Chapter 2
Two
Following my terrible day, it seemed unfair I had a terrible night. The only thing that saved me from my burning nightmares was Lidi’s sharp little foot trying to dig into my intestines.
I woke up enough to shove her bony arms and legs back onto her side without the tenderness I felt toward her during the day, knowing it wouldn’t matter; she made vague, grumbling noises in her sleep but didn’t wake. She just pulled half the covers off me as she made herself comfortable again.
I fought for enough blanket to keep from freezing and replayed the nightmare in my mind, as if it weren’t familiar enough. In my dreams, I was always running from the dragons. Cornered, desperate, I reached out for the magic I’d had as a child. But nothing happened.
Now that I was awake, what mattered was saving Tay’s life and Lidi’s magic. I tossed and turned, haunted by the ghosts of my flimsy, half-formed plans.
I never fell asleep deeply again before the sky began to brighten outside our little round window. I stared up at the ceiling as dawn pushed on despite my misgivings, the room’s darkness softening, and wished that today could be different.
Later that morning, I shakily climbed up onto a chair to get down the tin of saved seeds from one of the high shelves. Lidi watched me with the open judgment of the young.
“Lidi, could you go gather the eggs, please?” Tay asked her.
She nodded and ran off. I winced as the door slammed, the hanging pots swaying from the impact and sending a fresh wave of green smells through the tiny cottage.
Gripping the top of the chair, I carefully climbed back down.
I was irrationally terrified of heights. Even the not-so-lofty heights of a chair.
I set the tin down on the table and opened it, revealing the precious saved seeds.
With Lidi’s magic, she could probably sprout anything, no matter the season.
I had about a dozen half-formed plans, although I’d be better off with a single good one.
“If I went away to work for the Fae, they might be willing to help us.”
Tay had his arm braced on the table, looking too tired to finish eating his porridge, but he straightened at that thought. “Cara. No. You haven’t been particularly successful serving mortals.”
“You don’t believe in me?”
“I believe in you. It’s the rest of the world that gives me qualms.” He gave me a smile that was half-teasing, half-tender. “You are terrible at shutting up and smiling and serving. It’s bad enough down at the pub. How’s it going to work when poor graces will get you murdered?”
His humor dropped away at the last word. “Promise me you won’t. The Fae aren’t safe. Especially for someone like you.”
Lidi flew back in then, babbling about rabbits in the garden, and I made a shushing sound toward Tay. He glared at me, knowing I was just cutting him off, and I smiled back brightly as I started washing the dishes.
After breakfast was cleaned up, I walked Lidi to school. I’d braided her hair back into two braids that started at her temples, and they were neat and perfect, the way I could never manage my own hair.
Curi walked with us as far as the gate to our farm.
The wooden poles for the gate leaned precariously, as if the flowers curling around them were dragging them down.
It had been a different world—to me at least—when my father drove the poles into that ground. “Look at this land of ours, Cara,” he’d told me. “You did this. Thank you.”
I’d been proud then that my magic had bought this home. No one had asked me, but if my parents had, I would’ve willingly given that light inside away for their sake.
All it cost was the lifelong sense I was missing something, even though my memory of my magic was just a shadow.
Curi wrapped herself around my ankles one last time—apparently a rescued cat’s way of expressing gratitude is to quietly endanger their savior’s life over and over—and then slunk back to the sundial rock where she liked to sun in the garden. I closed the gate, latching it shut.
I ran my finger across the soft petals of one of the enormous bobbing pink roses that bloomed on the gate. “You make our life more beautiful, Lidi, do you know that?”
She smiled, faintly but sadly, and it tore at my heart.
“That’s a gift. That matters,” I told her, then took her hand.
The two of us walked down the lane. Green trees to either side arched over the road so that the sun shining through cast a lattice of light and shadow, and the scent of fresh, damp greenery would’ve told me it had rained overnight, even if I hadn’t listened to the rain patting against the rooftop last night, cozy next to Lidi in our little space just below the eaves but unable to sleep.
“The Dragon Trials start soon,” she said. “Have you ever seen a dragon shifter?”
“No, and I don’t want to.”
“Everyone wants to go. Gigi’s big brother is going to go watch,” she said wistfully. “You really don’t want to?”
“I’ve never been further than those mountains.” I pointed to them in the distance. Somewhere beyond that was the capital, and the queen’s gleaming castle, and the world of dragon shifters and Fae.
“And I don’t want to go any further.” I tickled her side. “I want to stay here with you.”
She giggled and pulled away.
“Tormenting you,” I added.
“But you were talking with Tay about going away,” she said.
“I’m just trying to figure things out. I’m trying to find answers to grown-up problems you don’t have to worry about.”
If I went away to work for the Fae, I doubted they would help me. But perhaps I could steal a cure, and when I brought it back here, everyone would assume it was a gift. They sometimes helped the people who served them. Their unpredictable generosity was part of why mortals loved them.
Mortal loyalty was also based in the fantasy—which came true just barely often enough to keep it alive—that the Fae might raise a particularly deserving mortal into a Fae.
“I want to see Fae and dragon shifters and the Trials,” she said decisively. “Why does everyone think the dragons are so scary when they protect us?”
“Because they’re unpredictable.” I tickled her again, and she twisted away, laughing, but didn’t release my hand. “Just like me.”
She was still giggling, but I regretted the words. So far, no one had ever seen any resemblance between me and the dragon shifters. Mam had fretted about releasing my magic to the Fae, afraid it would have some different tinge that alerted them to the mark she made me hide.
At the time, I’d still thought Tay and I shared a father.
Our father had loved me as well as he did Tay.
Tay’s magic had bought him the extra years of life that brought us Lidi, and that had been a gift.
Tay reminded me gently sometimes that we had traded away our magic for the things we loved most: the farm and our rambunctious little sister.
I wouldn’t change anything, so why was I angry?
“Sometimes one nightmare can protect us from another,” I added, thinking about the dragon shifters I didn’t know, like the one who got my mother pregnant before she married a better mortal man.
“Sometimes dragons can turn evil. That’s why people are afraid of them.
But they keep us safe from the monsters. ”
“I’m going over the mountains someday,” Lidi said.
She clearly hadn’t given a damn about anything I said about the dragon shifters. Even though she’d asked, she ignored my answer. Children do keep one humble.
“I hope you do. Just remember to come home.” We turned down the wide path to the school. The trees that dotted the field in front of the school had wide, spreading branches from which hung a dozen swings, and brightly colored strings of pennants fluttered in the breeze.
The trees were full of clambering children, and other red-cheeked little ones ran back and forth playing tag. The doors to the school must not be open yet. Miss Hex, who had taught Tay and me to read years before, drank tea alone right up until she had to ring the bell, and who could blame her?
I tried to ask Lidi who else had been bullying her, but she ran off with her braids bouncing to hug her best friend, as if they’d been apart for longer than the night. I lingered, watching them. There were plenty of chores waiting for me at home before work and little incentive to rush away.
A shadow crossed mine. Something soared low overhead, and I ducked instinctively.
I looked up, already smiling at my fear, ready to make a joke of the bird that had terrified me.
But something dark and winged and somehow slithering through the air was moving away from us. My jaw dropped open, and then the wings tilted, and the thing was turning, circling…
It was circling around the schoolyard.
“Get inside,” I shouted, breaking into a run. I pushed children stumbling toward the schoolhouse, searching for Lidi as I went.
The enormous winged wyrm banked, turning toward us for another pass.
Lidi and her best friend ran hand-in-hand for the doors. Miss Hex threw the door open, wide-eyed, and then looked up at the sky. Her jaw unhinged in horror too, and for a split second, she looked as young and terrified as her charges.
“Get them inside and keep them safe!” I shouted at her.
The rogue thought ran through my head that I could let the monster wyrm eat any of the little assholes that bullied Lidi. But even as I thought that, I was running for the edge of the clearing. Some children were still frozen, staring up at the wyrm as it circled again, dipping lower this time.
“Move! Get into school!” I shouted.
In the distance, the bell was ringing, over and over, frantically. Miss Hex must be yanking at it desperately.
The bell got the kids moving, automatically, as if they were conditioned to run toward school when the bell rang. Thank every last fucking god. There were just a few more kids now up in one of the trees, and they were jumping down.
Two of them ran past me toward the school. But when the third boy landed, he fell heavily on his knee. His face twisted with pain.
“Get up!” I ran toward him as he launched himself up, hobbling along, before his leg went out under him again.
I grabbed him, and together, we half-stumbled, half-ran across the field.
The wyrm circled again, this circle smaller, tighter, closer. The flutter of its wings pushed air down on our heads.
“Go!” I shouted, turning back at the steps to the schoolhouse, because something primal in me—something that was prey—knew that the wyrm was coming in again, and this time, it wasn’t just a probing swoop.
Two other children broke from the schoolhouse and ran to help their friend.
The bell had stopped ringing.
The children’s little fenced garden by the front of the school was full of sweet pea and carrot plants, littered with their spades and watering cans and—there. A shovel.
I grabbed it and turned, swinging it already, as the wyrm’s wings cast a low shadow over me.
As I turned, I saw its dreadful eye fixed on the children, who were half-dragging their friend up the stairs.
I slammed the shovel into the wyrm’s head.
It was so much bigger than I’d realized. It tilted to one side, its wing clipping the grass, and its grim eyes fixed on me. It had an awful, snarling mouth.
I raised the shovel between us, readying for another pass, and backed toward the schoolhouse.
“Hurry!” Miss Hex shouted over the hustle of children’s feet on the porch.
“Hurry!” she shouted again, and this time I knew she was calling for me, but the wyrm was coming in for another attack, and I didn’t dare turn back.
The door slammed shut so hard I felt a ripple under my feet.
I hit the wyrm with the shovel again just as its teeth scraped against me, and it turned, coming back in for another pass. Pain lanced through my body, but I barely felt it.
When my back bumped the door, the wyrm landed, snarling, right in front of me.
Lidi was screaming inside. “Open the door, let her in!”
“Don’t open it!” I shouted, knowing that I couldn’t hold the line against the wyrm. If that door opened, it would slither past me into the school.
The wyrm’s jaw latched around the shovel, yanking it out of my hands as I struggled to hang onto it. It gave me a malicious look as it crunched through the handle, spitting the two pieces of splintered wood to the ground at my feet.
The wyrm landed in front of me, looking as if it were grinning. Blood poured down my shoulder where the wyrm’s teeth had grazed me.
My hands knotted at my sides. I needed a weapon.
The wyrm suddenly launched toward me.
I threw up my arms, my eyes closing despite my intentions as if my instincts were protecting me from seeing more of that enormous fanged mouth, the thing coming toward me.
Its teeth scraped me. Then it was gone.
The wyrm was yanked to one side, struggling in the mouth of an enormous dragon.