A Sky Full of Dragons, page 1
This story celebrates the delightful critters and creatures all around us, which is why I’m dedicating this book to the wonderful creatures in my life.
My pet rescue dragons, Grand, Fielding, Stella, Sammy, Teddy, and Fancy.
My wild unicorns, Maggie May, Dolly, Ralph, Sparkie, and Tabitha.
And I can’t forget the very magical hats, Sunshine, Boo, Miss Pawpaw, Sal, and Dinkey.
NOTE: These spells have been collected by the Before Long Witch. The Before Long Witch was born in a dragon’s footprint but raised by a most wild herd of unicorns. She was named “Before Long” because she knew that before long there would be a whirling, there would be a storm, there would be a wind that blows the old ways away. She gathered these incantations, enchantments, sorcery sonnets, and cauldron prayers throughout her long life so that the ancient magic would never be lost, much less forgotten to the tides of time.
Please practice these spells responsibly.
SPELL NO. 9,087
EYES FOR SALE, PICK YOUR COLOR, PURPLE LIKE A TROLL’S MOTHER.
NOTE FROM THE BEFORE LONG WITCH
This spell may be used for banishing Cyclops rats from your sock drawer. Can also be used to fight a troll, as Cyclops rats are natural enemies of the aforementioned. Recite spell while holding your wandle high, turning it in small circles. Spell works best when wandle has been dipped into the spit of a deranged fairy.
CHAPTER 1 THE MAGICAL HATMAKER
AUNT CAULDRONEYES MADE POINTED HATS covered in bright green warts for witches, large floppy hats covered in crystal eyes and moonlight for werewolves, and hats that had an edge of mist and a ribbon of rain for the ancient trees in the forest.
She made hats that smelled like an old troll’s foot for trolls themselves, and plenty of hats for ogres, fairies, giants, and dragons, even the grumpy ones. She also made hats for unicorns, but when she did, she always had to cut a hole in them.
“To fit your wild and wonderful horn,” she’d say to the unicorns with a giggle. Then she’d measure the spirals that come in as many sizes and colors as there are stars in the sky and dreams to be had.
It was the best day when I got to help Aunt Cauldroneyes with unicorns.
“What do you always have to have in the house for unicorns, Spella?” Aunt Cauldroneyes asked me.
“You have to have a jar of boogers,”1 * I said. “For when a unicorn gets hungry.”
“You are the perfect unicorn hatmaker, Spella!” Aunt Cauldroneyes said with a neigh like a unicorn. “Especially for a hatmaker who is so young.”
I had turned eight at the beginning of September and had lived with Aunt Cauldroneyes ever since she found me as a baby in the bottom of a purple cauldron during a thunderstorm. She named me Spella De-broom Cauldroneyes. She chose De-broom as my middle name after her favorite flying broom brand, and she named me Spella because she said I was the best spell she’d ever found in a cauldron.
We lived in Hungry Snout Forest, in a house made of laughing stones that Aunt Cauldroneyes had gathered herself from the banks of the river when she built the house long ago. The house had a roof that you couldn’t see was purple with yellow polka dots, because of the crispy vines and crunchy twigs that covered them, like giant nests. Except, of course, when the wind blew and lifted the nests up.
Each of the nine chimneys was shaped like a long-necked goose, and they all faced different directions. In the winter, violet-colored smoke puffed out of their beaks as if they’d been eating exploding gumdrops. The windows in the house were arched with circles of glass colored in the bright shades of wild grapes, raspberries, and fairy fromps. But inside the house was the best of all because Aunt Cauldroneyes had enchanted the doors to smell and taste like chocolate.
“So the hats can have a nibble-wibble,” she said.
There were plenty of hats who lived in the house with us. They had their own beds and floppy slippers and mugs for chocolate curl. Some of the hats burped. Others farted like a spitfang. The witch hats constantly cackled. The ogre hats constantly grumbled.
The little hats made of fuzzy fabric with round twitchy ears and pink tails lived in pockets and teacups like mice, while the hat we called Mr. Sea Captain had long purple tentacles he would stick out the attic windows.
“Like an octopus,” Aunt Cauldroneyes would say as she waved her arms in the air.
The feathered owl hats flew over the wild wonders, chasing the mice hats until they giggled. The hats with bat wings had to be kept out of the daylight and preferred to sleep in tiny coffins. They also had a habit of biting with their little fangs.
“These will be my vampires,” Aunt Cauldroneyes had said as she made the bat hats, lining them with red silk.
There was even a hat that was made of so much dirt that when you lifted her up, it was like lifting a rock and discovering beetles and earthworms on the underside.
“We’ll name her Wormella,” Aunt Cauldroneyes said.
While each hat was delightfully unique, they all loved dancing to Aunt Cauldroneyes’ funky-clunky monster records.2 * The hats were more creature than fabric, after all, and I was in charge of feeding them. They ate spools of sugar thread, caramel buttons, and chocolate thimbles. I had to make sure the candy stayed out of the sunlight. The hats hated eating melted thimbles.
After dinner I would walk the hats in Hungry Snout Forest. Then we would go into Aunt Cauldroneyes’ library, where books flew to and from the shelves. I would sit in her big poufy chair that smelled like cinnamon, catch one of the books flying by, and read to the hats until we all fell asleep. I always pretended not to be woken by the scratchy whiskers on Aunt Cauldroneyes’ chin as she gently kissed my forehead.
“Little Spella,” Aunt Cauldroneyes sang a lullaby, “she’s a dragon-fire poet, a wild truth’s muse, September’s sapphire, a little too blue. Wise as a river, deep as a well. For this cauldron’s child, a secret to tell. Dream a thousand skies tonight. Take a thousand leaps. This is your story. This is for keeps.”
She would cover me with a warm quilt and say, “I love you like a sky full of dragons.”
Aunt Cauldroneyes was as old as one thousand, five hundred years. She was older than that, if you believed it. Her voice was like the warmth of soup in winter, and she had pale green skin from an accident with a pickle potion when she was younger. Though, it can be said that all witches have a little bit of green in them. Sometimes the green is all over. Sometimes it’s only a spot here and there. And sometimes it’s just a tooth.
One of the best things about Aunt Cauldroneyes was that her wrinkles turned her whole face into one large spiderweb. A Silver Spider would crawl out from her hair and swing from one cheek to the other on glistening thread.
“Isn’t she marvelous?” Aunt Cauldroneyes always laughed as the spider tickled the tip of her nose. “We’ve been friends since I was a little bubble.”
Aunt Cauldroneyes had large eyes that reflected everything, and her two salt-and-pepper-colored braids were so long, they fell to her wide, bare feet. She would put her braids into a bowl. Using a pestle, she would crush and grind them like cocoa beans until they became a dark brown powder that she would mix with hot milk into a drink we called chocolate curl. Her hair would grow back down to her wide feet in the time it took the milk to boil.
On the night Aunt Cauldroneyes found me as a baby in the purple cauldron, lightning flashed against the sky and thunder roared like angry trolls. But not even a storm would stop Aunt Cauldroneyes from peeking into cauldrons, her shaggy purple cloak dragging on the ground behind her while her mauve shawl was pulled across her shoulders.
“You never know what you’ll find in a cauldron,” she always said. “I’ve found dragon eyes, troll nose rings, an old wizard’s robe with small giggling moons in the pockets, and even a laughing jar of jokes.”
We pulled a joke out of the jar every night. One of my favorites was, How do you know if your vampire dog has a case of the October sniffles?
“He keeps a coffin,” Aunt Cauldroneyes was always the one to say, making sure to cough so that “coffin” sounded like “coughin’.”
Aunt Cauldroneyes was known as the best magical hatmaker in the world. There was a large wooden sign nailed to the porch of our house that read MATHILDA THE MAGICAL MILLINER.
“ ‘Milliner’ is a fancy name for a hatmaker,” Aunt Cauldroneyes told me when I asked her about it. “And Mathilda is my first name. I’m named after my mother, who was also a Mathilda.”
Written beneath her name on the sign was OPEN MORNING TO MIDNIGHT. COME INSIDE FOR CAULDRON CAPS AND WITCHY SNACKS! PLEASE KNOCK FIRST AND WIPE YOUR PAWS, TENTACLES, AND ALL MANNER OF FEET ON THE DOORMAT.
We had every kind of creature and magical folk stopping by the house to pick up their custom-made hats. Aunt Cauldroneyes never used a wand to make hats or for her magic. I called her a spider witch because thread, in whatever color she conjured, came from her hands, like spider silk. Her fingernails were rather short, but when she clacked her tongue three times, they would grow long enough to stitch the thread. Three more clacks of her tongue, and her fingernails would once more become so short that they barely scratched the back of the hat we called Fleabag.
I would lie on my belly in the attic and watch Aunt Cauldroneyes while she sewed, and her two long braids stuck straight up. Her braids always stuck up when her fingers worked really fast. Sometimes while she was sewing, she would ask me to grab her a jar of fairywild oil to rub the fabric with, or get her a handful of kissing bells to sew onto
Everything Aunt Cauldroneyes used to make hats with, from thunderbird feathers to tickling buttons, were things she had found and collected. She was a forager. It was one of the reasons she was always looking into cauldrons.
“I knew when I looked into that purple cauldron and found you, Spella,” she said to me, “that you were more special than any old potion bubble. I also knew that you would one day be a Wand Keeper, because of your shadow.”
Aunt Cauldroneyes had a regular shadow of herself, but I had a shadow that was shaped as an egg about as tall as the cookie jar in the kitchen.
One time, I held a candle to the shadow. It was like shining a light onto the thin shell of a bird egg. I could see small bolts of lightning flickering on the inside of it.
“Every witch or wizard destined for the wand has a shadow of an egg,” Aunt Cauldroneyes told me. “When a Wand Keeper turns ten years old, the egg will hatch a creature.”
“What type of creature?” I asked as I imagined great and wonderful things.
“What hatches may be a water owl or a giant squid or a two-headed gorilla from the mountains,” Aunt Cauldroneyes said. “It can be anything in the world, because you feed the creature your magic while they are inside the egg. Once hatched, the creature will be the shadow of your wand.” She held her hand up in the light of the candle, casting a shadow of her hand on the wall. “They will also be your shadow. Because the eggs come from the great thunderbird, the creature will flash with lightning. Imagine it now, Spella. You journey through the world with the shadow of a unicorn galloping beside you, or a thunderbird flying high above you, or a lightning lizard slithering beside you. And whenever you need them, your creature will gallop, swim, slither, or fly into your hand and transform into a solid wand. The wand you will use to cast the very magic you had fed the creature with while they were still inside the egg.”
“I wonder what my creature will be,” I asked.
“A creature that will be as wonderful as you are, Spella,” she said. “I bet your wand will even have your beautiful blue freckles.”
She would rub her hands, which smelled like the thousands of cauldrons she had stirred, across my cheeks and over my bright blue freckles. I wasn’t very fond of my freckles, starting out. The other kids in the village drew pictures of me with hag hair and wonky teeth and a big pointed chin that had goat hair on it. I didn’t have any of those things, but they seemed to think that just because I had blue freckles, I was ugly all over from head to toe. That’s why my only friends were the hats—and Egypt, of course.
Egypt was Aunt Cauldroneyes’ talking cat. She was wrapped up like a mummy, with only her glowing yellow eyes showing. She was always tripping on the loose pieces of frayed linen that dragged on the ground beneath her. She had come from the land of the pyramids and had a habit of writing hieroglyphics on the walls in the house with black crayon. She had the even worse habit of mummifying things, from pots and pans to umbrellas and even pillows.
“I knew all the famous pharaohs,” she’d say in her deep, dusty voice, waving her paw through the air. “I’ll tell you about them if you give me three chocolate mice.”
Chocolate mice were her favorite candy. It was how I got her to help me walk the hats. Getting the hats to go on their walk was often like herding wild animals. We had to pull the octopus hat, Mr. Sea Captain, in from the windows, his tentacles knocking things off shelves. Egypt always managed to catch all the unicorn figurines just in time. Then there was the giant hat who preferred to stay inside and knit or do jigsaw puzzles, his small gold-rimmed eyeglasses always perched dangerously on the very end of his bulbous nose. His name was Grandma’s Boot.
“Grandma only ever wore the one boot,” Aunt Cauldroneyes said. “No one ever knew what happened to the other one, or even whether it had ever existed.”
Aunt Cauldroneyes said the boot was what was left of her old grandmother, so she’d pulled out the stitching and unfolded the skin of it and softened the sole. With the length of a single shoelace, and the size of a single boot, Aunt Cauldroneyes had made a hat that was as giant as the life she said her grandmother had lived.
Even though he was named after a boot, the giant hat didn’t much enjoy walking. I thought it was because, having once been a shoe, he had done so much of it.
“Ah, come on,” he’d say. “No walk today. I just walked yesterday. Besides, I got to finish my puzzle. I only have three pieces left.”
Me and Egypt would push him out of his comfy quilted cushion. He would quickly grab hold of the doorway with his long fingers and try to pull himself back toward his chair.
“You can finish your puzzle when we get back from our walk,” I always had to tell him.
“Are you pushing hard enough?” Egypt would ask, her voice barely able to be heard from beneath the heavy ribbon fallen down from the hat and covering her face. “I feel like I’m doing all the heavy lifting here. And I’ve been mummified for over a thousand years.”
Pushing the giant hat was like pushing a boulder. The fairy hats were the easiest to move. I could hold ten in one hand, they were so small. They looked like little pointed witch hats, only the points drooped under the weight of the very tiny toadstools growing on them.
The fairy hats’ bits and baubles were of tiny, secretive things like the spittle of ravens or the sparkle of stars. One fairy hat could be the color of a green toad, another a flash of fuchsia. They often changed color, depending on mood, and they all had funny names like Grow-a, Fen-reer, or Ow-stree. Though you might have thought they were dainty and fragile, with their tulle and sparkle, they knew how to use pine needles as swords and acorn caps as shields.
“Warriors of the winds,” Aunt Cauldroneyes would say.
Each night at bedtime I ran around the house with a jar to catch the fairy hats as if I were catching fireflies. Once they were inside the jar, I would press my face up against the glass and smile in at the twinkling lights as they smiled back at me.
“I love you like a sky full of dragons,” I’d whisper to them, because you never wanted to speak loudly to a fairy hat. They have such tiny ears, after all.
I always caught more of them than Egypt. It was rather hard for her to grab hold of a fairy hat, given how they would fly under her linen, causing it to glow and flicker until she was like a mummy made of lightning.
“Lightning mummy! Lightning mummy!” Aunt Cauldroneyes would giggle and clap her hands until her mauve shawl slipped off her shoulders, revealing even more fairy hats hiding beneath her collar.
1 * MOST THINK UNICORNS ARE GRACEFUL CREATURES WHO EAT THINGS LIKE SUGAR BALLS AND PINK DUST, BUT UNICORNS LOVE TO EAT BOOGERS. IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THEY’RE GOBLIN BOOGERS OR ELF BOOGERS OR CAT BOOGERS. THEY’LL EAT THEM ALL.
2 * FUNKY-CLUNKY MONSTER RECORDS MUST BE KEPT IN A LOCKED CABINET ON NIGHTS WITH A FULL MOON, OR THE RECORDS WILL CHANGE INTO WEREWOLVES.
CHAPTER 2 THE HIDDEN UNICORNS
I NEVER WANTED TO LIVE anywhere else but Hungry Snout Forest. Aunt Cauldroneyes said that at one time, before so many trees had been cut down, there used to be very old ones known as Anima Mundi. There, in the shallow bowls of their trunks, the trees held the raindrops from thunderstorms and turned them into stars, making galaxies in the middle of the forest.
“Can you imagine, Spella?” Aunt Cauldroneyes said. “Galaxies in something as simple as a puddle of water. That is the power of a forest.”
I tried to imagine how large Hungry Snout had once been. It was still vast enough to get lost in, but Aunt Cauldroneyes said that was still too small when you have creatures like dragons who take up many acres by themselves, and herds of unicorns who need wide-open spaces to gallop.
“When I was a little bubble,” Aunt Cauldroneyes said, “there used to be Star Spiders.3 * They were Silver Spiders that were so sparkly, you could see them miles away. They dropped down on webs they created in the sky, and they would lay their silk across my hair like diamonds.”
