, as if trying to shoo a mosquito. “For heaven’s sake,” she said aloud, to no one i
n particular. “Catherine will come to Crescent Valley when I’m good and ready for her to be here!”
It was about a year later when Winona gazed darkly upon the sight of her granddaughter, uninvited, in Crescent Valley. Had the girl’s leg not been already broken, Winona would have seriously considered splintering it herself. Anything to slow her down!
They were in the hunting fields, down from the steeper slopes of Wings Mountain, where everything had gone wrong. Best Winona could tell, something had spooked the herd of oreams they were all hunting. That something may or may not have been Catherine herself. The large, horned rams had reintegrated their difficult, full formation and become incredibly dangerous to anyone stuck in their path. Newolves were too fast to be horribly concerned, and dragons could fly or turf-whomp out of the way. Unless, like her granddaughter, they had managed to break a leg during the proceedings.
That hadn’t been the worst of it. Jennifer Scales, granddaughter to Crawford Scales and apparently the newest incarnation of the revered Ancient Furnace, had shifted back into human form and then given a beaststalker shout in the dead center of Crescent Valley.
What that sound, what that light, had reawakened in Winona! It had shocked her beyond measure and terrified her past the point of action. She was outraged at the intrusion. And she wasn’t the only one.
Thank goodness Xavier Longtail was here, she was thinking despite herself. The dasher had knocked the girl unconscious, perhaps with more force than absolutely necessary, but the fact was he had given Winona valuable time to think.
“What do we do, Eldest?” Several of the tramplers nearby were looking at Catherine with concern . . . and at the nearby limp body of Jennifer Scales with far less favor.
“First, someone needs to take my granddaughter to my cave and arrange for a doctor.”
Two burly creepers volunteered. Catherine, who had had the good sense until this point not to say a word, suddenly began to protest—she wanted to stay with Jennifer, the fool!—but the conversation was short and sweet, since Winona ignored her.
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