Dangerous Gift Page 20

  “So now you have to listen to me,” Boa says. “I want you to tell me the truth for once. How many spells have you cast on me?”

  Jerboa barks a laugh. “I couldn’t possibly remember all of them. I’ve been trying to fix you for literally centuries.”

  Boa’s eyes go a little unfocused for a moment. “Centuries?” she whispers.

  Jerboa tries to remember when the last memory wipe was, but she’s too cold to think straight. “Yes,” she hisses instead. “Nearly eleven centuries.”

  “Three moons.” Boa presses her free talon to her eyes. “Why don’t I remember that?”

  Jerboa would shrug if she could move her shoulders.

  “Because you keep erasing my memory,” Boa answers herself. “That’s why I get so confused. That’s why you keep talking about things I don’t remember at all.”

  “Let’s be fair,” says Jerboa. “You also have an uncommonly stupid brain.”

  “How would we know?” Boa flares. “Is any of it really me anymore?” She brandishes the quills at Jerboa. “I only love you because of magic,” she says. “Right? You’ve been enchanting me to love you.”

  “No, that’s all real,” Jerboa lies, silkier now. “If you love me so much, let me go.” She looks down at the ice that now encases her legs and tail. Her scales are so cold. Her wings are raised slightly, immobile, but the ice will reach them any moment.

  “It’s not fair to make me love you when you don’t love me at all.” Boa angrily wipes her tears away.

  “I love you when you’re not like THIS,” Jerboa points out. “You’re exceptionally unlovable right now.”

  “Well,” Boa says. “I guess we can fix that, can’t we? Just a little tweak here, a correction there — all you need is this, right?” She holds up an unrolled scroll.

  Uh-oh. Her Boa spells.

  She should have been more careful, kept them all in her head the way she used to. But it was getting so hard to keep track of them, and some of them were complicated … it was just easier to make an enchanted scroll where she could write down whatever she wanted to change about Boa, and it would happen.

  But Boa wasn’t supposed to see it. She wasn’t supposed to get her claws on it.

  “Where did you find that?” Jerboa snaps.

  “MORE OBEDIENT,” Boa reads from the scroll. “EVEN MORE OBEDIENT. CHEW WITH HER MOUTH CLOSED. STOP ASKING ABOUT TALKING TO OTHER DRAGONS. FORGET THAT OTHER DRAGONS EXIST. REMEMBER THAT OTHER DRAGONS EXIST AND STOP ASKING INANE QUESTIONS. ALWAYS LET MOTHER HAVE THE BIGGER FISH.” She narrows her eyes. “This certainly explains a lot.”

  Jerboa has never been so cold.

  “Guess what?” Boa says. “It turns out, anybody can add notes to this scroll. Watch.” She picks up Jerboa’s quill and writes on the scroll. “GRE-EN TAIL BAR-B,” she says slowly as she writes.

  Her tail barb turns a beautiful shade of emerald green.

  “See? Exciting, isn’t it?” Boa writes on the scroll again. “NORMAL COLOR TAIL BARB.” And her tail goes back to normal.

  Jerboa can’t feel her wings. The ice is up around her neck now; she can’t even move her head to look at the rest of her.

  “But you know what I really want?” Boa says. “More than a green tail, Mother? You might remember this, because I’ve asked for it before. More than once, I think. Maybe quite a lot, in all those memories you erased.

  “I’d like to be an animus dragon.”

  No! Never!

  Jerboa tries to cast a spell with her mind. She tries to rip the scroll out of Boa’s claws, but it only flutters feebly.

  “Oh, sorry to disappoint you — for what, the eight millionth time?” Boa says as the quill snaps in half. “You actually can’t stop me from writing it down. Because I already did.” She looks down at the quill with a smile, and it smooths back into one piece.

  She’s not going to save me, Jerboa realizes for the first time. Not ever. This isn’t a negotiation. It’s a final performance. Boa has freed herself from her mother’s spells. She doesn’t need Jerboa anymore.

  These are my last moments, after all this time.

  She finds she’s not as sad as she would have expected. She has lived a really, really long time. And most of it was quite delightful, when it wasn’t irritating.

  “Good-bye, Mother,” Boa says, and she actually looks much sadder than Jerboa feels. She’s crying, but Jerboa doesn’t know if those are real tears, or ones caused by the spell that makes Boa love her.

  I only have a moment.

  One last spell.

  Not to save myself. Just to make sure that Boa isn’t as triumphant as she thinks. Something to ensure she never, never forgets me.

  She casts the spell on Boa herself, making her daughter her last animus-touched object.

  And then she is gone.

  She is free.

  She can’t believe it.

  Boa steps toward the block of ice that has her mother trapped inside. It is fascinating to see her like this, through the bubbles and glaze of the ice walls. It’s hard to see her expression, although Boa will always remember the contorted fury on her face.

  I did it. I tricked her. I freed myself. Finally, after all this time. Longer than she could possibly have guessed.

  I’m the only Jerboa now.

  She hesitates, then writes in the scroll: RETURN ALL BOA’S MEMORIES. GENTLY, she adds in a hasty scrawl.

  It’s still too much.

  It’s so much.

  All the times they fought, and Jerboa just flicked the memories away like bugs so Boa would be pleasant again.

  All the promises she made and broke with a snap of her claws.

  The conversation about making a brother came back, and Boa clutched her stomach — did it ever happen? Was there another damaged dragonet in their past, or had she convinced her mother and spared someone else her fate?

  No brothers appeared; no sisters either. Boa was alone with her mother throughout all the centuries of memories.

  But there were servants here and there — dragons that Jerboa kidnapped and enchanted. Boa had loved some of them. She would have run away with them if she could have.

  Her memories gave her no clues about what happened to them when Jerboa was done … did she wipe their memories and throw them back out into the world? Or something worse? All Boa could see were days where she was happy, building sand castles with a RainWing or swimming with a SeaWing, and then the next day they’d be gone, along with all her memories of them.

  I have had friends. I just … never knew it.

  Maybe she can cast a spell to find them. Maybe some of them are still alive. Maybe she can restore their memories, and they’ll be so happy to see her.

  What if I search for them and find out something terrible, though?

  She’s not sure she’s ready to face every truth about her mother right now. And there are so many other, less traumatizing things she can do with all her wonderful magic. She can make everyone on the whole continent be friends with her! She can make herself queen of the Kingdom of Sand, if she wants to. She has all the power her mother had, but she’s not going to use it to torture one dragonet for hundreds of years. She’s going to use it to be happy. To have a completely different life.

  But first things first: She needs to get this frozen monster out of her doorway.

  Boa touches the shell around her neck. It gives her instant teleportation to wherever her mother is — the first spell Jerboa ever made at her request. That could still be useful, if she puts her mother in the right place.

  She rests one talon lightly against the chilly ice wall and looks through the dark whorls to where she thinks she can see her mother’s eyes.

  “I enchant this block of ice to bury itself under this hut and stay frozen there forever.”

  The ice and her mother vanish and the hut shakes slightly, as though something is settling in the sand below it.

  But Boa doesn’t even get a moment to be thrilled. Pain lances through her, sharp
and blinding, and she shrieks at the unexpected agony.

  When the first wave of pain passes, she opens her eyes, gasping, and sees that one of her claws is gone. It’s been sliced off as if someone took a hatchet to it, and there is blood EVERYWHERE, although the claw itself has vanished into thin air.

  “What?” she whispers. “What?”

  Did she cast the spell wrong? Maybe she was accidentally touching the ice block with that talon, and it took a piece of her with it?

  Or …

  No. No, no, no.

  Somehow she knows, in a space beyond knowing. She can’t see the shape of it yet; she still has to figure out how and what exactly this is, but she is certain of one thing.

  Her mother did this to her.

  * * *

  She is sitting by the freshwater pond, washing the blood off her newest stump. Six claws gone. When she has lost all of them, what will go next? Her ears? Her horns? Her tail barb?

  Her wings? She shudders.

  She has to be so, so careful with her spells. There’s no way to know which one will cause enough damage to kill her.

  She lost her second claw trying to heal the first one, and it only half worked. The wound closed, covered over with a shiny new layer of scales, but her claw did not grow back.

  She used a normal bandage on the second injury and thought for a long time.

  Her third claw: sacrificed for information. She enchanted a scroll to truthfully answer any question she asked of it. Through the pain and the spinning stars around her head, she made it tell her what her mother had done.

  One final curse. She should have expected it, should have enchanted something to protect herself. But she’d had to move fast when she found the Boa-changing scroll in the piles of bags her mother had forced her to carry across the desert. Her mother was so rarely careless, or perhaps Boa was rarely smart and alert enough to catch her when she was.

  And now Jerboa has left her this: a last spell that was a masterpiece of awfulness. Every time Boa tries to use animus magic, she will lose a piece of herself, bit by bit, until she dies of her wounds. The spell specifies that the pieces could not grow back, even with magic, and it is reinforced with words of binding that mean there is no way to reverse it or fight it.

  Boa tried anyway, which is how she lost claws four and five. It didn’t seem fair that she could be injured by spells that didn’t even work.

  Her mother learned a lot over the years, about what animus dragons could do to each other, and how to word spells so other dragons couldn’t break them. Boa remembers all the horror stories now — everything her mother told her to try to scare her away from animus magic. But she’d never taught her anything. Boa knows nothing about protecting herself as an animus.

  And I’m not a normal animus. I’m cursed.

  All right. So. She can live without magic. She is still free of her mother. This is her chance to have the normal life she always wanted — free in the world, meeting other dragons. Maybe it wouldn’t be the glamorous enchanted whirlwind she’d imagined, but it would be a thousand times happier than her life up to now. She would be herself. She would choose her own path. She would be free.

  At that point she had looked at her maimed talons and realized it would be hard to walk into any dragon village and make friends looking like this. She’d have a lot of explaining to do.

  So, then, good-bye to her sixth claw as a new spell was added to the shell necklace, casting a glamor so that she looks normal and intact to any dragons who see her. No one will ever see what her mother did to her, or know how much pain she is in.

  Boa still has several objects her mother enchanted, and she knows what about half of them do. Her information scroll can tell her the rest. She might even be able to sell a few of them to a queen somewhere, if she dares to risk it.

  And if she’s ever in danger, one thought will bring her right back here, to this hut by the ocean, to the floorboards that cover her mother’s grave. Where she can dance and dance and no one will ever tell her to stop or cast a spell to make her fall over or enchant away her love of music for a hundred years.

  “I hope you didn’t die thinking you’d won, Mother,” she says out loud. “Because unlike you, I can control myself. I don’t need to use my magic. I’m going to be happy, despite everything you’ve done to me.”

  She spreads her wings and lifts into the sky.

  * * *

  She is taking a break from other dragons. She does this occasionally — goes back to her hut for fifty years or longer, until everyone she’s met this time around has forgotten about her and she can come back as someone new.

  It might have been longer than fifty years this time, though. Has it been closer to a hundred? It’s so peaceful on her beach, all alone with the waves. In the cities, around other dragons, she is constantly tempted to use her magic, even knowing the pain it will cause her. But here she never thinks of spells she wishes she could use. She can just be.

  She has one friend, a dragon who knows the truth about her. They met by accident before Glacier became queen, but Glacier is not like other queens. She believes in solving her own problems, and she knows how dangerous animus magic can be. She also knows the cost Jerboa has to pay every time she uses her magic. Jerboa took off her glamor once, so Glacier could see her as she really is. She was surprised when Glacier cried. No one has ever felt sorry for her before, or told her that it’s not fair, everything she went through.

  In all the years they’ve known each other, even through the recent war, Glacier has never asked Jerboa for a single spell.

  Once, Jerboa asked her about that, and Glacier said, “You should save your magic. Someday, the world might really need it, and you’ll be the only dragon who can save everyone.”

  Jerboa had laughed. “Me? Like a hero?”

  “Why not?” Glacier had answered. “Don’t you think you’re here for a purpose?”

  Two thousand years was a long time to wait for a “purpose,” Jerboa thinks. Maybe she’ll have to invent one, eventually.

  She is strolling down the empty beach toward the water, thinking about what kind of fish she’ll catch for dinner, when the universe suddenly crumples inward, and an unfamiliar voice says, clear as a bell:

  “Bring them here. Every animus dragon in all the seven tribes. Bring them here to my throne room right now.”

  And before she can think or breathe or run, she finds herself standing in a sunlit black marble throne room.

  In front of her is the largest dragon she’s ever seen, a NightWing-IceWing hybrid, menace radiating off him. He has his back to her, and as she appears, three more dragons appear in front of him — two SeaWings and another NightWing, all looking completely terrified.

  Jerboa doesn’t hesitate. Centuries of reacting to fear have trained her well; she is barely in the room for a moment before she seizes her necklace and whisks herself home again.

  She is in her hut, her heart pounding. Her claws sinking into the weathered wooden floor, which she has replaced several times over the years, but always in the same spot. Where her mother is buried.

  Thank you, Mother. For once, one of your spells has saved me.

  The magic has brought her home, but is she actually safe? Who was that?

  And all those other dragons — are there really five animus dragons in Pyrrhia right now? Didn’t Mother say the limit was one? How is this possible?

  She scrambles over to her trunk and tosses everything in it aside to get to her answers scroll. “Tell me who that was,” she says.

  The writing goes on for a while. The scroll is usually very concise, but it seems to have a lot to say about this Darkstalker. His past, his history — he was alive back when my mother was, she thinks — the spell that tucked him away, the mistake that freed him, the NightWings who follow him.

  “What does he want with animus dragons?” she asks.

  TO CONTROL THEM, the scroll answers. TO USE THEIR MAGIC INSTEAD OF HIS OWN, TO PRESERVE HIS SOUL. AND TO BE SUR
E THAT THEY CAN NEVER BE ANY THREAT TO HIM.

  Jerboa shudders, feeling sick. What if he’d been facing her? What if he’d gotten his claws on her and forced her to use her magic? What if he found it amusing to watch her slowly sliced into pieces until she died?

  I have to protect myself against him. I have to cast something to make myself invulnerable to his spells. Or something to make me more powerful than him.

  She reaches for one of her copper bracelets, then hesitates, struck by a chilling thought.

  “Why did he summon all the animus dragons right now?”

  BECAUSE HIS MAGIC TOLD HIM SOMEONE WAS CASTING ANIMUS SPELLS, AND HE WAS AFRAID THEY MIGHT BE AGAINST HIM.

  She asks quietly, “He can tell when someone uses animus magic?”

  YES.

  “Can he sense me right now?”

  NO. HIS SPELL ONLY SEARCHES FOR NEW ENCHANTMENTS.

  “How can I protect myself against him?”

  THAT ANSWER IS NOT AVAILABLE YET.

  She knew it would say that. It can’t see the future or tell her what’s going to happen; it is sort of useless when she needs to hide or make plans or, for instance, when there’s a big ominous magic user haunting the land. Once she tried asking it: “how long will I live?” and it answered: UNTIL YOU DIE, which was neither comforting nor helpful.

  Maybe this is it. Her purpose. Maybe she’s the only dragon in Pyrrhia who can stop him. If she can come up with just the right spell …

  “Is this my purpose?” she asks the scroll, knowing what it will say.

  THAT ANSWER IS NOT AVAILABLE YET.

  I could kill him, couldn’t I? With one stroke of magic? Or put him back to sleep under the mountain, the way he was before?

  Except … if he’s as old and dangerous and powerful as her scroll says …

  “Has Darkstalker protected himself from other dragons’ animus magic?” she asks.

  YES.

  She stands up and starts pacing around the hut. The world is in danger and there’s nothing she can do. In a way, it’s a relief, because she would rather hide here. But it feels wrong. It feels as though there should be something, if she can only think of it …