The Journey to Dragon Island Read online

  Brine unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth. “I thought Peter imagined you.”

  The ghost laughed. “You should know better than that. Peter may have hidden talents, but imagination isn’t one of them. My guess is that when Boswell’s egg hatched, some part of me was baked into the shell. And when those pieces of shell regained their magic, I came back. As long as you have magic, you have me.” He smiled. “The Onion and I are getting on very nicely. We’ve had some interesting conversations.”

  Brine put her hand on the wall to steady herself and felt a vague throbbing through her palm. “How can a ship have a conversation?”

  “It can’t,” said Marfak West. “That’s your mistake—you thought you were on board a ship. In your mind, this ship has always been the Onion, and so that’s what it is for you. You forget that I sank the real Onion at Magical North.”

  Marfak West made even less sense when he was dead.

  A thumping came from overhead: Kaya breaking through the hatch. Brine shrank back against the crates. “I haven’t forgotten. This was Aldebran Boswell’s ship the Orion. But it’s the Onion now.”

  “It’s actually far more complicated than that. Reality often is. The universe is changeable, and sometimes it doesn’t make up its mind what to be until someone is looking.”

  “Boswell said that,” said Brine.

  “Boswell was a very clever man.”

  “Oshima?” Kaya’s voice echoed in the dark underdeck. “Oshima, where are you? Hiding won’t change anything, and we need to talk.”

  Brine pressed herself as far back into the gap as she could.

  “I don’t see why you’re objecting so much,” said Marfak West. “This is what you’ve wanted, isn’t it? To be captain of the Onion?”

  Denial sprang to Brine’s lips and died there. Marfak West smiled.

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Brine. “But not like this. If I became captain now, with the crew under a spell, with Cassie and Tom and Ewan all dead, with Peter trapped on Marfak’s Peak, this wouldn’t be the Onion anymore.”

  The hatch crashed back, and footsteps sounded on the steps. “Oshima,” said Kaya, “I am ordering you to come out.”

  Brine stayed where she was, waiting breathlessly.

  A crate moved.

  “There you are,” said Kaya. He stopped, his eyes widening in shock.

  “Surprised to see me?” asked Marfak West.

  Kaya’s staff began to glow. “You’re dead. You don’t belong here.”

  “That makes two of us,” said Marfak West, “but you know the story. Marfak will rise and the island will die in flames.” The shadows around him turned red, writhing like fire. Brine didn’t know whether a ghost could actually hurt someone, and after everything Kaya had done, she didn’t care, but still she stepped between the magus and the ghost.

  “This isn’t Kaya’s fault,” she said. “He only ever wanted to save the island. We pushed him into this. Besides, he’s my father.”

  The flames around Marfak West died. The ghost stared at Brine, then he threw back his head and laughed. “Your father? Is that what he told you?”

  Brine’s world stopped.

  “Don’t believe him,” said Kaya. But the flash of guilt on his face had already given him away. Besides, Marfak West rarely lied. He used the truth as a weapon to hurt you, but he wasn’t a liar—not like Kaya.

  Brine put a hand on the wall to steady herself. Her chest ached as if she’d been holding her breath for days, and now she was gulping in air faster than she could cope with. “If Kaya isn’t my father, who is?” She hadn’t recognized anyone on the island until she’d seen Kaya.

  Kaya tried to drag Brine away, but Marfak West moved far quicker. The ghost’s fingers closed around the magus’s wrist and passed through. Kaya screamed and jerked back.

  “I helped raise you,” he shouted, clutching his injured hand. “You were special from the start. I loved you like a daughter—even before I found out what you could do. Magic is potential, it is the ability to shape the world, and you had so much potential. You could tell a story and make it come true. You were the answer we were looking for. You still are.”

  His staff glowed brighter, and Brine felt the urge to believe him, to accept all this and just do as he wanted. She shook her head to clear it. He was trying to control her again, and it wasn’t going to work. She pressed her fingers into the wall until they ached.

  “Where are my parents?” she asked. She turned to Marfak West. “Did you kill them?”

  “Why does everyone think I go round killing people? They were alive and well when I left the castle.”

  “Then what happened?” asked Brine.

  Kaya didn’t answer, but Brine didn’t need him to, because, as if a final obstacle had slid aside in her mind and a box had opened, she remembered.

  * * *

  “Oshima.”

  Oshima didn’t remember the two people bent over her, or even that her name was Oshima. Her thoughts had been in tatters for so long. But the man and woman were urging her out of bed and then carrying her up the steps to the top of the castle, where the sky was jewel-bright with stars.

  For some reason, the man was carrying the magus’s staff: Oshima recognized it.

  Then the castle vanished and they were running through trees to where a boat waited. They settled her in, and the woman hung a piece of bright shell around Oshima’s neck. “For protection,” she said, and kissed her.

  The man opened a bag and took out more shells. He rubbed each one and they all began to glow. But the woman turned back to the shore with a cry as the air parted behind them and the magus appeared.

  Then a sound louder than a dinosaur’s roar, and the people were shouting and pushing at the boat. But their hands slipped away, and Oshima was alone.

  After that, there was only a sea in bright sunlight and, later, people with strange white faces looking at her.

  * * *

  Brine blinked a few times and stood trembling. It took her a moment to come back to herself and remember what she was doing here. Her parents’ voices filled her mind. She could see their faces—quiet and serious and always looking slightly afraid. Now she knew why. “You killed them,” she said. “They tried to escape with me, and you killed them.”

  “That’s not true,” said Kaya. His breath came in wheezes. “They cast a spell to send you away, and I couldn’t stop them. You disappeared, and as the spell was starting to fail, they tried to follow. They must have known it was hopeless. Most of the spell’s magic was already used up by sending you away. They could have ended up anywhere.”

  “But they did end up somewhere?” A surge of hope cut through the fear that gripped her. “They’re still alive?”

  “They might be,” said Kaya. “I spent my time looking for you, not them.” He coughed. “I’m sorry we lost them, but they broke Orion’s Law; they knew how important you were. If I had had you these past three years, Orion’s Keep would have had all the magic it needed.”

  Brine barely heard him. Her parents were alive; the thought filled her mind and she couldn’t help but smile.

  “You don’t need them,” said Kaya, frowning uncertainly at her. “I’m not your real father, but I will be like a father to you—the father you should have had all along. We’ll travel together, learn from each other, and when I die, everything I have will be yours.”

  He reached out to her. His eyes were dark and shining and quite, quite mad.

  Brine backed into the wall. Kaya really believed what he was saying. He’d convinced himself that he’d had no choice about what he’d done, that he’d done everything for the right reasons. He’d probably even come to believe she really was his daughter and wonder why she didn’t love him back.

  “You’re too late,” said Marfak West. “You can’t control her. You can’t control the ship, either; the Onion doesn’t want you here. I told you once before, people who don’t understand magic shouldn’t use it.”

  �
�I know what magic is,” snarled Kaya. “It is life; it is potential; it is change.”

  “Yes, and you want to lock it up inside stone walls until it stagnates and dies with age.” The ghost stepped out into the open, and Brine found she could see straight through him. “You could have dealt with Marfak’s Peak years ago, but you spent all your power on keeping things the same. You still don’t understand—anything that won’t change is dead already.”

  Kaya backed away. “You’re the one who’s dead. You don’t belong here, and you will leave. As for this ship, I claim it as my own and it will obey me.”

  He slammed his staff down onto the deck—onto wooden boards filled to overflowing with a hundred years of magic. Magical power raced into his staff faster than the spellstones could cope with. The underdeck flooded with light as every spell in the staff came to life at once, and the spellstones fought to cast them all. Kaya cried out and collapsed to his knees. The air shimmered in twenty different places all around him, and Brine saw flashes of sea and mountain and trees through them.

  Then Kaya vanished.

  It happened as fast as drawing breath. One moment there, and then he was gone. His staff fell to the floor and rolled gently across to Brine’s feet. In a daze, she bent and picked it up.

  “Where did he go?” she asked.

  The ghost of Marfak West studied his fingernails. “How many movestones did he have in that staff?”

  “I don’t know. A lot, probably.”

  “Then he’s probably in a lot of places. It’s what happens when you try to use magic without understanding it.”

  Brine bowed her head. Kaya had lied to her about everything. He’d left Cassie and the others to die on Orion’s Keep when it fell. He’d tried to steal the Onion. But he was also the only person she remembered on this island.

  “Marfak’s Peak is about to explode,” said Marfak West. “You might want to do something.”

  Brine shook her head and slid down the wall onto the floor. She felt the faint thudding of magic through her feet, a regular beat, like someone was banging a drum, and she wished it would stop.

  But then the beat formed a rhythm and the rhythm took on words.

  Finish this.

  A thrill ran through her. She had a family, Brine thought. Her parents were only part of it. There was Cassie, and Peter and Tom, the whole crew of the Onion. All the people who made her the person she was. And, somewhere in the world, her parents would be looking for her. Brine knew they would, because she knew them. They would never give up until they found her, and she wasn’t going to give up, either.

  The floor trembled until the vibrations ran up through her, and her whole body pulsed in time with it. She’d never quite been able to work out what it was, but now she knew. It wasn’t, as Peter kept saying, the magic that filled the ship. It was the sound of a heartbeat.

  Brine climbed to her feet. “The Onion isn’t just the ship. It’s the crew. It’s Cassie. It’s the story. And stories are living things; they keep changing.”

  Marfak West nodded slowly.

  This ship was not only the Onion. It had belonged to Aldebran Boswell, the scientist and explorer who had tried to find Magical North and had died there. A century sleeping in the most magical place in the whole world, a place steeped in stories and legend until eventually it had become Orion’s ship—the ship that flew to the stars.

  But the story of Orion was different here. Orion wasn’t a ship: She was a dragon.

  “I can help you,” said the ghost.

  Marfak West always had wanted to be the star of the story. Brine walked past him and picked up Kaya’s staff. “It’s all right. I know what to do.”

  The ghost sighed, and faded. Brine found that she didn’t hate him anymore. She wondered what had changed inside her.

  You can tell a story and make it come true, Kaya had said. Of course she could, because all stories had truth at their hearts. All she had to do was find it.

  Echoing the ghost’s sigh with one of her own, she tucked the magus’s staff under her arm and climbed the ladder to the deck.

  CHAPTER 34

  There is no do or don’t do. Trying is all that matters.

  (from BRINE SEABORNE’S BOOK OF PLANS)

  Peter had no magic left. There was nothing he could do to stop the falling balloon, and yet he tried to do something anyway. He ran, his arms outstretched, reaching up for Stella. As she fell, Boswell plunged down out of the sky, caught her clothes, and flapped his wings madly. She slowed then plowed straight into Peter, and both of them fell. Something in Peter’s leg tore painfully. His head bounced off a stone, and bright sparks of light danced in front of his eyes. He came to a halt and lay panting, wondering why it was so hard to breathe, until he noticed Stella lying on top of him. Bits of shredded balloon drifted gently down.

  Peter elbowed Stella off. “Are you alive?”

  “I can hear you, so I guess so.” She picked herself up, groaning. “That hurt.”

  Boswell landed beside them. Stella flung her arms around the dragon. “Well done,” she said. She met Peter’s gaze. “What do we do now?”

  Patches of grass burned all around them. The fire was spreading quickly across the dry slopes and—Peter was sure it wasn’t just his imagination—the crack in the mountainside just above them gaped wider and redder. And amid the shattered rocks, something moved.

  Peter got up, ignoring the pain in his leg, and hobbled back up Marfak’s slope to the place where the eggs had hatched.

  “Look,” whispered Stella in awe.

  Baby dragons.

  Two were as red as the fires around them, and the other two were the color of polished bronze. They snapped angrily at Boswell as he bent to sniff them, and he drew back, looking surprised and somewhat offended.

  There ought to be some ceremony for this, Peter thought, but there wasn’t time. He grabbed the two red dragons and cradled them in his arms while they bit and clawed at him. One of them breathed fire at his chest, setting his shirt alight.

  Stella bent to pick up the other two. One of them cowered flat and bit her, and the other one backed away fast, its bronze wings whirring. Boswell darted after it while Peter beat out the flames on his shirt one-handedly.

  “We’re trying to help you, you stupid animals,” said Stella, making a grab for the little bronze one as it kept retreating.

  Boswell pounced, trying to pin the dragon to the ground, but it slithered out from underneath him and dashed away. Peter gasped a warning, too late. The ground split with a roar, lava spurted out, and the bronze dragon hopped back again into the bubbling mass and disappeared.

  Stella stumbled back, away from the molten rock.

  “It’s all right,” said Peter. It wasn’t, but he couldn’t think of what else to say. “You tried—and we have three dragons. Three out of four is good, isn’t it?”

  Stella wiped her eyes on her palm. The remaining bronze dragon twisted in her grip, trying to escape. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have been faster.”

  “You should have been in the balloon, staying away from here.”

  Boswell nosed Peter’s hand as if in commiseration. The baby red dragons stopped blowing fire and went back to biting and clawing. Peter turned them around so they couldn’t reach him, and hobbled painfully to his feet. The smoke from the volcano must have been affecting his eyes, because tears were running down his face. “We should go higher if we can,” he said. “If we can get above the eruption, we may be safe.”

  The ground shook as they began to walk, and more cracks opened around them. Stella pulled Peter on as he stumbled. “Can you magic us out of here?”

  “Sorry,” he coughed. “The eggs took all the magic when they hatched. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

  “You have a strange definition of fine.”

  “I know. I get it from Cassie.”

  They stumbled on together, but as fast as they climbed, the fire seemed to follow them. Keep together and keep hold of the drago
ns, Peter thought. Nothing else mattered. Although he would like it if the little creatures would stop attacking him for one minute. He clutched them tight against his chest with one arm and clung on to Stella with his free hand. Boswell flapped ahead, circling back and shooting little flames at them to urge them on faster.

  Below, the mountain was falling apart. Rocks crashed down, some of them splintering into pieces that kept tumbling on until the splinters turned to dust. Molten lava spilled through the spaces they left, slowly at first, then turned into a sizzling black-and-scarlet flood that rolled on down toward the sea, where the waves swallowed it harmlessly, sending up huge clouds of yellow steam.

  “We did it,” said Stella, shouting over the noise of falling rock. “Marfak is erupting out to sea. We’ve saved Apcaron.”

  Peter nodded, gasping for breath. The ground rumbled as if there really were a dragon trapped inside the mountain. Maybe later they could celebrate, but right now his lungs were full of smoke, and he could barely see through the ash that filled the air.

  He took another step and the mountain quaked. He staggered, losing his grip on the two red dragons. As he reached for them, his foot caught in a hole, his knee wrenched, and his whole leg buckled underneath him.

  “Peter!” cried Stella. She crawled back to him. Boswell herded the red dragons into her arms and sniffed at Peter, whining softly.

  Peter tried to get up but a new burst of agony made him dizzy, and he collapsed again.

  Stella knelt next to him. “Peter, you’ve got to get up.”

  But he couldn’t: He knew he couldn’t. In a way, it made things easier. It meant he could stop worrying, stop trying to do this when he knew there was no way off the mountain. He’d done his best, and it had almost been good enough—that had to count for something. “You’ll have to take the dragons,” he said. “Keep climbing, and don’t look back.”

  “No,” said Stella. She sat stubbornly. “I’m not leaving you. You can still walk.”

  “No, I can’t. Sorry.”

  Boswell butted him with his nose. Peter pushed the dragon away. “Sorry. It’s not safe here. Boswell, go. Find Brine.”