Dragon Captives

by Lisa McMann

  “Just hang on, Seth!” cried Fifer.

  “Sing the song, Fife!” urged Thisbe.

  “I told you I don’t know it!” Fifer yelled back. “Why don’t you sing it?”

  “Singing is in your studies, not mine!” Thisbe said. “That means you’re supposed to pay attention to those parts.”

  “Now you’re just making up rules!” said Fifer, but she felt guilty for not writing down the song Alex sang to get the wings to stop moving. Thisbe was right. Singing was her thing. And even if they’d never officially talked about which of them would be best to learn the different varieties of magic spells, it seemed logical that Fifer would handle the singing ones.

  “Stop arguing and do-o-o-o something! Please!” Seth called out again.

  “We’ll just have to grab him when he comes around again and pull him off,” said Thisbe.

  The twins eyed the moving structure, trying to predict where it would go next. When it came charging toward them, they flinched identically but held their ground. “Reach out your hands, Seth!” Fifer called.

  Seth did it—or at least he tried—but he was awfully dizzy. When the rolling structure of sticks drew near, the girls grabbed Seth’s hands and leaped out of the way, pulling him with them. He hit the ground with a sickening thump, his face slamming onto the pavement. Luckily some squashed tomatoes kept him from hitting it too hard.

  Fifer and Thisbe took a fresh grip on his hands and pulled him along over the smashed produce, slipping and sliding, as the giant tumbleweed headed off in a different direction. When they were a safe distance away, they let go of Seth’s hands. Thisbe glanced around warily, making sure the men from earlier hadn’t spotted them.

  Seth sat up, disoriented, and together all three watched as the prison grate roamed down an alley, heading straight for the cliff. Soon it threw itself over the edge and was gone.

  The children breathed a sigh of relief and looked around the square. It seemed like a hurricane had come through it. Thisbe caught sight of a couple of villagers hiding behind a flipped table. She narrowed her gaze as she realized it was the boy and girl from earlier. She caught the boy’s darting glance and held it, but he made no move to do anything. He only eyed her fearfully. After a minute or two, when Seth decided it was time to try standing up again, Thisbe forgot about the strangers.

  Seth was covered in slime. Part of a smashed tomato clung to his cheek as he got up; then it slid off and hit the ground with a splat. “Well, I have to say that was terrifying.” He wiped his cheek on his sleeve and checked his front teeth to make sure they were still in place. His body ached. “How exactly did all of this happen?” He examined his component vest, and his face fell. It was covered in sticky goop.

  “Tell you on the way,” Thisbe said, growing cautious again now that the grid was gone. “Let’s get out of here before the creeps who captured us come back. Are you okay?”

  “Good enough to walk,” said Seth, trying not to cringe at every step.

  The three of them set off the way they’d come, through the backstreets and up over the rocks, forging a path to the dragon. They moved slowly to accommodate Seth’s turned ankle and various unnamed injuries. As they went, Thisbe kept watch over her shoulder while Fifer told Seth the story of their frightening capture and imprisonment, and the magical experiment that ensued and went horribly wrong.

  “Hux was pretty mad when he found out where you’d gone,” Seth said. “He told me you were in grave danger, but I didn’t really believe him. I’m sorry.”

  “Clearly he was right,” muttered Thisbe. “We know that now. But did he say why?”

  “No. He just told me to get you.”

  Thisbe flashed him a judgmental look. “So once you got to the village to rescue us from grave danger, you decided to steal food instead.”

  “Hey,” said Seth defensively. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday and I was starving. I was going to find you. Besides, the place was chaotic.” His gaze landed on her bulging rucksack. “You don’t happen to have any water in there, do you?”

  “Yeah.” Thisbe pulled out one of the filled canteens. “Here.”

  Seth stopped to take a drink. Fifer put her hand up to shade her eyes and looked toward the cliff where they’d landed. “We should be getting close. Do you see Hux anywhere?”

  “Maybe he’s hiding,” said Seth, capping the canteen and handing it back to Thisbe. “He seemed afraid to go down to the village. Which is really weird, since this is supposed to be the land of the dragons and all.”

  “Hiding?” asked Thisbe. “Where’s a dragon supposed to hide on a mountainside? And why would he be afraid of anything?” She put the canteen away and they set off again.

  They continued hiking up the mountain, growing more and more unsure of where exactly they’d landed with Hux. The ice-blue dragon was nowhere to be seen. They trekked for hours, combing the area, looking around giant boulders and quietly calling out Hux’s name.

  When night began to fall, they grew frantic, but they knew they’d traveled more than far enough to find him. Where was he? They didn’t want to believe the truth—Hux was gone.

  To the Rescue

  While Fifer, Thisbe, and Seth were wandering aimlessly around the black cliffs of Grimere, Simber was only just coming upon Warbler Island. He spotted a familiar white boat skimming the waves offshore. “Therrre’s Sky,” he told Carina and Thatcher. “I’ll drrrop down to let herrr know what’s happened.”

  Sky noticed them soon enough, and she slowed the boat a little to match Simber’s speed. “Where are you off to?” she shouted, and put her hand above her eyes to shield the sunlight. Sky’s auburn hair was streaked with natural highlights, and it flew wildly in the wind. Her light brown skin was darker than usual and peppered with freckles from spending so much time on the water between Warbler and the Island of Fire.

  Carina explained everything to her.

  Sky listened with alarm. “Do you need me to go back to Artimé?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “Or come with you? Is Alex okay? I’ll bet he’s panicking.”

  “He’s a little upset,” Carina said. “But he’s all right. I think you can stay here and keep working with your mother. It’ll probably do Alex good to stew about it alone for a bit. And Aaron’s not far away by tube if he needs help.”

  “Is everything else all right? How is Kaylee? And the baby?”

  “Kaylee and the baby are doing wonderfully,” said Carina. “Everything else is exactly the same as when you left. Artimé and Quill are sleepy as always.” She paused. “How is your project?”

  Sky glanced in the direction of the Island of Fire, which wasn’t visible at the moment. “It’s going well. Scarlet has been a big help,” said Sky. “We’ve turned the old broken underwater glass cage into a feeding station for sea life, and we’ve completely redone the gardens inside the reverse aquarium to resemble Ishibashi’s greenhouse. And,” Sky said, a gleam in her eye, “I’m so close to figuring out how to stop the island from plunging underwater. I can feel it.” She took on a faraway look. It had been her mission for years to figure out the mysterious scientific workings of the volcanic pirate island. “I almost got pulled under the other day, though. I thought life was over for me.”

  “Didn’t you feel the island trembling?” asked Thatcher, who had never been on or inside the underwater island, but who’d heard plenty about it.

  “Barely,” admitted Sky. “That’s part of the problem. As I’ve been working on changing the climate inside the volcano, the tremors have lessened, and they don’t offer as much warning as they used to. I was so wrapped up in my work—thought I had more time. Thankfully Scarlet was in the boat and saw the water rippling. She scooped me up at the last second and got us out of there.” Sky patted the control panel. “If this thing wasn’t magic, I don’t think we would’ve been able to get away from the suction.”

  Carina looked alarmed. “Be careful, please,” she murmured. “We need you.”

  “I will, belie
ve me,” said Sky. “Don’t mention that to Alex, all right? He’s always so . . . so worried. You know? I don’t want to give him anything else to fret over when his sisters and Seth are missing.”

  “Speaking of them,” said Simber, “we rrreally should continue.”

  “Right,” said Thatcher. “Let’s keep moving. We’ve got a long flight. Nice seeing you, Sky. Say hi to Scarlet for me.”

  “I will.”

  “And . . . for Crow,” Thatcher added with a half smile.

  Sky grinned. “You got it.” She turned back to Simber. “Stop by and let me know once you’ve found them, will you? If you think of it, I mean.”

  “Of courrrse we will,” Simber promised.

  Soon the trio was on their way again, with the long night stretching out before them. They were only a third of the way to the waterfall that marked the western edge of their world . . . and there was no telling how much farther they’d have to go beyond it to find the land of the dragons.

  Lost and Alone

  While Thatcher and Carina were gearing up for their second night balancing on the back of a stone cheetah, Fifer, Thisbe, and Seth found themselves alone in a foreign world with no way to get home, or even make contact with home. And after their experiences earlier in the day, they were feeling more than a little jumpy.

  They hadn’t thought to bring any seek spell items from Alex or the others in Artimé—Fifer only carried a single created item from Seth with her, which did them no good now that he was sitting right next to them. Yet every few hours Alex sent seek spells to the girls from Artimé. Being unable to respond was just one more thing that made them feel helpless, and they were quickly veering toward hopelessness, too. The reality of their predicament hit them like a door slamming in their faces—first came stunned silence, then painful realization, then a terrible sense of dread.

  “No one knows where we are,” said Fifer. “No one. We’re going to die out here, and they’ll never find us.” Her lip began to quiver, and a tear escaped one eye. She batted at it fiercely but didn’t trust her voice to say more.

  Thisbe hated to see her sister so upset. Even though she felt the same way, she tried to hold her worries inside. “It’s going to be okay,” she said grimly, though she couldn’t imagine how. Using the last bit of daylight, she scoured the mountainside, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ice-blue dragon. Surely he was too big to disappear completely, but it seemed he had done just that. He wasn’t anywhere—not up the mountain toward the castle, not in the valleys in between or by the forest farther inland, not down the mountain toward the little village of Glen Freer, which was now in shambles.

  “Hux said our plan was to get to that castle,” Seth said. “Maybe he went ahead . . . without us? That hardly seems smart, though.”

  “What if he was captured?” asked Fifer, sniffling. “What are we going to do?”

  Thisbe paused her search, thinking aloud. “Well, the other dragons are probably hanging around that castle, right? I mean, that’s why Hux brought us here, to fix their wings, so if the castle is where he said we need to go, Arabis and the others would be there.”

  “I suppose,” said Fifer, and Seth nodded.

  “Then all we have to do is find one of the dragons and make new wings, and have him take us home. It doesn’t have to be Hux.”

  Seth and Fifer looked at Thisbe as they ran the proposed solution through their minds. Fifer wanted to believe it would be that simple. “I guess that would work,” she said, though her tone was doubtful. Ever since she and Thisbe had been abducted, frightening what-ifs had filtered into Fifer’s thoughts. Fears she’d never even imagined before were suddenly piling up, poking at her to notice them.

  This experience had been nothing like she’d expected—it wasn’t glamorous at all, like the stories Lani and Alex and the others had told. It was awful. The twins and Seth couldn’t trust anyone here. They were wandering around aimlessly without a place to sleep, without decent food or enough water. And Hux had abandoned them.

  Fifer began to wonder if Alex had been right about this trip being too risky. It certainly felt that way now. And she couldn’t stop worrying about getting back home again.

  She sat up, unable to keep her worries inside. “But, Thisbe, the dragons are slaves. Do you still believe the Revinir will let one of them take us home after we’re done making new wings? Or is he going to maybe . . . I don’t know . . . take us as slaves too? Like those men in Glen Freer tried to do?”

  Thisbe’s expression darkened. “Well,” she reasoned, “the Revinir sent for somebody to fix the wings. So he needs us. He’s not going to do anything to hurt us.” At least . . . not right away, she thought.

  For once, Seth was less worried than the twins about something. “Seriously—what would the Revinir want with a bunch of kids? We’re not anything special.”

  Thisbe tried not to feel insulted. “Well, whatever. It doesn’t matter anyway. We don’t have any other options, do we? We can’t sit on this mountain forever. The dragons are our only way home.”

  The knot in Fifer’s stomach tightened a bit. But she swallowed hard and tried to sound upbeat. “So we should just go up there and . . . find them?”

  “Exactly,” said Thisbe with more confidence than she felt.

  “It looks awfully steep,” said Seth, who preferred flying to climbing, especially after the bamboo-grid incident had left him limping. The moon, rising behind the castle, made it glow in the night sky. The high ground was far off with a few valleys in between, and the climb would be steeply uphill a good portion of the way. “It’s going to take us forever to get there.”

  Thisbe frowned. “I guess I’ll go get us some more food, then.” She rummaged through the rucksack and took out what they’d stolen so far, stacking it on a flat rock. Then she pulled out the canteens and handed them around. “Let’s eat and drink what’s left. I’ll get more.”

  “You’re not going alone,” said Fifer. “And we shouldn’t leave anybody alone on this mountain, either. We need to stick together from now on.”

  Thisbe agreed. The three wearily went back down the mountainside again. In the dark, the town square was sparsely lit by torches around the perimeter, and the streets around it were unevenly illuminated by lights coming from house windows. Most of the townspeople had cleaned up their stalls by now, and the carts and tables were gone. But on the outskirts of the square in the dirt and bushes, the children found a few pieces of produce and some crushed loaves of bread. They snatched them up.

  Once they had picked up everything edible, stuffing the rucksack as well as all of their pockets, Seth remembered his lost magical components. He ran back into the square where he’d been turned upside down by the prison grate and got down on his hands and knees, feeling all around, trying to find some of the components he’d lost. He managed to locate a bundle of scatterclips and a blinding highlighter, which could also serve as a light if they needed it, and a few preserve spells, which seemed completely useless at the moment, as he had nothing of value that needed preserving. He kept them anyway.

  When Fifer heard a rustling sound down an alleyway near her, she fled toward the others and whispered harshly, “Someone’s coming. Let’s go!”

  Seth abandoned his search and shoved what he’d found into his vest pockets, and then the three of them snuck away to the river to fill the canteens again. As Fifer bent down to fill hers, they heard a crackling noise somewhere in the darkness.

  “We should hurry,” murmured Thisbe, looking around wildly, fearful that the men from earlier might come back. They hadn’t seen anyone outside—and now many more of the house windows and apartments above the shuttered shops were lit up. Shadows passed in front of them as people went about their evening rituals. Smells of dinner cooking wafted out and made the children’s stomachs growl, which in turn made them even more homesick.

  They drank their fill from the river, capped the canteens, and tried to clean Seth’s sticky clothes and hair the best they could. Th
en they headed back up the mountain, glancing over their shoulders now and then as they went. It was slow going without much light to help them find their way—they counted on the moon to guide their journey and keep them from stepping too close to the edge of the cliff. A faint boom echoed from far away, like the one Seth had heard earlier, and an angsty animal’s howl broke their concentration. The children tried not to think about what sort of strange animals or creatures they might encounter without warning.

  After a time, the sky grew cloudy and the moon became veiled, making it even harder for the children to see. Seth, who was leading at the moment, tripped over a rock and went sprawling, coming to rest in an open area. He muttered under his breath and sat up, rubbing his sore ankle.

  “Why don’t you use your highlighter?” urged Fifer.

  “I don’t want to waste it. Let’s just camp here,” he said crossly. “I’m tired and hungry.”

  “Good idea,” said Fifer.

  Thisbe wrinkled up her nose at the other two, knowing they couldn’t see her doing so, and said nothing. She wanted to keep going. Their limited water wouldn’t last them long, and they had no idea where or when they’d find more. But she was tired too, so she didn’t argue.

  There wasn’t much they could do to make a camp, since they had no gear, so they just sat down on the smoothest ground they could find. Once they settled and had a little something to eat and drink, they began wishing for blankets, but those weren’t to be had. At least their clothes were dry, though they were a bit stiff and scratchy from all the seawater they’d soaked up. One by one, huddled together, Fifer, Seth, and Thisbe dropped off to sleep.

  They had no idea anyone was watching them.

  The Other Children

  When Thisbe opened her eyes at dawn and remembered where she was and why she was lying on the ground, she immediately reached for her rucksack. It felt strangely lighter. She sat up and opened it, then gasped. The canteens were there, but the food was gone.