“So let me get this straight,” Mara said, clasping her hands in front of her like she was conducting a business meeting, “there was a literal, real-live dragon in your house, and you don’t ‘know what else there is to say’ on the subject?”
“I don’t,” I grumbled, pulling my sketchbook out of my backpack.
We were at the library, after a group “study club” that Grammy had signed me up for. Honestly, it was less to help me study and more to help me ‘make friends;’ I had made a friend (Mara had done all the work), so I guess it was a win. Basically, various homeschool kids met up at the library, and different parents or librarians would lead a lecture or study-time on different topics. Then there’d be homework time, and then we’d wait to get picked up. It was flexible and low-key, and now that it was over, Mara and I—and a few other kids—were here for the foreseeable future. Most parents or guardians didn’t go back home after dropping their kid off—driving in and out of town was a pain on good days, so most just timed their errands for the same time period. But that often meant they weren’t back for a while.
“I feel like there’s a lot to say on the subject of dragons,” Mara shot back, pulling out her own sketchbook.
That was one of our shared interests—if in different directions. She liked drawing weapons and fantasy creatures and original characters; I liked animals and landscapes and abstracts and colors.
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, then, what do you want me to say?”
She shrugged exaggeratedly. “I don’t know. What did he look like? How do you know he was a dragon? It was a he, right?” she added in as an afterthought.
I nodded.
“Also what did he want? Why were you hiding from him? Did he, like threaten you? Basically, anything besides ‘yeah there was a dragon, y’know how it is.’ I do not know how it is.”
I met her eyes, and, when she didn’t look away, dropped my gaze with a heavy, bitter sigh. Considering it had been two days since the closet incident, it felt safe to say that Mara wasn’t dropping the topic. “He just looked normal, because this dragon can shape-shift. I don’t know if he’d fit in the house otherwise. But yeah, just a guy. Bald, golden eyes, golden tattoos on either side of his neck. A weird amount of dangly earrings.”
She side-eyed me as if it say ‘that doesn’t sound like a normal guy.’ “So if he can shapeshift, how do you know he was a dragon?”
“It’s hard to explain.” To tell the truth, I hadn’t known at first, since I’d never met a dragon before. I’d just known that he was something to stay away from. “He said he was, and, well, I don’t know. He wasn’t human, that much was obvious. And Grammy believed him, too, so that basically confirms it.”
“Has Grammy ever met a dragon before?”
I shrugged, making a show of drawing and mumbling as quiet as I could get away with. “I don’t know. She doesn’t talk much about her younger days.” Maybe if I was vague enough, she’d get tired and give up.
Mara sketched the outline to something humanoid. “So, why were you hiding from him?”
Grimacing, I leaned closer over the triangles I’d planned to form into an abstractish face. I hadn’t put down any base sketch to guide me, though, so it wasn’t promising to go well; but I had bigger, more irritating things to pay attention to. “Because.”
“Because what?”
Beneath my hands, the pencil lines grew harsher, and I told myself it was on purpose. “Because you don’t mess with dragons. It’s not a good idea. And… the vibes were off.” I wanted to have a rational explanation, something like ‘he threatened us,’ or ‘I was scouting him out and trying to not get seen,’ or ‘Grammy told me I needed to stay safe,’ but none of that was true. Instead, he had been a model of civility, which was awful. It made articulating suspicious specifics about him so much harder when, so far, he had done nothing but exist.
“You can just say you were scared,” Mara said lightly. “I can’t judge, I’ve never met a dragon. But I can imagine they’d have a presence, y’know?”
I did know. Part of me was relieved that she wouldn’t be disappointed if I told her that—the rest of me grated, like I had metal grinding around my ribs; I hated that she just assumed as much, that she was right, and that she didn’t see it as a big deal.
“So what did he want?”
The graphite in my mechanical pencil snapped. Slowly, I clicked the eraser until more graphite came out, pretending I was being careful and not just using it as a distraction. “He wants to make a deal with Grammy. She hasn’t told me the details yet.”
“But you do know something?”
Of course we’d end up on that. The one part of the deal they had agreed on.
“Come on,” Mara prodded. She raked me over with eyes crinkled in good humor, holding her pencil loosely, poised.
Chewing on my lip, I furiously scribbled over the abstract on my page, the formlessness of it—my own fault—suddenly offensive, abrasive; charged anger building with each too-hard pencil scratch.
“What, you’re just going to bring stuff up and then not tell me?” She teased.
“I didn’t bring it up,” I hissed, a last effort to keep my voice low, and banged my pencil down on the table, “you just decided, on your own, that I had to tell you.”
For a moment, I could feel a spotlight pinning me to the ground as eyes flicked our way, but in that moment, the spark burning its way to my lungs didn’t care.
Mara gripped her pencil, tensing as the playful look pulled away from her face like molting skin. My own pencil threatened to crack under the pressure of my fingers as we locked in a startled stalemate.
“Look, it’s clear you’re upset,” Mara said, rolling her lips together, breaking the sharp-toothed stillness more gently than I deserved.
You don’t say.
“But you’re going to have to talk about it to someone or its going to get all twisted up in you and make your feelings about it even worse.”
I snapped over the next page in my sketchbook, as if it were the book that had caused this.
“Okay, okay,” Mara sighed, and did something I’d never seen her do before: backed off. “We can just draw for a bit. Like, I still think you should talk to someone, but it doesn’t seem like you’re ready for it, so, we can just chill.”
When I shot her a glance, she had gone back to her sketch—probably an elf, considering the length of the ears—and the only sign of discontentment I could see was the furrow in her brow, and her lips pressed thin.
Without a word, I went back to… whatever. As I did, the heavy weight of staring eyes pressed into my skin; the lightning flash inside me faded, leaving me jittery, achingly conscious of my rudeness. Despite the failed drawing from earlier, I was now in the mood for just covering the entire new page in one messy abstract, one I told myself I’d color later to make look like stained glass. It would be okay, I told myself—I meant it to be messy, this time, so I wouldn’t be upset by it. I wouldn’t.
Mentally, I knew that everyone had gone back to their business, that no one watched me, but emotionally a panel of judges had gathered, lurking behind bookcases and casting their verdicts against me with disgusted headshakes—even though there was no indication of that being the case. The siblings at the nearest occupied table—two twins and their younger brother—seemed wholly absorbed in their books (encyclopedias for the eldest, novels for the others), and Ms. Graham, the librarian, was busied with computer work at the information desk; any other patrons I could see were out of the study section and scattered among the shelves, paying no attention to us.
I bit my lip again, working to keep my hands moving with the pencil, and not moving to wring knots out of my shirt. That would be too conspicuous, too awkward. So, instead, I focused as intently as I could on making my pencil strokes even and smooth, and eased myself into a breathing exercise, the way Grammy taught me. Panicking wasn’t the solution, and pathetic blubbering would just make Mara less inclined to forgive me.
If she even wanted to. She was probably fuming, wondering why we became friends, why she tried to hang out with me.
On one hand, it’s not like she had a ton of friends to choose from. Once, during a particularly long library wait, she’d confided in me how much it bothered her that most people thought she was adopted.
“It’s not my fault I look so different from the rest of my family,” she’d said, lighter than I could tell she meant, “Dad married a black woman, had me, my mom died, and then later he married a white woman. It’s simple. But other people don’t seem to see it that way.”
I still believed that she could have made friends with anyone, if she had decided to, but instead she had decided on me. And I was doing a bad job of being friends back.
My throat ached from the words that I knew I’d have to say. I didn’t want to talk about this, but I didn’t want to ruin my only friendship over being stubborn and waspish.
I kept staring at my paper, because I didn’t want to look at anything else—but I’d stopped drawing.
“Sorry,” I said, quieter than I meant. But I was just glad that my voice came out at all. “It’s just… there’s a lot going on. Grammy hasn’t really told me much, but they decided, as a way to test things out, that he—the dragon-man—Kalgyrad—could keep coming to visit, so he can, uh, train me in Mithae. Which means I’m going to have to spend more time with him, and he creeps me out.” It didn’t sound like a lot when I said it out loud, but I hoped that somehow she’d understand. “It’s, um… it’s not an excuse, though. I still shouldn’t have snapped.”
The silence dragged on like claws through dirt; her pencil slowed.
“Yeah. That’s okay.” Her voice sounded more… careful than it had been. I heard her take a breath, diving back in to the conversational fray. “But, uh, Mithae… you’ve mentioned that before. That’s magic runes, right?”
“Yeah. Well, magic as a whole. Also kind of like the fourth dimension, and like, its own aspect plane. It’s complicated. But, um, yeah, basically it’s magic.”
“So, the dragon is teaching you magic? You guys use the same kind of magic?” Still careful, she’d turned to look at me—which is more than I’d done for her yet.
“Well, different races and beings can access Mithae in different ways—some cultures have different ways of putting rewrites—magic spells—together, so it’s almost like a different language, and there are creatures that don’t have to weave spells, they can just use certain types of Mithae like we can use our muscles. But, uh… it all fundamentally comes from the same source, and fundamentally we all have to use the same kind of system. So, like, there might be some differences in approach, but I can use the same rewrites he can, and the same theory would apply to what I know.” I winced. Shut up, stop talking.
“Whoa, that’s cool.” Her voice was soft now, almost reverent.
I hadn’t done it on purpose, but I should have known that a discussion on Mithae would be perfect for getting her to forgive me. Weirdly, it felt like I’d manipulated her.
I cast a quick, repentant glance at her, and met her eyes; cheeks flushing, I turned away. “It’s… less exciting when you actually learn it. I think chemistry might be easier to understand in the long run.”
“Still,” she said, poking me with her pencil, “it’s magic. You can shape the world around you with just some shapes on paper.”
“Well, not paper,” I replied automatically. “It’s not dense or strong enough. Can’t hold Mithae.”
“Really?” Now she sounded excited. “Why not?”
“Because… like… the writing isn’t the magic.” I flipped through my sketchbook to find a demonstration, but, well, I typically avoided drawing Mithae rewrites in my school sketchbook. Better to not be conspicuous. “Writing’s the thing that ties the magic to the real world. So whatever Mithae gets tied to has to be strong enough to channel it.”
“Otherwise it explodes?”
The hope in her voice made me smile. “No, it just, kinda… doesn’t work.”
“Oh.”
We both went silent; I had no doubt that she was trying to think of the right question to ask next, and I was casting about in my head for a way to make sure we stayed talking about Mithae and not the dragon-man. Kalgyrad, apparently.
Quickly, I looked around the library. No one was observing us, neither of our guardians were here, and now the twins both had headphones on—their brother had wandered off towards the graphic novel section. Safe enough for now.
Opening my sketchbook to the last page, I hunched over it and began to sketch. Mara carefully attended to her own sketchbook; but her pencil dawdled vaguely over nothing, and she subtly leaned towards me. I almost chuckled. For the purposes of further demonstration, I hummed the notes as I—slowly—traced out the awkward cursive-type lines; then I pushed it towards her.
She blinked, as if she hadn’t been watching me. “Is that—?”
I nodded. “It can make a smallish object glow like a flashlight.”
“I’ll be honest, other than the bigger symbol, this looks like a bunch of squiggles.” She smiled, playfulness slipping back onto her face; the world felt right again. “I was hoping it’d look like an actual language or something.”
I smiled back. “It does kinda make me wonder who came up with this, or how they figured it out. But yeah, the big one is what we call the focus symbol, and then the instructions are attached.” I pulled the sketchbook back and began tracing out the lines by themselves, in their proper groups, but without connecting them.
She dropped any pretense, and huddled to look over my shoulder. “So what was the humming?”
“Okay, so this might be getting into the weeds a bit, but basically, for a rewrite to work, it has to be the union of matter and ‘unmatter,’ or Aedrir and Mithae. Matter, or Aedrir, is the material used, Mithae, ‘magic,’ is present through the song, and the writing is what ties the two together.”
“Interesting. So you were humming the glow-song?”
“Kind of? Different note sequences go with different lines—it’s like a kind of language, too, the spoken part of it, if you will, so it can also get a bit complicated.” I finished the unconnected version of the rewrite, and turned it towards her.
“Fair enough.” She tapped the paper. “But it doesn’t work on paper because it’s not the right form matter.”
“Yeah.” I looked around again, double-checking that no one was paying us and my weird hummings any mind. Still clear. The brother had returned, but had his face scrunched up against his palm and seemed engrossed in whatever comic he’d picked out.
Quickly, I pulled my aluminum water-bottle out of my backpack and I made one last sweeping check of the room, holding the bottle under the table. Using the eraser from my pencil to trace on it as I hummed, I set to work producing an actually functioning rewrite. The ‘writing’ doesn’t need pens—the motions and sounds of weaving the rewrite is what binds the magic, and that produces visible lines on its own.
My rewrite was clumsy, but it worked. In a minute or so, I pulled the pencil away, holding the final hummed note; etched lines flared out around the bottle in a sort of electric yellow, and the bottom of the bottle shot out a beam of warm light, crackling like lightning. Its reflection shone in Mara’s eyes as she grinned and clasped her palms together.
Another glance around—still nothing. Just as hurriedly as before, I scribbled out a shorter rewrite; the light flicked out, the lines flickering to silver before disappearing like they’d never been.
“So, that’s a rewrite.” I gestured vaguely with the water-bottle and set it back down on the table, unsure of where to go from there. “It would have gone out in a few minutes, anyway, because aluminum isn’t very dense, but, uh, yeah.”
“You have to teach me how to do that,” Mara said, voice rising in excitement. “That’s so cool, you can literally—”
I kicked her sharply, noting with alarm that Ms. Graham had turned her head toward us, and the brother spared us a glance from behind his comic.
“Okay, yeah, but keep quiet about it,” I hissed, “it’s kind of a big secret.”
“So you are going to teach me?” She said, quieter. We’d had already held several arguments about whether or not magic should be secret, but thankfully she was too distracted to get into it now.
“Well, no—I can’t, not without permission.”
“Why not?”
“It’s… it’s a thing, a rule.” I hadn’t exactly told her about Warden stuff, not fully, and I didn’t want to now, of all times.
“Why? Because of your Grammy?”
I think as far as she knew, Grammy was a solitary wizard who had taken me in as an orphaned child. That wasn’t untrue but the reality also wasn’t quite as romantic. “Yes. No. It’s complicated. Look, I’m sorry, but that’s all I can really say right now.”
Mara frowned, clouding the eagerness still illumined in her face.
I looked away. We had just made up after I had snapped at her, and I didn’t want to have to do it all over again—but this was too long and complicated, and I had no idea if I was allowed to tell her, and I had been too scared to ask Grammy. So… I just… couldn’t talk about it right now.
“Okay, okay, fine,” she sighed. “Secret society and all that. Being all hush-hush only makes it more suspicious, but whatever.” She chewed on her lip, tapping her pencil on the table.
This wasn’t over, I knew. Just postponed. “Yeah, sorry. I don’t understand it all myself just yet.”
“I guess that makes sense.” She pushed herself back in her chair, arms stiff against the table. “Can I keep the drawing you did of the, uh, rewrite, at least? Like, you can’t teach me how to do the spell, but I guess it’s like… a picture of it? I don’t know. A keepsake.”
I hesitated. Giving her a template was as good as teaching her myself. But I hadn’t taught her the right notes to sing, nor had I told her one of the other foundational rules of rewrites: they have to be drawn, unbroken, or it messes up the spell. Realistically, she wouldn’t be able to reproduce what I’d done, and, well, I’d been shooting her down all day.
“Yeah, sure.” I carefully tore the page out of my sketchbook. “The lines are kinda messy and not as neat as they should be, but, yeah, that is basically what it looks like.”
Mara grinned, doing a slight wiggle of a dance as she folded it and hid it in her backpack.
Internally, I sighed a breath of relief. She was at least being sensible enough to keep it secret—and she was pleased.
“Okay, but what else happened with the dragon?” Emboldened by her victory, of course she came back to Kalgyrad.
And she timed her return well. The verbal and emotional ups and downs had ensured I’d be too tired to resist. I shrugged. “Don’t know that there’s much left to tell. He showed up almost a week ago, and asked for an audience with Grammy. I didn’t like him then—he has the air of someone who knows more than they’re telling, in what I would call ‘cartoony’ and ‘mustache-twirling’, except that he looks more like a mafia boss, is very polite, and also doesn’t have a mustache. Grammy kinda avoided whatever he was wanting to talk about, and then sent me out to do chores around the house, and then he was gone. And when I found out he was coming again, I… uh… panicked. They had a talk, heard me hiding in the closet—because my phone kept going off, by the way—and then, after seeing my homework, the dragon-man offered to teach me Mithae as part of the deal they were discussing.”
“Why didn’t you just turn sound off on your phone?”
I rolled my eyes, slouching against the table with crossed arms. “I did, after the first message you sent showed me it was still on.” I decided not to go into detail about the rest of the process, or how I’d also forgotten to turn vibrations off.
She chuckled. “Sorry, I didn’t know it was serious.”
‘I told you I was hiding from a dragon’ was on the tip of my tongue; I heroically kept silent.
“Alright, then, so, why is the dragon teaching you magic anyway? Is he a philanthropist or something? Sounds a bit odd for a dragon, or to be part of a random deal.”
“I don’t know why,” I groaned, letting my head collapse into my arms. “I don’t know what deal they’re working on, or what a dragon wants from us.” Maybe it was because we were Wardens? But that would be more of a reason for an extra-normal to avoid us, on principle if for no other reason. Except, maybe there was something in that. What if he was trying to cut off a Warden’s involvement before he could get caught? He might be trying—
“But it could be a pretty neat learning opportunity,” Mara said, tapping her pencil against her lip. “Like, dragons and magic are linked, right? Dragons are powerful, right?”
“Very.” The emphasis I was trying to put on my reply lost itself through the table and my crossed arms. “You have no idea.”
Which made it even weirder. If a dragon was trying to avoid Wardens (and couldn’t just, I don’t know, kill us), why would he start handing over one of his best weapons? True, I’d never be able to use Mithae as effectively as a dragon, but still. Maybe it was a high-risk, high-reward scenario. Which just further begged the question: what was he planning?
“Did he at least give an explanation of some kind?”
I flopped a hand about dismissively. “Something about sharing cultures and learning from each other.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
I pushed myself back up into a sitting position. “He’s not telling the whole truth. He wants something else, I know that, but I don’t know what. And Grammy knows, too, but she’s just… playing along.”
“Hmmmm.” Mara had started absentmindedly gnawing on her pencil’s eraser. “Quite the mystery.”
“Yeah.” I studied her, eyes narrowing. She wore her thinking face, no longer paying attention to me—but how pleased she looked worried me, a look like she’d just remembered she had a whole sweet potato pie waiting for her back home. “I’ll tell you all about it once everything gets figured out,” I added cautiously.
“Hmm? Yeah, sure.”
Had she heard me? Probably not.
“You know,” she said slowly, “potentially, we could—” she cut off. I looked where her eyes were focused, and saw Grammy shaking her boots off at the library door. “Never mind,” she amended. “Just a random thought. If it sticks around, I’ll tell you later.”
“Okay.” I had already put all my schoolwork away, so all that remained was drawing materials and the water bottle. Putting those away, I forced away a frown. Mara was planning something, something to do with the dragon-man (and possibly Mithae), and whatever it was, it was a terrible idea.
Civilians and illdýr shouldn’t mix.
“Look, Mara,” I started, grasping in my mind for something that might pour cold water on her hopes and dreams, but Grammy was already there.
She bestowed one of her rare smiles on Mara. “Good evening, ma’am,” she said, voiced touched with friendly irony.
Mara mock-curtsied. “Always a pleasure, ma’am,” she said back.
They exchanged pleasantries—Grammy asked about how she was doing, how school was, and Mara answered back and in kind—but I didn’t care to focus.
Under my collarbone grew a staticky feeling of unease, telling me I’d made another mistake, that I was going to have to either tell Grammy or fix it before she found out; it twined together with the remembrance of the cold house we were going back to, the training planned for me, and the looming threat of Kalgyrad’s Mithae lessons. Seeking something, a distraction or an answer, I scanned the library stacks. Ms. Graham waved at me from where she was putting away books, and I gave a small wave back. But nothing else showed up.
I wondered if, somewhere in here, there was a book called “How to Solve Your Problems and Stop Being a Coward About It,” or “How to Deal With an Evil Dragon That’s Invading Your Home,” or something equally applicable. But now wasn’t the time to look; Grammy finished talking with Mara, tapped my shoulder. We said our goodbyes, and headed towards the door. I held the first set of doors open for her.
“Did you have a good day?” She asked, as she always did.
“Yeah, fine,” I replied, as I always did. “We learned about protein synthesis.” Well, that line wasn’t always the same.
“If it helps, you’ll probably have a better day in a bit,” she said with a knowing chuckle. I hunched deeper down in my coat as she pushed the second set of doors open, unleashing a blast of cold Appalachian air. “Llewellyn’s visiting for supper.”
I didn’t say anything—I didn’t have to. I looked up and smiled, feeling relief blasting in stronger than the cold.
“You’ll still have to do your basic exercises and routines,” Grammy said sternly, trudging towards the old beater car we’d had as long as I could remember. “But you can spar with Llewellyn a bit, too, and we’ll leave the bulk of training for tomorrow.”
My smile widened. Llewellyn didn’t go too easy on me, but, well, anyone was easier than Grammy.
Settling into the car and turning the heater as high as it could go—not very high—I leaned back against the seat, shoulders loosening.
I might not know everything, but I could tell what I did know to Llewellyn, and he could help me sort it out. He’d ask Grammy what was going on, and she’d have to tell him, and then he’d stop her.
“Him being here should help calm your nerves a bit, too,” Grammy added, slamming the car door to make sure it stuck. “He agreed to stay the night and the whole morning tomorrow, instead of going straight on to his parents’ house.”
Uh oh. My shoulders tensed again.
Grammy tossed me a look as she put the car into gear, and I couldn’t tell if it was apologetic or amused. “Kalgyrad agreed to visit on the weekends, if you’ll remember, and, tomorrow’s Saturday. I thought it could help you if Llewellyn got to sit in on your first lesson.”
“Oh.” I turned mechanically to the window, misting from my now heavy breaths. Somehow I’d assumed I wouldn’t have a lesson until next Saturday. I latched onto the door handle, gripping until my fingers started going numb.
So much for relief.
Maybe Llewellyn could still fix it. Maybe he’d decide that it was too much for me, and tell Grammy to never let Kalgyrad come back. Maybe she’d listen to him for once.
But before that utopian future arrived, I’d have to survive my first lesson with the dragon.
To be continued….
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