The Dragon Queen

by J M Sanford

  Amelia was painfully aware of every eye in the chapel upon her. Meg, close by, with her hand pressed over her mouth as if she had to forcibly hold in her words. Harold, with his despair written plainly on his honest face. Archalthus, white-faced and trembling with fury, visibly willing himself to assume the form of a dragon, as if he wished he might eat his temporarily vulnerable brother and settle the matter of who would marry who, once and for all. And then, the blue eyes of the White Prince, mesmerising. She’d seen the way those blue eyes had gazed at Rose, the way the white dragon had fought to have the Red Queen.

  Amelia drew a breath of the thick silence that clogged the room, felt her thundering heart almost shake her body. “I don't care to marry a dragon and I won't be your second choice, damn you!” she shouted, and slapped the handsome White Prince as hard as she could.

  The White Prince hissed like a snake, his handsome face turning ugly with anger, his cheek red where Amelia had struck him. In her terror and anger she’d quite forgotten she had on her conjuring rings, and they must have added to the sting. ‘The White Prince had a heart like thin ice,’ Amelia remembered. Now she had broken it, and she could imagine herself plunging into the icy black waters beneath as Prince Regeltheus grabbed her left wrist and pulled her close, heedless of her cry of pain. “You will be my Queen,” he hissed, “and you will learn to behave yourself!”

  “No!” Green sparks flew from Amelia’s fingers as she struggled to pull away, but the dragon prince had no fear of such puny flames as a mere fledgling witch could produce – they burned her instead of him. “No! I won’t marry you!” she screamed.

  “Unhand that young lady!” shouted Percival, and at his rallying cry several other voices of dissent raised: Meg, Bessie, Bryn. “Let go of her!” Amelia heard Meg shout. But no one dared attack the dragon prince. It was only when Regeltheus pulled off Amelia’s left glove, the wedding ring shining in his white hand, and forcibly uncurled her fingers, that Harold charged forward. He’d been trying to heed Meg’s warnings not to get into a fight at the wedding, but this was all too much for him to bear.

  “Din’t you hear?” he growled, his face and ears brick red, “The lady said no.” His fists were balled up ready for a fight, but Harold didn’t get the chance to throw the first punch. A flash of light painted the gloomy interior brighter than the noonday sun and an ear-aching boom shook the walls: Archalthus had transformed himself at last. Rearing so high that his horns raked the icy ceiling, the red dragon smashed down towards his brother, who in a matching flash of flame and stardust exploded into coils of blinding white scale. Dragon met dragon in a clash of fangs and claws, looping muscular bodies heaving as each fought for dominance; for Queen, for Crown. The wedding ring went flying almost unnoticed, bouncing across the chapel floor. Between them the dragons crushed the artfully carved altar of ice, as the wedding guests cowered behind the scant shelter of the pews. Half the roof fell in, and the Red Paladin shielded Rose with its immovable bulk, crouched over her as if she cowered in an alcove of stone.

  Still it took less than a minute for the red dragon to collapse, exhausted, his form suddenly as flimsy as autumn leaves, and the man who wished to be the Red King lay there looking smaller and more helpless than ever in all his finery, pinned beneath the white dragon’s mighty claw. Out of reach, Commander Breaker was still speaking into his pocket watch. The rest of the golems must be on their way, but even then they surely wouldn’t be able to swarm the white dragon and overwhelm him before he dispatched them all.

  “Now,” said Regeltheus, loud enough for all to hear, “will you submit, or must I kill you? Do not expect an easy death, my brother. First I’ll chain you as you chained me, deep in the earth until you can no longer remember the colour or the scent of the sky. I will take your palace – your world! – and make your pretty Red Queen a scullery maid. Just as soon as I have married that venomous wench, I –” He stopped abruptly, his heavy brows rolling down in a look of puzzlement as an unpleasant thought struck him. “Where is the wedding ring? Paladin!” he roared, “Find me that ring!”

  Harold stood between Amelia and the white dragon, stubborn and tight-lipped, his fists clenched. He’d seen something beyond the ruined window, and the wild light of hope shone in his eyes.

  “Treacherous wretch!” spat the white dragon, swinging round to search between the pews for the missing ring, nosing his way through the too-narrow spaces and the debris.

  By this point Amelia had also seen what Harold had seen, and she too couldn’t help but stare. The eerie glow of a light thrown low across the swirling snow, and in the midst of it a mass of dark red shapes charging towards the ruined chapel. Still it was not until the thunder of the approaching monster shook the walls, and the clanking of iron grew deafening, that Regeltheus turned to see the iron dragon. Beating its wings against the biting bitter air, the mechanical beast strained against magical locks and heavy chains held by four golems on horseback, who worked in unison to direct its fury. Starlight glowed from every joint of its body, from every seam and chink of its scaly armour, and Archalthus smiled like a terrible angel at this monstrous proxy for himself.

  Regeltheus snarled, backing up. “What is this?” And then the real dragon reacted as a dragon might be expected to: spewing fire at the imitator. The folds of the mechanical dragon’s wings – unfinished; unfireproofed! – went up in a woof of flames.

  “Kill the White Prince!” Archalthus shouted, and the golems let go their chains at his word.

  The white dragon was not one to stand and be attacked: he charged to meet his imitator head-on as it lunged, its heavy jaws snapping for the white dragon’s throat, but Regeltheus was quick for his great size and the iron fangs only grazed his flank, deflecting off scales. Meanwhile, Regeltheus seized the iron dragon with fangs and claws all at once, wrestling it to the ground. Flakes of dark ash flew from the charred remnants of canvas wings. Regeltheus tore screaming great gouges through the mechanical monster’s hide. But it regrew, and regrew, and still it fought, knowing only fury and the will to destroy. Like the stone gentlemen clambering out of the ruined window to join the battle, it would fight until the finish.

  33: GHOSTS IN THE SMOKE

  Frozen with fear, Bessie stared at the dragons battling in the snow. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Archmage Morel’s red robes. He lay slumped in a corner near the gift table, one hand curled into a claw at his chest as he wheezed for breath, but soon he would recover his strength enough to get to his feet, grab the snow globe and be gone. Bessie needed a distraction, now. She took a deep breath, and signalled to Amelia. Holding one end of the spellpaper to the icy floor with the flat of her palm, she ripped off the other end, and at once a green haze began to emanate from it, sparks of sickly yellow spiralling up as the fog rolled higher, thickening. The spell giggled as it went up, a high thin sound like nails down a blackboard. Bessie scrabbled back, holding her breath, but the stuff invaded her nostrils even so, dragging at her skin. She coughed so hard she was almost sick, her ears ringing and her eyes watering as the bloom of greenish fog obscured the other wedding guests from her view before they even noticed it, reducing them to eerie shadows. It caught Archmage Morel too, awful racking coughs incapacitating the old man. Bessie could hear the fog catching other people as it spread across the room, the echoes loud and ever-multiplying. Slowly at first, the shadows too began to multiply…

  A gout of flame and something like a crash of thunder shook the room. Another jet of flame followed, and another, and in their flickering light, Bessie could make out the ghostly silhouettes of two white dragons. Her heart thudded painfully against her ribs, it hadn’t occurred to her what would happen if Regeltheus were to be caught up in the smoke, but there was no way to take it back. With no time to waste, Bessie scrabbled towards the place she’d last seen Amelia. She saw a hazy blonde figure step back, bumping into someone who hadn’t been there before.

  “Sorry,” Amelia mumbled reflexively, before seeing
that the shadowy girl, with her floating tendrils of fair hair, was none other than herself. Bessie, tripping over the hem of her sea-green gown in her hurry, ran for the two Amelias. One of the two shoved the other, hard enough that the other Amelia – the real one – stumbled and almost fell to the ground.

  “Watch yourself!” said Bessie, grabbing the real Amelia by the wrist and pulling her out of reach as the false Amelia aimed a vicious kick at her progenitor. The shadowy shape of another Bessie had been creeping up behind her, and the real Bessie lashed out with her fist, bruising her knuckles on the surprisingly solid face of her doppelganger. A second later the duplicate exploded into a cloud of green shadow before the real Bessie could land another blow. With her mind still working fast to figure out what had gone wrong, she pulled Amelia down into the shelter of the space between pews. She thought the shadow had most likely expired by itself, not from her limited fighting prowess.

  “How does this help us?” whispered Amelia, glancing wild-eyed around at the fog. Both shadow copies had disappeared, and Bessie thought that all the real people present had probably taken cover, but strange things moved in the fog, echoes laughing and gibbering. Was that Bryn there, unpacking his treasure box? Really him? She thought she heard the clatter of steel, but her eyes had proven untrustworthy and her ears were suspect too. Outside, in the thin green, two white dragons fought the iron dragon, all three of the beasts roaring and smashing against the landscape, and the prince’s men, fighting and dying, fighting and dying.

  “Decoys!” Bessie hissed back. “They were supposed to be mischievous, just mischievous! ‘Double the fun,’ it said on the box.”

  Amelia nodded, her expression grim. “Bad magic.” Just like the griffins had said. Then: “What are you doing?” for Bessie had whipped out the pretty knife she’d stolen from Rose’s room, and cut a hasty slit halfway up Amelia’s skirts.

  “We don’t need you hobbled,” explained Bessie, turning her attention to her own borrowed gown, hacking and tearing off almost a yard of fabric. “You’d already burst a seam, so what does it matter?”

  Amelia glanced down at her bodice: in her fight to get away from the White Prince, she hadn’t even noticed the split in her side. “Right. I’ll get the snow globe,” she said, and then disappeared from view.

  The green fog obscured the table of wedding gifts, and Amelia would have to dance with the malicious shadows before she could reach it. Bessie crawled after her along the length of the pew, her knife in her hand, heading for Archmage Morel. His coughing fit had exhausted itself, and he lay there in the corner where she’d last seen him, wheezing for breath. Still, she had to be absolutely certain nobody reached the snow globe before Amelia, and the Archmage was closest… But before Bessie could reach him, Meg appeared and seized the old man by the arm. Sir Percival was hanging on to Meg’s shoulder, perhaps to keep from losing her in the fog, but more likely for the support of her sturdy frame.

  “Help us escape!” the witch appealed to the Archmage.

  “My magicks are too weak! This world conspires against me,” he babbled in a panic. “I dare not use magic against a dragon again: once was foolish enough…”

  “Watch out!” shouted Harold’s disembodied voice through the fog, just in time for Sir Percival to swing his walking stick and smash a shadow figure’s knees out from under it. The shadow hit the icy tiles, bursting into wisps of green, and Harold appeared in its wake, coughing and hunting anxiously around to see where Amelia had disappeared to. The fire sprite had escaped his cage and was describing a near-blindingly violet halo above Harold’s head.

  “What about the mechanical dragon?” said Sir Percival, kneeling to speak to the Archmage. “It answers to you above all others, does it not? Put it between us and the enemy, and we can retreat to the Orb together.”

  Amelia appeared beside her mother like a mirage, nodding eagerly. “We have the sn–” but Meg clamped a hand over her mouth.

  “You,” said Meg to her daughter, “You keep disappearing on me. I wish I’d never taught you that particular spell.” She gripped Amelia’s face in both hands, squeezing her cheeks. “Here, have this, before it gets dark:”

  “Ow!” Amelia wrenched herself free, shaking her head, wiping at her tightly closed eyes. When she opened them again, they were bright yellow, slit-pupiled. “I could have done that for myself,” she protested.

  Meanwhile, Sir Percival hadn’t given up on the Archmage. “Help us, Archmage Morel. Please.”

  But Morel only shook his head, “If the dragon golem is defeated,” he was breathing so shallow and fast he could barely get the words out, “either one of the princes may kill me…”

  “They won’t,” Meg insisted, hauling at him by his robes, “We’ll keep you safe, don’t you worry about that.”

  “How? How can the likes of you defeat the dragon when I cannot? No, I’ll not side with a witch, not again…”

  “Look!” shouted Meg, “Come with us, or you’ll die here!” But the floor stirred and began to crawl up over the long drapes of the Archmage’s robes, covering red with flowers of ice, thicker by the second, cocooning him.

  “No, don’t do that!” cried Meg, trying in vain to break away the sheets of ice that the Archmage desperately pulled around himself with the last of his magic. Even with Harold and Amelia pitching in, the ice spread and thickened faster than they could scrape it away from his clothes and hair and skin. It grew as hard as stone – it might even shield him from dragon’s fire – and soon it was inches thick and the cocoon still growing.

  “Will it save him from the sun?” asked Amelia. “Can he even breathe in there?”

  Meg shook her head. “I don’t know, I just don’t know…”

  As the Archmage disappeared from view, fading to a dark red shadow in the ice, Amelia tugged at Meg’s arm. “Rose. We can still save Rose.”

  Even as she spoke, the fog was dissipating to reveal the bewildered bride standing with both hands clamped over her mouth, her ocean-blue eyes round as saucers as she tried desperately not to breathe any more of the green fog. It was too late to worry about that: a blurry bride figure struggled in the arms of the Red Paladin, chattering furious nonsense and beating its gnarled hide with her fists, while the real bride cowered unnoticed in the enormous golem’s shadow.

  Meg shook her head. “Too dangerous. How would we get past that great stone lump?” she demanded, dragging Amelia towards the door.

  “I won’t leave her,” Amelia panted, throwing her weight against the pull, stronger in her stubbornness, “I won’t abandon her again!”

  “Oh for crying out loud!”

  Bessie, with her brain still stuck on where her simple spellpaper had gone wrong, noted fleetingly that the Red Paladin couldn’t tell the difference between the real bride and the copy (but why?)… And then the angry duplicate slipped through the golem protector’s embrace as if solid stone was no more than a trick of the light, the bridal train dragging behind it like a skein of cobwebs as the duplicate went dancing skittish across the floor of the ruined chapel.

  Bessie made up her mind, there and then. “Scarlet!” she shouted, and charged headlong after the ethereal Rose, grabbing for the long tatters of the bridal train.

  The Red Paladin lumbered down the aisle towards them, each heavy footstep shaking the ground, as Bessie grappled with the duplicate, which clawed at her with fierce long fingernails. To Scarlet’s credit, she grasped her part in Bessie’s plan and scarcely half a heartbeat later the griffin leapt into the air. The duplicate Rose exploded into green shadow, sending Bessie sprawling to the ground, and the Paladin turned from her at once, disinterested, caring only for where its ward had vanished to. But even as it turned, Scarlet came down like a hawk, grasping the real Rose in her talons, swooping her off the ground.

  “Put me down, Scarlet!” screamed the bride as she was borne aloft, “Let go of me this instant!” but the griffin was a creature with her own free will, and would not let go. Beneath them the Red Pal
adin bellowed, reaching up like an enormous angry toddler deprived of some favourite toy, as with each powerful stroke of the griffin’s wings she lifted the bride further out of reach, past the crumbling remnants of the roof, Rose’s hysterical screaming growing thinner and fainter. She screamed for her guards, but if the golem gentlemen heard her at all, then they ignored her in favour of attacking the white dragons: two of them now, equally real and dangerous, neither of them feeling the sting of swords, lashing the small attackers away as a horse flicks flies with his tail.

  Bessie watched them in horror. Her spell, which should have been weak and temporary, nothing more than a trickster’s diversion, had been snatched up by dragon magic and turned into something much more. Out in the deep snow, the white dragon and his new twin pinned their mechanical rival down, claws screeching on metal as they pried their way past the ceramic scales, even as the iron body shuddered with the effort to rebuild itself. A flash of flame seared the sky, and in the aftermath, through the haze, the glowing orange smear of molten metal ran glowing over the scales of the dragon golem. One white dragon seized the golem by the neck, the other by the tail, and between them they pulled the iron beast apart, the metal screaming as it was rent in two, starlight flashing against the snow and rolling down into a ditch. And when the iron dragon lay dead, the white dragons turned on each other. Writhing and roiling, they wrestled and fought for higher ground amongst the ruined stones of Ilgrevnia.

  They didn’t see Scarlet pass them by with the bride trailing white lace and diamonds. Nor did they see Sable fly overhead, or the band of wedding guests spilling out of the door, not even the bright purple of the fire sprite as he flashed over their heads. At the highest point of a precarious tower, one of the white dragons had the other by the throat, steam rolling out from between his teeth, rivulets of hot bright blood running between the scales. Drops of crimson hissed where they splashed into snow, sending up plumes of steam. As the victim tried in vain to rear away from the teeth fixed in his neck, his claws lost purchase on the icy rock, and both dragons tumbled down into a narrow gulley before they could open their wings wide enough to save themselves. Together they hit the rocks with a dreadful crack that reverberated beneath the low frozen clouds, as one of the dragons vanished at last in a puff of green smoke, leaving the real white dragon heaving for breath. The impact had shattered half the scales along his left flank, the silver-blue shards glittered now amongst the broken ice lying like a field of diamonds over the iron-grey slopes. The white dragon tried to get to his feet, but failed, and Amelia was the only one to spare him a glance as she and her friends passed the deep trench.