The dragon spun, a streak of movement, a dancing center of magic, too graceful and quick for a beast so big and unwieldy.
Meriwether no longer had the strength to stand. Awareness and force flowed out of him, like a liquid seeping through his feet. Before darkness swept over him, he heard a sentence, not in Franklin’s voice, but in another, stranger accent—inside his head. “We will meet again, Meriwether Lewis…son of Wales.”
He was absolutely sure it was the dragon speaking.
A Greater Calling
Meriwether woke up wet. Unfortunately, this was not an unknown experience for him. Having learned from a young age to procure and use magical healing herbs, he had often slept out in the open in the woods of his native Virginia or Georgia. In the hot and humid summers, he often took a midafternoon nap on the verdant grass beneath the pines. More than once, too, as he slept, a thunderstorm would soak him through and he’d awaken in sodden clothes facing a long walk back home.
But this was an entirely different situation. Instead of the blue Virginia skies, he blinked and gazed up at a gray-black sky. Instead of the woods, he was in the middle of a city, a burning city. It reeked of manure, soot and fire. The insistent ringing of a bell made Lewis’s head pound. He woke up fully to see a bucket brigade attacking a fire that engulfed the roof of Government House. He turned, rolled over, saw that he lay close to a charred pile of remains. He must have got water tossed on him while—
With a shock, the entire scene came back to him, the unlikely wizard, the dragon.
He sat up, which made his head swim. It wasn’t like him to swoon like that, to remain unconscious even when doused with water. Normally when he got soaked through, he woke up. He’d had to fight his mind before, but never his body, which had stood him in perfectly good stead, no matter what he demanded of it.
“Easy, Mister,” said a voice just behind him, and he turned to see two men eyeing him warily. He might have been concerned if they looked at all ill-dressed or shady, but they appeared to be prosperous men of St. Louis. “We thought you’d lost consciousness because of the magics.” The man’s voice had a trace of a French accent. “And we didn’t know what succor to give.”
“But how do you feel?” the second man asked. “Are you also a wizard?”
Meriwether surprised himself by laughing, a short sound between a bark and a cackle. “No, I’m not a wizard. Definitely not.”
“Then you are in the retinue of the great man for other reasons?” asked the first man. “We saw you fight the dragon alongside Franklin.”
With a start, Meriwether understood their assumption. If they thought him to be one of old wizard Franklin’s traveling companions, maybe they had left him lie unaided in the mud of the street, doused with the water used to extinguish the fires, because they were afraid to approach.
Much had changed since magic had returned to America, and undoubtedly many such changes had been beneficial to society. He knew that some places had devices powered by magic that did the work of men, thus making slaves unnecessary. But despite their familiarity with the arcane changes in the nearly half century since the Sundering from the Old World, people still feared magic—and well they should. A single gifted individual, if trained and of a disposition to do such a thing, could level half a city.
Meriwether grinned ruefully as he caught traces of apprehension in the men’s eyes. He picked himself up, looked at his sodden clothes. “No, no,” he said, in an easy tone. “You’ve got me all wrong, my friends. I only just met the great man, by happenstance and desperation. I’m not traveling with him. In fact, I arrived yesterday, and I’m staying at Chez Marie Bayard’s.” The men exchanged a look at the mention of the comfortable but undistinguished hostelry; surely, the wizard Franklin stayed in far more exotic and expensive lodgings. “I just came here hoping to catch a glimpse of him at work, not fight a dragon beside him!”
The joke must have caught up with the men. The first chuckled, and the second said, “Some glimpse you got, Monsieur.”
“Indeed.” He drew himself up and swayed against a sudden dizziness. “Meriwether Lewis from Virginia. For years now, I’ve been the personal assistant and household healer to Thomas Jefferson.” Jefferson’s name might have been unknown to the men, but he wanted to emphasize the location and the respectability of his position.
They came forward to shake his hand, and then offered to help him to his lodgings. He accepted their help, thankfully. As night fell and the last of the scattered fires were doused, the city assumed a carnival aspect. Townspeople gathered on the street, discussing everything that had happened. Meriwether heard comments as they passed by.
“Three dragons—three!”
“And all the houses around Government House set alight and all burned to the ground, not a bucket of water in sight.”
Meriwether felt the water trickling down his back, his coat drenched from the efforts of the bucket brigade, but he decided not to contradict the gossipers. Other comments were as outlandish, ranging from declarations that a whole group of magicians had come to rescue the town from dragons, to those who insisted that several carriages—and horses—had been incinerated in the square.
His head was still dizzy, and he wondered if it was an after-effect of proximity to magic. He couldn’t forget what he perceived as the voice of the dragon in his mind, and he wondered if it was correct that he would meet the monster again, and under what circumstances. Though he was a natural scientist at heart, Meriwether did not look forward to the opportunity.
Finally, his new friends delivered him to his hostelry, in a building that had once been a commodious colonial house. The building permitted a large common room in the front, and several small rooms on the second floor. Meriwether parted from the men at the door, with much enthusiastic hand shaking and much apology for having been the cause of such trouble, while the men in return assured him it had been no trouble at all. They apologized in a roundabout way for not having intervened on his behalf earlier, before his clothes got, surely, ruined by the water and the mud.
He entered the warmth of the inn’s crowded common room, which at nightfall had the aspect of a dining hall mixed with a tavern. Men sat at tables, arguing, laughing, talking about the day’s remarkable events, playing cards. A large haunch roasted in the vast fireplace, filling the air with a smell of burnt fat and meat. For some reason, it hit him wrong, perhaps too near a reminder of how close he and Franklin—not to mention the two terrified horses—had come to being roasted meat themselves. Meriwether felt his gorge rise, choked it back, and hurried toward the narrow stairs that climbed up the left side of the room to the upper rooms.
A voice called out to stop him, “Mr. Lewis, if you will?”
The hosteller’s younger son, a twenty-year-old gentleman with an uncertain complexion, pushed his way through the crowds in the common room. He must have been doing his turn as the ale dispenser, as he wore a stained apron and smelled strongly of beer. “Pardon me, sir,” he said, out of breath, reaching Meriwether after frantic progress through the closely packed tables. “Pardon me, but the wizard has sent word that he’d like to talk to you.”
“The wizard?” He stood near the stairs, dripping, aware that eyes were turning toward him. Waterlogged, muddy, and singed, he was not fit to be seen in society.
“The wizard Franklin, sir. He called for you, sent word right here to the inn.”
Meriwether realized he sounded thick-witted. “For me?” Granted they had risked death together to save the horses from the dragon, but how did old wizard Franklin even know who he was, much less where he stayed? And how could he get a messenger here so quickly?