Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary

I read this one in winter, which turned out to be the right season for it. The copy I have is a battered paperback with a dragon on the cover and a spine that cracks open to the same page every time, the one where Kendra is in the gorge and a small dragon starts talking to her. Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary came out in 2009 from Shadow Mountain, the fourth of the five main Fablehaven books, and it picks up shortly after the mess at the end of Grip of the Shadow Plague. The Sphinx has been unmasked as the leader of the Society of the Evening Star. The Knights of the Dawn are rebuilding. Kendra and Seth are supposed to be ordinary kids with bodyguards, which lasts about thirty pages.

It has a reputation as the dragon book, but the dragons do not show up for a long time. The first third is a kidnapping story, and it is the strangest part of the series.

The girl who comes home wrong

Kendra is at home before Christmas, reading Patton Burgess's Journal of Secrets by candlelight. The journal is written in a fairy language she can read because she is fairykind, and one entry is addressed to her by name. Patton says he hid the details of two artifacts in a chamber beyond the Hall of Dread, a dungeon corridor at Fablehaven full of imprisoned shades. She tells no one, not even Seth, which is the first mistake of several.

At her volunteer day care job, the manager, Rex Tanner, runs a touch-and-feel game with boxes of odd objects. Kendra gets pricked by a cactus fig. The fig is a stingbulb, a supposedly extinct fruit that copies the first living thing it stings and then dies after a few days. Rex is a stingbulb too, a duplicate planted to set up the kidnapping. He knocks her out, and she wakes tied behind his desk, looking at a perfect copy of herself.

The copy goes home. Seth notices almost at once that something is off: she eats an entire box of cereal, skips school, snaps at him, and writes a letter that their bodyguard Elise intercepts. The letter gives away the Chronometer's location at Fablehaven and mentions Patton's hidden clues. Warren and Seth confront the fake Kendra, and she swallows a poison pill and dies. Seth thinks his sister is dead. They bury her. The graveyard scene, with Seth in a dark suit and Grandpa Sorenson trying to find words, is one of the few places the book lets the grief sit.

The real Kendra is at Torina Barker's house. Torina is a lectoblix who stays young by draining the vitality out of other people. Her house is a beautiful, awful place with a library that doubles as an aquarium and a leopard shark in the tank. There are other captives, Haden and Cody, both aged before their time. Kendra tries to warn a new arrival, a man named Russ, and Torina drains him in front of her. Kendra makes paper airplanes and throws them out the window. Nobody comes.

Then the Sphinx arrives. He is polite and completely in control. He wants Kendra to touch the Oculus, the artifact of sight, because she is fairykind and might survive it. She does, and her vision opens out in every direction at once, until she starts to lose the border between herself and the world. The Fairy Queen sees her looking and tells her to let go. Kendra comes back, shaken. The Sphinx is impressed and disappointed. He does not gloat; he takes notes.

A knapsack and a borrowed horn

At Fablehaven, a fairy trader named Maddox turns up, claiming to have escaped Brazil. He is another stingbulb. He frees Vanessa Santoro from the Quiet Box, the cell that keeps its prisoner unconscious, and Vanessa knocks him out and calls for Grandpa. Vanessa is a narcoblix who can control people she has bitten while they sleep, and she used to work for the Society. Nobody trusts her, including me. The book keeps her useful and suspicious, which is the right way to play her.

Kendra gets help from an unknown ally: a leather knapsack with an extra-dimensional room inside, a note, and a stingbulb. She grows a duplicate of herself, tells it to guard her secrets, and climbs into the knapsack with Cody. She leaves Haden behind because he has given up. Trask, a Knight of the Dawn, is staking out the town of Monmouth, Illinois, and picks her up.

The reunion at Fablehaven is warm and short. Kendra leads the group into the secret chamber, where Patton's message is written on the ceiling. The Translocator, the artifact with power over space, is hidden at Obsidian Waste in Australia. The key to its vault is at Wyrmroost, a dragon sanctuary that does not allow humans. The artifacts are keys to Zzyzx, the demon prison, and the Society wants five. To get through the gate, they need the first horn of a unicorn, a relic called the Soul of Grunhold, which Patton gave to the centaurs.

This is where the book's title starts to play games with you. The artifact is not at Wyrmroost. The key is. The expedition is a trip to a vault that holds the key to another vault. That is either clever or a sign of a middle book.

The centaurs refuse to lend the horn. They are proud, and they are still angry about Broadhoof, who died helping the Sorensons. Kendra makes the case and gets nowhere. So Seth does what Seth does. He visits Graulas, the dying demon, who tells him the shadow plague left him with a shadow charmer's power. Graulas names him properly: he can hide in dim light, speak with dark creatures, see invisible things, and resist magical fear. Then Seth goes to Grunhold with a troll named Nero, navigates the Tauran maze of invisible walls, and swaps the horn for a banana. The banana is the best joke in the book, and the fact that it works says a lot about Seth.

The gate at Wyrmroost

The team is Kendra, Warren, Tanu the potion master, Trask, Dougan the mountaineer, Mara Tabares the dragon tamer in training, and Gavin Rose, a young dragon tamer who has been writing Kendra letters. Seth is not invited. He stows away in the knapsack anyway, with Warren's help.

They fly into Kalispell, Montana, board a helicopter, and land in a heart-shaped clearing in the snow. The entrance to Wyrmroost is hidden behind a distracter spell, a piece of magic that makes your mind slide away from the thing you are looking at. Kendra can see through it because of what she is. She walks the group to a golden gate and opens it with the unicorn horn. On the other side, the snow stops and the air is warm.

Camarat meets them at the gate. He is a red-and-gold dragon with a lion's head and a breath that works like truth serum. He asks why they have come, listens to the answer, and lets them pass. He is a sentry who has seen too many humans.

Blackwell Keep is run by Agad, a wizard who used to be a dragon. Agad is dry and tired. He is careful. He points Kendra to Patton's false gravestone in the churchyard, where the inscription says the key is an iron egg hidden in the treasury of the Dragon Temple. He also warns her about the sky giant Thronis, who lives above the sanctuary with his griffins and does not like trespassers.

A stampede of perytons injures Warren and exposes Seth. The team is separated. Thronis captures most of them and jokes about making them into pie. Seth talks him into a deal: five figurines from the Dragon Temple treasury in exchange for their freedom, adamant-edged weapons, and a ride to the temple. Thronis is a giant, but he is also a collector, and the figurines matter to him more than the people do.

Raxtus

Kendra and the injured Warren end up in a gorge, and this is where the book finds its heart. A small dragon lands on the rocks. He is iridescent, much smaller than the big dragons, and so shy that he keeps turning nearly invisible. His name is Raxtus. He was raised by fairies, he is the son of Celebrant, the king of the dragons, and he is a disappointment to almost everyone, including himself. He does not have the size or the presence of the big dragons. He is kind.

Kendra does not try to use him. She talks to him. He carries her to the Fairy Queen's shrine, where golden owls with human faces called astrids keep watch. The Fairy Queen speaks to Kendra and tells her that the Sphinx is a misguided man trying to unleash something he cannot control, and she shows her the way to the Dragon Temple. Raxtus agrees to fly her to the entrance, but he will not go inside. He says it would be a betrayal of his own kind. That choice matters later.

The shrine section is short, but it connects the dragon plot to the fairy plot and makes Raxtus more than a convenient rescue. He is brave in the way a person is brave when he has been told his whole life that he does not count.

The Dragon Temple

The temple entrance is a ravine guarded by stone dragons, with dragonflies everywhere. The team crosses a narrow ledge over a black lake, and the hydra Hespera comes out of the water. They get past her, but the temple is a series of traps designed to keep people from leaving as much as entering.

The next guardian is Glommus, a blind dragon who puts the whole group to sleep with a mist. This is where Vanessa earns her place. She can ride Tanu's sleeping body, and she picks up a sword and kills Glommus while everyone else is unconscious. It is creepy and effective, and it complicates the team's distrust.

Then comes Siletta, the poison dragon. Her presence is toxic, and her breath kills quickly. Gavin gets close enough to be poisoned and has to be purified with the horn. Seth looks at the horn and sees a weapon. Against a creature made of poison, the horn is the right tool. He and Kendra handcuff themselves together so neither of them can run when the fear hits, and they press the horn against Siletta. Mendigo, the wooden puppet who has been with the group since book two, distracts her and is dissolved in the process. Siletta shrinks into nothing. The handcuffs are a great image: the two siblings literally tied together, trusting each other to hold on.

In the treasury, they find the iron egg and the five figurines. Trask tells them not to take anything else. The room is full of gold, and the ambush is coming.

Gavin Rose

Outside, two dragons hit them at once. Gavin runs back to help, and then he changes. He becomes an enormous black dragon, and the book stops pretending. Gavin Rose is Navarog, the demon prince. Navarog had killed the dragon tamer Chuck Rose and invented Gavin as Chuck's secret son. He has been a Knight for a while, writing Kendra letters. He eats Dougan in one bite. He knocks Mara off a cliff. He slashes Kendra across the chest, and the adamant breastplate Seth gave her saves her life.

Kendra runs into Sidestep Cleft, a narrow passage in the rock where a big dragon cannot spread his wings. She has a rain staff, and she uses it to call a storm and bring lightning down on the dragons. Navarog follows her in human form because he has to, and he is still stronger than she is. He burns the knapsack with Warren inside. He takes the key and the horn. He is gloating, and he has earned it.

Then Raxtus arrives. He is invisible, he is small, and he is exactly the right size to come up behind a man in a narrow cleft and eat him. It is a ridiculous, satisfying end to the villain, and it works because the book has spent so much time making Raxtus feel like a failure. The dragon nobody respected saves the day by being the thing nobody respected.

Seth and Tanu escape on griffins to Thronis's tower. Thronis shoots a dragon out of the sky with a giant crossbow, takes his figurines, and gives Seth two as a gift. The griffins collect the survivors. They return to Fablehaven with the key and the horn, and they tell the centaurs they rescued the horn from the Society, which is a lie that keeps the peace.

What the book gets right, and where it stumbles

The ending is a cliffhanger, and it is a good one. Grandpa Sorenson comes out of retirement and becomes Captain of the Knights of the Dawn. He inducts Seth properly, which is a nice payoff for a kid who has spent four books being told to stay home. Then he tells them the news: the Society has kidnapped Kendra and Seth's parents. The book closes on that, with the key in hand and the next artifact waiting in Australia.

The best thing in the book is Raxtus. He is funny without being a mascot, and his arc is small enough to fit inside a big plot. The second best thing is the sibling relationship. Kendra and Seth spend most of the book apart, and when they are together, they are good at being siblings: they tease each other, keep secrets, and handcuff themselves together to fight a dragon. The temple sequence is the strongest action writing in the series so far, especially the Glommus and Siletta fights, which are solved by cleverness rather than strength.

The first act is slow, and the fake-Kendra plot relies on the reader knowing more than Seth does, which makes his grief feel like a delay rather than a reveal. The expedition has a lot of logistics: helicopter, gate, keep, gravestone, stampede, giant, shrine, temple. Each piece is fun, but the middle sags under the weight of one more obstacle. And the kids succeed by luck more often than the book wants to admit. Raxtus happens to be in the gorge, the horn happens to be the perfect weapon against Siletta, and the adults are usually captured or hurt when the kids need to act.

It also does not work as a standalone. If you have not read the first three, the Sphinx, Vanessa, the artifacts, and the Fairy Queen will mean very little. The violence is harsher than the cover suggests: Dougan is eaten on the page, Mara is knocked off a cliff, Kendra is slashed, and the parents are taken. It is middle grade, but it does not coddle. I would hand it to a reader who liked the first three and wants the series to get bigger, not to someone looking for a dragon book they can start cold.

What keeps it from being a mere bridge novel is the voice. Mull is good at writing kids who are scared and still make jokes. He is good at monsters that feel like people with bad habits. I finished the book thinking about Raxtus, not the key, which is probably the point.