Hero

“HE’S ALIVE!”

The witch’s familiar burst out from behind a still-standing column, a flurry of black wings. Cwyn’s usual perch had been upset by the quaking, so she flew once around the room and landed on Betwixt’s giant head. The chimera snapped at the mischievous raven.

Now that Cwyn could see the room, so could the witch: she used the bird’s eyes as her own to move about the caves. The witch had summoned the bird in the mad wake of her blindness for just this purpose. Peregrine had worried about being found out, but this secondhand sight was less than perfect. Even better, the witch had a new obsession to distract her from sensing that her daughter no longer shared her demon blood.

“JACK WOODCUTTER!” The witch stood in the archway, eye sockets gaping blank holes in her pale blue face, a contrast to her pink, gaping mouth.

“That scoundrel again? I will summon him directly and order him to clean this up.” Peregrine had found that jesting and teasing were the best way to converse with the witch. Betwixt had found that the best way was not conversing at all.

The witch blamed everything on Jack Woodcutter, from burned hair to errant farts, so this conclusion did not surprise Peregrine. Jack was the only human he’d ever known to venture this far up into the White Mountains by choice. The witch had captured Jack and forced him to complete her list of impossible chores. Jack had repaid her by stealing her eyes. Peregrine had helped Jack escape her clutches and disappear back down the treacherous mountainside.

Oh, what fun that had been. It felt like a million years ago and only yesterday that Jack had left them. Peregrine had no way of knowing if the bravely stupid man had survived, but he hoped so. He wished Jack well in his adventures. He did miss the company, but not more than he treasured his immortality.

The witch did not glare at him with her hollowed sockets as she might have looked at him with eyes, but Peregrine could feel Cwyn’s unyielding stare. “Snip-snap-snurre-basselure! No man alive could shake the bones of the earth so, except him. That rascal stole my eyes! I will have them back!”

Peregrine went about the business of resetting the room to rights, demonstrating to the witch just how seriously he considered her histrionics. “You haven’t found Jack in all this time, Mother. What makes you think you’ll locate him now?”

“Shivers and shimmies! Every earthquake has a center. Jack is at that center. I’d bet my eyes on it.”

Peregrine was tempted to take that bet. “Even if he is, how do you propose to find him? Betwixt isn’t exactly in any shape to travel.”

The chimera in question feigned sleep on the hearth. The snakehound’s eyes were closed, but Peregrine marked his still, shallow breaths. Betwixt was the only one among them who could descend the mountain unaided, albeit perilously, and only when he was in a form that afforded him both wings and skin thick enough to withstand the unbearable cold. Peregrine had seen Betwixt assume a form like that only once. He wasn’t yearning to see it again anytime soon.

“I will cast a spell,” said the witch.

“Of course you will, Mother. How silly of me.”

“Yes, you are! A silly girl, I always say.” The witch was hit-or-miss when it came to spellcasting, but it was her favorite hobby. She kept at it every day, siphoning off the sleeping dragon’s magic, trying to open a portal back to the demon world from whence she’d come. She rarely succeeded in doing much more than infusing light into stone or summoning strange magic objects from afar. Once, she’d succeeded in making the cave walls taste like cake. Peregrine missed that particular spell, stomachache or no.

The witch’s spellcasting lair and bedchambers were a series of caves very close to the dragon’s tomb—proximity to the dragon boosted a spell’s power, for better or worse. Every spell she cast drained her physically—the stronger the attempted spell, the quieter she was afterward. She often retired directly to the adjacent room, when she didn’t pass out in front of the cauldron. If she was deep enough into a spell, she could waver indefinitely between the lair and her bedchambers, disappearing for rather notable lengths of time. This could go very well or very badly for Peregrine and Betwixt. Possibly both.

“I’ll need a map for the scrying,” she said. “East and west. West and east, and always south.”

The whole of the world was south of here; she could mean anywhere. “They’re in the library,” answered Peregrine. “I’ll fetch one for you.” He didn’t want the witch anywhere near that particular cave.

“Thank you, my silly green darling.” Idly, the witch scratched the dark blue stumps of her horns beneath her hair. “We’ll go prepare.” Cwyn launched herself off the rocks to fly back down the tu

The “library” housed the few precious scrolls Peregrine had collected from the witch’s hoard . . . and from the skeletons of those who’d met with the dragon once upon a time and hadn’t lived to tell the tale. There were some spells but more maps, all with vague descriptions of how to reach the dragon’s treasure using tu

Peregrine and Betwixt took their time journeying up to the small, out-of-the-way alcove. Betwixt’s great hound’s feet slipped on the steep path, which made for slow going. Peregrine had selected this particular niche for its dry warmth, its proximity to the dragon’s lair, and its difficulty to reach. Betwixt often had a hard time getting there while sporting particularly large shapes, or aspects without wings. Peregrine was only forced to bow his head to avoid the low ceiling, and watch his knees on the knobby floor.

He slipped off his soft boots, lit the library’s lantern from his torch, and then scrubbed the torch out against the rough, pitted ceiling. “There were a few maps of the continents that I recall . . .” Peregrine muttered. He set the lantern on the gnome-shaped icerock pedestal beside the piles of books and papers with a “Thanks, Old Man.”

Betwixt sniffed from pile to pile, sneezing at some particularly old documents and rendering them into dust. “Oops.”

“It’s okay. That one was Trollish. I never could read it. I put all the maps over on this side, but I thought I had separated out the ones that weren’t just of the mountain . . . yes, here.” He gently unfolded a large, wide sheepskin sailing map of the three continents, with the ocean between them. Above the ocean, at the highest point of the map, a star marked the Top of the World. The shadows on the wall bent over to examine the work of art with him. Whoever had created this map had been quite the traveler. Before seeing this, Peregrine had had no sense of exactly how large the world was.

“You’re not going to give her that one, are you?” There was a growl in the chimera’s voice. “She’ll probably just destroy it.”

“I know.” The map itself didn’t matter; Peregrine had long since memorized it and every other scrap of vellum and skin he’d collected here. But holding the thing gave him some wistful measure of hope, reminding him that there was still so much of the world yet to see.

“Copy it on the wall, here,” Betwixt rattled his tail at an odd blank space to the left of the niche’s entrance. “For safekeeping.”

As long as the dragon slept on, as it had for centuries, everything here at the Top of the World would be safely kept. And if the dragon ever woke . . . well . . . there would be nothing left worth keeping.

Peregrine took up a sizeable chunk of charred coal. On the right side of the alcove’s opening were hash marks he had begun making when he’d first discovered this place, both drawn and scored with a knife, in an effort to mark the passage of time. Eventually he’d tired of the exercise and progressed to more productive things like bettering his artistic abilities, or teaching himself how to play the silver flute he’d found on a wispy old skeleton of unknown origin.