“Sold him?” Astrid wrinkled her nose. “What do you mean?”
“They made a deal with Leopold.” Fetter shrugged. “I was never clear what it was for, but I knew it was important. I overheard them talking with Leopold a day or so before you left. You were always the best with the plants, at least according to them, and Leopold needed someone to keep his garden alive. It wasn’t going to be a short-term thing, either. I could tell that much from what they’d said. And then Leopold handed over a bag of coins before he left.
“You were very young, two or three years old, but they could tell you had a special touch with garden plants. Anyway, Dad took you for a walk one day, and you didn’t come home. We asked about you, but all they said was you were away on a special mission. I asked and asked and asked about it until Dad threatened to tan my backside but good if I mentioned you again. So, I stopped asking. And now, here we are in the Lost Forest, looking for a dragon you kept asleep for all those years. Funny how life works out, eh?”
Thaddeus looked at Teofil to see how he was handling this bit of information, but all he could see was Teofil’s profile as he stared out through the twisted tree trunks in the direction of the fairy circle. From the tight line of his lips to the muscle clenched in his jaw, Thaddeus figured this was new information to Teofil, and it hadn’t been delivered quite as delicately as it could have been.
“Hey,” he said in a low voice, and leaned in to bump his shoulder against Teofil’s. “You okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay,” Teofil replied with a single nod. He flashed a tight smile at Thaddeus before he got to his feet. “Let’s get busy gathering firewood and try to find some leaves for bedding. It will be dark soon.”
Finding his strength, Thaddeus got up. His wounded leg ached as if asking him to sit down again, just for a while. He touched his toes to stretch his back, and when he straightened up, he used a tree for support to carefully stretch his legs. His father had taught him these stretches several moves ago, when they’d taken up jogging together—an activity that hadn’t lasted very long for either of them—and the memory ached inside him like a physical wound.
Astrid came up to Teofil and put an arm around his shoulders. “So, Mom and Dad sold you to a wizard to be his garden gnome, so what? I bet they got a good price for you.”
Teofil laughed and hugged his sister tight. Thaddeus laughed, too, as he stood up straight again. Teofil surprised him by leaning in for a quick kiss before he knelt to start digging a fire pit. Astrid moved off into the trees to pick up sticks, and Thaddeus walked in the same direction but with a bit of distance between them. As he picked up branches and dried leaves for the fire, Thaddeus thought about Fetter’s revelation. He wondered how he would react to finding out his parents had sold him off for a job. Granted, it turned out it had been a very important job—keeping the drachen narcosis alive so his mother in dragon form remained asleep—but when it came down to it, it still amounted to a kind of slavery, and child slavery at that.
And it wasn’t as if secrets hadn’t been kept from Thaddeus as well. Secrets like his wizard heritage and that he and his father had moved so many times because some members of the magic community wanted to kill them. And then there was the fact that his mother was still alive, but as a dragon who had been sleeping beneath the garden next door to their latest house. He was pretty sure there were still some secrets his father hadn’t told him. He just hoped his father lived long enough to share them.
“I guess I upset Teofil.”
Thaddeus started and saw Fetter standing near him, a pile of sticks in his arms.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Thaddeus said and went back to his own gathering. He was uncomfortable talking with one of Teofil’s siblings about family and relationship matters. He was an only child and didn’t know much about the relationship between siblings. He wished Fetter had gone off in a different direction and allowed him some time on his own to think.
“I do that sometimes,” Fetter said. “Well, probably a lot.”
Thaddeus gave up on wishing Fetter would move off into another part of the forest and instead asked, “Do what?”
“Say things I shouldn’t. My family’s told me that a lot since I was very small.” He picked up a few more sticks. “I remember that day, you know.”
“Which day? The day Teofil went to live with Leopold?”
“No.” Fetter looked him in the eye. “The day of the attack on our village. I was only four, but I remember it clearly. Astrid was almost three, and Teofil was a year old.”
“You were all there?” Thaddeus asked, gut clenching at the thought of young children, especially someone he cared about, caught in the middle of a war. “All three of you?”
“We had to run for our lives,” Fetter said. “I picked up Teofil and told Astrid to follow me, and we ran as fast as we could. One of the men caught us, a bad wizard named Azzo Eberhard. Mum and Dad told me about him later—said he had gained a lot of dark magic and was supposedly very close with Isadora.”
“What happened?” He forgot about the sticks in his arms. All he could think about was young Fetter, only four years old, running for his life with his baby brother in his arms and his little sister trying to keep up. They must have been terrified.
“I got away somehow,” Fetter said. “I remember kicking and screaming for help as Azzo dragged me off into the woods. I shouted at Astrid to run, and I dropped Teofil somewhere along the way. After that it’s a blur. The next thing I remember is coming out of the woods with Teofil back in my arms.”
“Oh my God,” Thaddeus said in a quiet voice. “You must have been so scared.”
“Yeah, I was.” Fetter stared off into the distance, his expression blank and unreadable. Then, just as suddenly, he looked right at Thaddeus and gave him a bright smile. “Anyway, that was a long time ago, right?”
“Well, yeah, I guess,” Thaddeus said. Fetter’s sudden shift in mood made him feel a little uncomfortable. He couldn’t blame him for wanting to put the subject behind them, but the abruptness of the change made him uneasy. He didn’t know how to respond to the change in tone, so he resumed gathering sticks until Fetter spoke once again.
“I’ve been thinking of our conversation about your dad.”
“Oh?” Thaddeus didn’t want any more discussion of leaving his father behind. But he didn’t want to be rude to Fetter when they only had each other to depend on, and especially since they were all on this journey because of his family. So, he kept quiet and picked up more sticks and small branches and let Fetter talk.
“Remember that story Astrid and I told you about the Lost Forest and the grave of magical beings and the Well of Tears that contains a powerful magic?”
Thaddeus didn’t look around. “I do.”
Fetter moved closer to Thaddeus and lowered his voice. “What if we tried to get Teofil to ask the wood fairies for the location of the Well of Tears instead of a path through the Lost Forest to the mountains? If we found the Well of Tears, we could get some of the magic water out of it and take it back to your father. I’m sure it’s powerful enough to fight troll poison, so we could use it to heal him.”