Dragon Gifts: Chapter Twelve
It was a crisp autumn day and the sky was that odd blue gray haze, the sort that was not quite cloudy and not quite clear, but some subtle blend of both. Fortunately, the sun took away the worst of the chill. She didn’t even really need a jacket, though her aunt had somehow managed to magic one onto her before pushing her out the door. She surveyed the yard from the doorway, looking straight out across the yard and into the fields and woods beyond. She was careful not to look down into the garden, lest she be faced with the evidence of the attack so soon. The leaves were changing colors rapidly now, past reds and yellows and into brown, and there wasn’t a green leaf left in sight. She took a slow deep breath, letting that cool dry air into her lungs. This was the kind of air that made you feel alive, nothing like the air back home, full of car exhaust and God knows what else. It braced her against the sight in front of her, the one she was trying so hard to avoid.
Now that it was daylight, even three days after the fact, the evidence of the attack was everywhere she looked. It was there in every crushed plant, in every every bent or shattered post of the once tidy fence, and in the bare patches of dirt that had once been covered with lush grass. The thought that if she looked too closely she might see the remains of the dragons they killed brought her head back up with a jerk. She didn’t regret that she hadn’t been there to help dispose of the bodies. She wasn’t normally squeamish about blood, but it was different, somehow, when she knew she was to blame. It wasn’t as if she’d made a habit of it. Bruises and scrapes were a far cry from a sword thrust to the heart.
She pushed off the doorstep, letting the door slam behind her, and stepped across the yard in just a few strides. She had it in mind to head for the forest on the other side of the lane, to let her feet guide her path. Distance was the important thing now. Just thinking about the attack had set her mind on fire, and it was becoming hard to think. Something about the shade up ahead told her that she’d find peace there. She was halfway there when a crack in the grass behind her stopped her in her tracks. She spun around just in time to see Tristan coming up behind her. He wasn’t looking at the sights, but scouring the horizon, one hand on his sword hilt. He looked a little nervous, but when he caught her looking at him, he put on what he probably thought was his most serious face. It looked ridiculous on him, more of a pout than a manly scowl.
She waited until he’d caught up and pried his hand loose from the hilt with an effort. He’d been gripping that sword for dear life. “I liked you better when you were a little more carefree,” she told him. “This new side of you is coming across as a little forced.”
He glared at her, but when she let go of his hand, he let it drop to his side. “I could have gotten us killed messing around. I nearly got you killed, didn’t I?”
“You were hardly ‘messing around,’” Gina protested. “And besides, it wasn’t your fault that the yard was too small. So what if the dragon toppled into my path? He was easy enough to dispatch and he worked well as a way to buy me some space.”
“I meant after that,” Tristan mumbled.
Gina had to think hard. The pain surprised her, and she had to stop from putting a hand up to feel if the gash had reappeared. Things were still a little jumbled in her head, and she was only just starting to put the pieces back in order. “Wait, you mean when I pulled you out of the way?” she asked at last.
Tristan nodded.
“But that’s why I was able to hit him!” Gina exclaimed. “He overreached trying to get you. You were the perfect distraction.”
“Really?” Tristan asked. He blinked once in surprise, perhaps expecting it to be a joke, but when he saw that she really meant it, he noticeably brightened and stood a little straighter. Under other circumstances, he might not have been that happy about being relegated to decoy, but Gina realized that he needed this reassurance in whatever form it took. If it was a small one, at least it was more believable to his ears.
When she started for the forest again, he ran up to join her and they walked side by side, him with new confidence, her with a new found hesitation to her step. Far from being a nuisance, she had reason to be grateful for his company. A tiny corner in the back of her brain wasn’t so sure that this had been the best idea. There really wasn’t anything to stop the dragons from coming back to finish the job, and if she and Tristan were out here all by their lonesome, they’d be easy to pick off with no one the wiser. Little by little, the trees sprung up around them until they were in the forest proper, and she found herself pulled by some dim memory to a forgotten path buried beneath the leaves. There were parts of the forest around here that never got any real sunlight, and she had a feeling that it would be nearly impossible to navigate safely in the dark. It was cooler, too, and she hugged her jacket closer around her chest. A set of hat and gloves would not go amiss right now. She was about to call a halt and retrace their steps when their path took them into a familiar clearing. There, high up in the branches of an ancient oak tree, were the remains of an old tree house.
“I remember this,” Gina murmured. She ran to the base of the tree and clambered up the side, careful not to put her weight on the rope ladder still swinging enticingly from the branches. There was no telling what damage the years had done to it. She reached the sturdy branch that the tree house rested on in no time at all and perched next to it so that she could peer into the tree house’s windows in relative safety. The wood seemed sound, but she had reason to fear that the extra weight she carried around with her these days might do irreparable harm to its dainty construction. She smiled down at Tristan, still standing there on the ground and waved at him happily. It really wasn’t that high up after all, and she was fairly certain she could leap down from here without a problem. It had seemed so much higher when she was a girl. It was funny how a little change like gaining a few inches could rearrange her perceptions.
“Do you remember when our dads made this?” she yelled down happily.
“Of course I do,” Tristan shouted back. “They argued over the plans for days.”
“And then my mum made us picnic baskets full of snacks for us to pull up with a rope. We’d sit up here for hours and play.” Gina reached through the window and pulled out a small wooden box. Inside were all her old treasures, carefully wrapped just the way she’d left them. Little pieces of cloth, pebbles that she’d thought looked pretty, tin soldiers and a handful of feathers. She looked at Tristan in surprise. “I can’t believe this is still here.”
“After you left, no one wanted to play in the tree fort anymore. Jason and Terry were getting too old for it anyway, at that point, and I didn’t feel like playing by myself. Daniel was only a baby then.”
The sunlight streamed down to warm her face, and the dappled light played about the fallen leaves on the ground below. The peace she felt here was nearly overwhelming in its power. Already, most of the stress was ebbing away, as well as most of the pain.
“Are you going to stay up there?” Tristan asked. “I can’t climb trees, or I’d join you.”
Gina eyed the ground and made her leap. She was feeling rather bold today, and there was no time like the present to test her theories. The shock of her landing as she hit the ground stung a little, but she shook it off and grinned at Tristan’s startled face. “You live on a manor in the English countryside, surrounded by thousands of trees and you can’t climb any of them? Tristan, this is terrible news. How did this happen?”
“Do you have a lot of trees in the city?” he shot back. “I seem to recall that you weren’t always so comfortable with heights.”
Gina winced. It was true. Getting her up in the tree house at all the first time had been a real team effort, and she’d only been able to tolerate it by carefully avoiding the windows. Over time, she’d gotten bolder about it, but the fear had never completely subsided. Until now. She looked up at the tree house in disbelief. She’d jumped down from that height? What had she been thinking? And where had she learned to climb trees? There weren’t that many to be found in the middle of a city, after all, unless she counted Central Park, and her mother had never taken her there.
“I think I’d better keep on the ground from here on out,” she said, a little shaky now. Her head was aching something fierce again, this time threatening to turn into a full blown migraine. She hoped she hadn’t managed to reopen the gash on her head with all her leaping about. She concentrated on the source of the pain and willed it away. For the most part, it seemed to work, until she was left with a dull throb.
“Yes, perhaps you had. Mother will kill me if I let anything happen to you.”
“So you are babysitting me,” Gina said. She waited to see if he’d deny it, but when he didn’t, she let it slide. She’d expected as much, anyway, and he didn’t show any signs of resenting the task. She was glad of a little company now and again, and he made a pleasant companion.
She picked up a branch and swung it experimentally. It broke apart in a shower of splinters when it hit the oak tree and she found herself rummaging through the undergrowth for something a little sturdier. She found a good stout lump of wood that she thought would do the trick, but halfway through the thought, her mind froze and she dropped it again as though it burned her hands. She’d been looking for a weapon, she realized. She pushed the thought out of her mind, but she was already planning alternative strategies. It’s seven paces to the rope ladder, she thought, and there’s a rock behind my foot with a good heft to it. When she realized what she was doing, she stopped and jammed her hands in her pockets. It was eerie the way things were going today. She kept finding herself doing things before she even had a chance to properly think about it, but maybe it was a normal reaction under the circumstances. She’d been attacked twice, both in places that she’d thought were safe. Was she over thinking the problem? Maybe she just needed to let her mind wander and do what it wanted for a while. She kicked at a pile of leaves and watched them float in the breeze before they settled again at her feet. At least the scenery was peaceful enough.
“What do you do for fun around here?” she asked, hoping for an easy distraction to the buzzing in her brain. Stop plotting ways to take him out, she scolded herself. That’s your cousin you’re thinking about.
Tristan shrugged. “Not much. We don’t have a telly or anything like that, and mum and dad never really encouraged us to have any friends from the outside. We play board games sometimes after dinner, or do picture puzzles. I read a lot and help Daniel with his projects or his homework. Nanna saved quite a few books from the fire, so I study those when I get the chance.”
Gina made a face. She wasn’t the quiet sit at home type, and she read too fast to find books very entertaining. She couldn’t even remember doing a jigsaw puzzle before, and she and her mother weren’t really the board game type. “No offense, but that all sounds incredibly boring.”
“So what did you do back in New York?” Tristan asked.
Gina tried to think back. There wasn’t really much that she’d considered “fun.” She and her mother had played a fair amount of cribbage, and a little poker on the side with some of the others in the apartment complex, but that was mostly to pass the time. Did chess count as a board game? She’d played a little in the after school program in middle school. She’d been decent enough at it, but she doubted that her fellow students had made the most challenging opponents, and she hadn’t kept it up. “I rode my bike, went for runs around the local park, caught a movie or two when it hit the theaters. Sometimes I watched TV. You know, that sort of thing.” She shuffled her feet through the leaves and listened to the pleasant rustling sound it made. She was not envisioning how easy it would be to use them to trip an opponent. She wasn’t. Honest. She had to keep him talking, to keep herself distracted if nothing else.
“Did you leave behind a lot of friends?”
“That depends on your definition of friends. There were a lot of kids I looked after, but most of them were younger than me. I don’t make friends easily with kids my own age. I found most of them very foolish, and I think they knew how I felt.”
“That sounds lonely,” Tristan said. “That just leaves you and your mum.”
“Is it any lonelier than being cooped up here?” Gina asked. “At least I had my mother, and not all my teachers were horrible, just very demanding. Apparently they thought I was a bit of a problem child, too smart for my own good and too lazy to apply myself. There was always at least one teacher every year that thought he or she would be the one to make me see the light. I had a lot of fun breaking them in.”
“You? Lazy? I don’t believe it. You’ve thrown yourself into everything my parents sent your way with hardly a second thought.”
Gina shook her head. “You can’t count simple self preservation. I can pull my act together if it’s life or death, but back home, just getting by was hard enough. Your mum’s right, you know, about me and school. I got it into my head that good grades would get me singled out and bullied. Stupid, right? Like anyone was going to look past my thorny exterior long enough to notice anything else. I mean, c’mon, I was the one that went stalking around the school and trouncing all those bullies in the first place. On the other hand, my teachers had this crazy idea that just because I was smart, I should put my brains to something useful. Makes you wonder what they’d think of me now. I doubt this is what they had in mind.”
“I guess so.” Tristan didn’t appear to be convinced. He had that familiar look to him, the one she saw every time she rescued some kid back home. Hero worship. Great.
Gina decided to switch gears. She had a sudden urge to throw him off balance and try and put a backbone into him, and she knew just the way to do it. “I couldn’t help but notice that your archery got much better once your uncle and your brothers went back to the house after our practice. So good, in fact, that I have to wonder if you aren’t the best of the bunch after all, no matter how good Jason might be with a bow. What’s that about? Don’t want to be singled out?”
“That’s completely different,” Tristan protested. He looked away, but not before she saw his face turn bright red. She didn’t need that to tell that she was on the right track.
“Is it, now. Sounds pretty lazy to me.”
Tristan’s eyes flashed, but she cut him off before he could say a word. “Let’s see. I think I know how this one goes. I don’t know if I could stand being second best at something I loved and know I’d never get better no matter how hard I tried. Does that sound at all familiar?” Tristan stared at her open mouthed and she knew she was on the right track. “Well, that’s not going to be you, at least not for long. Look, your brother’s an amazing archer. I’d almost believe he could do that blind folded, but when I saw him fight last night, I realized that he can’t adapt. Twice, he almost got himself killed because the dragon facing him fought in a way that Jason wasn’t expecting. He was defending against blows that never came or stepping into attacks he never saw coming. I bet he has the same problem when bow shooting.”
Tristan didn’t seem pleased at the slights she made against Jason, but he didn’t actually try to cut her off. Maybe he was actually listening to what she had to say. Or maybe he was too mad or too stunned to come up with a proper come back. She had a feeling she knew what the most likely scenario was. At least mad was better than that pathetic puddle he’d tried to turn into just a short time ago. Gina rolled her eyes and started walking back the way they’d come, forcing Tristan to hurry after her. “Promise me you’ll actually try next time we practice, and I promise you that I’ll try paying attention in class for once if I ever get back to Mrs. Mercer’s twelfth grade science class, but that’s my best offer. The rest of my teachers can go to hell.”
Tristan licked his lips and stuck his own hands in his pockets. “Mum says that you saved my brother’s life. You saved mine anyway.”
Gina glanced at him in surprise. Why was he bringing this up now? “You don’t have to worry that I might think you leaked my secret,” Gina assured him. “Your father is a very suspicious man. Fortunately for your brother, he was right.” She must have guessed correctly, because the rest of the tension he’d been carrying with him seemed to fade away.
They came to the edge of the forest more quickly than she’d thought possible, and she picked up speed again, heading directly for the cottage. She hoped that she’d dealt with whatever was eating Tristan. She had business to attend to, after all, and some fresh ideas to discuss. If the dragons thought she’d lie down at their feet and die, they had another thing coming.