A Shade of Dragon 3(62)

“But you’re—What about the spring semester at Shenandoah?” she demanded, blanching.

I smiled. “I won’t be going back to The Shenandoah Institute,” I told her. “My life has gone in another direction.”

“This is crazy, Nell,” she breathed, staring at me as if I was telling her that I wanted to join the circus.

“Do I seem like I’ve gone mad?” I asked. “Is there no such thing as marriage, no such thing as royalty, as responsibility to a land?” I hadn’t even gotten to the “dragon” part yet. I figured they would need a very slow acclimatization to this new reality.

Mom stared at me stonily for several beats. “No. You don’t seem any different than you always have.”

I exhaled, my shoulders loosening. “Exactly. Hey, babe?” I asked Theon, turning toward him. He raised his eyebrows. “Could you take that love letter out of your satchel, so I can show it to them?”

“Oh, yes.” He glanced around and then smiled sheepishly. “I left it on the front porch,” he explained. “I’m not sure it can fit easily through the front door.”

Mom and Dad shared a look which said: The man owns a satchel that won’t fit through a front door.

But I would be patient with them. I would help them find their way to understanding Theon, and the fire dragons, and The Hearthlands. My duties as queen were many. They didn’t just end when I stepped off of the soil.

Theon returned from outside, the yellowed scroll of papyrus in his hand. “Satchel definitely won’t fit. But here’s the love letter.”

“Love letter?” Mom raised a brow at us. “What is this?”

I would save the oracle for another time. That might be a bit much for them.

“I sent you a message with it before,” I said. “Don’t you remember?“

They both looked at me, agape. From their expressions, a part of me doubted whether they had ever received the note I’d sent while back in The Hearthlands, but another part of me guessed that more likely, the two had refused to believe their eyes. Brushed it off as a hallucination caused by grief. Buried it away in their subconscious.

“You could call it magic, I suppose,” I said. “Let me show you. The paper sends a message to anyone you love, wherever they are. Do you have a pen?” Naturally, Mom furnished me with a pen, and I scrawled out, Mom, Dad. I love you. I’ll be home soon.

The words materialized behind our heads, on the wall of the living room.

“Oh my,” Mom breathed.

“Hey! My wall!” Dad barked.

The words disintegrated after several seconds, and they both turned their eyes toward me, confused.

“I’m not exactly certain what we’ve witnessed here today,” Mom murmured.

“This is how I will stay in touch with you across the distance between our worlds,” I said, pressing the pen back into Mom’s hand and dividing the love letter into two pieces. “And this is how you can get in touch with me. The words will appear wherever I am, and I will come to you.”

“You say the distance is great,” Mom reiterated.

“The distance is great,” I agreed, “but it’s also small. It’s hard to grasp, and we don’t have to cover it all right away. We have the rest of our lives to figure out all the little pieces.”

I looked at Theon, and then back at them. They seemed so young to me suddenly. But they would grow again. As they came to accept this shift to their paradigm, they would seem less and less scared, less and less confused. They would come to accept what their eyes would show them. They would come to accept Theon, and me, and our new life together… in time.

“We can’t stay,” I told Mom and Dad again.

“You can’t just go!” Mom cried. “You just got here!”

“We’ll visit soon,” I promised. “We have a wedding to attend in the morning.” I stepped forward and embraced Dad, then Mom. Their faces were still distraught.

“I just don’t get it,” Mom exclaimed.

“You will,” I promised her. “I had a hard time with it, at first, too. But—let’s just say—for all the jabs I made at Zada? How I called those YouTube videos fakes?”

Mom pursed her lips and nodded.

“It was all true,” I told her simply. “The videos are real. And Zada… she was right. Harpies. And oracles. And witches. And dragons.” I smiled and leaned forward, kissing Mom’s cheek. “They’re all real. We’ll be back soon. I promise.”

They were hesitant, but they bade us farewell. Theon extended his hand to my father, and I watched closely. Dad’s eyes shifted to Mom, and then to me, and, with a kind of grimace, he took Theon’s hand and gave it a brusque shake.