The Dragon Queen (Lamb & Castle Book 3)

by J M Sanford

  Bessie thought of what Archmage Morel had said about the sun, and the eternal winter descending upon this world. “Right. Yes. Let’s go and get it, then.”

  ~

  Not so long ago, Bessie had sworn to herself that she’d never ride a griffin, not even if her life depended on it. Now she found herself strapped into a double saddle on Sable’s back, hanging on for dear life behind Amelia. It was a bumpy ride, all the more terrifying when for much of the journey they’d scarcely been able to see past the end of the black griffin’s beak, and Bessie had her doubts about whether he could see any better. Before the flight, she’d been meaning to measure the time it took to get from the ice palace to the ruins, to estimate the distance or the griffin’s speed somehow and file that information away for later use. When the snow had been at its thickest, she’d feared slamming into some unseen cliff face and never even knowing they were dead, and the thought jostled her counting right out of her brain. She turned her head to stare along the black wing, the wind snapping her hair sharply across her face as she tried to catch a glimpse of the gentler russet griffin carrying Archmage Morel. Could she hear Scarlet’s wingbeats, or did she only imagine it in the howling wind? The air was clearing. Below them, she could make out the scattered black shapes of stones in the snowfield below: the ruins of Ilgrevnia. At the periphery of the wreckage, the enormous Orb glowed like a firefly. Some distance away from it, she recognised the Red Paladin that had been at the dinner table last night, digging in the wreckage with its enormous hands, though the figure looked doll-sized from the air. They were much too high up for Bessie’s liking.

  Having made up her mind to search for the snow globe, Bessie had first sought out the Archmage, hoping that the groundwork she’d done (or tried to do) by engaging him in conversation at the banquets would help her. She told him how Amelia had hidden the snow globe somewhere in the wreckage of the Flying City, playing up the idea that they’d only be able to find it if she could retrace her steps through the ruins.

  “What was that?” Amelia’s voice flew past as fast as a bird blown on a storm.

  “What?” Bessie yelled.

  “That flash!”

  A yellow glow was spreading out across the dark shapes of the ruins, flowing out like waves on a shoreline. Bessie tried to pin the epicentre, noting that whatever it was, it hadn’t emanated from the Orb. The taste of magic filled the air, and the griffin tilted sharply beneath them. Bessie’s stomach lurched with the sudden descent. All she could think then was that she really hadn’t needed to come along on this trip… She held on tight around Amelia’s waist. They were strapped in, and the straps must hold, but the griffin himself fought for purchase on the air, buffeted by storm winds that had come from nowhere, screaming in fear and rage. Amelia shouted something that Bessie didn’t catch, something shrill and panicked, the words jolted from her as the three of them were thrown through the sky.

  By the time the griffin had levelled, wings held still in a calm current, they were some way off course.

  “What was that?” Amelia shouted again, this time at their mount.

  “Bad magic!” the griffin squawked as he veered back towards the ruins.

  “Where from?”

  “Can’t say!”

  Bessie barely resisted the urge to kick her heels into the black griffin’s sides. Can’t say? Won’t say? Impossible to tell, with griffins. As Sable dropped again, panic rose in her stomach before she realised that he was coming in to land. Squeezing her eyes tight shut, she counted back from a hundred, yelping in alarm when they hit the ground. She and Amelia dismounted clumsily, making a meal of unbuckling and disentangling the unfamiliar setup while Sable cackled at their efforts and didn’t make matters any easier. Finally pulling her left foot free of the stirrup, Bessie straightened up and looked around for the other griffin and rider. The remnants of Ilgrevnia surrounded them, broken structures rising up from the deep snow at dangerous angles. Scarlet and the Archmage were nowhere to be seen. Snowstorms here came in so suddenly, and with the blast of magic on top of it, Scarlet could easily have been caught out. She was a weaker flier than Sable, more easily frightened. Where to look for them? Where to start? If they got to a high place, if the snow cleared, they might be able to see. The cave of the ruined workshop was distinct, with remnants of the window arches and the balcony beyond them. That had offered a good vantage point before, and Bessie hiked towards it, wary of what the deep drifts of snow hid: the cast-iron spears of old railings, the shards of a thousand shattered windows. “I think you’d better follow in my footsteps,” she warned Amelia. As she spoke, a ghostly figure appeared some way off, shambling through the falling snow towards them along a narrow pathway through the ruins. It drew close, materialising into the less spectral apparition of Archmage Morel.

  “Where’s Scarlet?” Amelia shouted over the wind.

  “Already searching for the Device,” he assured her, wrapping his robes tighter around himself against the driving snow. “No time to waste, not in this weather.”

  “I think someone tried to shoot us down,” said Amelia.

  Bessie could have kicked her ally. If someone really had been trying to shoot them down with magic, then the most likely culprit was standing right in front of them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told Amelia, loud and clear enough for Archmage Morel to hear. “There’s no one here who would do such a thing. It was just freak weather. See how the storm’s blowing itself out, even now?”

  Amelia mumbled something inaudible, and stared at her shoes.

  Not only had the Archmage possibly tried to shoot them out of the sky, he’d found them far more easily than they could have found him. He’d probably used more magic to keep track of them: it was all too easy to imagine spidery eyes hidden in the thick folds of their fur coats, and Bessie’s skin crawled at the thought. It could be tricky to manage, but she’d stick with her plan. “I don’t know if we’ll ever find the snow globe in all this,” she said.

  Archmage Morel shook his head. “We have no time to lose. And if we fail…”

  Bessie glanced up at the whiteness that was the sky. She could believe that the sun was absconding, but couldn’t imagine where it would go. It couldn’t just keep spiralling out forever, could it? Would it hit some sort of limit? Would it leave to circle some other world? There were other worlds out there, even if only the one, so where exactly, if they didn’t share the same sky? She wished she knew more magic. When she lowered her gaze from the sky, she jumped: standing below the balcony of the workshop were two figures on horseback, starlights shining in their chests. Close.

  “One for each of you,” said the Archmage. “To help you, and make sure you don’t get lost.”

  Make sure we don’t make a run for it, you mean, Bessie thought. Although where he thinks we’d run to… “Thank you,” she said. “I only hope they’ll be able to keep up with us. And you must be careful, too, Archmage: this place is all loose stones and broken railings.”

  “Young lady, I was here when the City fell,” he reminded her. “No need to nanny me. No need at all.”

  Bessie scrambled off up the slope, daring the horse golems to follow. Of course, Amelia hated climbing high, and did so only under duress, so Bessie knew in advance that the hiding place would be somewhere accessible. “It was in a sort of alcove,” whispered Amelia when she caught up, “shadowed from the moonlight. It looks different in the day.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Bessie, still getting her bearings. “I didn’t want to go straight to it anyway.”

  Amelia nodded – they’d made their plans hastily and literally on the wing.

  “Somewhere around here?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  But Bessie was already kneeling to scrabble through the snow and rubble. She anticipated checking a few possible hiding places before finding the snow globe, but that would be fine, because there was something else she was hoping to see: the triple-headed dragon knot, the emblem of the Dragon Lands.
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br />   The two girls skirted around the workshop, each wrong hiding place taking them further from the Archmage and their unwanted bodyguards. As Bessie had feared, the golems could follow easily enough over the treacherous loose stones and ice. Their extra weight meant that they got bogged down and they soon had to dismount, but even so, they’d recover from a twisted ankle far more easily than she or Amelia could, and they didn’t have to take the same care. The thought had occurred to Bessie that she might manage to overpower a golem by smashing the star on his chest – she’d gained the impression that the new power sources were more fragile than they looked, bright but brittle. Something like a well-aimed pickaxe or a broken railing, even swung by a teenage girl, must surely do some damage. The golems might not get up again after their stars had been put out. As the two girls panted their way up a steep slope, Bessie whispered this idea to Amelia, who jerked away, looking shocked. “All right,” Bessie relented. “But we’ll keep the idea in mind, just in case.”

  Four or five possible hiding places later, their teeth were chattering and their fingers were turning numb even through their gloves, and Bessie had begun to dig with the genuine hope of stubbing her fingertips on the smooth roundness of the snow globe. The snow globe wouldn’t be hard to hide in the deep pockets and heavy folds of a fur coat many sizes too big for her. After that she’d have to force herself to continue the charade of hunting through a few more locations just like the ones she’d already investigated, before they could return ‘empty-handed’ to the Archmage. She would put on her best look of disappointment, mention all the broken glass they’d seen (she would come back with a cut or two in her gloves to lend some convincing realism) and let him fill in the blanks. Amelia was under instructions to stand by, quiet and sad. Where was Amelia, and how did she keep slipping away like that? She surely wasn’t wasting her power on making herself invisible here, was she? Ah, there she was, amongst a cluster of towers that looked like the massive rotted trunks of a grove of trees a million years dead. She was kneeling in the snow before an alcove, head held low as if she was worshipping at a broken shrine, looking down at the hollow where she’d scraped the snow away.

  Bessie clambered over to her. “Are you all right?” she said. She hoped Amelia wasn’t crying again. She’d never known what to do with crying people.

  But Amelia’s eyes were dry when she looked up at Bessie. “Did we check this place before?”

  “Um, I don’t think so. Might’ve lost track a bit. We’ll just have to keep looking.”

  As Amelia got up, she leaned closer and whispered, “No, really. I’d stake my life on this being the place. These towers, that window there,” she pointed to a round hole high in a fragment of wall, where the rainbow remnants of a stained-glass window hung, “I recognised it as soon as I saw it.”

  “Are you absolutely sure? Could you be remembering wrong?”

  Amelia shook her head vehemently. “Someone got here before me. And if it wasn’t you…”

  By accident or design, somebody else had found the snow globe. The Archmage? A golem? Somebody else she hadn’t considered? The dragon? Bessie didn’t even know which option was the worst. She weighed up the awful possibilities, even as she tried to think what to do next. The golems were standing at a distance, hopefully not close enough to hear their conversation. “Don’t let on,” she said to Amelia, quietly. “We’ll try three more hiding places, then we’ll wrap up the search, all right?”

  With nothing but the flimsiest of plans coming together in her head, Bessie made for the place where she knew the Orb had landed, stopping three times along the way. Digging in the snow stung all the more for knowing that their plan was ruined. Still, angry as Bessie was, she managed to feign surprise when she looked up to find the glassy dome ahead of her. “Archmage Morel?” she called, then turned to one of the twin shadows tracking her and Amelia. “Fetch the Archmage, please,” she said, doing her best to adopt that particular ladylike tone of command she’d heard all too often from her peers in the Academy; the ‘please’ that was an order and not a politeness. The golem thought about it for a moment, but then turned to carry out her order. Probably he wouldn’t have done so if the Archmage had been further away, Bessie thought.

  The old Archmage was leaning heavily on his stick as he came over. “Have you found the Device?”

  Bessie shook her head. “There’s an awful lot of broken glass out there.” That line still served, and she resisted the urge to say more. They both knew that Amelia hadn’t smashed the snow globe herself, but in the settling of the ruins… well, under the circumstances they couldn’t be expected to spend too much time searching for something that might turn out to be in bits anyway. “What about the Orb?” she said, after a carefully timed pause. “Is it well?” It was glowing bright, outshining the sunlight dispersed through the heavy clouds. Just as she remembered, it felt as if it were trying to pull all her magic out through her skin, and its hum reverberated through her teeth.

  “The Orb requires a control Device,” said the Archmage, somewhat impatiently. On its previous use, it had been set off by a node bomb, which was hardly ideal even if they could find another. “The ‘snow globe’, as you call it… much of the finesse would be lost… but it would suffice.”

  “I’m pretty sure I broke it,” said Amelia, turning red and staring at her shoes as she spoke. “I mean I used a spell on it and I’m not sure it was quite the right one, because when I tried to use it to go back, it didn’t work anymore.”

  “Pfft. You were undoubtedly using the wrong return spell, or trying to use it too soon. It takes time and light to restore the Orb of Helemneum. Was the great Orb dim at the time? I thought so. But look at the way it glows now.”

  “Could you make another snow globe?” asked Bessie.

  “Foolish child! The snow globe was created specifically to complement the Orb: the glass of the two came from a single source, with exactly the same proportions of troll tears and basilisk venom. They were created under the same moon, the same alignment of stars, the same flow of magic in the sky that night… Nothing else in this world is even of the same glass…” The Archmage stood and stared distractedly at the vast globe of glowing crystal, the bright facets within. “So much power,” he mused, tugging at the long tangles of his beard. “More than enough. Yes, there is a way…”

  “What are you thinking, Archmage Morel?” asked Bessie, playing the part of the bright and curious pupil, despite her fears that the Archmage had not only tried to shoot them down, but that he could have arrived sufficiently ahead of them to somehow find and take the snow globe. He wasn’t listening. “Archmage Morel? A way to do what?”

  He swatted a hand in her direction as if she were no more than a buzzing fly. He didn’t even look at her. “To siphon off some of that power. Then there would be no need for the dragon’s help, nor for the destruction of that marvellous skyship. Restore the sun’s path…”

  Bessie’s stomach flipped. “The skyship?”

  “That foolish Argean can’t imagine the value of what has fallen into his hands. I should hate to destroy such a unique thing without good reason.”

  “Oh no, please don’t!” Bessie’s emotion was genuine enough here. Had he really considered destroying Sharvesh to get at her magic? Was that why he’d stolen her from Bryn? The thought sickened her. “All those rings mark you as one of the greatest mages of our time: I’m sure you can find some other way to save us!”

  That swatting gesture again. “Be quiet. I must think. I must… think…”

  Amelia and Bessie waited while Archmage Morel circled the Orb, prodding at the slush of melted snow around it. He found a chunk of something charred to a stick of charcoal, and a dry enough wall to scratch out some calculations that Bessie hadn’t a hope of understanding.

  “Go away,” he told the two of them now and then, half-heartedly. “Shoo.” They were outside the bounds of his thoughts, and from time to time it startled him to realise that he was not alone.

&nbs
p; “We can’t leave you here by yourself, Archmage,” said Bessie. For one thing, what if you activate the Orb and vanish away with it, leaving the rest of us for dead? “What if another bad storm came in?”

  He ignored her, turning back to his wall of black scrawl and smoky smudges. When he’d filled the wall with his thoughts, he next trundled off with an armful of rubbish and began cobbling together… something. He built it in place around the Orb, dragging broken pieces of its old stand into position, half by magic, half by what little physical strength he had. It was slow work, when the business with the white dragon had taken so much out of him, and he wasn’t sufficiently impressed with Bessie’s eager student routine to allow her to help him in any way. He’d brought a bag of scrolls and tatty papers with him from the palace, and he wouldn’t even allow her to hold them open for him against the wind. She watched him intently, every scratch he carved into the bindings of the Orb, every stroke of paint, although she couldn’t read the sigils, of course. She wanted to go back to the others. She wanted to get Greyfell’s opinion on all this, and Meg’s, but she didn’t dare, not if it meant they might come back to the ruins and find only snow-melt where the Orb had stood. Not that there was anything she could think of to do if the Archmage tried to abscond with the Orb. Grab hold of him and hope he took her with him? Fight him for the snow globe so that she could come back for her friends? But somehow she didn’t think escape was what he had in mind… not for today. Who knew how many decades of his life he’d poured into the design and manufacture of this world, but it meant too much to him to abandon it as a failure.

  Scarlet and Sable came along, curling up against the girls to offer them some warmth.

  “Do you understand what he’s doing?” Amelia whispered. There was something odd about her voice, and when Bessie looked round she saw the tracks of tears down Amelia’s cheeks.