Chapter One The Irritating Riddle of the Sphinxes #2
Calla grinned at me, no trace of malice on her face.
There never is. I felt like an ass for wishing her away.
Don’t get me wrong. I like my sisters. I love my sisters.
But it would be nice if once, just once, they got hopelessly lost on one of our assigned tasks and utterly failed at it, while I came home with every problem solved and all the spoils of victory neatly wrapped up in a bow.
Maybe then the queen would stop treating me like the broken cauldron she never quite got around to throwing out.
The way she’d treated me ever since she released me from my tower prison.
Calla, as usual, looked like she had been sleeping in a hay barn—and very possibly she had been, although I’ve also seen her look that way after a comfortable night in her own bedroom.
Mysterious stains spotted her surcoat, and so many holes riddled her kirtle that it was less kirtle than hole.
My own well-worn traveling clothes were pristine in comparison.
Pieces of straw flecked her uncombed hair, and speaking of her hair…
“You’ve got birds,” I said, “nesting on your head.”
She nodded slowly, making an effort not to wake them. “Yes. They’re starlings. The little one is Antonio Frühvogel-Featherington, and the bigger one is Tweet. Aren’t they adorable?”
They were. The pair of them were fast asleep and nestled together, tucked heads resting one atop the other.
I was relieved it was only birds taking a nap on her head this time.
I’ve seen her infested with naked mole rats.
Or even beetles, which is rather off-putting.
Calla loves all of nature’s creatures and would never think to evict a friendly beetle from her hair just for being a beetle.
No matter what, however, she always somehow smells like a fresh spring breeze. It’s almost obnoxiously pleasant.
Beneath the birds and above the tattered clothing, Calla looks more like me than our other sister does.
That isn’t really surprising, since Calla and I share one parent, while Jonquil isn’t related to me by blood.
Jonquil inherited the queen’s looks; my older sister is statuesque, with hair that cascades down her back in long dark plaits—although unlike the queen, she bears angry scars around her neck and all her joints.
Calla is on the smaller side, and she and I share the tight curls and dimpled smile that we both received from our father.
But Calla has my stepmother’s eyes, and I, of course, do not.
I also try to keep my hair cropped a bit shorter than Calla’s since mine tends to grow spontaneously when I’m under stress.
If I let it go untended, I start to trip on it.
“So,” I said, “I’m guessing you’re behind the magic self-ploughing field.”
“It’s not magic,” she replied. “Some earthworms agreed to do me a favor.”
“Of course they did.” Peering more closely at the roiling earth in the middle distance, I could just make out the wriggling mass of them as they churned their way through the soil.
As a plan, it was disgusting but effective.
I was glad she wasn’t carrying any of them in her hair.
“How did you manage to make friends with earthworms?”
“I rescued one from being eaten by a bird.”
“You saved one worm, and every worm on earth became your sworn friend for life?”
“Well…yes.”
If I had tried to save a worm from a bird, all I would have gotten was pecked. In Calla’s case, the only surprising thing was that she hadn’t enlisted an army of gophers and moles as well.
“I suppose all we have to do now is get past the sphinxes and sow the teeth, then,” I said.
“Oh, well, that’s…” She sounded almost embarrassed. “That’s taken care of, really.”
“What do you mean, it’s taken care of?”
I glanced over at my sack of teeth and found it lying empty and flaccid on the ground.
“Remember that bird I rescued the worm from?” Calla said. “I didn’t want to leave the poor thing hungry, so I helped it out. One thing led to another, you know how it goes.”
Over the field, a whole flock of starlings fluttered through the air, wheeling into dense clusters that immediately broke apart again.
Tiny white objects rained from their beaks—my carefully collected teeth, I assumed.
As far as I could tell, not a single bird was diving down to grab a worm. Calla must have negotiated a truce.
“So I managed to accomplish absolutely nothing on this quest,” I said. “As usual.”
“This again?” Calla sighed. “Don’t be ridiculous. It was a quest for teeth, and you literally found the teeth.”
“You could have done that. Anyone could have done that.”
“Well, you also kept the sphinxes from attacking us.”
I frowned. “How…did I do that, exactly?”
“My comrades, look!” shouted Probably Truthful as it noticed what was going on in the field. “We have been tricked!”
“This lack of betrayal shall not be met with instant death!” bellowed Probably Lying as it crouched to spring.
“A storm in the air— / Its sharp and pungent odor / Heralds the thunder!” threatened No-Nose.
Calla’s eyes widened. “I thought you said you were getting on well with them! You didn’t ask them the question?”
“What question?”
“The question that makes them not attack us!”
“Calla, tell me what the confounded question is. I’ve still got one more!”
“You ask the first one what the second one would say if you asked what isn’t the right thing to say to keep them from—Eek!”
She ducked just before a stone claw swung through the air where her head had been.
The claw slammed into a tree, which shuddered, tilted, and toppled over, showering us with dirt as its roots ripped out of the ground.
Antonio Frühvogel-Featherington and Tweet woke with startled chirps.
They launched themselves out of Calla’s hair and took wing.
The birds had the right idea. “New plan,” I said. “Run.”
I grabbed Calla’s hand, and we dashed away. The stone sphinxes bounded after us. The ground trembled with their every step. I might have had one question left, but it didn’t look like I was going to get a chance to ask it.
A tail as wide as a barrel lashed toward me, arcing over the sphinx’s head like a scorpion’s sting. It missed by only the barest of margins as I threw myself to the side. My hair sprouted a few inches in panic.
“Help!” Calla screamed. I turned, thinking she was calling for me, but then a swarm of buzzing black-and-yellow darts flew into the sphinxes’ eyes. The monsters roared and shook their heads, batting at the blinding clouds around them.
“Wasps?” I asked.
“I lent them a hand a while back,” Calla panted. “Long story, no time, keep running!”
I revised my opinion—there were worse things than earthworms she could have had in her hair.
The wasps weren’t going to distract the sphinxes for long. No-Nose had already figured out wasps couldn’t do much against stone. It charged forward again. The other two wouldn’t be far behind.
“If we can find somewhere to hide—” I began, but I didn’t get any further before No-Nose gathered itself for a tremendous leap.
The stone sphinx sprang, blotting out the sun as it sailed over our heads.
It landed in front of us with a sound like a building collapsing and smiled its sharp-toothed smile.
“Crickets are chirping,” it growled rather incongruously. I heard the others catching up behind us. “On a sultry summer night—”
An earsplitting screech rent the air, and something huge crashed into the side of the sphinx, bowling it over. “Ow!” it cried out. “That really hurt!”
“Get on!” my older sister, Jonquil, yelled from the back of her dragon as it dipped low. “Now!”
The dragon’s scales glittered with iridescence, red and blue and green, as they caught the sunlight.
Calla and I didn’t have to be asked twice.
We sprang on, careful not to put a foot through the delicate wing membrane.
The two of us scrabbled at the ridge of the dragon’s spine, trying to find a place to cling to as it hurled itself back into the air.
One of the trailing sphinxes took a lunge at us.
It fell well short, its tail snapping off when it smashed onto the ground.
The dragon swiveled its long, snakelike neck and unleashed a gout of flame at our pursuers.
Heat seared my arm as its fiery breath narrowly missed its own passengers.
I tried to shift out of the way and nearly fell off.
The fire engulfed the tailless sphinx while I struggled to find my balance again on the shifting scales. Dead, crisped wasps dropped from the air around it. Calla made a noise of distress in the back of her throat. I wasn’t sure how I should feel. They had defended us valiantly, but…wasps.
The sphinx seemed little affected, its stone face merely blackened a bit. “You will escape our wrath!” it roared after us. “We will not chase you to the ends of the earth and beyond!”
“Maybe that’s the truthful one,” Calla suggested optimistically.
“Thanks,” I said to Jonquil, more grudgingly than she deserved. “For coming to save us.”
Jonquil shrugged.
Unlike both Calla’s garments and my own, her clothing was immaculate in spite of whatever adventures had brought her here on dragonback. There wasn’t a speck of dirt on her highly impractical gown; she was riding the dragon sidesaddle, and I’ve got no idea why she didn’t slide right off.
Of course, you could drop her in a mud pit, and she’d come out spotless. I was certain she used some kind of magic for it. I’d always thought it pointless, wasting a spell that way, but as the oldest, she felt that there were standards she needed to uphold.
“I’m glad to be of help,” she said, “but that’s not why I’m here.”
My brow furrowed. “You didn’t come to rescue us?”
“No. You’ve been summoned to Skalla. The queen wants to see you immediately.”
“Seriously? Now?” My stepmother’s sense of timing was as maddening as ever.
Very few people could send lifesaving assistance in my direction, whether intentionally or by accident, and somehow leave me feeling miffed about it. Only my immediate family, really.
I finally managed to get a solid grip on the dragon and peered over the side to see if the sphinxes were still trying to follow us. In the field below, babies were beginning to grow out of the ground where the teeth had been planted. Weird.
“So what does she want with us?” I asked. “Did she come up with another quest before this one was even finished?”
“She doesn’t want to see all three of us,” Jonquil said. “Just you.”
“Oh,” I said, my throat going dry. “Crap.” A private audience was never, ever a good sign.
Being devoured by a sphinx would have been safer.