“Then it’s settled. We leave at dawn,” Lyle said, giving me a grin I liked far too much.
We finished eating and spent the rest of the evening talking about everything and nothing. I told Lyle about my village and how much I missed everyone there, and how my magic never seemed to work right even though I did everything I was supposed to. He told me about life in the mountains and how the trees looked like they were on fire in autumn. By the time I fell asleep, I felt as though I’d known Lyle my entire life.
But when I woke the next morning, cold and stiff, I almost wondered if I’d imagined the entire meeting. The remains of the fire were there, but there was no Lyle, and every single one of the nets was gone from the lake.
But then a crashing echoed through the underbrush, and I turned toward the woods. And there, coming through the trees, was a real-life dragon.
I froze with fear as the creature lumbered toward me, unsure whether to scream, run, or just fall to the ground and cry. The creature was black as onyx and had eyes of amber. It stopped a few feet away and peered at me, sulfurous smoke leaking from its nostrils.
I took a deep breath and let it out. If the dragon wanted to hurt me it already would have.
As I studied the creature I began to see that the dragon looked familiar, and the more I studied it the more certain I became that the dragon and I had met before. “Uh, Lyle?” I said, feeling beyond silly. But the dragon let out a whoof of air and bobbed its head, and I laughed.
“You’re a dragon! Wait, that means my spell did work. Which means my translation is right,” I said, pacing as I put the pieces of the puzzle together. “I knew Hansen lied. Which means my suspicions about him having the castle complex under some sort of enchantment are correct. Ugh, that snake!”
The dragon tilted his head and I began to pace, my mind working through the possibilities of the depths of Hansen’s treachery. “What if he’s been translating everything wrong all this time?” I could suddenly see the entirety of the sorcerer’s plan, as though the universe had just laid it out for me. “He wanted all of the nation’s best warriors to head inland, away from the bay. But this also means that the ships the mermaids were complaining about weren’t ours. Oh no,” I said, as I realized what was going on. “Lyle, I know dragons have absolutely no use for us, especially in light of our history, but I think Klydonia is about to be invaded. Do you think you could give me a hand?”
The dragon shifted and shimmered, and then Lyle stood there before me. “What do you mean? What’s happening?”
“The spell the sorcerer was doing yesterday required mermaid tears, which everyone knows are used for transformation, and I just didn’t think about it until now . . . Ugh, then the Minister of War’s son was turned to stone . . .” I slapped my forehead. “Hansen’s spells had my brain all muddled, but now that I’m outside his influence I can see what he’s truly about. He’s planning on helping an invasion.”
Lyle nodded. “Let’s go back to my village and tell the elders what’s going on. I think we can help. Besides, I think it’s time the people of Klydonia remembered why the dragons were left alone in the first place.”
I had a moment of worry. What if I was wrong? But then Lyle shifted into his massive form and gestured for me to climb aboard, and I put my doubts aside.
For once, I was going to believe in myself.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The dragon elders were more than happy to follow me down into the more populated part of Klydonia. It turned out that while they lived a very good life in the mountains, they were quite bored.
“We haven’t had a single battle in at least fifty years,” cried one of the older dragons, who looked like the kind of nice old lady who would bake cookies for everyone in the village. “I miss the crunch of bones.”
I wondered if I was making a mistake bringing a pride of dragons into Klydonia, but there was nothing in the treaty that said they couldn’t fly toward the bay.
And so, I scrambled up on Lyle’s back and hoped that I was right, even though it meant that my country was being invaded.
As the dragons came into sight of the bay, it quickly became clear that my hunch had been correct. Ships fired on the castle complex, the sounds of screams and fighting coming from inside the complex itself.
“We have to destroy those ships,” I yelled at Lyle, and he let loose a low bellow that the rest of his pride echoed. An amethyst dragon with emerald eyes and two other smaller ones peeled off toward the ships, and as Lyle tilted toward the castle complex, flames were already engulfing the sails and masts of the invaders.
“Can you put me down in the center of the castle?” I wasn’t sure what exactly I would do, but one of the books had told of a spell for repelling invaders. I was hoping it was still active, because I now had no doubt that Hansen was a part of this. I had to stop him before this invasion became an all-out war.
Lyle landed softly in the middle of the main court, which was eerily abandoned. It was usually the source of much activity, and the absence of people frightened me.
“Halt!” cried men in a livery I didn’t recognize. Their pale skin marked them as not from Klydonia, and their speech was rough and harsh. They stormed the court and flashed swords that caught the sunlight. Lyle took a breath, but before he could unleash a fiery blast at the soldiers an incandescent blue light hit him, shifting him from his dragon form back to the boy I’d met in the moonlight.
“Lyle!” I cried out.
Hansen walked out from behind the soldiers, Ernst by his side, their faces smug. Hansen’s usual vacant expression had been replaced by a sneer.
“Oh, Melie, it’s too late. We control the castle, and there’s nothing you can do.” Well, at least he’d finally gotten my name right.
Lyle was on the ground next to me, and I fell to my knees beside him. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. It hurts to have the transformation reversed like that, but I’ll be fine.”
I took a deep breath. I was going to believe in myself, even if I just wanted to curl into a ball and sob. “Okay, I have a plan. I’m going to need you to run toward the gardens. Can you do that?”
The soldiers moved toward us, and Lyle nodded. Without warning he jumped to his feet and ran toward the flowering arch that was the entrance to the palace complex gardens.
The soldiers were stunned for a moment, but then chased after him, Hansen and Ernst on their tails. After all, Lyle was a dragon; I was just an apprentice with unremarkable abilities. Which one of us was the greater risk?
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
But I was also a girl who had read the entirety of the spell section in the royal library.