The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  “Agatha’s so hard to fool, you see,” said Laura.

  “You need deceive her a bare sennight,” said Fence. “We must away.”

  “Well, okay, then,” said Laura.

  Ted removed his startled gaze from his sister; nobody had asked her opinion, and it was usually hard enough to get it out of her when she was asked. He addressed Fence, who was still looking at Randolph, and rather as a nearsighted person will look at the chart in the eye doctor’s office. “Can we manage with so few?” said Ted.

  “I do believe it,” said Fence, without moving. “If Randolph can sift the riddles of the Gray Lake, Matthew and I shall do what we may with the Library of Heathwill.”

  “Who do we go with?” asked Ellen.

  “I fear me you must be separate,” said Fence.

  There was a chilly silence.

  “Well, who gets to decide?” said Ellen.

  Fence said to Randolph, “Which wilt thou have?”

  Ted was reminded of choosing sides for gym class, and hoped absurdly that Laura would not be the last one picked.

  For the first time since he had entered the room, Randolph looked at the five of them, one by one. His face was judicious. Patrick scowled at him, and he did not react. Ellen grinned, and he raised an eyebrow at her. Ruth lifted her chin and returned a good imitation of the judicious expression. Ted, when his turn came, tried to look reliable. Randolph’s gaze lingered on him.

  “Are you right-handed?” said Randolph.

  “Yes, my lord.” Ted remembered with uncomfortable vividness their first fencing lesson. Randolph, however, who must have had it in mind also, looked vaguely satisfied, though there was no warmth behind it.

  “For an embassy to the Dragon King,” said Randolph, “’twere best have our own King.”

  Ted did not think this a good plan to ensure that he didn’t kill Randolph, but Randolph was right; if they were going to continue this masquerade, the King belonged with the embassy wherein courtesy and preserving the forms mattered most. He doubted that Belaparthalion or Chryse would be half so impressed by the King of the Hidden Land as they would be by Fence.

  “True enough,” said Fence. He turned his head to Laura. “I think I must have thee,” he said. “In the sorcerous library, we may find news of thy talent. Randolph?”

  “Lady Ruth,” said Randolph, in rather an odd voice, “you have spoken once with the Judge of the Dead; will you so again?”

  “An it please you, my lord,” said Ruth, in an equally odd voice, “I will.”

  They had spoken with the Judge of the Dead in order to return Ted himself to life. Ted wondered what had happened then that remembering it now should make them sound so strange. The memory made him feel odd too, but he was the one who had died.

  “Well, what about the rest of us?” said Ellen.

  “A moment,” said Fence. “When entered you this country?”

  “We came in the first week of June,” said Patrick, “but we didn’t do anything except wander around the Well of the White Witch until Ted and Laura showed up, on the fourteenth. Benjamin came looking for the real kids, and found us.”

  “So she did it then,” said Randolph, “and all our dealings thereafter were with you five.”

  They all nodded.

  “What,” said Ellen, “about the rest of us?”

  “I’ll take you,” said Fence, smiling. He was probably relieved to be able to change the subject. “Fence’s Country will like you greatly.”

  “Is that where you’re from, Fence?” said Laura.

  Fence went on smiling, but Randolph’s face grew utterly blank, and then he pushed the still-full goblet away from him until it clinked against the nearest platter. Fence said placidly to Laura, “Nay, I am but named for him that gave’s name to the country. I come from the Outer Isles.”

  Randolph stood up. “I cry you mercy,” he said to Fence. “I have yet some business that awaiteth me.”

  “This won’t serve,” said Fence, with no particular emphasis.

  Randolph leaned the heels of his hands on the table and said, “I do beg you, then, hold to the affair we are bent on and start not aside for these trivialities.”

  “Any knowledge,” said Fence, “is armor ’gainst their discovery.”

  Randolph sat down again. It turned out that more planning must wait until Benjamin, Matthew, and Celia had been informed of what was going on; and until Andrew had been told that the King would be joining his party. Ted thought that this might cause trouble, but he meant to let Fence worry about it. For all the discussion they got done, Fence might as well have let Randolph leave; unless he had meant not to continue the discussion, but to make Randolph eat with the five imposters.

  Which was probably in theory the right thing to do; but nobody had much of an appetite.

  CHAPTER 6

  LAURA lay in the breezy darkness of the room she shared with Ellen, under linen sheets and silk quilts and, square on her chest, the hot, solid weight of the black cat, which had decided suddenly after months of ignoring them that Ellen and Laura were the only people it could stand to look at.

  She was not exactly asleep, or exactly awake. A blue wash of moonlight swept in the unglazed window, struck the silver pitcher that sat on their dressing table, and fell muted into her face. She wished Ellen snored. She wished for a thunderstorm. She was afraid of what she would see if she dozed, and terrified of what she would dream if she slept. She was not the Princess Laura and she had never even laid eyes on the Princess Laura’s mother; but Fence had told her that the visions she saw and the oddities she dreamed of were a legacy of that mother’s family. She did not mind playing Princess Laura, but she minded this.

  Ellen did not snore, and the night was clear. The moonlight fixed her with its glittering eye, and she saw what she was meant to. The evergreen trees of the forest were enormous; their branches began yards above her head. Between their widely separated trunks were only piles and heaps of discarded brown needles, and fallen branches, and an occasional seedling, growing hopefully upward. The air was very cold and smelled damply of pine and cedar. There was also a fainter smell that Laura associated with Christmas. Blue spruce. Laura was confused by this sudden collision of her memories and Princess Laura’s. It was she who remembered Christmas, but Princess Laura who knew that that smell meant blue spruce.

  “Deck the halls with boughs of holly!” shouted Laura, afraid that Princess Laura would move her to say something peculiar.

  Her voice was frail and faint in this vastness of air and branch. Very high up, a sharp wind drove long clouds across a thin blue sky. She could hear crows quarreling.

  Laura was cold and puzzled, and beginning to be bored. She listened to the inside of her mind, but nothing unusual was there. Princess Laura wasn’t going to be any help. Laura hunched her shoulders against an eddy of wind, and realized she was wearing a pack. She shrugged it off and knelt gingerly in the needles to open it. It was made of green nylon, and the tag said “Caribou.” Inside it were a squashed apple, a little ivory unicorn with green eyes, a pocket-sized copy of Peter Rabbit, with the original illustrations, and a silver flute that made her tentative hand shiver as if it were falling asleep. She had felt it before. This was the flute of Cedric.

  Laura stared at this collection for some time. The unicorn was hers, a present from Fence. The food might have been anybody’s. She opened the little book, and encountered Ellen’s determined black script on the flyleaf. “EX LIBRIS ELLEN JENNIFER CARROLL. THIS MEANS YOU.”

  The flute was Laura’s too. Somebody who had seemed to know what he was doing had given it to her, when Princess Laura was already dead. Fence said there was a saying that Cedric’s flute would save them at the end. Ruth, who had had flute lessons for eight years, couldn’t get a single decent note out of this flute. Laura, who couldn’t even play the piano, let alone coordinate her breath and her fingers at the same time, could play this flute to perfection.

  She supposed she might as well pla
y it now. It was very cold to the touch. She put it to her lips and blew a few experimental breaths. She played “The Minstrel Boy,” which had once summoned her a unicorn. This time it summoned nothing. She played “Sir Patrick Spens,” which had pricked Randolph’s conscience. Only her cold fingers tingled where she held the flute. She played “Matty Groves,” which she did not like. Whatever she hoped to wake up did not care for it either.

  “You could at least let all the wild animals come and listen and be tamed,” said Laura, removing the flute from her mouth and addressing it severely. She gave up on Secret Country songs and, defiantly, played “James James Morrison Morrison.”

  She was playing the last line when the tree nearest her burst violently into flame. A rush of hot air drove her backward. Laura considered running, but saw that neither nearby trees nor the needles at the foot of the burning one had caught. The flame was very clear and yellow. Laura looked at it hopefully; but the tears ran down her face from the heat and the brightness. She blinked them away, and when she opened her eyes again she was staring into a shaft of moonlight, and the cat had jumped down from the bed.

  Ted and Patrick got up in the morning and found a note from Fence stuck to the inside of their heavy wooden door by no agency that they could discover. It peeled off neatly. It was folded in three and sealed with a blob of blue wax on which there was no imprint of a seal. Fence’s handwriting was round and earnest, like his face.

  His sentences were more brisk and businesslike, and required Ted and Patrick to meet him after breakfast in the Council Room. This gave Ted an uncomfortable sensation in the stomach; but Fence had added a line at the bottom of the page to say that he would already have apprised Benjamin, Matthew, and Celia of Ted and Patrick’s true nature. Ted felt better, until Patrick said, “What do you suppose he thinks our true nature is?”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Ted. Patrick just stood there on the stone floor in his white nightshirt, with his pale brown hair sticking up, and grinned at him.

  “What are you so pleased about?” said Ted.

  “I’m just looking forward,” said Patrick, serenely, “to being myself once in a while.”

  “We agreed that we need to keep up the masquerade.”

  “But not with anybody who knows.”

  “Pat, come on, we’re only here on sufferance.”

  “That’s right,” said Patrick. “Mine.”

  Ted said, in as close an imitation as he could come to Benjamin’s abrupt tones, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

  Patrick regarded him with the intent, blue, merciless stare he had used when he played Fence. Ted had never thought to ask him what he thought of the harmless-looking, untidy, abstracted reality that was High Castle’s resident wizard. He did not ask him now. “Let’s get dressed.”

  “I hoped,” said Patrick, crossing the huge room to the six oak chests lined up against the wall, “that I’d never have to wear those damn stockings again.”

  “Don’t we have any robes, like Fence and Benjamin wear?”

  “I don’t want one like Fence’s,” said Patrick, rummaging. “I don’t want one at all. They’re probably as hot as the hose.”

  “Well, it’s fall now. The hose won’t be so hot.”

  Patrick looked over his shoulder, his hands full of embroidered silk, his face holding its most distant calculating expression. “It’s fall,” he said, “and it’s a hell of a lot warmer in here in the morning than it was all summer.”

  “Maybe we burned Claudia up with her house,” said Ted, savagely.

  “I hope not,” said Patrick. “What if the only way to find out what’s going on is to ask her?”

  “No problem,” said Ted, still savagely. “You just go to the land of the dead.”

  Patrick hauled the nightshirt over his head, flung it into the middle of their bearskin rug, and disappeared into the violet folds of the silk shirt, still with the calculating expression. He had lost track of what he was holding; he would never have put that shirt on if he had looked at it first. Ted put on one of the linen shirts Patrick had strewn on the floor.

  “And ask her?” said Patrick.

  “The ghosts don’t remember, unless you nudge them.”

  “The sight of you ought to nudge her all right,” said Patrick, crossing the room and picking his jeans up out of the rocking chair. There was something strange in his tone. After a moment Ted recognized it as admiration. Admiration from Patrick was rare, and, just now, unnerving.

  “When’s the council?” said Patrick.

  “Eleven. We should go now.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Patrick, standing up abruptly. “I have to go check my watch.”

  Well, thought Ted, Patrick would have to get the sword from Fence, who would say something to keep him in line. Ted waved him cheerily on his way and ran down to the Council Room. Randolph was there already, with the three girls. Ruth was wearing the sort of white flowing dress she had always worn in this country. Ellen and Laura had apparently, like Patrick, suffered a rebellion against the garments of the Hidden Land; they had put on their boys’ clothes from the battle.

  Randolph was wearing blue as usual, although he was no longer of the school of Blue Sorcery. In the late morning light he looked, if not all right, at least better than he had. The table in front of him was piled with books and scrolls and maps. Most of them were dusty. Ted was nerving himself to ask what they were for when Celia and Matthew came in, also piled with books and scrolls. Matthew, a long, thin young man with red hair and a sardonic eye, looked at the children with an expression of uneasy reproach and said nothing. Celia moved briskly past him, dumped her burden on the table, and smiled. She was taller than Matthew; she had sleek yellow hair braided down her back, and pale eyes that might have been blue or green or gray, and a long, puckered scar on her forehead.

  “Give you good morrow,” she said. “I am Celia, called Lady for my service to the last Queen; but in this company we dispense with sugary courtesy. Matthew is my husband, and the three yellow bees you’ve marked buzzing hither and yon making an upset are my children.”

  There was a muddled silence. Ted collected himself and said, “Thank you. You know our names and we don’t have any sugary titles. Laura is my sister. Ruth and Ellen are my cousins. The Patrick with the superior smirk who isn’t here is their brother.”

  Celia said, “You are welcome to High Castle.”

  “I doubt it,” said Ruth. “But it’s kind of you to say so.”

  Matthew grinned; Randolph actually looked at Ruth as if he were seeing her; Celia made a disapproving frown and then smiled too. “So,” she said. “Let plain speaking be the order of the day.”

  There was another silence, less uncomfortable, broken by the arrival of Fence, who sat down in the chair to the left of the one that had been King William’s. Celia and Matthew sat down too, and Ted gathered his courage and sat in the King’s chair.

  “Where’s Benjamin?” said Ellen. Ted knew that she was, as always, enjoying herself. He and Ruth and Laura, because they were not, would never have asked Fence that question.

  “Recovering himself,” said Fence, sitting down and exchanging some look with Matthew.

  “Is he terribly grieved?” said Ellen. She didn’t sound eager, but like somebody dispassionately in search of information.

  “He is so,” said Fence. “More to thy purpose, he is wroth. A saith, if a should lay eyes on one of you before the day is out, a will break that one between his two hands.”

  Ellen sat back abruptly. “We didn’t do anything.”

  “You cozened and deceived him, and all of us; if there was a necessity in’t, yet thou shouldst give Benjamin some little time to see it clearly.”

  “Can we have a council without Benjamin?” said Ted.

  “Well enough,” said Fence. “He hath told me his desires; and given leave for all of you to accompany what embassies we have chosen for you.”

  “Well, good.” Ted decided that this time he would out-wait F
ence. Fence had called this council.

  Fence said, “I have spoken also to Andrew. I’d thought to have some small difficulty in the persuasion, but he seemed well pleased to have thee, my prince, and Randolph also, in his train. So have a care.”

  He looked at Ted until Ted nodded, and then looked at Randolph until Randolph put his head back and said to the ceiling, “Fear me not.”

  Ted remembered, suddenly and unpleasantly, that there was another secret here they had not spoken of. Only the five children, Randolph, and Fence knew that Randolph had killed the King. Andrew suspected it, but had seemed unwilling to enter any accusation because of some plot of his, or of his sister Claudia, that he did not want to call attention to. Matthew and the other members of the King’s Council had all the information they needed to discover Randolph’s crime, but they had not discovered it yet.

  “How,” said Ruth, rather diffidently, “did Andrew like the notion of having me along?”

  “That pleased him also,” said Fence, “that thou, and Randolph and Ted, that he thinks are both besotted on thee, should be made to travel all together and endure one another’s company.”

  “Do we have to keep up that masquerade?” demanded Ruth.

  “In small things only,” said Fence. “A hasty withdrawing on thy part, or a gaingiving in thy look, those will serve.”

  “I can hardly wait,” said Ruth, gloomily.

  Ted could not look at Randolph, who had been betrothed to a girl he now knew was dead; and who had, when the present Ruth appeared, been treating Lady Ruth with distant courtesy and dancing every dance at the Banquet of Midsummer Eve with Claudia. Then Claudia tried to kill Fence, and Randolph avoided both her and Ruth. On the journey back from the battle, Randolph began, cautiously, treating Ruth as an affianced bride who had reason to be angry with him. Ted thought that Randolph hoped that Lady Ruth, who unlike their own Ruth had great pride and a hasty temper, would refuse to take him back after his dallying with Claudia. Randolph had told Ted that he did not, as a regicide shortly to be so proclaimed before the court, wish to encourage anybody to marry him. Ruth had been driven almost to distraction by this state of affairs. At least now both of them would be playing a part.