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In the aftermath of the coup and the battle and the crowning of two rulers and the quadrupling of Candian lands, some details get a little lost. Titles have to be conferred, new treaties have to be made, and maps have to be redrawn, not to mention renewing the entire Concord.
So it takes everyone a couple weeks to notice the dragons.
The first reports come from the new southern border of Candia and Fructera, in the vast expanse of candy-grasslands, not even a month old. A cola river carves a path below mountains that haven’t seen a single snowfall yet, and geysers are erupting from the rolling hills of the lowlands.
(“Couldn’t you have wished for something a little less dramatic?” Ruby asked Liam, once, on the second morning of peace, as yet another earthquake made the wrecked front gate slam shut. Word had just started to trickle in that Candia really had expanded four times over, pushing the Meatlands and the Dairy Isles to the north, Ceresia to the east, and Fructera and Vegetania farther south. None of those lands had been lost—it was just that Candia was that much bigger now.
“Hey, if you give a seed to a gardener, something’s gotta grow,” Liam had said.)
So they don’t investigate right away. There are earthquakes every day—every hour at first—for weeks, though they seem to be dying down as the burgeoning landscape finally settles. The mountains that spew clouds and stream with syrup fire are new, and nobody’s sure what to do with them quite yet, but the geysers to the south seem easier, so the House Rocks sends a small scouting party out to investigate. They find:
“More dragons,” Ruby says, sitting down in the chocolate crumble dirt.
“Yup,” Liam agrees, and plunks down next to her.
They stare at the geyser. Four tiny dragons are playing around it. They’re even smaller than Cinnamon was when he hatched—these dragons are the length of Ruby’s forearm, maybe, and they look like they’re made of steam instead of fire. They have glassy sugar crystal scales, which are rough and faceted, glittering silver. Their eyes have a yellow glow like sunlight through mist, and they don’t seem to be hungry for much more than candyfloss moths and the occasional cricket.
“They’re pretty cute,” Ruby says.
“Do you think the queen will want one?”
“Maybe. I don’t think these ones breathe fire.”
One of the sugar dragons lands at their feet, looks up at them, and puffs out a bit of hot steam that fades away into the afternoon sun with a little haah!
“Probably not,” Liam agrees.
Ruby flops on her back in the grass and closes her eyes. It’s quiet out here—not too many farmers have gotten up the courage to travel south just yet. The landscape is oddly raw in places; hills slope gently and then end in steep cliffs, and streams begin and end without source or mouth, but that’s probably fine.
The more important thing is—she’s not sure, but when she closes her eyes and slows her breathing, she thinks she can feel it. There’s magic here, more than there’s ever been in one place, maybe. And stronger. It hasn’t been hoarded. It’s sunk into the ground and it’s growing in the grasses. This land is magic, every inch of it, and it can’t be taken away for anything.
Which means, also, that there’s about four times more Candian magic in the world now, just in general. Apparently this is what causes dragons.
The geyser begins to rumble, and then Ruby feels steam flaring up out of the ground. She opens her eyes and watches the sugar dragons chirp and flash, dancing upward through it. It settles again after a minute.
“Maybe there’s heat in the ground,” Liam says, setting his palm flat on the dirt.
“From the land getting four times as big in one morning?”
Liam shrugs, and it looks like he’s hiding a smile. “Yeah, maybe.”
The sun sinks lower in the sky. They watch as the geyser erupts again, and the steam looks gold in the light of the autumn evening. The sugar dragons flit upwards, twisting and tumbling, chasing moths through the sweet-smelling breeze. They look happy.
“Does this feel weird to you?” Ruby asks, not looking at Liam. She’s still lying on her back in the grass, and the sky above her is so, so blue.
“Not really,” Liam says. “I spent a lot of time in the woods already, so...”
“This is just what you do.”
“Yeah.” He runs his fingers through the soil. “But I get what you mean. It’s weird to go back to normal.”
“Not back to normal.”
“No.”
The space at her side is so empty it exerts a pull, a gravity. A little sideways longing. She knows he feels the same.
“But back to where we started,” Liam says.
“Yeah.” Something occurs to Ruby. “Hey, have you heard from Primsy? Are you and her...”
“I don’t know!” Liam says. “I have no idea. She wrote me a letter—” He pulls a slice of cheesepaper out of the pocket of his overalls. It’s one sheet, folded like an envelope, and Ruby can see tidy cursive writing on the inside. “Is that normal?”
“It means she likes you,” Ruby says, grinning.
“She does?!”
“Weren’t you guys talking about getting married?”
“Yeah, okay,” Liam says, looking down at the letter. He tucks it back in his pocket. “We’re not—I mean, that’s kind of on hold, because I’m the master gardener now, so I don’t need to go somewhere else right away. And she’s helping remake the Concord, so...”
“Hey,” Ruby says. “You have time.”
“Yeah,” Liam agrees.
The geyser sends up a little puff of steam, not a full eruption, but the sugar dragons all chase it upward anyway, then flutter back down to look for more moths. The air’s a little cooler, and Ruby thinks she can feel the warmth in the ground, radiating upward.
“How long do you think you’ll be at Castle Candy?” Liam asks her.
“Probably for a while,” she says. “I mean, I’ll visit Mom and Pops, obviously, but I might need to stay here for a bit.”
“Yeah?” Liam looks at her, waiting.
“I think... Saccharina and I have a lot to talk about. I don’t even know how to start, most days—I don’t know any of it—but...” Ruby pauses, and then: “I think we laugh the same,” she says, like a secret. “It’s kind of like Pops’s laugh, but it’s not, it’s... You know?”
“Yeah, I get that,” Liam says.
“So she sounds a little like Jet,” Ruby says. “But also like me. And like Pops. And I think I’m getting used to it.” That comes out even quieter. “We both like sleeping in, so we keep being late to breakfast and having to cook for ourselves, and she taught me this recipe for taffy cakes she likes, so I showed her mine...” She shakes her head, shakes it off. “It’s not bad. It’s just... new.”
Liam doesn’t say anything, and Ruby sits up, digs her fingers into her knees. “I think we both got really close to doing something bad,” she confesses. “Right at the end of the battle. I was scared, and I think she was scared, and we could’ve... chosen differently. But we didn’t.” Two of the sugar dragons chase each other upward in a quick little helix, chirping high and bright. “I’m really glad we didn’t.”
Liam looks over at her. “What? Sorry. I missed part of that. Look—” He’s got one of the dragons perched up on his knee, eating seeds out of his hand with tiny crystalline teeth.
“Oh, cute,” Ruby says. “Can I try?”
Liam passes her some of the seeds—they’re dark brown and rounded and tiny, just the size for a dragon to snack on—and she lies down on her stomach and stretches her arm out toward the dragons, palm up in the grass. One of them flits toward her, then lands a few inches away from her open hand and the seeds she’s holding out. “Hey,” Ruby tells it softly. “It’s okay.”
The dragon hops forward and cranes its long, scaly neck over her palm. Its tiny head dips down, and it picks at one of the seeds with its teeth. It actually nips her a little bit, and Ruby says, “Ow,” but very quietly, so she doesn’t scare it.
Wish you could be here, Jet, she thinks. She’s had that thought often. Maybe a little less, lately, but she’ll probably never stop.
Still, a tiny sugar-crystal dragon with eyes like lemon suns is eating seeds out of her hand, and the sun is sinking to the brand-new mountains to the east, and when Ruby breathes in she swears, for a second, she can taste the magic in the air. The horizon is so wide.
“Hey, Liam,” she says. “There have to be other dragons out there, right? Since there are these ones.”
“Theo told me one of the knights saw something in those new mountains in the northwest,” Liam says, like he didn’t singlehandedly create that mountain range. “The volcanoes. He said it looked like a dragon. And Cumulous has been talking about hearing ice cracking, but not ice cracking, up near the monastery...”
“The ones in the volcanoes could be more like Cinnamon,” Ruby says, “since they could grow bigger and live in the fire. Didn’t Cinnamon’s egg hatch in fire?”
“Yeah, it did,” Liam agrees. “There’s hot syrup in the volcanoes, too, so there could be syrup dragons.”
“Small ones that swim,” Ruby suggests.
Liam nods. “Yeah, and the ice cracking in the north could be shave ice, maybe? There are shave ice fields up by Castle Manylicks, and there’d be a lot more if the ice keeps breaking.”
Ruby imagines spiny dragons with sharp, pointed scales that breathe gales of sweet flavored ice. “Definitely,” she says. “What else? There are those caves that opened up in the ground, with crystals inside—”
“Rock candy dragons,” Liam says instantly. “You know those big geode crystals? Those ones.”
Ruby thinks about hot springs in the mountains with massive plumes of steam and towers of white smoke above the volcanoes. “Cotton candy dragons,” she says. “They’d be so light—they could be huge. Like clouds.” She props her chin in her free hand, the one a dragon isn’t nibbling seeds from, and looks up at the evening sky. It’s dark now, verging on black to the east and faintly lit to the west. Wide, filmy clouds are floating in the air like bands of milk-silk, blue and white and gray.
For a moment, she swears she sees one of the clouds flap.
And then the cloud folds its wings and plummets from the sky, diving across the plains, and Ruby grabs Liam’s arm and shouts, “Look!” The dragon races toward them like the roiling edge of a storm, and she can see its sleek cotton candy head, its mouth open in a gleeful shriek, its tail a streaming, sugary banner.
The wind hits them, and the dragon roars overhead, and for a moment its wings blot out the sky.
Then it’s gone, and Liam and Ruby are sitting there in the dirt, clutching each other and staring upward.
“Holy shit,” Ruby says.
“Yeah,” Liam agrees.
There’s a chirp at Ruby’s feet. She looks down and sees that the dragon she was feeding is picking at the seeds she dropped. “Sorry, buddy,” she says. It looks up at her and chirps again, which she chooses to interpret as forgiveness.
“Dragons,” Liam says.
“Dragons,” she says back.
They nod at each other for a second, and then they both burst out laughing so hard they can barely breathe. It’s a laugh of relief, probably, and also just joy, and awe. A cotton candy dragon as big as a cloud has just come soaring down from the sky and all Ruby can do is laugh until tears stream down her cheeks.
They pull themselves together eventually. The geyser erupts again, and the little sugar dragons go whirling up in it, chirping to each other as they flutter through the steam.
“That was a pretty good wish,” Ruby says.
“You think so?” Liam asks.
“I mean, did you see that?” She points up at the faint shape of the dragon, soaring off among the clouds.
“Yeah,” Liam says. “I guess it was.”
(There will be dragons in Candia again—sugar and syrup and shave ice dragons, and a hundred more, in every shape and flavor. There will be a great wide world for them to fly through. And there will be magic in Candia, too, so much that even kindergarteners can feel it, and when Ruby finds that out she’s going to laugh until her sides ache again, and then maybe cry, just a little, before walking down into Dulcington to talk to the families and the shopkeepers and the riverboat sailors, and hear about all the dragons in the rivers and the mountains and the clouds—
and she’ll look up, up, over the rooftops, and she’ll see the far-off shape of a cotton candy dragon in the sky.)