Phoenix (16 page)

I blow a blast of fire in his face. He’s fire proof. We all are, even our paper-thin wings, but he has to close his eyes against the flames. It’s hot and disorienting and makes it difficult to breathe and impossible to see.

Ram counters by blowing a blast of flame right back.

How long we’re braced like that, straining against each other, blasting fire like a pair of blowtorches, I don’t know, but then I feel a second set of hands, talons pushing against my shoulder.

I stop blowing fire long enough to see.

Nia.

She’s in dragon form, trying to separate us, and she has this look on her face that says we’re fools, both of us, and she’s not impressed with either one.

A look that says brothers shouldn’t fight. Dragons shouldn’t fight, not against each other when there are so few of us on earth.

Chastened, I release Ram and lower myself back down to the ground, where Nia has dug a large bowl-like hole in the sand and dumped the fish from my shorts.

I grab my boxers and tug them on before turning back into a human.

Ram and Nia have changed by then and are hastily eating fish.

For a while, we eat in fuming silence. The fish are delicious, but due to their size and the quantity we need to eat to make up for flying all night long, we don’t bother to remove the bones, which means we have to chew thoroughly to grind the bones down small, or risk getting a severe case of indigestion. It’s still faster than attempting to remove the bones first, but all that chewing leaves little room for conversation.

And besides, what can I say? Do I accuse Ram of trying to impress Nia by making me look bad? Challenge him to a real duel, a fight-to-the-death for a bride? Nia has already said she doesn’t want to endanger either of us. That’s why she tried to run away that first night. I don’t think she’d let us duel.

No, Nia would surely insist on choosing her own mate before letting us duel for her.

And right now, I think she’d choose Ram.

So I keep my mouth shut, because any chance I might have of winning her hand lies in the future. I’ve got to impress her. Or Ram has to repel her. The balance has to shift between us.

Arguing now won’t accomplish that.

I eat my fish and drink water from the freshwater well Ram found (yes, he found water far before I returned with fish) and then we grab the last several fish and head to the highest ground we can find to bed down for the night.

While I’m not ready to challenge my brother to a duel or ask Nia to choose between us, there are a few things we need to discuss. And since we’re planning to sleep until the yagi catch up to us and then fly on as dragons, the only way we’ll be able to discuss this before it’s too late, is if we talk it out before we go to sleep.

“We need to post a watch tonight.” I inform the other two.

“We won’t get much sleep that way,” Ram argues.

“If the yagi catch up to us while we’re asleep, if they paralyze us with their wailing before we start moving, we won’t be able to run away or even defend ourselves.” I state my arguments as succinctly as I know how.

“We can’t risk that.” Nia turns her concerned face Ram’s way. “We’ll need to post a guard, even if it means less sleep. We’re close enough to our destination now, safety is more important than sleep.”

“Fine.” Ram scowls. “We’ll take turns. I’ll take the first shift. Nia, you can go second. Felix can go third.” He gives the orders in a voice that’s particularly bossy, probably because he had to capitulate once Nia agreed with me. The extra bossiness is to compensate for the fact that I got my way.

Ram is cranky. I’m cranky, too, but I don’t want to end up with horns locked again, and I’m not finished raising important issues to discuss. But if I choose my words carefully, and speak only once Ram has a large bite of fish in his mouth, he’ll have to chew and swallow before he can interrupt me.

As I’d hoped, Ram takes out his frustration by biting off a large portion of fish. It will take him awhile to chew it.

Still, I speak quickly. “I think we should only fly as far as the northernmost islands of Fiji tomorrow, then eat and sleep before we continue on to find the island we’re looking for. It will take time to locate the island and find the dragon, if there is a dragon there. We don’t want to get there when we’re tired and hungry, or the yagi will catch up to us while we’re sleeping, and we’ll end up drawing them to the dragon. We want to avoid that if at all possible.”

“The yagi are going to catch up to us one way or another,” Ram argues the moment he’s swallowed his fish. “If we can reach the area before it gets dark out—”

“I think Felix is right.” Nia interrupts Ram. “We don’t want to endanger any dragons that might be on the Fijian island.”

Ram clamps his mouth shut. Silently, he kicks a pile of sand into a pillow, and smooths out a bed for himself, shooting me a sideways glance that says he saw what I did there, and he’s not happy.

I won.

Not that it means much in the big picture. If I had to guess now, I’d say Nia still likes Ram better than she likes me.

But she took my side—technically, more than once, even. She backed me up.

We’re going to do things my way, for the first time on this trip.

The thrill of victory lasts long enough for me to mound sand for a pillow and lie down to sleep.

Then I realize the catch.

Of course there’s a catch.

If we do things my way instead of Ram’s way, and anything goes wrong, it will be my fault.

*

I dream, again, of fire, but this time, the walls of fire are not simply barring me from getting anywhere, but they’re burning things I recognize. There’s my bedroom as it looked in my childhood, with the train set circling the room on a track built on shelves high on the walls. The train courses around, through a tunnel, across the bridge that spans the door, whistling in distress as the flames chase it and lick it up.

The flames devour my favorite park, the spy cabin we stayed in less than a week ago, the stable in our Azeri village where we keep horses, the village library, the homes of my friends.

The flames are hungry, burning, consuming, leaving charred blackness in their wake.

They are destruction. It’s the touch of destruction, made manifest in consuming fire. Even as I realize that, I see where the flames are coming from.

Me.

I started this fire.

I’m burning everything up, everything I care about, everything I love.

I hear Nia’s voice crying out from the other side of the flames. She’s calling for help, for rescue from the fire.

From the fire I caused.

I started this fire, but I don’t know how to make it stop.

“Shh! Calm down. It was just a dream.” Nia’s bent over me, kneeling beside me in the sand, her fingers cool against my flushed forehead.

“The fire,” I whisper. “It’s everywhere.”

“We didn’t build a fire.” Nia corrects me.

I shake my head and clear my thoughts. Glancing across our campsite, I see Ram is fast asleep. We’re in the second watch shift, then. Embarrassed by my behavior, I feel the need to explain. “I keeping having these dreams of fire surrounding me. I can’t escape. It’s burning everything.”

“I thought you said I was the Phoenix.” Nia gives me a look I don’t recognize. Is she teasing me? I haven’t known her to tease or to be anything but dead serious, like Ram.

Maybe I imagined the look. But no, it means something. I just don’t know what it means.

Whatever it was, I do know this: we’re closing in on Fiji and the possible end of our journey, and I haven’t wooed Nia with any success at all yet. This may be my last chance.

I smile what I hope is a charming smile, which I fear may instead be a groggy, I-just-woke-up-and-am-not-entirely-with-it-yet smile.

Judging by Nia’s wary eyebrow, it’s the latter.

I plunge on, regardless. The trick is to get her talking about something. About anything, really. We need to interact, pure and simple.

So at the risk of sounding stupid, I say the first thing that comes to mind. “But you are a phoenix. You were born of fire.”

“I didn’t choose to be.” Nia lounges in the sand beside me and props her head on her hand. She’s looking at me. I have her attention. We’re talking about something important—I know it’s important because her words seem to reach inside me and take hold of my deepest parts.

“Is that how it works?” I feel slightly breathless. “You have to choose the fire?” In my dreams, the fire was coming from me. Does that mean anything? Do dreams mean anything, or are they just the dross of our lives, the byproduct of our productive hours—waste, to be thrown away?

Is there anything valuable inside them, something we can mine as though for treasure?

Nia sounds reflective. “The way I understand the myth of the phoenix, it can only be reborn after giving selflessly. After dying selflessly.”

“A sacrificial death?”

“Exactly. That’s how I know I’m not one—I didn’t choose anything. I made no sacrifice. I hadn’t even technically been born.”

Nia has shared something precious, a confession, almost. I don’t know how to respond. I want to honor what she’s said, but how? Everything I think of sounds cheesy, unworthy of her brave admission.

She rolls onto her back again. Is she going to go to sleep? Is our conversation over?

No, I can’t let it be over. I haven’t won her heart yet. I’ve got to keep her talking—we were so close. But what can I say? Something, anything.

“Do you think it’s possible to make gold?” I blurt the question just as Nia rolls away from me with her back turned my direction. Her guard shift must be over. She looks like she’s going to go to sleep.

But at my question, she moves back toward me, guarded questions on her face.

I continue. “Do you think Eudora thinks it’s possible to make gold?”

Nia rolls onto her side beside me, propping her face in her hand with her elbow in the sand. “I told you about the books in her library.”

“About gold?”

“About gold, and other things.” Moonlight kisses Nia’s face and lips. The night is long spent. It will be morning before too long. Nia seems to weigh whether she should speak further.

I will her to, pleading with my eyes since I don’t know what words to use.

Nia makes a reluctant face, casts me a sideways glance, and then picks up a pinch of sand, letting it fall grain by grain from her fingers like so many twinkling stars. “One day there was a book. A book about gold. A book I’d never seen in the library before. It was very old. Handwritten.” She measures out the words like the individual grains of sand. Falling, spinning, catching the moonlight and glinting before landing and being buried by the others that follow.

There is something here. Something golden, if I can see its true beauty before it falls from sight.

Now she looks up and meets my eyes. Hers are lit with surprise. Had she forgotten I’m here? Or is she surprised to find herself speaking these words, a secret she had never expected to tell anyone? Sometimes, in the enchanted light of the moon, words are spoken that could never stand the light of day.

I’m afraid to push her further, to break the silence. I want her to say more, but I fear my words will only push her away. I proceed with caution. “An old book—about gold?”

She dips her head and closes her eyes. “The language was ancient.” Her eyes pop open and meet mine. “You know how old English books are hard to read? Beowulf, even Shakespeare? Language changes over time. There are dialects. This book was in Russian. I’d been using the Russian language program for several months with no real goal in mind, just learning the language to fill the time, and because I thought it might come in handy.” She falls silent and picks up another pinch of sand.

“The book was in an ancient dialect of Russian?”

Nia nods, and once again the grains of sand fall idly from her fingers. “I tried my best to read it, but between the sketchy handwriting and the strange dialect, and the fact that I wasn’t fluent in Russian yet.” She shakes her head regretfully. “I studied much harder after that so I’d be fluent, so I could understand the words in the book if I ever saw it again. But I never did. I think the white witch had brought it into the library from some hidden place. Maybe she wanted to cross-check a fact from another book. Something like that. I only saw it that one time, and I didn’t understand it all then.”

“But what you did see—what you could understand—”

Nia sits up straight and brushes the sand from her fingertips. “I don’t know enough of what I read to know what it said.”

“But it talked about gold?”

“Yes.” Nia sighs. “I don’t know if the author was trying to preserve knowledge, or simply record theories. I don’t know if it was fact or musing. A theory, or a recipe.”

“A recipe?” I prompt when she falls silent again for some time. “For making gold?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nia’s eyes widen as though she’s been caught or found out, or hadn’t realized she’d given away so much. The pre-morning dawn has begun to light the eastern horizon, and the night is losing its magic cloak of secrecy. We’re vastly closer to the equator here, so the day and night are nearly equally divided.

I don’t want to push her, but I fear Nia won’t tell me anything more once daylight comes.

“Gold is an element. It isn’t made, it exists.” She speaks as though correcting a child.

I close my eyes. This is the problem, then. She doesn’t want to tell me what she read because she doesn’t believe in it. She doesn’t think it’s possible to make gold.

But Eudora believes it. And plenty of magicians and scientists and experts and thinkers once believed it was possible, too.

I don’t know if it is, or not, but I want to know what Nia knows, even the parts she can’t admit to herself. If it’s possible to make gold, maybe old King Midas wasn’t just a myth. The golden touch part may have been an embellishment, but the part where gold was made where no gold had existed before?

Sure, it sounds like a dream, like a child’s fantasy. But there is such a thing as gold, even if we don’t know where it comes from, really.