“Okay,” I said, trying to bury with words the unease that was gnawing at my stomach. This was supposed to be over. We were supposed to be back in the real world. We were supposed to be safe. Both of us. “Well, maybe we just need to say it again. Maybe we didn't say it loudly enough, or clearly enough. 'Cause ... you know ... we were crying and all ... Maybe.”
“It can't hurt to try,” Emily said. But she was just being the comforting big sister. Her face was saying: It can’t help, either.
Still wary—see what being abandoned in a maze, tossed out of a royal ball, and flame-roasted by a dragon will do to a girl?—I waited for Emily to speak first. She did. “End game. Bring me back to Rasmussem,” she said. Again.
And I repeated it. Again. “End game. Bring me back to Rasmussem.”
We waited. Again.
While doing all that waiting, I noticed—I can be such an observant soul!—that Emily had a leopard-print blanket around her. And—oh, yeah!—so did I. They were both a really soft, plush fake fur: hers, regular leopard; mine, pink leopard—which was what led me to suspect the fur was fake, although in this place, maybe not. Maybe the pink leopards periodically shed their fur in order to play with their best friends, the lake dolphins.
Whatever the origins of the blankets, someone must have been worried about us getting cold. I looked beyond Emily, through the open French doors that led inside, into the tower part of the castle. I could see a huge, elegant Renaissance-style bedroom, round because of the curved walls of the tower, all crystal and gilded surfaces. A couple of her guys—her strong, good-looking, silent servant guys—were hovering inside, right by the door, where they could see us. One was arranging and rearranging and re-rearranging flowers in a vase. The other had a feather duster, and he was going over the table that held the vase as though the wood were really thousand-year-old paper and the slightest pressure would cause it to collapse. Both of them being totally obvious about keeping an eye on us.
“Completely harmless,” Emily assured me.
But they were, apparently, able to act on their own, to note that the temperature had gone down with the setting of the sun, and to fetch coverings for us.
Which was kind.
But couldn't they have, just as easily, chosen not to be kind?
We were stuck here with game characters who had free will. Uneasily, I let the blanket they had given me slip off my shoulders. Still, being my mother's daughter, I couldn't just leave it there in a heap on the parapet, and so I folded it. Only then— finally—did I notice something else.
There was no sack, no gold-coin-and-sprite-and-wishing-fountain sack, anywhere on the balcony.
I took Emily's blanket from her and held it up. Shook it, even, in case the sack had gotten caught in its folds while the blanket had been dragging along the floor.
“What?” Emily asked.
I tried to think back to yesterday, to approaching the castle, to seeing Emily ... I forced myself to stay with the memories, right through killing her, then to landing on the super-heated stones of the parapet.
I had been holding the sack in my dragon talons; I knew I had.
“What?” Emily repeated.
“I had a sack of gold,” I told her.
“Not chief among our worries.” She began pacing, knowing as well as I did that Rasmussem was not going to be pulling us back.
I persisted. “But there were sprites in it. And their magic fountain.”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Interesting. But important because...?”
“We could wish to go back,” I said.
She gave me much the same look as when I'd suggested we should simply try repeating our desire to go home.
“And,” I said, “and it's one more thing gone wrong that shouldn't have.”
That, I could see, struck her as a much more meaningful argument. The accumulation of things gone wrong was getting oppressive.
Emily bent over and walked back and forth, scrutinizing the stone floor. Suddenly, she crouched down and ran her fingers over the surface. “Look,” she told me.
I got down next to her and saw—in the residue of soot my dragon flame had left—a smudge. “What is it?”
“What's it look like?”
I hate it when people go into teacher mode like that. “If I knew, I wouldn't have asked.”
“Well, this part over here looks to me,” Emily said, “like teeny tiny footprints. And here, where the footprints are obliterated, I think something was dragged.”
I finished for her: “Something like a sprite-powered sack full of gold?”
The smudges continued across the stone balcony floor until they passed through the French doors and into the bedroom. There, the floor was white and gold tiles. And clean. Impeccably clean. I put my hands on my hips and glared at the servant with the feather duster, who pretended not to notice me as he ran his duster over the other servant's shoulders.
“You really think this is important?” Emily asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “For some reason, the sprites have taken an intense dislike to the two of us.”
“No,” Emily said. “They love me.”
“Not as much as you might think,” I told her. “I need to find them, and, thanks to your very efficient servants, the trail ends here.”
“It only ends to human eyes,” she told me, “and noses.” In the moment I took to try to figure that out, Emily transformed into a bloodhound.
Oh, I realized, she must have wished for the ability to transform into WHATEVER at will. I had specifically asked for dragon shaping. I didn't need to experiment: I knew the sprites hadn't extended my wish to fit with my sister's.
Bloodhound Emily put her nose to the floor and started sniffing.
I followed, wishing I'd asked the sprites for a comfortable pair of sneakers while I'd had the chance. Or that I'd asked Emily to wait a sec so I could rummage through her closet for a pair of her shoes, because I'd been off balance since losing that one right before I went over the cliff. But now there was no time—for regrets or for rummaging. I had to move fast or risk losing her as she tracked the sprites through that tower bedroom, down a long spiral flight of stairs that brought us out of the tower and into the castle proper, through a big ballroom, down a flight of regular stairs, down a hallway, through an entry hall, outdoors, down four marble steps, through a courtyard, beyond the castle wall, and down a path that led through an Alpine meadow. Since the path was dirt, I could pick up the trail here myself. Yeah, and the telltale little cloud of dust moving down the path away from us was another strong clue.
Emily sat on her haunches and bayed, which I guess showed that just as I'd gotten dragon instincts when I turned into a dragon, bloodhound instincts automatically came with her new shape. But now that our quarry was in sight, she switched out of her doggy form back to being Emily.
We ran up to the dust cloud, which was being thrown up into the air by the scurrying of two pairs of sprite feet moving at top sprite speed. Strictly speaking, Pink and Purple were still inside the bag. They had their scrawny arms up over their heads, holding on to the open neck of the sack as though it were a huge hoodie for two, while the body of the sack dragged and bounced and jingled and gurgled behind them.
I worked it out from a legalistic point of view, since Pink and Purple gave every appearance of being tiny lawyers-in-training. Okay, I had wished for—and paid for—the two of them to go into the sack, along with the gold and the wishing fountain. So they couldn't just get up and magically spirit (or would that be sprite?) themselves out of there. Even flying home—and that was assuming their tiny wings would be able to hold out that distance—put them on shaky ground, legally speaking. But, treacherous little fiends that they were, they apparently didn't think it against the rules of our agreement to walk home so long as they were still at least 50 percent inside the sack.
I stepped around them and stood in their way. “Excuse me,” I said.
Pink gave a groan of disgust. “Told y
ou to walk faster,” she snapped at Purple.
Emily crouched down in front of them. “Hello, little sprites,” she said as though addressing adorable miniature two-year-olds.
Pink kicked Emily on the ankle. “Hate you,” she said. “Hate you, hate you, hate you.”
Purple almost knocked Pink down in her attempt to also get a kick in, all the while still holding on to the sack. “Hate you, too,” she spat at Emily.
“Yeah, right,” I said to Emily, “I'm really feeling the love here.”
“I don't understand this,” Emily said, half to me, half to them.
Pink pretended Emily had a language problem and made like a thesaurus: “Hate: despise, detest, hold in contempt, have an abhorrence for, loathe, feel revulsion toward, suffer an aversion to, dislike”—and here she overenunciated every syllable while at the same time relishing every instant of hate-spew—“ex-treme-ly.”
“But why?” Emily asked. “What have I done?”
Purple screamed and pulled her own hair in frustration. Which, of course, meant she let go of her section of the sack edge, so the fabric all but engulfed the two little malignancies.
Emily plucked the trailing sack up to be able to see and hear them better.
“Keep changing the rules!” Pink shouted at her. “Cheater! Make more butterflies, make more flowers, make more cash prizes at the arcade!”
“There's an arcade?” I asked.
“Too many coins!” Purple screamed.
“Too many wishes!” Pink yelled.
In unison the two of them shrieked: “Too easy! Dirty, dirty cheater!”
“No, really,” I said, “don't hold back. Tell us how you feel.”
“Oh,” Emily said.
The crack in her voice made me turn away from the sprites to my sister. She looked ready to cry.
Over the sprites?
But then it came to me: over the betrayal. First her friends turned on her, then this world she had tried to form into a safe refuge did the same.
And here I was, taking sarcastic potshots at her and the sprites indiscriminately.
Before I could apologize to her, she apologized to the sprites. “I'm sorry,” Emily said.
“Not,” Pink grumbled.
“Not sorry,” Purple agreed.
“But I am,” Emily insisted.
I could see where she was going. The servants could take action on their own, so what would happen if the sprites could, too? If the sprites of this world could take offense at us, they might well be behind what was going wrong here, why we couldn't go back. So, for good measure, I indicated that I was contrite also. “Me too.”
The sprites ignored me. Still speaking to Emily, Pink said in a pouty voice, “If you're sorry”—and here she shook the sack she was still holding up over her head—“if you're truly sorry, reverse this stupid spell your stupid cheater sister put on us.”
“Hey,” I protested. Okay, I could understand they were peeved with us, but stupid? Stupid cheater? Me?
Purple shook her head as though to show she'd known we couldn't be trusted. “Not sorry,” she said to her sister sprite in an I-told-you-so tone. “Not really.”
“Of course I am,” Emily protested. And to prove her good intentions, she said, “I wish for you to be released from the spell Grace put on you.”
As soon as she said it, I caught on. Two seconds too late. “No!” I shouted.
It was the one wish they granted for free. Tossing the sack up in the air away from them, the two sprites sneered at us. “Goodbye, losers!” they cackled. Sprites, gold, wishing fountain, and sack disappeared.
“Oops,” Emily said.
Chapter 15
Dragon Flight
WELL, that's a kick in the pants,” I said, looking at the place where the sprites no longer were, as though if I spoke in an it's-no-big-deal tone, then this latest setback would turn out to be no more than a minor inconvenience. “Can you call them back?”
“How?” Emily snapped, sounding testy, sounding as though I were responsible for the sprites' bad disposition. “You mean, like, 'Yoohoo! Sprites! Please come back! Oh! And if you can't do that, then could you kindly send us home to Rasmussem!' Something like that?”
So much for elevating the morale here. “Hey!” I said, putting my hands on my hips.
“What?” She got right up into my face.
“This is not my fault.”
“No, it isn't,” she snarled. “You're absolutely right: it's all my fault. Every stinking bit of it.”
“That isn't what I meant.”
“But it's what you're thinking,” Emily said. She looked around, and I could tell she was searching for something to throw, or to break—some destructive action she could perform to express her extreme frustration. But there was nothing handy, and all she could do was kick at the recently sprite-vacated spot. “Every single damn thing I do turns out wrong. It was fine for me to just lose myself in the game and never come back, but now you're stuck here, too.”
Her regret cooled down my anger. “I'm not blaming you,” I said. “I was just asking if you had some sort of sprite summoning spell.”
“No.” She practically spat out the word, her temper still at full blaze. “No, I was not clever enough to think of that. Just like I was not clever enough to come up with some better solution to my real-life problems than to do something that would hurt Mom and Dad and now endanger you. I am leaving behind a legacy of destruction that will have everyone hating me when I'm gone.”
The reminder that we were both in very real physical danger was not doing anything to clarify my thinking. Still, sniping at each other would accomplish nothing.
“All right,” I said, “so what do you want to do? Fight with me? Break things? Give up? And just sit here waiting to die, grumbling about how unfair it is?”
“No,” she admitted sulkily.
“Okay,” I said, “if we can't force the sprites to come back here, then we'll have to go to them wherever they are. Which I assume would be back in the center of the maze?”
Emily shrugged.
“Is that where you first found them?”
She gave a nod that was hardly more enthusiastic than the shrug.
Since she wasn't being much help at all, I finished, “And I'm assuming there's no instant teleportation spell or device...”
She shook her head.
“...so the fastest way to get there would be the way I came: flying in our dragon forms?”
Emily summoned the energy to mutter, “I guess.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what are we waiting for?”
Emily raised her arms, and in the blink of an eye she was a bronze dragon. She was huge, her head far longer than I was tall. And she was beautiful. As well as terrible. Her wings flapped once, twice, slow, majestic moves that displaced enough air that the resulting wind almost knocked me over. But then she was rising: over my head, then tree-level, then bird-level. She circled, waiting for me.
“I wish to be a dragon,” I said, though I hadn't needed to say it out loud the first time, nor had Emily spoken any words.
I held my arms out.
I flapped them.
I bunny-hopped to break contact between my feet and the ground.
How had I done it last time?
I had simply wished it, and it happened.
So what was wrong this time?
Knowing the sprites' tendency toward treachery, I had been very careful with what I'd asked for, not wanting my metamorphosis into a dragon to be a one-shot deal, just in case, nor wanting it to be irreversible—also just in case. I had worked out the wording in my head beforehand, so
I remembered exactly what I had wished for and paid for: I had asked for the power to turn into a dragon at will.
Okay, I thought, I'm willing it now.
Emily glided back down to earth and hovered before me in all her dragon splendor. “What's the delay?” she asked, her voice her own, despite her dragon body.
“You reversed my spell,” I said. “Apparently, those demon-spawned sprites took that to mean all my spells.”
Emily sighed, the warm air of her breath like a megahair dryer on my entire body. She settled to the ground. “I'll carry you,” she said, reaching a dragon claw toward me.
“No way!” I scrambled backward, remembering how hard I'd had to clutch the sack to maintain a firm hold. “Lose your concentration while you're flying, and if you didn't puncture me with your talons or squeeze the life out of me with your grip, you'd drop me.”
Emily studied her claw. “Dragons should come with opposable thumbs,” she mused.
“Yeah,” I said, “take it up with Rasmussem's design department. How about if I climb onto your back and ride you?”
Uh-huh. Easier said than done. Even when she lay flat on the ground, I would have had to climb like three times my height. And her scales were hard and slippery. She picked me up—very careful not to puncture, squeeze, or drop—but her arms weren't long enough to go around to her back: another definite design flaw.
“All right,” Emily said. “We'll return to my castle. I'll wait under one of the tower windows, and you can go up there and jump out on my back.”
“Jump out a window onto your back?” I repeated.
“Yes,” she said.
“And count on not killing myself in the process?” “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I explained, “what if I miss?”
Emily snorted, singeing my eyebrows. “I'm a pretty large target to miss.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but I could slide right off you and hit the ground, and there wouldn't be any way for you to catch me.” I tucked my elbows in close to my body and waggled my shortened arms helplessly, dragonlike.
“Well, if you die...” she started. But she didn't finish. The truth was, we didn't know what would happen if I died in the game world. The previous times, I had returned to Rasmussem, but things had changed. And we didn't know how much. We couldn't count on anything happening now the way we thought it should. I remembered the pain I had inflicted on myself with that rock that had bounced off the ballroom window. What if, now, I couldn't die in the game, but could still feel the pain of injuries, even deadly injuries?