A week goes by. My days are filled with magic lessons and practicing with Endellion. Most days, my sword-fighting skills are far superior to my magic ability. But through experimentation, we find that whenever I’m wearing the Bloodstone around my neck, my magic feels strongest, even though I’m careful not to borrow magic from it. Not after what happened the time I bled on it.
But it’s not all work. Mateo spends a lot of his spare time working on a complicated piece of magic. “I’m trying to translocate one of the rooms in the castle,” he says when we ask him what he’s doing. “Specifically, the study.”
“Umm, why?”
“The Silver Mage’s wards are tied to the castle,” he replies. “My hypothesis is that if I can move one of the rooms somewhere else, then the wards will come with us.”
I remain confused until Mateo manages to perfect the spell, and I get to see it in action. One weekend, Mateo piles all of us into the study, and tugs at the threads of magic. I feel a whoosh of air and a sense of being displaced. “What happened?” I ask when he lowers his hands.
He smiles at me with a twinkle in his eyes. “Look out the window.”
I do, and my mouth falls open. The view isn’t of the snow-tipped lawn in front of the castle. No. When I look out, I see the Eiffel Tower. “Are we in Paris? How is this possible?”
“I told you,” he replies. “I moved the room.” The others are looking just as impressed as I am, and Mateo shrugs, seemingly uncomfortable with the attention. “It’s not hard to move an object,” he says modestly. “Aria, you know that as well as I do. The only complicated bit was making sure that the castle wards stayed intact. Which they have. So, shall we go explore the city?”
“Can you move people too? Never mind, that’s a dumb question. I mean, you moved us, so obviously you can.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not a dumb question,” he replies. “And the answer to that is, only if I can see them.”
“Why?”
“Dragons can’t sense other dragons,” he replies. “You can see each of us in your mind’s eye, but I can’t. We have a built-in immunity to some kinds of magic.”
Huh. Interesting.
After we return from Paris, Mateo starts teaching me how to translocate people, and I realize how simple it is to summon an object in comparison. “He’s fighting me,” I complain as Mateo tells me to move Rhys from one end of the room to the other.
“Well, yes. Of course he’s going to fight you,” Mateo replies. “Try again.”
By the end of that week, I’m exhausted. “I wish I could summon a broomstick and escape these dragons,” I snap at Mateo in the study after a particularly grueling lesson.
He looks puzzled, and it breaks my nerdy little heart. “What are you talking about, tesoro?”
“Harry Potter? When he summons his Firebolt? You’ve never read the books? What about the movies? Surely you’ve seen the movies.”
He shakes his head. I turn to Bastian, who’s doing something on his laptop. “Bastian, what about you? Have you seen Harry Potter?”
He looks up from his screen and gives me a perplexed look.
Okay. This must be fixed. My face brightens. “Let’s do a movie marathon tomorrow night.” I look around the room, meeting the eyes of all of my mates. Erik tries to avoid my gaze, but I’m having none of it. “All of us,” I add for good measure.
Bastian has a movie theatre in his castle. Because that’s normal. I gasp when I see it. The room’s set up like a high-end movie theater. The whole front wall is a massive screen, the furniture consists of plush chairs that recline, and there’s even a popcorn machine off to one side.
“It’s not my fault,” he says defensively when he catches my astonished expression. “I haven’t been here in twenty years, remember? The designer got carried away. It looked good on her portfolio.”
Frau Ziegler bustles into the room. “The pizza has been delivered, Lord Jaeger,” she says. “Shall I bring it in?”
“Yes, please.”
My eyes go round. “There’s pizza? Really?”
“Olives, mushrooms, and spinach,” Casius says with a grin. “Ready for dinner?”
“The real question is, is dinner is ready for me? I’m starving.”
He chuckles. Frau Ziegler enters the room, carrying five large boxes of pizza in her hands. For six people. Seems about right. I grab half of them from her and set it down on the table in the back.
“We’ve got it from here,” Bastian tells the housekeeper. “Take the night off, Frau Ziegler. I don’t want Derther complaining that I’m working you too hard.”
“Nonsense,” she says with a smile. She puts a slice of pizza on a plate and hands it to me, and then turns to leave. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?”
“Perfectly sure,” Bastian replies with a grin. “Unless you have a way to get me out of watching this movie?”
I give him a withering look, but there’s a piping hot slice covered in black olives, mushrooms, spinach, and dripping with extra sauce in front of me, and that takes priority. I take a bigger than necessary bite and moan in delight.
“Good?” Bastian asks.
I nod as I chew. “Almost as good as New York,” I say between bites.
He chuckles. “Almost? Next time I’ll send the plane to fetch it.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I gasp before I realize he’s teasing me. Jerk.
We start watching the movie. All my dragons snort at the scene in the Sorcerer's Stone when Hagrid shows Harry his dragon egg. “Dragons do not hatch from eggs,” Erik points out with a frown.
“It’s fiction. Look, the egg’s hatching. See how cute the little baby dragon is.” I grin at them. “Wait, do you guys have baby pictures somewhere?”
“The camera was invented two hundred years ago, love,” Rhys points out. “Well after I came of age. But I’m pretty sure there’s a portrait of baby Bastian somewhere in this castle.”
I swear Bastian goes pink. “Griffith, do you have a death wish?” he growls.
The baby dragon on the screen coughs and sets Hagrid’s beard on fire, and the dragons turn their attention back to the screen. “That would never happen,” Erik says again. “We don’t get our fire until puberty. Otherwise, none of us would ever grow to adulthood.”
I give Erik a quelling glance. “No talking during the movie.”
Halfway through The Prisoner of Azkaban, I get up to get popcorn and end up pulled down into Rhys’ lap under the guise of sharing. Not that I’m complaining.
I’m yawning half-way through the fourth movie. Harry has just gone up against the Hungarian Horntail, and predictably, all the dragons are offended by the scene. Except for Casius, who’s seen the movies before, and knows what to expect.
“The only thing they got right is the appetite,” Mateo grumbles. “We can control our fire, and contrary to what people think, we don’t go around eating people.”
I giggle at his expression. “Once again, you do realize this is fiction, right?”
He just shakes his head. I watch the dragon snap its chains and take off in the air after Harry. It reminds me, there’s something I’ve been curious about. “I have a question. Why don’t you fly more often?”
Bastian sighs. “After the curse, there was a lot of resentment among the other magicals,” he says. “They blamed us.”
“I thought the curse wasn’t public knowledge?”
“Not the specific details, but they all could tell that something had changed. And of course, only dragons could manipulate magic. The blame fell on us. Rightly so.”
“The dragons retreated,” Casius adds. “The thirteen families were being hunted by Zyrian, and the lesser dragons were forced to take sides. Those were dark days. I think it’s still affecting us, to be honest. We’re still secretive, and we keep to ourselves. We only fly when we won’t be seen.”
“I’m going to bed,” Erik says, standing up abruptly. Too late, I realize that Erik really doesn’t like talking about the past.
His departure leaves an awkward silence in the room, and not even the roars of the CGI dragon on the screen can fill it.
12
Rhys