The Girl Who Drank the Moon(39)

“Here I am,” he sang loudly, “In the middle of a terrifying wood. Tra-la-la!”

Thump, thump, thump, went his heavy feet. Were his feet always this heavy? They must have been.

“And I am not afraid,” he continued. “Not in the tiniest bit. Tra-la-la!”

It wasn’t true. He was terrified.

“Where am I?” he asked out loud. As if to answer his question, a figure appeared out of the gloom. A monster, Fyrian thought. Not that monsters as such were frightening. Fyrian loved Glerk, and Glerk was a monster. Still, this monster was much taller than Glerk. And in shadow. Fyrian took a step forward. His great paws sank even deeper into the mud. He tried to flap his wings, but they still wouldn’t lift him off the ground. The monster didn’t move. Fyrian stepped nearer. The trees rustled and moaned, their great branches shifting under the weight of the wind. He squinted.

“Why, you are not a monster at all. You are a chimney. A chimney with no house.”

And it was true. A chimney was standing at the side of a clearing. The house, it seemed, had burned away years ago. Fyrian examined the structure. Carved stars decorated the uppermost stones, and soot blackened the hearth. Fyrian peered down into the top of the chimney and faced an angry mother hawk sitting on her frightened nestlings.

“Sorry,” he squeaked, as the hawk nipped his nose, making it bleed. He turned away from the chimney. “What a small hawk,” he mused. Though it occurred to him that he was away from the land of giants, and everything was of regular size here. Indeed, he had only to stand on his hind legs and stretch his neck in order to look into the chimney.

He looked around. He was standing in a ruined village, among the remains of houses and a central tower and a wall that perhaps was a place of worship. He saw pictures of dragons and a volcano and even a little girl with hair like starlight.

“This is Xan,” his mother told him once. “She will take care of you when I’m gone.” He had loved Xan from the first moment. She had freckles on her nose and a chipped tooth and her starlight hair was in long braids with ribbons at the end. But that couldn’t be right. Xan was an old woman, and he was a young dragon, and he couldn’t have possibly known her when she was young, could he have?

Xan had taken him in her arms. Her cheek was smudged with dirt. They had both been sneaking sweets from the castle pantry. “But I don’t know how!” she had said. And then she had cried. She sobbed like a little girl.

But she couldn’t have been a little girl. Could she?

“You will. You’ll learn,” Fyrian’s mother’s gentle, dragony voice said. “I have faith in you.”

Fyrian felt a lump in his throat. Two giant tears welled in his eyes and went tumbling to the ground, boiling two patches of moss clear away. How long had it been? Who could tell? Time was a tricky thing—as slippery as mud.

And Xan had warned him to be mindful of sorrow. “Sorrow is dangerous,” she told him over and over again, though he couldn’t remember if she ever told him why.

The central tower leaned precariously to one side. Several foundation stones on the lee side had crumbled away, allowing Fyrian to crouch low and peer inside. There was something, two somethings, actually—he could see them by the tiny glimmer at the edges. He reached in and pulled them out. Held them in his paws. They were tiny—both fit into the hollow of his palm.

“Boots,” he said. Black boots with silver buckles. They were old—they must be. Yet they shone as though they had just been polished. “They look just like those boots from the old castle,” he said. “Of course, these can’t be the same. They are much too small. The other ones were giant. And they were worn by giants.”

The magicians long ago had been studying boots just like these. They had placed the boots on the table and were examining them with tools and special glasses and powders and cloths and other tools. Every day they experimented and observed and took notes. Seven League Boots, they were called. And neither Fyrian nor Xan was allowed to touch them.

“You’re too little,” the other magicians told Xan when she tried.

Fyrian shook his head. That can’t be right. Xan wasn’t little then, was she? It couldn’t have been that long ago.

Something growled in the wood. Fyrian jumped to his feet. “I’m not afraid,” he sang as his knees knocked together and his breath came in short gasps. Soft, padded footsteps drew nearer. There were tigers in the wood, he knew. Or there had been long ago.

“I am a very fierce dragon!” he called, his voice a tiny squeak. The darkness growled again. “Please don’t hurt me,” the dragonling begged.

And then he remembered. Shortly after his mother disappeared into the volcano, Xan had told him this: “I will take care of you, Fyrian. For always. You’re my family, and I am yours. I am putting a spell on you to keep you safe. You must never wander away, but if you do, and if you get scared, just say ‘Auntie Xan’ three times very quickly, and it will pull you to me as quick as lightning.”

“How?” Fyrian had asked.

“A magic rope.”

“But I don’t see it.”

“Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Some of the most wonderful things in the world are invisible. Trusting in invisible things makes them more powerful and wondrous. You’ll see.”