Hero by Alethea Kontis Page A

Jack had repaid her by stealing her eyes. Peregrine had helped Jack escape her clutches and disappear back down the treacherous mountainside.
    Oh, what fun that had been. It felt like a million years ago and only yesterday that Jack had left them. Peregrine had no way of knowing if the bravely stupid man had survived, but he hoped so. He wished Jack well in his adventures. He did miss the company, but not more than he treasured his immortality.
    The witch did not glare at him with her hollowed sockets as she might have looked at him with eyes, but Peregrine could feel Cwyn’s unyielding stare. “Snip-snap-snurre-basselure! No man alive could shake the bones of the earth so, except him. That rascal stole my eyes! I will have them back!”
    Peregrine went about the business of resetting the room to rights, demonstrating to the witch just how seriously he considered her histrionics. “You haven’t found Jack in all this time, Mother. What makes you think you’ll locate him now?”
    “Shivers and shimmies! Every earthquake has a center. Jack is at that center. I’d bet my eyes on it.”
    Peregrine was tempted to take that bet. “Even if he is, how do you propose to find him? Betwixt isn’t exactly in any shape to travel.”
    The chimera in question feigned sleep on the hearth. The snakehound’s eyes were closed, but Peregrine marked his still, shallow breaths. Betwixt was the only one among them who could descend the mountain unaided, albeit perilously, and only when he was in a form that afforded him both wings and skin thick enough to withstand the unbearable cold. Peregrine had seen Betwixt assume a form like that only once. He wasn’t yearning to see it again anytime soon.
    “I will cast a spell,” said the witch.
    “Of course you will, Mother. How silly of me.”
    “Yes, you are! A silly girl, I always say.” The witch was hit-or-miss when it came to spellcasting, but it was her favorite hobby. She kept at it every day, siphoning off the sleeping dragon’s magic, trying to open a portal back to the demon world from whence she’d come. She rarely succeeded in doing much more than infusing light into stone or summoning strange magic objects from afar. Once, she’d succeeded in making the cave walls taste like cake. Peregrine missed that particular spell, stomachache or no.
    The witch’s spellcasting lair and bedchambers were a series of caves very close to the dragon’s tomb—proximity to the dragon boosted a spell’s power, for better or worse. Every spell she cast drained her physically—the stronger the attempted spell, the quieter she was afterward. She often retired directly to the adjacent room, when she didn’t pass out in front of the cauldron. If she was deep enough into a spell, she could waver indefinitely between the lair and her bedchambers, disappearing for rather notable lengths of time. This could go very well or very badly for Peregrine and Betwixt. Possibly both.
    “I’ll need a map for the scrying,” she said. “East and west. West and east, and always south.”
    The whole of the world was south of here; she could mean anywhere. “They’re in the library,” answered Peregrine. “I’ll fetch one for you.” He didn’t want the witch anywhere near that particular cave.
    “Thank you, my silly green darling.” Idly, the witch scratched the dark blue stumps of her horns beneath her hair. “We’ll go prepare.” Cwyn launched herself off the rocks to fly back down the tunnel. The witch followed like a tethered ghost, all white hair and blue skin and gray rags against the shadowed archway.
    The “library” housed the few precious scrolls Peregrine had collected from the witch’s hoard . . . and from the skeletons of those who’d met with the dragon once upon a time and hadn’t lived to tell the tale. There were some spells but more maps, all with vague descriptions of how to reach the dragon’s treasure using tunnels long since buried under ice, crystals, Earthfire,