Nobody was watching the girl hunched inside the crook of a willow root in the Galefang. No one would judge her tears. Still, the girl tried to hold them all in until her face scrunched tight and her hands balled into fists at her side, but it was no use. She wept bright orbs that anyone could have mistaken for pearls until they shattered against the ground.
Even after struggling through the wild currents of Sundered Blue and beating Lord Ash to this wretched forest, the girl could find no trace of the curse of the Grandfather Dragon! An ancient latticework of spellfire vibrated under the soil of the Galefang. The barrier was too weak to keep her out, but still strong enough to scatter her focus whenever she tried to sense the precise location of the hidden magic within the enormous forest. Her tracking skills had never failed her when she concentrated all her will on finding a lost thing. Until now . . . .
The massive beat of wings startled her. Dragon wings! Bolting up, she thrust her finger into the air and tested the sky. The twisting, tumbling changes in the air currents never lied to her. Her tracking skills had led her to the right place, after all. No doubt this dragon must be the guardian of the curse—she'd have to be careful not to catch its notice. Now she could narrow down her search area. Precious time would be lost gathering and drying herbs to make tracking charms strong enough to lead her to where the curse lay hidden in the dragon's den, but she had no choice.
"Wait for me, Father," the girl whispered aloud in a voice that was so thin and quavering that it startled her. "Please wait, just a little longer."
***
"Told you there was a dragon," Tad said smugly as the Fairchilds cowered under the massive shadow cast by Aerohim's wings.
Kit blinked groggily as the ground rumbled when the dragon landed beside him. A hot breeze singed his cheek as Aerohim snuffled his hair.
"I thought I told you to stay on the road—" Aerohim chided, but his tone hardened suddenly. "Why is your head leaking?"
Kit opened his mouth to reply, but the words garbled together on his tongue as a wave of dizziness washed over him.
Minnow pointed to where the Fairchilds stood in the road like petrified statues. "It's their fault. They called us thieves and stole Kit's oakenstaff!"
"How rude." Fresh smoke spiraled from Aerohim's nostrils as he twisted his neck around to face the Fairchilds. "Very rude."
"The girl's mistaken, your Ra-ra-resplendence!" Mr. Fairchild stuttered.
"Always lying," Mrs. Fairchild added, bowing and scraping low to the ground. "We'd never harm Foxkit, he's like a s-s-son—" But she choked on the brittle end of her lie.
Mr. Fairchild picked up Kit's crutch, dusting the dirt off the arm handle and holding it out with shaking hands. "We just had a little misunderstanding, that's all—"
Aerohim's tail spike swung out and seized the crutch from him. "Silence!" he roared.
Kit flinched as the heat of the dragon's command crackled against his skin; he'd never seen Aerohim truly angry before and wondered if he and the other Silver Pennies were safe so especially . . . close.
"I hereby banish you from the Galefang," Aerohim growled. "Forever." He wove his body around the Fairchilds in a tight-winding circle. "If you loathsome scum dare to trespass my woods again, your blood will boil as poison sap in your veins and the shadow of every leaf will cut into your skin with the sharpness of a thousand knives!"
"Cover your eyes!" Kit cried out to the others as a searing jet of blue flame streamed from Aerohim's jaws. Horrified awe coursed through the boy as the sapphire column of fire enveloped the Fairchilds and evaporated within seconds, leaving only a pile of ash that blew away with a gust of wind. Aerohim truly was a wondrous monster . . . .
"You—you burned them alive!" Charles said in disbelief as he stared at the scorched spot in the road.
"Nonsense," Aerohim said, his wings twitching with offense at the Mazak boy's accusation. "My spellfire transported that repugnant pair many leagues beyond the Galefang safe and sound—well, probably." Cinders sprayed from his nose as he sneezed. "They might lose their hair." The dragon smiled with many hundred teeth. "But my banishment charm will kill them if they ever try to enter the forest again."
"Wow. You can breathe magic flames?" Kit asked as Lil and Vi propped him up into a sitting position in the middle of the road. "I didn't know dragons did that."
Aerohim preened, his scales rippling in the sun. "Dragons don't. I do." Widening his jaws, he blew a gigantic green fireball straight at him.
Kit didn't even have a chance to dodge it. He closed his eyes as the emerald heat wave hit him. But instead of searing pain, a cool breeze curled through his body. The throb of the wound in his head vanished with a bubbling, tickling sensation, along with every other bruise, cut and blister. Did that mean—almost too scared to look, Kit opened his eyes and stared at his right leg, but the bone and sinew were still thin and twisted. His shoulders sagged. It was too much to hope, after all . . . .
"I'm truly sorry, Foxkit," Aerohim whispered. The dragon lowered the crooked oak crutch that had been Kit's companion most of his life in front of his eyes. "My spellfire can only heal wounds that are given after birth, not before."
Kit forced himself to smile even though it felt like his lips were lifting a mountain at each corner. "Don't be sorry. I never thought it would," he lied. He mentally cursed himself for giving into a few stupid seconds of weakness; the tiniest sliver of hope stabbed like a dagger. Grasping the oakenstaff once more, Kit pulled himself upright and was startled when Minnow wrapped her skinny arms around his knees.
"Did it hurt being dead?" she asked, sniffling loudly.
Kit patted her on the head, grateful to have won the loyalty of his fierce, pint-sized protector. "Nope. Not a bit!"
Aerohim stomped a hind leg, creating a minor crater in the road. "You hatchlets are more helpless than newborn dust fluffs! I guess I won't get any peace in the Galefang until I drop you off at the hamlet myself." His eyes narrowed to gleaming slits. "I just hate all the screaming, fainting and selfish cow hording that happens whenever I come within half a league of one of your villages!" He sighed as he swung his tail in a semicircle around the six orphans. "Climb on—I want to get this over with as soon as possible. It's highly demeaning for a dragon of my stature to play ferry to mortals."
The other Silver Penny orphans moved towards Aerohim's tail, but Kit blocked their advance with his outstretched crutch. "No, wait!" he said. "We want . . . I want to stay with you, Aerohim," he admitted for the first time out loud.
A hushed silence fell over their group as Aerohim became very still.
"I don't need any pets," Aerohim said finally, "and you're all much too small to make a good snack. Regretfully, my answer's no—"
"We could bring you snacks," Vi interrupted. The girl's gaze was lost behind long blond bangs that hid the pock marks left from Noxfever, and she was the last person in their group that Kit would expect to plead for his wish—unless it was hers, too.
All of theirs.
"We'll hunt whatever you want!" Lil added as she nodded her head.
"Yeah, and style it fancy, too" Charles said enthusiastically. "How does badger cutlet with stag bone broth and pickled boar's feet sound?"
Tad gagged. "I don't think dragons eat that kind of stuff," he whispered.
Minnow giggled. "Charles does."
"Shuddup!" the Mazak boy growled.
Kit matched Aerohim's unfathomable green gaze with his own stubborn desperation. "If you drop us off at that village, we'll probably just get driven out, or worse, split up and sent to different work farms. Please don't send us back to . . . to the other humans!" he pleaded.
Aerohim blew aquamarine smoke rings from his nose as he gazed down at the orphans. "Hmm, I suppose you're more or less—well, less—the right size for treasure indexers. Perhaps I'll let you stay for awhile if you help me search for something lost among my hoard, an artifact that I misplaced many, many ages ago."
"Absolutely!" Kit said, and then asked quickly, "Treasure what?"
"Treasure indexers." Aerohim snorted six mini fireballs in rapid succession and Kit realized that this was the dragon's version of laughing. "It's just a fancy title for 'assistant,' really," he continued. "They count, catalogue and display treasures in an organized manner. Dragons used to kidnap human princesses to do that sort of work all the time, but the practice fell out of fashion, what with all the pesky knights that came after them."
Lil flipped her braids happily. "Then we're perfect! No knights will come for us; nobody even wants us!"
Organizing piles of rusting and tarnished treasure didn't sound like much fun to Kit, but he would take that task any day over the March Gorge.
"I accept!" Kit said, half-afraid that Aerohim would take his offer back.
"Me too," said Charles, though Kit thought he detected the faintest note of hesitancy in his voice, as if the Mazak boy was afraid of something.
"Me three," Minnow added loudly, refusing to be outdone by anyone.
It took less than a second to get up to the sixth yes. The Silver Penny orphans clambered aboard the dragon's back and settled carefully between his spikes. But as the dragon took to the air with his passengers, confusion filled Kit as Aerohim glided even deeper into the green heart of the Galefang.
"Aren't we going back to your den?" Kit asked.
"You mean that hole in the ground? That wasn't my den, it was a common robber's lair," Aerohim said, his tone mildly insulted. "I just took forty winks there a hundred years ago after chasing a flock of unruly phoenixes out of my territory." Kit ducked as the dragon gave a contemptuous snort and they flew through a puff of live cinders. "They were amusing themselves by lighting the Galefang on fire, so I taught them what real fire tasted like."
Kit couldn't believe how casual the dragon was about a century of nap time. Aerohim must be more ancient than the founding of Havardale Kingdom itself!
"That's my den," Aerohim said, flicking his snout towards a faraway smudge in the distance that was crowned with snow-capped peaks. "It's rather small for my trove, but I manage."
"But that's a mountain!" Charles said.
Kit's jaw dropped. Just how much treasure would they be indexing? The mountain's jagged face towered over them with each passing wing beat, forbidding and cold. But Kit didn't start to panic until Aerohim tucked his wings in at his sides and dropped straight as an arrow towards a shallow ravine strewn with carriage-sized boulders from a massive rockslide. Kit hunkered low against the dragon's back as the wind screamed over his body. They were going to splat against the razor-edged rocks and scatter little orphans pieces everywhere!
But Aerohim's body melted through the mountainside as if it were no thicker than the filmy wall of a bubble. The image of the ravine rippled like a pebble thrown into a pond and was replaced with a triangular cavern entrance easily fifty feet tall. The dragon landed on a slab of rose quartz at the threshold. One by one the orphans slid off of his back, reeling dizzily. Kit hung onto his oakenstaff as the spinning world realigned in his head.
"Not doing that again," Tad said as he pulled his cap so low that it practically swallowed half his face.
"Then I'll take your next turn, fifty times again!" Minnow said, and Kit choked back a laugh as he smoothed her tangled nest of ringlets.
"You could've warned us the r-r-rocks were just an illusion," Lil grumbled, her nut-brown cheeks paling as if all blood had rushed away. "I thought we were gonna die!"
"Well, I knew it wasn't real," Charles said, but he dropped his smug grin as Vi flicked him on the back of the head. "All right, but I suspected it—"
"Oh, but my mirage charm is quite real," Aerohim interrupted. "Unless you're with me, so don't wander out of the cavern or you'll be trapped outside and probably die of frostbite." He puffed out his chest. "Welcome to Mt. Galefang!" he roared.
Nothing happened.
Aerohim coughed a tiny pink smoke ring and Kit wondered if that was a dragon's blush of embarrassment. "Gizzard stones!" he muttered. "It's been awhile since I lit the place up, hasn't it?" He widened his jaws and a column of fire shot straight upwards. The flames danced across the ceiling and lit up a constellation of white crystals embedded in the rock.
Kit gaped as the crystals' glow illuminated the contents of the massive cavern. "Now this is a proper dragon hoard," he whispered.
Dunes of coins shimmered in a golden haze on all sides. Sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds winked in scattered piles across the floor as if they were common pebbles. Strings of pearls hung between stalactites like the webs of tangled chandeliers. Swords, marble statues and other random pieces of artwork and weaponry lay half-buried in the glittering mounds as if giant children had played with them and dropped them there when they grew bored. Or one very disorganized dragon . . . .
A grin split Charles's face as he nudged Kit in the side. "We're going to be treasure indexing forever!" he whispered.
Kit gulped. The Mazak boy was right. There was no way that the six of them could organize all this loot, not even in a hundred years. But he forgot that they weren't just treasure indexing—they were also treasure hunting. Aerohim flattened a mound of gold for the orphans to sit on as he detailed the dimensions of the artifact he'd misplaced among his hoard countless centuries ago:
And failed miserably.
"Well, actually . . ." Aerohim gave an awkward, cinder-stuffed cough as he scratched the side of his neck with a talon. "I don't remember exactly what I lost, only that it's bright—yes, very bright!"
Minnow held up a ruby as big as her fist. "Bright as this?"
Aerohim shook his head violently. "No! So bright that it blinds."
Minnow scowled and threw the disappointing ruby over her shoulder.
"It's also so warm that you can't hold it for very long without burning yourself." Aerohim sighed. "And heavy . . . there's nothing heavier in the entire world."
Kit's puzzlement grew. The task the dragon had given them was clearly impossible. What could weigh more than the world? It was hard enough to be asked to hunt for a needle in a haystack, but at least a needle had a name and clear description! Worse, if they did find the mysterious artifact, the encounter might leave them blind, burned, and quite possibly crushed. And yet . . . he found it difficult to stay depressed for very long when dazzled by the facets of ten thousand times a king's ransom on every side.
"Right," Lil said as she stood up and rubbed her hands together as she eyed a mound of star sapphires. "Let's start treasure indexing!"
*Song Credit: "Blue Sky" by Forest Elves.