The Wishing Map is a full-length fantasy that is being posted episodically at this site. To read the previous episode click here. To read it from the start, click here.

Gina and Zack’s search for a monstrous Questing Beast has led them to Rennou, where Gina and the dragon pup she’d named Puff had fallen into disgrace.

She jumped up onto the Great Porch. “Puff?  B’frona?” She ran across the scarred platform, grabbed the Dragon Manse’s scale-tailed latches, and pulled open the doors.

Zack found her standing in front of a magnificent lespin-wood staircase, shouting, “Puff? It’s me!” She walked halfway up the stairs, called several more times, and then sat down, shaking her head. But she soon lurched forward–the questing sword in its back-harness was urging her to keep moving.

They walked in dusklight toward the far end of the village. It was rotting, like the fields surrounding it and the vegetables in its marketplace. “The Curse is back,” Gina muttered, “and it’s my fault.” Spotting a girl moving silently in the opposite direction, she asked, “Where I can find B’frona the Miller’s boy? Is he still with the widow F’lenn?”

The girl nodded, “The Millhouse. The widow’s house burned to the ground,” then started off again.

“How?”

The girl kept moving.

The sword urged Gina forward.

The first thing they noticed was the glow from the millhouse’s second story window. It would have been easier if no one had been there. But the sword, and an aching desire to see Puff and even the lonely orphan boy B’frona, left Gina no choice.

As they approached, they heard the grist wheels braying. Gina’s heart jumped. Was Puff here happily licking shrennel flour off the grinding stones? Will he recognize me? Two months have passed. 

A heavy wooden lever clacked into place. The rynd stone slid away from the runner and ceased its spinning. Gina stepped under the grinding shed’s cantilevered roof. There, finishing the day’s work by torchlight, was a rawboned teenager. Gina couldn’t make out his features. Was he from the village? He finished stitching shut a heavy cloth sack, then tossed it into a corner and started walking toward the irontree staircase. He spotted Gina and Zack and said, “The mill is closed for the night.”

He had lanky limbs and oversized hands, like a hound that hasn’t yet grown into its paws, but his features were fine, his cheekbones strong, his hair walnut brown and curly. He was almost handsome, even if his attitude wasn’t. He seemed familiar. Could he be B’frona’s cousin?

“J’nah?” The young man held his torch near her face. “So,” he sneered, “ the great girl knight herself, the Dragonmeer of Rennou, has returned at last.”

And then she knew. Somehow, even though he’d been an eleven-year-old boy just two months ago, this reedy teenager in front of her…

Was B’frona!

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Thoughts: Grudges are weapons of self-destruction: left unresolved, they turn to acid inside the one who holds them.

To read the next episode, click here.