The Whim of the Dragon

by PAMELA DEAN

  Ted in his turn got up. The sound of his heart in his ears was louder than it had been when he fought Randolph. His breath fought with his throat. He thought very carefully of Shan, with his quick perceptions and his wealth of strange tales. He thought of what changes might have happened, with the Lords of the Dead gone and Shan in possession of his brooch.

  “Randolph,” said Ted. “If you’ve got Edward, you don’t need me. You stay; I’ll go.”

  “You God damn well will not!” cried Laura, bounding up and letting Cedric’s flute roll across the short grass.

  “This won’t serve,” said Randolph to Ted.

  “Neither will your departure,” said Fence.

  “Fence, a bargain was made. If any deserve this departure, I do so. Who shall go else? Will you lose Ted, whose crime is bright imagination?”

  Fence’s round face, as it had once or twice since Ted had known him, sharpened suddenly, so that you could see the bones of it. He opened his mouth.

  “No,” said Randolph. “Not thou.”

  “I know!” said Ruth, with an artificial brightness tinged with genuine hysteria. “Let’s all go!”

  “Oh, proud Death,” said Patrick to the Lords of the Dead, not much more calmly. “What feast is toward in thine eternal cell?”

  “None,” said Melanie behind them.

  They turned and looked at her. She had slid off the dais and now walked up to stand between Ruth and Randolph. Ruth shied away from her like a startled cat, and then moved closer again. Randolph stood still.

  “Will you have me?” said Melanie to the Lord of the Dead.

  There was another of those silences. Ruth looked sideways at Melanie, swallowed, and seemed to be about to speak. The rich-voiced Lord said, “Edward Fairchild must stay hence.”

  “That’s naught to me,” said Melanie.

  “Is it not?” said Celia.

  Ted remembered, with a shock almost as great as the original discovery had been, that Melanie, to whom it was naught if Edward stayed or went, had put him there in the first place.

  “He is still troublesome,” said the lilting voice.

  The rich one said, “Let Melanie speak with him.”

  “Oh, God,” said Ruth.

  Melanie looked at her. “Vex not thy thoughts wi’that,” she said. “Consider him.” She inclined her head at Randolph, and looked around, picking out the five visitors. “You children,” she said. “Have you a use, or a fondness, for this lord?”

  She was looking at Ted. “I have,” said Ted. “Both.”

  “Despite that he did murder William?”

  “He didn’t have any good choices,” said Ted.

  “Claudia,” said Randolph.

  “Who is she?” said Melanie, without looking at him. “Ruth Eleanora. Have you a use or a fondness for Lord Randolph?”

  “Both,” said Ruth, between her teeth.

  “Laura Kimberly.”

  “Both,” said Laura.

  “Ellen Jennifer.”

  “A very great fondness,” said Ellen, scowling. “What kind of a trick is this?”

  “None,” said Melanie. “I have misjudged my powers, or yours. I could not make you my creatures; you would not be my allies; you are caught in the web in a manner I did not mean, that is displeasing to me. Be quiet. Patrick Terrence. Have you a use or fondness for Lord Randolph?”

  Oh, Lord, thought Ted. Edward said, quite clearly, The players cannot keep counsel, they’ll tell all.

  “I,” said Patrick, “have neither use nor fondness for any of you; but keep in mind that the Lords of the Dead have much less of either for Randolph. I want him more than they do.”

  “You five,” said Melanie, “I did wrong without cause. These others I did wrong with, it may be, insufficient cause; but cause there was. An Randolph will serve you better above the earth, I’ll take his place below it.”

  Randolph stood up. “Melanie,” he said.

  “What you have done,” said Melanie, smiling at him, “you may recompense by remembering it. Make this Edward a King. Be his Regent. An that’s not suffering enough, tell all I have done to High Castle, and comfort what uproar followeth.”

  Randolph looked at Fence, and back at Melanie. He was extremely white. He said, “When two such warring teachers do bid me read in the same book, what may I do but obey?”

  “Nothing,” said Melanie, and she walked from between Ruth and Randolph to the Lords of the Dead.

  The austere one said, “Desirest thou no preparation?”

  Melanie looked back at the rest of them. “The voices of your others,” she said. “How troublesome?”

  “Edward was extremely so,” said Ted.

  “Lady Ruth gave me some bad moments,” said Ruth. Ted heard in her voice an echo of his own tone, dazed and automatic.

  “An I speak to them, will you keep them or let them go?”

  “Keep them,” said Ted. If this was the closest he could come to restoring Edward to life, then he would do it.

  Ruth nodded; so did Laura. Patrick looked thoughtful, which was normal; but Ellen, too, hesitated and stared at the ground before she nodded.

  “What else you would know,” said Melanie, “seek in the house by the Gray Lake. I have writ a great part of my plans, if not of my accomplishments, therein.” She hesitated; Ted had never seen her look anything like uncertain. “There are cats therein,” she said.

  “Are they more to you than those children were?” said Celia. Ted saw that she was so angry she could not even raise her voice; but very faintly, behind the fury, was a genuine desire to understand.

  Melanie must have heard it too. Her tone was not placatory; but it was not scornful, either. “I had no children,” she said.

  Celia only looked at her. “Fence,” she said. “Is this vengeance? Is this justice? She deserves—”

  “Use every man after his desert,” said Fence, “and who shall scape whipping?”

  Celia began to say something; Randolph touched her arm and said, “He speaks of me.”

  Celia looked not at him but at Matthew. “Below the earth,” said Matthew, “she will have what she deserves.”

  “Yes, she will,” said Ted. “We saw those children, Celia. Edward will deal with her. He’s changed.”

  Into something rich and strange, said Edward, and chuckled.

  Melanie might have heard him too. She had been watching the discussion steadily, but now she turned away too quickly for a good dramatic effect, and said to the Lords of the Dead, “My preparations are done.” They bowed to her; she did them a courtesy; they began to walk away. Against the bright roses and the brilliant grass, their sober brown dress looked darker.

  Melanie spun suddenly and said to the gaping crowd of King Edward’s court, “For your guardians, sing them a song. For yourselves—speak and write truly of me or you will be the worse for’t.”

  “We will,” said Randolph.

  Melanie picked up her red skirts and ran lightly, like an otter, to catch up with the Lord of the Dead.

  CHAPTER 31

  IN the Hidden Land, November came in with malicious winds and a downpour of icy rain that ticked against the windows like something trying to get in. The visitors to that country reacted to it each according to his nature. Ellen made friends with Celia and Matthew’s children. Nobody had told them what was going on, but Ellen managed to get out of John, who was trusting and voluble, that while none of them really liked the Princess Laura, they thought her much improved of late.

  “Except she’s someways timid,” said Margaret. “What hath made her so?”

  “Looking on the Lords of the Dead,” said Ellen; which was essentially true. It was her intention to make Margaret respect Laura, and not to take too much time over it.

  She had less influence over the fates of the others. She had decided that Ruth should marry Randolph, but she knew better than to interfere. Ruth did not come sighing to her little sister with confidences; she just called herself names. Randolph would ha
ve to do something, that was all; and Ellen had had enough of even seeming to make Randolph do anything. As for Patrick, he should go home again. He didn’t belong here. Ted did. So did Ruth and Laura. So did Ellen herself. Their parents wouldn’t like it. Patrick was Mother’s favorite, but her father, however vaguely, was going to miss his daughters. Patrick might miss his sisters, too; but that would serve him right.

  Ellen thought over whom she would miss, and scowled. Laura climbed the dusty steps of the North Tower at dusk on a day of cold rain. The door to the uppermost room was open this time. The gold light flooding out of it was kinder than sunshine. Laura stopped in the doorway, regarding the Crystal of Earth. Claudia, who had moved it hither and yon, preventing Patrick from breaking it, preserving it for the Hidden Land, could just as well have broken it herself and had done with it. Laura had read, slowly and painfully, muttering under her breath and applying frequently to Ted for the hard words, Melanie’s account of what she had done with regard to this object.

  The little globe Melanie had set here for Patrick to break had not held nothing. It had held their game, the Secret Country of their stubborn and flawed imaginations, the Secret Country into which no Claudia had ever stirred a meddling finger; the shallows to which the Hidden Land was a whole burgeoning ocean. Laura still sometimes thought she preferred the shallows. She had not asked Patrick what he thought; Patrick, who had fought a practice session with Melanie’s sword, and had it taken away from him by an exasperated Fence and a horrified Randolph; and who had, perhaps, as Shan said, had his heart shown to him in such a guise that he wanted to cut it out. And yet he had never shown, in any way except his always being there to play with them, that the Secret Country had a place in his heart at all. He was harder to understand than Melanie. And he was going to be hard to live with, if they had to stay here.

  Patrick was busy reading. He finished Shan’s journals; and was not satisfied. He read as much of Melanie’s voluminous writings as he could stand, filching them from Ted and Fence whenever those two gave up, as they did about once a day; and was not satisfied. He stayed up late making lists; he paced around the dusty corridors and the swept halls and the wet rose garden, thinking until his head hurt; and was not satisfied.

  Some things he had figured out. Melanie had expected, when she brought Patrick and his relations into the Hidden Land, to be in almost complete control of them. She had intended to move them to do any of a number of things that would serve the double purpose of making Fence and Randolph unhappy and endangering the Hidden Land. She had also intended to merge them with the dead children, both so that the masquerade should not be discovered and so that it should be, in some measure, the real royal children who had committed whatever crimes she had in mind for them. She had had no control over the real children; she had expected to have more over their dead voices.

  But both Shan’s Ring and Melanie’s own sword had awakened the Lords of the Dead, one by one; and while they were awake, however disgruntled, they would notice and retaliate if she tampered more than delicately with anyone in their domain. Melanie had not intended either Shan’s Ring or the sword to have this property of waking the Outside Powers. Patrick could not discover where said property had come from, which was one of the things vexing him.

  Another was that all these people and accounts contradicted one another. You might expect Melanie to lie of course; or perhaps just to have a very different idea of what had gone on than Shan had. You might expect the Outside Powers or the unicorns to sidestep the truth, or to have a viewpoint so different that nothing they said would ever make sense. But you would certainly expect the scholars of Heathwill Library to have made something of all these contradictions.

  It also bothered him not to know why Melanie had been so far off in her estimation of how much control she would have over them all once she got them into the Hidden Land. Melanie herself seemed to think that the problem was a result of their having found the swords and stumbled in before she was ready for them; which had happened in Patrick’s case because of a dog named Shan, and in Ted and Laura’s because their cousins had been playing a game they loved as much as Ted and Laura loved the Secret Country. Fence and Randolph found these points significant. Patrick found them irritating. It seemed to him more likely that Melanie had failed because he and his relations had been stronger of imagination, or purer of heart, or just stubborner of spirit, than she had thought them. Or she might have been like Aristotle, possessed of a very fine mind and a set of erroneous assumptions about the universe. Maybe her philosophy of magic was as flawed, in its way, as Andrew’s had been.

  Andrew vexed Patrick too. He had been so besotted on his so-called sister that he had done anything she asked him to, even when he knew she thought it was magical and therefore should have thought it useless. He had hoped, Melanie thought, to win her from her false philosophies by slow degrees. And she had used this hope. Andrew had thought that he and she and Lady Ruth were engaged in secret negotiations with the Dragon King to bring about a sensible peace, instead of a disastrous magical battle. The details of this plot were not available to Patrick’s questing mind.

  He finally sought out Laura, who was the only one of his relations not constantly occupied, and asked her to help him go over his information, in case she knew anything he didn’t.

  “Why?” said Laura, sharply for her.

  Patrick hesitated. It was irrational. But then, this country was irrational. “I said,” he said, “that I wasn’t going home again until I understood what was going on here. And having said it, I don’t think I can, until I do.”

  “Oh?” said Laura. “So you aren’t planning to break the Crystal of Earth any time soon?”

  Patrick stared at her. He was not in fact planning to break it at all; but he was not, either, planning to disabuse anybody who had it of the notion that he might be dangerous. “No,” he said. “Not any time soon.”

  Laura grinned. “I remember what you said in Australia,” she said. “Princess Laura says, we should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling.”

  “Carl Jung said that!” said Patrick, furiously.

  “You might think about it anyway,” said Laura.

  The King of the Hidden Land received a letter from Lord Andrew. Andrew had stayed behind in the Court of the Dragon King. This, Ted had managed to figure out, counted as the vengeance with which Ted was supposed to reward oath-breaking. And certainly to leave a man who feared magic alone in a court of shape-shifters was punishment enough, whatever Andrew had done or contemplated doing. The letter said nothing of all this, but contained implicitly the assumption that Andrew had been left as a liaison and observer.

  Nobody knew what Chryse and Belaparthalion had said to the Dragon King, but he looked far from benign when they finished saying it. Looking thus, he had made to Ted a speech so flowery and convoluted that Ted had not understood a word of it. Fence, consulted during the journey home, said it contained a promise of explicit treaties of peace, and the forwarding of damages for the late war.

  Andrew’s letter, opening with brisk formality, detailed the treaties. Ted would have to show them to Fence and Randolph. If they contained innuendos or double meanings, he could not find any. It might be that their language was so plain that it was subject to too many interpretations. It appeared that the Dragon King had agreed to leave the Hidden Land alone except in the case of three particular kinds of provocation, none of which sounded either possible or probable of occurrence, in return for nothing whatsoever. He was also sending north a staggering amount in jewels and gold and fine cloth. Ted wondered uneasily if the shape-shifters of that court could turn themselves into emeralds.

  Andrew’s letter contained a postscript. “My lord Edward: My philosophy altereth daily in this place of shadows. My heart is as it was always; wherefore, my liege, I do humbly beg your leave to sojourn here yet a little time. If by my return your grace shall have departed to your other realms, take w
ith you my good wishes for your safety and happiness.”

  That was clear enough. He hated it down there, and if he could possibly manage it he was going to stay there until Ted and the others had gone home. If they ever did. And that “If,” of course, was the payment made by the Hidden Land. The Hidden Land had lost its royal children and received in return a motley and reluctant crew bent, if not on abandoning it, at least on making sure they had the means to do so. The Hidden Land had lost its dragon and received a patched-up composite capable of nobody knew what. None of these reverses had profited the Dragon King, but in that coin just the same the Hidden Land was paying for the Dragon King’s friendship. And after all, the Dragon King had gotten an afternoon’s amusement out of it.

  Ted felt oppressed. The upper hierarchies of the Secret Country dismayed him. Everywhere you turned there were magical creatures of capricious ability whose power of distinguishing between right and wrong was less developed than a politician’s. Recent events had shown that one was not exactly at their mercy; but one was always having to watch out for them. For the first time, he thought he understood how Patrick felt.

  He presented this fact to Patrick later that day, at supper. Patrick heard him out gravely, but all he said was, “Consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

  It came to Ted, with a more than minor shock, that he was going to miss Patrick. Not his part in the game; not even his genius for improvisation. Just Patrick. And if he felt like that, how would Patrick feel when he went home—if anybody could ever go home—and all the rest of them stayed?

  If all the rest of them were staying. Ted did not know what he was going to do about his parents. He had thought of sending them a letter by Patrick, who was such an unlikely witness to all these events that they might believe him. Patrick’s own parents would probably haul him off to a psychiatrist.

  Ted took a savage bite of bread. He would worry about all this when they found the way out. Tomorrow, said Edward, not altogether approvingly, is another day.