“You can do that?” Simon had asked.
“Don’t be too optimistic, OK? It’s magic, but it’s not magic. The memories will be gone, but the suspicion will remain,” Alaythia said as they were leaving. “You may get people giving you funny looks or asking questions for a long time.”
“It’s not as if they think we’re an average, ordinary family as it is,” Simon muttered.
A few minutes later, they were standing in the cinders before the novelty shop. Simon had seen the horror of fire before, but never in his home town. He hadn’t realised until now the dragons could reach so deeply into his life.
Emily’s father was standing nearby, talking with a worried neighbour. Then her mother’s car pulled up and Emily got out and wandered over to Simon, looking a bit dazed. “My father told me what happened,” she said. “What’s going on?”
Simon looked at her and tried to find the right words. He said he saw someone throw a match and run. He and Aldric gave everyone the same story: they didn’t get a good look at the guy, whoever he was; he was small, maybe even a kid, someone who had done this randomly. But there were no real suspects as far as the police were concerned.
Alaythia, however, had found evidence of the real arsonist.
As Simon was being questioned, he saw Alaythia tap Aldric on the shoulder and they moved away from the policemen. Simon saw her showing Aldric a small bone shard she had taken from the ashes of the shop.
It was all that remained of the beast.
“This will not be pleasant,” Aldric told her, and he placed the skull shard back in her hands and closed her fingers over it. Simon noticed how much older his father’s hands looked against the smooth ivory of Alaythia’s. The skull bones of the dragon were the most useful of any fragment, but his father’s seriousness made Simon feel less than fortunate. In the ruins of the castle tower, candlelight flickered around them and the moon pierced the uncovered window.
Aldric had decided to return to the castle because it was dangerous to try this experiment anywhere else and, after all, there was nothing much left to ruin.
Alaythia’s face took on a deathly colour almost immediately and she closed her eyes.
“You will be able to see into the creature’s mind,” Aldric told her. “Its most angry, sad or deeply-held memories. You will not like what you see. You may witness things you have never imagined before. Thousands of murders may pass before your eyes – and you may see them all in terrible detail.”
There was no mistaking the skull bone as anything else. It bore red, vein-like patterns, but Simon had never understood until now what those patterns might contain.
Simon reached out and held Alaythia’s arm, but Aldric moved his hand away gently. “The dragon’s spirit might enter you, Simon,” said Aldric. “I do not think you would like that.”
The darkness in his voice convinced Simon immediately and he backed up against the stone wall to feel safer.
“Be careful, Alaythia,” Aldric whispered. “Its spirit may want to toy with you before it vanishes from life completely …”
Alaythia had gone into a trance and now began to whisper the ancient language of magic. For an instant, her young face looked weathered with age, then returned to normal, but her voice changed as she chanted. Soon the room filled with two voices coming out of her, one of them horrible and Serpentine. Alaythia began to tremble and Simon saw Aldric tighten his jaw.
Then she quietened and fell back into sleep, her hands still holding the shard.
While Alaythia slumbered, Simon roamed the burned castle, his nose filled with the musty smell of a dead fire. Because of the rainfall, the ground was mushy and muddy beneath his feet, and as he ran his hand over the blackened walls, Simon counted one blessing: that Aldric kept most of his important belongings on his ship.
The few photographs of Simon’s mother were kept in Aldric’s stateroom on board, hidden in a cabinet. She’d been killed by the White Dragon when Simon was very small, so those mementoes were things he couldn’t replace. He didn’t have memories of his mother; as a young child he’d been sent to boarding school for safekeeping from the dragons. Those photographs were all that connected him to her.
A rustling came from the darkness ahead and Simon clutched his torch tightly. Something was up there.
Simon didn’t move. He was alone, his father out of earshot in the next wing. It would be impossible to get to him fast if Simon was under attack. He’d have to face this alone.
If it was an assassin, it wasn’t being quiet. It was moving in the muck in the blackness ahead, then suddenly, it pounced into a puddle in the hallway, spattering water at Simon, and an animal’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight.
“Fenwick!”
The fox smacked his lips and then gave something like a grin. Simon allowed himself to breathe.
“What are you doing here?”
The fox trotted through the darkened hallway and leaped on to a low cabinet that had survived the blaze. Simon, familiar with this routine, looked straight at the animal’s eyes, which slowly darkened.
The fox wriggled its snout at him and Simon felt a tickling in his head as if whiskers had brushed over his brain. Then Fenwick held its mouth open, as if its breath held magic. And it did, Simon had learned.
He had, over time, earned the animal’s trust enough to be rewarded with a bit of his mother’s magic, a spell she’d left on him: Fenwick brought Simon things the fox had heard.
First, Simon saw only darkness and heard a group of voices, all of them boys, kids he knew from the Lighthouse School. Fenwick had eavesdropped on them and captured their conversation in the wind, pulling it into his mouth.
Now Simon saw them in his mind, talking about him:
“Weird guy …”
“Always by himself when I see him …”
“What’s so weird about him? He’s just home-schooled.”
“You ever know anybody home-schooled? It means their parents are kinda out of it.”
“I’m not saying that, but he’s never there, he won’t talk about what he learns all day, I see him out there practising with, like, a steel lance, riding his horse, it’s totally bizarre and if you get close, his dad chases you away from the house.”
“His dad is weird.”
“That lady isn’t though. Is that his mum?”
“No, she’s too young …”I think she might be a stepmum or something. She’s really nice. I’ve talked to her a few times in town. If it weren’t for her, I’d think that place he lives in was a nuthouse.”
“He always liked playing with fire when he was here,” said one boy.
Another said, “He was always building bonfires out on the beach. It’s totally obvious he was the one who set fire to the joke shop, ’cause that girl who works there said she didn’t want to see him any more.”
Simon groaned. Now he was prime suspect in town for the fire that had ruined his home. Life was interesting. Very interesting.
He patted the fox, wondering if Fenwick felt sorry for him.
He would have felt sorry for himself – but a scream interrupted his thoughts.
Alaythia.
What Alaythia saw with her dream-eyes was not a world anyone would seek out. For the longest hour she’d ever known, she had experienced life, or pieces of it anyway, as a female Pyrothrax from Brazil, the Ashlover Serpent.
Alaythia