Julian pulled her in closer to him and rested his chin on her head while she burrowed her face into his chest. "The spreenie said you were in trouble," she managed to gasp between gulps for air.
"The spreenie," corrected the spreenie-in-question, "said Eleni was in trouble."
I felt bad that I'd assumed the worst of Larry—that he had abandoned us, when in reality he'd gone to fetch help—but I didn't feel bad enough to apologize.
Larry fluttered his little blue eyelashes at my grandmother, and she took a second to say, "Thank you, Larry," on her way to come give me a hug.
I found myself clinging to her. "I thought...," I started.
"I know," she murmured. "But we're all fine."
With my eyes closed and my face buried in her hair, her voice was the same as it had always been, the comforting and gentle tone my grandmother used when I'd fallen off my tricycle, or when I was upset with my mother, or when Gia had had some success that made me feel insignificant.
Another voice, one like the shifting of tectonic plates, grumbled and grated, "If I may intrude..."
The dragon was still holding on to Vediss and Berrech.
I glanced at Julian and saw the easy, familiar way he and Tiffanie stood side by side with their arms around each other, despite the fact that he was looking his most attractive and she was sporting her Wicked Witch of the West look. Just when I'd found myself getting interested. It served me right. Those troublesome assumptions about the way people look. It explained, if I had stopped to think about it, her frantic single-mindedness to rescue him. And if she loved him that much, that had to count for a lot and of course would be more meaningful than a few warts and wrinkles.
The dragon said to me, "I am indebted to you." It may have been holding Julian's uncle and cousin, but it was waiting for me. I'd been the one to actually undo those locks. In its mind, that made me the only significant one there. "I realize these are somehow related to your friend and that you are hesitant to see their blood shed, but they have held me prisoner for many weeks now."
Either the direction this was heading made Berrech and Vediss nervous, or the dragon in its agitation tightened its grip a bit, for they began to squirm, though it was obvious they were going nowhere.
"I could," the dragon offered, having to raise its voice to be heard over their pleas, "take them away so you wouldn't actually have to watch..."
"No," Julian said. "Please spare them." That plea seemed directed at both of us.
Now there was a wild thought: me and a dragon comprising an "us."
To Berrech and Vediss, Julian said, "I am tempted." That admission seemed to uncover the feelings he must have buried during his capture and kept under control until now. He spat out the words, "I am so tempted."
Sounding worried, Tiffanie started, "But you—"
Julian spoke over her. "But I cannot begin my public career with the death of my kinsmen." He stood there looking so furious I wondered if he was hoping one of us would find a flaw in his reasoning and point out how he could let the dragon eat them. But then he took a steadying breath and spoke to the dragon. "I realize you have suffered at their hands, that you have been held against your wishes and been in fear for your life."
We could all tell by the grumbling going on in the dragon's chest and throat that this was going nowhere toward making it feel inclined toward leniency. "Yes...?" the dragon prompted, a bit of steam escaping its jaws.
Julian hesitated.
I could see Tiffanie's gnarled fingers dig into his arm, but she didn't say anything.
Finally Julian said, "But in the end, they did not harm you. I will bring this up before the High Council, and they will not take any of this lightly. These two, as the leaders, will be imprisoned, and to an elf that is great punishment."
The captive elves nodded vigorously, obviously much favoring elf justice over dragon justice.
The dragon's internal grumbling continued, and it narrowed its eyes at Julian.
Eleni, holding my hand, gripped it tighter.
Brave Heart barked. And barked and barked.
Tiffanie listened. And after a while, she smiled. "You are truly wise," she told the dog. For the rest of us, she interpreted. "Brave Heart points out that at his home there is a saying: 'Who is the pet, and who is the master, and who has trained whom?'"
Larry, once again sitting on Eleni's shoulder, clapped his little blue hands over his chest and declared, "Oooo, that's deep," which was kind of along the lines of what I'd been thinking—which was, Huh?—but at least I'd had the sense not to say it.
"Quiet, spreenie," Tiffanie ordered. To the dragon she said, "These elves must have provided you with food in the time while they held you prisoner."
The elves interrupted to remind the dragon of all their efforts on behalf of its comfort.
Tiffanie talked over them: "And, as a logical consequence of feeding generally comes..."
"Never these two in particular," the dragon said. "But they assigned their underlings..." The dragon caught on, as I did. The cave was not that big, and if the elves were to share it with a dragon that couldn't go out, someone must have done a fair amount of shoveling. And of course Berrech and Vediss would consider themselves above such a task.
There was a noise which I thought was the beginnings of an earthquake, but it was the dragon laughing. "The Dragon Warrens could use a certain amount of cleaning," it said. "After all these generations. It might take five or six or seven years. But I could return them to you when they have finished." It asked me, "Does this meet with your approval?"
I checked by glancing at Julian, who was watching Tiffanie. She nodded, then he did, so I did, too.
Berrech and his father did their best to look grateful, though they may well have been having second thoughts.
"Thank you," I said. And because the formal language Julian and the dragon had been using had me kind of caught up in it, I found myself saying, "I may have saved your life, but you also saved mine, and that of my ... kinswoman, Eleni. Our lives are now twined together, and I will remember—I will ever remember—your kindness."
That, I told myself even as the words left my mouth, was not well thought out. I had just, basically, told a dragon to feel free to give me a call.
The dragon looked startled, but didn't laugh at me. It bowed its head in what appeared to be all earnestness.
I bowed back.
And in that instant while I wasn't looking, it took to the air, carrying the two elves with it.
26. Letting Go
As soon as the dragon was gone, Merrindin got to his feet and broke for the dunes.
"Never mind," Tiffanie told Brave Heart, who had made to lunge in that direction. "We know who he is, as well as the other two."
"Three," Eleni corrected, remembering the mermaid-chasing one we'd left tied up with vines and seaweed.
"Three," Tiffanie said. "They'll all be spending a good long time in public service for what they've done. Dragons aren't the only creatures who need cleaning up after."
So that, all of a sudden, was the end of that.
In the chaos of trying to come up with plans without knowing exactly what was going on; of facing dangers involving all sorts of potential for catastrophe, including but not limited to imminent death; of getting to meet my grandmother as a teenager, then growing to enjoy her company as a brave and funny and fiercely loyal friend rather than as an elderly relative, I had ... not exactly forgotten, but ... put aside the thought of what awaited me back home.
Back at the nursing home.
Now that knowledge simultaneously filled me and left me empty.
Such nuances of emotional devastation were beyond Tiffanie. "These two will never be able to find their way back without help," she told Julian as though Eleni and I were not people with ears—and feelings—but two fruit baskets that needed to be sorted out and delivered. "I'll take her"—she indicated Eleni—"because that will give me the chance to talk to Brave Heart's humans to see if I can
buy him from them." For those of us not fluent in Dog, she explained that even while she and Brave Heart were running up and down the dunes confusing the elves, they had discussed this and that Brave Heart:
(1) absolutely wanted to go with her; and
(2) was under the impression his owners would be happy to sell him, since he had grown considerably bigger than the pet-store owner had led them to believe; and
(3) offered that, should they need extra convincing, he could always start chewing slippers and peeing on the rug.
Brave Heart barked so enthusiastically that we all became, suddenly, fluent in Dog.
"I'll go with you," Larry announced. He pointed at the three of them in turn—Eleni, Brave Heart, and Tiffanie—naming them: "Beauty and the Beast and the Beast."
"Who invited you?" Tiffanie snarled at him. To me, she said, "See you back in Mrs. Robellard's class." Then—being the sentimental person she is—added, "Tell anyone about any of this, and I'll turn you into a toad."
"Okay," I said. Eleni was looking as panicked as I felt about how quickly things were suddenly moving. I asked, "Why are we saying good-bye now when we have that long walk back through the forest to get to the gate?"
Tiffanie sighed, but Julian patiently explained, "There's another gate just over that rise. Normally the gates aren't built so close together, but once the dragons took over Dragons' Cove, this one became pretty much unusable, at least during fledgling season. But there's no reason we can't use it now."
So. We were out of time.
"Good-bye," I said to Tiffanie, because that was just for now, and—besides—she hated me, and I was afraid of her.
She gave a halfhearted wave, but mostly she was occupied with finding just the right glamour for herself, trying out different 1950s looks—all of them, of course, gorgeous.
Next came Brave Heart, because I'd known him the least amount of time. It should have been easier than it was. I knelt in the sand to give him a hug. "Good-bye, Brave Heart," I told him. "You are very well named."
He wasn't the kind of dog to hold a grudge. He gave me a slobbery dog kiss on the cheek.
Larry was noisily and wetly licking his lips all over and puckering up, but I figured a dog kiss was about as far as I was willing to go.
"One question, you little blue aberration," I said. "How did you happen to choose me?"
"Choose you?" Larry repeated, obviously reluctant to admit my train of thought had left the station without him.
"For the glasses." He was still pondering this, so I spelled it out for him: "How did you come to choose me to give the glasses to after you stole them from Vediss? How did you know I would eventually help you, and therefore Julian?"
"Oh," Larry said. He shrugged his little iridescent wings and admitted, "I didn't. I just grabbed them then flung them through the nearest gate. I had no idea where they landed."
So much for being the ordained one. The Chosen One. She of Whom the Prophecies Speake.
"Good-bye, Larry," I said. "I'll think of you every time I lose a sock in the laundry."
"So long, kid," he told me. As he was suddenly talking out of the side of his mouth, I suspected he was doing an impersonation of somebody-or-other; I just didn't know who. He said: "Just remember this: We'll always have Paris." He blew a percussive kiss at me.
I didn't like the way he made it sound as though we'd shared some kind of special moments and worried what the others would think. But then I remembered they all knew Larry.
Eleni shooed him off her shoulder so the two of us could talk without him. "Take care, Jeannette," she told me, brushing my hair off my forehead, just the way she used to when I was a toddler.
"You, too." For the first time in hours I remembered that Jeannette is my mother's name. That there would come a time when my grandmother could not tell me and my mother apart. That there would come another time when she didn't know either one of us. There was so much to say, and I couldn't think how to say any of it. I blurted out, "You were so brave." Because that, of all qualities, is the hardest to fake.
She gave a dismissive snort. "You, too."
"No." I shook my head for emphasis. Me? Maybe to someone outside I might have looked like I did one or two gutsy things, but it wasn't because I was brave, it was because I was backed into a situation and wasn't smart enough to think of anything that could be done differently.
Eleni took hold of my chin and she forced me to look directly into her eyes, though I was trying to avoid this, because my eyes were suddenly wet. She said, "You fight the things you can fight. The rest you have to let go. That's all anyone can do."
She thought there was something I was afraid of, something I couldn't face.
"You, too," I insisted to her. What could I say: Especially fifty years from now when you're fading away. Fight the Alzheimer's. And how, exactly, could she do that?
She took my weeping the wrong way. She guessed: "We'll never meet again, will we?"
"Yes," I assured her wholeheartedly. "You'll see a lot of me. You will."
And that helped her.
But I knew I would never see her again, not in any way that counted.
She nodded at me, believing my true-but-only-as-far-as-it-went statement.
I nodded, too, then hugged her, and then let her go. Because there was nothing else I could do.
JULIAN CAME with me, returning me to the Westfall gardens a moment after I'd first passed through the gate. As soon as we were back, Tiffanie's spell that caused him to look human on Earth kicked in again; but now I knew how to look beyond that.
"Is she the one you visit here?" he asked. "Eleni?"
I nodded, mumbling, "She's my grandmother." My eyes were leaking again, and I expected him to have no patience with that, big warrior elf that he was, but he put his arm around my shoulders to steady me. It had the opposite effect.
He said, "There's so much of her in you. Not just the way you look, but your spirit, your honesty, your strength. It must be difficult for you, having her in this place."
Well, that killed any chance of my being able to stop crying anytime soon. Even if he was all wrong about me.
"She wouldn't give up on you," I told him, "but she's given up on herself."
Of course there was no way for him to know what, exactly, was going on—why Nana was in the nursing home. For all he knew, her body could be failing. A failing body was something I could understand.
He asked, "What do you mean?"
"How can you forget things that are really important to you?" I demanded. "I mean, I understand Alzheimer's makes it so you can't remember streets and you get lost, and you forget where you've put things, and you don't know what day it is. But how can someone forget her family? It's not like forgetting to bring home a book you need for a homework assignment, or like messing up the words to a poem you're supposed to have memorized. How can you forget love?" Before I knew what I was about to say, I blurted out: "It's just like a father deciding his life is more convenient without you."
"Oh, Wendy," Julian murmured, letting me hide my face in his chest. Though back on the beach in Kazaran Dahaani, he hadn't been standing close enough to hear when Eleni and I had been saying good-bye, his advice was close to hers: "Some things can't be fought."
"If this is your idea of comforting me, you're doing a stinky job." I pushed away from him and rubbed at my eyes, hating that I was making a fool of myself in front of him.
"She hasn't chosen this," Julian said. "Sometimes bravery and strength and goodness just aren't enough."
It wasn't like I was greedy. It wasn't like I expected she should live forever.
"And I don't know about your father, but I suspect that if he's chosen a life without you, it was not an easy choice; and it was probably not a choice against you, but for something else."
Sometimes, I reminded myself, you just have to let go.
I rubbed the tears away. I would do the right thing, I decided: I would forgive my father for choosing another woman over my mot
her and me; I would forgive my mother for choosing another man after my father and in addition to me; I would forgive my grandmother for leaving me; and I would forgive myself for not being the person I wanted to be, though I would try harder to be that person.
"Don't you ever get tired of being right all the time?" I muttered at him.
Then I blinked, surprised. "I can see."
He raised his eyebrows at me.
"No prescription glasses, no magical glasses: I shouldn't be able to see you, even this close up." I looked beyond him, and the trees were in focus, and the nursing home's back porch, and the nurse's aide who was standing there still glowering at us for running through here—thirty seconds ago, her time.
Julian said, "My mother must have done a healing spell on your vision."
"Your mother?" I demanded, that thought temporarily shoving aside the wonder that I had been wrong yet again, that Tiffanie had done something nice for me. "Tiffanie's your mother?"
Wearing a mild but inscrutable expression, Julian said, "Yes."
"But you're an elf."
"Half elf. That's one of the reasons Berrech is so offended at the thought of my succeeding my father." Now he was definitely holding back a grin. "Why? What did you think?"
"Never mind. Would she—could she help my grandmother?"
That wiped the grin off his face. "Oh, Wendy." I guessed his answer even before he said it: "Some things are too lost for even magic to bring back."
There was no use being angry at him. Or at life.
I flung my hair over my shoulder and strode up the path toward the back entrance.
"May I come with you?" he called.
I had assumed he would, but was even more pleased that he asked. I waved for him to catch up.
As we passed the nurse's aide, she reminded us in an aggrieved tone reminiscent of the dragon's grumbling, "No running."