by Tara Grayce
As I return to the grate in the floor of my cell, sounds of grunting and stone banging against metal fill the dungeon. Hopefully whatever guard is at the top of the stairs isn’t too concerned with the sounds coming from down here. So far, no one has come to check on us even with Trygg and Herockghyrra shouting at each other at the top of their lungs. If someone was paying attention to the amount of noise we are making, they would’ve silenced us long before now.
I spend the next hour tugging, prying, stomping, and wiggling the grate. For as rusty as the grate is, it’s still solidly bolted to the stones. Perhaps if I had a crowbar I could’ve pried one of the bolts lose, but I couldn’t get the right leverage with my fingers.
But I can’t give up. How long will it be before the Flame of the Dragons attacks Dad and Trygg’s uncle? How many will die in battle if we can’t escape and stop it?
And my internal Earth clock is slowly ticking from Saturday into Sunday.
Some of the banging across the dungeon halts. Trygg calls out. “Stop, everyone. I think I hear someone coming.”
Herockghyrra grunts one last time, as if stopping her efforts is all her idea and not prompted by Trygg at all.
I call out a translation for Brett, and the sounds from his cell quiet. Only then can I hear the tromp of boots and skitter of claws on the dungeon stairs.
A moment later, a swarm of farffles hops down the stairs and halts in a circle at the edge of the dungeon, as if prepared to cut off our retreat if we try anything.
Three skinny men with sharp faces and overly long legs stalk down the stars after the farffles. The men are dressed in drab, brown clothing, and they would look identical except for the flashes of different color in their hair. One has streaks of blue, another red, and the third green.
As the green-haired one lumbers over to my cell with an awkward, high-kicking, bouncing stride, I study him. There is something about these men. I can’t place what they are. They aren’t dragons, even though they have sharp features a bit like a dragon’s. They aren’t silvaran.
The green-haired man unlocks my cell door and steps inside while across the way, the other two head for Trygg’s and Herockghyrra’s cells. A few farffles hop in after him, baring their incisors as if to warn me not to try anything.
The man clamps manacles on my wrists before he unlocks the shackle from my ankle. I can only guess the manacle is also enchanted, though I can’t tell since I’ve only studied magic theory with the castle magician and haven’t progressed to any actual magic.
The man grabs my elbow and steers me out of my cell. I glance over my shoulder at him. His eyes are a deep brown, but they aren’t human eyes. They are solid brown with a huge circular pupil and no white showing at all.
He bares his teeth, showing off two buck teeth and long, pointed incisors just like a farffles. He grunts and shoves me forward.
There is something blank in his eyes. Something too much like the looks in the eyes of the farffles hopping around my feet. Something very, very wrong.
The green-haired man shoves me into the center of the dungeon. Herockghyrra and Trygg have similar manacles on their hands. Trygg is inspecting his, as if trying to figure a way out of it, but Herockghyrra ignores her manacles as she glares at her red-haired guard as if she can burn a hole through his skull.
“These creatures are...” She spits out a dragon word that I’m pretty sure isn’t a nice thing to say.
“They’re wrong,” I finish. Our guards shove us toward the stairs with a series of grunts, as if they can’t talk.
When the farffles by our feet make similar grunting, chittering noises, it finally dawns on me just how wrong these men are.
They aren’t men at all. They’re farffles turned into silvaran form.
It goes against all rules of magic to perform such an enchantment. Something like that just isn’t done. Animals aren’t meant to have a silvaran form. They’re animals. With an animals’ level of intelligence. They won’t be able to talk or think the way a human can.
Yes, dragons and unicorns have animal forms, but they aren’t animals. They are races of people with the gift of language and reason. They can turn into an animal form the same way the court magician could enchant himself into a goat. Even as a goat, he still had his same human reason and soul, even if he couldn’t talk with a goat’s mouth.
But the enchantment doesn’t work the other way. An enchantment can’t give a creature a soul and reason beyond what it has been born with in its original state. Animals can’t become people.
If whoever has captured us is willing to go so far beyond what anyone should do with magic, I don’t dare even guess what she will do to us.
As we reach the dungeon stairs, I cast one last glance over my shoulder. Brett grips the bars of his cell window, forgotten and unimportant to whatever scheme we’ve fallen into.
Our farffle-turned-human guards hustle us up the stairs and through several passageways until we are shoved through the shattered remains of what had once been huge double doors and into the crumbling remains of a Great Hall.
Many of the huge beams still span the ceiling, even if they are black with scorch marks. Cracked roof tiles litter the marble floor, now gray with dirt and ash, while huge gaps in the ceiling let in hazy light. A few tattered banners hang from the rafters, though most are too blackened from a long ago fire to tell what color they’d once been.
At the far end of the hall, a woman sits tall on a fire-blackened throne. She is dressed in a dark, blood red dress, matching the maroon-colored strands of red threaded through her otherwise black, straight hair. While her sharp features and hair indicates dragon blood, her skin is lighter than Herockghyrra’s and shines with the same faint silver-blue coloring of my dad’s.
I swallow and try to stop a shiver from traveling down my spine and into my legs. Down in the dungeon, it had been easy to cling to hope of escape and pretend this wasn’t as bad as it seemed.
But here, facing this woman, I know without a doubt that my life has never been in more danger.
Chapter 13
We Antagonize a Monster and Her Evil Rabbit Minions
We are halted at the base of the dais where she sits. She glares down her long, pointed nose at us. “I am—”
“Melltra Larrona. We know.” Herockghyrra inspects her fingernails, looking with every move and drip of scorn in her voice as if she is very not impressed. “Really. Abandoned castle. Use of magic for nefarious purposes. It wasn’t hard to guess.”
Melltra’s bright blue eyes darken with an even sharper glare, though by the way her jaw tightens, I guess the rogue magician isn’t too happy about having the thunder of her big reveal stolen from her in such a flippant manner.
I’m not sure what good it will do to anger her, but honestly, sarcasm and flippant attitudes are the only weapons the three of us have at the moment. I do my best to match Herockghyrra’s scornful expression and bored posture. “Crumbling, dark castle. Blood red clothes. Seems like you’re trying just a little too hard at the cliché villain role. I’ll admit, the evil farffles are an interesting touch, though hardly intimidating.”
Trygg snorts and flicks his lock of hair out of his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, just eyes Melltra up and down, snorts again, then turns his gaze elsewhere as if dismissing her to search for a sprig of grass to eat.
The look Herockghyrra shoots me is almost approving. As if, for the first time since we found ourselves locked in the same dungeon, we may actually be on the same side.
Herockghyrra sniffs and raises her eyebrows. “I suppose this is the moment you monologue your grand scheme to us. Sorry to disappoint you, but we already figured it out. Wasn’t that hard, really. You have the daughters and nephew of the three prominent peoples in Averell. You’re trying to start a war, aren’t you?”
Melltra’s face gets more and more a blotchy purple-red with every word Herockghyrra speaks.
I probably shouldn’t push her. I’m liable to get myself magic-blasted into oblivion, but I can’
t let us lose our upper hand, even in this small way. “It isn’t going to work. My father and the Stallion of the Unicorns are close friends. They will never turn on each other. And our relations with the dragons have come a long way in the past twenty years. What do you have to gain, anyway?”
“Probably revenge.” Trygg shakes his head. “That seems about the cliched motivation she’d pick.”
“Silence!” Melltra shoots to her feet. All around us, the farffles stand on their hind legs, ears sword-straight, eyes eerily fixed on Melltra. Melltra glares at us. “You are just pathetic, ignorant children. I can’t expect you to understand. Can it really be called revenge when it is justice I seek? Your parents killed my parents. They cast me into the wilds of Averell after deeming me a monster. I ask you, can a child be blamed for her parents’ mistakes? Can a child help the blood that runs through her veins? Can a child help if she was born a monster?”
With a screech like a dragon’s war cry, she changes form in front of us. Her wings are sinewy and bat-like, just like dragons’ wings, but they are smaller and scrawny. Her body is covered in maroon scales, even though she is still shaped much like a woman. Her head and face are still those of a woman, though scaled and ridged.
I must have recoiled. Or gaped. Or done something to betray my shock. She swings her head at me, burning human eyes set in her dragon-like face. “You scorn me, just like your father did. You see only a half-dragon monster.”
I stumble back a step then, stifling a gasp. Not, perhaps, at what she is saying about Dad. I don’t believe a word of anything coming out of her twisted sense of reality. No, I shake because she can talk. In both forms. No other creature in Averell can do that.
Trygg makes a sound in the back of his throat, like a suppressed, panicked whinny even in his silvaran form, but stands his ground.
Herockghyrra spits out the same dragon word she’d used for the farffles-turned-men in the dungeon.
Melltra swivels to face Herockghyrra. “And you scorn me, just like your mother did. You see only a half-silvaran monster. I am deemed monster by both sides of my blood. Do you wonder why I pit them against each other now? Why I want to see them burn and bleed each other until all of Averell crumbles like this castle? You call me monster. Then monster I will be.”
I don’t know what our parents did over twenty years ago during the war. My dad was a young prince. His parents had been killed by the dragons allied with Melltra’s parents. I don’t want to think what might have happened to have caused Melltra to become the twisted creature she is now.
I’ve met half-unicorn, half-silvaran people before. I’ve heard of half-dragons before. Yet, I’ve never heard of something like this happening. Usually, the child either inherits the ability to transform into a unicorn or dragon from that parent, or they don’t and they take more after the silvaran parent. It’s simple genetics.
What caused this? Why does she blame my parents? If there is any truth to her accusations against my parents, then can I reach out to her? Or is Melltra too far gone?
Reaching out is what my dad would do. That’s why her accusations make no sense. My dad has built his entire reign on uniting the peoples of Averell in peace by reaching out and listening to them.
I am my dad’s daughter. No matter whether Averell will end up my home for the rest of my life or if I will carve a place for myself on Earth, right here, right now, I am a princess of Averell.
I fight back the churning in my stomach and force myself a step forward. Then two.
Trygg grabs my arm with his manacled hands. “What are you doing?”
I shake him off. Right now, I can’t be the average high school student part of me. I have to be the princess who holds her head high and reaches out in diplomacy before anything else. “I don’t know what happened to you or the pain you went through. But becoming a monster isn’t going to help anything. Things have changed in Averell. Dragons and silvarans and unicorns have experienced peace and are beginning to put old prejudices behind them. Come back with us, and we’ll help you. Things will be different.”
For a moment, I think she might be softening. Her face isn’t as tense. Her eyes less sharp.
Then she changes back into her fully human form, throws back her head, and laughs. “Oh, aren’t you just so innocent and sweet. You think you can just offer a bit of kindness and appeal to some shred of goodness left in me. You forget one thing. I have discovered I like being a monster. It is very freeing. Why would I give up being powerful to go crawling back to your parents begging for them to accept me? No, I’d rather see them on their knees begging.”
Okay, so she is even more twisted and scary than I figured.
I ease back a step and glance to Trygg. He shrugs, as if to say he is out of ideas as well.
When I shift my gaze to Herockghyrra, her face still hasn’t lost its raised eyebrow, scornfully bored expression. She picks something from under one of her long, pointed fingernails. “I find it so sweet that you think you’ve started a war. At most, you’ve started a minor skirmish. But dragons aren’t the irrationally angry creatures we’ve been made out to be. My mother will sit down with the king of the silvarans and will realize there is more to this than my disappearance.”
Melltra crosses her arms and smirks at us. “I don’t intend to merely start a war. I plan to control it. A lock of your hair left here. The princess’s finger left there. And when one side or the other appears to want to make peace, a dead body to give them extra motivation. I’ve already left enough evidence that your dear mother will believe the unicorns are behind your abduction. Your parents are already preparing for war.”
I’m not brave enough to fully process those words here. Not when it means that our deaths aren’t going to be quick. We’ll be locked in this dungeon for weeks, maybe months, never knowing when Melltra might decide to chop off a body part or kill one of us. All while knowing our parents are out there, fighting and killing each other. Fighting and killing the wrong enemy.
All to satisfy this monster’s version of justice and craving for power.
I snap. I’m not thinking. All I can see is her smirking face as she gloats over the horror she is going to cause for my parents and brothers. For my country—one of them anyway. For my friends on this side of the portal. For all the unicorns and gnomes and naiads and dryads and even dragons I’ve grown up with.
I make it all of four steps before farffles swarm over me, biting my arms, legs, neck until I collapse to my knees, then to my stomach. The last thing I see before the blackness takes me once again is Melltra’s twisted smirk.
I GROAN AS I COME TO. My head pounds even worse than the last time I’d been knocked out with farffle venom.
“Amy? What happened? Are you all right?” Brett sounds particularly worried. “Trygg tried to explain using charades, but it wasn’t all that helpful.”
I try to imagine Trygg’s version of charades performed through the bars of a dungeon cell. Yeah, not helpful at all.
Sitting up, I press a hand to my head. “I’m fine.” I repeat myself in Averellian for Trygg.
“Oh, good. I was really starting to worry. What were you thinking? I’m usually the impulsive one. I’m going to have to go out and do something particularly reckless to reclaim my spot as the foolish friend.” Even though Trygg’s tone is cheerful, it doesn’t have the usual bounce to it.
“I think attacking the farffles as they swarmed Princess Amarani probably counts.” Herockghyrra’s sniff lacks some of the derision she’d used with Trygg earlier. Perhaps we are getting somewhere.
I pull myself upright and peer through the bars. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. It was foolish.”
“My interrogation was going splendidly until your little outburst.” Herockghyrra raises an eyebrow at me and tosses her hair back over her shoulder.
Trust a dragon to use taunting a villain into monologuing as a form of interrogation. I shrug. “I doubt there is much more that we could have learned. We now know m
ost of her plan, and I’m not sure she has more details planned out. She strikes me as someone who goes with the opportunities as they come.”
“Very true.” Herockghyrra grips the bars of her cell. “She’s no dragon.”
I’m not sure what she is. Part dragon. Part silvaran.
I know a little bit about mixed blood. I am part Earth, part Averell, after all. I literally live in two different realms.
But no one can tell just by looking at me what I am or am not, as long as I remember to powder my silver freckles on Earth. I’ve never felt like I’m a monster. I’ve never been scorned either by silvarans in Averell or humans in Michigan. And the only weird side effect I have from my mixed heritage is having two, rather accurate internal clocks ticking away in my head.
If things had been different, would I have reacted as Melltra Larrona has? Would I be angry too?
I don’t know. But right now, I do know that, in a way, it doesn’t matter how she got to be what she is. That’s a problem to deal with some other time. Right now, what she is doing isn’t okay, no matter her past. It isn’t right to incite a war and plan out ways to keep the bloodshed going.
Brett, Trygg, Herockghyrra, and I have to escape and stop this.
“Has anyone made progress with their metal grates?”
“I think mine is loosening. Maybe.” Trygg holds out his hands, palms up. Red marks crease his palms.
But they aren’t loosening soon enough. Not for Brett. And not for our parents.
“Keep trying.” It’s all I can think of. I can’t let us give up. I have to believe there is a way out of this.
While Trygg disappears from his cell window, I quickly explain to Brett what happened with Melltra. Brett is silent for several heartbeats after I explain. It must be a lot for him to absorb.
It’s a lot for me to take in, and I’ve grown up in the center of Averellian politics. I’ve heard the stories of what happened in the war over twenty years ago. Some of them, anyway. I know there are some things my parents haven’t told me, at least not the details. After all, my grandparents died in that war. Dad isn’t going to tell us the details of that as a bedtime story.
