Gemstone Wyverns

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Book excerpt

Chapter 1

"Legend says a wyvern talker will claim this diamond and assume the crown from the Guardians as the true King of Alsace."

Josh piped up before thinking. "I'm a wyvern talker!"

Schoolmaster Saltpeter threw his head back and laughed. "Those wyrms you raise, boy, aren't worth the meat you can pick off their bones! They're not real wyverns."

His schoolmates laughed too, and Josh felt his face turn red.

"Can't it be a queen?" Alyson said, her hands on her hips, her scowl on her face. She was the class beauty—and a castle brat.

The schoolmaster cleared his throat and adjusted his monocle. "Well, er, I suppose …"

"This doesn't even look like a diamond!" Josh said dismissively.

"Well, I suppose he'll first have to transform the uncut rock into a beautiful jewel," Saltpeter said, frowning.

Josh pulled a white crystal from his pocket and concentrated, shining the crystal's light on the dull stone in the display case.

The raw rock under the glass glittered between dull edges with the brilliance of the diamond underneath. He felt its draw as a bit of vertigo touched him …

"Josh, watch out!"

Startled, he stopped himself from falling.

Schoolmaster Saltpeter clopped Alyson on the back of her head.

"Hey!" A tiny emerald on a chain popped out of her hand.

"What'd I tell you about using your gemstone during class?"

"But we're on a field trip! And he used his!" Alyson pointed at Josh.

"But not on another student. Now, behave, or you'll fail the assignment."

Josh giggled. I should have sensed she was making me dizzy, he thought, wondering why his protective turquoise stone hadn't alerted him.

Schoolmaster Saltpeter cleared his throat. "Now, as I was saying about the diamond—"

"Just a legend," Tony interrupted gruffly. A sullen youth with dirt-blond hair, he was the son of Guardian William Kingstead, and the heir apparent. "There hasn't been a real king in two hundred years."

"Er, uh, indeed, uh, and the guardians have done well to fend off trouble." Grimacing, the schoolmaster ran his finger around his collar. "But the ancient teachings are clear. Only a wyvern talker with a white diamond of highest purity and clarity may rule over Alsace. And only this diamond has that potential." He beamed, looking over the group of adolescents. "Enough of this, in the next chamber …" And he headed toward the door.

Josh lingered, looking among the tapestries in the main hall of Alsace Castle, each depicting a deceased king. Light streamed in through a huge, oval stained-glass window. The tapestry adjacent to the diamond display case was of King Harold the Third, behind him a wild wyvern, thrice his height, its wings too wide to fit on the background. King Harold the third had died peacefully in his sleep two hundred and thirty years ago, and his wyvern, a roan-colored beast named Canticle, had died a day later. Upon Harold's death, his fist-size emerald had evaporated in a cloud of green smoke, and no one with a large gemstone and tamed wyvern had stepped forward to take his place since.

A large gemstone and a tamed wyvern, either one daunting to think about.

Looking at the highly intelligent face of the wyvern, Josh wondered, if I could talk to you, what would you say?

His father raised the domesticated strain of wyvern, the wyrms not much taller than Josh himself. Wyrms rarely spoke more than two words running, their conversation dull and simple. Unlike most people, Josh understood their every word.

Doesn't that make me a wyvern-talker? he wondered, sighing and looking at the diamond again, remembering everyone's laughter.

A wyrm rancher is all that'll ever make me.

The stained glass window exploded inward, and wings opened with a pop like a parachute, spreading halfway across the chamber.

Josh instinctively dropped and rolled.

The wyvern settled on the floor—a wild wyvern, at least as large as the one in the tapestry. "Break the glass for me, boy!" She was mottled orange and white, the long spines of her majestic crest as long as his forearm. Her hot breath stank of sulfur and brine, and the scales on her upper body grated against each other like stone on stone. She towered over him and could have smashed him flat with her bulk without thinking.

"Nnn, nnn, no, I can't." Josh felt his hands reach for his belt of their own accord. "Don't make me!" he protested, trying to resist the compulsion. Despite his resistance, the belt came out and swung around, and the buckle struck the glass, shattering it.

"In time, you'll know the service you've rendered." Great claws large enough to crush his chest enveloped the raw diamond, and the wings flapped, lifting the creature.

The wyvern released him, and Josh reached for his amethyst.

"Don't, boy," the wyvern said, hovering, "lest you incur my wrath!" And she flew in a tight circle just under the rafters.

"Drop that, you beast!" Tony called, rushing in, a spear in hand.

The wyvern threw herself toward the demolished window and rolled into a ball. Josh threw himself at Tony as Tony threw the spear.

The spear point caught the hind flank but ripped out on the window frame, and Josh and Tony tumbled to the floor, a short wyvern shriek the last they heard of the beast.

"What the wyrm are you doing?" Rough hands pulled him off Tony and held him high off the ground. Guardian William poked his red face into Josh's. "I saw you throw yourself at Tony!"

Josh flinched from the spittle.

"I would've skewered that wyvern if he hadn't messed up my aim," Tony bawled, rubbing his fists in his eyes.

The Guardian looked at the shattered glass display case where the diamond had stood mounted for over a hundred years. "Is that your belt?"

"He broke the glass with it to help the wyvern!" Tony wailed. "I saw him."

"But … but …"

"But, nothing! You'll rot in the dungeons until you're dead! Guards!"

And despite his protests, they hauled him off, took him deep into the bowels of the castle, threw him into a cold dark cell, and slammed the door closed.

"In time, you'll know the service you've rendered," the wyvern had said.

Service to whom? Josh asked the bitter dark, weeping in despair.

#

In her castle suite, Constance Whipplethorpe caught something out of the corner of her eye. "Tis the castlechild Alyson, If I be not mistaken."

A sapphire the size of a thumb was mounted on the end of a staff as crooked as she was. Often called the sapphire of time, the stone might be used to divine both future and past. Where truth was murky, the sapphire wielder might plumb what happened and reveal a truth where the deceiver had shrunk the momentous or enlarged the minute.

The giggle from behind the bookshelf announced the girl's presence better than any glimpse.

"As I thought," Constance said, looking twice her eighty years, bent over with such great age she might have had a hunchback. "So, quite the events this afternoon, eh? Not often a wyvern crashes through a window and steals a stone from under the very noses of those intending to keep it safe. Not often at all!"

The girl peeked out. "Why's a stupid diamond so important?"

"A hundred ten years ago, a raw diamond the size of a human heart was dug from the base of a mountain and enshrined under glass," Whipplethorpe said, pausing dramatically to throw a glance toward Alyson. "Legends grew of a wyvern talker who would one day claim the raw stone, and with the help of a beast the size of the one who purloined the stone today, seize the throne and rule Alsace with a sure and mighty hand!"

"It's not even a pretty stone," the girl said.

"It was about time for your weekly visit when no one else was looking, eh?" Constance said, pushing up her spectacles and brushing her hair away from her face. Her coif was a spider web but for tangles and matting that no spider would live with.

Alyson frowned. "You're not answering my question, are you?" Then she grinned. "But you will soon enough."

Spritely grin she has, Constance thought, and so pretty in that yellow chiffon dress. Whipplethorpe's clothes were drab and threadbare, held together with stitches and spit. This girl is so unlike the stern father and the prim, precise mother. I’ve a feeling she'll become so unlike either, Constance thought, that neither will know what to do with her.

"It's happening already," Alyson said.

Little thief lifted the thought from my mind without my knowing it! "Where’d you learn that, you little imp? I didn’t even feel it. Oh, I forgot. Your mother got you that diamond last year, didn’t she? Had no idea the trouble you’d get the rest of us into, either. Step closer, Castlechild." Constance removed her spectacles and let them hang from their chain.

The tome in her lap closed by itself, sensing it went unread. It would open again at the same page if she looked at it for more than a minute. In between the books behind her, the shelves were stacked with gewgaws and gim-tricks, trinkets and teasers, puzzles and pop-snicks. An atlas had a spinning globe on its spine, the cover of a potions manual bubbled, a book of chants hummed a sonnet to itself, and an obscure compendium of arcane spells scrambled its title so no one could find it.

"Give me your hands, Alyson," Constance said, looking the child over. When she realized that the child stood taller than she was sitting, putting her gaze on a not inconsiderable bosom, Constance looked up. "Well, perhaps you should pull a chair. No, no, not that one, it’ll object to being sat upon and likely leave you on the floor. Yes, that one's much better."

Eyes now level with—acknowledge it, she told herself—the young woman, Whipplethorpe smiled. "Yes, I’d agree that even now your parents are a bit bewildered as to your future."

"I’m not. I want to be a sorceress like you!"

Constance chuckled, flattered, and then she pulled her staff between them, the sapphire of time mounted upon it. "Tis a curse and a blessing, you know."

"A curse? How could it ever be a curse?"

"To have the power to look back in time as this sapphire helps me to do means being asked to use it, and sometimes for nefarious purposes. Guardian William calls on me to look into the past, and sometimes demands I tell him the future."

"You can see the future?" The girl looked more in awe than before.

Blast me, this is backfiring, Constance thought. "Having it means being asked to use it, and sometimes, when I use this power, I’m taxed to fatigue, so exhausted I simply must rest. For you know that the excessive use can cause problems, yes?"

Alyson frowned. "What kind of problems?"

"Ill health, the wasting disease, and even the catatonia." She raised her voice. "The catatonia. Have you ever seen the catatonia?"

She shook her head, red curls rustling against her shoulders.

Constance smiled. "I hope you never do. The sapphire of time would like nothing better than to invite your soul into its timelessness and keep you there forever, while your body lives imprisoned in the forward march of time, never moving, oh yes, breathing, but not eating, not talking, not seeing, not thinking. Wasting away until you expire from neglect. Every time I use this stone, I risk losing my mind in time."

She saw the girl’s gaze narrow. Good, she thought. "For now, child, your focus needs to be on strengthening both mind and body. You’re doing well in fencing and hand-to-hand combat, I hear, but you’re not so attentive to your maths and physics." Constance waited for the girl’s response.

Alyson looked thoughtful.

"Something else on your mind?"

"My parents intend me to marry Tony, don’t they?"

Constance’s silence betrayed that they did. "Not to your liking?"

"He pulls wings off dragonflies and chops up worms to see them squirm."

"Cruelty can be softened with time and attention. Anthony would benefit if someone were to devote those to him."

"What do you know about wyrm ranching?"

This child baffles me sometimes, Constance thought. Difficult to know what she’s thinking. "Ah, I’d forgotten the field trip to that ranch last month. You’re worried about the boy, Josh?"

"Tony lied about what happened."

"What possible motivation would he have for doing that?"

"He heard Josh, too, heard him talking."

"Talking? What do you mean?"

"To the wyvern."

Constance was silent. She’d heard about it, but wasn’t inclined to believe it.

Not now. Not after the raw diamond had been stolen by a wyvern. And the wyvern to whom this boy Josh had supposedly been talking, no less. It reminded Constance too much of the old legend, a legend she’d dismissed long ago. No one talked with wyverns anymore.

"How do you recharge your sapphire?"

Pesky child, Constance thought, asking so many questions. "A perilous endeavor, requiring cunning and forethought. Elusive creatures they are, the wyvern, rarely coming down—"

"What have the wyverns to do with recharging?"

"The wyrms raised by Josh's father can give that little diamond around your neck the charge it needs to use it a dozen times or so, but to recharge a stone the size of that raw diamond requires a wyvern. What do you suppose would happen if you tried to recharge a stone like my sapphire with a wyrm?"

"I don’t know." Alyson shrugged.

"You’d kill the wyrm, and not have much use of the stone for all your efforts. No, a wyvern is needed to recharge my sapphire. As I was saying, elusive creatures, rarely coming down from their mountain eyrie except to attack the wyrm herds and castles and burn our crops and homes. A scourge, they are, and if we had to give up the stones to be rid of the wyvern then so be it, for the terror they put into us has shortened many a life." Constance realized she was sweating, the memories of many wyvern attacks fresh in her mind.

"Anyway, what I do is take a wyrm to an outcrop and chain it there, rig a loop of thin rope around it, tied to a springy sapling bent all the way over, and when the wyvern drops to snatch up its favorite food, I spring the trap. Now that of course is when they get dangerous, for the wyvern is likely to scorch anything in sight, including the rope I’ve used to tether it to the largest rock I can find. Before I was much good at it, I’d use too small a rock and they’d just fly away, the rock dangling by the rope.

"Now here’s the tricky part. You’ve got to get the wyvern to swallow the gemstone to charge it fully. They’re like a tinderbox inside, full of explosive gasses, but somehow the gemstones either absorb all that explosive energy or neutralize it or catalyze it, and soon as it’s charged, the byrd will vomit the gemstone back up. While you’re there, you should gather a little of the emesis, as its properties are helpful with elixirs and potions. Look, I’ve got a vial here someplace." Constance groped her ample person and finally alighted on a fold in her stomach.

The glass vial glowed, the swirling green liquid looking alive. "Never use more than a drop, I’ve found. Made a potion once for a man who was having some difficulty pleasing his wife, and after the first batch didn’t take, I used two drops in the second and he walked around all of a year bulging painfully wherever he turned."

Alyson giggled.

"Now child, you’re too young to be thinking such stuff but it exemplifies the need to be careful what you concoct." Constance felt a bit warm, remembering the months of joy her husband had brought her after that, not wanting to say so to the innocent child in front of her.

A distant shout startled her from her reveries.

"What was that?"

The shout was repeated and bells began to ring.

"Wyvern attack!" Alyson said, darting for the door.

"Stop, child!" Constance called after her, too late already and she too large and too slow a stop a quick little girl like her.