The Whim of the Dragon Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  THE CRYSTAL AND THE DRAGON

  With a dramatic suddenness that you do not expect from a world in which you have lived for three months, and which has rained all day on the road you have to ride tonight, the dark arch of Claudia’s tower window lit up with silver. The roiling depths of the golden globe stilled; the rich light dimmed to gray; and from a little spark of red in the globe’s center there grew the stately form of a dragon. It grew to the size of the globe, to the outermost diameter of its glow; and stopped, before Ted had to decide whether he was going to leave the room, possibly dragging Ruth with him.

  The wind rattled the windows. Ted could feel his heart thumping in his ears. He had a good side view of the dragon, which floated with its tail to the trap-door and its head toward Randolph, at the window. The dragon was bright red with touches of black. It was a very twisty, decorated dragon, with seven claws on each foot and a great many tendrils and spikes and whiskers.

  Ted didn’t want that huge, tapering head to look in his direction. It had black eyes with red pupils and could have looked at him, if it had wanted to, without turning its head. But its gaze was bent on Randolph. Randolph went down on one knee and bowed his forehead onto the other. It was the most extravagant gesture of respect that Ted had ever seen anybody in the Secret Country make.

  FIREBIRD WHERE FANTASY TAKES FLIGHT™

  FIREBIRD

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  First published in the United States of America by Ace Books,

  The Berkley Publishing Group, 1989

  Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003

  Copyright © Pamela Dyer-Bennet, 1989

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68445-6

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Patricia Wrede,

  whose patience has been so sorely tried

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am greatly obliged to David S. Cargo for the design of Heathwill Library; and to Michael Mornard for advice concerning the castle of the Dragon King.

  As always, I owe more than I can say to Steven Brust, Nate Bucklin, Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey, Will Shetterly, and Patricia Wrede for providing kindness and censure in the appropriate doses.

  Her Gentle and Fruitful Grace, Ruth, Lady of the Green Caves, formerly Princess of the Hidden Land and Lord of the King’s Forests, to their Excellent and Estimable Lordships Randolph, King’s Counselor, and Fence, Council’s Wizard, greetings.

  3 September 490

  Dear Fence and Randolph,

  I did try to write this in your manner, but I was afraid you would never unravel it. I am going to write in plain English, and trust to your perspicacity to understand.

  I am not Lady Ruth of the Green Caves. Edward, Patrick, Ellen, and Laura are also not who you think they are. We come from somewhere else, where, for years and years, the five of us played a game. The game was you, The Secret Country. We had the characters, the people, right, except for Claudia. We had never thought of her. And we didn’t have the story exactly right. But we would play the Banquet of Midsummer Eve, and Randolph’s poisoning of the King, and the battle with the Dragon King; and in the end Edward found out that Randolph had killed his father, and so he killed Randolph in the rose garden. These events and people seemed strange and wonderful to us, and altogether different from the lives we led.

  This summer we couldn’t play. Ellen and Patrick and I were living about as far away from Ted and Laura as it’s possible to be, and we were all very unhappy. But Patrick found a sword under a bottle tree. It glowed green. It’s the one you called Melanie’s. Ted and Laura found a sword under a hedge. That one glowed blue, and you called it Shan’s. The hedge was the same as, or like, the hedge in front of the House by the Well of the White Witch. And that house was also in our world.

  If you hold Melanie’s sword and crawl under the bottle tree, you come out in a place called New South Wales. If you hold Shan’s sword and crawl under the hedge, you come out in a place called Illinois. And if you begin in those places and crawl under with the swords, you find yourself in the Hidden Land. That’s how we got here. Benjamin thought we were your royal children. And yours weren’t around to contradict him. So we played our parts as best we could. You must understand that we did not, in the beginning, necessarily intend any deception. We were not certain that you were real at all; and yet you were the people we wanted most to meet in the world, and the Secret Country was the place we wanted most to be, and the princesses and princes you knew were the people whose parts we most dearly desired. We had doubts even then, and these doubts grew on us as we found our parts more difficult to play in truth than they had been in semblance; but by then we were entangled, and feared to do ourselves, and perhaps you also, more harm than good by a confession. Nor did we know what to confess. We thought we were in truth your royal children, or as near as you could get. It seemed to us that, if they were not back in our places contending with the strangeness of our lives, which we knew they were not, then they were nowhere except within us.

  But when Ted was in the land of the dead, waiting for Lord Randolph and me to ransom him, he saw and spoke to all five of them. Edward told Ted that Claudia had killed them with a stratagem and a potion. This was not of our game. We grieve for your loss. If there were anything we could do to Claudia, we would do it. We think it best to go home, leaving you an account of what we know. We have left the swords, one under the hedge before the house, and the other under a bottle tree perhaps fifty yards to the right of it.

  There is one other thing. Time flows in your world just as it does in ours. This startled us, because in the stories we’ve read, matters were better arranged. If we were a long time in the Secret Country, our guardians at home missed us and were angry, and if we were a long time at home Benjamin and Agatha missed us and were angry. So we bethought us of the Riddle of Shan’s Ring, that it might blow time awry, so we could stay a long time in your country and be gone but a moment from ours.

  Ellen and I took Shan’s Ring to the hedge through which Ted and Laura had come into this country. And we tried diverse methods; and when we stood in our own world, and I stood outside the hedge, and Ellen stood in the yard of the house, I threw the Ring over the hedge to Ellen and said the verse aloud. There came a flash of purple light, and a gap opened in th
e hedge. I saw the Secret Country in it, so I came through back to this place. But Ellen saw the house light up, and a woman burst out of the door brandishing a broom and shouting incomprehensible things. This woman was the Lady Claudia, whom you know. Ellen ran for the hedge, and Shan’s sword, which she held, pulled her down to show her where the Ring lay, and when she retrieved it, she came through the hedge back to this place and fell in the stream.

  Now I thought that what had happened to Ellen had taken longer than what had happened to me. So I took Shan’s Ring and went through the hedge. And I was in a strange country that looked like the Secret Country, in that it held the Well of the White Witch, and the plain, but that looked most unlike it in that the air and sky were glassy and felt altogether odd and unpleasant, and there was an army on the plain. So I came back quickly to the Secret Country. But you should note that this place in which I had found myself was the selfsame place in which Lord Randolph and Fence and I stood much later when we bargained with the unicorn for Edward Fairchild’s life.

  Now, once I had gone through the hedge with both the Ring and Shan’s sword, I found myself back in our world again, and sat there for a little while, and came home. But for Ellen hours passed and the sun rose and she was greatly vexed. So we thought that Shan’s Ring had changed the rate at which time passed, and we would be safe to stay here until the story’s end.

  But we find now that, knowing you and knowing Lord Randolph, we do not like the end of the story, and fearing to give you more pain than joy if we stay, we have gone.

  Two more matters. First, in our game, Lord Andrew was a spy of the Dragon King; so have a care of him. And second, in sober reality, Randolph pledged his life for the return of Edward Fairchild. But he didn’t get Edward Fairchild. He got Ted Carroll, whom he knows not and doesn’t want. So you might try that on the unicorns if they get fussy.

  We thank you for our sojourn in your country, which is one of the best ever we saw or heard tell of; and we repent of our deception; and we wish you well.

  Believe me, good sirs, your most obedient,

  most affectionate, most humble servant,

  Ruth Eleanora Carroll

  PROLOGUE

  THEY had set free the fire of her house. That was noth ing. Her house had been burned by the master of fire, and she had restored it. She had burned in such fire as made this a dance of sunlight on water, bright but harmless. But if they had intended not her destruction but their own escape, they had succeeded. And there were others in her house less inured to fire. She called the water-beasts without the proper forms of their names. They would match this discourtesy by coming without further preliminaries, and thus escape the fire. As she thought so, they surrounded her, bubbling and spouting. The faint smoke in the room was overlaid with damp purple mist, and the fire’s crackling drowned in the rush and murmur of innumerable waters. She wished it were better than an illusion.

  “Flee the fire,” she said. “After the time it takes to boil six kettles, I will requite this barbarous rudeness.”

  They hissed like a gallon of water spilled on a giant’s griddle, and were gone. The smoke grew thicker. She could not remember how many cats were in the house, and cursed the humor that made them all black cats. She called each cat’s six names, and in a little time had all nine of them climbing her skirts. No cat that had lived with her feared fire. But they were indignant, and disposed to be intransigent. She crouched and gathered them in, grinning. So those children had broken the mirrors in her house. Who would break the mirrors in her mind?

  She spared a moment to look into one that offered no escape: not for her, and not for those she looked at. She saw Fence and Randolph, in High Castle, in its Mirror Room. They did not know what its mirrors could accomplish, and in any case were occupied with other matters. It pleased her to see them standing there as the outline of their doom took shape, surrounded by salvation and thinking it ornament.

  Randolph was thinner than when she had danced with him at Midsummer Eve, his face sharper, his green eyes darker, his wild black hair limp and his bewitching voice hardly better than a croak. He looked as if he had been ill a fortnight.

  “Truly I felt such nudgings and nibblings as thou ex-plainest thus,” he said, “but I tell thee, Fence, not once did I feel them regarding King William. That foul crime I did of my own will.”

  She had never seen Fence look like this. Nothing she did could make him suffer so. Randolph could make him suffer worse, and, before the end, no doubt he would.

  “Will you, then,” said Fence, “tell me why?” His round green eyes and innocent face beneath the untidy brown hair were not amusing, and his shortness was no cause for contempt. He was formidable.

  “That you might be here to reproach me,” said Randolph. He suffered Fence’s look and countered with mere steadiness. He seemed to be bearing some pain so great that he dared not attend to it. She had never seen Randolph look so, either.

  She reached out a hand, and frowned. Her mind-mirrors were but doors or windows; they were not, as the mirrors of her house had been, instruments of her will. She could work no nudgings and nibblings from here.

  “Better far that I were dead, having had no doubt of thee while I lived,” said Fence, still looking up at Randolph.

  “What? Dead, the truth undiscovered?” said Randolph. The mockery in his voice was mild, but she felt it in her bones like a curse. So, it seemed, did Fence.

  “You made this truth!” shouted Fence. “Spare me your convolvings.”

  “I had thought to,” said Randolph, and the mockery now was leveled at himself. “Edward, I thought, had killed me long since.”

  “Edward,” said Fence, as though he still did not believe it, “is dead. You are the Regent.”

  “I am a regicide.”

  “A perfect jest, then,” said Fence. “Having killed King William, his heir dead already, you must take William’s place.”

  “That is madness.”

  “No,” said Fence, “it is justice.”

  She laughed. She would not have thought of this. Had those children done it? Both men started at the laugh; Randolph drew his dagger. She chuckled, in her mind only, as they snatched back the tapestries covering the mirror. Their arts could not discover her, unless she continued so careless.

  “An the very air laugh at us, is that not justice also?” said Randolph.

  Fence’s mouth quirked, but he said nothing.

  “Fence, it is not justice to make me king. What of the country? I am a poison as potent as that wherewith I struck down William, the only antidote thereto being my death.”

  “If that were all, all would be easy,” said Fence. “You are not the poison. Your act is that. Though you die and enter the shadows and forget what you have done, yet you have done it, and all our history to come is poisoned thereby. At least stay and see your handiwork.”

  “Stars in heaven,” said Randolph. As he had in the event, he looked far more poisoned than had the dying King.

  “The lesson of Melanie was ever bitter to your mind,” said Fence. “Learn it now with your heart. Life gained by treachery is a pain sharper than death.”

  In her fury at this statement, though it was an old axiom in the teachings of the Blue Sorcerers, she almost spoke aloud to them. But a brisk blow on her cheek brought her back to the burning house, where an unhappy cat resented her neglect.

  “Quite right, small one,” she said to it. “All attend.”

  She found in her mind a mirror that was a door, and sent three cats where they would be most useful. She found the second door, and pulled herself and the other six cats through it, to her House in the Hidden Land, four leagues from where Fence and Randolph turned and turned in the maze she had made for them. She must consider now whether it was still possible to bring them to the trap at its heart.

  CHAPTER 1

  THAT was good,” said Laura mournfully, and licked an escaped drop of ice cream from her elbow.

  “You don’t sound like it,”
said her brother. The lock of hair on the right side of his face was sticky with chocolate ice cream, but he managed to look and sound superior just the same.

  “I thought,” said Laura, who was used to this, “that maybe I wouldn’t like ice cream anymore.”

  “You wanted the Secret Country to leave its mark, huh?”

  “Well—”

  “You just look at that scar on your knee if you want to see a mark,” said Ted.

  Three small children pushed between them, and they moved slowly away from the drugstore and down the dusty summer street. Laura had never before thought it possible to be tired of summer.

  “Let’s go home,” said Ted.

  “I’m not used to it yet. If we get home before dark they won’t be too mad.”

  “Oh, my God!” said Ted, stopping dead before a gas station.

  “What’s the matter?” Laura said, looking at him carefully. It was hard to concentrate on his expression. He looked so peculiar in his too-short jeans and his too-tight shirt, with the thick, light brown hair down past his shoulders. Laura supposed she looked peculiar too. Her shorts fit well enough, but her blouse was too tight across the shoulders now and too short to tuck in.

  “Shan’s Ring didn’t work,” said Ted, in a tone of outraged disbelief. “We’ve been gone for months.”

  They had been gone for months, struggling through an imaginary world come gruesomely to life. Hence their old clothes no longer fit them, and Ted’s hair was too long.

  “Looks like summer to me,” said Laura, taking in with a gesture the violent blue sky, the deep green of the oak and maple trees, the daisies blooming in the yards of old houses, the drooping peonies with their petals showered to the ground.

  “Remember when we left?”