“Girl?”
Something had happened to Maraud. I squatted down and touched her cheek, and felt cold steel instead of warm pebbly skin.
“Who did this to you, girl?”
She was a sad, broken, rusty piece of metal, with most of her face flaked off. Smaller than me.
I staggered back, clamped a hand over my mouth to keep from crying out.
Maraud was not a monster at all, but some ancient toy that no one loved.
“This isn’t real,” I whispered—and looked around—and saw that we were gone from the Underbridge—that we stood outside some miserable broken-down building, covered in graffiti, where a couple of kids did drugs in the shadows.
There were no whales in the sky. No brontosaurus necks arcing high overhead.
“Solomon?”
It was Ash—but not. This person was stronger, in some ways. No wicked spell held her back. No faraway look glazed over her eyes.
But she was weaker, too. Not a princess. Not an othersider. Just a person. Like anyone else.
And the woods were empty. No monsters lived there.
I held out my hands, and felt how empty they were. Nothing lived in them. No magic.
As far back as I could remember I could feel it inside me, even if it took me years to figure out what it was and how to use it. Now there was nothing.
Once, when I was a hungry little kid—before the Palace, before Radha—sleeping wherever I could find a safe place, eating only what I could scavenge—I’d had the most wonderful dream.
A table was spread before me. Covered in candles; so long it disappeared into the distance. Piled high with food; a thousand plates of weird and wonderful dishes. Some were real, like the sweet-spicy–smelling wyvern kebabs I’d never been able to afford, or the cheap roasted chestnuts that kind fellow citizens would buy for me from time to time—but some were not, like a strange giant circle of dough that had red sauce and melted cheese on top of it, or tiny, little pale pink sausages crammed into strange little loaves of bread, or pink oranges that were actually orange.
At first I’d been afraid to eat it. Clearly it was meant for someone way more fancy and wealthy than me. But I took a handful of pomegranate seeds, and no one stopped me, so I went to town. Spent hours, it felt like, eating all that food.
I ate it until I woke up.
And I lay there, in the dark warm basement where I’d been lucky enough to fall asleep, and felt how I had nothing. No food in front of me. Nothing in my stomach. Nothing but pain and hunger.
Never in my life had it been so painful, to wake up into cold, drab miserable reality. And it never was again—until that moment, when I looked around and saw that I stood in a world with no magic, no dinosaurs, no monsters. How could humans survive in a world so ugly?
“This isn’t real,” I whispered again, and shut my eyes and focused on the red light of the sun that filtered through my eyelids, praying that when I opened them I was home and safe again.