The Passage to Mythrin 2-Book Bundle (39 page)

Amelia stabbed the sword point-down into the ground. “So, the gate wasn't blocked after all. Pier lied. Why?” She fanned her fingers through the space inside the trellis, but it stayed dark and empty.

“Obvious. To keep us from getting to Mythrin. She thinks there's no way for us to get there now. She doesn't know about the book.”

The trellis stood in the middle of Mr. Manning's garden. It wasn't really a trellis. There was another word for it. It was like a doorway made of two trellises that arched together at the top, and you grew roses or grapevines — no, it was roses, she could smell them — up and over it. Arbour, that was it.

“Lucky she's wrong.” Amelia paced and kicked at the grass. “Ike, hurry!”

“Relax! He's a fast runner. It'll take him only, um … ten minutes to get home. Five to get the book, maybe a bit more if his father sees him and he has to talk his way out of the house. Another ten to get back here.” Simon nodded reassuringly.

“Twenty-five minutes! Maybe thirty!” She clutched her hair. “That's five
hours
on Mythrin!”

“Am— Amelia, take it easy. We'll still get there before moonrise, if Ike is right.”

“Maybe too late for Ty.”

“Ty's not the only one in danger,” he said, but she hardly heard him. She sat down cross-legged on the grass in front of the arbour. It drove her crazy knowing that the gate was there, and she couldn't touch it or see it. A white moth fluttered in the space between the trellises. A mosquito zinged through.

It's like nothing's there, but I know it is. If only I could feel it!

She gripped her ankles and tried to be patient. At least there'd be no problem seeing the arbour.
Got my night eyes now.
There was a lot to see, if you looked. The moths were scraps of white gauze. And hey, a bat — click, chirp, skitter, swoop — one less moth. Over there under those bushes, two lights shone at her. Cat's eyes. They made her think of Ty. Then the lights winked out as the cat turned its head to stare at the bats.

“The mosquitoes are eating me alive,” Simon said.

“Mm.” Her fingertips in the grass felt another kind of life. Something tiny walked over her hand. The grass stirred as it grew, each blade unsheathing upward, roots fingering downward.

“Look, fireflies!” he said.

Amelia opened her eyes and looked for the tiny yellow lights blinking in the dark. Zap! Bat got one. “Listen to the bats!”

“You can't hear bats,” Simon said kindly. “Not when they're hunting. See, they make these sounds humans can't hear, they make them echo off —”

“I can hear them.”

“But …”

And now that she listened really hard, there was another sound in the air: a high, faint, far sighing.

“Ammy, what's the matter with you?”

When she listened to the distant sighing with her eyes closed, she could see it: blue light branching and weaving in the air. But so dim, a ghost of a hint of a memory.

“Ammy!” A hand grabbed her arm.

She opened her eyes and the blue light and the sighing sound went away.

“Ammy, what are you doing?” Simon looked scared. She could see that even in the dark and through the layers of dirt and dried blood on his face.

“It's
Amelia
. I'm turning into a dragon, I think.” She felt strangely calm, as if this was a dream. There was a reddish glint on her wrist. The patch felt rough when she moved her fingertips over it towards the hand,
smooth when she stroked towards the elbow. “Look, I have scales!”

Simon grabbed her hand and touched it, then brought it close to his eyes. “No, you don't!”

“Maybe they're on the inside, not the outside.” She stood up.

He jumped up beside her. “You're not a dragon! Forget what Pier said.”

“Never mind Pier. Ty said I'm changing. It's from sharing Mara's dreams.” She gripped the hilt of the sword and pulled it out of the lawn. “And on Mythrin I was a dragon, for a little while. Remember how I flew, how I carried you?” That memory blew through her again like a warm wind. It buoyed her up on her toes.

“Yes, but this is Earth. And you're human, not dragon! You can't just go changing because you want to.”

“Bet?” She listened again for the distant sighing, and it was stronger and nearer. She closed her eyes and pictured the gate. It glowed in the darkness behind her eyelids — tall, arched, a slab of glowing sapphire, its glassy surface a mass of braided shapes. She reached into the space inside the arbour, and it was icy cold. She opened her eyes, and there it was: the sapphire gate. It fitted the shape of the arbour exactly.

Simon was staring at her, not at the gate.

She raised a hand and touched the glowing slab, and it dissolved into the passage between worlds.

“Ike'll kill me if I go without him,” Simon said.

“Stay here, then.”

“No way! Can't let you go alone.”

He looked back over his shoulder. “Somebody's watching us from Mr. Manning's house. From the window.”

Amelia turned and yes, somebody tall and thin was standing at the patio window. She smiled and waved, grabbed Simon's hand, and stepped forward.

The dusk-blue passage tipped them out into the crisp air of Mythrin under a golden sky. This time they weren't sitting in a bruised heap in that tall, narrow building like a cathedral. Instead, they stood on a hillside knee-deep in small bushes with yellow flowers all over them. Boulders stuck up like islands in a yellow sea.

To their left rose a slender tree, and to their right another. Their branches arched and met overhead. They were the only two trees on the hillside.

In front of the gate, and in a wide trail down the hill, the yellow bushes were crushed and burned. Amelia closed her eyes and imagined two huge, scaly bodies bursting from the gate in a fury of claws and wings and boiling flame.
Ty!
She listened, but no answer came.

“We're in the right place, anyway,” Simon said.

The valley of the Casseri lay below them. Westward rose the cliffs, black and jagged against the brightness of the hidden sun. The church-like building stood three-quarters of the way up, at the back of a stone shelf. Below sparkled a little river bordered by trees. Far to the east, in a gap between low hills, an orange disk sat on the silver line of the sea.

“Full moon rising. So Ike was nearly right on.” Simon gazed back and forth. “Where is everybody?”

Nothing moved in the valley, except the river. Nothing on the cliffs. Amelia grounded the sword, point down. “Have we missed the day? Or did they already have the showdown? Did they already….” She didn't want to say it.
Is there anybody left alive down there?

“You're thinking Mara might ….”

“No! Mara would keep her word. But suppose Zeph got at the other dragons. He wouldn't stop till all the Casseri were dead.” She started down the hill. “I need to find Ty. And Mara. Ow!” The yellow-flowered bushes snagged her ankles and whipped her legs with stems like bristly wires. Smaller rocks were hidden under the bushes, some small enough to roll underfoot, the others big enough to trip over.

“Actually, it's worse than that,” Simon said, right behind her. “What Zeph would do, I mean.”

“How do you know what Zeph would do?”

“The Prism Blade showed me.”

As they picked their way down the hill, Simon told her what really happened when he wielded the cup and it became a sword. Wayland's Prism had carried him into the dragon's heart and mind. “I saw everything he ever thought. I knew everything he wanted.”

“We already knew what he wanted.” She stopped to pry her sandal from between two stones. “He wants to be chief. Ty told us that.”

“Yes, but Ty never guessed the worst. Ammy, listen.” He waited until she was looking straight at him. “Zeph was planning to use the Prism Blade
against his own people!
”

“But why? And how ….” She blinked. “Oh. Erwin. Or you.”

“Right. He was going to use Erwin — or me — to wield the Blade and kill Mara and anyone who followed her. See, he thinks just like Pier. He thinks that's what the Blade does: kills dragons. He was all set to kill half the dragons on Mythrin just so he could be chief of the rest of them.”

She felt sick. “And the humans?”

“Oh, they're nothing to him. Bugs to step on.”

They set off down the hill again. Near the bottom the slope levelled out, the snaggy bushes gave way to long grass and then to thick-limbed trees like willows,
with roots that snaked around the boulders and into the water. The river chuckled and sang.

Still, nothing else moved. The air was sun-warm and motionless. Even the birds were silent.
In fact, the only noisy things around here are Simon and me
.

“So that's how the Prism Blade is a sword in the heart.” Simon stumbled over a tree root and slapped a hand on a boulder to stop his fall.

“Okay, and I get it about opening doors. But what about the riddle that can't be answered?” Amelia turned on one foot. She'd been walking along the tree roots, using the sword like a hiking pole. “Oh, wait. He called
you
riddle!”

“Right. The dragon can't get inside your mind, even after you stop using the Blade. He can't make you do anything. He can't even use fire on you. That makes
you
the riddle he can't read. See, most humans are clear — dragons can see right through them — but the Prism makes you like a … like a stone.”

“How do you know all that?” She felt a bit jealous. Until now, she'd been the insider, the one who knew about dragons.

He shrugged. “Dunno. I just know.”

“Well, I can see how Mara wouldn't like it — humans being able to read dragon's minds — but —”

Something cracked on the boulder next to Simon's
hand. Metal flashed and bounced. Something else thunked into a tree trunk behind Amelia's head and stuck there. They stared at it: a thick, steel shaft that looked like it could go through an elephant without stopping.

They dropped. Steel flashed through the space where they'd been standing. “Hey!” Amelia yelled. “Stop! It's us!”

“Why are they shooting at us?” Simon burrowed into the long grass between two boulders.

“Pier told them to, probably. She hates me.”

Amelia peered out from behind a tree trunk as wide as a fridge. She ducked back. A bolt grazed the trunk and fell behind her.

Keep your head down!

Amelia choked. That voice in her head! She could almost see the blazing emerald eyes.

“Mara! Where are you?”

“Uh?” Simon propped himself up on his elbows.

Look up. Look around.
“Look up, she says.”

“The cliffs!” Simon pointed.

Amelia looked, and saw. One of the jagged points on the western cliff poked up another pointy bit. A dragon lifting a wing. Now she remembered that the top of that cliff was actually smooth. All the jagged bits were dragons.

“There must be hundreds!”

Simon rolled over on his back so he could look up the yellow-flowered hill. “Thousands.”

The hill had a jagged crest now too, like the cliff — only, not black on this side, but glittering like jewels as they caught the last of the sunlight. Wherever you looked around the rim of the valley — dragons.

“Where are the humans?”

“They'd be in the caves,” Simon said.

“Mara! What about Ty? Is he all right?”

He will live. Which is more than his foolishness deserves.
The voice was grimly amused.
Now, hush! You have come at just the wrong time. Everything hangs on a claw's tip.

“But Mara, we did it! We saved Wayland's Prism from Pier, and —”

And brought it here. I know. I feel it. All the dragons feel it. The little pale ardin feels it too, no doubt. This is the worst thing you could have done.

“But it's not —”

Hush!
A door slammed in Amelia's mind. She stared helplessly at Simon. “She's gone. She says we messed up.”

“Something bad is going to happen,” he said quietly. “There are only … what did Pier say? Two hundred and thirty-one people in the caves. A lot of them kids.”

“Mara wouldn't hurt them.”

He just looked at her.

She closed her eyes.
Mara!
No answer.

One of the jagged bits on the cliff moved again. A voice like a cello swept the valley. It was Mara's dragon voice, but grown so big that it might have come from a cello the size of Founders Tower.

“Strangers!” sang the cello, immense and sweet. “We kept our word. All these days we left you in peace. But now the round moon rises. And you have not gone.”

The voice vibrated in the tree trunk under Amelia's hands, and then it died. Then: “Strangers, this is our world. You cannot stay here. You must go.” Silence, but for the liquid song of the river. Then again the deep, sweet voice: “If you stay, you will stay in your caves like worms. And you will starve. We will wait, and watch. We can wait forever.”

“This can't be happening! Mara wouldn't …”

“Sh!” Simon said.

“We do not hate you,” sang the cello voice. “And we do not love death for its own sake. But you must go from here. Perhaps you have lost the way.” A long silence, and Amelia thought there would be no more, but then: “Come to me. I will go down.”

“Come to me!” Simon sat up, open-mouthed. “Is she crazy? They won't ever —”

“Oh, good glory!” The largest jagged bit on the cliff lifted off, spread wide wings, and floated down to the meadow across the river. “Mara, no! They'll kill you!”

Forgetting danger, Amelia started to squeeze between the boulder and the tree to the river. Simon scrambled up and grabbed the back of her T-shirt. “You'll get yourself shot! Besides, Mara isn't stupid.”