King's Exile: Chronicles of the Dragon-Bound: Book 1

by William Culbertson

  Could someone bring a horse to him outside of the city walls? He thought about this for a long time as he lay in the bed as his shivers diminished. Involving someone else in his escape meant that person would know what had happened. Even if Dax could think of a person he trusted enough to ask, could he risk that person being discovered? How ruthless was Mathilde? What would she and Keir do if she suspected someone had information about where Dax had gone?

  No, he had better go alone and on foot. Once out of the city, he would stay off the river road to avoid being seen. It might take several days longer, but the more mystery there was to his disappearance, the better his chances would be of getting to his aunt and uncle’s estate.

  Relieved at having made a decision about where and how to go for help, Dax needed to decide when he should leave. Tonight? The way he was feeling, he would not get far. Since Mathilde knew he was ill, she would probably send someone to check on him in the morning. If he was gone, the search would start.

  What about tomorrow? If he tried to get some sleep tonight and begged off his schooling because he was sick, he would have the morning hours and maybe into the afternoon before anyone knew he was gone. He should feel better in the morning, and he could travel much faster through the city during the day. But daylight held a greater risk he would be seen. Seen, yes, but would he be recognized? Not many people outside the castle knew him by sight. On formal occasions he was always dressed in elaborate robes when he appeared in public. For his escape he would dress plainly and avoid attention—another good argument for not riding off on one of the sleek mounts from the royal stables.

  How should he prepare for the trip without attracting attention? After more thought, he decided that if he was going to leave early in the morning, he would pack what he needed from his room tonight before he slept. Dax forced himself out of bed. His chills had mostly subsided, but he staggered around on weak legs. No, he was not going tonight. He stood uncertain for a moment, but his determination returned. He would do this.

  His closet held clothes and equipment that he had used on hunting trips with his father. He pulled out a well-worn pack and looked at it—serviceable, but not large. He had remembered it as being bigger. Still, he would not need to take much. He looked into the closet again. Maybe an extra shirt and some underclothes?

  When he took out his hunting clothes, he found a new worry. Nothing fit! He had not worn them since his father had fallen ill. Was poisoned!—he reminded himself. The flash of anger made his heart thump in his chest. As his anger faded, he looked at the clothes. Since he had worn them last, he must have grown. He dug out an older pair of leggings that would work, but what about a coat? Spring weather had arrived, but the temperatures, especially at night, would still be cool, if not cold. His training clothes were obviously guard-issue, and all his other coats, with their fine material, fancy embroidery, delicate lace, and shiny brass buttons, were very conspicuously royal. People in the marketplace wore dun and drab clothing. If he wore a coat from his closet, he would stand out like a peacock in a chicken coop.

  What he really needed was a worn, everyday coat—not royal finery or even a new cloak purchased from the market. He needed a commoner’s coat. As he thought, he had an idea. He pulled out the richly colored red coat he had received from the Duke of Bington when the duke had visited the castle two months ago. The coat was two or three sizes too big for him, but Mathilde had instructed him to put it in his closet for the future. Now he looked at the coat in a new light. It would be perfect for a trade. If he could find someone with a good, sturdy work coat, he would try to arrange a quiet exchange.

  Finally, well after midnight, Dax threw himself into bed, determined to get what sleep he could. He was exhausted, but his mind raced from one worry to another, thinking about clothing, food, and all the other items he should take with him.

  #

  A sudden rap on his door startled him awake. Light streamed through the window and stretched a broad, bright line across the foot of his bed. Sandy-eyed, he blinked away sleep. Ruallo poked his head into the room. “Your Majesty?” Seeing Dax awake, Ruallo stepped into the room. “Mathilde said you were not feeling well last night, and I should check on you.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Befuddled by sleep at first, Dax remembered his danger. His mind snapped fully awake. Controlling his urge for action, he moved lethargically to push the hair back out of his eyes. He looked at Ruallo with his eyes half open. “Would you tell Mathilde I think I would do better to stay in bed today?” He put his hand back on his forehead and rubbed his temples as if he had a headache. He discovered he really did have a headache. “I will find something for breakfast later in the kitchen,” he told Ruallo. “Please give my regrets to Evnissyen for this morning. Also, tell Captain Danford I will send word if I feel up to coming to the training yard this afternoon.” A moment later he added, “Right now I don’t think I will be there.”

  “Very well, Your Majesty. If I may say, you do look a little peaked this morning.”

  Dax smiled ruefully. “Yes, I had some stomach trouble and didn’t sleep much last night. I would really appreciate it if you told everyone to leave me alone today. I will call for you if I need you.”

  Although he truthfully might have done better if he had stayed in bed, Dax was up and on his way the moment the door closed. From the closet he took up the pack he had prepared the night before, but he immediately thought of more things he had to have. Daylight reminded him he needed a hat. His pack was not that large, and he still needed to take food. He ended up leaving out his extra pair of boots and strapping his sleeping blanket on the outside of the pack. The load would be clumsy, but he could carry it. Now, he had to get moving. Not only did he need time to get as far away as he could before he was missed, but he had to act before he lost his resolve. The fierce determination he had felt last night was gone. Weary from lack of sleep, hungry from lack of food, and weak from the aftereffects of the poison, he was still convinced he had to flee the castle. But he had to leave now.

  Dax hoisted his pack and took one last look around. His room. As long has he could remember, this room had been his—a boy’s room—comfortable and familiar. His eyes lit on Mrs. Pibb lying on the table beside the bed. Tears welled up in his eyes as he looked at the worn and tattered stuffed rabbit. His mother had made it while she was carrying him. That was what his father had told him. She had wanted her baby to have something soft and snuggly. Threadbare in places, he treasured it as his only possession from her. He did not know where the name Mrs. Pibb had come from, but he had always slept with the toy at his side. He thrust the rabbit into the pack. There would be room enough even with the other items he still needed to get.

  Dax slipped through the room’s secret door into the passageway beyond and made his way toward the kitchen. Just down the hall from the scullery, a closet of cleaning supplies had a sliding panel at the back. It was the nearest point to the kitchen, and it should be free of people at this time of day. Cautiously he checked the hall before he opened the closet door. Seeing no one, he stepped into the corridor leading to the rear entrance of the kitchen. The pantries just inside contained food, spices, and other supplies for the cooks, but one cabinet was the travelers’ store. It held a supply of dried meats, hard biscuits, and other foods that would keep well on a trip.

  He had just finished packing more than enough food for the four days he would need to get to his aunt’s farm when he heard a noise behind him. “Ah, going for a little trip, are we?” Ma Cookie’s cheerful, bantering voice made him jump. One look at the boy and she changed her tone. She knelt beside him at the pantry. “Your Majesty, is there something wrong?” she asked, concerned.

  Dax’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment at being caught unaware. He would never lie to Ma Cookie—even if he could have—but he realized she might be in danger if she knew too much. “Listen,” he started cautiously, “I have to go away for a while, but it would be better for you if you didn’t see me.”


  “You are in danger, aren’t you? It’s that Mathilde, I’ll wager.” Dax said nothing in reply. He had never heard that flat, cold tone in her voice before. He did not want to answer and looked away. “Do you have enough food?” she continued. “Where’s your waterskin?” Ma Cookie was not like other adults. She did not question him further. She was all business and seemed to understand without his having to say anything. In a few short minutes, she had fed him a substantial breakfast in a back room out of sight of the main kitchen. She checked his pack while he ate. Handing him a waterskin and another pack of dried mutton, she nodded, satisfied. “Now get yourself off before someone sees you and asks questions.”

  Dax hesitated. He felt a real pang of loss. Facing Ma Cookie, he wondered when he would see her, Ruallo, or any of the other persons who populated his daily life. Leaving meant he was leaving his life behind. He knew he would have had much more hard work to be ready to become king. He would not miss that. He was a king in name, but he had no responsibility. He would not miss that either. He liked living in the castle. He would miss his room and the secret passages. But he would miss these people most of all.

  He faced a yet greater loss. Mathilde was going to take his throne and give it to Keir. Dax’s father had been on his deathbed, pale and weak from the flux, when he had put his hand on Dax’s shoulder. “Dax, it’s up to you now.” His voice was a faint echo of his normal hearty tone. “You’re my son, and I know you will be a good king.” But Dax would only be king if he could escape Mathilde’s plot to kill him and find a way to win back his throne. Hopeless and helpless, he stood there, unable to move. What could he do?

  Ma Cookie interrupted his despair and swept him up in an all-encompassing embrace. She set him back on his feet, straightened his hat, and pushed him toward the door. “Now you take care of yourself, and come back to see me some day.” He saw tears in her eyes, but she shooed him out with her hands. “Now, get!”

  Dax swallowed the lump in his throat and blinked back tears in his own eyes. He could not stay. Around the corner, out of sight, he ducked back into the castle’s secret ways. This time he headed for the lower regions. His father had shown him the castle’s hidden byways, and there were secrets within secrets. In addition to the passages within the walls, the castle had many small corridors that were not secret but hidden, back hallways used by servants, where the lords and ladies never ventured. The lowest levels of the castle had storerooms where people seldom went. Some contained food and household goods, but many held a bewildering array of cast-off articles. Dax had heard that East Landly’s palace had dark dungeons for prisoners on its lower levels. Here at Stone Harbor Castle, the adjoining guard complex had cells for that function.

  The storerooms were not his destination, however, and he navigated around them, out of sight, heading lower yet. On the castle’s basement level, the passages, secret or not, had large drains that channeled drips of rain and other moisture from the castle out the seaward side of Adok’s rocky bulk. Mariners coming into Stone Harbor said that sometimes dark streaks of water on the rock made the castle appear to weep, but the drains held another secret. One drain, at the far north end of the hidden network, was higher than the others and was never wet. An oversight by the builders? No. Under the grate that covered it, the bottom of the drain channel was a cover that slid aside revealing a still lower level of passages. The cover made a dry scrape when Dax pulled it aside, and the odor of cold stone rose up to meet him.

  The secret ways inside the castle were narrow, irregular passages between the walls, but the lowest levels were a connected system of small caverns with tunnels between chambers. Dax’s father did not know for sure how the tunnels had been built, but tradition held the Kotkel had built them. Some called the Kotkel elves, but Dax’s father had told him they were not. They were just a different kind of people who were seldom seen these days. Travelers’ tales said they were small, manlike beings who lived away from humans. Some said they purposefully hid themselves. Supposedly they had once built an extraordinary nation on this same land, but by the time the kingdom of Landly was created, even the ruins of their world had decayed. His father had told Dax he believed Kotkel had built the tunnels since legend had it they had built the heart of Stone Harbor Castle for themselves.

  The cave chambers resembled paintings Dax had seen of the grottos at Fingle’s Mount, where rock had flowed like water and made long stone teeth that hung from the ceiling and grew up from the floor. In the dim lantern light, he saw an occasional drop of water fall from the ceiling’s teeth like drips from a melting icicle. Tunnel sections between chambers were obviously different. Circular and about four feet in diameter, they had been built with tools unlike any Dax knew. The floors were a beaten track of tamped earth, but the walls rose overhead in a perfect curve. The tunnels could have been giant worm holes in the rock—if worms that ate rock made perfectly straight burrows. The sides of the shafts had long scoring marks as if some giant beast had gnawed its way through. Dax shuddered. If there were worms that ate rock, he never wanted to meet one.

  Dax’s father had had to crouch when he had led Dax through the tunnels. Taller now, Dax had to bend his own head in the tunnels. The uneven floor occasionally brought him too close to the ceiling, and he had to crouch. Most of the rock tunnels ran horizontally, but the cave passages led down lower still. Where slopes were too steep, someone had built steps. The way out of the castle was on the lowest level of all, but Dax had another destination first—the royal treasure chamber.

  An obscure natural passageway, half hidden around a rocky corner in one cavern, led upward to the room. Behind a heavy door, the treasure chamber had a dry, sandy floor. Wooden boxes and chests along the walls showed no signs of age other than a little dust. Dax’s father said some of the chests dated back to the first of the Ambergriff kings. The crown of West Landly, with its large blue stone, rested in a carefully polished wooden box in a protected nook near the door. Dax remembered seeing his father wear the crown several times on important state occasions. The last time had been Dax’s tenth-year celebration, the day Dax had become official heir to the throne. His father always retrieved the crown himself for these occasions, and that morning he had brought Dax along.

  Dax lifted the lid of the box and looked at the crown. He wondered if he would ever wear it in the Great Hall. The last time his father, lord king of this realm, had worn the crown, sunlight streaming through the high windows had made the jewels set into the crown sparkle like dew on the morning ground. While his father sat on the throne, the blue stone had caught the light, casting spots of color onto everything nearby. Portraits of other Ambergriffs, four kings and two queens wearing the same crown, looked down from the walls of the broad corridor outside the Great Hall. Earlier Ambergriff kings and queens whose portraits hung farther down the grand hallway wore the old crown, which itself sat in the box next to the new crown. He touched the crown—his father’s crown. He swallowed hard. Would it ever be his crown?

  He thought of Mathilde’s treachery and frowned. If her plot was successful, she would give the crown to someone else. He sighed. Only if he was clever enough to live through the next few weeks could he start thinking about the crown. It took all his courage and resolve to close the box and set it back on the shelf.

  A special cabinet in the back of the treasure chamber held the twin crowns for the king and queen of Landly—a united Landly. The third of the Ambergriff kings had had twin sons, and rather than chance a succession conflict, he had set each to rule half the kingdom. Darius Ambergriff III never intended there to be a permanent division of west from east. However, in the way of all monarchs, the East Landly and West Landly kings continued their separate reigns. The two realms had been ruled ever since as separate kingdoms. West Landly claimed the Ambergriff name and tradition in their crown. East Landly’s kings descended from the same line, but his royal cousins ruled with different names and traditions. The kingdoms were rivals in trade and influence over the surrounding are
a, but they were united in language and proud of their common heritage.

  Dax had seen the twin crowns of old Landly once before. His father had shown him their jewel-encrusted magnificence. They were even larger and more elaborate than the crown of West Landly. Two large, oval, blue jewels flanked a larger center stone, symbolizing the kingdom’s reach from the Great Ocean in the west to the Dawn Ocean in the east. The center stone was a round, bright-faceted diamond symbolizing the Circular Sea at the heart of the kingdom. Two identical crowns—one for a king, the other a queen. Although the days had long passed when the kingdoms were one, his father had told him there was a prophecy that one day the Landly crowns would be worn again to rule a united kingdom. The single blue jewel of the West Landly crown was a both a legacy and a promise.

  As Dax stood in the treasure chamber, he had a thought. His mouth twisted up in a smile of cynical amusement. Mathilde had replaced his father’s loyalists with her own men. As far as he knew, he alone in the castle carried the secret of the kingdom’s treasure room. If Mathilde put Keir on the throne, who would tell her where the crown, symbol of royal authority in the kingdom, was to be found? Certainly not the rightful heir to the throne!

  That thought brought a flare of anger and galvanized him into action. Dax found a chest of the right size and emptied it. He gathered the crowns and carefully wrapped them in protective clothes and packed them inside. He carried the chest a short way back down the passage to a small side passage. It led nowhere, but it had enough space at the end to conceal a chest. Once covered with loose rocks, it was just another blind niche in the ragged caverns. He dusted his hands in spiteful satisfaction after he had erased the last of his footprints leading to the hiding place. Even if Mathilde discovered the treasure room, the royal crowns might still evade her grasp. Until a rightful king took the throne of West Landly, either himself or someone selected the Assembly of Nobles, the crowns would stay hidden in the depths of Adok.