Free The Dragons' Chosen by Gwen Dandridge Page B

deserting you. I won’t. I’ll be back, and soon. Make no mistake about it. We’re in this together.”
    I dared not speak. I would say the wrong thing. The last time she left, it was over a fortnight before she returned.
    “I have to go back. My mother gets all wiggy if I don’t phone her each weekend. Midterms are next week and I have a B plus going in. I can’t screw this up.” She sounded like she was pleading with me to understand. I didn’t.
    She sighed then, a small shrug indicating her confusion and discomfort. “My consciousness-raising group says that you’re a metaphor for change, for the struggle women are going through. That this kingdom is only a dream representing the patriarchal social structure. The dragons illustrate my fears of being absorbed in a male relationship and I’m trying to put it in perspective, sort of like Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz .” She scuffed her foot against the trunk of a huge oak. “They say that I’m reaching through to my subconscious and they applaud my imagery.” She looked over her eyepieces at me. “I don’t think so. I think this is real. Besides,” she nodded toward Michael arm-wrestling with Lucinda over who should carry the saddlebags, “this is not how I view the battle for sexual equality.
    “I don’t care if you’re a dream or a figment of my imagination. Whatever. All I know for sure is that you’re not going to be eaten by dragons on my watch. You are not going to face this without me. I will be back soon.”
    I struggled not to sound like I was pleading. “We’re to arrive at the cave in twelve days.”
    Chris nodded. “I’ll return before you know it, long before you get there.”
    I nodded, and a weight lifted from my shoulders as I looked into her eyes, earnest and compelling.
    “Okay, now that this is settled, I do need to leave. The paper won’t take me any time to write. Midterms will be over in nothing flat after that.”
    “Yes, I understand.” I shook my head. “I don’t actually, but I’m trying.” I raised my head. “How are you going to go back to your world?”
    She drew herself up onto her toes and clicked her heels together. “Click my ruby red slippers together and say: ‘There’s no place like home.’”
    I glanced at her feet. She still had on her brown lace-up boots.
    “Oh, not really. I’m just going to ‘want’ to return.” She closed her eyes. I could see her eyelids flutter. “Hmm. Before, I have returned whenever I was startled. Would you pinch me? Maybe that would help.”
    I reached over and squeezed her wrist. “Harder.” I thought about her leaving me and I pinched her, hard. Chris yelped in pain. And she was gone.

 
    Chapter 13
     

     
    We traveled without much respite the next day and the day after that. Douglas asked when Chris would return. I didn’t know. At the top of each hill, at each turn in the road and each night during supper I looked for her, as we edged ever closer to the mountains. From here I could see the jagged silhouette of the great Crystal Mountain, a mountain so high that clouds obscured its snow covered peaks. Nothing good ever came from there. Chilled, I averted my glance, trying to focus elsewhere.
    In the evenings I read the dragon book, deciphering lines of faded archaic script. The fragile yellowed pages of vellum cracked beneath my fingers. Nothing seemed helpful to my situation.
    I didn’t know if it was significant that they only showed up during a ten-year period in each century. Or that the first time the message came from the dragons, there were three princesses chosen, not one. I puzzled over this for a while, not making any sense of it.
    Other details didn’t seem to apply to me. A family named Mastin was tasked with guiding the princesses through the mountains. It was a job handed down from father to son to grandson. That was not happening in my case: Captain Markus’s last name was Clarson, and his mother was a Branneau from the