The Girl Who Drank the Moon(4)

She attempted to scowl again.

“I MEAN IT,” she hollered.

The thick water bubbled and swirled, and the large head of the swamp monster slurped out of the bluish-green. He blinked one wide eye, and then the other, before rolling both toward the sky.

“Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young man,” the old woman huffed.

“Witch,” the monster murmured, his mouth still half-submerged in the thick waters of the swamp. “I am many centuries older than you.” His wide lips blew a bubble in the algae slick. Millennia, really, he thought. But who’s counting?

“I don’t believe I like your tone.” Xan puckered her wrinkled lips into a tight rosette in the middle of her face.

The monster cleared his throat. “As the Poet famously said, dear lady: ‘I don’t give a rat’s—’ ”

“GLERK!” the Witch shouted, aghast. “Language!”

“Apologies,” Glerk said mildly, though he really didn’t mean it. He eased both sets of arms onto the muck at the shore, pressing each seven-fingered hand into the shine of the mud. With a grunt, he heaved himself onto the grass. This used to be easier, he thought. Though, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember when.

“Fyrian is over there by the vents, crying his eyes out, poor thing,” Xan fumed. Glerk sighed deeply. Xan thrust her staff onto the ground, sending a spray of sparks from the tip, surprising them both. She glared at the swamp monster. “And you are just being mean.” She shook her head. “He’s only a baby, after all.”

“My dear Xan,” Glerk said, feeling a rumble deep in his chest, which he hoped sounded imposing and dramatic, and not like someone who was simply coming down with a cold. “He is also older than you are. And it is high time—”

“Oh, you know what I mean. And anyway, I promised his mother.”

“For five hundred years, give or take a decade or two, that dragonling has persisted in these delusions—fed and perpetuated by you, my dear. How is this helping him? He is not a Simply Enormous Dragon. At this point, there is no indication that he ever will be. There is no shame at all in being a Perfectly Tiny Dragon. Size isn’t everything, you know. His is an ancient and honorable species, filled with some of the greatest thinkers of the Seven Ages. He has much to be proud of.”

“His mother was very clear—” Xan began, but the monster interrupted her.

“In any case, the time is long past that he know his heritage and his place in the world. I’ve gone along with this fiction for far longer than I should have. But now . . .” Glerk pressed his four arms to the ground and eased his massive bottom under the curve of his spine, letting his heavy tail curl around the whole of him like a great, glistening snail’s shell. He let the paunch of his belly sag over his folded legs. “I don’t know, my dear. Something has shifted.” A cloud passed over his damp face, but Xan shook her head.

“Here we go again,” she scoffed.

“As the Poet says, ‘Oh ever changéd Earth—’ ”

“Hang the Poet. Go apologize. Do it right now. He looks up to you.” Xan glanced at the sky. “I must fly, my dear. I’m already late. Please. I am counting on you.”

Glerk lumbered toward the Witch, who laid her hand on his great cheek. Though he was able to walk upright, he often preferred to move on all sixes—or all sevens, with the use of his tail as an occasional limb, or all fives, if he happened to be using one of his hands to pluck a particularly fragrant flower and bring it to his nose, or to collect rocks, or to play a haunting tune on a hand-carved flute. He pressed his massive forehead to Xan’s tiny brow.

“Please be careful,” he said, his voice thick. “I have been beset of late by troubling dreams. I worry about you when you are gone.” Xan raised her eyebrows, and Glerk leaned his face away with a low grumble. “Fine,” he said. “I will perpetuate the fiction for our friend Fyrian. ‘The path to Truth is in the dreaming heart,’ the Poet tells us.”

“That’s the spirit!” Xan said. She clucked her tongue and blew the monster a kiss. And she vaulted up and forward on her staff’s fulcrum, sprinting away into the green.

Despite the odd beliefs of the people of the Protectorate, the forest was not cursed at all, nor was it magical in any way. But it was dangerous. The volcano beneath the forest—low-sloped and impossibly wide—was a tricky thing. It grumbled as it slept, while heating geysers till they burst and restlessly worrying at fissures until they grew so deep that no one could find the bottom. It boiled streams and cooked mud and sent waterfalls disappearing into deep pits, only to reappear miles away. There were vents that spewed foul odors and vents that spewed ash and vents that seemed to spew nothing at all—until a person’s lips and fingernails turned blue from bad air, and the whole world started to spin.

The only truly safe passage across the forest for an ordinary person was the Road, which was situated on a naturally raised seam of rock that had smoothed over time. The Road didn’t alter or shift; it never grumbled. Unfortunately, it was owned and operated by a gang of thugs and bullies from the Protectorate. Xan never took the Road. She couldn’t abide thugs. Or bullies. And anyway, they charged too much. Or they did, last time she checked. It had been years since she had gone near it—many centuries now. She made her own way instead, using a combination of magic and know-how and common sense.