The dragon plucked the tiny square of pasteboard with two enormous talons. “It seems a bit like cheating.”
“So who’s going to call you on it? You’re a dragon.” Jen smiled.
The dragon grinned, displaying twin rows of sharp, white teeth. “Indeed.”
THE REMAINDER OF THE TRIP was relatively simple. The iron golem was pleased enough to hear about electroplating and rust-resistant coatings that he agreed chasing Jen would only risk opening more microfractures to speed oxidation. The chimera slunk into the woods in embarrassment after Jen couldn’t stop laughing for almost ten minutes. The vampire wouldn’t get within fifteen feet of Jen after a handful of garlic oil pills.
At last, Jen stood before the alchemist’s castle. There was a small mailbox planted in the dirt on this side of the drawbridge. This gave Jen a twinge of anger, marbled through with sadness as though one of them were decaying radioactively into the other. She wondered which one started the reaction. She’d never gotten any letters from her father. Not even cards for their birthdays. A somewhat ragged owl with white plumage was sorting letters.
“Honestly,” Jen said, rolling her eyes. “It’s not like your species has particularly great direction sense. Or day-vision, for that matter. Pigeons would have made much more sense; something migratory, at least.”
“Hey,” the owl snapped, “you try dealing with the price of mouse gizzards in this economy and see what jobs you feel like turning down.”
Jen watched it flap irritably away. “And why would you even need a postal service if you can teleport at will?” she said, unable to help herself. She needed to work on her tact, Newt always told her. Mom didn’t see the problem with being plainspoken, but that was part of the trouble, wasn’t it?
Meanwhile, she was on the outside of a castle, and her father was on the inside. She peered down into the moat, then ducked backwards quickly as a goggle-eyed fish with enormous teeth leapt into the air, jaws snapping shut in the space where her nose had been a moment ago.
“Dad!” Jen said. “That’s ridiculous. Piranha hardly ever attack humans, and they’re really not all that dangerous even when they do.” She moved several steps away from the water, however, just in case.
“He just got some mail,” Jen murmured to herself. “He has to come out and get it sometime.”
She settled herself beside the mailbox, crossed her legs, and pulled out a book. Introduction to Neurochemistry was interesting, but a little difficult to read; perfect for long waits. After a while, she ate her second sandwich. The sun set, staining the sky red as suspended water particles in the atmosphere bent and scattered the light at its new, oblique angle. This high in the mountains, the view was spectacular, but brief. Jen sighed when she could no longer see the words on the page. She tucked the book behind her head for a pillow, zipped up her jacket, and closed her eyes. I’ll just sit for a while, she told herself. Not sleep. Just rest my eyes…
A hollow, metallic clatter woke her in the dark hours of the morning. Her eyes flew open to espy a short, thin man with a brown beard and sad eyes.
“Aha!” Jen cried. She leapt to her feet, clutching her book.
Her father reached into the mailbox and withdrew Jen’s car keys, which had been balanced precariously on the lip. “These are yours, I take it?” His voice was quiet, and not as deep as she’d expected. He held the keys out on the palm of his hand. “You look a lot like your mother.”
Jen found she didn’t know what to say. She retrieved her keys. Now that she was standing, she realized that she was taller than he was. This felt somehow wrong to Jen, perverse, a violation of a belief she hadn’t known she held.
“Have you come to kill me?” her father asked her.
Jen’s jaw dropped. “What? No! Why would you think that?”
He shrugged, his eyes downcast. He looked very small. “It was the last thing she said to me.”
In an almost physical rush, Jen had a vision of her father’s life for the past fourteen years. He lived alone, in the cold and the dark, his family taken away—all done legally; Jen had seen the papers–-and surrounded by impossibilities of his own design. He could do anything he wanted, except for the thing he wanted most. How much time had he spent calling into a void before giving up? How long could someone survive surrounded only by what they made themselves? At what point would one’s own psychological effluvium reach toxic concentrations?
“I’m sorry,” Jen said. It didn’t seem right, but the silence was worse.
“She raised you well, I see. You walked right past my defenses.”
“Monsters are a lot less troublesome if you don’t treat them like monsters,” said Jen. “I deal in facts. Problems and solutions.”
“That sounds like your mother, all right.”
Jen hesitated. “Did she really threaten to kill you?”
“If I ever spoke to you or her again. You kids, especially.” Her father shrugged again. “I didn’t quite believe her when she threatened it, but seeing you here, now, looking like her twenty years ago… “ He rubbed at his beard, then took both hands and scrubbed his face as though coming out from a swim. “Why have you come, then?”
“Oh!” Jen looked up. “It’s about Newt. He’s gone alchemical.” She relayed the sordid tale of Newt’s descent into nigh-madness.
“So he kept at it, did he?” Jen’s father tapped his lips thoughtfully, giving Jen a frisson as she recognized the gesture in herself.
“Not exactly,” said Jen. “It went dormant, I suppose.”
“You can’t keep out of it for long, though,” her father said, shaking his head. “Not once it’s started. I don’t know if you could ever avoid it in the first place; the propensity for alchemy is something that tends to be discovered when it happens, not something you can predict. It was inevitable for Newton to experiment. This incident has probably been made worse by his long abstinence, actually; he’ll be in a fever about it for weeks.”
“Can’t you do something? He’s trying to find Truth. Surely you’ve already done that, somewhere along the line; can’t you give him the secret?”
“That’s what alchemy is, Jen.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “The search for truth. No two alchemists ever find the same one; my truth would be as useless to him as it is to you and your mother.”
“I don’t think it’s useless,” Jen said. She reached up a hand and touched his arm lightly. “Some of it can be very beautiful, in its own way.”
He smiled, but only with half of his mouth. “I remember when she said the same thing.”
“I think you should see Newt,” Jen announced firmly. “You might not be able to give him what he wants, but he needs your support. He always has. You understand him better than we can, at least in this.”
“It would be breaking the rules…”
Jen waved a hand. “He’s eighteen. He can make his own decisions about that now.”
Her father nodded slowly. “You’re…you’re right. Of course you’re right. You have that clarity of vision that I never mastered. I get so wrapped up in my own projects that I forget…well, I forget things.” He glanced up, suddenly, a sly look in his eyes. “You know, you broke the agreement yourself, coming to see me. You’re only fifteen.”
“Some things are more important than following rules,” said Jen. “I’m surprised you’d even suggest they aren’t and why are you grinning?”
Her father didn’t answer. Instead, he stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. From overhead came the sound of massive, leathery wings flapping. With a whumph and a brief whirlwind of dust, the dragon landed on the trail in front of them.
“I thought you said you couldn’t fly!” Jen snapped.
The dragon bowed its head sheepishly.
“He probably couldn’t, when you met him. It depends on who’s doing the asking,” her father said. He snapped his fingers, and the dragon knelt on its forelimbs, making a sort of scaly staircase to its shoulders. “Come on. Let’s go save Newton.” He s
crambled up and reached a hand down to Jen. “It’s okay. I’ll keep us in the air.”
Jen looked at the hand for a moment. The physics were all wrong; dragons couldn’t exist, let alone fly with two passengers on board. What if her father was wrong, and her presence damaged whatever force kept the dragon airborne? How could she trust something she couldn’t understand?
“All right,” she said. She took her father’s hand.
THE FIFTY-ONE SUITORS OF PRINCESS JAMATPIE
Leah Cypess
They were madly in love with her, and they were driving her crazy.
She couldn’t step out of her room without tripping over the bundles of flowers and love poetry that had been left at her doorstep. She couldn’t walk out onto her balcony in the morning without having at least three of them kneeling below it, singing love songs that didn’t rhyme. She couldn’t go for a walk without at least four of them offering to accompany her, and then dueling with each other to decide who would get the honor. In short, she could do nothing except sit in her room and glare at the walls.
“I hate them,” Princess Jamatpie snapped one afternoon. “I hate being courted and I hate all the suitors. I want them to go away.”
Her maidservant, Amelda, who was combing the princess’s hair, looked mildly shocked. “It is time for you to get married, Your Highness. You are sixteen years old. Your mother got married at fifteen.”
“But my mother,” Jamatpie pointed out, “got to marry my father. I have to marry one of these utter imbeciles!”
“I’m sure they’re not all imbeciles, Your Highness. At least you’d better hope not, because the only way to get rid of them is to marry one. At that point, the rest will leave. All you have to do is make your choice. My personal recommendation is Prince Halis.”
Jamatpie twisted around and looked at her maidservant in surprise. “Why do you say that?”
“He bribed me to, Your Highness.”
Half an hour later, after Jamatpie’s rage had subsided and there was nothing breakable left in the room, she gave her maidservant’s advice some serious thought. Amelda, she concluded reluctantly, was right. But she didn’t want to marry someone who was only courting her because she was a rich, beautiful princess. She wanted to marry someone who liked her for herself. Which was a little unreasonable, considering the fact that none of them knew her very well, but unreasonableness in royalty is a hereditary trait.
Jamatpie went to her mother to ask for advice.
“You might try what I did,” her mother suggested. “I didn’t hold with these antiquated, sexist methods. I simply interviewed them. Each one, for an hour, until I found out who I liked the best. And that, of course, was your father.” She smiled fondly at the king, who stopped snoring and looked up, feeling that he had missed something.
Her mother’s method sounded reasonable, but rather time-consuming. Jamatpie decided to try the more old-fashioned methods first.
“I pretended that I had been turned into a cat,” her aunt Elina told her. “And, of course, all the suitors left, except for one who said he loved me even if I was a cat.”
“Hmm,” said Jamatpie doubtfully.
“I posed riddles,” her cousin Rametta said. “And the person who got the right answer wed me.”
That sounded pretty good, except that Jamatpie didn’t know any riddles.
“I didn’t have to worry about such things,” her great-aunt Sevella sniffed haughtily. “I was placed under a spell by an evil witch and trapped in a glass tower for twenty years. The hero who rescued me became my husband, of course. So I didn’t have to deal with this foolishness.”
“How fortunate for you,” Jamatpie said, and left hastily.
It was the suggestion of a distant cousin that finally brought her to a decision. Lialla explained that she had located a convenient dragon, and declared that the prince who slew it would marry her.
“I don’t think dragon-slaying has anything to do with the qualities one looks for in a husband,” Jamatpie said, trying to be polite.
She needn’t have bothered. Lialla, unoffended, just shrugged.
“Of course it doesn’t,” she said. “But you have to pick somehow, don’t you?”
That comment lingered in Jamatpie’s mind. The first thing she did was go back to her mother’s suggestion, and interview each prince for half an hour. (An hour seemed a bit excessive.) But all the princes had researched her interests intensively. Every one of them hummed her favorite tune as he walked through the door, explained that he was currently reading her favorite book, and then waxed eloquent about the rights of unicorns to live without being hunted. (Save the Unicorns was one of the princess’s passions.) After twenty interviews, Jamatpie gave up in disgust.
“You have to pick somehow,” she repeated aloud. “If that’s all there is to it, I’m holding a lottery.”
She made the announcement from her balcony the next day, and the news spread quickly. The next morning, she opened the door to her bedroom and found nothing but carpet at her feet.
“How strange,” she said.
“Not at all,” Amelda said. “Now that the princes know you are going to choose by lottery, they are simply waiting. Why should they spend more money on flowers and hired poets?”
“Oh,” Jamatpie said. “Well, that’s good. I think.”
That night, as was her custom, she dined with all her suitors at a huge table in the main hall. Usually the suitors were all excessively courteous, falling over themselves to try to make witty remarks. Tonight half of them didn’t show up. The other half of them went for the food as if they were starving, called loudly for more wine, and spent most of the evening burping.
“I think I’ll move the lottery up to tomorrow night,” Jamatpie said.
That morning, the suitors took all her father’s horses and held races on the back lawn, tearing up most of the flower beds. Then they held duels and dented all the best swords. By the time the lottery was to be held, Jamatpie’s father was so eager to have the suitors gone that he put on his crown and attended the lottery himself.
In the great ballroom, with the princes sitting along the length of the dinner table, Jamatpie stood in front of a large glass bowl. The bowl was full of wood chips, and on each chip was carved the name of a prince. Jasmine only hoped she would know how to pronounce the one she drew.
“Attention,” she said, and all the princes looked up. She had prepared a lengthy speech, but at the last moment was too nervous to recite it. Besides, they all knew what this was about, didn’t they?
She plunged her hand into the bowl—and it froze.
Literally. She couldn’t move her hand. She couldn’t even twitch her fingers. For a moment she panicked; then she realized what had happened.
Evidently, every prince had gone out the night before and paid a wizard to ensure that it would be his chip that was selected. And now all those wizards’ spells were warring against each other, trying to force the princess’s hand to move one way or another. The forces of their magic cancelled each other out perfectly, and the result was that the princess could not move her hand at all.
Meanwhile, power buzzed within the stone tower of the wizard Gluck and the crystal palaces of the wizardesses Gruella and Griselda (who strongly preferred not to be called witches, and backed that preference with nasty curses). They were the only three wizards in the kingdom, and each had been hired by exactly seventeen of the princes. To be fair, they had each set up a spell for every single prince. Only in a situation like this, they had promised themselves, would they give precedence to the prince who had paid the most.
Every wizard added just a bit more power to the spell of the prince who had tipped them most extravagantly. They added power proportional to the amount of money, naturally, and finally Jamatpie’s hand moved.
Her fingers brushed a wood chip, which practically flew out of the bowl along with her hand.
“Prince Halis,” she read.
The rest of the princes booed. Prince Ha
lis rose and bowed to her with a smile. He was wearing a cloak of spun gold studded with tiny emeralds.
Prince Halis was very rich.
Jamatpie looked at him for a moment. Then she dropped the wood chip on the floor and straightened dramatically.
“Seize him!” she shouted.
“Huh?” said Prince Halis.
“Huh?” said the princess’s guards.
“Seize him!” Jamatpie said again. She spoke very fast. “This lottery was a test! I wanted to see which one of you would be dishonest enough to bribe a wizard and make my hand choose him. Seize him and throw him into the dungeons.”
The princess’s guards finally moved forward. They moved so slowly that Prince Halis had plenty of time to escape—which was actually what Jamatpie wanted him to do—but he was too stunned to move. Before long, he was being marched off toward the back of the hall, in the direction of the dungeons.
“I want him executed,” Princess Jamatpie said loudly. She figured she might as well. It would increase the amount of bribes the prince would spend before escaping from prison and returning to his home kingdom. Her kingdom’s economy could use the boost.
After that, she had only fifty suitors. But it didn’t seem to make a difference. The love letters and flowers were back, as were the duels, the courteous manners, and the serenades.
“Your grandmother,” Amelda suggested, “disguised herself in rags and spent years working as the lowliest peasant to find someone who truly loved her for herself. It’s not too late for that.”
“Hmm,” Jamatpie said. After some thought, she went to talk to her parents.
Several days later, the halls were empty, the swords unused, and the morning air full of silence. Amelda expressed surprise.
“I’m betrothed,” Jamatpie explained.
“You are what?”
“Betrothed. My parents had no choice. They wish to form an alliance with the kingdom of Charida, to our north—”
“South, actually,” Amelda said.
“South. They have, to forge the alliance, betrothed me to the prince of Charida. Prince Tamer.”
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