Caden's Comet Read online

  “You okay, Mother?” I asked as I slid into my chair. Skelly took the seat next to me, leaving Sara Lee’s empty at the other end of the table.

  “I’m fine,” she said, but her expression said otherwise. Plus, her long black hair, usually so neatly combed, had formed a tangled mess down the right side of her body, and she had dark circles under her eyes.

  “You can tell me.” I took a bite of my pie, but it no longer tasted as sweet as I’d expected.

  “I’m just worried.”

  “About Sara Lee?”

  “I know she’s always on some mission or another, but this one feels different. It feels… dangerous.”

  For a long time, neither of us said anything. By the time Serio, the old captain and Sara Lee’s most trusted diplomatic advisor, entered the dining room, I had dozed off against the hard back of my antique chair.

  “Your Majesties.” Serio struggled to move his hunched form into a low bow, and when he rose, he winced.

  “What are you doing out of bed, old friend?” Nimue asked fondly.

  “I fear I bring bad news.”

  “She’s missing, isn’t she,” Nimue stated.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. As you know, we’ve tried to contact the ship a hundred times, but the radio went silent yesterday afternoon and never came on again.”

  Nimue’s spoon clattered to her pie dish and then cartwheeled off the edge onto the floor. No one moved to pick it up. What are they talking about? I wondered as I stared down at my own piecrust. Did Nimue already know about the disappearance, and that was why she seemed even more distant than usual?

  “Five hours ago the tracker stopped sending signals as well. Either someone turned it off, or more likely, it was destroyed.”

  “You’ve sent scouting parties to look for her?”

  “Of course. The last marker was near the star Gravoria, so we started there and worked our way out.”

  “And?”

  Serio shook his head. “Not a piece of the ship remains in its last posted location. We used our latest metal detector technology, as well as sent dragons out into the—”

  Nimue nodded as Serio droned on, but I could tell she had stopped listening. Her greatest fear had been realized—what more could she need to know?

  I, on the other hand, launched into rapid questioning. Where was my mother headed? Who had she met with? What was the last communication?

  “All standard procedures, Your Highness,” Serio explained. “Nothing out of the ordinary. We have two outposts in Bravo Galaxy, and your mother’s ship was supposed to deliver their supplies and return home. Simple point A to point B, if you know what I mean?”

  I didn’t. The closest I ever got to diplomacy was attending the many balls thrown in our honor by the town governors. I avoided everything else, not just because I was twelve, but because patience and the ability to compromise were not two of my strongest suits. Much like Nimue, I preferred to leave that whole business to Sara Lee and her crew of capable advisors. I would fight an adversary if I had to—and I would win, thanks to my mother’s training in the army barracks—but negotiate? Sit through long meetings where men moved game pieces around a table meant to represent our planet? Listen to hours of complaints from old farmers who seemed to have nothing better to do than request audiences with their queens?

  Pass.

  “Keep looking,” Nimue commanded, her request pulling me from my thoughts. “Send the whole army if you have to. She’s got to be out there somewhere, right?”

  Serio did not answer.

  Chapter Two

  FROM THAT day on, I rarely slept. The eyes haunted me, and then, on following nights, bits and pieces joined the eyes. One night there was hair the color of the dirt beneath the Draman sand; another, the youthful curve of a neck. After a month a pair of brown wings emerged. Not boney like the Dramans, but thick as leather and much more powerful.

  Daylight became my sleeping hour. I fell asleep at breakfast, while reading in the garden, and during the royal baby blessings. My eyelids felt like the weight of the tower bells had been attached to them, and they closed without warning at quite inconvenient times—while walking down the stairs, for example, or in the middle of telling my mother about my day.

  The nights when the eyes did not appear, nightmares of Sara Lee’s death came instead. I watched her ship explode, collide with an asteroid, and run into a robot ship that had somehow escaped the alternate future my mothers had created. I watched her cut down by the hand of a great enemy, though I could never see his face.

  Amazingly, Nimue never noticed my distraction.

  Skelly asked me what was wrong over and over again, but I blamed the exhaustion on my growth spurt. And grow I did: five inches during my thirteenth year, and another five inches the next. By the time I was seventeen, I had reached my full height of six feet eleven inches. Sren, whom I often met in the forest behind the castle to continue what we’d started as young boys, had stopped growing years ago, and I had to bend my knees to kiss him.

  Queen Sara Lee had still not returned, and Nimue had taken to her bed in her grief. Even I, whom she called the light of her life, could not revive her. Perhaps I didn’t have the heart to; I missed Sara Lee just as desperately, and as I stretched into a man, I longed for her swordplay and strategic wisdom, her levelheadedness and her guidance in matters of both the heart and head. She became like a splinter lodged deep in my heart, around which the organ grew but never healed.

  Finally, Skelly grew tired of my evasion. For some reason, my godparent seemed convinced that my fatigue was tied to knowledge of Sara Lee’s disappearance, and nothing I said, short of telling my guardian about the dream, could persuade Skelly to drop the subject.

  So I stopped trying to. Instead, I spent an afternoon in the garden detailing the many deaths I’d seen, as well as the faceless enemy who kept reappearing.

  “These are not just dreams, Grian,” Skelly said with certainty. “They’re divinations.”

  The next morning when I woke up, I was in another place.

  “Where am I?” I asked Skelly, who was perched on a strange purple tree that seemed to be whispering.

  “You’re in the forest of Uncanny Trees near the Cave of Secrets.”

  They were names I recognized, peripherally, from my mothers’ stories.

  “And why am I in the forest of Uncanny Trees near the Cave of Secrets, may I ask?”

  “Come.” Skelly led me over the ground of thick roots and falling purple leaves that brushed against my cheek like a mother’s palm until we reached a cave. “There’s someone inside who will want to meet you.”

  In the middle of the lake, an old woman’s face appeared. I could tell she had been very beautiful, once, though age had pruned her face and turned her hair gray.

  “Mother, I brought the boy, just like you asked. I’m convinced he has secret knowledge about Sara Lee that would assist in her rescue.”

  “Her rescue?” I asked. “How do you know she needs rescue?”

  But instead of answering, Skelly pushed me into the water headfirst. I tried to dive, but only belly flopped into the warm water. A strange feeling took over my mind and body, as though I was a library catalog the old woman rifled through, while I sunk deeper and deeper into the lake. Memories surfaced and disappeared, from my first kiss to the way I put on my shoes in the morning. Finally, the fingers stopped at the card filled with dreams.

  Who is this? the old woman asked.

  I don’t know.

  A ghost?

  A dream. I see him almost every night.

  The hands suddenly released me, and I sputtered to the lake’s surface.

  Prince Grian knows nothing about his mother, the old woman told Skelly, but he has seen the other boy, Caden. It is time for Grian to find him. I have a feeling that he will stumble on Sara Lee on the way, though it is only a hunch.

  But Mother, I thought we had to wait until his eighteenth—

  There is no time. The forces of the u
niverse are beyond our understanding; if they sent Grian the dreams, then he must go now.

  You know that boy? I asked the Mother, still stuck on the first part of what she’d said. Who is he?

  I am not certain whether his name is Caden in this life or not, but I do know he is an Earth Dragon. She said these two words with emphasis, which reminded me of how, over and over again, Skelly had made me capitalize Bone Dragon in my Dramanian studies. “You’re a member of a kingdom,” my godparent reminded me, “not a breed of dog or a species of elephant. You should be proud of your history.”

  After a while I had stopped trying to explain that I didn’t know what an elephant was.

  In another life, the Mother said, you two were lovers. Find him, and you save the entire dragon species; fail, and we are all doomed.

  But how can I find him? I’ve never even left Draman.

  Leave that part to me. I will send you to Earth, the home of the Earth Dragons, where you can enlist the help of Merlin.

  The same Merlin who knew my mothers and helped them save Draman? Nimue and Sara Lee had told me many stories about the bearded old man, including his great magical powers and the love story between him and Lup, the werewolf.

  Exactly. He will be with the wizards, who have returned to their Council’s Mansion now that your mothers successfully changed their fate. No one will know about the robots, or their flight to Balu, or the final battle—except Merlin, of course. To everyone else, they’ve been there casting spells the whole time.

  May I go with him, Mother? Skelly asked hopefully.

  I’m afraid not, my dear fairy. Even I can only send one person across the universe at a time. Besides, this is something Grian must do alone.

  In an uncharacteristic display of affection, Skelly splashed into the water and hugged my waist tightly.

  “I’ll be back before you know it,” I said, though in reality, I did not know if I would ever return. All I knew was that the boy from my dream existed, and I had to find him.

  It is time. Now Grian, pick up the stone on the bank that has the symbol of a spiral on it.

  There were many stones on the bank of varying shapes and sizes, each with its own symbol. The Mother had given Sara Lee a stone that Merlin had used to send her and Nimue back in time, but that stone had appeared in her pocket; finding the proper one among many was much more difficult. Even so, I eventually came upon the spiral and brought it to the lake’s edge.

  Good. Now skip the stone across my waters with all of your might.

  I did what she said, first placing the rock in the bend of my index finger and my thumb on top, then snapping my wrist to flick the rock. The large pebble skipped six times, but on the seventh skip, instead of sinking to the bottom of the lake, it floated. Then it began to turn, and with it the water, so that the spiral pattern came to life in a whirlpool.

  Jump in, light prince. Jump in, and let the magic do its work.

  I looked back at Skelly, who wiped at tears. “Take care of my mother,” I told the fairy. “By watching over her, you’re watching over me.”

  Then I jumped in. The water tugged my legs and then dragged them, round and round, like falling off a horse but still being strapped into one of the stirrups. Under the water I went, and then, just when I thought I would drown, everything disappeared.

  Chapter Three

  I WOKE up with an old man standing over me pouring his mug of cold coffee onto my head. Sputtering, I sat up and brushed the liquid away with my arm.

  “I’m awake!” I shouted as the old man shook the final drops onto me.

  “I know. But you’re covered in swamp muck and smell like rotted fish. A few coffee grounds might do you some good.”

  Though I had never met Merlin back on Draman, I recognized the old man as soon as I saw him. He was even wrinklier now than the stories told, his face like a balled-up dress shirt and his hands like skin-covered branches. He wore silver spectacles—though when I looked closely, there was no glass in the frames—and a silver wizard’s hat with the last five inches frayed into strands. His robe was dusty and worn, and it smelled like it had been kept in a basement for the last century. In fact, it probably had.

  “Hello, Merlin,” I said as I stood and brushed the lake muck off my pants.

  “Hello, Prince Grian. You look quite a bit older than my visions, though you were just a bubble-spitting baby back then.”

  “You look older as well,” I said. “Why are you wearing such tattered clothes? Are wizards no longer respected on this planet?”

  “Wizards are not known on this planet,” Merlin corrected. “Because the robots never took over—thanks to your mothers, of course—the humans never found out about the wizards or the Igreefee in the forests. We never traveled across the universe, nor back again after the robots’ defeat, and you’d do best not to mention it to anyone without magic. About my clothes—” He lifted a shovel. “—you’ve caught me in the middle of my gardening.”

  When I looked around, I realized that, indeed, I stood in the middle of a vegetable garden. In the distance four skyscrapers loomed, each with a neon blue number from two to five. Behind me, a shack that seemed to belong to Merlin made a sharp contrast with the glowing buildings.

  “I prefer to live alone,” Merlin explained, as though he could read my thoughts. “Makes for better meditation and magical practice. Besides, the Egg is a sham if you ask me.”

  “The Egg? But my mothers said the Egg is foolproof. Isn’t that the object Allanah used to birth the first Sun Dragon since the original species? The one that named you Librarian and entrusted you with the Eternal Book, which helped you save everyone with its ancient spells and insights?”

  “My, you are well-versed in wizard history. But you would be, seeing as how Nimue was always quite interested in our culture. It’s not that the Egg is wrong in its evaluation of a wizard’s talent, but that it—like any test of its kind—cannot take dedication into consideration. Nowadays, in both the wizarding world and the human one below, everything is tested and assigned by the higher-ups. It’s harder than it ever was to move out of one’s rank or job or class. If you ask me, some of the Level Fives in charge around here have the discipline of a scullery maid.”

  Something he’d said in his soapbox speech stood out. “Wait, did you just say the humans below?”

  “Of course. Haven’t you realized those clouds above us are awfully close?” Merlin pointed behind the house, where the land dropped off steeply and did not reappear. “The Mansion floats.”

  I walked to the edge, from which I could look down the slope into the air and then, below that, the ground. As I took in the land, covered on every inch with skyscrapers and billboards, tunnels between rooftops and trains taking rushing people to and from these tunnels, I felt a sense of nostalgia for a land I had never seen. The old Earth, where everything was green and growing.

  “And that’s just one city,” Merlin said. He had walked over to the ledge too, and now he leaned on his wooden walking stick and put his chin on his hands. “All of Earth looks that way now. We had to lift the Mansion so we would not be discovered, along with the Igreefee forest and a small plot of land for the Earth Dragons who want to test their wings. A few Ice Dragons remain here, but they mostly hide in their caves in the North Pole and leave the Earth Dragons alone.”

  Earth Dragons. At these two words, I remembered why I had been sent to Earth in the first place.

  “Merlin, I’m here to find—”

  “—the Earth Dragon who’s the love of your life?”

  “How did you know?”

  “It’s the age-old story. I did it, in my youth, as did my parents before me. But we must be discreet; there are those who would take a Bone Dragon’s appearance on Earth as a sign of war, let alone the one and only Sun Dragon. No one can know the truth. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.” I said the words he wanted to hear, and yet, I wondered if I meant them. Could one man really comprehend that, with one wrong
move, he could start a war?

  “Good.” Merlin shoved his sleeves up to his elbows and wiggled his fingers. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done any magic like this. Who knows if it’ll even—”

  He clapped, and suddenly we were somewhere else.

  THEY CALLED the floating land of the Earth Dragons Little Earth because it was round, green, and as sparsely inhabited as Earth in its earlier days. According to Merlin, unlike the Ice Dragons, Earth Dragons were half-human like me; unlike me, they needed a special necklace charmed by the wizards to hold their human form.

  Because they had a human side, the dragons only came to Little Earth to play. The floating land was like a theme park, where dragons could soar over fields, get a massage under a peaceful waterfall, and meet others of their kind. Much like a medieval sword-fighting school, there were areas where instructors taught young dragons how to breathe fire with accuracy. As targets went up in flames, the smell of smoke reminded me of home.

  “This way,” Merlin said and led me toward the shack labeled Registration. Behind the window, a young woman wearing a silver locket dotted with diamonds blew bubbles with her gum and paged through a magazine. Merlin rapped his knuckles on the glass and was met with a roll of the girl’s heavily shadowed eyes.

  “Welcome to Little Earth. Please sign the sheet on one of the clipboards, including first name, last name, home address, and the last time you transformed. Please also sign the waiver on the second page indicating that you do not hold the owners of Little Earth responsible for any injuries to—”

  “We’re not Earth Dragons,” I cut in, hoping to stop her droning whine. “We’re actually here to look for—”

  “No humans or wizards allowed. You can take the helicopter back down to Earth; one comes every fifteen minutes.”