The Dragon King

by Patty Jansen

  Henrik had not sent a message to his daughter because he didn’t want to risk people who shouldn’t know finding out he was back in the city. He knocked on the front door.

  Surprised voices came from inside the house. Nellie imagined that not many people visited after dark.

  The door opened, and a young woman with blonde hair and freckled face looked out. Her eyes widened when she saw Henrik. “Papa!”

  “Clara!” Henrik swept her up in his arms.

  She called into the house, “Oh Jan, Annie, come have a look who it is.”

  Two young children came into the hallway, a boy and girl. “Grandpa!” They ran to Henrik, and they all piled together in hug.

  Finally, Henrik’s daughter’s husband came into the hall. “Henrik. It’s good to see you,” he said. “We were all afraid we’d never see you again.”

  And then they looked at Nellie in an uneasy silence.

  “This is Nellie,” Henrik said. “She’s an old childhood friend who used to live a few houses down the street where I grew up. Nellie, this is my eldest daughter Clara and my son-in-law Gus.”

  “My papa’s friends are my friends,” the woman said. “Come into the kitchen. Have you had anything to eat?”

  “We have,” Henrik said. “But some tea would be nice.”

  They followed her to a warm, well-lit kitchen. A table with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth stood in the middle, with cabinets of the family’s tableware around the sides. A door opposite probably led to the dining room, but this room was where the family spent their evenings. It was warm, and the table held a slate for children to learn to write, and a ball of wool and a pair of knitting needles.

  Clara set a pot to boil for making tea.

  They all sat around the table, including the children. The boy Jan was the older, about five or six. He still had soft curls and rounded cheeks.

  The girl was not much more than a year younger. With her red cheeks and flaxen hair, she reminded Nellie of Anneke.

  Clara said, “Now be nice, children. I know it’s past your bedtime, but if you behave you can have a glass of milk and talk to grandpa.”

  “Are you coming back to live with us, Grandpa?” Jan asked.

  “Maybe for a little while,” Henrik said.

  “Surely you’re kidding?” Gus said. “The guards are combing the streets in search of you.” His eyes met Nellie’s. “Both of you.”

  “We have ways of avoiding them,” Henrik said.

  “Do be careful, papa,” Clara said. “We don’t want anything to happen to you. The guards have already been to the house once to ask where you were. I wouldn’t know what to do if they came while you were here.”

  She brought the teapot to the table and poured some hot milk out of the pan for the children who sat very quietly in their seats, looking on with wide eyes.

  “What else did they want?” Henrik asked. “Magic trinkets?”

  “No, they asked specifically for you. They had a long list of accusations to do with the Regent’s death. I told them that I didn’t know about any of it, but that you’re one of the most respected guards in the city, and you never do anything without a very good and just reason.”

  Henrik put his hand over his daughter’s. “Thank you.”

  Her eyes widened. She realised what that meant.

  Henrik told them of the things that had happened since they fled the harbour. He left out the details about Prince Bruno, because it was better that not too many people knew.

  “So are you coming back here to live?” Annie asked.

  “I would like to, but I don’t know if that would be safe for you.”

  “Don’t be silly, papa, you’re always welcome here. Your friend is welcome, too. I mean what I said. If you did anything, I’m sure you had a very good reason.”

  While they drank tea, talk was about general things, for the sake of the children. Clara then went to take them to bed.

  Left in the kitchen with Nellie and Henrik, Gus asked, “Did you do it?”

  “Yes,” Henrik said. “There were reasons that I can’t talk about.”

  Gus nodded, and everyone was silent until Clara came back into the kitchen. Gus was a bookkeeper, and as far removed from violence as possible. He was clearly uncomfortable with the idea that his father-in-law had killed someone in view of the public.

  “I’ll show you upstairs.” Clara smiled at her father. “No, we haven’t rented out your room yet.”

  “I was worried there for a moment.”

  She preceded Nellie and Henrik up a narrow flight of stairs. Several rooms opened up into the hallway. From one door came the giggling voices of children.

  “Be quiet now. It’s bedtime,” Clara said as they walked past.

  The room at the back of the house contained a double bed, a couple of chairs and a wardrobe with a palace guard uniform on a hanger on the outside of the door. Up an even narrower flight of stairs was the attic with one room that clearly hadn’t been used for a long time, and an area where spare furniture was stored.

  “You can have this room,” she said to Nellie. “Wait until I bring you some hot water bottles. Let me get the sheets and make the fire.”

  “I can do that,” Nellie said. She followed Clara into the room.

  Clara set an oil lamp on the table next to the unused bed. She pulled some neatly-folded sheets out of the wardrobe.

  “You look after your father’s bed,” Nellie said. “I can manage.”

  Clara left the room again, and Nellie busied herself lighting the fire and putting the sheets on the bed while Clara went downstairs to get some blankets.

  Henrik came into the room, leaning against the doorpost. “Are you comfortable here?”

  “It’s very kind of your daughter to put up with us,” Nellie said. “I hope this is isn’t going to be risky for them.”

  “That is what you do for family. But we’re safe. If it were really as bad as Gus says, Master Thiele would have warned us.”

  “He did say to be careful.”

  Clara came back, and a moment later the bed was made.

  It was now starting to get warmer in the attic, and Nellie invited Henrik to sit by the fire in the attic room for a little while.

  “Bring your blankets,” she said. “You can warm them by the fire and they will be nice and warm when you go to sleep.”

  “I’m pretty tired,” Henrik said. “I’m not used to all this travelling anymore.” But he brought his blanket anyway, and he sat on the hard wooden chair with the cushions that stood next to the hearth.

  “I’m sorry if I embarrass you,” Nellie said.

  “You don’t.”

  “But your family doesn’t know what to think about me.”

  “That’s because I don’t know what to tell them. A friend doesn’t sound very satisfactory, does it?”

  Nellie looked down. Blood rushed to her cheeks. “I don’t know that this is a good time to discuss . . .”

  “Why not? We’re about to start something dangerous tomorrow. I don’t know that you understand how dangerous. It’s a mutiny. This whole town is eating out of the shepherd’s hand, and we’re wanted people. There are few people in town who will protect us, and we’ve spoken to those already. Everyone else in this town is hostile to us.”

  “I understand.”

  “But then surely you understand not wanting to do this alone?”

  Nellie wasn’t quite sure what he expected her to say. Martha had died a few years ago, and sometimes noblemen took a new wife very soon after their previous wife had died. But obviously Henrik and Martha had been very much in love, and she didn’t think that it would be appropriate to push Henrik on the matter.

  She didn’t even dare hope that he was interested in her.

  The attic was under the sloping roof of the house, and there was a small window in one of the sloping sides. From where she sat, Nellie could see the dark sky.

  “You’re avoiding me,” he said.

  “I�
�m not.”

  “Why are you looking out the window, then?”

  “Because I’ve just noticed there is a window.”

  “I still think you’re avoiding me.”

  “What do you want me to say to that? It seems that whatever I say, you will never believe me.”

  “Not when it’s about you. I can see the look in your eyes. You’re wondering if it’s appropriate for me to be up here with you.”

  “Well, I do wonder that, especially because of your daughter. What is she going to think?”

  “Stop thinking about what people think. This is my house, so I have the final say over whether something is appropriate.”

  He met her eyes. “You’re so guarded, I couldn’t possibly do a better job guarding the palace with all my colleagues. Why are you scared?”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Yes, you are.” He rose, and crossed the room. The bed wobbled when he sat next to her.

  “Whatever should I be scared of?” But her heart was hammering.

  “Precisely.” His look was very intense. “Have you ever been with a man?”

  “I’ve had suitors.”

  “Anyone you favoured? Anyone who kissed you?”

  “Of course.” There had been some young men, and she had taken some walks by the river holding hands, and one or two had kissed her, but it was all a very long time ago, and working for the queen had been a life she didn’t want to give up. Mostly because Mistress Johanna had never wanted to marry. She always said that the life went out of a woman’s eyes once she married and there were children to look after. Of course not being married for a noblewoman like Mistress Johanna was out of the question, but most maids didn’t marry, and if they did, they gave up being a maid, and that, more than anything, frightened Nellie: sitting at home by herself in a prison of her own making would be insanely boring. As maid, she had travelled, she had been the queen’s closest friend, she had influence without responsibilities and the citizens of the city didn’t even realise that she, and not the queen, had a major hand in raising those two children.

  “So who was it? Tell me about it.”

  “I can’t see why. It was a long time ago. The men are happily married as far as I know, and I don’t need to blot their reputation.”

  “That’s just it: you are always concerned with other people first. Is there going to be a time you’ll think about yourself?”

  Nellie started laughing. Her hands were sweaty with nerves, and she could do nothing else.

  “What?” Henrik asked.

  “Men are so transparent. Henrik, if you really want to kiss me in my unattractive old age, I suggest that you shut up and do it.”

  He laughed, too. “Practical, down-to-earth Nellie.”

  If she’d been wondering about kissing, the next moment he did just that. It turned out she didn’t really know anything about kissing at all, or about any of the things that might follow from it. But, as they said, you were never too old to learn.

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  NELLIE WOKE UP the next morning because faint light filtered onto her face. Through the window above the bed the sky was dull grey. Something warm and heavy lay by her side.

  By the Triune, Henrik.

  Nellie pushed herself out of the bed, her heart thudding. It was already light, and he’d been here all night. She remembered how he had rested his head saying that he should really go downstairs.

  The ice-cold air bit into her skin. Shivering, she found her overdress and stockings and pulled them on.

  Henrik opened his eyes.

  “Don’t look.”

  He smiled. “Is there anything I haven’t seen?”

  “Not in the daylight. This is so embarrassing. What is your family going to think?”

  “Nothing they haven’t thought from the moment we came to the house together.”

  And those looks had been uncomfortable and questioning. They would be even more uncomfortable now.

  Not only that, it was late and they needed to start looking for Bruno. “We were supposed to be at Master Thiele’s already.”

  He pushed the blanket off. “First breakfast. You can’t walk around the city all day on an empty stomach.”

  Clara was in the kitchen cooking porridge for the children. A maid had also turned up, and she was warming water for washing.

  The young girl’s presence was probably why there were no uncomfortable questions over breakfast. And Nellie knew Henrik was right: she did worry far too much about what other people thought of her, but that was a hard habit to break. She happened to think it was important, because the way you treated other people influenced what people said about you, and that said a lot about whether people would trust you, or whether you could trust another person.

  Nellie and Henrik ate quickly and then went back to the guild’s hideout. Four men and one woman were already in the room downstairs.

  The air was bitterly cold. A servant had just lit the fire but, as yet, it did little to warm the room.

  Nellie didn’t know any of the other people except for August, but she had seen their faces while they stood guard at the palace gates or in the streets. The woman was a cousin of the mayor’s. She had no husband or children, but she was extraordinarily good with numbers and Saardam’s bookkeepers would pay her to check their accounts. The men were the guards who protected the palace, but they would spank a little apple thief across his eight-year-old bottom rather than put him in jail. They would trust the mayor’s cousin with the accounts.

  Master Thiele had spread out a number of documents on the table, maps mostly, from what Nellie could see.

  On one paper, she could make out the streets of the city, with the church and the palace clearly marked. Someone had divided the city into four parts, each a different colour.

  Two more men came in to be greeted with solemn nods, and then Master Thiele judged that everyone had arrived.

  “Welcome here at this early hour. You are my most trusted people. I realise I’m asking a lot from you, and I may ask you to act against your orders. I’m definitely asking you to face great danger. It has come to the point that we are the protectors of fair Saardam. Everyone else, including your colleagues, is the enemy. They are unaware, but they have been corrupted with magic through the food they eat. We are gathered because we need to secure the safety of a young boy who is the key to all our efforts to restore fairness and peace in Saardam. We’re asking you to protect Prince Bruno.”

  In a few sentences, he explained the situation as Nellie had explained it to him yesterday. The five men and one woman listened, their faces displaying nothing except the fullest attention.

  “Obviously we can’t just walk into the palace and demand to be taken to the ballroom,” Master Thiele continued. “First we need to make sure that we have enough people to push the palace guards aside and get into the room. Exactly how we act depends on the number of people we can recruit. Please note that I’m not looking for a violent struggle unless we meet violence. Our faces are familiar to many of the guards, and I hope that violence will not necessary. I’m also not looking to usurp power, merely to instate a council that will take action and solve the succession problem considering all the facts, not just some people’s agendas.”

  He put his hands on the table, on top of one of the maps.

  “We need to find support. To this extent, I have brought this map. Some of you will be very familiar with it, but to explain to others”—he looked at Nellie—“this is the map the guard commanders use to allocate parts of the city to different patrols. The coloured sections are called quadrants. We will be using the same boundaries, because it’s easy; and we don’t have to explain to our members because they will be familiar with where the boundaries are. You will divide into groups. Each group will be given the names of potential supporters. We will visit them and ask for their support. Explain to them what I have just said and that time is of the essence.”

  But what about the mag
ic? Nellie grew increasingly frustrated. Again, these people pretended magic didn’t exist even while warning about it.

  “This would be so much better if we could give these people a remedy against magic first,” she said when Master Thiele had finished speaking. Right now, with most of the people members of the guards, it was a matter of chance whether they struck someone who hadn’t been eating the shepherd’s handed-out food. Even then, the person could go back to the palace, eat there and betray the group.

  “There is no time for that,” Master Thiele said.

  Nellie disagreed, not because she thought time unimportant, but because she knew that, without a remedy against magic, the plan was doomed to fail.

  Nellie and Henrik ended up in a group with a young man called Adrian whom Henrik knew through the palace guards. Henrik explained that Adrian had a delicate stomach and never ate the palace food because it made him ill.

  Next, they all spent time dressing up. They were to look like ordinary citizens, but also wanted to be unrecognisable, especially Henrik. To this end, they went into a very cold, musty room next to the main living area that was full of wardrobes with various types of clothing.

  Henrik chose a dark cloak and hat. The fact that he’d grown a beard since leaving the palace helped his disguise as a well-off citizen.

  Then it was Nellie’s turn. “Hmm, I think you should dress as his wife.”

  He gave her a long woollen coat that was much nicer than anything she had ever owned. It smelled a bit musty, but the moment she slipped it over her shoulders, it felt warm and comfortable. He also found her a pair of nice shoes with metal buckles, and replaced the tatty shawl she wore over her head with a very fashionable hat.

  Adrian, who was young enough to be their son, got a slightly more flamboyant outfit such as a young merchant’s son would wear.

  They went out into the misty morning, mingling with the citizens on their daily business and listening for gossip.

  Since Nellie had been here last, even more shops in the artisan quarter had been boarded over, their owners gone from the city. The only shops that seemed to be doing a good trade were those selling second-hand items. Plenty of things were for sale, since people leaving the city didn’t want to take all their things with them: the most exquisite tableware and furniture were available in big quantities, and so was luxurious clothing in the latest fashions. The elaborate dresses hung in rows on racks, and the prices were low.