by J M Sanford
“Her Ladyship’s feeling rather overdrawn,” said Scarlet, with weary patience. “Best you go now.”
Amelia nodded, turning sharply and storming out of the room. Yes, best go, before she could lose her temper and say something mean-spirited that wouldn’t help matters. Out in the corridor, she sagged against the wall and let out a long sigh. “That didn’t go so well, did it?” she chided herself quietly. Rose probably wouldn’t even have stood and listened to the whole story if Scarlet hadn’t been holding her captive at pinpoint. Amelia could only pray that Harold would have better luck if he ever got to talk to the White Prince.
19: THE WHITE KNIGHT AND THE DRAGON
Miles from the palace, the line of heavily-burdened stone horses carved a path through an unchanging landscape of snow, where only the wind spoke across the lifeless grey hills, the black and distant pine forest. The white griffin, pale and silent as a ghost, flew overhead, keeping watch for any sign of the dragon. Harold, laden with spear and sword and shield, gripped his horse’s reins with hands as numb as death, waiting.
The plan when they’d set out that morning had been to get a safe enough distance from the palace to summon Regeltheus by name, but as Harold had feared, the dragon was too far away to ‘hear’, or had otherwise figured out a way to resist the lure of his name. One of the tireless golems could have called the dragon’s name over and over as they rode… at risk of summoning the dragon into their midst without warning. The Archmage had been too exhausted to use his future sense any more, so they’d set out to hunt down a white dragon in the snow, relying on Commander Breaker’s best guess as to where that dragon would go. At noon, Harold had wanted to know where they were headed; now he just wanted to be sure they weren’t lost forever. Even when night came, the unnaturally purple sky would be starless and innavigable, dominated by the unchanging moon.
Snow began to sleet thickly across the sky, and the griffin dropped to the ground, barring the path of the indefatigable horses.
“Stop!” called Commander Breaker, jumping down from his mount.
“You’ve seen it?” asked Harold, his right hand jumping to the hilt of his sword.
“No. But he can’t fly in this,” said the Commander, walking his griffin to the lee of a ridge, sheltered from the fierce wind and the wet snow.
“What, the dragon?” Harold couldn’t imagine the white dragon being at all daunted by a bit of snow.
“Owlfeathers.” He meant the griffin, of course. Owlfeathers (if that was the creature’s name) set the pace for all of them. When he walked, the horses walked; when he flew, they galloped to keep up. Now he’d stopped, shaking snow off his fluffy white paws and grumbling, and didn’t look like anything in the world could convince him to move off again just yet.
Harold couldn’t bring himself to complain about any respite from the long ride. He had bruises on top of bruises just from his lightning speed training session with Master Greyfell. He understood now why Percival had gone to the trouble of padding the saddle, although it hadn’t been nearly enough. The long ride after that had left him sore and aching in every part of his body he cared to name, and it didn’t bode well for his usefulness in a fight, if they ever got that far. Along the way, he’d tried asking exactly how the white dragon had been trapped before, but none of the golems remembered. “D’you know where we are?” he asked. The capricious snow was already fading away, but the Commander was settling in, huddled against the furry flank of his griffin, out of the worst of the weather. Harold dismounted stiffly from his cold stone horse, grimacing as he jarred frozen stiff joints and burning muscles, questioning what he could do to make himself more comfortable, the answer being ‘not a lot’. He reassured himself with the thought that while he had the horse he couldn’t be lost forever – he had no reason to doubt Master Greyfell on that point.
“His Highness the White Prince,” stated a nearby golem, loud but calm. “Thirty seven degrees to the east. No more than three-quarters of a mile distant.”
Harold thought he caught a glimpse of great white wings before the distant serpentine figure disappeared. All around, the waiting golems voiced their agreement and began to move off, and the white griffin rose to shake out his wings. Harold stumbled to his feet and hauled himself back onto his horse, encumbered by spear and sword and heavy shield, wishing he’d left one of the three behind. Not the shield, though: Percival said the heavy shields had been used in the original capture of the white dragon, and would deflect even a dragon’s fire. Its light colour might even help camouflage a man on foot in these conditions. It was a pity it weighed a ton.
The stone horses picked up the pace, switching to a thunderous gallop as one. It was ridiculously high up on the back of a galloping horse. Not in the way that a skyship was high up, but perched precariously above the remorseless hammer blows of those galloping hooves was no place to be, and it was all Harold could do to hang on, with the icy wind streaming against him, stinging his eyes and nose. “Should we call his name?” he shouted, but nobody answered. Commander Breaker and the others had some new plan, and Harold could all too easily believe they would leave him behind if he fell off here. The white griffin soared overhead, set like a loosed arrow on some distant point, but the wind and sleet soon drove him down again. The terrain was getting rough: if these had been flesh and blood horses, Harold wouldn’t have dared ride one of them over ice and rocks like this, miles from anything that passed for civilisation. His horse of ever-living stone might not be able to break a leg, but it could certainly lose an inexperienced rider, so Harold pulled lightly on the reigns and murmured, “slower, Horse,” even at the risk of falling behind. The horse obeyed at once. It wasn’t a bad horse, really, for all that it was spookily quiet. He’d give it a name, soon as he could think of a good one.
As the other horses slowed, the griffin swooped down uncomfortably close to Harold, the blast of cold air from its wide wings stinging his face, and he had to hold his hat firmly onto his head. Away from the palace and out in the open, Harold had soon been glad of his fur hat. He took the opportunity to pull his new scarf up over his nose, too, as the wind blew fiercer and the snowfall thickened.
The horses walked on, following orders uncomplainingly, and the white griffin stalked closer to Harold. Harold nodded to the griffin’s rider, making it clear that yes, he had seen him. At the tail end of the hunting party, Harold was doing his best to keep the six golems in sight, though he could see them only as vague silhouettes in the grey, the lights on their chests shining weakly on the falling snow.
“Master said bring the dragon back to the palace,” said Commander Breaker. Then, in a conspiratorial tone, “But he didn’t say if he wanted him live or dead, did he?”
Didn’t he? A seed of doubt sprouted in Harold’s mind. He’d heard the Archmage mumble something about bringing the dragon back after cutting off its wings, but Archalthus had blanched at that and ordered no one should commit such a barbaric act. Death would be kinder than such a fate, for a dragon. Harold hadn’t heard anything after that, as he’d been whisked off to the courtyard to find a horse.
“We’d be doing Master a service if we got rid of his brother. No White Prince, no Black Prince, no contest. Master wins by default.” Then the Commander smiled, although any friendly effect was ruined by his monstrous teeth, and added: “Might work out quite nicely for you, too.”
Harold felt his face go flaming red in the cold. Ever since he’d learned that Amelia had been the one to drag them to this icy place, he’d feared she’d been trying to get to her White Prince. The excuse that she’d wanted to rescue Rose sounded a flimsy one to Harold’s ears: girls didn’t go around rescuing each other, did they? And Meg, who wanted him to bring the white dragon back home? Mothers always wanted to see their daughters married well. A butcher’s boy would lose to a prince any day of the week, and a knight wouldn’t fare any better. Harold kept his mouth firmly shut, cringing inwardly that his hopes and fears were so obvious.
The Comma
nder changed tack. “You’ll notice he didn’t send the mage with us.”
The old mage was gravely ill, though, so it would be neither fair nor sensible to send him out on a dragon hunt. “Miss Spinner said these golems can wear the dragon out, and I reckon she’s right about that. Like dogs after a stag,” he added Sir Percival’s appraisal of the plan. If a stag weighed uncountable tons, could fly and breathe fire… “We can catch him and bring him back,” said Harold firmly, more to reassure himself than anything. Their pursuit would tire the dragon, sooner or later.
“The witch doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Don’t hold back when it comes to the fight. I wouldn’t want to have to take news back to your fair lady that you’re a coward.”
“She’s not my fair lady,” said Harold. “She’s the White Queen, and I’m her Paladin.”
“But she won’t be White Queen for long, will she? If I was in your shoes, I’d be thinking of my own future.”
Harold kept his mouth clamped shut and his eyes on the path ahead. He wasn’t a coward. If he was a coward, then he wouldn’t have come out at all, would he? He squinted against the bitter wind to see the way ahead. Down in a shallow valley lay a long stretch of land that looked from a distance as flat and white as Ma’s best tablecloth. At the other end of it stood a line of grey rocks, flat-topped and bigger than houses, the whole row of them like a village lined up along a country road. A boundary. What lay beyond the line of stones? This world was false, unnatural, man-made, and they might find the sheared off edges of it, the icy earth dropping off to nothing… But no: real or not, this world was just as immense as the one they’d left behind. The indistinct darkness in the distance beyond the stones would be yet more pine forest. Harold walked his horse carefully down into the valley. When the ground beneath them groaned at every step, he urgently pulled his mount to a halt. Ice. Like when the millpond at White Horse had frozen over one winter, so that children had been able to go sliding about on it all morning while the old wives fretted. Only this was a river, by the look of it. “I don't know how much weight it'll take,” he said aloud. A horse was heavy, a stone horse doubly so. The first of the stone gentlemen began to walk his mount cautiously around, looking for a way ahead, and Harold kept his place at the end of the line. They passed a place where some unlucky stag or something had fallen in, the shattered edges of the ice like glass revealing the dark water beneath. Commander Breaker jumped down from his griffin and proceeded on foot down the frozen river, towards those huge rocks. He carried a pike, as well as the sword at his belt. Did he somehow know the dragon was close? He headed with certainty towards the biggest of the great rocks, the one rising out of the river’s course like the hull of a ship, crusted with snow. Commander Breaker disappeared from view in the hazy snow-smeared shadow of the island. When he reappeared, it was high up on the edge of the rock. “Here,” he said, and the six golems, still on horseback, began to make their way around under their Commander’s orders, to join him where he stood. Harold followed, fears of cowardice crowding at his back to push him onward. His stone horse, handsome as a thoroughbred stallion, went up onto the island as surefoot and sturdy as a hill pony, as patient as an old mare. Even so, Harold held tight and urged the thing to go easy, just in case. By the time Harold reached the flat top of the island, the six golems had arranged themselves into a perfectly spaced circle, barely large enough for a dragon. Commander Breaker stood at the cliff-like far edge of the promontory, looking down, and Harold dismounted to join him reluctantly. He’d had some time to accustom himself with the dizzying heights where skyships flew and skysailors worked, but he hadn’t been born to a life amongst the clouds and he had to steel his nerves before looking over the edge. Pillars and globules of ice lined the long drop, looking as if some careless person had left a hundred thousand candles to run wax all over the place. A frozen waterfall, descending to jagged rocks below, the distance of the fall hard to guess when looking directly down it. Beyond, the dark pine forest spread – the wind carried the scent of resin now – and the white curve of the river meandered into it, but Harold’s eyes kept wandering back down to the uncountable spears of ice hanging poised over the river below. “That’s a long way down,” he said, pointlessly.
The Commander looked up as if he’d forgotten all about Harold. Then he grabbed hold of the reins of Harold’s horse, walking the beast back down towards solid ground, back up onto something that was definitely shoreline, where the white griffin waited.
“What now, then?” Harold asked, following and feeling like a lost child.
“We’re going to stay back out of the way while they summon the dragon.”
“On the edge there?” Harold glanced back at the six figures on horseback, precarious on the outcrop of dark rock. The golems had no fear of heights. No fear of anything, as far as Harold knew.
“We’ll net him, make sure his wings are pinned, then we push him over the edge there. We can tell Master it was an accident. Agreed?”
“Um… I’d swear the mage said about bringing him back.” That was the point of the fireproof nets some of the golems carried, and of those grappling hooks with their ferocious iron jaws. Once netted and bound securely, the dragon would be in for an undignified sort of sleigh ride all the way back to the ice palace, where he could be locked safely away again. Or so Meg said.
“No. Better this way. Accidents happen all the time in high places. And if the fall doesn’t kill him, we can go down there and finish him off. For now, stay out of the way, and when we get back I can tell your fair lady just what a brave knight you were.”
“I reckon…” Just then, the loudest thought in Harold’s head was that the Archmage wasn’t even here to call off the golems if they all turned against him. ‘Accidents happen all the time in high places,’ and the Commander might not have been talking about just the dragon. If Harold should chance to ‘slip’ and fall into some ravine, there wouldn’t be any witnesses to tell his side of the story.
“Come on, how’s the girl going to fall in love with you if everyone knows you’re a coward?”
On the promontory, the six golems began to chant the white dragon’s name, six voices rising as one: “Regeltheus, Regeltheus, Regeltheus,” emotionless but powerful enough to raise the hairs on the back of Harold’s neck. He glanced back the way they’d come. The ice palace was far behind them, long lost from his view, well enough away that there would be no risk to the women if they summoned the dragon here. Too bad if it wasn’t far enough, as the chorus of voices crashed through the empty landscape like waves on rocks. Climbing back onto his horse, Harold craned his neck trying to see into the circle – nothing was happening – and then something huge burst up from beneath the surface of the lake, shards of shattered ice flying through the air like glass. The ground shook, chunks of rock and ice falling into the lake as the white dragon clawed its way up onto the island. Its wings, big as sails, beat the air as it fought for purchase. Opening its enormous fanged jaws wide it spat only sparks, the furnace of its body chilled by its time spent lying in wait under the ice, but it could still snap any one of its would-be captors in two. The ground under Harold’s horse’s hooves rumbled and shuddered. Swearing under his breath, he kicked the stone beast into turning and making for more solid ground. The golems, their original calculated angles useless, nonetheless attempted to adapt their plan: three of them fired their hooks at the dragon. White scales cracked as the iron jaws clamped down, one on a foreleg and one biting into the thick muscles of the dragon’s neck. The dragon’s enraged shriek was deafening, echoing endlessly across the icy skies. The third hook had gone wide and caught one of the horses in the shoulder – the stricken creature stumbled as it tried in vain to recover itself, flashing from bloody flesh to black marble and back again, but the grappling hook’s jaws had sunk too deep, and the horse’s rider couldn’t pull it free. The horsemen with nets were getting in position to throw them when the wounded dragon twisted, the sleek and powerful coils of its serpentine
body driving its tail through the air like a whip and throwing two of the horsemen into the river, where they crashed through the ice, into freezing water. They didn’t resurface. The third of their number flung his own net, its lead weights bouncing off silver scales, its fireproofed cords binding the monster’s wings. The dragon’s flesh grew hotter with its rage, a stream of fire jetting from its jaws, but the golem and his horse weathered the flames, polished black stone shining through clouds that roiled up as ice turned to steam in an instant. The promontory fared worse, the horse’s back hooves slipping as it staggered towards safer ground. It must have been an age before Harold realised he had a spear in his hand. How could he get close enough to use it? He had his shield, but now it felt as heavy as a house, as small as a tea saucer. Hot wet clouds of whiteness blinded him, but he could see in flashes as the dragon cut down the remaining golems again and again – by fire, by claws, by the lash of its terrible tail. The dragon bellowed as it fought, deafening, too furious to feel even the deepest of injuries. The golems were either losing ground or deliberately retreating from the island and towards where Harold sat frozen in his saddle, though he couldn’t make enough sense of the unfolding chaos to tell. He thought he saw the flurry of feathery white wings rise up, thought he heard Commander Breaker shouting, impossible to tell what his orders were over the roaring of the dragon, the crash and thunder of its convulsions. Bring back the dragon? Talk to it? Blow that for a game of soldiers – kill the monster, more like, if it didn’t kill them first. Tightening his grip on the spear, Harold once again spurred his own horse into action, seeking his chance from any angle. The dragon fired upon a horse and rider, knocking them down with the force of the blast, and it took the golems several heartbeats to come back to life. The instant they did, the dragon seized the stricken gentleman by the leg, wrenching him from his seat and slamming him against the rocks like a huge and horrible child in a tantrum with a ragdoll. Harold could see the golem fighting to free himself, impossible that he should surrender or die no matter how he was broken… and then the heartlight flew free of the golem’s chest, flying high in an arc before coming to rest in the snow, flickering faintly, nothing more than a grounded star now. The golem lay broken in pieces, and the dragon turned its attention to the horse struggling under its massive claws. It wrenched the heartlight out of the horse’s chest and threw the unfortunate creature over the waterfall, where it shattered into a million pieces, breaking the spell engraved upon its heart that had made it live. Then the dragon whirled round to find another horse and rider, who raised his white shield, deflecting the dragon’s fire. In a rage the beast rammed its horned head into the shield, sending shattered pieces of fireproof coating and splinters of horn flying. Harold urged his own horse into a charge, levelling his spear at the dragon’s head and throat. Time slowed as it all went wrong and the dragon twisted impossibly out of range, the end of the serpentine tail arcing towards Harold and his horse almost incidentally. The blow gouged armour and ripped into horseflesh – and the horse stopped like a statue, the suddenness of it flinging Harold forward against the stone arch of the horse’s neck, hard enough to rattle his teeth and shake his brain like jelly in his skull. Somehow he managed to wrap one arm around the stone neck and not fall off, but before he had time to rearrange his thoughts and try for another charge, the dragon lunged for him. Lashing out with the spear, Harold made contact, but that only knocked the spear from his hands. Enormous fangs raked his armour, the dragon’s breath scalding hot on his face. With his eyes closed against the heat, something yanked him from the saddle. He tensed in anticipation of being flung high and dashed on the rocks but instead was only shoved to the ground, the dragon’s claws pinning him down.