“What will you do if we find it? Will you really destroy it?” Kitsuna asked as we started scanning the shelves for something, anything, that could help us locate the tear.
I bit my lower lip and didn’t meet her eyes. How was I supposed to explain that I didn’t want to destroy the tear, but I didn’t have any other option? I couldn’t let the Fate Maker have it. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”
“We always have a choice.” Kitsuna shrugged. “Everything we do is a choice. The Fate Maker chose to be evil. You’ve chosen to fight him. That’s the way it is. When he comes to our gates and demands that relic, you’ll refuse him, and that’s another choice, a choice that not everyone would make.”
I shook my head. “Anyone would fight back against him. There’s no choice there.”
“Your aunt wouldn’t.” Kitsuna reached for a book and flipped it open, scanning it. “She’d give him the relic if she thought it would increase her power.”
“Then she’d be an idiot. He would kill everyone if he had the relic.”
“She wouldn’t care,” Kitsuna said, looking up at me from her book. “They’re cruel in Bathune. There’s a reason they choose to reside in a place where nightmares live.”
“Cruel?” I asked.
“Yes, cruel. Did I ever tell you that I saw my father once?” she asked. “He came back to Dramera from Bathune to see my mother.”
“But wait, didn’t he take off on your mom after you were born?”
“He did.” She shut the book and reached for another. “He came back, though, once I’d come of age. It’s said that some wryens can hunt. They’re often good trackers. We have a dragon’s hunting instinct, but because we can’t shape-shift we’re much better on the ground than regular dragons. So human flexibility with a dragon’s nose.”
“So you’re like the hounds the Fate Maker told me about once.”
“Hounds?” Kitsuna looked surprised. “How do you know about those poor creatures?”
“Gunter of the Veldt had brought one in from Bathune to hunt. The Fate Maker said that people had died trying to hunt the Hound and that it had escaped.”
“I’m not surprised,” Kitsuna said and wrinkled her nose. “Gunter has always seemed like a cruel child trapped in a man’s body. Anyway, my father came back to Dramera to see if I had similar skills to that of a Hound.”
“Do you?”
“No. In Dramera, female wryens aren’t traditionally trained to hunt. And even if they were, there are no older wryens in Dramera who could train me. So, when my father found out that I wasn’t going to make him any money, he left again. He didn’t even see me.”
“What?”
“He never even bothered to come and see me. He went to my mother and asked about my abilities, and when she told him that I couldn’t track, he went away again and never even came to see me. He couldn’t walk up the stairs to the loft I was hiding in to see his own daughter because I wasn’t going to turn him a profit.”
“That’s horrible.”
“That’s how people in Bathune are taught to think. It is a cruel country and your aunt is a hard empress. If she were in your position she would hand the Dragon’s Tear over to the Fate Maker and not think twice about the consequences to other people. ”
“Then it’s a good thing that this is our quest and not hers then, isn’t it?” I reached for a book—A History of Dragon Lore. That looked promising. I flipped it open and started looking for any mentions of the tear. “Dragon Creation Myths,” “Dragon’s Fire,” “Magical Properties of Dragon Scales.” Nope. “Myths and Legends of Treasure”? Now, that could be interesting.
I flipped through the book to the beginning of that section and started to skim through the text. There, halfway down. The word “Tear.” That was it. I skimmed a few more pages. Nothing more than a mention of the Dragon’s Tear. No description of what it was or what it could do.
“This isn’t helpful,” I said as I slid the book back onto the shelf. There had to be some way to narrow it down from the hundreds of books in section four. “I need to find something, anything, about the Dragon’s Tear. Please, whatever stars rule this world, help me find something useful.”
The world around me started to buzz. The air hummed like bees inside my ears and the hair on my arms and on the back of my neck prickled.
“Your Majesty?” Kitsuna’s voice sounded far away. “What’s…”
The shelf in front of me started to fade out and I could see a faint light glowing as the whole shelf seemed to waver like a mirage. Behind that shimmery image I could see another shelf, this one hidden behind the first, and there, directly in front of me, was a thick book bound in royal-blue leather. Just like the Chronicles of Nerissette had been when I’d first seen it in the World That Is.
The book seemed to float, levitating above the shelf, and I reached out, plucking it down. Once it was flat in my hand the book flung itself open, the pages flipping rapidly on their own. Suddenly the book stopped moving, and I looked down at two pages. One of them held a portrait of a woman on a throne and the other was filled with text. The Dragon’s Tear was across the top in large letters.
“Hey, Kit, I think I might have something. ‘The Dragon’s Tear is said to give its owner the power to imprison their enemies, to hold the fates of every person and thing in Nerissette in the palm of their hand. A magical talisman, its purpose is to temporarily melt the barrier between the World That Is and the World of Dreams.’”
“That certainly sounds like a portal,” Kitsuna said. “Does it have a picture? And where did that come from anyway? It’s like a magic book just appeared in your hands.”
“Maybe.” I stared at the other page, at the portrait printed there, ignoring the bit about magic. These days I would have been surprised if there wasn’t some sort of weird magic involved in all of this.
A woman in the same coronation dress I’d worn three months ago was sitting on the Rose Throne, my crown sitting on top her head. She wore a crystal necklace and held a twisted wooden staff with a glass dome on top, no bigger than a golf ball, and a silver leaf floating in the center of the glass.
“Okay.” Kitsuna took the book from me. “What in here looks like it could be the relic?”
“That glass ball.” I pointed at it. “I bet that’s a relic.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think it’s the tear. Not dragon-y enough.”
“You’ve got a point. So what else could it be then?”
“No idea.” Kitsuna shook her head. “What else is in this picture that speaks to you? What else feels like it could be a relic? Specifically a dragon-related relic.”
I took the book back and studied the picture, trying to find something, anything, that might be a relic.
“The necklace?” Kitsuna pointed to the trinket the woman in the portrait was wearing around her neck.
I leaned closer and scrutinized it. The Golden Rose in the picture was wearing the necklace the dragons had given me at my coronation. Winston had put it on me himself. The necklace wasn’t lost—it was in my jewelry box. But the bracelet…
“What about that?” I pointed to the queen’s hand and Kitsuna took the book from me, bringing it up close to her face.
“Are those dragons?”
“They look like dragons to me,” I said. “Each of them is biting the tail of the one in front of it.”
“Someone biting my butt would make me cry,” Kitsuna said. “Nice, big, fat tears.”
“Not to mention a bracelet goes around your—”
“Hand,” Kitsuna and I said at the same time.
“So, crying dragons circling a hand… If I was a magic sorceress looking to make a relic called the Dragon’s Tear that holds fate in the palm of your hand, then that’s what I’d go for,” I said. “What about you?”