"The Bluebird of Unhappiness," I suggested. "The Bluebird of Downright Dysfunction."
"Oh, I am so amused," Larry said. To Tiffanie he said, "How about an eagle?"
"You're too small to be an eagle," Tiffanie said. "The spell would have to extend way beyond your actual parameters." She moved her hands from roughly five inches apart—approximately Larry-sized—to two or three feet apart, to demonstrate an eagle's wingspan.
"Not a powerful enough witch to do it?" Larry taunted.
"I am tempted to leave you this way forever," Tiffanie threatened, but she flicked her fingers at him, and the toad shifted to a little bird that looked sort of like a small gray cardinal.
"What am I?" Larry asked, twisting in midair, trying to catch a look at his backside.
"Tufted titmouse," Tiffanie said, "for the pure joy of the silliness of the name." Then she was all business: "Come on, let's go. We've wasted a lot of time, and Julian is in danger."
We started walking, two pretty elven shepherdesses, one drop-dead-gorgeous elven shepherdess, and a sheep with a tendency to sniff at the edge of the path and to chase after butterflies. Followed by a tufted titmouse that grumbled and criticized all the way.
"So," I said, trying to be sensible and logical, thinking ahead, planning ... like my grandmother. "Dragons' Cove..."
Eleni waited expectantly, while Tiffanie wore a pained expression that indicated she just knew I was about to say something worthless.
"Dragons' Cove," Larry repeated in a slow, dim tone, as though I'd just caught up to the conversation of fifteen minutes ago.
"So...," I said again. "Sand..."
Eleni nodded encouragingly.
"And dragon eggshells..." Hopefully, I finished, "But of course ... no dragons?"
"Nooo," Larry said, "baby dragons grow on baby dragon bushes and are plucked by storks, then delivered to happy dragon mommies and daddies. No dragons involved. Nuh-uh. Rated PG. Definitely."
"Laying and hatching season is in early spring," Tiffanie assured me.
Just to be sure, I pressed on. "And dragons don't go to Dragons' Cove except then?"
"Sometimes," Larry said.
"Almost never," Tiffanie corrected him.
Almost. Great.
"Not to worry," Tiffanie assured us.
"Except—," Larry started.
Tiffanie had finally had enough of him. "Would you just stop instigating and shut up?"
Larry gave an aggrieved snort, flapping his little titmouse wing to his little titmouse breast.
"Zip it," Tiffanie ordered.
In the suddenly Larry-free silence, Eleni finally asked in her quiet voice, "Except...?"
Tiffanie sighed.
Eleni pretended she didn't notice. "Glass is made with sand and extreme heat."
Tiffanie sighed even louder. "Can't humans make glass without dragon-breath flame?"
"Well, sure," I started, "but—"
"That was a rhetorical question, honey," Tiffanie said. "There won't be any dragons, so let's just concentrate on getting there fast while Julian is still in one piece."
I could tell Eleni wasn't satisfied with Tiffanie's high-handed manner of rushing us, but she didn't say anything. She stopped, though, took off her shoe, and shook it as if to get out a stone.
I hung back, as did Larry, who obviously liked Eleni best of all of us. Tiffanie didn't wait, apparently figuring we could catch up, and Brave Heart stayed by her.
In a low voice, Eleni asked Larry, "Did you see any dragons while you were hanging around the cave watching Vediss make the lenses?"
Larry made a bunch of inarticulate noises, and motioned with the tip of his wing toward his beak. Zip it, Tiffanie had told him.
A fine time for him to choose to listen to any of us.
WE PASSED a pond and saw some elves at the far end, sitting on a raft with their feet cooling in the water, lazily drifting. They waved, and we waved back, but they were too far away to talk or to talk to, and fortunately they weren't interested enough in us to paddle their raft closer.
There were getting to be fewer and scrubbier trees, and in very short order the ground got rocky, then sandy, then I became aware of a noise that I recognized—though I'd never heard it before—as the roar of the sea.
We had reached Dragons' Cove.
Tiffanie threw herself down onto the ground behind a sand dune. "All right," she said once we'd all hunkered down and joined her, "we need to cause distractions to try to separate them. Now, there's at least five of them, and they have no reason to be wary of us at first, so maybe I can entice one to follow me, and we can get him out of the way."
I loved the way she glossed over that.
"Then I can make Brave Heart look like a wolf"—he pricked up his little sheep ears at that—"which might get one or two more of them to pursue him. That would leave two, and I could use what you called my 'stop-action' spell on one, and surely all of us together could overpower the last."
"I think you're making this sound too easy," I said.
Eleni said, "How about a reconnaissance mission?"
"Huh?" Tiffanie and I both asked.
"Larry, would you be willing to go into the cave ahead of us and let us know exactly what the setup is so there won't be any surprises?"
I expected Larry to make his can't-open-my-beak mumbling, but he didn't have the attention span to keep up any one single annoying action for very long. "Do I get a new disguise?" he asked.
From between clenched teeth, Tiffanie said, "Even if I could make you look like an eagle, an eagle could hardly slip unnoticed into the cave."
Larry pouted.
Eleni said, "How about a wren?"
"Boring," Larry told her.
"A wren is beautiful in an understated way," Eleni corrected him. "As well as being brave, and diligent, and noble."
I have no idea if she was making this up, but Larry bought it. "Okay," he said.
Before he could change his mind, Tiffanie turned him into a wren, which looked pretty drab to me, and he flew toward the shore.
We peeked our heads up over the sand dune and watched him fly into a hole in the bottom of a cliff that was near the water's edge.
We waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until I was sure he'd been spotted and captured.
Then he came out again and flew back to where we were, which was more of a relief to me than it should have been.
He settled on top of Brave Heart's head. Brave Heart snapped, but couldn't get at him.
"Well," Larry said, "the bad news is that Vediss is with them, so that's one more than you counted on."
Now it was Tiffanie's turn to pout.
"What's the good news?" Eleni asked.
"There is no good news," Larry told her. "There's bad and there's worse." Despite his words, he was obviously pleased with himself. He gave a little victory dance in the air, waggling his tail, and trilled in a gloating singsong: "There's a dragon! There's a dragon! Shouldn't have told me to shut up! There's a dragon!"
22. Any Plan Is Better Than None—Isn't It?
"Well," Tiffanie said. "So there's a dragon. That really doesn't change anything."
"Ohh," I assured her, "I'm guessing it probably does—at least a little."
"No," Tiffanie argued, "we still have to rescue Julian." She looked ready to rush in alone if necessary.
I'm assuming I looked ready to let her, but I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah, he was the good guy, and the bad guys had it in for humans—I got all that—but that seemed a much less tangible danger than coming face-to-face with a dragon.
"Just," Eleni said calmly, "hold on. We all want to help Julian, but we won't be helping him if we fail because we didn't take a few moments to think this out."
Eleni's ability to think things out, to put things into perspective, could be simultaneously inspiring and annoying.
Tiffanie folded her arms over her chest, drumming her fingers, just barely containing—f
or the moment—the urge to be moving.
"All right," Eleni said, "Larry. What, exactly, did you see?"
"Dragon," Larry said. "Dragon, dragon, dragon. Big dragon." He nodded for emphasis, because his wings were so small that even extending them fully fell short of the impression he wanted to give. "Fire-breathing dragon." He made a noise which I presumed was supposed to be the sound of flame coming out from between dragon jaws, but as it came out of a wren's beak, that was only an educated guess.
"Just one dragon?" Eleni asked.
Just? I thought.
But I could see why she was asking. Even though he was using the singular dragon, he kept saying the word so often, it sounded like he was talking about a whole herd. Pack. Swarm. Flock. Whatever you call dragons when there's a whole mess of them.
"Just one." Larry made the combustible-breath sound again as though we needed a reminder. "He saw me," Larry said. "He tried to make wren fricassee out of me." Yet again he did his fire-breathing dragon impersonation. Still, his attitude seemed not so much frightened as exhilarated. I started suspecting he just liked making that sound of whooshing flame. He said, "I risked my life for you."
"Thank you," Eleni said, managing to avoid veering from briskness into sarcasm. She glanced over the crest of the sand dune and observed, "Luckily, he didn't follow you."
"No," Larry admitted, with perhaps a bit of the self-importance knocked out of him.
I wasn't as generous a person as my grandmother. I pointed out, "Couldn't have been too hungry."
Larry stamped his little bird foot on Brave Heart's woolly head.
Brave Heart growled.
"Spill it, Larry," Tiffanie ordered.
Larry fidgeted with his feet, like a toddler being forced to confess to some wrongdoing. He finally mumbled, "He was chained."
"Chained?" I repeated skeptically. "What kind of chain can hold a big, fire-breathing dragon?"
"Iron," Tiffanie said. "Iron binds those of us from Kazaran Dahaani."
"Ah," I said. "Why?"
"Just does."
Eleni had a better question. She asked, "So this dragon is being held prisoner?"
In his most insincere voice, Larry mumbled, "I was about to tell you."
Rather than argue, Eleni asked, "Are dragons intelligent?"
"Compared to what?" Tiffanie countered. She was looking straight at Larry. She added, "I don't know what the average IQ is for dragons. We don't go in for standardized testing much here in Kazaran Dahaani."
I admired how Eleni could keep calm despite Tiffanie's goading. She said, "I don't need to know if this dragon could be accepted at an Ivy League college. I need to know if it would realize that it was being rescued and cooperate in that rescue."
Trying not to sound contradictory-of-everything the way Tiffanie did, I still had to point out, "Like we don't have enough to worry about with rescuing Julian? Now you're developing a soft spot in your heart for captive dragons?"
Eleni sighed. "I'm not talking about an additional task. If we help the dragon, maybe the dragon will help us. If the dragon is intelligent enough not to make fricassee out of all of us."
Tiffanie was nodding, but then again, she would have agreed to anything to keep us moving. I asked, "So, like, how intelligent is 'intelligent'?"
"They can talk," Tiffanie said, then added with a malicious grin aimed directly at me, "though that's certainly not a sure indicator of intelligence." Before I could demonstrate my intelligence with a quick comeback, she added, "They can reason, remember, plan, plot, hold grudges. We can assume this dragon will be at least as intelligent as the majority of the people we go to school with."
I wasn't intelligent enough to be able to determine if she was praising dragons or slamming the student body at James Fenimore Cooper.
Larry said, "If you're looking for a volunteer to go in there and sweet-talk that dragon, I volunteer Tiffanie."
Tiffanie rebutted with, "Yeah, well, I volunteer you."
Eleni, the peacekeeper, told Larry, "Your size does make you the one most likely to pass undetected."
"No," I said.
Everyone turned to look at me.
"Come on," I explained, "could we really be sure the little blue perpetual-chaos machine wouldn't screw up?"
While Larry looked resentful, and Tiffanie looked thoughtful, and Brave Heart scratched an itch, Eleni clarified "screw up" for herself by asking, "You mean do something bad?"
"Yeah," I said. "Or stupid. Or he might kind of lose track of what he's supposed to be doing and wander off to do something else entirely."
Larry made a motion with his wing at his beak, which was probably the wren equivalent of thumbing his nose at me. "All right," he said, "if you think you can do so much better, then go ahead."
Surely it hadn't sounded as though I'd volunteered, had it?
"I never said that," I protested.
Eleni sided with me. "It's too dangerous for Jeannette," she said. "I'll go."
Which wasn't what I'd been hoping for, either. "How is it less dangerous for you than for me?"
For once Eleni didn't have a good answer. "Well," she said, stalling for time, then settled for "I'm older than you..."
Maybe by one year. I countered with, "Are you saying you're smarter and better able to handle the situation?"
"No," she said, then realized she'd cut away her best argument, and shifted to "Yes," then realized she'd just called me incompetent, so tried "I just don't want anything to happen to you."
"Absolutely nothing will happen to me if you get killed," I said. "In fact, I won't even get born." Afraid that if I said it, it would sound too sentimental, I muttered, "And I don't want anything to happen to you, either."
I was arguing to go into a cave with five nasty warrior elves and one-of-them's nasty father in order to ask for help from a fire-breathing dragon who might be intelligent but whose temper had to be short from having been kept a prisoner for who-knew-how-long? Maybe Tiffanie was right to disparage the intelligence of me and my friends at school.
But that was how we came up with our plan.
JULIAN, according to Larry, was being held in a cage in the back part of the cave, next to where the dragon was anchored by heavy chains fastened to a collar of iron around its neck. Vediss and his son, Berrech, were huddled over a workbench to the right of the cave entrance—we presumed trying to fashion a replacement pair of glasses that would allow Berrech to return to Earth to track down those from Kazaran Dahaani who were disguised as humans. At another table to the left, Berrech's four hench-elves were setting out food since it was—Larry pointed out in a piteous tone as though he hadn't been the only one among us to have eaten—dinnertime. I guess socks must be like Chinese takeout: twenty minutes later, you're hungry again.
"Are elves magical?" Eleni asked, which I thought was a reasonable question considering we were about to take them on, though not one I would have thought of. We should know if they were going to be able to throw magical spells at us, and couldn't assume Tiffanie would have told us.
But Tiffanie rolled her eyes. "Elves have magical artifacts, but they possess no magic themselves. That's why I had to cast a glamour over Julian when he went to school on Earth. Are we ready, or are we going to talk this to death?"
Bad choice of wording, as far as I was concerned.
We were as ready as we were likely to get.
The first part of the plan was for Tiffanie to go down to the shore the long way round, so as not to be seen if any of the elves glanced out the cave entrance.
We watched her go into the water, for which I had to give her credit, 'cause I'm assuming it had to be cold. In Tiffanie's case, besides being about a hundred years old, she didn't have an ounce of insulating fat on her. I've noticed that the skinnier a girl is, the more likely she is to complain that any body of water is too cold.
Regardless, Tiffanie waded right into that water, then transformed herself into what looked like a mermaid. The kind of mermaid without a litt
le shell brassiere.
She started singing.
Larry clapped his wren wings over his ears and proclaimed her siren song was so absolutely wrong it hurt, but I thought her voice was the most beautiful I'd ever heard. Her voice, or the words, or her voice and the words and the melody together were soothing and enticing and full of the promise of something just beyond articulating but highly desirable. I don't know how else to describe it except it was like knowing there's a piece of your favorite kind of chocolate sitting on the kitchen counter, and you're trying to keep to a diet so you haven't eaten anything except the good-for-you stuff in two weeks, and you know you're supposed to be in the other room, working on your five-page homework assignment, due tomorrow, comparing Silas Marner and The Waste Land, and you haven't read either because one is so boring and the other totally incomprehensible, so you're trying to skim through the Cliff's Notes, which themselves are boring and incomprehensible, and trying to come up with something to bluff your way through another four and three-quarters pages now that you've written your name, homeroom number, and, "In this paper, I will compare the novel Silas Marner by George Eliot and the poem The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot," and the piece of chocolate is calling you—by name—saying, "Come and eat me before somebody else does"—that's what Tiffanie's song was like.
The song somehow made me feel ... oh, I don't know ... like a worthwhile person: brave and self-sufficient and naturally gracious—all the things I wanted to be and admired in others but had always suspected I could only pretend to be. The kind of person whose father would not ditch her and move to Hong Kong, no matter how he felt about her mother. All I needed to do was listen to that song, and I would be that complete person....
I came to my senses when I fell.
My hands smacked into the hard-packed sand, and that was the first I was aware I'd stood up from our hiding place behind the dune and had begun walking toward the shore. What had happened was that Brave Heart had grabbed the cuff of my jeans in his teeth and set his woolly butt down in the sand to hold me there.
Larry was flapping his wings in Eleni's face, which didn't seem to be doing much good about getting her attention as she started walking, wearing a dazed but happy expression on her face.