For a few moments there, Drusilla had forgotten her quest. And the ache that filled her now was almost such that she didn’t want to continue. She had to force herself to square her shoulders and back out of Miles’s arms. The future of Morgania lay in the balance.
The flicker of sadness across his face tugged at her heart, but she had to be strong. This could lead nowhere good.
“I’m sorry, Miles. We need to find the Behemoth, get the key and save my father’s kingdom. And not let ourselves get distracted by…other things.”
He nodded. “Sure. Okay. Let’s go, then.”
The last bit of the climb seemed steeper, although Drusilla wasn’t sure if that was the terrain, her tired legs, or the weight of what she’d just done. He deserved better than to be labeled a distraction. After all, she had wanted it as much as he had. But still, she had her life in order—for all its good and bad points—and she couldn’t afford to rattle that order. Not right now.
At the summit of Mount Ayth, a cavern yawned open.
Distant, disinterested hums emerged from within. The kind of hum that said, I’m not interested in the petty doings of the likes of you.
“Is that…?”
Miles nodded. “That’s the Behemoth.”
“It sounds busy.”
“It usually is.”
“So what now?” she asked.
“Now we get really, really careful.”
He stepped into the cave with cautious confidence. She followed with a good deal less certainty in her stride, peeking over his shoulder.
And there it was.
It wasn’t what she’d expected. Come to think of it, she didn’t know what she’d expected. Something large and hairy, with glowing eyes, gleaming teeth, sharp claws and a bad attitude. Instead, it was…well…rather drab. It looked like a big, boxy earthworm, with a segmented body ten or twelve feet long and about waist high. If it had eyes, it kept them well hidden. It must have had eyes, though, for this was without doubt the cleanest cave she’d ever set foot into. Apparently it had a neatness fetish. It also seemed to like cold. She shivered.
“So that’s it?” she whispered.
Miles nodded. “That’s it. It seems content enough. This might be easier than we’d hoped.”
“Famous last words,” she replied.
As if on cue, the Behemoth let out a series of sputtering belches. Iridescent scales twinkled angrily and the belches turned to repetitive yips.
Eeep-eeep-eeep-eeep-eeep!
“Oops,” Drusilla whispered.
“Oops,” Miles agreed.
“Now what?”
“Now I earn my keep.”
It seemed like an odd comment. His company had hardly been an imposition on this journey. And he’d certainly pulled his share of the weight all along. So why did he feel a need to earn his keep? Maybe he simply enjoyed the opportunity to show off his Behemoth-taming skills. Maybe it was simply a verbal tic. Maybe she was trying to parse too much from every word, every action, wondering if he felt the same things she was feeling, and if he was as afraid of them as she was. Maybe she should stop thinking about maybes. Maybe she should stop thinking, period.
He approached the Behemoth with a surprising calm, walking down one side, then around to the other, studying it, as if divining its intentions from the pattern of its yelps and flashing scales.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
“That was the plan.”
“Will it breathe fire?”
He shook his head. “That only happens in stories. Behemoths are actually rather sedate, unless you try to poke around inside them without putting them to sleep first. And I’ve rarely had to go there. But they’re still dangerous.”
She was ridiculously disappointed. What was a fantasy without a fire-breathing Behemoth to defeat? “What do they do?”
“Well,” he said, taking a closer look at some of its scales, “if it gets really angry, it’ll cast a spell of forgetfulness.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not. It’s diabolical. It will find everything you most need to remember and make it forgotten. Poof. As if it hadn’t even happened.”
Maybe this was more dangerous than fire-breathing after all. She stiffened her spine, ready for a fight. “Definitely not good. So how do you stop it?”
“Carefully,” he answered. “Very carefully.”
If there was any meaning to the Behemoth’s squeals, burps and flashes, she couldn’t see it. But apparently he could. He seemed to stalk the problem like a heron eyeing a fish. Long moments of stillness. A careful step. More study. More stillness. Waiting for the right opportunity. Waiting to strike.
It was surprisingly mesmerizing. She’d thought he would use a sword, or powerful magic, or at least a whip and a chair. Then again, she’d thought the Behemoth would be large, hairy, toothy, clawy and attitudey. Life had a way of not giving you what you expected. And yet giving you exactly what you’d hoped for.
Finally he stopped circling it and looked up. “I think it’s ill. Seems to have caught a cold.”
Her entire mental image of Behemoths—what little had survived the initial sighting—collapsed. This was no vile monster. Instead, she found herself thinking of chicken soup, hot chamomile tea, lots of rest under a warm blanket and a heaping-double-extra-helping of womanly TLC.
“How can I help?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s pretty technical.”
“It’s not technical. The poor beast is sick.”
“Yes, but it can get very cranky.”
She waved the warning away. “Pish, tosh. Women are used to dealing with beasts that get cranky when they’re sick. We call them ‘husbands.’”
“I don’t get cranky when I’m sick,” he protested.
“And you’re not a husband, either, are you?”
He smiled mischievously. “Not yet.”
Her heart slammed in her chest. She was suddenly more afraid of him than she’d ever been of the Behemoth.
The Behemoth let out another series of sputtering squeals. His face shifted in a heartbeat. “This is bad. We need to get to work. There’s a stack of crackers over there. Hand them to me, please?”
“Of course.” She walked over to where he’d been pointing but saw nothing that looked even remotely edible, or at least not for a human. “What do they look like?”
“They’re round and shiny, with a hole in the middle.”
“Oh…these?” she asked, holding them up. “These are crackers?”
“Behemoths have strange tastes,” he replied.
She handed him the stack, and he began to sort through it, apparently looking for the right flavor. After what she’d seen on this quest, the notion that a Behemoth might be cured of a cold by the right flavor of cracker was no longer a stretch. The world was far weirder than she had ever imagined. And yet, also far more beautiful.
“Let’s hope this works,” he said, tickling the Behemoth’s mouth. He saw the quizzical look on her face. “I’m trying to get it to stick its tongue out.”
She merely nodded and watched as he gently touched and tickled. Finally, seemingly convinced that he meant no harm, the Behemoth’s tongue slid out of a tiny slit of a mouth. A creature this big had a mouth that small? Chalk up another one to unrealistic expectations.
Miles put the cracker on the creature’s tongue and tickled again. The Behemoth seemed to consume it warily, drawing the cracker into its mouth and pausing for a long moment before letting out a tiny shudder. Drusilla hoped it was a shudder of relief. It wasn’t.
The Behemoth regurgitated the cracker, uneaten.
“Not good,” Miles said. “It must have the flu. Or some virus worse than a common cold.”
“Can you take care of it?” she asked.
“I can, I think. But at this point, the treatment gets pretty radical. You might not want to watch. It could get ugly.”
She smiled. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”
“Don’t say you weren’t warned.” He drew a breath. “I’m going to have to give it an artificial brain for a little while, until I can find the infection in its real brain. And it’s nauseous, so the timing is critical. I have to get it to eat a very particular kind of cracker, then knock it out before it can spit it back up. When it wakes up, it’ll swallow it. I hope.”
“And the cracker has the artificial brain?”
“Exactly.”
“And if it doesn’t swallow it when it wakes up?”
His face paled at the mere thought. “Let’s just say I hope you’ll remember me, Princess. But first things first. Let’s find that cracker. It should be in a box marked Boot. ”
She paused, looking at him with a cocked brow. “You keep artificial brains in a box marked ‘shoes’?”
“Not shoes. Boot. A very big difference.”
“Yeah. One has a high top.”
He frowned at her, but she could see the twinkle in his eyes. “Boot. Look for Boot.”
“This doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“It doesn’t have to. It’s a tamer’s code word.”
“Oh.” She was beginning to think Behemoth tamers were a little…odd. Odder than most folk, which probably wasn’t saying much, now that she thought about it.
Considering that the Behemoth’s cave was neater than a guard barracks before a royal inspection, finding the boot crackers should have been easy. But many of the boxes seem to have been labeled by a drunken chicken during a rainstorm. She could go blind trying to decipher the smeary scrawls. Miles, on the other hand, found the scrawls suspiciously transparent.
“You wrote these?” she asked.
He flushed the tiniest bit. “Penmanship was never my forte.”
“I guess not.”
Now that she knew whom to ask for decoding help, however, the search went faster. Finally she found a hand-labeled box that looked vaguely like it might be the one. She held it out to him. “This says boo, or something like that. I’m guessing that’s ‘Boot’?”
His eyes brightened as he took the box. “You’re learning to read my writing. That’s scary.”
She chuckled. “Don’t let it go to your head. My father may be the king, but there’s a reason he has scribes to do his writing for him. His signature looks like the death throes of an ink-covered beetle.”
He nodded, but she could tell he wasn’t really listening. He’d already opened the box and was digging through the crackers. “Ah, here it is. The freshest boot-flavored cracker.”
“I can’t believe that creature eats boots.”
“Behemoths have strange tastes,” he said. “Now comes the tricky part. See that fluorescent scale over there?”
“Which one?”
“The green one.”
“Which green one?”
He walked over and pointed. “That green one.”
She couldn’t resist the opportunity and leaned up to kiss him. “Gotcha.”
“Princesses.” He shook his head. “Okay, that’s the one. Push on that scale when I tell you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Puh-leeze.”
He carried the cracker back over to the Behemoth’s mouth and began tickling its lips again. After a bit of coaxing, the beast tentatively offered its tongue. He put the cracker on its tongue and tickled it into the mouth.
“Now.”
Hoping the beast didn’t do something terrible to Miles, Drusilla pressed the scale into its boxy body with the very tip of her finger. In an instant, the beast shuddered and went deadly still. The fluorescence of its scales faded to black.
“Oh, no,” she said, a sinking feeling in her stomach. “I messed up. I’m sorry. I killed it.”
“No.” His voice was reassuring. “It’s just in a deep sleep for a moment.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes, Princess. You just tamed a Behemoth. Now let’s see if we can wake it up. Push that scale again.”
“Are you sure?”
He simply smiled. She pressed on the scale again. The Behemoth let out a series of belches, buzzes and grunts. Miles’s eyes were fixed on its mouth. The cracker stayed down. After a minute or two, its scales began to twinkle happily.
“Is it all better?” she asked.
“Not yet. It’s using the artificial brain now. But that means I can fix its real brain.”
With practiced ease, he stroked and massaged the Behemoth’s scales. It responded with satisfied blinks and grunts, obviously trusting him. After a few minutes he stepped back. “Nasty bug. But I think we caught it before there was any permanent damage.”
“You’re sure?”
He touched her hand. “Princess, with a Behemoth, you’re never sure until it works. We’ll know after we put it to sleep and wake it again.”
He pressed a scale, and the Behemoth obediently, almost cheerfully, stuck out its tongue. The boot-flavored cracker was still there.
“It didn’t eat?” she asked.
“Oh, it did. It’s Behemoth magic.”
“Ah.”
This, of course, made perfect sense. Behemoths truly were strange creatures. Miles put the cracker back in the box, let the Behemoth withdraw its tongue and nodded to her.
“Press that green scale again.”
“Which one?” she asked with a mischievous wink.
“You just want another kiss.”
“You’re right.”
He came to her and their lips met, softly at first, grazing, almost tickling, until she opened her mouth the tiniest bit and let the tip of her tongue touch his. He let out a low groan.
She pressed the scale and sent the Behemoth into sleep again, then woke it with another press. All the while, her lips and tongue never left his lips. The Behemoth let out a happy sigh.
He smiled. “You sure know how to push the right buttons.”
She suddenly felt giddy. “Call me the Behemoth-Tamer Tamer. Now let’s find that key.”