Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  “It’s your choice, Your Highness. But if you don’t let me cut it, we’re not going anywhere. I can’t take the risk, in all conscience.”

  Madelaine kept crying. The scissors drew forth a grief deeper and more inconsolable than the death of her father had. Leonie waited, watching the mirrors, bracing every time a vehicle swept past the layby, but none of them ever slowed down. Maybe switching vehicles had successfully thrown the pursuit off … for now.

  “All right,” Madelaine sobbed.

  “All right what, Your Highness?”

  “All right, you can cut it! Daddy did keep talking about sacrifice. I suppose this is what he meant. Should I get out of the car?”

  “I’m glad you’re being sensible, Your Highness. Yes, get out and come around to my side.” Leonie opened her door. Madelaine squatted in the grass, sheltered by the car door from any oncoming traffic. She pulled the pins out of her hairknot and dramatically hurled them into the ditch.

  Leonie bit back a swear. Now she’d have to guddle for those. She said, “Bend your head over so the bits don’t go down your neck. Here’s a plastic bag to put it in; hold it for me.”

  In the dark, the princess’s nape glowed white, whiter than any commoner’s. After all that fuss, Leonie found that she had to set her teeth and force herself to saw through the first thick hank of hair. Madelaine squeaked as the scissors brushed her neck.

  “Chin up, Your Highness. I’m a good hair-stylist. At least, I’ve got nine little brothers and sisters and I used to do trims for all of them. I’ll make you look like a pin-up model, you just wait … Save you time in the bath, too.”

  At last it was done. Madelaine sprang back into the car, fluffed her newly shorn curls in the rearview mirror, and moaned. “Oh, Fifi! Oh, look what the horrid woman’s done to Mama! Oh, oh …”

  “It’ll grow back.” Leonie knelt on the verge, fossicking in the icy muck of the ditch where Madelaine had thrown her hairpins.

  “You—I’m sorry, I don’t think I actually caught your name?”

  Crikey. The princess was right. Neither she nor Elspeth had ever bothered to ask Leonie’s name. That was something, maybe: a dodgy link in the chain that would lead Oswald Day to Leonie’s family.

  She found one of the hairpins and fished it out. The 24-carat gold lion’s head on the end was clogged with mud. “Leonie Grant, Intelligence Company.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “So am I,” Madelaine said. “That’s funny.”

  Was the princess now trying to be friendly? Still fossicking for the other hairpin, Leunie had no time for it. On the point of giving up, she stuck her finger on the hairpin’s sharp point. She chucked it into the plastic bag with Madelaine’s hair and got back into the car, wiping her hands and arms on the upholstery, which couldn’t get much mingier. Her fingers had gone numb. She fumbled the cap off the lemonade, poured it down her throat.

  Madelaine and Fiona were in the back seat again, having gravitated as if by some law of nature to the proper place for royalty. Leonie didn’t care. She started the engine. They’d head straight to the port and buy tickets for the overnight car ferry to Cork. The quicker they got on that boat, the better their chances of getting off again before Oswald Day thought to look for them there. It would mean sleeping in the car on board. Hard routine.

  Madelaine leaned forward between the seats. “I said, that’s funny,” she said with a tinge of glee.

  “Funny? What’s funny?”

  “You’re the same age I am, but I thought you were much older. I suppose you’ve had a hard life.”

  Leonie gritted her teeth. “Lie down now, Your Highness, and see if you and the baby can get some sleep.”

  31

  Ran

  That Night. Dublin Castle

  Ran didn’t believe in the Worldcracker anymore, but he couldn’t just throw it away. In the end he’d left it in the mews. Keep it for me, he’d told Honor. Up there would do. The top of the perch frame was secured to the rafters. Honor had dropped the sword on top of a beam, dislodging a shower of dust and mouse poo onto Ran’s upturned face. It would be safe there. No one climbed the perch frame except once a year during spring cleaning.

  But in the middle of the night he woke with a sense of danger so imperative that he didn’t question it.

  He rolled out of bed and pulled his warm sheepskin smock on over his pyjamas. The smock had been Piers’s; it came down to his knees. “Nurse!”

  Grumble, grumble, scrape, scrape. The door opened a crack. Ran squeezed out into the hall. Vast in her night uniform of white flannels, hair tousled, his nurse gazed down at him. “Nightmare, my lord?”

  Ran nodded, suddenly tongue-tied.

  “Hot milk. Hot milk it is, then. Pop back into bed with you and I’ll be there in a trice.”

  Ran shook his head. He jumped onto his nurse’s bed, shoes and all, and sat in the warm spot hugging his knees. When he was very little he used to sometimes wake up bawling, and Nurse would let him get into bed with her so that he ended up sleeping the night through out here. The hall was cold and softly lit by electric candles that gave a yellow tinge to the ancient stone.

  His nurse sighed. “Stay there, then. Take those shoes off and get under the covers.” She plucked her dressing gown off the bedpost, jammed her feet into her slippers, and flapped off towards the back staircase, which led to the kitchens.

  The instant she was out of sight, Ran fled the other way. He passed Hilburt, Smaghs, and Wollis, who were Guy’s and Mother’s varlets and Phyllicia’s nurse, respectively, sleeping outside their doors. None of the other rooms on this floor were occupied any more. He pattered down the stone stairs and stopped on the lowest landing.

  The great hall at night always looked eerie and somehow wrong. The Swan Throne stood on the dais like a museum exhibit coldly lit. Two Sauvage liverymen guarded the doors at the end of the hall.

  A faint crumping noise came out of the night.

  The liverymen looked at each other.

  Brrrump! And the distant noise of a klaxon.

  One of the liverymen said into his walkie-talkie, “What was that? What’s happening?”

  The other man pushed out through the doors. The walkie-talkie man followed, and Ran followed behind them, unnoticed, as they jogged across the bailey.

  The bailey of Dublin Castle was a quadrangle with the Old Keep at the end. The university and the chapel were on Ran’s left, and the Lord Niall Building, headquarters of the Sauvage Corporation, took up the whole right side of the quadrangle. The other side was the wall with Cork Hill Gate in it.

  The liverymen trampled between the elms growing in the middle of the quadrangle, over the flowerbeds.

  The Cork Hill Gate stood open, and the portcullis was up, as it should be. Ran had never seen this gate closed, nor the portcullis lowered, in his life.

  The windows of the the sentry kiosk at the gate glowed placidly. But there were no sentries inside.

  One of the liverymen ran up the steps to the parapet of the wall. The other one hesitated.

  Ran put on a burst of speed. His footsteps echoed off the barrel vault of the gate. The man-at-arm’s footsteps thumped behind him. “Hey! You! Kid!” He thought Ran was one of the servants’ children, some of whom still lived in the bondsmen’s quarters of the Old Keep.

  Outside the bailey wall, Ran dashed along the road towards the paddock, heading for the mews. The liveryman was still chasing him and shouting. Over his own panting, he heard the klaxon wailing from the Cork Hill Gate.

  We’re under attack!

  The liveryman’s hand fastened on the back of his smock. “Got you! You little … m’lord?”

  A low, strange cry issued from within the mews: a moan that died into a hoarse craking.

  Dragons cheeped, their high squeaks signaling fear.

  It took a lot to scare a dragon.

  The liveryman, also startled, let go of Ran. He hurtled across the paddock and fumbl
ed open the gate in the brick-walled mews enclosure.

  The lorry-height door of the mews stood open. As Ran approached, a dragon burst out. It was big, golden Ambassador, fleeing from whatever had gotten in. Following Ambassador’s lead, the rest of the hunt emerged, barely touching the ground before they leapt into the air and dispersed like enormous starlings. But Honor was not among them.

  Ran dropped flat and crawled on his stomach over the threshold.

  In the dark, his hand met the warm bulk of a dragon lying on the floor.

  “Honor!”

  The liveryman’s boot came down in front of Ran’s face. The man tripped and sprawled headlong on top of the fallen dragon.

  Somewhere in the dark overhead, a gun went off.

  Ran crawled forward. The dragon was not Honor. It was Platinum, a juvenile male, and he was dead. His belly had been ripped open, the way the dragons themselves would rip open rabbits loosed in the paddock for their hunting practices.

  The liveryman clambered to his feet, slipping on Platinum’s guts. He drew his sidearm and shouted, “Get out of here, m’lord!”

  Overhead, the frr frr frr of wings. That eerie moan sounded again, and was answered by the huffing grunt of a dragon’s challenge. Ran, on his knees, stared up at the beasts tangling in the darkness. Honor—it had to be Honor—had taken refuge under the second-topmost perch platform. Clinging to the struts, she swiped at her flapping, jinking antagonist. What was it? Too big to get in and get at her. It was shaped like a dragon, more or less, but it seemed to have four wings, two big ones and two small ones over the shoulders. Its head was oddly lumpy-looking.

  The man-at-arms fired his gun.

  “Stop it!” Ran screamed. “You’ll hit Honor!”

  The perch-frame shook. The four-winged monster landed on the topmost perch.

  A man’s legs swung down from the rafter above.

  “Halt, villain!” Ran’s liveryman bellowed. “Hands up!”

  The man had a gun. He fired.

  Ran’s liveryman grunted strangely and fell over.

  The monster spread its wings. The stranger jumped onto its back. Honor dropped out of the perch-frame, preparing to launch herself at the enemy. “No!” Ran shouted. He glanced at the liveryman, who was moving weakly on the ground, like a sleeper having a nightmare. His eyes were open and blood was coming out of his mouth.

  The monster settled to the ground in front of Ran. The stranger jumped off. “Hello there,” he said to Ran. “He called you m’lord. Just a figure of speech?”

  The man was thin and shabby, black-moustached. His smiling mouth gave the impression that he was having a grand old time. He glanced without interest at the man he had shot and the dragon his beast had killed.

  He had the Worldcracker stuck through the belt of his raincoat.

  “That’s mine!” Ran tried to sound like the Lord Protector of Ireland, but he still sounded like a child.

  Crump!

  “Sounds like the diversion’s still going. But they won’t be able to keep it up much longer. Me, I’ll be off; and you—I think you are a lord, or at least someone important. You’ll come with me.”

  A long arm cinched Ran’s waist and swept him off his feet. The man carried him out of the mews under his arm, one bony hand holding his jaw shut. The other dragons had all vanished, the big cowards.

  The man threw Ran over the back of his monstrous steed and jumped on behind him. Sour-smelling frills of ruff scraped Ran’s face. As he filled his lungs to scream, the monster leapt into the air.

  Spotlights spurted into life all around the curtain wall, dazzling wells of light, their beams swinging and interlocking.

  The monster drove through a gap between the tilting lights, soaring into the wind. Behind them, small-arms fire banged.

  The rhythmic motion of the monster’s wing muscles jogged Ran up and down. He had to cling to its horrid ruff to stay on. The wind rushed up his smock, ballooning it over his head.

  Like a coal of warmth in his mind that rapidly grew to a flame, he sensed Honor. She was coming! She was gaining on the overburdened monster, and with a shrill scream, she dropped out of the night. Her claws deftly fastened on Ran’s smock, sparing his skin. She started to tug him off the monster’s back.

  The man grabbed Ran’s braid. Dodging Honor’s wings, he drew his gun with his free hand.

  Honor, no! Fly! Terrified for her, Ran flung the thought like a whip. Go, go and tell them …

  What? How? Dragons could not talk.

  The gun went off close to Ran’s head, deafening him. Honor sank into the monster’s slipstream.

  32

  Vivienne

  The Next Day. November 25th, 1979. Dublin Castle

  Gone.

  Gone, gone, gone.

  The attack on Dublin Castle had caused great confusion. Vivienne had turned out the entire garrison, only for them to spend several hours stumbling around in the dark, shooting at hedges and each other. When dawn came they had found no enemy, but only a few homemade mortars hidden outside the walls.

  And no trace of Ran.

  Gone, gone.

  The mortars pointed to the IRA, which meant that they could equally be false clues meant to throw suspicion onto the terrorists and away from the real kidnappers.

  Guy, for one, had absolutely no doubt that Ran had been spirited away by Oswald Day’s spooks.

  They’d shouted at each other until Vivienne retreated to her studio.

  “I cannot endorse military action against the Crown to retrieve one small boy, even if he is my son and heir,” she repeated yet again.

  “Of course not,” Sophia said. Loyal Sophia. She’d rushed to Vivienne’s side this morning, and Vivienne was so glad of her unconditional support that she did not think, as she usually did: Poor Sophia. “Have a drink, darling.” Her hands fluttered, spilling ice cubes. A drink: Sophia’s cure for everything.

  “We do not even know who has taken him,” Vivienne said. “We must wait for a ransom demand to arrive.”

  “Of course. Mustn’t go flying off half-cocked.”

  That was one of their father’s phrases. The sisters exchanged a rueful smile. Vivienne’s smile faded as she reflected that in her place, Niall Sauvage would have ordered his hit squads of loyalists onto the streets at dawn, convinced that there was no situation which couldn’t be improved by rounding up the usual suspects and giving them a taste of the electric drill.

  She would not turn into her father.

  Bad enough that Guy seemed to be a second Niall in the making.

  “Guy’s futile conspiracy with Llywelyn and York has already gone too far. I think the Lancashires may be in on it, too. I can hardly bear to say it, but I fear Guy is trying to use Ran’s kidnapping as a lever to force my hand … even if he is not consciously aware that that’s what he’s doing.”

  “Darling, do you think …”

  Sophia trailed off. But Vivienne knew what she had been going to say. Do you think Guy may have kidnapped Ran to give himself an excuse to move against Oswald Day?

  Furious with herself for even thinking it, she rounded on poor Sophia, who had not said anything. “The only way to find out who has taken him is to wait for them to contact us! And in the meantime we must keep his disappearance a secret.”

  “Yes, darling. Of course,” Sophia said, cringing.

  “Which would be a great deal easier if you had not brought your damn sons, and their wives, and their varlets, and their talking monkeys!”

  “It’s only Irene who’s got a talking monkey,” Sophia said in a small voice. “She needs something to love. Clive is such a sod.”

  At least you know it, too, Vivienne thought. “I am sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Knuckles rapped on the door. “Auntie!” Speak of the devil. It was Dierdre, the wife of Sophia’s eldest son, Cyril. Vivienne’s teeth gritted a little tighter, as they always did when she heard Dierdre call her Auntie in that lilting Irish voice. “Guy is just leaving—
”

  “And? Therefore? Either come in or go out, Dierdre—darling.”

  Dierdre did neither. She stood on the threshhold, clad in a sort of jumpsuit, as if she were preparing to leap out of a helicopter, except that her camouflage was pink and purple. Her silver high-heeled boots matched her chandelier earrings. A seal-fur vest completed the ensemble. “I thought perhaps you’d want to see Guy off,” she said. Her innocent tone belied her obvious hope for yet more family drama.

  “Perhaps you should, Vivienne,” Sophia said.

  “Why?” Vivienne turned her back on Dierdre and moved closer to her sister.

  “It’s all talk, only talk,” Sophia said in a low voice. “They’re not serious. They’re only showing off to each other. But I think Guy needs to do this. He needs to do something. He can’t just sit around and wait for a ransom demand. It’s the way young men are made,” she concluded half-apologetically.

  Vivienne raised her eyebrows. Each of them had raised three sons. All three of Sophia’s were shits, with the partial exception of Colin. But now she thought it was just possible, all the same, that Sophia knew more about this business of mothering men than Vivienne did.

  For while Sophia’s three were thriving, Vivienne’s own sweet Piers was dead, and now her baby, Ran, was gone gone gone—

  Guy was all she had left.

  “Very well. I’ll see him off.”

  Too impatient to wait for her car—afraid of missing him, now—Vivienne commandeered a motorbike from a knight courier in the bailey. Sophia and Dierdre piled into the sidecar. She roared out to the Overwhelm barracks, a cramped brick warren. Men trotted to and fro purposefully. Their salutes had something of the cringe about them, as if they feared her disapproval of their activities.

  Guy stood in the barracks square near the Dragonet helicopter he used for leisure trips, talking to a couple of his friends. Catching sight of Vivienne, the pair jumped hurriedly into the helicopter. Vivienne had seen who they were. Hanna O’Cinneide, the girl Piers had been dallying with, and Alan O'Scolaidhe, that silly little pansy,.