The coins had slipped and slid jingling and clashing past each other, looking and sounding much like so many tiny cymbals, over the stash of cash and jewels and ember-glowing phoenix eggs. One had uncapped a peephole to not the treasure chest’s gold lining but brown-hide book binding near the bottom and pulled the breath out of Cloud Cover’s and Limerick’s lungs, smooth as wind.
As the party had cleared and distributed the contents of the chest in draws of telekinetic balls of loot at a time, the two had stood planted and craning their heads further and further in from the front, floating and spinning together in delirious anticipation, looking in and out of each other’s eyes, which were opened so wide each half thought the other’s would drop out of his head.
Now, the book was here, here in their hooves – Cloud Cover warily suspended and rotated it just above eye level, with Limerick’s smile splitting longer and wider every time the Pegasus shifted its weight from a hoof to the digits of a wing – this was it, and it looked exactly the way it was supposed to. This was the legendary largest fortune they’d ever see, all bound up in a bundle of hide and yellowed paper, to be relinquished in exchange for the second-largest in smaller, more simply-split units, in line with a promise they’d made back in Canterlot. It was just as all their sources described – the four that had had anything to say about what it should look like, at any rate. At least they’d agreed. Nowhere on the Book of Lyra was its title printed. Instead, a thin sea-green ribbon stretched along the spine, tucked and stuck into the binding at the top and bottom; on the cover was a simple stylized harp, a curving horseshoe shape with three depicted strings, pressed in and filled in gold leaf that glossed as the book’s front cover was turned in and out of shadow.
Cloud Cover laughed.
“We’ve done it,” Limerick said.
Cloud Cover laughed again – his hoarse, sighing victory “Haaa!” – and Limerick whinnied like a schoolcolt on the happy rush of a day of wood- and stream-side gamboling that hadn’t wanted to end. He ducked and caught the book by a side on his nose and reared up with it, taking it with him as he swung himself to his full height, on his hind legs and with his neck stretched. Cloud Cover blustered broken reminders for caution as the earth pony danced irregular two-steps witha toss of the book into the air every few seconds.
Golden Chime, standing on the back of the dragon sprawled across the cave’s entrance, gave her horn a last rough polishing rub along the rough inky purple scales on the big reptile’s side, and then she shook out her mane to clear away any specks of blood that hadn’t dried enough to mat the stringy mane hanging in her face from under her helmet, and hopped down to the trove’s pebbled floor with a crunch. “That’s your book?”
“Can’t be anything else,” Cloud Cover said with a nod between his shoulder and a cocked wing, bristling with its black feathers and tufts of white and graying fur at their bases to resemble a porcupine perched on his shoulder.
“Is everypony else happy with their haul?” Limerick reared to fling the book up once more and snap it with gratified gusto to his chest with his forelegs. “I can promise you, what Cloud and I will get out of this each will beat the value of everything else from the box combined.”
“The chest’s all you get – remember? Happy or not, this hoard is – is mine!” That was the dragon’s first peep since his surrender – he snarled an abrupt, desperate snarl, his one open eye darting behind his fingers to catch any one of the five ponies who had invited themselves into his lair too close to taking more than their compromise-promised share, scanning his shelves of crates of aging rubies and many-colored diamonds, his racks of adventurers’ swords by shape and size, his woven baskets of golden apples and bundles of scrolls...
A flicker to the side showed the armored yellow unicorn close again, narrowing her eyes, horn lowered and glowing a hot summery blue, poised to jab.
The dragon dragged the whimper in his throat out into another snarl as he squeezed his eye shut, clasping his fingers tight together, his shoulders unsubtly wobbling. Golden Chime snorted, which Dawnbreak mimicked as he stepped up, blasting his snort into her ear and eliciting a flinch as he rounded the dragon’s head to the eye she’d already stuck.
She watched him turn his muzzle up and pointedly away, ground her hoof in the gravel, and let it go, the charge in her horn stubbornly flickering low and high like a windblown candle and then out. “We don’t just go and steal stuff,” she murmured, without expectation that the dragon caught it or thought of Cloud Cover’s longtime living. Then she lifted her voice. “Hang on. Limerick has a point. We should be splitting the loot without the book five ways, not three.”
Dawnbreak preemptively shushed the dragon, whose finger-shield he had gotten to cumbersomely prying at with his hooves. “Sky and Voyage can split my share, if they really want something. I bet it’ll be enough for them to have us back on the boat so they can get moving again.”
Flint Spark had meanwhile propped the flap of her saddlebag open with the tip of a feather to inspect the radiantly red clutch of phoenix eggs she’d nestled inside. “Well, I’m happy,” she said. “What were you going to do with these eggs, anyway?”
“What does anyone do with eggs? I – I – I was gonna eat them!” The dragon clenched his teeth as the unicorn stallion lit his horn and commenced repairs on his bloody right eye.
“What’s your name?” Flint asked, repositioning her bow and quiver.
“Bartamus. I swear. Or, not really – I – I’m an orphan, I heard the name somewhere, ‘n I thought it sounded good, but that’s what I always use.”
“I’ll name one of the phoenixes after you, if you’d like.” She marked that with a smile, lightly warm.
“Well – thanks. I think.”
“What about this book, then?” Limerick cantered high to the center of the group. Cloud Cover presented the item in question, flourishing over the cover with a wing. “What in the name of Discord brought it into your collection – hmm?”
The dragon’s voice sat heavy in his throat. He swallowed, and breathed out long and hissing through his nostrils. Two tapering streams of white steam flowed snaked upward and spread invisibly thin across the ceiling of the treasure trove. “I stole it from another dragon. I – I just took it. Heck if I know where he got it, but I hid it under all that other stuff in that box in case he came to get it back. I’ve got other boxes of coins. I thought it would blend in. But that’s not important, right? It’s yours now.” The dragon’s voice had cracked, and the ears of the two nearby unicorns flickered erect. Golden Chime coughed, looking away so that Cloud and Limerick could see her choke on a laugh.
“I certainly hope he’s not on this island.”
“Nahh. It was – ah.”
The dragon snapped off as Dawnbreak’s withdrew his horn, drawing a little green trail of light in a neat, vanishing arc from his eyelid. Shoulders, arms, and neck all quaking, he steadily gathered and raised his weight on all fours, lifted his head, and slowly opened both eyes, blinking anxiously and erratically, testing their focus from side to side. His legs locked and eyes fixed in a few seconds of dawning contentment, and then he tilted his head back down at the unicorn stallion. “It’s, uh, already back to normal,” he said, with a hint of a dazzled lilt. “Thanks. A lot.”
Dawnbreaker beamed and bowed, head lowered and foreleg crooked.
In the center, Flint Spark had crossed to meet Cloud Cover and Limerick.
“Ye-e-es?” Limerick sang.
“May I have a look at the book?”
“What for?”
“It’s a famous book that nopony alive has read. Why wouldn’t I be curious? Please.”
“Be gentle. We wouldn’t want to mess around with it any more than we need to.”
Limerick “Oh-h-h”ed. “We’re reading it, are we not?”
“That goes without saying, I think.” Cloud smirked as the book’s weight shifted from his black hooves to her gingery ones. “Hence, more than we need to.”
The covers spread against the floor and Flint flickered the pages past her nose. She looked up, hollowly. “Do you think it might be a fake?” she asked.
The stallions froze. Cloud Cover’s smirk thinned. “What makes you ask that?”
“It wouldn’t be easy to make a mock-up of a book there was only ever one copy of.”
“Well, perhaps not fake, but incomplete, or damaged and badly filled-in.” She flipped the pages further forward, then back, and stomped her hoof to stop them at random. Cloud let out a pained grunt aloud and winced. “I know. I’m sorry,” she muttered, then read. “’Ponykind shares Equestria with countless enemies, among whom the dragon is arguably the most dangerous and yet – ’”
“And yet look what happens if you do beat one,” Dawnbreak snickered. Nopony cared to check Bartamus’s reaction
“’ – poorly understood. A dragon’s growth rate, maximum size, and life span are yet unknown, but the young can breathe fire from the moment they hatch and the average flying adolescent is capable of carrying off a grown stallion. With flight, fire, fangs, claws, and sheer bulk at its disposal, an adult dragon...’” Her red eyes rolled up from the book. “Do you recognize this already?”
“Of course I do.” Cloud Cover ducked his head in a nod and breezed in beside her. He pressed delicately on the page and pawed it aside, and it came loose from between the pages before and after. A draft dragged it off and the Pegasi watched it tumble over on the edge of the open book and catch flat against the floor. The nearest corner flapped up once and twice again, failing to be re-caught by the draft.
Flint glanced at the old black stallion.
“Only a page torn out of the Equestrian Bestiary. Perhaps Lyra had been using it as a bookmark or a reference, or both. Here. This page says something about a dragon, and so does the other – I thought so. I don’t recognize a word of either of these pages.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t filler to make up for a lost page? I recognized a few more snippets of other books.”
“This page picks up where the last one left off nicely,” Limerick noted, pressing in on Cloud Cover’s other side.
“It could be a coincidence.” Cloud was squeezed as Flint Spark leaned in front of him with a raised brow to address Limerick. With a grunt he squatted and strained for a bit of space.
“It would be easy enough to check a few pairs of pages with other borrowed pages in between them.” He primed a page to turn for a first example.
“What are the chances that they could all read together coincidentally?”
She could have been honestly asking. In fact, she probably was – Flint Spark liked and respected questions, and asked many: if she asked interrogatively, it was because she was interested in the answer, and if she asked rhetorically, it was to get at a sincere, core point. If the last was, hypothetically, a rhetorical, it seemed lacking in the area of a substantial point. Cloud slowly, slowly exhaled anyway; he felt a tingle along his neck and back, and one of those slow, bone-clingingly insidious aches already setting into his unnaturally-bent old legs. “Flint Spark?”
“I don’t trust anypony’s judgment more than I trust yours – really. But I’m used to you talking that way.”
In a no-beat-in-between change of tune, she giggled, just behind his left ear. Cloud looked at her, with her returned calm smile. From that, the archer pony didn’t realize what she had done. Limerick to his right was smiling too, more cheekily. He tried to make three – as he did so he pictured it looked as dry as it felt tight. Flint was right. Ordinarily, Limerick was the pony to talk to for a measurement of potential, everything that could go right; and having known Cloud Cover longest of anypony in the team, he knew that the rogue, the veteran of subterfuge, on the other hoof had a flawless, finely-calibrated head for measurement of risk, everything that could go wrong. Limerick was listening into his head, where the numbers rolled and ticked for some way to calculate the odds that, indeed, the Book of Lyra, old as it was, could have been missing half its pages and read as misleadingly complete until a committed reader realized at the end of Saga of the Harmonious Six that they hadn’t only not read but would never read exactly how Twilight Sparkle, or then, “Clover the Clever” and friends had made it to the Changeling hive, and what they’d found there.
Limerick had led Cloud Cover to a few rewarding opportunities in their partnership’s time, and Cloud Cover had saved Limerick a certain acquaintance with pain; and Cloud Cover was constantly and quietly proud of the other fact Flint had given voice to – his judgment was ever-trusted. He trusted himself. So had it not struck him to doubt the book’s authenticity and condition because he had somewhere and subconsciously weighed it as without enough of a base to spend time and stress thinking on, or because he had finally come the point at which a prospect flew him too high on his hopes for sight of his senses? He and Limerick had – supposedly – found the famous book of Lyra, inside which were the origins of and marks left by the Harmonious Six and other such historic ponies, names of resting places of other more self-contained treasures, and complete written scores of music for effective bard mainstay stories to raise them from epic up to pure, spine-schilling and stardust-scattered magic. It was either too good to be true, or so good it had to be.
But surely even such a thing as this wasn’t worth getting caught in a sudden tow of self-consciousness over. Every call or action had at least an astronomically-small change of proving bad. The chance that he would happen to read a gutted book as complete thanks to flukes in the flow between ends of the gaps was an astronomically small one. Something had to be noticeable after only two spots missing pages. “I’m honored to have your trust,” he muttered, thinking it was appropriate if he remembered what Flint had last said, and turned the page.
It turned easily to a loose one – this one was dog-eared into a large triangle that took nearly the entire upper half of the paper into it. He folded it back into proper shape and Flint Spark and Limerick crouched to read. The writing was the same as on the pages pinching it in place and began “Notes on Dragons”. A line break later: “Judging a dragon’s age may be next to impossible. Although dragons age very slowly (a dragon hatchlings growth over a decade might even go completely unnoticed by a pony), they can grow on their own greed – a baby dragon that develops an obsession with hoarding early on will grow along with its hoard. Theoretically, a baby dragon could hit its towering, full-grown adult size in just a few days. To turn that around, the village-torching scourge in the mountains could actually be a literal overgrown spoiled child who hardly has a handle on what he’s doing!”
At the bottom right corner of its blank lower half, the page was cheerfully signed, “Lyra Heartstrings.”
“That’s promising,” Cloud Cover thought out loud.
“I agree,” said Flint. “I’ve never heard that anywhere.”
“They couldn’t fault you for bringing back nothing, then,” Dawnbreak cut in.
“Just what I was thinking,” said the third stallion, and he took the apparently settled satisfaction with him trotting to the cave’s front, turning to ask his friends if they were shoving off.
The unicorns took their lead, nodding goodbyes to the dragon half-cringing by the cave mouth, neck twisted away but head turned towards. Golden Chime managed a thank-you. Flint checked her bags once more and Cloud shut the book, and cantered to catch up with Limerick.
They took their turn thanking the dragon, “for sharing,” Limerick put it. The dragon started – then while he returned their goodbye, for just a sliver of a second, there was a little of a – sheepish quality? Cloud Cover paused in his steps just momentarily as his brain dizzyingly surged on a thought once. He had some wonder, but was unsure how to ask on it, or even what he’d say to being correct. He and Flint turned their heads away from Bartamus just a moment after Limerick stepping onto the sunny downward road.
The road had been worn around and around up the hill, coiling up from the trees clinging around the base like large burrs to the most imposing cave in the top, which had been where the dragon had established himself, and caught every one of the other many caves boring into its side, unless the caves had been dug around the road. In most of those smaller caves had been suggestion that the hill had been mined by Diamond Dogs before Bartamus had moved in – usual tools designed for and held and broken in by dexterous paws such as pickaxes and hammers, spiked collars and rough but durable protective gear shaped for large torsos, and even a few petrified bones. There hadn’t been any jewels; perhaps the dogs had taken them with them when they’d left the island, or the dragon had been the reason they had at all and had demanded the jewels before he’d chased them off. Or eaten them. Then again, their exploration of the caves had been cursory, with their focus on the dragon’s lair at the hilltop, with periodic splitting up to scour for hazards. Cloud Cover and Flint Spark had flown through the tunnels that had given their wings the room, and they probably would’ve left the spiral and flown straight down to the boat if Flint didn’t have her new phoenix eggs and Cloud wasn’t still a little worn out from their skirmish with the dragon.
The aching in his legs was exacerbated to a hint of a stinging by the bottom of the hill. At least it had been downhill, he supposed. But it was a small island, and from the end of the road, the boat was visible just caught on the sand, and so were the two ponies onboard, if not their faces. Salt Sky was the tan one pacing, and Voyage was the white Pegasus clinging in the sail lines with her wings stiffly extended and bending like creaking bare branches. Her head shot up in a blink, momentarily held to confirm she was spotting the team, and ducked down. She gave a word to Salt, who stopped and stiffened and clopped to the front of the boat.
“Always good to see everypony coming back from an expedition alive,” he called down to the beach, grinning. The tassels on his red scarf caught the breeze like flags on a flag. He looked up at the hole in the hilltop. “We don’t have a chase on our hooves, do we?”
“We didn’t slay the dragon, but we beat him,” Golden Chime said, already hoisting herself aboard from the stepladder. “And I don’t think anypony’s gonna have to worry about him again.”
“You did that good!” Salt laughed, and Voyage stared. “Did you find the Book of Lyra there, too?”
Limerick nodded hard. “Oh yes we did.”
“Anything else?”
“There was plenty in the dragon’s den, but we got him to agree to...”
“What about the caves? Voyage and I never got to really look through ‘em.”
“There were no monsters or anything,” said Golden Chime, “so you could’ve.”
“But nothing really noteworthy? No underground landmarks, or places that weren’t mined dry?”
“’Fraid not.”
Salt looked up at the hill again, searching from the boat – like an enormous, scoured-pale dead trunk, eaten through by bugs into a proper promising maze of holes and chambers, with nurseries, food stores, and a queen’s laying room and all. He sighed, and the idea sagged. “Ah, well. That’s one less priority spot to make it to. Voyage and I might come back here on our own time, eventually, just to see for ourselves.” With an inward sniff, he changed tone. “And I figure the two of you’d rather not keep a book like that on the sea for too long. We’ll sail overnight again and make it back to the cape by morning, but... once you’ve brought that book to your mysterious client, I hope you’ll make a point to sail with us again. Any lot who can best a dragon is valuable to Voyage and me. We might come along with you to a dragon’s den, now.”
Voyage took a deep breath, dove from the mast with a cable in her teeth, and thrust her wings wide with a poof, while Salt clopped down the stepladder to give the boat a push for her pull, hustling back on board on the first sharp skid in the sand. The sails swelled and the boat churned loose into the water. Voyage hovered to a slow until the boat coasted under her and landed, wincing, stretching her wings, then faced upwind and raised them again, eyes closed. Golden Chime had removed her helmet and was letting her blood-and-sweat-tangled mane, not as pale or yellow as usual, whip free. Flint Spark was nowhere visible, tucked away with her eggs in a small cranny below deck. Dawnbreak presented his share of the treasure to Salt.
“By our return to Canterlot, before anything, we’ll need to write up some questions for Spinel Crown,” Cloud Cover told Limerick.
“Come again?”
“We don’t really know why he wants the book, do we? We don’t even know that his offer is in fact the best we could get.” There were many reasons a pony would, but they’d met Spinel Crown. He was a fuchsia unicorn with a beetle-shaped pin cutie mark. Cloud and Limerick had both composed mental rosters of members of the royal family and Canterlot elite and they included no such pony. He had also admitted complete independence from the Celestial Arcane Academy, the Chariot School of Sorcery, and all of the dozens of bard troupes and would-be guilds across Equestria. That was why he was a mysterious client – he had seemed not to have minded meeting them face to face, but not a hint on his background had been provided, or his intentions, or his means, where the generous offer he had made would come from. Plenty of high-profile historians could have been willing to invest in the Book of Lyra, and, by Discord, so would the royal family, surely – it had to include a few bits about their history, along with the adventures of one of its long-lost members before her return.
“He might be an independent bard.”
“So are you.” Cloud raised a brow. “If we’d had the leads sooner, we could have made perfectly good use of this ourselves.”
“You and I both know we’re going to read it.” Limerick stamped a purple hoof and declared over the bow to the open seascape, “The Book of Lyra itself has returned to our world, in our time! IT HIDES NO MORE!” His teeth bit together as he smiled and spun a half circle while Cloud found himself strangely confused. “...And we can get plenty out of it before we turn it in, I’m sure.”
It was true that they hadn’t been given a deadline with their job.
A seagull cawed in a passing clump of kelp. Voyage looked like one, yellow eyes and all.
The wind was picking up strength. The water folded into battering, rolling waves that knocked the boat one by one, sent it tilting back and bucking into the next one with a spurting, spraying, salty crash.
“We’ll start when the wind dies down,” said Cloud Cover.
***
On top of the hill, Bartamus didn’t watch the boat leave. His eyes worked well enough that he could. Their focus was rushed out of his head by a heart pounding quickly enough for an animal a fraction of his size. He sat back on his haunches with his knees rattling.
The fact was that he had had his eye gouged out. Well, yeah – not actually out. But his eye had been stuck deep by a unicorn’s horn. For a few minutes, it had hurt, his eye had been full of blood and couldn’t see, and it wouldn’t see, for ever. So he’d thought, until the other unicorn had fixed it, back to normal, clean, clear, and painless. He’d realized that that was what he got for trying to have what proper dragon has. He’d been a small dragon with no lair or treasure. He’d had no mother to give him the small, starting gift share from her own hoard that some mothers did. So – and he realized now that while he had confessed as much, he had never apologized – he’d stolen it all, mostly from other dragons when he’d been small enough to slip into their lairs without upsetting much. He’d even stolen his name from an older, more proper dragon with some immature and incoherent expectation it would make him accordingly imposing. Given that Bartamus’s age, he should have figured that the name would’ve been a bit too dramatically old-world even for a dragon for him to just use. And this was what happened when you tried to take what you wanted before you’d earned it – you had ponies looking to slay you to take it back before you were ready.
His stomach roiled and bubbled, and he turned to the jars of gemstones by color and flavor on the mounted shelves. He thought of swallowing a few, then of the muffled sound and sensation of the chips and gem dust scraping and grinding together in his guts, which reacted, with a sickening acidic spurt.
He had never meditated on guilt before. But he assumed this was it. In fact, what he felt guiltiest over was the first thing he’d said after the fight. He’d already lost – what was he going to do to them with a popped and bleeding eye? They could’ve and should’ve taken whatever they liked, for themselves and the two other ponies waiting for them somewhere outside the cave. The Diamond Dog miners weren’t coming back for their jewels – he’d done a bang-up job scaring them off the island, which he’d been complacently proud of at the time. Some of them hadn’t even bothered looking for extra boats once the most accessible ones had been taken, swimming and dog-paddling straight off the coast for dear life...
The dragon jerked a wooden panel loose from a hole in the back of the wall. He slunk in. His sides didn’t rub around the walls like they usually did.
The room it led to was small and rather cozy with a low ceiling. He’d scraped the floor into a shallow bowl that he’d filled in with a sloppy nest of mangled baskets and dull bedsheets and Dogs’ vests. He stepped in, heard the twigs scrape and felt the cloth catch in his claws, coiled around, and again, gave up. He collapsed. The nest crackled and rustled. And he was so sorry, and dizzy with guilt.
His blood rushing as much as it was, he hadn’t expected to wink on out.
When he woke, the edges of his nest would look twice as high as they usually did.