Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

“Ah, so you’ve figured it out.” The dragon’s smile showed no teeth.

It extended a hand with eight clawed fingers. Dangling from the smallest claw, which was still longer than Tern’s hand, was a disc rather like a coin, except it was made of dull green stone with specks in it like blood clots, and the hole drilled through the center was circular rather than a square. The most interesting thing was the snake carved into the surface, with every scale polished and distinct.

“Is it watching me?” Tern asked, disconcerted by the way the snake’s eyes were a brighter red than the flecks in the rest of the stone. “What is it called?”

? 26 ?

? Yoon Ha Lee ?

“That is the Coin of Heart’s Desire,” the dragon said with no particular inflection.

“Nothing with such a name can possibly bring good fortune,” she said.

“It never harmed your mother.”

Then why had she never heard of it? “In all the transactions I have ever witnessed,” Tern said, “a coin must be spent to be used.”

The dragon’s smile displayed the full length of its jagged teeth.

“You’re not wrong.”

Tern inspected the coin again. She was certain that the snake had changed position. “How many of my ancestors have spent the coin?”

“I lost count,” the dragon said. “This business of reign-names and funeral-names makes it difficult to keep track. But some never spent it at all.”

“Why isn’t it mentioned in the histories?”

The dragon’s eyelid dipped. “Because I like to eat historians. Their bones whisper the most delicious secrets.”

There was a saying in the empire: Never sing before an empty shrine; never dance with ghosts at low tide; never cross jests with a dragon. Tern said slowly, “Yet the empire has prospered, if those historians are to be believed. We can’t all have failed this test.”

The dragon did not deny that it was, indeed, a test.

Tern looked over her shoulder at the door. Its outline was visible only as an intersection of shadow and murky light. “There’s no other way out of this treasury.” When the dragon remained silent, she touched the coin with her fingertip. It was warm, as if it had lain in the eye of a hidden sun. She half-expected to feel the rasp of scales as the snake moved again.

The dragon withdrew its hand suddenly. The coin dropped, and Tern caught it reflexively. “I’m afraid not,” it said. “But that’s not to say that you won’t receive some benefit on your way out. The question is, what do you want?”

“What did my mother trade it for?”

“She asked to leave the treasury and never return,” the dragon said. “Two days and two nights she spent in here, contemplating her ? 27 ?

? The Coin of Heart’s Desire ?

options, and that was what she came up with. She didn’t trust the treasury’s temptations. Of course, she thought she had been here much longer. Time moves differently underwater, after all.”

Tern tried to imagine her mother as a young woman, newly crowned empress, hazy with sleeplessness and desperate to escape this test. “How long have I been here?” she asked.

“Not long as humans reckon time,” the dragon said. Its cheerfulness was not reassuring.

“The gifts for the Twenty-Seven Families,” Tern said. “Whatever becomes of me, will they be delivered to the court?”

The dragon waved a hand. “They’re yours to dispose of as you see fit. I’m done looking at them, so I don’t see why not.”

Tern glanced around again. She might be here for a very long time if this went wrong. “I know what I want,” she said.

The dragon drifted closer.

Her voice quavered in spite of herself, but she looked the dragon full in the eye. “I don’t know what bargain has bound you here all these years, but I want no more of it. Let this coin purchase your freedom.”