Dark Fire

by Chris D'Lacey

  “No!” Lucy screamed as her hair began to rise. Every root protested in agony. Her scalp tightened and the skin above her ears was tugged to tearing point. But just when it seemed she would be sick with the pain (and stripped of her chief claim to beauty), she heard the sibyl herself give out a sharp screech.

  Lucy’s hair fell back into place. Looking up, she saw Ms. Gee flapping a hand. A wisp of smoke was rising from her fingers.

  “Gwendolen,” Lucy whispered. She spotted the little dragon zip around behind the sibyl and let loose another quick tongue of flame.

  “Agh!” the sibyl cried. Her bun of gray hair crackled alight and frizzled into a blackened prune. She staggered back against the tunnel wall. But by now she had set her evil glare on her assailant and the next exclamation to leave her mouth had venomous intent wrapped all around it. The spell left Gwendolen frozen in flight.

  Ms. Gee fumbled by her feet for a stone. “You pathetic excuse for a dragon,” she sneered. “I’ll smash you into pieces, scale by scale …”

  “No-ooo!” Lucy screamed. And as if her cry of woe had ignited a charge, the Tor lurched and part of the main tunnel collapsed.

  Ms. Gee looked up. The last thing she saw was the ceiling splitting open and a flood of stale urine pouring down upon her. Within five seconds, its toxic acidity had stripped the clothing and flesh from her bones, leaving nothing but her skeleton standing. The frail whimper she’d managed to elicit just before the stinking deluge engulfed her became a sad and eerie echo for mercy. Mercy, there was none. Her bones wobbled then collapsed into the poisonous stream, fizzing like magnesium strips as they were carried away with the flow.

  And though she could have been imagining it, Lucy thought she heard a high-pitched cackle of laughter rushing through the tunnels — as if the ghost of Mary Cauldwell had finally had her revenge.

  At the same time, the spell holding Gwendolen was broken and she tumbled into a heavy spin. Lucy cried out, but could do nothing to stop her beloved special dragon falling headlong into the waste. The splash gouged a chasm in Lucy’s heart and drove her scrabbling to the edge of the stream. Only Bella’s tight claws and yowling protests prevented her from wading in to try to save the dragon. Lucy’s arid skin wetted with tears again.

  But then came a remarkable turn of events. The wastewater parted and Gwendolen rose up, shaking herself dry in midair. She spat out something Lucy cared not to imagine and coughed an important hurr. Dragon, she said.

  Lucy looked at the yellow-green flow. “You mean it won’t hurt us?” She tweaked Bella’s ear.

  Gwendolen nodded. She dipped her paw into the urine and stroked Lucy’s hand. The fluid ran away. No burning. No scars.

  Lucy gulped, closed her eyes, and dipped one foot in up to her ankle. Here was a journal entry to top all others: Dragon urine feels inexplicably warm and has the density of a milky paste, but it’s safe to descendants of Guinevere and Gawain. “Lead the way,” she said, holding Bella safe in her arms.

  Within a minute, and with tunnels collapsing as they went, Gwendolen brought them back to the cellar. Letting Bella go, Lucy pounded up the steps and fell to her knees in the kitchen, taking in enormous gulps of air. Gwendolen immediately landed beside her carrying Ms. Gee’s vial, which had washed up by the cellar steps. She put it down beside Lucy, whose first thought was to dash it against the tiled floor. Bella came up and eyed the vial intently, as if she’d had the same idea. The two females exchanged a green-eyed look, and for some reason she couldn’t explain just then, Lucy changed her mind and put the vial into her pocket. Bella slunk away and leaped onto the sink, to look through the window at the rumbling Tor.

  Lucy stood up and rested her hand on the table for support. In doing so, she began to appreciate the magnitude of what was happening. Anything that could move within the house was rattling. Lights were swinging. Doors were banging open and shut. Cans of vegetables were dancing on their shelves. Apples were tumbling off their pyramid in the fruit bowl.

  Yet, despite the threat of destruction, the situation seemed to have peaked. For the Tor was still standing and the cairn at its zenith was visible again. It was as if the dragon had risen so far but could go no farther until the right word was spoken or the right action was completed. This was confirmed when a bellow of despair rushed through the house with the physical impact of a cannon blast.

  Meow! Bella’s fur stood on end. She turned her head and stared at Lucy.

  Lucy in turn looked at Gwendolen. “Did you hear that?”

  Gwendolen nodded. Every dragon from here to Wayward Crescent would have heard that.

  The great matriarch, Gawaine, had spoken. Free me, she had said. Teramelle, free me.

  40 CLOSE CALL

  A soft, warm shower. A long, luxurious soak in one of Zanna’s herbal bathing lotions. A stimulating foot spa. A rubdown with a damp cloth. Even five minutes beneath a leaking gutter. Lucy would have jumped at any of these chances to improve her personal hygiene, for she stank like nothing she could ever describe. But for once she put aside her private needs in favor of an urgent phone call home.

  “Hello. Lucy?”

  David’s voice. Her spirits lifted. She began to unload everything to him. The words came out in a breathless gabble, as if she were speaking through a tumbler of water. “You’ve gotta come. It’s all shaking. You’ve gotta come, NOW. The hill’s going to crumble.

  Tam’s …” The pain nearly knifed her to the farmhouse door. “Tam’s …”

  “Lucy, slow down. Speak calmly if you can. Are you safe?”

  “I think so.”

  “Right, tell me what’s happened.”

  “We went into the Tor,” she jabbered. “It was a trap to kill Tam. She buried him in a tunnel.”

  “She? The sibyl?”

  “Mm.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Dead. I got away from her. Bella led us out.”

  “Bella?”

  “She’s a girl. The sibyl turned her into a cat. I touched the dragon, David. It’s trying to wake up.” Another restless thump from the Tor shook the whole guesthouse, spreading cracks along the plaster ceiling. Lucy winced as the kitchen light fizzed out, its chandelier fittings half-breaking away and swinging precariously on their chains. Bella jumped down off the sink and ran to find shelter under the table.

  “I hear crashing. Where are you?”

  “In the guesthouse. In the kitchen. It’s like an earthquake!” Deep inside the house, something made of glass fell over and shattered. “The dragon’s crying for the unicorn to free it. What shall I do?”

  “Nothing. You do nothing. Find a safe place and — hang on, Zanna wants to tell me something.”

  Lucy sighed and turned away in frustration. She looked into the dining area and saw Gwendolen on one of the breakfast tables, creeping gingerly toward the window, as if she had spotted something in the garden.

  “Lucy, are you there?” David’s voice came through again.

  “Yes.”

  “Listen, something’s happened here. Zanna’s just told me your mom’s coming around.”

  Mom. In all the trauma, Lucy had forgotten her guiding light. Her anxiety once again gathered pace. “Is she all right? Is she asking for me?”

  “She’s not talking yet, but Zanna says she’s calm. I’m going to stay here a little while longer to make sure the situation’s stable, but I’m sending Grockle down to protect you.”

  “Grockle?”

  “Yes. Go outside. Let him see you. Is Gwendolen there?”

  With the phone pressed hard to her ear, Lucy headed for the dining room. Gwendolen was now on the sideboard where the cutlery was kept. Her ears were fully pricked. What? Lucy mouthed at her. David spoke again. “Luce, did you hear me?”

  “Yeah, she’s here.”

  “Good. Tell her to put out a beacon. It’ll help Grockle find you. He can travel across time planes as easily as you or I could look through a window. He’ll be in the general area before you know it. You c
an speak to him in dragontongue. Takes a bit of tuning, but you’ll get it. OK?”

  Lucy nodded blindly. “What about Tam?”

  There was a pause. David said, “We’ll find him. I promise.”

  A slow tear cut across Lucy’s cheek. “But —”

  “I’ll come as soon as I can,” David said. And he ended the call.

  Lucy clamped her phone shut, one-handed, and buried it into her jeans pocket. “Spread your auma,” she said to Gwendolen. “We’re going to have company.”

  Hrrr! went the dragon.

  Lucy screwed up her face. “Listen? To what?”

  Gwendolen cocked her head. She was sure she could hear a distress call somewhere. Not aimed at her, but the frequency was —

  The next heartbeat moved the house sideways a foot, shifting the furniture at least the same distance. The windows in the upper sash shattered and photographs of Scuffenbury flew off their hooks. High above, Lucy could hear what she thought was brickwork crashing against the roof. A shower of roof slates beyond the French windows and a bungee-jumping TV satellite dish convinced her. It was time to get out.

  “Gwendolen, fly!” she cried. She hurried into the kitchen for Bella. The cat was poised and ready to run. “Through the hall, out the front door!” Lucy panted, not sure if Bella would understand. But the language of falling masonry was common: Wherever Lucy ran, Bella would run, too. Within moments they were breathing in the garden air, where the ground was just as active as the floors of the house but there was far less danger of injury.

  But a greater threat was perched less than twenty feet away. In her hurry to escape, Lucy had fled toward the one place in the garden she thought would be stable: the dead, gray tree. Little did she know that Mary Cauldwell’s gallows still harbored evil, past and present. If Gwendolen had finished her calculations, she would have concluded that among the tainted branches was another dragon. Unlikely as it seemed, a Pennykettle dragon. And if she had turned her ears from the mayhem, she would have heard that dragon’s warning hrrr! For Glade had seen Lucy emerging from the house and had measured her captor’s eagerness for slaughter in the subtle tightening of its ruthless claws. From lungs that contained less air than an envelope, Glade had bravely cried out. Her call was eclipsed by the raven’s wings as it swooped to make an ugly mess of Lucy’s head. What saved the girl was a falling chimney. It thundered to the drive like a spent red rocket, clipping both handles of the empty wheelbarrow and flipping it through the air like an autumn leaf. The raven was lucky to avoid the turning metal, luckier still that the dust and debris created by the crash enabled it to swerve away without detection. Halfway through its plunge, it had sensed a major ripple in the fabric of the universe and knew there could be only one reason for that. Lucy Pennykettle had felt the rift, too, and was holding her breath in expectation. She was not to be disappointed. Once the clouds had settled, sitting astride the mess of bricks was the most magnificent creature she had ever seen.

  The bronze-scaled juvenile dragon, Grockle. Fearless, breathtaking, and huge.

  41 THE RIGHT TO DISOBEY

  Wow …”

  In the circumstances, Lucy could think of nothing more fitting to say. The last time she’d seen Grockle, five years ago, he’d been something of a kitten in dragon terms. Impressive, yes. Classically prehistoric. Charming. Frightening. Humbling. Vulnerable.

  Now he was simply mesmerizing. Ten times the size she remembered. And though he possessed all the strength and characteristics of a predatory monster (his incisor teeth were as long as her shins), there was a gentleness about him that Lucy had only ever seen before in the likes of cuddly, domestic animals. And he was beautiful. The soft scales that had covered his body back then had thickened up into roughened plates, though it was clear from his able versatility of movement that their pliability was almost fluid. When Lucy raised her hand to touch his chest the scales tensed in a kind of autonomic way, interlocking like a row of Roman battle shields. But as they measured her warmth and sensitivity, maybe even his kinship with her, the plates yielded and their hardness reconfigured, until her palm was gliding smoothly over him and the scales were changing color to the pressure of her touch without ever losing their glistening bronze base.

  But it was his eyes that enthralled her the most. In his youth they had resembled plain lizard eyes. Slit-ted, scary, and uniformly yellow throughout the iris. Now his iris, like his scales, had deepened and developed. The general shade was still predominantly yellow, but there was a richness in its textured layers as appealing to Lucy as amber gemstones. And behind the iris, in the darkly mysterious oval of the pupil, was a world that Lucy could only dream of. Here she saw unparalleled beauty. Incredible complexity. Extraordinary history.

  Her true destiny.

  She decided she would formally introduce herself. But before she could initiate a dialogue, Grockle jerked back and raised his head. With his ears extending in a stacking motion, he stretched his neck and turned to sniff the air. His nostrils dilated so widely that Lucy could see a fragile membrane of pale gray tissue rippling like a sail inside his snout. Above his wonderful triangular eye sockets, the bony ridges pressed themselves into a scowl.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. Something was clearly wrong, but she could see no dangers in the garden or beyond.

  Even so, Grockle lifted his tail, turning his isoscele like a rudder. An angry growl sounded in his serpentine throat.

  “Grockle, what’s the matter?” Lucy asked again.

  The dragon stared at Mary Cauldwell’s tree. He blew a line of smoke that was all the colors of Bella’s fur. With a rasp like a butcher’s knife, his claws emerged from the leathery pouches at the ends of his toes. He flushed his wings and prepared to fly. So great was the draft of air that it swatted Lucy’s face away to one side.

  “WAIT!” she commanded in (loud) dragontongue. To her amazement, the dragon stalled.

  His eye patterns switched again, reinventing the human definition of “confused.”

  “David sent you to protect me,” she said, with just a hint of truculence shading her voice.

  Grockle tilted his head.

  “Can you understand me?”

  Hrrr, he replied, in a low bass register that made her red hair lift off her shoulders. She even felt the rumble deep in her diaphragm and realized to her amazement that she could interpret the vibrations just as accurately there as she could in the bones of her inner ear. But then, the word was easy to render. He had spoken her name.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said. “We need your help.”

  Grockle sucked in through a tiny row of air vents just to the rear of his lower jaw. His jeweled eyes flashed toward the ancient tree. The scent of a raven hung in its branches, on a trail that was rapidly diminishing. Help us do what? he heard a small voice say. With near-preternatural speed, he swung back and peered intently at Gwendolen, realigning his nostrils like a double-barreled gun. From the sanctuary of Lucy’s shoulder, Gwendolen waved a wary paw.

  Lucy pointed at Grockle’s claws. “There. That’s what we need.”

  Gwendolen’s eye ridges mirrored Grockle’s.

  “His claws,” Lucy said. Perfect for digging. “We’re going to go and search for Tam.”

  42 THE COMING OF GAWAINE

  Hrrr? said Gwendolen. Had the girl gone mad? Tam would be as dead as the tree by now. Crushed. Suffocated. Drowned in pee.

  “He might have found a pocket of air,” Lucy argued. “If we wait for David, it might be too late.”

  She noticed Grockle tilt his head again and wondered for a moment if he’d read her thoughts. The dragon rumbled, but didn’t say a word. One eye swiveled toward her pocket as she opened it and showed him the vial of tears. “This will help,” she said, jiggling the vial so he could see its contents. She watched his extraordinary, multilayered pupil undergo a series of focal adjustments. Right at its center, a tiny floret of light appeared.

  “The moon,” Lucy whispered. She spun quickly on her he
els and found it in the afternoon sky. A fragile rice-paper disk of light, sitting over the Vale of Scuffenbury.

  “That’s it,” she breathed. “That’s what I need to do.” Her destiny was right here, bottled in her hand. She swung back to face Grockle again. “Take me to the top of the Tor!” She pointed to her chest, then the sky, and flapped her hands. “I want to go close to the cairn.”

  Gwendolen questioned the wisdom of this.

  “I’m not giving up on Tam,” Lucy said. “He wouldn’t have given up on us. We’re going to do this, Gwen. We’re going to make the mirror with my tears and let the moon reflect in it and” — she trapped a nervous bubble of air and looked back at the restless Tor — “we’ll have a better chance of finding him once the dragon’s free.”

  Meow. For the first time in Grockle’s presence, Bella made herself known. She stepped out from the shelter of an ornamental mushroom and sat down in plain view of the dragon. Her canny gaze swept toward the vial of tears and Lucy wondered, yet again, if the cat could be trusted. Maybe Bella had her own agenda? Maybe she had come to “claim the dragon”? Grockle, too, seemed equally wary. His keen sense of smell had detected the existence of a warm-blooded animal at ground level near to Lucy, but he’d assumed it would be nothing but a harmless feral creature. Bella’s swaggering arrival made him reconsider. Once again, his nostrils prepared for a strike.