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her chest and tapped her foot as she considered that.
Her eyes narrowed, probably as the same solution occurred to her that he had already considered and dismissed. “I don’t suppose you could arrange for them to be ambushed?”
He shrugged with every evidence of helplessness.
“If I knew where they were going. I don’t. I don’t even know where the dragon’s lair is except that it is within the treaty lands granted to the Wyrding Others. I do have some…contacts among the Others who would take on the task, but first my informant has to come back to tell me where they are going.
There are a great many trails through the Wyrding Lands, and unless the ambush is set up on the right one, it won’t catch them.”
That is the last time I use a fox. They’re as bad as cats for twisting orders around to suit themselves. Trying to bind a fox or a cat to a task they don’t want to do is like trying to catch an eel with your bare hands. He had not been able to obtain a vial of dragon’s blood in order to allow him to speak to all animals, so he had had to expend a great deal of time and concentration finding a wild beast that would serve as his eyes and ears in that valley and bind it to his service as a Familiar.
He had thought the fox was perfect—the right size to be inconspicuous, clever, agile and intelligent. But, alas, not obedient. Even the geas he put on it was not enough to make it obedient. And the geas itself depended on the fox of its own accord thinking that the dragon was a menace to the countryside.
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“And these contacts of yours—what are the odds of them succeeding if you do find a place to set an ambush?” she asked. Then she raised her eyebrow.
“The priority is to silence the Princess, of course. I don’t like the cost of having to summon another dragon if the Champion kills this one, but if Andromeda escapes outside Acadia and tells her story, we will have a true disaster on our hands. She was already suspicious enough on her own, and any half-competent Godmother or Sorcerer would certainly put the facts together quickly once she lays them before her—or him.”
You will have a disaster on your hands. By the time anyone figures out I was the one who summoned the dragon in the first place, I will be on a ship halfway to the Fortunate Islands. “You are quite correct, Majesty,” he said aloud. “So long as Andromeda is silenced, the most important issue is taken care of.”
He groped for the Summoning charm just around his neck. Made of dragon scale (and how lucky he was to have found the scale from a living dragon!) it was warm to the touch. So the dragon that had lost it was still alive. “We might not in fact need to summon another dragon. The populace is sufficiently cowed, and sufficiently in sympathy with your sacrifice, that the murmurs of discontent have stilled. I believe that just on the basis of having been forced to give your own daughter to the dragon for the good of the Kingdom, the people’s sympathies will remain with you no matter what else happens.”
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If that damn Champion kills the dragon, I don’t know how I’m going to Summon another one…
although a Chimera might do. Or if I could get that fox to steal me a Hydra’s tooth. Or perhaps a sea-monster?
There were a number of possibilities he had not yet explored, but on the whole, he wondered if it was worth his time looking into them. If the Champion managed to slay the dragon, unless the wretched man died in the attempt, there was still the possibility that Andromeda had already told him all she knew. Why shouldn’t she? He had been her rescuer.
Traditionally speaking, she should be head-over-heels in love with him now and pouring out her heart to him.
The Queen went back to pacing, and evidently came to the same rather grim conclusion. “Not if Andromeda tells him what she knows. She may be the most naive child in the Five Hundred Kingdoms, but we can’t count on this Champion being that naive. Especially since we don’t know anything about him. He could be another ignorant shepherd boy, but he could just as easily be a shrewd old warrior, suspicious and all too clever, especially if he was not once in the Acadian Guard but has actually been a mercenary instead. Those men know a trap a hundred leagues away, and can smell out anything that might threaten them. She must be silenced, and so must he!”
“First, she must be found,” he reminded her.
“And trust me, Majesty, I am working on that.”
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The trouble was that once they had gone into the Wyrding Lands, he was going to have the devil’s own time tracing them. Much to his silent fury, he had discovered that by the time he knew of the Princess’s escape, her room had been completely stripped of everything that had ever been owned by her or touched by her. Her miserable attendants had told him, with many protestations of sorrow, that they had felt it would ease the Queen’s grief sooner if all reminders of her child were whisked away out of her sight. There was not so much as a hair of the Princess left to be used to find her. So far as her rooms went, she might never have existed. Nor could he find any hints of her outside her rooms. The old furniture that had once decked those rooms had been broken up, given away, or disassembled and stored with other pieces exactly like it. The reports that she had made were gone when he went to look in the archives for them. Or rather, the reports were still there, but they were scribes’ copies. After the initial one that had so intrigued him, her own secretary had made the fair copies from her hasty ones, and where her originals had gone, only heaven knows.
The only things left that he knew with certainty that she had handled were books, but such ephemeral contact faded quickly and was confused with the traces of everyone else who had handled them. He had tried anyway, but it seemed that between the last time that Andromeda had touched the books and when they were put away they must have passed 202
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through the hands of twenty different people. She could not have been more effectively erased, magically speaking, if someone with knowledge of magic had gone about trying to obscure her presence.
So he could not trace her by her personal essence, and he did not dare try a broad magical sweep in the Wyrding Lands. Too many creatures of magic existed there, and no few of them would sense such a sweep and retaliate without hesitation for something they considered an intrusion.
He had made the fundamental mistake, once the fox had reported that the Princess was rescued, of telling it to follow her, lure her into the dragon’s talons if possible and report to him. In that order. He hadn’t thought then that he himself would be unable to track her, and he hadn’t thought that the fox would take his orders so literally as to completely fail to report back at regular intervals. Now the blasted beast was somewhere out there, and while he might be able to track the fox, he would be able to see only what the fox saw, which probably would not include the Princess and her Champion.
“Majesty, I believe I have the situation on the way to a solution,” he told the Queen mendaciously. “But I will need time and work. If I may withdraw?”
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her own thoughts, and dismissed him with an angry wave of her hand. He did not ask twice, but backed out of the Throne Room with a bow. He pitied the next person to come under her hand. Not that she would do anything overt—no, she would just find the worst possible task to assign him, or her, something that had little or no chance of success. Then, when the poor fool failed, she would, with a falsely compassionate smile, administer a cruel punishment in such a way that the wretched victim would feel he or she deserved it, and worse.
She was a past mistress of the manipulation of just about everyone ar
ound her. Even, on occasion, himself. She was good enough at it that he could even see her doing it and know what was happening, and she still managed to manipulate him. There was no question of how she had become the ruling entity here in Acadia.
He retired to his own rooms, to ponder his options.
His own suite here in the Palace was second in comfort to none, not even the Queen’s, and yet that comfort was not of the visible sort. He had selected with care the craftsmen who made his furnishings, which were all deceptively plain. He did not require inlay work, nor frescoes, nor hangings of silk. But when you sat on one of his chairs and discovered yourself embraced by supple leather and plush padding, when you reached for something on a nearby table and understood that the table was at the perfect height for a man precisely of his size, and 204
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above all, when you slipped into the silk sheets on the bed, under the blankets of lamb’s wool, atop the feather bed stuffed with the finest eiderdown, the level of hidden luxury here became clear to you.
What appeared to be plain leather and wood furniture, a starkly simple bed, were anything but. He maintained this illusion even in his clothing; what seemed to be simple wool was the finest of lamb’s wool, and what seemed to be linen was, in fact, silk twill. Next to his skin he always wore silk, though that was as much out of need as out of a love of luxury. Silk was a magical insulator, and he had a certain need to be insulated from magic.
The foolish thought that he was superstitious, because he was hung all over with what they thought were amulets. He knew he was frequently the subject of jests for all of his “trinkets,” which ran the gamut of carved bits of bone and amber to what appeared to be simple stones with water-worn holes through them.
In fact, they were something far more potent. He had found a way to store magical power and purpose in an object. And sometimes, to keep from inadver-tently activating one of his objects, he needed to be able to insulate himself from it. Using the carved car-nelian amulet that summoned a Demon Lord, for instance, would be very bad. Aside from giving the game away, it would waste the amulet that had taken a year and a day to craft.
And the Demon Lord would not be particularly pleased about it, either.
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One problem that most magicians had was that they were limited by their own power—or that which they could steal from others. Their own power was limited by their capacity to store it—power regenerated, but if your capacity had been filled, you did not generate any power over and above what you had. Solon had found a means to take an object (things made of metal or stone seemed the best), and store a spell and the power to make it work in that object. Releasing and targeting the power was a trivial exercise. So far as he was aware, he was the only Acadian magician to have discovered how to do this, though, of course, he could not speak for Mages outside of Acadia.
He honestly did not care what the Mages outside Acadia could and could not do. He had never had much interest in moving outside the bounds of his own Kingdom.
The simple fact was, Solon was the most powerful Magician in Acadia, not counting the Wyrding Folk, but Acadia was a very small Kingdom. That might have irritated some Magicians with wider ambition than Solon had, but Solon was a man who carefully weighed and measured every action before he took it.
And to his mind, this was of no matter. It was better to be the King Frog in a small pond than just another green jumper in a larger venue. No one would move to take Acadia away from him because it was so small. Solon was, he flattered himself to think, no fool. He had a fine, luxurious life here, he 206
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was the power behind the throne, and what more could he ask for? Untold riches? For what purpose?
There were only so many fine meals one could eat, grand vintages one could savor, luxurious beds one could sleep in, and so forth. Now, before he had begun his work with Cassiopeia, the Acadian ruling family had not been nearly this wealthy, but between the wealth from the ships he was wrecking with his weather magic, and the taxes he and Cassiopeia were extracting, there was enough gold and silver flowing into the Royal Exchequer to give the two of them an admirable style of living.
Cassiopeia was very well aware of the source of her wealth. That was why she was unlikely ever to attempt to punish him. However much she might rage at him—and she had, in the past, said many harmful things to his face—she would never actually do anything to harm him, not physically, and not in regard to his position at Court. She might with-hold her favors from him for a time, but that approach hurt her more than it harmed him. No, this was a good situation, comfortable in every way, and stable. He had everything he could want, and avoided a great deal of unpleasantness that came to Magicians with broader ambitions. Who wanted heroes riding up to your door every other week looking to slay you, younger Mages challenging you, or thieves trying to break in to steal some powerful object , the loss of which, would, Traditionally, be your ultimate downfall? Oh no. This was much bet-
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ter. Eventually he would claim the throne, but not now, and not for some time.
Move slowly, that was the key. Be careful how you use magic, so that you don’t attract the attention of greater Mages, or of The Tradition. Do things as indirectly as possible—using weather-magic to wreck ships, for instance. Even if he was caught at it, he could plausibly say he was trying to use it to weaken the storms, not make them more powerful.
It was a great pity none of this had prevented the Princess from becoming suspicious about what he had done.
Because calling the dragon had been a stroke of genius.
He’d had the dragon-scale for a while; he had known it had come from a living dragon when he had investigated what it was, but he hadn’t particularly had a purpose for it until complaints started coming about the increasing taxes, as well as a few other minor matters that concerned him, personally.
Now, there were always options in handling wide-spread complaints. One was to ignore them. Another was to make plausible excuses. But the third was to distract attention from the cause of the complaints and make people focus on other issues.
The best way to distract attention was to start a war; unfortunately, Acadia was ill-situated to survive such a war. With only a minimal army and without the ability to pay for mercenary troops, a war, regrettably, was out of the question.
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Regrettably, because a war could be used as an excuse for a great many things.
That was when it had occurred to him the next best distraction would be a—well, call it a “natural disaster.” All he had to do would be to use that dragon scale to summon and control the behavior of the original dragon—child’s play, since the behavior he would be dictating was very Traditional for a dragon—and prevent any Champion from coming to the rescue. In fact, to be on the safe side, rather than merely specifying “Champions” he had worded the spell as “Any Godmother, Wizard or Sorceress, or man capable of and inclined to meet the dragon in mortal combat and defeat it” when setting the magic in place on the borders of Acadia. That way the Champions of Glass Mountain could not sneak one of their own inside by sending someone technically only a candidate. And it would (or so he had thought) eliminate any possibility of a wild card coming in from outside.
I wonder if this is really an Acadian Champion? The more he considered the situation, the more certain he was that that was the answer. He cursed himself for not taking some other way to eliminate the Princess.
He had probably set the whole thing in motion himself. It made perfect sense—a Princess in peril, an unlikely hero, who probably was some burly Acadian shepherd-boy with a bucket for a helm and his father’s old sword. How could he not have seen that he was setting himself up for a Traditionally iconic rescue?
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Well, he would have to be very careful how he handled things
from now on. Anything he did, he would have to make certain he was not cueing up The Tradition for some other inconvenient solution.
But first, he would have to find out where the Princess and her rescuer were.
“Curse that fox,” he muttered, and went to his workshop to see what he could think of to do.
The Princess and her rescuer were staring at a dragon scale in the middle of the road.
“It can’t be the same one?” she asked doubtfully. “Can it?”
He got down off his horse and walked all around it, carefully not touching it, then drew his sword and, with the tip, turned it over. “It’s the same,” he said with some satisfaction. “There’s a chip here, and a crack running from it that passes across these growth bars—” he used the sword-tip as a pointer
“—that I made note of. So, we have a benefactor who is marking our way for us, or a villain who is leading us into a trap.”
She blinked. “How can you be so calm about this?” she asked, finally.
“Is it going to make any difference either way if I’m prepared for both possibilities?” he countered. “No. If it is a benefactor who intends to lead us to the beast so that we can dispatch it, I’ll be prepared for a cautious approach. If it is a trap, I will be prepared for ambush once we are into territory where so large a 210
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beast can ambush us.” He looked around at the dense trees and foliage. “This is not the place. So for now we can simply be ready for more ordinary perils.”
“As ordinary as they get in Wyrding Lands,” she muttered. He must have heard it, though, because he smiled.
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