A Shade of Dragon 3 (14 page)

But Nell had enough steadfast, resolute innocence—as if it was an oasis within herself she had been guarding her entire life—to share with the rest of us. To teach us how to let our own optimism spring forth again.

“This is a tragedy. But it’s also an opportunity. It’s an opportunity given to you by the gods themselves, Mrs. Aena. Queen Aena. It’s an opportunity to heal this city, and I don’t just mean the burnt buildings, the ruined businesses. I mean the relations between the fire and the ice people who share this land. You can start again by fully integrating your city. You said yourself the astrolabe used to be fixed so that the sun would shine brightest on the castle. Naturally, this felt perfect to you, but it also kept the ice dragons from ever being able to interact politically, or economically, or socially. And now—you have some good ice dragons here who are ready to start over with you. To help rebuild not just the stores and homes but the entire culture.” She looked significantly to Lethe and to Merulina before continuing. “You even have the opportunity here to heal the schism between your people by welcoming the birth—I mean, maybe, no pressure, guys”—she blushed and directed this aside to my brother and his bride-to-be—“but you could welcome the birth of a new breed of dragon. A breed of dragon who might have control over both fire and ice. Who might be comfortable in the summer and in the winter.”

Nell grinned between my mother and my people, pleading with them, revealing to them their own greatest avenue of success. She wanted them to believe in her, but not because she was desperate; because she was right, and she wanted what was most beneficial to all the people. A true queen. My heart sang with pride and gratitude that I had found her, and that I had chosen her, against all odds. Against even the will of the gods.

Nell went to stand directly in front of my mother. She looked much smaller by comparison, as humans are generally smaller than dragon people, but something similar passed between them. A kindred air to the straightness of their backs, the evenness of their eyes. They were a pair of queens.

“During the war, so many people ran,” she reminded my mother, her voice soft and private, something for Mother alone to hear. The speech was over, but a conversation had begun. “Now all that remains are those who would not leave for whatever reason. These are your truest people. These are the people who will pour themselves into the earth like rain so that it will spring up again.”

Mother watched her closely, thoughtfully, and I took a deep breath. She had that glint in her eye that she would have whilst appraising a jewel or hearing a request for a loan. “You are almost right,” Mother allowed. A small smile spread across her lips. “But these are not my people, Mrs. Aena. Not anymore.”

With that, Mother descended into a deep bow before her, the gathers of her gown buffeting down around her legs like the explosion of a flower’s petals in bloom. She clasped her royal brooch in one hand—the brooch which bore the family crest—and lowered her eyes until her chin almost touched her sternum.

When she stood again, her smile was hardly any larger. It trembled slightly, and her eyes were crusted with tears. “You, my dear,” she whispered to Penelope. “You are the wife of my eldest son, the prince of this great land. And although the coronation has not yet been held, it will be forthcoming. These are no longer my people.” Her tearful eyes turned from Nell to me, and she nodded again, a nod of approval and of departure. “They are yours.”

T
hat night
, after the remnant of our people had been secured wherever there was room enough to house them, and after Nell had excused herself to bathe in the steaming atrium, I gazed across the wounded expanse of The Hearthlands—the snow silvery and broken like shards of glass, not melting, but also no longer falling in thick swaths—and thought about the coronation to which my mother had alluded. “Forthcoming,” she had said. It was a lot to digest. Before me lay this ruined kingdom. But at the same time, Nell was right. Within its ruins lay the seeds of great potential, and if we didn’t turn our backs on that, if we instead allowed this new course to germinate, perhaps the capital city could be more magnificent than ever before. I was relieved to have her at the helm with me.

“Hey,” a soft voice called behind me. Before I turned, I saw her reflection shift, milky and blurred, on the glass. There was a pensive quality to her features now which the outside world seldom ever saw. So often, for others, she was cheerful at best and stoic at worst. But for me, she was vulnerable. She was bare.

I turned to behold her, swaddled in a silken, pearlescent bathrobe, her hair down and damp, her eyes deep and pained.

“Hey,” I replied, advancing to brace her elbows with my fingertips. I scanned her face for some clue as to her melancholy. We were together, back in the castle, and my own mother had bowed to her as the new queen. What could weigh so heavily on her still? After everything we had been through? “What’s wrong?” I asked, my brow furrowed.

Nell averted her gray eyes. “Queen,” she breathed, breaking away from my touch to stand near the glass, where I had been when she’d entered the room. “Queen in a day. It’s an awful lot to handle, isn’t it?”

“And I’ll be king,” I said, touching her shoulders. It had been so long since we’d been in the same room, unfettered by circumstances. I couldn’t stop touching her in my dream-like wonderment. “It won’t be so different. It won’t be so hard.” My reflection smiled at her in the glass. “Were we not already kings and queens?”

Nell smiled, but the smile was melancholy, and her eyes wouldn’t quite touch mine. “There are pressures on a queen—archaic pressures, really—which your culture places there.” Even as she said this, one of her palms came up and laid over mine on her shoulder. “You knew this… and you let that device, the astrolabe, go.” Her eyes fluttered down to her feet. “You knew it was our only hope. To manipulate the stars of The Hearthlands. To change the will of the gods, and make me”—she cleared her throat, and a tear darted down her reflection’s cheek, cast against the dark night sky outside like a falling star—“make me the woman with whom you were destined to be.”

I gripped her shoulders and twisted her gently to face me. I could not stand to continue having this conversation with the window. “Fate can be cruel,” I said, an unintentional bite to my tone. “According to Pythia, the gods had set me to fall for Michelle. It seems that you were to be with Lethe. It certainly would have been easy for Michelle and I to be together, and in truth, there were a few times where I stood at a crossroads between the two of you, and hers was the path of least resistance. I could have chosen her. Easily. But the gods… They crush even their most devoted followers at times. They make play pieces of us, and games of our lives. What about Romeo and Juliet?” I asked her. “It would seem, to consult history, that they were destined to die together in the Capulet tomb. But is that the way their lives
should
have gone? Two mere children in love, unable to reconcile the feud of fools? Was destiny good in that moment? Was destiny fair?”

Nell cocked her head and smiled, even with her eyes still faintly pink from shedding tears. “How do you know about Romeo and Juliet?”

I grinned. “It would depress you to realize how well-educated I am.”

My grin must have been contagious, as it leached onto Nell’s mouth in turn. “Then you’d have known that they weren’t real.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. But give me my point, would you?”

“Your point?” she goaded, feigning obliviousness.

“What do the gods know about you or me? Who is to say that they didn’t pair me with Michelle from sheer spite, or boredom? So… just forget them.” I ran my fingers lightly over her cheekbone and into her hair, tucking a strand behind the crest of her ear. “I want to follow my heart. And if the path under my feet doesn’t take me in the same direction, I’ll cut a new path. I’ll shave my obstacles down into stepping stones.” I took a deep breath and offered her a deeper smile, a warm smile of sympathy and consolation. “I knew that I was throwing more than just a weathervane into that vortex. But—Nell—look at where manipulating the stars has brought my people. You said it yourself earlier today. Maybe, if we hadn’t altered those discs to make us the most comfortable and secure people on this island, we could have avoided the war altogether. Maybe we should just stop trying to force our flawed notions of perfection.”

“Your logic is inconsistent,” Nell complained. “In one breath we should denounce fate, and in the next, we should allow it to run its course.”

“In all our breaths,” I said, “we should let ourselves be happy… and trust the pieces to fall in the right places. Or not. And it doesn’t matter. The question shouldn’t be, ‘Was I perfect? Did I do everything the way I was told that I should? Did people stand back in awe of me? Did I beat everyone else?’”

Nell grimaced, and I knew she was disturbed by the notion of being non-competitive. You didn’t have to be a psychologist to understand that the basis of her friendship with Michelle was largely a twisted urge, in both of them, to show the other one how they were supposed to do it.

“The question,” I finished, “should be, ‘Was I fair? Did I treat others with respect? Did I enjoy my choices? Did I appreciate what I had?’” I put my mouth close to her ear, to make sure that she could hear this. “I appreciate what I have,” I whispered. “I couldn’t ask for anything more. And tomorrow, if the gods themselves came to the coronation and offered me the stars in exchange for you… I wouldn’t take a single one of them.”

Nell smiled at me, and though the sadness had broken away from her, her eyes still shimmered behind tears. “You wouldn’t?” she replied, hoarse with the restraint of a sob.

“Of course not.” I laughed and touched her cheek. “A teaspoon of star stuff weighs about ten million tons. How impractical would it be to own one? Where would we even put it?”

Nell laughed, but shoved at my chest and broke eye contact, trying to step away from me and my insistence on merry-making, but it was the night of my coronation! The war was over—for now, and maybe forever, at last—and we were wed! I pulled her to me and crushed her laughing mouth against mine, driving one palm into her reams of silken hair and the other lowering to caress the curve of her lower back. I felt the chill from the window melt off of her as our body heat mingled, built, and coalesced.

“Be serious,” she breathed between our mouths, though I knew that she didn’t mean it. Her body bowed and flowed with mine as if we had been welded together.

I pulled away from her—only enough to gaze into her eyes—and offered my own ragged, windswept smile. “I am being serious,” I told her. “I knew when I threw that astrolabe into the portal that I was sacrificing more than just our eternal summers on the island. But… I don’t need any more than just you. Perhaps the astrolabe gave my dynasty a power which was too great, and too far-reaching, to bind the hands of the gods as it did. To ensure that our wishes were always held in their favor.” I cradled her torso against mine, pressing our foreheads together so that there wasn’t even a sliver of space left. “We have destiny, and we have free will, and that is enough for me.”

T
hat night
we slipped off into an easy sleep, side by side, docile and complete, and were awoken in the morning by an elated Altair. Elated, and rambunctious. Nell didn’t even stir, save to sigh sleepily and turn from the source of the sound. It was I who grumbled and nestled deeper into Nell’s dark hair, glaring up at him from the warm nest of blankets.

“Let’s go!” Altair cheered, bounding into the room. “Do I have to rip the blankets off of you?”

“No,” I growled, glowering. “How early in the morning is it? It can’t be that late.”

“It’s going to be ‘afternoon’ shortly,” Altair replied with a smirk. “The two of you slept for almost fourteen hours. But I suppose you needed it.”

I turned back to Nell, on the verge of shaking her shoulder and calling down to her, but she was already peering up at me, blinking sleepily. “Morning,” she cooed, still warm and foggy with slumber, “King Theon.”

The coronation traditionally occurred in the garden, but it was still too damn frigid—and apparently it would be for the next several weeks. We opted instead to adorn the throne room with garlands and banners and hold the event there. It was open to the general public of The Hearthlands and we stood before Einhen, the court priest, to hear our reign blessed and to kneel for my mother to grace our heads with the royal crowns. It was a brief ceremony, but it seemed to me to be never-ending. I had prepared for this my entire life, and Nell, straight and elegant in her robes, looked as if she had been born for it… regardless of the gods.

When we turned, our congregation of remnants—roughly twenty percent of whom were born from ice dragon lineage—bowed and clapped and called out for our long and healthy lives. Although the windows remained frosted, crusted in snow, it seemed to be spring all of a sudden, and I took Nell’s hand and led her down the aisle, bowing to the citizens as we passed.

Y
ou never know
which visit to your hometown will be the last, so to speak. I was only nineteen still, and yet I felt as if I’d crossed some boundary which could never be uncrossed. Whether that line led into queendom or just womanhood, I wasn’t sure.

Theon and I stayed in The Hearthlands' castle for another week or so, during which time a concerted effort toward reconstruction and infrastructure had been launched. There was also much talk of ratification to the law of the land, although Theon thought, naturally, that the laws were very fair and always had been. “Maybe it would help,” Merulina had suggested starchily, “if we looked over them with fresh eyes when you return from your voyage to Earth?”

We packed lightly, for the visit would be a short one, perhaps of one day. Altair and Merulina had already begun to prepare for their own wedding day in the coming week, and I’d been drafted into her bridal court. After the fall of The Hearthlands—and the brief rise of Everwinter—there was a silent consensus throughout the castle that some new life was awaiting, and we all dove into it as if from off a springboard. There was no one untouched by the tragedy, no one who had not experienced some loss, except maybe me. Unlike humans, the dragons had no desire to discuss the horrors of war, to hold vigils or to form support groups or to even erect monuments to their fallen. They were singularly, almost superstitiously focused on their future, and the sentiment was contagious: there was just so much still to be done.

But I couldn’t just leave my parents again without saying a proper goodbye. It was part of the barrier I had crossed into this new place. I needed to return home and bow to them one final time. There was a part of me—the girl in me, a tiny sliver, almost a ghost—which wrung her hands together and sweated at the notion of bringing Theon to this meeting with my parents. As if I had something to fear from them, whether it was disapproval or misunderstanding or something else an adult could lord over a child. But I knew that he needed to be there, and so did he. We weren’t just saying goodbye to them as adults, as king and queen. We were saying goodbye to them, with all due respect, as man and wife.

And so, on the front steps of the palace, we bade farewell and good luck to the court which remained behind to continue to work during our departure: the former Queen Aena, Altair, Merulina, and Lethe, among others loyal and sworn to the kingdom, such as Einhen and Charis. We received our bows, and kisses to our hands, and Theon shifted, the black scales coursing over his skin, the talons sprouting from his fingertips and toes, and nudged both his satchel and myself onto his back. I no longer ever feared that I might fall, but was beginning at last to be elated by the fingers of the wind running through my hair—and I was no longer surprised by the casual way with which dragons viewed nudity before and after a transformation.

We tore off into the sky, the crust of The Hearthlands’ snow below us, the bright blue sky above, and when we dove for the portal which would link us to the rock island, and from there to Beggar’s Hole, I pressed myself low to Theon’s shoulder blades and grinned with anticipation.

I
t was
at the cave of Thundercliff—now so familiar to us both, just about three months after the site of our first introduction, fated or not—that Theon deflated and his scales receded over his skin, allowing him the form of a man again. He dressed himself in clothes from the leather satchel, a woolen tunic and pants of some rigid, thick quality, similar to corduroy. I smiled at him. He made such a gorgeous human being.

“You don’t think the oracle will come approach us while we’re here, do you?” I asked with a hint of amusement to my voice. “Maybe remind you one last time of all the riches you’re sidestepping by rejecting Michelle Ballinger?”

“Oh, but she has approached us, darling,” Theon said, sidling up to me and grazing my cheek with a light kiss. “She’s been in my head from the moment we crossed that portal, doing exactly as you said. Moaning about how destiny has been skewed by my insolent harpoon, and luck will never walk the path of my heart again, and blah, blah, blah. Maybe you should be an oracle. You’re pretty good at divination too.” He winked and his warm palm braced my hand in his.

“Really?” I asked as he tugged me from the dry shelving of stone, onto the sand and through the rocks, toward the beach. “What is she saying to you, exactly?”

“Oh, bah,” Theon replied, smirking. “It’s really not worth repeating, my love.”

I hesitated just long enough to let the sweetness of my love for him spread through me, and then we set off across the chill stretch of beach, toward my father’s beach house. To know that he had silently withstood the oracle’s telepathic ramblings imbued me with strength in facing my parents, and we ascended the wooden staircase. We knocked at the front door. Three times. I took a deep breath and braced my fist to knock again, but it flew open and Mom was just standing there, gaping at me, her short black hair fretting in the breeze.

“Hi, Mom.” I broke the tension.

“Oh, my God!” she cried, throwing herself into my arms. I couldn’t remember a time I had seen her more emotional, even shortly before and during the divorce. That wasn’t the only surprise I was experiencing, either. Like… what was she doing still here? Didn’t she have her own practice to maintain—in DC? Wasn’t Zada going to eventually drive her insane? “Nell! You’re back!” she breathed into my neck. I felt my skin dampen where her tears fell. “What the hell happened? Are you all right?” She extracted me from her iron grip and beheld me at arm’s length, her scrutiny shrewd and maternal. “And what are you wearing?”

A blush crept into my cheeks and I cleared my throat. “It’s called a pelisse,” I explained, head nonetheless held high. “May we come in?”

Mom’s eyes panned to Theon for the first time since she’d opened the door. Her eyes were icy. She could’ve been a dragon for all the severity with which she gazed at Theon. “The man who kidnapped you,” she deduced coldly.

I shook my head and smiled, even though there was no real warmth to the expression. “He did not kidnap me,” I told her, and she hesitated, but moved for our passage.

Inside the beach house the living room was lit, and pictures of me adorned every table, every surface, as if I had died. I supposed that they had had no way of knowing whether or not I had. The decorations which were expected of Zada and Sage’s presence—posters of fairies and tie-dyed tapestries and pictures of celebrities beneath words—had disappeared from the beach house. I frowned and opened my mouth to ask Mom about this as we descended onto the couch, hardly warmer than outside, but she probably had more pressing questions on her mind.

“So,” Mom began, “where did he…” She glanced at Theon and cleared her throat, revising her question. “Where have you been? Was it the same place that Michelle went off to?”

At this, my brow furrowed. “Michelle is… talking about it?” That wasn’t like her. To tell the truth, in her mind, would be seen as weak.

“Michelle is not talking about anything yet. She refuses to conduct interviews on her disappearance, but she did hire a public relations agent who has been telling the papers that she’s writing a book about it this year.”

I rolled my eyes. Of course she was. If there was anyone who could make her gutless displays of self-service, her betrayal and subsequent rejection, into some harrowing tale of personal triumph over victimhood, it was her. Michelle Ballinger was victim and victor in one.

Theon squeezed my hand, and I glanced over at him. “Let’s not get distracted by her,” he whispered to me. “Michelle and whatever books she writes have nothing to do with us.”

“I somehow doubt that,” I whispered back. “But I see your point.” I turned my attention back to Mom, who had watched this display of intimacy and partnership between us as if Theon had tried to eat my face and exposed an alien life form living beneath.

“I returned to The Hearthlands,” I gently explained to her. “I don’t know what Michelle will say, one day, when she does begin speaking… likely for a high sum, and in front of many, many cameras—” Theon touched my hand again and I glared at him. He was right, though. Our rivalry had been a petty, girlish thing, and it was time to put it away. We had a city to rebuild, and Michelle was here, desperately scrabbling for her own followers, because she knew just how little her own kingdom was worth. “We were in the midst of war… and I couldn’t delay.”

Mom smiled mirthlessly and refused to look at Theon again. “You sound like some kind of—I don’t know—old queen.”

I grinned. “A new queen, actually,” I informed her.

Now she looked at Theon. A glare. “What madness has he been filling your head with?”

“Mom!” I snapped. “Someday when it’s ready, we’ll take you—and Dad—to see our island. And yes, it is in another dimension. Yes, you can only get to it through this mystical portal. And maybe at first, you’ll think that we’re crazy, or that you’re crazy, or anything at all, as long as it means that what we’re showing you isn’t real. Until then, I guess you can think whatever you’d like, though it does sadden me that my madness is the first conclusion to which you jump.”

Theon was grinning at me.

“What?” I asked, somewhat snappish.

“I love how you never, ever end a sentence with a preposition,” he replied.

And suddenly the stress evaporated. It wasn’t being a queen that made me secure in this volatile exchange with my mother, and God, eventually my father. It wasn’t being an adult or being a woman or anything quite so abstract which made everything okay. It was Theon. Having Theon’s unwavering love made everything okay. No matter what.

I turned back to Mom, who still appeared disturbed by our closeness.

“It will probably not be this year,” I went on. “There’s just so much going on at the palace.”

Mom sighed and rolled her eyes, massaging one temple. “So this boy, who claims to be a prince on some other island, not on Earth…”

“A king now, actually,” Theon interjected. I glanced at him and shook my head.

That wasn’t going to help.

“His land was in the throes of war,” I went on. She would listen to me… maybe. All hope of her listening to him was lost. “That was why I disappeared… both times. The second time, I went back willingly. And now power has changed hands. The coronation was held yesterday. We’ve come here to pay our respects as a married couple—”

“You’re married?” Mom gasped, her eyes the size of quarters. “You got married?”

“Yes,” I said, as firmly as I could manage. I did realize she’d probably wanted to be at the ceremony.

“You’re nineteen!”

“The common age of a bride, in The Hearthlands,” Theon informed her proudly. “And how old is common here on Earth?”

“Twenty-two, twenty-five, somewhere around there,” I informed him, feeling a spot of blush on my cheeks as I stared into Mom’s eyes. “It’s a negligible difference. She’s just making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“But you just started college,” Mom whined. “You don’t know what you want yet. These are pivotal years—”

Just then, to make matters all the better, the back door blew open and closed, and familiar footsteps thudded.

Crap.

“Hey, babe, did you remember to—” Keys clattered onto the counter in the kitchen and then Dad’s shadow slashed across the living room floor. I twisted to face him in the doorway, unsure of exactly what would happen next. The color drained away from his face. The musculature of his expression broke and sagged away like melted sculpture. “Nell!”

“Did you just call Mom ‘babe’?” I gaped.

Dad strode forward and yanked me into his arms, embracing me so hard it seemed as if my spine was going to be pressed into a powder. “I can’t believe you’re home,” he said, his voice crackling into my hair, “and it doesn’t matter why you left… just as long as you stay.”

I extricated myself from his hug. “I can’t stay,” I told him as gently as I could. “I’ve… It’s a long story. You called Mom ‘babe’?”

Dad swallowed. “It’s a long story,” he reiterated, and then his eyes drifted to Theon. His jaw clenched. “What the hell is he doing here? Patty, get the police on the phone!”

“He’s her husband,” Mom muttered. I didn’t need to look at her to know that she was massaging her temple again.

“Husband?” Dad choked.

“You called Mom ‘babe’!” I cried again. “What is she even doing here? Where are Zada and Sage?”

Dad cast his eyes to the side… caught. “Zada left. Your mom stayed.”

My eyes shot over to Mom, and she looked like stone, like a statue of a deer. It was exactly how she looked any time she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t “supposed” to—which, in her mind, meant following her heart.

“You two are back together, aren’t you?” I demanded. I didn’t mean for it to sound as accusatory as it did, but I suddenly felt like a furious, embittered eight-year-old all over again. They’d dragged my innocent little heart through the wringer with their divorce, and part of me surged protectively around my inner child, buffering her from the likelihood of their inevitable
second
divorce. “After eleven years,” I said, glaring between both of them, “you just… get back together like high schoolers?”

“Hey!” Mom snapped, shooting to her feet. Theon was, for all intents and purposes, invisible to me now. “Losing a child is hard! You disappeared, Penelope. You disappeared for weeks, came back, and then disappeared again. We—bonded over that. We thought we’d lost you forever, and that we didn’t have anything left, but then we realized that we had each other.”

Theon and I shared a significant look around my mother.

Still, I had to exhale.

“But Mom,” I said, casting a look at my dad. She must’ve known what I was about to say. Dad was confident and exciting and spontaneous, but he was also unreliable, and emotionally inconsistent, and so, so selfish. “We’ve talked about this a million times,” I said to her in a low voice. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”

“Just what is that supposed to mean? Patty? What is she talking about?” Dad asked, glaring between the two of us.