She wanted to use her fingernails to claw off her own skin, which seemed like a good reason to turn around. The pressure kept building--along with a sensation like ants dancing all over her body. There were lots of arguments in favor of returning to the safety of home. Willa was not even really sure she would get any answers from the creatures she sought. But they knew things she could not, even with all of her knowledge and power at full force, so here she was. Aching, trembling, tired, but here, and walking straight towards all kinds of unpleasantness.
       She took another step and went through the entire process of re-centering herself again. The horrible crawly feeling subsided enough for her fingernails to be viewed with equanimity--for now. Controlling her breathing first, Willa then made sure each and every bit of her body was where she wanted it to be. She might be getting so old that her left foot throbbed more days than it didn't, but she was not about to let it fly off into some dragon dimension.
       Plum. Plum was an excellent argument in favor of home. He was no doubt waiting for her right now, full of canine longing and love. And she really should have picked the blueberries behind the hedge. The raccoons had probably gotten them all by now. The binding spell would hold the garden, but had she remembered the herb patch?
       A stab of sheer pain up her leg and into her hip brought her right back to the mountainside. If she got through this trip, her joints were going to howl for weeks, but first, she had to take another step forward. Willa carefully relaxed her muscles, imagined Plum by her side on a walk next to the lake, and brought her right leg forward to begin the process over again.
       Heading into the dragons' domain was beyond foolish, a fact Willa knew better than anyone. Her nephew Bey might think she was some sort of heroic magical witch on a quest, but the truth was that she had tried everything she could think of to avoid having to make this trek. Her eyes crinkled, thinking of his consternation when she had anticipated and spoiled all of his plans to sneak out and accompany her. She adored the boy, really, which was a good part of why she was here in these dusty mountains fighting for control over a body that should know darn well it belonged to her by now.
       Dragons existed in more than one place at a time; that's what her teacher Ross had told her many years ago. He had been striding along in his usual loose-limbed fashion, his absurdly long hair flowing behind him, and Willa hurrying to keep up. Ross knew as much about dragons as anyone, but the places they existed were mostly beyond where even witches could see. Being near them was to feel as though you were being pulled in all different directions at once, with no clear sense of up or down, north or south. At the moment, Willa felt a kind of kinship with the tuning fork her lost love Karin used to use; it would rattle her teeth every time. Dragons infected you with their own strange pull. Willa was working every second to convince her own bits and pieces not to disintegrate.
       When she was younger and had first felt the toe-curling sensations brought on by proximity to a dragon, Willa had hardly known whether to pull out her own hair or writhe in ecstasy. Now, a lifetime later, a brief longing for Karin flashed through her with the tuning fork image, but Willa was back in the moment quickly. It took a fairly strong sense of self to maintain control in the presence of even one dragon. Willa was marching into the heart of dragon territory, and even here at the perimeter, she had to cultivate conscious regulation of her own body with every step.
       It helped to focus on the oddness of the mountain air in her lungs, on the calls of the sparrows wondering who she was, and on the rocky terrain beneath her boots. She grounded herself in the reality about her--the taste, feel, sound of it.

       They were here. Or, rather, she was there. The strength of the pull suggested the presence of many dragons in the immediate vicinity, which is precisely why Willa had chosen this location. The nonexistent ants were all over her skin now, dancing in every pore and partying in every crevice, yet she could not see even a glimmer of an actual dragon. They weren't hiding. There was no need for a dragon to hide from a witch, let alone for many dragons in their own place to do so. They were ignoring her. Being a fairly antisocial creature herself, Willa sympathized with their annoyance at her intrusion, but she was there for good reason.
       "Dragons! I have come to speak with you."
       "So, speak," snarled a voice to Willa's left, but no dragon showed itself to her.
       "I would prefer to speak to someone I can see." Willa was pushing things, but unless she established some respect, they were unlikely to give her any real information.
       "You dare," began the voice to the left, and Willa decided she had to be dealing with a youth or adolescent. Another voice interrupted this time almost directly in front of Willa.
       "Witch, about what do you wish to speak?" Along with this new, deeper voice, an outline of a body at least fifty feet long appeared, with a head looming so high above Willa that she could not see anything of its face or eyes. If she had not already had her mind on keeping her body in one piece, it might have been terrifying.
       "About magic."
       The dragon in front of Willa took on a more substantial form, and as it did so, Willa felt her own body respond. There was a change in the tension. It reminded Willa of when power built up in her system, and she needed to control it.
       "Your magic and our magic are not the same," thrummed the deep voice.
       "No, dragon, they are not, but you know things I cannot."
       "Why would we help?"
       "I have been here before. I came with the witch Ross, when I was an apprentice. We returned an egg."
       The dragon vanished from her view. She knew it was still "there" in some sense, just occupying space in that sort of way dragons had so that she couldn't actually see it. Forcing herself to breathe, to relax her muscles, Willa waited as only a very old witch would know how to wait under such deeply uncomfortable circumstances.
       Again, the pressures shifted. Willa breathed and held onto herself as more dragons than she had ever seen took shape around her. All around. The dragon directly in front of Willa had sunk onto its haunches and rested its head on the ground so that its eye was roughly the same level as Willa's head when another dragon's voice sounded.
       "We will speak with you."
       Willa nodded, reinforced her self-control, and began to talk. "Something has changed with my people's magic, and I don't understand how or why." Willa's voice was steady, revealing little of the ongoing strain on her body. "The boys are not coming into their magic as they should. It has been happening slowly, but now it seems to be the way of things. Even my own niece's son, Bey, who bears all of the marks and signs of magic, did not come into power. He is now well past the age when it should have happened. There are new witches, but they are all girls, and there are not enough of them. In my people, magic has never been completely predictable, but something has changed."
       Willa stopped, waiting.
       "Tell us more about the boy."
       "From before his birth, he was marked for magic. And I have never been wrong about a mark that strong. His aura is full of potential to this day, but usually, such an aura will shift into a clear pattern of color indicating magic by around the age of four or five when there is power there. Bey is thirteen. There is no hope. His aura remains translucent, and he has no magic." Willa paused and looked harder at the dragon, "But he should have magic."
       As Willa spoke, her frustration for Bey, and her fear for her people, began to weaken the control she had been so carefully maintaining while in the presence of the dragons. It was doubtful that she would be able to block the dragons from her mind here, in their place, even if that were her intent--but it was not. She did not intend to lose herself either, though. She at least could make it a choice. Sort of.
       Struggling, she looked at the dragon in front of her, having no idea if the giant eye could sympathize. She knew what was coming, knew she was about to be read like a book. The dragons would require nothing less, and Willa knew no other way to find answers.
       "Be calm, witch." And she was.

       She was deliciously calm and free of all the clawing pain and tension of just a moment ago. She was at home, in the back room next to the big table of her earliest memories. Its dark surface was a map of achingly familiar scratches and dents. Her sister's hand snatched up the remnants of the berries they had picked earlier that day. Willa realized they were looking forward to a full summer's evening meal, waiting for her father to return from the fields for the day. Her mother's sing-song voice rang out with the nickname born of her stubbornness she had all but forgotten.
       "Will-na, help your sister wash up before she stains that apron beyond recognition."
       Laughing, Willa and her sister twirled toward the door to the water bucket, but Willa knew she shouldn't be so sanguine. It was as in a dream when you want to wake yourself up, but you just cannot; Willa both was and was not her younger self. She knew what was coming, knew that the peace and comfort of the anticipation of her father's return were about to be irrevocably lost by his continued absence. He would not come home that night.
       As the desolation of the coming loss took hold, the surroundings shifted, and Willa now found herself walking home as fast as she could make her legs carry her as daylight drained from an early spring sky. She was a few years older and terrified she wouldn't make it home before dark. The elder Willa felt the terror like a worn and detested cloak, knew it so well it sat in her bones. Females were not allowed out on their own after dark, and Willa was perilously close to putting her own life, and the lives of her mother and sister, in serious jeopardy. The years after Willa's father's death were a tightrope walk of finding the means to survive without overstepping the bounds of increasingly stringent rules about the conduct of women and girls.
       It was hard to breathe, to move, but young Willa hurried through the darkening streets despite the mounting fear. She had to get home, and the longer she took, the more dangerous it became. The sound of two male voices drifted through the late afternoon air, easily eclipsing the chirps and calls of the newly returned migratory birds and making Willa long to be able to fly away herself. The youthful voices were laughing, joking, brave with their power, and with a fresh wave of fear, Willa realized they had to be patrollers; no one else would be so loud and free. As the voices grew closer, Willa's eyes sought a refuge. Home was too far now, but Willa simply could not move. Her feet rooted to the ground beneath her, and her breath came in small gasps. She began to think about how sorry she was that she was going to do this to her mother and her sister when, suddenly, she just thought, "No." A crack of thunder shook the world around the young Willa, and the older Willa reliving everything with her, felt certain for the first time that she herself had indeed called that thunderstorm into being. The patrollers yelped and, still laughing, turned and went back the way they had come, and Willa ran home in the first fat drops of the storm.
       A sense of strength surged through Willa as the memory of coming into her own powers took hold. The way her world had turned purple overnight, and she had immediately had a sense of purpose, even if she had not known what to do about it. And then Ross had been there. Willa saw him now, emanating peace and strength, quietly talking to her mother. His clothing was roughspun like theirs, and he was unadorned. Nothing about his person or possessions spoke of wealth or privilege, but his speech and bearing indicated both education and something else. A sense of ease. The older Willa fully understood that it was a lack of want and knowledge of his own power that Ross carried with him. Young Willa saw only this stranger's maleness and hated him for it. But it was he who had helped Willa find her place and whose maleness had protected all of Willa's family from what might otherwise have been horrible consequences for her powers.
       A slightly older and very frustrated Willa stood next to a charred spot on the ground that was still smoking. Ross placed his hand on her shoulder, smiling down into her scowling face, explaining that she would be able to harness her powers with time.
       The taste of bile settled onto Willa's tongue next as she watched Ross stalk into her mother's cottage, uncharacteristically obvious in his anger. Her mother and sister asked questions with their eyes, and Willa swayed on her feet. She was holding onto the wall by the door and trying to see the room in front of her instead of the blood on the street behind her. The young woman had not even been a real witch, just falsely suspected of practicing magic.
       Now Willa was back in the cramped little cellar room where she had gone into hiding. There was the mildewed blanket she had hated so much and the constant pressure of building magic to be controlled. A wave of hot emotion poured through her, fear and indignation mixed with the memory of holding back her own magic for those long months.
       Then a different, larger dark room and the voices of Ross and some other witches, most of whom were men who valued their female apprentices and allies as they strategized. Willa took in everything and learned as they fought not with violence but with subtlety and, of course, with magic.
       The memories and their attendant emotions seemed to be speeding up.
       Ross and now a fully apprenticed Willa, still thin and wan in appearance, hiking through dusty mountains to return a wrongfully stolen dragon's egg. Willa relived an overwhelming sense of freedom when away from all things human, despite the ordeal of coping with the dragons.
       She and Ross carefully constructed a plan for her integration into the village: Willa once again felt the pride of using her power to help restore balance to land that had been overused, making it her own place and tying it to her. In the process, she also gained the support of all of those who needed to grow their food or graze their animals there.
       And Karin, who was so wary of Willa's interference at first but too practical to ignore the help she offered and too intelligent to do anything but try to understand. How Willa wanted to stay back in that time, when she and Karin were both young and strong and discovering one another.
       Then there was comfort of a kind. It had taken more than a generation, but by the time her sister's third child, a daughter, had come into her power, they had no longer feared for her safety.
       Little Bey, only weeks old when Willa first saw him, charming even then, and glowing with potential. Nephew to one witch, Willa's sister's child, and great-nephew to Willa herself, he would be the next link in her family's chain of magic. Willa had every intention of teaching him herself so that he could take over her lands for her when it was her time to go. Bey grew, but while girls his age--first one in town, then another in the next village—came fully into their power, his potential slowly seeped away. Willa felt the fear and anger of realizing what was happening to Bey, and the cold dread at the way young men, none of whom ever had even the smallest potential for power, muttered about magic. Her childhood pain was in every dismissive sneer and jealous complaint about witches having too much power.

       Willa came back to herself, feeling increasingly less comfortable as her mind and body returned to the present moment. At least the horrible feeling they gave you meant you could not forget where you were. She also realized that mercifully, little attention had been paid to emotionally charged memories outside of those related to what Willa needed the dragons to understand. The deaths of those Willa had loved most dearly passed quickly so that Willa barely had a sense of mourning her mother, Karin, or Ross.
       She looked at the dragon that had been in front of her through the entire meeting.
       "You've read me. You understand that if boys lose the ability to come into power, they may very well turn against girls and women again. They feared us before, but without the possibility of their own power, and without men of power to support us, it will be so much worse. Age may mean little to you, but it means everything to me. I have very little time left to help."
       The dragon blinked out of sight, but the pressure beating down on Willa's body barely lessened, so she held still and kept breathing as Ross had taught her so many years ago. She knew dragons cared nothing about human social structures or quarrels, but she also knew that they understood about taking care of their own people and minimizing conflict. She kept waiting.
       Eventually, the dragon's head rematerialized. The same eye remained in front of Willa's body while a rumbling voice came through the air from the right side of her where another dragon sat on its haunches, its head high up beyond her vision.
       "You are here because you do not know where else to go. We see things you do not see, but we do not see all the things you see. If some of you are not coming into your power, if the male children are not finding ways into their spheres of color, it is either the beings or the power. We suspect the answer to your question has to do with the source of the power."
       The source of the power. She needed to know more. Willa steadied herself against the continued onslaught of their presence on every bit of her body. She had to keep her mind clear in order to get whatever information she could.
       "But what could be wrong with the source of the power? Why aren't boys who are so clearly marked for magic coming into it?"
       The large dragon eye immediately in front of Willa blinked slowly before the voice responded.
       "All power, yours and ours, is linked in some way to the land and sky and sea, to the elements of the world around us, and they have knowledge of their own." Willa knew all of this, of course. She nodded. The dragon continued.
       "They know why. We do not."
        Willa was working very hard to maintain her composure. Yet even as her ire rose, she knew it was pointless. The dragons were honoring her by their presence, and they would have given her a better answer if they had one to offer. The land and sea and sky knew; the dragons did not. Willa took a deep, steadying breath.
        "Can you tell me nothing more?" She suspected she might be crossing a line, but there was little to lose. In her life, she had crossed most of the lines she had encountered; there was no point in being nervous now.
        There was rustling, and the mountainside shook as a dragon either landed or took off. Willa stood her ground and kept control of her breathing and her body. Things were starting to go numb, which was easier but dangerous. Eventually, the same dragon voice erupted into the air.
       "We do know that in most of time and place, there are human males of power. Seek them, and they can help you find the answers."
        The dragon's head in front of her pulled back and moved upward, and Willa understood that the interview was over. She looked around and saw dragons everywhere, and they were all about as fully present as they ever were. Dragons could see in places and times that she could not, and they had offered her what knowledge they could.
       "Thank you." The large dragon in front of her began to fade from visibility, and Willa turned to go. She had a long journey back, and it seemed she would only have a short time at home. In her core, she knew that if she left on another journey, she would not make it back. So be it. She would ready her lands to accept a new witch, then go to find the boys who were coming into magic. Bey could come with her this time. He needed purpose and to get away from the small-mindedness of the boys his age. And she would take an apprentice. Her niece would know of a good candidate.
       With each step down the mountain, Willa came back to herself a bit more. The absence of the tension brought on by the presence of the dragons felt glorious so that even the usual aches and pains barely registered.
       She was going home to Plum and Bey and to arrange things as best as she could in the time she had left.