The Dragon Queen

by J M Sanford

  Scarlet answered the question. “No, poppet. I’ve only a teensy bit of kitchen magic, you know that.”

  “Bessie? What about you?”

  Bessie fidgeted, shrugging her shoulders against Sable’s warm side. “I don’t understand it in the details,” she said. “He’s fixing the sun, if we’re lucky. Wrecking our only way out of here, if we’re not.”

  23: THE INDISPENSABLE ARCHMAGE

  At no stage would Archmage Morel even consider any help from the girls or the griffins, nor even allow them to approach the Orb and the rickety contraption he was building around it. Hours passed, the meagre daylight fading, and they could only watch. Weak as the Archmage was, he could still spin magic to connect the parts of the strange new Device. At his word amaranthine glowed blue and melted into globular shapes, and he climbed the Orb’s struts even though his robe snagged on the rough edges and charred on newly solidified metal. Over the course of hours, the thing cradled around the Orb grew to a fierce spike of metal jabbing at the heavy clouds, and as Morel’s confidence in his plan grew, his mood brightened and he called out comments from time to time on the progress of his work. The Archmage, however, was given to mumbling at the best of times, and the wind blew his words away from them. “…something like a good game of billiards, not that I’ve played for many a century,” was all Amelia caught as Morel climbed down and stepped back from his work. “Now, all that remains is to…” Without warning, white light flashed from the Orb, lancing from the amaranthine spike and arching across the sky, striking somewhere beyond the horizon. Amelia had thrown her arm across her eyes a second too late and the line of white fire was etched right across her vision. Some warning would have been nice. The Orb’s light had dimmed visibly. Magic crackled, Amelia could smell it: a smoky, metallic smell thick in the air. It was almost night, and with the afterimage of the brilliant arc seared into her vision, Amelia could no longer see Morel. She felt the griffins stir at her back.

  “Archmage Morel?” Bessie called out.

  “A triumph… A marvel…” came his thin faltering voice from somewhere in the shadows, and Bessie jumped up to run to his side. Splashes of amaranthine ran molten through the snow, rivulets of a dim purple glow, that Bessie danced neatly over and Amelia kept her distance from. The ancient Archmage resisted help no further, leaning heavily on Bessie and Amelia as they manhandled him onto Scarlet’s back. “Did you see?” he kept asking them, even once they were airborne. “Did you see what I did?”

  “Yes, Archmage,” Bessie called back, reassuringly. “We all saw.” And as the griffins began their low, slow flight back to the ice palace, she was still watching the Orb, still glowing faintly, draped in threads of melted amaranthine.

  On their return, Prince Archalthus received news of the Archmage’s self-professed triumph with calls for the best wines from the cellar. Morel was whisked away at once on the arm of a golem. Scarlet, weary from flying, slunk off back to her kitchen, and the girls were sent to change into prettier clothes. Mechanically as any golem, Amelia went off to follow her instructions. She’d lost the snow globe for good. She’d failed Harold.

  Bessie remained undeterred. “The Orb was ready to go,” she said, wasting no time upon entering the guest parlour to inform the others of what had happened, “and virtually indestructible, I’d say. But then the Archmage used half its power to knock the sun back on course – or that was how he explained it, anyway – so we wouldn’t be going anywhere just yet even if we had the snow globe. He used up a lot of his own magic too, by the look of things.” She sighed, then peeled off her gloves and threw her fur coat over the back of the nearest armchair. “Oh, and did you hear? His Highness,” she spat out the phrase, “wants everyone dressed up and in the great hall by nine o’clock.”

  “Terrific,” Meg muttered, lifting herself heavily from the armchair. “Didn’t you find the snow globe, then?”

  “Someone’s taken it,” said Amelia. Tears prickled at her eyes and she swiped at them irritably. She’d thought she’d cried out every drop of saltwater in her, but apparently not. “I know where I left it, but it wasn’t there. Someone must have taken it.”

  “All right, calm down. Do you know who?”

  “Probably Archmage Morel,” said Bessie, “but we could hardly confront him about it.”

  “No, that’s good,” said Meg. “So long as it’s close by. How long for the Orb to recharge, then?”

  Bessie shook her head. “I wouldn’t like to guess.”

  ~

  At nine o’clock, Prince Archalthus welcomed them into the great hall with a broad white smile, a glass of deep red wine in one hand, Rose close by and smiling charmingly, beautiful as ever in yet another new dress. The three griffins lay beside the enormous fireplace, and two golems in red coats were busy making sure everybody else was provided with drinks.

  “Archmage Morel is indeed the greatest Mage in this world or any other,” Prince Archalthus announced to the room at large. Everybody in the palace had gathered in the great hall, but for one: the mage himself was conspicuous by his absence. Not that this appeared to be any great cause for concern for Archalthus. “The sun’s path is restored, Spring is on her way, and all the green things may rejoice!”

  Amelia couldn’t help but stare at him and wonder how many glasses of wine he’d already had.

  “Not only this,” Archalthus continued, “but Archmage Morel tells me that with the renewed power of the sun, we may soon have jaunts to other worlds whenever we please.”

  “It’s going to be just fabulous,” Rose chimed in. “Where will we go next? I can hardly wait!”

  Amelia couldn’t summon a polite smile. She thought of the dimmed glass of the Orb, the flickers of light within it, and how much longer it would be before those flickers kindled to a sun-like glow again. You can keep your day trips, she thought sourly, I just want to go home. Then she remembered with a guilty shock that she couldn’t go home, because what about Harold? She couldn’t return to Springhaven without Harold. How would she face his family? She just couldn’t. She’d retreat into her tower, cocoon herself once more and never come out again. Meg would have to tell Ma Butcher what had happened to her son. Meg had likely been the bearer of such bad news before…

  ~

  Meg did her best to keep Amelia up and moving in the days that followed, to keep the blood pumping through her veins, keep her eyes and mind engaged in the world. Mother and daughter walked the grounds of the winter palace together every day. Their hands and faces froze for it, but it was better to be up and about, breathing the crisp winter’s air, instead of huddled by the fireplace. Even so, Amelia would walk the same convoluted clockwork-like groove around snow-sparkled gardens, walkways and balconies, left to her own devices. Meg had no doubt that the girl’s mind ran the same fearful, guilty routines over and over again, too.

  “Let’s go up one of the big spires and see if we’re in for a good sunset,” Meg suggested.

  Amelia nodded, unenthusiastic. Too lost in her own thoughts to disagree. Meg tried to summon up some soothing words, but… what if Harold really was dead? They’d all been hoping for some miraculous return, but it didn’t seem fair to dole out false hope forever.

  At the sight of the cracks in the edifice of the highest tower, Meg steered them around to one of the less impressive spires. It was a long hike nonetheless, so that Meg was quite out of breath by the time they reached a balcony high enough for her liking, and she had to stop and rest in the doorway. The wind spiralled around the tower, viciously cold, but Amelia was past caring about all but the worst of the weather. With younger lungs and fresher legs, she’d gone straight to the railings, staring out across the ice and snow. Meg sighed softly to herself. “Of course.” Amelia was looking in the direction Harold had ventured off with the prince’s men. Poor girl… No, she was looking straight down the long drop. Meg joined Amelia to see what had grabbed her attention. A golden glow painted the walls of the ice palace, but it was no sunset: the sound of metal
working rang up the sides of the tower from a courtyard sunk deep and hidden from view by high walls and towers. Seen from above, it was a dirty black pit, small fires and furnaces burning, and the white points of distant stars blinked in the spaces between them, small as fireflies.

  “What the blazes are they up to now?” said Meg. She’d thought she’d heard things, these past few days, but she’d foolishly dismissed it as the cracking and groaning of the icy towers. She’d thought she’d heard thunder, and some clumsy person banging about with pots and pans. The griffins fighting, as brothers and sisters do. Nothing to worry about, surely… Meg cursed herself and her misplaced complacency, here in the Dragon Prince’s palace. “Amelia? Your eyes are better than mine, can you see what they’re doing?”

  Amelia shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

  “Awful lot of firewood they’re going through, whatever they’re doing.” On the opposite side of the palace from us, in a secret courtyard. Meg turned and thudded back down the stairs, peering out of windows along the way in hopes of a better vantage point. “It looks…” she removed her spectacles to scrub at the lenses with the cuff of her sleeve, and squinted down at the scene. She hoped it was a trick of the light, what she’d just seen; her own overactive imagination at work.

  “It looks enormous,” said Amelia, coming down the stairs behind her. Tentatively, she leaned out over the windowsill, and Meg hated to do it but had to pull her back. They might be seen, now that they weren’t so high up, and it was better not to let on what they knew. Or thought they knew. Careful to keep hidden, she peered out of the window. The thing in the courtyard was almost all bare iron bones, and she could make out the spine of the construction, articulated to curve and coil. Golems were at work on something that looked like the thing’s ribcage, while Archmage Morel sat heaped on a wooden crate. Watching, supervising, doing his best to protect and build up his own stores of power, if he had any sense. At the Archmage’s feet, the head of the construction looked close to finished, and a brass eye the size of a dinner plate caught the flicker and spark from the nearby fires, looking alive and malevolent.

  “You remember the clockwork dragonette?” said Amelia, her voice barely above a breath.

  “How could I forget?” Meg whispered back. And if that thing in the courtyard was what it looked like, there’d be no smacking that on the nose with a saucepan… Well, you could try, but it probably wouldn’t even notice.

  “Would it be harder to make one so much bigger?”

  “Easier, I’d say.” As long as you had plenty of materials and manpower to throw around. Which we don’t. “Not so fiddly. No need for expensive fairy-made gears and such. The golems there could build the thing if you told them how, and just get the mage in for the important bits. Putting the soul in, and suchlike, if it’s a golem and not just a mechanical beast. So that part’ll come later, if it’s anything like what they do with skyships.” She became aware that she was running on, talking to herself essentially, with Amelia probably in no frame of mind for lessons. The girl was still standing and staring down at the dragon in progress, though.

  “What do you think they’re going to do with it?” she asked.

  Stepping away from the window herself, Meg sighed, running both hands through the wind-knotted tangles of her hair. “Goodness knows, though I somehow doubt it’s for our benefit.” How long had those furnaces burned? How much longer would they burn before the work was finished? “Come on, let’s go and get Perce’s invaluable opinion on things. Our amateur mage…” Greyfell might have something to say on the subject as well. Or, to be more accurate, Greyfell would definitely have something to say on the subject, and it might be something useful.

  They returned to the guest parlour, stepping into a tense kind of silence that made the hairs on the back of Meg’s neck stand on end.

  “What?” she snapped. “For goodness’ sake what now?”

  Bessie was the one to dart forward with two white cards in her hands, passing one to Meg and one to Amelia. “These arrived while you were out walking.” Everyone, in fact, had a white card in his or her hands.

  Meg looked down at her own name elegantly scrolled out in crimson ink on the front of the card. She held her breath as she flipped it open, then ripped the card into quarters and threw it into the fire for good measure.

  Amelia made a sound that might just have qualified as a laugh, and with a look of utmost disbelief on her face, began to read aloud the contents of her own card. “The pleasure of your company is requested at the marriage of Miss Rose Felicity Hartwood and Prince Arch–” she stumbled over the name, “You-know-who.” She skimmed over the time and place, the details of a lavish reception with dancing, and gave another humourless bark of a laugh. Good. The thing was ridiculous and deserved to be laughed at.

  “Does he expect us to be jumping for joy?” said Meg. “I don’t give a tinker’s whizz for his wedding.”

  “Hmm. I would suggest that the handwriting is likely that of a young lady,” said Percival quietly.

  “Rose?”

  “Of course Rose!” snapped Bessie savagely. “She’s got the prince, she’s got the crown, and now she’s rubbing our noses in it!”

  Meg had noted that there was no option to accept or decline the invitation. “Three days from now, is it?” She sighed and cast out her hand, hailstones and rain battering the window as if flicked from her fingertips, but on the other side of the glass. “Just look at that weather,” she said, walking over to the window. “Oh deary me, I hope it’s not like this on the day of the wedding. It’s hammering down out there, just come and see.”

  The wedding guests clustered at the window, each with their own comment on the dire and sudden rainstorm. “Three days to put a stop to this nonsense,” said Meg, changing gears, making a start by telling Percival and Greyfell what she’d seen in the secret courtyard, speculating on what it might mean. Amelia just sat in silence beside the fire. “Amelia! Come here.” Keep her moving, keep her busy. There would be plenty to keep busy with, over the next three days.

  24: BLACK PRINCE

  “Girls, get your walking boots on.” Meg had her bag over her shoulder, and stood waiting at the door. “I don’t know about you, but I swear I’m a stone heavier for all this rich food.” Playing the part of the responsible adult admirably, she’d talked the two golems at the door into letting them go for another walk, promising that the girls would be on their best behaviour. Bessie, the coals of her previous humiliation still smouldering, had nonetheless smiled sweetly and made herself the picture of contrition. She would be good from now on, and there was so much she wanted to see of this world, if she was to live here. In truth, she’d listened in awe as – under cover of hailstorm – Meg had spoken of an iron dragon, the witch’s serious tones betrayed by the light of adventure in her eyes, a light that made Bessie want to spy on this creation for herself.

  Meg, however, was leading Bessie and Amelia down toward ground level, if not lower. “Amelia?” she said, once they were out of earshot of the golems, “Take care of Bessie if we need to get out of sight.”

  Bessie wanted to say that she didn’t need anybody’s care or help, but kept her mouth firmly shut on the matter. Quick and quiet as she could be, she still didn’t have her conjuring rings. Probably that was the reason she’d been allowed out, far more than her grovelling apologies… As they descended another twisting spiral staircase, into a windowless hall, she spoke up. “Don’t I get to see this great production, then?” she said, careful not to use words that might draw undue attention if they were overheard. The hall and the tunnel beyond were cluttered with crates and trunks and things Bessie couldn’t identify, but the whole mess had much the same character as the detritus of the Archmage’s workshop in Ilgrevnia. Meg was clearly at work gathering information, with the concentration of a hound searching for a scent.

  “Not just yet,” she said.

  Bessie was not to be brushed aside so easily. “This looks like Archmage Morel’
s domain.”

  “Well done, dear,” said Meg, in a patronising way that made Bessie bristle.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?” Amelia interrupted, before Bessie could say anything more.

  Meg paused. “You two know about skyship souls, don’t you? Amelia?”

  “Must you bring that up again?” said Amelia, turning red.

  “Yes, I must. Now, just for the sake of conversation, what soul would you put in a dragon golem?”

  Amelia folded her arms. “One that could fly,” she said, sulkily. “Something big, I suppose.”

  Bessie glanced from mother to daughter, recognising the tension of an old argument in the air. “And it’d have to be one that was pretty full of itself,” she added, lest she be forgotten.

  “Now there’s an understatement,” said Meg. “Not many souls that fit the bill, I dare say. Not any piffling soul could get that thing off the ground.”

  Bessie thought she understood what Meg had in mind: the iron dragon would be useless without a suitable soul to bring it to life, but a soul must be stored carefully in the time between being removed from its original body and being ensconced in its new place, lest it evaporate into the ether as disembodied souls naturally did. Of course, Meg was assuming that whatever the prince had in mind for the iron dragon wouldn’t be good for the rest of them… Which was probably fair, and they’d had a hard enough time fighting the man-shaped golems. They couldn’t afford to let Archalthus have a weapon like the iron dragon Meg and Amelia had described.

  “Just for the sake of conversation,” said Amelia, still looking peeved, “I’d have to wonder where you’d get something like that.”

  “And where would you keep it?” said Meg. “Until you were ready to use it, that is.”