“How?” her companion asked.
“Er—swim the moat and climb the wall?”
The gypsy shook her head. “If you swam that moat, you’d catch something that will infect the whole city. No one remembers when they drained it last.”
“I don’t suppose you brought a rope, did you? There was none in Papa’s workshop.”
“Why do you want one?”
“Well, we could tie a rock to one end and throw it up over the wall and catch it on something to hold it while we scale the wall then enter the castle from the back where the entrance to the wine cellar probably is. There’s just a door between it and the dungeon so we might be able to enter that way, even without a key.”
“Ah, a splendid plan! When we unlock wine cellar and open door, the guards come to see who’s there and of course must then sample wine. While they sleep off spectacular drunkenness, we walk out the front with boy. I give him one of my skirts and a shawl and anyone who sees us will think we are entertainers leaving after a banquet.”
“Yes!” Verity said. “Exactly. That sounds good only…”
“No rope,” the gypsy said with a sigh, then snapped her fingers and said, “Heyyy, they put up that gallows. Maybe the rope is there already?”
“Yes,” Verity agreed, “But… the gallows is inside the courtyard next to the castle wall, soo…”
“We still got no rope to get to the gallows to get the rope.
“So, we go in the front.” She bent down and pulled up Verity’s skirt, squeezing her calf as if she were being fattened for the pot. “Let’s see your legs. You a good dancer?”
“Not at all,” Verity said sadly. “I flunked cotillion class. And I put on trousers underneath, in case I needed to climb a rope.”
“I’m gonna charge that Nic extra,” the gypsy complained. “I got to do everything! But okay, I can play fiddle, sing, and dance. Good thing I am Gypsy and can do useful things. Now if only lawyer had hired a man to saw through the bars of the boy’s cell window.”
“Oh, I can do that,” Verity said, relieved not to be completely useless. “I brought a saw and I’m good at bending metal.”
“You?”
“Me. Papa taught me. So if you distract the guards with your—um—performance, I’ll just slither in while they’re busy watching you.”
For a scheme devised on the spot, it wasn’t the worst one. The only hitch was the guards weren’t the only ones distracted by the gypsy’s dance and music. Verity was so impressed she almost forgot to sneak.
Of course, since deception was anathema to her, it was fortunate that sneaking was all she had to do.
The clouds skimmed across the moon, casting long smudgy shadows across the courtyard. Verity dodged through them, but when she touched the chill stones of the castle wall, had no idea where to go from there. She knew where the dungeon was from the inside only. Wondering how she would locate Toby’s cell, she was startled by a sudden burst of light revealing the one half-buried window.
A rag fluttered two hands below the soles of her boots, looking at first like a wind-blown piece of garbage.
A ditch broad and deep enough to bury a flock of sheep, one at a time, ran along the wall. The window with the rag was the only break in the wall as far as Verity could see. Heavy iron bars were set into the stone, but still, it was an opening, wasn’t it?
“This must be the one, but it’s impossible,” Verity grumbled, surveying the small awkward opening. “I’ll never get those bars removed and extricate him undetected.”
“Not if you wait till they hang me!” Toby’s voice responded urgently from inside the cell. “Hurry!”
Verity stuck a file between the bars. “Very well then,” she said. “Get to work from your side and I’ll work from mine.”
“That lawyer warned me when he came to see me tonight that you’d come, but it’s no good, Miss. You’ll just get arrested, too.”
The gypsy’s voice came from the shadows, startling Verity. Not only could the woman dance, she could sneak with the best of them. “You young folk! Where’s your gumption? Come on, son. Did your mama never sing you this song when you were small?” She chanted in a singsong voice, “A thing that’s tried is a thing half done,” Verity had heard children jumping rope to this verse on the street in front of her house.
“How can you end what you’ve not begun?” Toby whispered back, earnestly sawing at a bar with no apparent effect at all.
Well, charming ditty but not very helpful, Verity thought. Argonians set a lot of store by songs—something about the power the old minstrels used to have—but one old woman and one young one, no matter how practiced, and one boy who probably had to stand on tiptoes to reach the window judging from the angle his file was tilted as it poked through with each pass, were not going to accomplish anything. Not in a night. Not in a week and probably not in a month.
The plan had sounded so much better in the cemetery.
It wasn’t long before the rasping paused, then stopped, with both Toby and the gypsy winded by the unaccustomed kind of work. Verity paused, listening to the silence. Her spine prickled through all her layers of clothing.
The gypsy leaned in to apply her file to the bar again, but Verity put her hand on the woman’s arm. “Shhh, don’t you feel it?” she said.
“What?”
An explanation was unnecessary. Gliding like a gull, a dragon no bigger than a large dog, including its tail, landed between them, making a small distressed noise in its throat.
Both women were on their stomachs, stretching their upper bodies across the ditch to reach the bars.
“Taz?” Toby asked.
“Lovely to have a reunion,” Verity said. “But, if they catch this beastie, they’ll kill her, too. If only these things weren’t so bloody stupid, we could probably find a way that she might help. As it is, I suppose you can hang together instead of separately.”
“She’s not stupid,” Toby said.
“Perhaps not for a dragon,” Verity said soothingly. She was just getting ready to explain to him why dragons were stupid—that they were bred that way on purpose—when Taz wrapped her tail around the bars, gave it a flip, and the bars went flying, clanking against the ground as a big hole appeared in the wall.
Toby took Verity’s and the gypsy’s extended hands and the two of them pulled him out.
Verity listened to the hue and cry from the sentries, responding to the racket the bars made, Taz jumped skyward, swooping Toby up in her talons. Soaring upward and toward the gate, she passed over the gallows, and with one annoyed burst of flame, destroyed it before lifting her cargo up and over the gate.
Elsewhere in the city, a train hissed, a whistle screamed, and wheels began clanking on the tracks, masking other noises. The timing couldn’t have been better, and it took the guards a few precious minutes to see that their prisoner was departing with the help of wings and their gallows was ablaze.
The two guards at the gate and the one from the dungeon were the only ones on duty so they hastily recruited any passing civilians they could draft from the streets outside the castle.
Everyone formed a bucket brigade. Verity and the gypsy blended with the other civilians and when the gallows was finally quenched, simply walked out of the courtyard, their clothing now reeking of the filthy moat water heated to boiling by the burning gallows.
“I hope he’ll be all right,” Verity said once they were well away from the castle. She searched the sky, which was still dark and would stay that way for several more hours. When there was no response, she realized that she stood alone in her damp stinking clothing. The gypsy woman had vanished. Toby and Taz the dragon had vanished and Verity was once more alone.
Not that she would be allowed to remain that way for long.
Chapter 9
Taking a Dragon on the Lam
Immediately after the balloon crash, once they’d rescued Verity Brown from drowning, and other people who had spotted the fire had rushed to assist her, Toby
and Taz had taken to the air again and searched the bay for Mr. Brown and Captain Marsters, but did not see so much as a bubble. They searched until they could search no more, which wasn’t too long since, although dragons were quite strong, Taz couldn’t hold Toby’s weight for very long and eventually had to set him ashore and scan the bay by herself, only to get distracted by flying fish.
Every small fishing boat and pleasure craft in port joined the search for the missing men, as Toby expected, but what he did not expect was that one boatload of official looking men began firing their blunderbusses at Taz. She darted back to shore, unhurt, but whimpering to Toby. It didn’t take a telepath to tell that she was thinking of what a hard day she’d had and how hard she’d being trying to help everyone, and the ingrates repaid her by attacking. He was soothing her when he saw the small cadre of guardsmen charge the hill where the two of them stood.
Taz snatched him up again and carried him into the city, but she was too tired and weak to do so for very long and soon set him down in the warehouse district, where he hid, urging her to flee the city and hide out in the mountains until he could come for her.
It took them a week to find him, and then only because he had to come out to steal food. They tried to make him tell where Taz was, but since he honestly didn’t know, although he often felt her near, they left him alone after the first day or two.
He was touched and quite hopeful when Verity attempted to bully the magistrate into releasing him, but it backfired. Before her visit, he hadn’t been treated any worse than one could expect to be treated as a guest of the government. Afterward, his circumstances sharply deteriorated. When his cold, thin, discolored, buggy, and no doubt spat upon—or worse—gruel normally arrived, at the changing of the guard, nothing was shoved through the bottom of the door. He finally got together the courage to ask and the guard snickered, “Oh, Harry told me never to mind fetchin’ in your gruel, lad. He said you had friends in high places and her ladyship would be dropping by with a roast, veg, and a puddin’ a little later, bein’ as you are such a favorite of hers.” He then went on to speculate why Toby was supposed to be one of Verity’s favorites in language that seemed pretty coarse even to Toby, who had been around livestock breeders most of his life.
They taunted him about his impending death, which he did not find as amusing as they seemed to. From the sound of it, the jailers had started a card game when he had another visitor.
The sharp faced red-haired attorney had a furtive air about him, as if he had come to the dungeon to hide out.
He closed the door behind him even before the jailer had a chance to do so, and faced Toby, speaking in a very low voice. “I am Tod N. Balgair, attorney at law. My client, Miss Verity Brown, has requested I visit you and provide what assistance I can. I offer you this.” He handed Toby a handkerchief.
“Why? Is my nose leaking?” he asked, a little stupidly, as hunger and fear had combined to dull his wits.
“No, but there are other uses for it. You might, for instance, decorate the bars of your cell in case anyone happened to be looking for you.”
“What did you have for your last meal?” Balgair asked loudly.
“Nothing,” he said.
“What do you want?” the lawyer asked, and all Toby could think of was oatmeal with dried fruit. Balgair waited with him while the guard fetched it from the palace kitchen and took the opportunity to slip him some money. Toby looked at it wonderingly, almost unable to believe he would ever have a chance to use such stuff again.
He thanked Balgair, hope rising inside him like a balloon.
The jailer, who had never been prompt before, returned in record time with a steaming bowl of oatmeal that didn’t seem to have been tainted in any way. Toby was still gobbling it down when the jailer slammed the door behind the lawyer.
He hadn’t exactly fallen asleep when the ruckus began outside, fiddle music, singing, and little cries of excitement, accompanied by cheers and some lewd remarks. He was a bit stuporous from his recent meal and from cold, but he roused himself and looked around.
The music and the racket were at a distance, but a voice he recognized as Miss Brown’s issued from immediately outside his window. As promised, she’d come to spring him. She was saying how impossible it looked and he realized rescue was at hand if only it would hurry a bit. The night wasn’t getting any younger. He said something to that effect and she handed him a file so he could set to work from within.
She was risking a lot to try to help him, and while he was grateful, he feared if she had no better plan than that, they’d need two nooses on his gallows.
Soon after they started working on the bars, the music stopped and a second woman joined them.
Their tools were noisy and made no visible impact on the bars, which were set into the stone with what must surely be the best masonry in the entire construction of the castle. Verity, scraping away at the stone, muttered, hopeless and, we’ll never… and to him, where is your dragon? They’re never around when you need them.
As if she’d been summoned by enchantment, Taz was suddenly flapping at the grate and the two women became redundant. Once Taz arrived, Toby was fine. They hadn’t been separated since he took her from a dump where she had been abandoned to starve and die, a weak runt too small to be of much use to industry. Normally this would never happen. Dragons were valuable commodities, but without a purpose, they were thought to be dangerous and actually, they were. Although he was still in his apprenticeship at the balloon builder’s, he immediately saw how her size could be an advantage in the balloon business. Not that he cared if she was useful or not or that her wings were still too small in proportion to her body for her to fly at that time. He had ways of helping her fly without wings, until hers developed, which they soon did. She was beautiful and the moment he touched her she nuzzled against him, looked up at him with her big bright eyes, and burped a gas bubble, burning a hole through the elbow of his coat.
Fortunately, it had been a thick coat. He put himself out, and with some trepidation tucked her inside his coat to carry her back to his lodgings in a barn, above a farrier’s forge. This proved to be a suitable training ground for a fledgling dragon since most things in it were at least fire resistant if not proof.
It was the bravest thing he’d ever done, but the best thing, too. For the most part he was an uncomplicated fellow. He loved to fly. He loved Taz. He hated the thought of hanging and was certain he wouldn’t care for the reality, either. Sure, his ears were a little pointed and he wasn’t sure where he came from originally, but he had been lucky enough to be brought up in one of the few genuinely kind orphanages in Argonia under the care of Mrs. Shepherd, whose cousin’s brother-in-law got him the job at the balloon making factory. His world had been just fine, his and Taz’s, until the balloon betrayed them all.
Taz made a short gargle of pleasure at seeing him and then seized the grate with her tail and flung it away. Sticking her narrow head into the opening, she blinked her shining eyes at him and stepped back so the two women could reach in and haul him out.
She bore him aloft, her talons wrapped around his arms, and flew over the castle wall, pausing only long enough to incinerate the gallows. He dangled from her talons as they flew over the city, a view they were both well acquainted with from the balloon tours—the hundreds that had been without accident or incident.
But the further they went, the lower she flew, until Toby worried someone would hear his boots on a rooftop or she might accidentally brush him off on a chimney. The smoke from the chimneys blew right into his face, too, and he thought it was good that they traveled in the night, lest someone wonder about all the coughing erupting overhead.
Taz’s presence disturbed the birds sleeping on the rooftops and they flew up in protest. He could do nothing but cringe as they flew into his face, since he couldn’t use his arms or hands to fend them off. Taz lashed her tail a little, but every time he moved or she did, their altitude dropped a little more.
“Set me down here,” he shouted up to her as she flew over the warehouses. “No, not on the roof. In the street.”
She did and cooed at him as he rubbed at his arms and shoulders, which were all but dislocated by now. “We can’t fly out of here,” he said. “We need to make it to the rail yard and take a train out of the city.” He had the money Balgair had given him for a ticket if need be, but buying a ticket for Taz would no doubt draw unwelcome attention to them, even if he wasn’t recognized. “We’ll stick to the alleys.” Like most boys, he had enjoyed spending time in the train yard when he wasn’t working, watching the locomotives and imagining their distant destinations.
Taz gave a little cry, sounding uncertain. When they reached the main street they saw few other people but there occasional carriages rolled by, and two men, their arms around each other’s shoulders, staggered past. Toby jerked his head upward and Taz flew up to the nearest rooftop. When he crossed the street, she flew above him and perched briefly atop a gargoyle adorning an office building on the far side.
Market Street, one block past Main, held dark and closed shops, restaurants, and inns and one block from it brought them to the industrial district. Across the street from the factories was a long slope leading down to the rail yard. The passenger station sat beneath an arched bridge, but beyond its edifice, multiple tracks held freight cars, boxcars, flat cars, and an occasional unoccupied passenger car.
Lanterns hung from hooks above the tracks holding cars about to be put into service. The switchman and brakeman were busy making up the train and Toby kept to the shadows, Taz close behind him, until the cars were in place on the proper track to be coupled with the engine and two passenger cars chugging slowly out of the station and into the yard.
Once the freight cars were added to the rest of the train, Toby knew they had very little time. He signaled Taz to alight on the top of the first boxcar and ran alongside as it began rolling. Before it picked up speed, he grabbed the doorframe and hung on as he slung a foot up on the frame and tried to haul himself up after, so he could pull the door open.
The Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad Page 7