Dragon Mage

  The attic had intrigued Shilo though, with all of its boxes, barrels, and unusual objects arranged in no discernible pattern. She'd thought she might like to poke around in it sometime. She just hadn't intended for that time to be now. She shivered at the thought of going up there in the dark, searching for whoever was talking. It was like something out of a Stephen King movie.

  "Don't go up there alone," she whispered, as if she were giving advice to a character in a horror film. "The monster's upstairs and it'll get you." Like said movie character, she ignored the warning.

  Shilo reached for the door handle just as thunder boomed and the lights flickered on. She let out a great sigh of relief and turned off the flashlight. She hoped the power would stay on, but she intended to take the flashlight up with her—just in case.

  The door opened, the hinges complaining with an ominous squeal, and each step creaked as she went up. Shilo didn't think there was an inch of floor in the entire building that didn't creak or groan in protest when she stepped on it. Halfway up the stairs she stretched and barely reached the string that dangled down from a bare lightbulb. She tugged it carefully; the string had several knots in it—evidence it had been pulled too hard in the past and had snapped as a result.

  The light came on and spiders skittered to the shadowy edges of their webs. She could smell the oldness of this place, in the wood of the building itself and in all the things stored here. The smell was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but it settled firmly in her nose, and she swore she could taste the staleness.

  "Sigurd . . . Sigurd Clawhand."

  Shilo froze. This is so very much not a good idea, she thought. "Don't go up there alone," she repeated. But she took another creaking step, and then another, the string from the lightbulb brushing her forehead and making her jump. She nearly lost her footing and took a tumble. Grabbing the rail with her free hand, she noticed that she was trembling all over and that her breath came unevenly. Her chest felt tight and her tongue felt thick, and she swallowed to try to work up some moisture.

  She should wait for Meemaw and Grandfather to come back from their precious fish boil and get them to come up here with her. They could all search together for the whiskey-voiced woman who called for someone named Sigurd. The name sounded . . . Norse, she decided, like Ragnor and Leif and Jarli. She should wait.

  Shilo sucked in a deep breath and continued up the stairs, cringing at each creak of the wood and telling herself she wasn't a frightened girl. She was fifteen years old, an age that was considered an adult in some cultures. An adult wouldn't he afraid to go into the attic on a stormy night, she thought. Shilo shook her head. An adult would be smart enough not to come up here alone.

  The stranger in the attic might be dangerous.

  "Who's there?" Shilo asked.

  A heartbeat later she repeated the question louder and with the small measure of authority she'd summoned.

  "I ... said . . . who's . . . there?"

  No answer.

  She walked to the center of the attic, threading her way between boxes of old kitchen tools and wooden fishing lures— all properly labeled and waiting for price stickers. She edged past a spinning wheel, from which cobwebs hung rather than spun wool, and made her way past a shelf filled with hand-thrown clay bowls with funny marks and drawings on the in-sides.

  "I said . . . who's there?" This time there was a tinge of anger to her voice. She tapped her foot in irritation. Since she'd bothered to come all the way up here in a power-flickering storm, the least the stranger could do was show herself.

  Shilo peered into the corners ... as much of the corners as she could see. So much stuff was piled up it was a wonder the floor didn't give way and send everything falling into Meemaw and Grandfather's living space. Included were old glass lamps, wooden wagons, tin weather vanes, easels, glass and cloth Christmas decorations, and ceramic lawn ornaments—which she strongly doubted were antiques. In the mix were rocking chairs and rocking horses, unicycles and tricycles, turn-of-the-century dresses in clear plastic bags, Hula Hoops hanging from nails and covered with webs and the husks of dead insects, and much more.

  Her gaze lingered on a grandfather's clock that was missing the pendulum, then moved to a bench—devoid of dust— where pieces of pocket watches were spread. A large enameled basin sat atop a delicate-looking stand that was made of some dark wood. And there were boxes and bins stacked everywhere.

  The old sea chest was positioned directly beneath the last fluorescent light tube. Meemaw had pointed it out to her the day they'd come up here, telling her that things from her father's childhood were tucked inside, things that maybe should have been given away or sold years ago. Things that Meemaw had clung to and that maybe Shilo might want.

  Shilo stepped toward the chest, no longer noticing the floor creak beneath her feet. A stool sat in front of it, on a faded rug braided from rags.

  She hadn't heard the voice since she came up here. Maybe she'd never really heard it. Maybe it was part of a song playing on the jukebox across the street, drifting in through a crack somewhere.

  She sat on the stool and put the flashlight between her feet, wanting to keep track of it just in case the lights went out again. The chest had some dust on it, though not so much as other things in the attic. Fingerprints were clear around the latch and on the top, and Shilo remembered that Meemaw had placed a little red truck in Dad's casket; she'd said it was a favorite toy. Meemaw had probably gotten into the chest before driving down for the funeral.

  Tears welled in Shilo's eyes, and she shook her head. No more crying, she told herself. She'd cried an ocean in the past three weeks. Meemaw was going to open the chest for her before, but Shilo had declined. "Later," she'd told her grandmother. Meemaw seemed to understand.

  Forgetting all about the voice and the storm and the advice she'd given herself not to be up here alone, she leaned forward and lifted the catch. The chest must have been something to really look at once, all mahogany and brass, old and shiny and magnificent in the cabin of a ship's captain. Cleaned up, it would fetch a good amount of money, Shilo was certain.

  She released a breath she'd been holding and lifted the lid. The fusty scent of old things wafted up and made her cough.

  "Toys." Lots of them, all dating back some thirty-five or forty years. "Why would Meemaw keep all of this stuff?" Sentiment was fine, Shilo thought, but too much of it simply took wp too much space. Her father was dead and buried, and these toys should find a new home. She'd talk to Meemaw about putting some of these things up for sale in the store. Old toys were highly collectible now; she knew that from perusing eBay when she was in Marietta, where the Internet and e-mail existed.

  'These gotta be antiques. I'd forgotten they actually made these things." Shilo referred to an assortment of eight-track tapes lined up in a lidless shoebox. The Beach Boys' Endless Summer, Boz Skaggs' Silk Degrees, three Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond—arghh, her mother had played him all the time— Moody Blues, two Monkees, the Cowsills, and one cracked Lovin' Spoonful. There were 45s in another box, which she took out and sat on the floor beside her. "Oldie moldy music," she said. But her fingers lingered on the Rolling Stones. "Them and Neil Diamond've been around forever."

  Shilo doubted the eight-tracks would sell, as no one could possibly own something that played those big, bulky tapes anymore.

  "What's this?" She picked up a stack of baseball cards that were held together by a rotted rubber band. "Grandfather should go through these." She set them on the floor next to the 45s.

  An Etch-A-Sketch came out next, and she fiddled with the knobs to discover that it still sort of worked. There was a worn baseball glove, a baseball hat, and a yellowed letter to her father written by someone named Kim, who asked him to send a picture of snow. There were several board games, too: Dogfight, Jeopardy, Stratego, and Monopoly, this latter game likely to fetch several dollars because the box was in great shape and it looked like all the pieces were there. She spotted a pinewood derby car that her fa
ther had likely made, and this she put next to the flashlight, deciding to keep it in her room.

  Old roller skates, a G.I. Joe, a single croquet ball and the head of a croquet mallet. "Why ever would you keep these? Useless without the whole set." There was a stack of Archie comic books, all with deep creases down the middle like they'd been folded and stuffed in a back pocket, and all too worn on the edges to be worth anything. There were a couple of Super-mans farther down, in slightly better shape. At the very bottom was a puzzle box, the cover showing four dragons—red, blue, silver, and yellow-gold.

  She stared at the puzzle for several moments before reaching in and taking it out. Then she set it on her knees and regarded it curiously.

  There weren't any words on the box, like a title or copyright line. Even that many years ago they copyrighted stuff, she knew. There were no words to say who had manufactured it or when or where it had come from. And there was no broken seal around the edges. All the puzzles she'd seen in stores had seals to keep people from opening the boxes in the store and losing some of the pieces.

  So the puzzle was a puzzle.

  And more than that, it made Shilo a little mad. When she was younger, shopping in the mall with her dad, she pointed to the puzzles in the toy stores and drugstores, wanting ones with puppies and ships and fields full of flowers. But her father wouldn't let her have even one, tugged her away from the toy aisles and tried to interest her in new Barbie dolls.

  She had lots of Barbie dolls when she was younger. All of them donated to Goodwill when she hit junior high.

  "No puzzles," he'd told her. "No puzzles ever."

  He said they were too expensive, though she knew they weren't. He said they took up too much space—particularly if you had a bunch of them. All she really wanted was one or two. He said that the pieces would get lost and that the whole thing would be worthless, money thrown away. Well, she had to concede that part was true.

  She opened the box and immediately decided there weren't enough pieces to complete the picture on the cover. Yes, lost pieces made a puzzle pretty worthless.

  "Dad was right." Shilo started to replace the lid, then stopped herself. Holding the lid in one hand, she brushed the fingers of her free hand over the pieces. Her skin tingled where it met the wood. "A wooden puzzle." Too bad it wasn't all there; she bet wood puzzles were antiques for certain.

  There was a layer of paper on top of the wood, and the puzzle had been printed on that. It made the pieces thicker than the cardboard puzzles her friends had. The paper was curled on the edges of some of the pieces, making them look like dried fish scales ... or dragon scales. She stirred them with her index finger. They felt odd, some of them cool to the touch in this summer-hot, stuffy attic.

  A chill passed through her as she turned more and more of the pieces over, seeing the vibrant red that belonged to the red dragon, the lake-blue pieces, the silver ones. The yellow-gold pieces shimmered under the fluorescent lights, like metal had been powdered and mixed with the ink.

  The lid slipped from her grip, and now she moved the pieces with both hands, while she looked for something flat she could spread them out on. Might as well see just how much of the puzzle was missing.

  "Sigurd Clawhand ... I have need of you."

  Shilo had been so engrossed in the puzzle she'd forgotten that the real reason shed come up here was to find the speaker. Startled, she leapt to her feet, the bottom of the box overturning and spilling the pieces on the rag rug.

  HOT V'

  Shy? Shilo spun and saw her grandmother.

  "Shy, are you all right?"

  Shilo opened her mouth to warn Meemaw that a stranger was in the attic—or a ghost. But her throat had gone instantly dry, and no sound came out.

  "Sigurd," she heard, finally realizing the voice was in her head. "Sigurd, you must hurry."

  3 Dragon Dreams

  "OH! I DIDN T MEAN TO STARTLE YOU.”

  Shilo's grandmother stood at the top of the stairs, shaking her head as if scolding herself, her gray-blue hair haloed by the fluorescent lights. "I didn't see you in your room, but I saw the door to the attic cracked open."

  She laughed lightly, the sound like that made by the tin wind chimes that hung from the store's front porch. "Let me help you pick up that old puzzle.''

  "You don't have to, Meemaw. I'm the one who dropped it. I just hope I didn't lose any of the pieces."

  Her grandmother laughed again. "Child, pieces of that puzzle were lost a long time ago." She bent and started picking up the ones that belonged to the red dragon. "Got some old puzzles on the sale rack downstairs, not antiques, but from the sixties and seventies. If you want to work a puzzle, take your pick from those. They look to have all their pieces."

  Shilo opened her mouth to ask her grandmother why she'd kept this particular puzzle if it was missing pieces. But then she'd need to ask why her grandmother had kept all these other things in the sea chest, including the head of a croquet mallet.

  "You know, Shy, your father concocted such interesting stories about this puzzle. He said when he put part of it together it sent him to some ancient land in the far, far north . . . farther north than the Upper Peninsula, I'd gathered."

  Shilo grabbed the silver pieces and tossed them in the box. "From a puzzle? He made up stories?"

  "I remember quite a bit. Lots of years ago, Shy. But the stories! My, they were vivid. Said snow spread everywhere, and that there was a huge forge and a master smith where he went. He said there was a chair that looked like a throne, and that men fought a silver dragon." She pointed to the silvery pieces. "Said the dragon looked just like the one in the puzzle. It was the first time he had ever told such wild stories to me. I think he just had dreams that got a little too real and scary."

  The far north . . . Shilo shivered, feeling instantly cold in the insufferably hot attic. A wind came out of nowhere, whistling around her ears and setting her teeth to chattering. Her grandmother seemed not to notice, and continued:

  "Ah, I swear if your father had a nose like Pinocchio it would have stretched all the way across the street and to the front door of the pub."

  Shilo picked up one of the silvery pieces. It felt like ice, and she dropped it into the box. Her fingertips were pink where they'd touched it. The cold wind stilled, and after a moment more her fingers warmed. The attic returned to its sweltering state.

  "Said he watched them slay a dragon, the master smith and someone else."

  "Meemaw, did he mention someone named Sig or Sigurd?"

  Shilo scooped up the rest of the pieces and put them in the box. Her grandmother added the few she had in her hands, and Shilo put the lid on. Still, Shilo didn't set the puzzle back in the sea chest. She kept it balanced on her knees. "Sigurd, that's the name, Meemaw."

  Shilo watched her grandmother's expression draw forward, like her face was pinched.

  "Well, that's the name he said the master smith called him. He must have told the whole story to you, too."

  "Maybe," Shilo answered after a moment. "Maybe when I was younger."

  "Sigurd Clawhand."

  Had her grandmother just repeated that name? Or was it the stranger talking again?

  Shilo stared at the puzzle box lid. The blue dragon looked stiff and strange; its head was curled a bit. It had a cone-shaped horn midway down its nose. The silver dragon was coiled and rearing. It had a red tongue and eyes so green they looked like wet emeralds. "And he, my father, said this puzzle . . ."

  "Fool thing, that puzzle." Shilo's grandmother made a clucking sound. "Back when we lived in Georgia, there was. an old man next door, quite the world traveler he was. He up and died, and your father said he found the puzzle in the house. He shouldn't have been poking around things that weren't his. But he was a good boy for the most part, and I forgave him that little transgression."

  "Fafnir," Shilo said.

  "Pardon?"

  Shilo somehow knew that was the name of the silver dragon, the one her father claimed to have watche
d slain.

  "Maybe Dad did tell me something about all of this, Meemaw." But Shilo didn't remember that. She'd remembered him reading to her—books by Dr. Seuss and Clive Cus-sler, and history books, of course, and the Bible. She never remembered him talking about dragons and puzzles. "And about Sirrush-Lau." That was the name of the blue dragon. How did she know that? And how, too, did she know that Sirrush-Lau was called by priests, intending to set it against Daniel . . . the Bible's Daniel? But Daniel killed the dragon. How did she know that? Her fingers trembled and the box jiggled in her hands.

  Her grandmother had been talking, and Shilo was so caught up in the unfamiliar memories that she missed part of it.

  ". . . Ras, why he claimed that his name was Sker . . . Sherkar . . . ah, yes, Sherkarer of Meroe, and that the puzzle whisked him away to ... well, that was all back almost forty years ago, Shy. I'm surprised I remember what I do. Kim, I think he was Korean, and he said he went to the Far East. Actually, all the boys went to Anthony Wayne School, and I don't think they went any farther than the playground. Certainly not to the Far East or to the Far North. And there was Artie, he was my favorite of your father's childhood friends, even though he wasn't the best of influences. A real scallywag! He told some whoppers, too, close to rivaling your father's. He said the puzzle took him to Old England and that there were tribesmen, Picts, Romans, and some famous folks—Artos Pendragon, Modred, Vortigen. Quite colorful."

  "Pendragon, the man who was a dragon," Shilo whispered. "The red dragon on the box."