The Silver Moon Elm (23 page)

They began a sharp descent, angling for a thin stretch of ground between two lakes Jennifer had never seen before. This part of Crescent Valley was beyond her experience, even before last Sunday. She checked her bearings—which way had they been going? Northeast? It appeared so.

“They’re pretty sparse out here,” he called out as they leveled off a few feet from the spongy ground. There were few moon elms nearby, and the reddish-orange glow of the lichen lit up their claws as they landed. “They don’t care much for large bodies of water. The best hiding places are even closer to the ocean than we are now.”

“The ocean?” Jennifer had heard the lake that held the portal eventually emptied out into the ocean, but she had never seen it. She sniffed, but there was no salt in the air, just the familiar scents of gently churning lake water and moss-covered earth.

“Out over the water is the safest place of all. I tried to get us out there back when…” He trailed off and sighed, absentmindedly scraping the lichen with a hindclaw. “More of us could have survived, I’m sure of it. But tradition held strong for too many of us. Ned and the others weren’t willing to let go of that plateau. It meant too much. It was their end. Our end.”

She didn’t know what to say. Finally, he looked up at her. “Anyway, it was. Until you showed up today. So it’s Jennifer, eh? Great guns. How are you even possible?”

“I…I’m the Ancient Furnace.” It sounded lame to her ears, but it was all she could offer.

His reaction stunned her. “Of course you are,” he said as if she had told him the sky here was sort of dark.

“How did you know?”

“Any regular dragon wouldn’t be able to hold human shape here, would they? And as a dragon, you’re an obvious blend of the types. The prophecies spoke about you.”

His unwavering faith filled Jennifer with unexpected warmth. “You know who I really am.”

“I know what you represent. A second chance. Hope.” His golden eyes glittered. “You are going to set things right again!”

The warmth dissipated, leaving anxiety behind. What did this Elder expect of her? “Uh, yeah. See, I’m not sure how I can—”

“I don’t know either. But you being here is no accident. You and I are going to figure it out together. Oh, Goodwin!” He jumped up, held his gecko out high on a wing claw, and let out a whoop. “We’re not alone after all!”

And neither am I, thought Jennifer.

CHAPTER 11
Thursday Night

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Stretching out on the spongy ground, tracing swirls in the yellow, then green, then blue lichen for Goodwin to follow as he scrambled about the ground, Xavier told Jennifer all he knew about the advance of the werachnids over the past few decades. He didn’t ask about her own origins, he just accepted that she was here to help. This made her glad, not just because of his confidence, but because she wasn’t sure how to explain it all anyway.

It had begun around the time he was a child. “I was eight years old,” he told her. “And I’m seventy—no, scratch that, seventy-one—now. It was a good time for dragons. Beaststalkers were in fewer and fewer towns, and they had always been our primary enemy over the centuries. But as a child, I remember not being afraid of them, since no one had seen one in years. They became excellent fodder for campfire ghost stories, and our Elders began to relax their guard, hoping against hope that we had seen the last of such killers. We weren’t great in number, but we were growing.

“That all changed when the werachnids attacked Alexandria, which was where most of our Elders lived when they weren’t in Crescent Valley. The aggressors used a weapon we had never seen before—poison in the air. After smothering the town in it, they attacked. They were led by a champion some of the arachnids called The Crown.”

“The Crown?” Jennifer frowned. “What was he like?”

“None of our number who saw him survived. The few dozen who made it out of Alexandria, including my own family, had lived on the fringes of the city. We didn’t stay long after the poison cloud descended. Of course, there were rumors. Some said he was a mere teenager, but had extraordinary intelligence. On top of that, he clearly had powers unlike any spider or scorpion—the poison gas was evidence enough of that. But his future attacks drove the point home.”

“Eveningstar was next,” Jennifer guessed.

He nodded. “It was twelve years later. A few of us had dared to hope that the werachnids wished no more violence, being content with overrunning Alexandria. But they were merely pausing. They did nothing hastily. Every plan took time, every trap was sprung after careful consideration.

“With Eveningstar, their method was to begin with the river, which curled alongside the town. They dumped something in it that caused the entire body of water to boil, sending up a curtain of poisonous steam. With the north and east cut off, even for flying creatures, the werachnid army came from the south and west. This time, The Crown showed the first evidence of necromancy. With a word, he crippled six Elders at once, dropping them from the sky like wounded flies. With another word, he struck them blind and pulled their wings off. Those he let survive, to carry his message. Just about everyone else in the town perished.”

“How did your family escape?”

“They didn’t. My father, Jacques Longuequeue, was one of the six Elders The Crown mutilated that day. My mother, Martha, he outright killed. As for me and my brother, Charles, and some other young dragons, he thought it amusing to leave us alive, pinned under the piled-up corpses of our fellow townspeople. We weren’t rescued for two days.”

“That’s horrible.” Jennifer didn’t know what else to say.

“It was. And fifteen years later, they came after Pinegrove. This time, the mere specter of their advance caused the town to empty. There was no battle at all. We scattered like dandelion seeds, some of us going to Crescent Valley, others of us finding refuge in twos and threes in the countryside.

“But even that was not enough for The Crown. Efforts to disperse and settle in small groups around and outside of Minnesota were unsuccessful. The Crown had assembled a small team of prodigy werachnids like himself—there were three or four of them, perhaps. This team had a particular talent for seeking us out and exterminating us. Eventually, we realized dividing ourselves was even worse than sticking together. We gathered again in Crescent Valley, with a small outpost at the farm by the lake portal—the one you came through. Crawford and Caroline Scales, and a few others of us, volunteered to stay out there, and feign a last stand. Our hope was that The Crown would assume we were the very last of our race, wipe us out, and never know the rest of our number were hidden in another place.”

“And that didn’t work.” Jennifer sighed.

“The Crown didn’t even come to do battle. He sent his elite team—three of them, anyway, to the farm to talk. Under a crescent moon, they came under human shape. A girl and two boys—teenagers, mere children like you! And with supreme arrogance, they told us exactly what to do if we wanted to survive. They revealed that they knew where Crescent Valley was. If we surrendered it and the lake portal, they would let us flee to the most remote corners of the world, and die off in peace. Or we could stay, fight, and die more quickly and violently.

“Our choice was obvious: We weren’t going anywhere. Charles got off a good tail shot to the head of one of them, and that was our answer. That cost him his daughter. Ember wasn’t even five years old, and the young woman put her to sleep with a word before she left. The little girl never woke up.”

“What did these three look like? Did they have names?”

He scratched his horns. “My memory’s not good with faces,” he admitted. “And they never used names. But the woman was kind of skinny, with dark hair. Smiled a lot, but you got the feeling she might not mean it.”

Tavia, Jennifer guessed. And young Edmund Slider, then? “Did one of the boys have blond hair, with sharp features and black eyes?”

“I’d suppose so,” he said, squinting. “But I’m sure I can’t remember the third one at all, other than he was a tall drink of water. It was cold out, and they had hats and other gear on.

“The next year was hard,” he continued depressingly, as if what he had been relating to that point was all sweetness and light. “More and more arachnids seemed to show up without ties to the crescent moon. That meant they could show up when we were mere humans, and arrive as humans if it suited them to do so while we were trapped in dragon form. We adopted some tactics that—Well, the year was hard.” He shook his head and avoided detail.

“There was a short but fine moment of victory less than a year after Ember died,” he recalled. “The Crown himself came to the portal to do battle. He killed a few of us effortlessly, before a young creeper with a real knack for camouflage—Crawford’s kid, name of Jonathan—leapt out from under The Crown’s feet and sank his teeth right into the bastard’s throat. With no way to speak sorcery, and losing blood rapidly, The Crown fell. Then Jonathan and his father incinerated the corpse.”

Jennifer sat up straight at this and couldn’t hold back a small grin. “Jonathan Scales killed The Crown.”

Unaware of what this meant to her, Xavier rambled on. “He sure did. That kid was a reckless son a bitch—all due respect to his mother, Caroline—but he was a vicious fighter. Seeing their mighty Crown die put the scare in his followers. They didn’t come back for another year after that.

“When they did, there were simply too many of them. And the Quadrivium—that’s what The Crown’s inner circle started calling themselves—really came of age. They overran the cabin, and we had to get back to Crescent Valley. And then the real nightmare began. Our last refuge, precious and pure to us, came under attack. First, the wereachnids only knew about the lake portal.”

This made Jennifer squirm in her seat.

“But then invaders showed up in places far away from the lake, using entry points we had rarely used or forgotten. Worse, what showed up wasn’t just arachnids anymore. It was new things, horribly mutated. The sort of things you saw today. The Quadrivium experimented with their own kind, and then sent them into the fray. It was a terrible thing to do, and it worked extremely well.”

He stroked Goodwin’s back a few times before he spoke again. “You know the story from there—it’s all written on the stone plateau. Three years after we gave up the outside world, we lost this one, too. After our last stand, when Ned died in my own wings, I scratched the last grave on that plateau and fled. It was cowardly not to go out fighting, I suppose. To run and hide, year after year, and slowly fade away.”

“You’re not a coward,” Jennifer protested. “If you had gone out fighting twenty years ago, you wouldn’t have been around to save me today, when I thought I wanted to die—but I really didn’t.”

“Hmmm,” he allowed, his yellowed teeth showing. “Well, that’s my story. A long and sad one, I’m afraid. And now I’m left to wander here by myself. The Quadrivium stopped looking for me in earnest once they were sure I was the only dragon left. Crescent Valley has been left to rot. What possible harm can I do, before I die?”

Jennifer raised her head and licked her teeth. “You wanna find out?”

Xavier volunteered to keep watch and scout the area with Goodwin while Jennifer stretched out and tried to get some sleep. There was a lot of excitement in his voice, but Jennifer wasn’t sure he had much notion of what to do next.

Great, the Ancient Furnace has shown up. So what? What can he and I possibly do together? Repopulate the species?

She snorted and twitched her tail as she dismissed the idea. The old guy was something like five times her age; and while this version of Xavier Longtail seemed okay, she hadn’t quite forgiven the old version for being such an ass. And even if she had a kid, by any father, so what? The kid got to die alone a few years after his or her parents. Not exactly a rousing tale of recovery.

No, the answer wasn’t repopulating this universe. It was restoring the old one. But could they? And should they even try?

She recalled the note her father had written her. It was probably still in Tavia’s guest room with all of her clothes, assuming Skip hadn’t moved it. She felt a pang of guilt. He had told her to sit tight. He had told her to accept this world and make a life. The first time she had read those words, she had resisted the idea. But with a couple of days under her belt here, she wondered if he might have been right. Given how powerful these werachnids were, fighting would probably get her killed. Her father wouldn’t want that.

But he reminded you about the stone plateau, a new voice in her head argued. He wanted you to fight. He just didn’t want to tip off Skip.

This was certainly possible. Of course, it was hard to be sure either way. Jonathan Scales had probably had less than five minutes to write words that would pass Skip’s inspection and still mean something to Jennifer. His mention of stone and fire certainly seemed like a code now—but it may have been a code to check out Crescent Valley, and give up if this refuge was lost. And lost it was.

And why is it lost? the voice persisted, making Jennifer roll over restlessly. Who lost it, Jennifer? Who brought the enemy through the portal, revealed our deepest and most ancient secret, and then got angry at the dragons who thought it was reckless to do so? How many names are on that plateau, Jennifer? How many people did Skip kill when he gave the Quadrivium the location of Crescent Valley? How many people did you kill?

The guilt was more than she could bear. She covered her head with her wings but she knew the voice would not let her sleep. Not with that knowledge. Not until she had set things right.

It may kill me, Dad. But I can’t let that plateau stand like that.

The voice in her head accepted that resolve as down payment on her debt, and it quieted down long enough for her to slip into an uneasy slumber.

CHAPTER 12
Friday

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The lichen in the nearby copse of trees was graduating from orange to yellow again when Jennifer woke up. Even without the visual cue, she would have known it was morning: The enigmatic warmth that radiated from the ground at the start of each day was, at least, a familiar comfort. She remembered asking her father about it on one of her first trips to Crescent Valley. He had told her it was the breath of Brigida, the first dragon, who no one had ever seen die thousands of years ago.