Earth's Magic (2 page)

The smile on his face as he watched the training said it all, Heather thought. Wellington Jones, plump and bespectacled, had longed all his childhood for a warrior future he thought never could be his. Now, with much of his plumpness turning into muscle, he found himself a respected young officer in King Arthur’s army. But if there was one thing that seemed to please him as much as that, it was the lovely, strong, egotistical young Indian warrior who’d returned with them from the Americas last fall.

As Heather and Rus walked up, Welly turned his smile on
them. “Isn’t she magnificent? She’s really turning those farm girls into first-class warriors.” He sighed. “But she won’t let me take a hand in it. She tells me to go play with the men and leave this young Amazon crew under her command.”

Heather laughed. “Takata certainly thinks a lot of herself—but with good reason. You’re fully excused for thinking a lot of her too.” When Welly blushed, Heather tactfully changed the subject, though there was no denying that those two were becoming quite attached to each other. “I’ve been sent out to look for Earl. Any idea where he’s got to?”

“Yeah, he was just heading out onto the fells when we came down for morning practice. Said he wanted more time to look at and think about that comet. He’s obsessed with the thing. Though, granted, it is special and kind of creepy the way you can still see it in the daytime. I think he went that way.”

At Welly’s vague gesture northward, Heather nodded. She figured she knew now where Earl had been heading. One of his favorite sitting and thinking spots was a low hill with a sweeping view of Derwentwater and the mountains that hemmed in the large lake. Thanking Welly, who immediately turned back to watch the women warriors in training, Heather headed off. Rus zigzagged ahead of her, investigating smells with both noses.

Snow from the last storm still dusted the ground. In shadowed spots, it spread out in smooth, untouched blankets. Heather was surprised to see a few hardy shoots pushing through the white crust. In the last few years, it seemed that spring had been coming earlier. Everyone hoped this meant that the nuclear winter that had gripped the world for the last five hundred years was gradually losing its hold, though the extinctions it had brought about—exotic animals and plants that she had read about in surviving books—could never be reversed.

That subject always made her sad, loving animals as she did. But she dismissed the thought now and followed a narrow path upward as it wound in and out of snow patches. At last she saw Earl sitting on a knoll that thrust out of the mountain like a knobby elbow. Wrapped in his dark woolen cloak, he was seated on one rock, leaning back against another, and gazing into the southern sky, which stretched over the far end of the long Borrowdale Valley.

She walked a little closer, then stopped and just looked at this ancient teenaged wizard. She’d known him first as a rather odd older schoolmate, then as a friend, then as the person in this world whom she’d come most to love. His pale face with black eyes and hawk nose was framed in an unkempt fall of black hair and a minimal black beard, a beard that still frustrated him with its meagerness.

“Come on up, Heather,” he said without looking around at her.

“You knew I was here?”

“Wouldn’t be much of a wizard if I didn’t.” Then he laughed. “Actually I saw you walking along the trail farther down.” He moved his staff from the flat rock beside him and patted the rough, mossy surface. “Have a seat.”

As soon as she did, Rus came bounding up a side trail and enthusiastically licked the boy with both tongues before loping off to investigate something else.

Heather looked into the southern sky where Merlin had been staring. The faint smudge of light that they had been seeing for days stretched across the southwest as if someone had taken a glittering paintbrush to the sky.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Merlin said softly. “Even through the perpetual dust clouds, even in the daylight, it can be seen. I’ve searched those ancient books that have been collected here at
the manor. A few are astronomy books with information on comets. They say some come regularly, like the one called Halley’s comet that’s supposed to appear every seventy-six years. But this isn’t Halley’s. I’ve checked the dates, and the cycles are wrong. It isn’t any of the others I found mentioned either. From those descriptions, this comet is bigger and brighter than any of them.”

“So what is it?” Heather asked, snuggling closer for protection from the sharp wind that was battering the knoll.

He put his arm around her, adding the warmth of his cloak to hers. “Scientifically, comets are supposed to be big balls of ice and gas. But when … when I was here before, way back before scientists studied such things, people believed that comets were omens. Usually they were supposed to be portents of disasters—earthquakes, floods, plagues, wars.”

“So what do you believe now?”

“Both. Science can tell us
what
things are but not
why
. So the question is, why should it appear now when there is no record of this particular comet ever having been seen before?”

He turned and looked into Heather’s gray-green eyes. “Do the people, the foreign people you talk with in your mind, do they mention it?”

“They do,” she answered easily. He was almost the only person who wasn’t uncomfortable talking about her strange powers of communication. “It disturbs them too. Of course, those in the southern part of the planet see it in the northern sky. But people all over the world are seeing it, day and night, and are frightened about what it might mean.”

He nodded. “So am I. As this supposedly great wizard, I should be able to tell what omens mean. But I don’t know. That in itself frightens me. It’s like nothing I’ve ever dealt with—in either life. I just know that something big is about to happen,
but I don’t know how to foresee or prevent it—if it needs preventing.”

After a long silence, Heather hugged him. “Well,
I
know something big that you
might
be able to do something about. Arthur asks you to find Blanche and see if you can convince our dragon friend not to eat quite so many local sheep. It seems that the shepherds hereabouts are getting fed up.”

Merlin laughed. “No, it’s Blanche who’s doing the feeding.” Standing up, he grabbed his staff and then pulled Heather to her feet. “Sounds like it’s time I took my eyes off the sky and tended to earthly matters like hungry dragons. Want to come along? I’ve been keeping watch on her comings and goings enough to have learned where she’s nesting.”

Once the two reached the valley floor, with Rus gallivanting ahead of them, they saw Welly walking their way. Though in theory younger by a few years than Merlin in his current state, the boy was already heftier than the gangly rejuvenated wizard. His smile, though, was youthful and eager. He waved as he drew closer, then shook his head. “Takata says that just having a ‘renown warrior’ like me around watching makes the girls nervous. So I’m banished for the morning. You going dragon hunting?”

“Not much of a hunt, really,” Merlin answered. “Blanche has been very cagey about her lair, but I think I know where it is. Why don’t you join us?”

They headed west into a wide valley, then turned off into a much smaller one. Here the snow lay thick, but it had softened enough so that the crusty surface often couldn’t support their weight, and they kept breaking through into softer snow. Only Rus was able to scamper along the top. Once the dog reached the end of the valley, he turned and barked, seeming impatient for the others to hurry. Annoyed as she slogged through the
clinging snow, Heather sent him a mental message to stop showing off and shut up. First one head obeyed, then more reluctantly the other did as well.

“Of course,” Merlin said as they finally stood at the end of the valley studying the steep slope above them, “Blanche gets to her lair by flying. We’ll have to climb. But I’ve been studying this cliff face from a distance and I think there’s a route.”

Eyeing the cliff, Heather and Welly exchanged doubtful glances. Then, shrugging, they began climbing, trying to follow the sketchy trail of ledges and clefts that Merlin was taking. Fortunately, the fierce wind had scoured the snow away from this slope, and they could see what they were climbing on. For once, Rus seemed content to take up the rear and not push his way past them.

At last, Merlin stopped on a narrow ledge, carefully turned around, and surveyed the fells around them. “I think this is the right level. If we walk along this ledge to the right, we should come to an opening that’s probably the mouth of a cave.”

Welly had no love of heights, though he didn’t mind them as much as he did tight, confined places, but he was definitely regretting his impulse to come along on this venture. Maybe he should have stayed back, he thought, and just basked in the idea that a bunch of young girls, and Takata in particular, thought him a renowned warrior. Nervously pushing back his glasses, he stepped onto a firm-seeming stone slab only to have it tip and begin tobogganing down the slope.

He squealed, teetered, and started sliding after the stone when he felt two sets of teeth clamp into his coat collar while a hand grabbed his wrist. Between them, Rus and Heather hauled Welly back up to the ledge.

Kneeling, he gasped at Heather, “Wouldn’t it have been easier just to send a mental message to Blanche to lay off the sheep?”

“No it wouldn’t,” Heather answered. “She’s a dragon. I can do that mental talking with most animals and some people, but dragons are their own thing.”

“That they are,” Merlin said, sidling along the ledge back to them. “And I think we have found this one’s lair. It’s not far now, and don’t worry, the ledge gets wider.”

When they had all gathered in front of a jagged gash in the cliff, Merlin took a deep breath and coughed. “This is it, all right. Nothing smells quite like concentrated dragon dung. I’d rather not go far inside if we can help it.”

Taking a few steps into the cleft, he raised his voice and yelled, “Hey, Blanche, you home? We’ve got a message for you from the King, the Pendragon.”

His words echoed, then sank into silence.

Welly groaned. “All this way, and she’s not home.”

“We might as well wait a while,” Merlin said. “Stinky or not, it’ll be warmer inside.”

“That’s all right,” Heather said, stepping farther into the dark opening. “I want to see if she’s laid her eggs yet.”

The others followed. As the cave opened out, they were relieved to find that the worst stench came from a little side room. The rest of the cave was relatively fresh. “I guess dragons place their toilet rooms close to their doors to discourage visitors,” Heather speculated.

“Sure should work,” Welly muttered.

Merlin ignited a cold purple light along his staff. That plus the greenish glow from patches of luminescent moss clinging to the stone walls filled the cave with soft, misty light.

Examining the moss, Merlin said, “This is the same stuff we saw the time we followed that Cornish passage into Avalon. It doesn’t normally grow in the outer world. Blanche must have been making a few trips back to Faerie. I guess we should be
honored that she decided to have her children here in our world.”

As they walked farther into the cave, Welly pointed to what looked like strips of leather hanging from rocky spurs in the walls. “What are these?” Cautiously he touched one, then drew back. “Meat, dried meat. I guess here are the missing sheep.”

“Some of them,” Merlin agreed. “She’ll have eaten some herself, of course, despite the goodies Arthur sometimes has the cooks lay out for her. But these pieces she seems to have dried and stored.”

Just then Heather called from deeper in the cave, “Eggs! Here are her eggs. She’s laid them already. Three of them. I didn’t expect dragon eggs would each look so different and … so beautiful.”

Hurriedly the others joined her. In a niche where the cave wall slanted down to meet the floor, a hollow in the rock was filled with three odd-looking eggs. They were long and rounded on both ends, each about the size of a person’s head. In the dim light of the cave, they glowed.

Each egg shone as if it were made of a different precious metal. One glowed with the silvery sheen of moonlight. Another shone like the purest gold. And the third had the warm reddish cast of bronze.

“They
are
beautiful,” Welly said. “I wonder when they’ll hatch.”

“When they’re ready for the world,” said a grating voice behind them, “and when the world is ready for them.”

They spun around, astonished, not for the first time, at how silently a big dragon could move.

“Blanche!” Merlin said, bowing his head briefly. “And when will that be?”

“Anytime in the next minute or the next millennium. They’ll
know when the time is right. Now, puny, pestering people, are you going to beg my forgiveness for barging uninvited into my lair?”

“Our apologies, Blanche,” Merlin said, “but we bring a message to you from Arthur.”

“Ah. The Pendragon. That’s different. I am always ready to hear from
him.”
The white dragon folded her thirty-foot length into a sitting posture and cocked her head attentively. “Well?”

“The High King appreciates your special need for sustenance but requests that you select your prey from a wider geographic area than this immediate vicinity. This is so that he can retain the goodwill of his subjects—something essential for a successful monarch.”

The dragon snorted, releasing twin puffs of sulfurous-smelling smoke. “A reasonable request, I suppose, but irrelevant. This is the last meat I’ll be bringing to the cave for a while.” She kicked the bloody body of a sheep lying beside her on the cave floor. “I’ll dry this batch for the kids, then I have to be off on an errand.”

“But what if the eggs hatch while you’re away?” Heather asked.

The dragon shrugged, causing the wings folded along her side to ripple. “If they do, they do. We dragons are tough. We don’t have weak, helpless, slow-growing, and disgustingly coddled babies like you humans do. Most of us don’t even meet our parents. Of course, newborns sometimes get attached to things they see early on: a parent perhaps, but as likely a sibling or their nest—or treasure.”