Part II
Her Dragon Guardian
Chapter One
Many seasons later…
The Garden of the Hesperides offered a paradise of fragrant blossoms, lush green trees, and delectable vegetation, roots, and berries. For Medea’s entire life, this protected, sacred space, a gift from Gaea to Hera on her wedding day, had provided her and her two sisters with everything they needed to grow and thrive.
Everything until now.
Lately the garden was short of one very important thing—privacy.
Since the day their parents, Orpheus and Alena, with the help of the goddess Isis, had snuck in through the front gate, the two had lived in a simple cottage built by their father’s own hands. When Alena gave birth to the three of them, Orpheus had added on a second room, and for most of their lives, that had been perfectly adequate. Until Medea, acting contrary to their parents’ wishes, had conjured the golden grimoire.
She and her sisters, Isis and Circe, had spent years studying the book in secret, as well as other books they’d covertly summoned during stolen moments alone.
Only, their thirst for knowledge had far exceeded what they could attain in tiny sips of guarded study. They needed a way to easily hide and transport the book so that they could practice the spells on its pages anywhere in the garden, not only in the confines of their chambers. The book itself had inspired their plan. A spell inside held the promise of freedom and opportunity. If this worked, it would change everything.
“Why didn’t any of us think to use a spell to make this blasted thing lighter?” Medea grunted from the effort of carrying the massive tome. The thing weighed a ton. Even with her sisters gripping the corners of the sling they’d created to tote the tome from their family’s cottage, the dead weight made her stagger, and fresh beads of sweat broke out across her skin.
Medea was relieved when they arrived at their intended destination, the field of ever-blooming marigolds that decorated the area near the front gate of the garden. The golden scrollwork of the front gates rose into the clouds.
She gazed through the bars into the empty field beyond and wondered at the stories she’d heard about the Guardian at the Gate. Her father had spoken of a fierce dragon with razor-sharp teeth, massive horns, and impenetrable black scales. Nothing but a small stone cottage stood on the other side of the bars. The heaviness of disappointment weighed on her heart. As afraid as she should be, her curious mind was desperate to see the beast for herself
“Medea, are you sure about this? Mother and Father would be furious if they knew we were here. It’s forbidden!”
Medea whirled to find Circe’s face distorted with worry as she dropped her corner of the sling and let the golden grimoire dent the field of marigolds. Circe hated to break the rules. Since they’d obtained the contraband spell book, she’d been wracked with guilt over their secret activities. Admittedly, Medea and Isis had pressured her into going along with this idea. But what was the use of having powerful magic if you couldn’t use it to hide that very magic?
“They won’t find out, sister,” Medea said. “And if you stick to the plan and help me execute this spell, they’ll never know. We can do this. We’re ready.”
“We’re grown women and powerful witches. Why do we need to follow the rules anymore anyway?” Isis added. As always, she did not share Circe’s qualms about breaking their parents’ rules. Despite resembling her sisters in the most basic sense—black hair; straight nose; a pink, bow-shaped mouth—Isis had always carried an aura of darkness about her, from the deeper olive tone of her complexion to her navy-blue irises, only a fraction of a shade lighter than her pupils. Her gaze held an intensity the others did not share.
“You know why we have rules, Isis,” Circe said defensively. “It’s for our safety. Hera doesn’t know we’re here. If we break the rules, she could find out and… execute us, I suppose.”
That was the story their parents had always told them anyway, although the longer Medea lived, the more she questioned if the stories were actually true or inventions of exhausted parents who needed their three rambunctious daughters to obey.
The nymphs who tended the garden had agreed to keep their secret as long as, their parents explained, they followed three simple rules. One, they must never eat the golden apples that grew in the orchard. Two, the sheep with the golden fleece that grazed along the hillside were off-limits to eat, although using their wool for weaving was permitted. And three, the rule that applied to them on this day, they weren’t allowed near the garden gate.
The first rule made sense to Medea. Nothing living in the garden ever ate the golden apples. Not rabbits or the aforementioned sheep or the tiny, spindle-legged deer that frequented the brook near their cottage. The only beings that ever touched the apples were the garden nymphs who collected the ones that fell from the branches in giant baskets. None of them had any idea what the nymphs did with the apples, but they’d never seen them eat the fruit. Perhaps, Medea assumed, the fruit wasn’t edible at all.
The second rule was trickier to understand. Somethingdideat the sheep. Occasionally one would go missing overnight, silently disappearing from the flock with no explanation. But Medea had a horrific memory of a loss that was not so silent. She’d awakened in the middle of the night to the bleats of panicked sheep and the distant thunder of stampeding animals. There had been blood the next morning, splattered across the hillside.
For many nights after that, she’d feared the unknown. What was killing the sheep? As far as she was aware, there were no predators in the Garden of the Hesperides. Time and again, she’d asked their father Orpheus for an explanation. He’d answered only that there were rules for a reason and if she followed them and was within the wards that protected their cottage before nightfall, she had nothing to fear. Someday, he said, when she was older, she’d understand. Now she was older and she no longer feared the mysterious sheep thief, but she still had no explanation for it.
The third rule was the most perplexing. Why couldn’t they come here to the field near the gate? She understood why they should not leave the garden of course. Their parents had explained to them that they had made enemies among the gods. Was it simply protection from being seen through the gate that their parents were after? Then again, after all this time, was anyone still watching?
“Let’s get this over with,” Circe muttered with an exaggerated shudder. “I don’t like it here.”
Isis laughed. “What is it, exactly, you hate about this place, sister? Is it the sunshine, the sea of beautiful flowers, or the idea of practicing unsupervised magic with your sisters that bothers you?”
“Knock it off, Isis. You know she hates breaking the rules.” Medea had long ago accepted Circe’s resistance to rule-breaking as a trait tied to her fiercely loyal heart. She ignored Isis’s derisive glare and drew her wand from her sleeve, opening the book to the spell they’d agreed on.
Abruptly, Isis’s head turned sharply to the side and her nostrils flared.
“What is it, sister?” Medea asked. A chill crawled along her neck at the look on her face. Unlike Circe, nothing usually rattled Isis.
“I smell smoke,” she said. “And something else. Something… animal. But it’s strange. Musky. It reminds me of death.”
