Chapter Six
Occupied as they were with clearing out the cages in preparation for a second round with the bellows, neither Robert nor Ostvald noticed the stranger watching them until he was well into the Great Hall. Only when he cleared his throat did they turn and see him: fortyish, middle-sized, neatly dressed, darker than light, with nothing at all memorable about him except his own eyes, yellow-brown and attentive to everything. He bobbed his head in a manner that managed to sidestep servility, saying, “Your pardon, gentlemen—I intrude upon you. My name is Mortmain.”
“We aren’t ‘gentlemen.’?” Robert’s voice was tight and toneless. “For now we’re servants, just like you, only you smell better. And we’re working.”
“I am perhaps a bit more than a servant.” Mortmain’s own voice had a peculiarly distinctive quality about it, being at once husky and rather high, with an actor’s perfect diction—all the result of years of trying to make himself heard over, under, or through King Krije’s roaring. He asked, “These are dragons? I had been given to understand that dragons were somewhat… larger? We do not have them anymore where I come from.”
“Oh, there are larger ones.” Robert was inspecting a pinpoint leak in the old bellows and wishing the man would go away. “Some very much larger.”
Mortmain reached curiously to pick up one of the dead dragons, but Robert banged the bellows down almost on the reaching hand, sending a small puff of dust into the air. Not knowing that the danger from this batch of drachengift was well past, Mortmain quickly covered his mouth and nose.
“Don’t touch them,” Robert said.
Mortmain took a step backward before the quiet voice.
“They’re dragons,” the young exterminator continued. “Vermin. Ungeziefer.” He and Ostvald had changed back into regular clothes to deal with the corpses; there was no mask now to mute his tone or hide his anger. “Everybody hates them, as they should. And most everyone looks down on me and my profession, also as they should, because I do the dirty work they won’t touch—killing, poisoning, trapping the poor bloody things to sell at Dragon Market. You’ve never been to Dragon Market, Mortmain. They skin them there—some dealers do it while they’re still alive, because the skin and meat stay fresher that way, and don’t get so hard. What I’m doing here is a bit kinder, I think, but I could be wrong. Hard to say, you know?”
Ostvald put a wary hand on Robert’s shoulder, to no avail: Robert couldn’t have stopped now even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t. “Yes, there are larger ones, friend Mortmain, and there is one largest of all. Perhaps he will come to visit Dragon Market one day. I would like to see that.”
Mortmain was still backing away, but so smoothly and gracefully that it was hardly noticeable. “Of course,” he responded. “Absolutely, I quite understand your point of view—enlightened, really, admirable. Your pardon once again, but I came in search of my lord the Crown Prince Reginald of Corvinia. I am his—ah—counselor, as well as his valet, and as the day begins there are matters we must speak of. If by some chance you should encounter him during your labors…” And with that he was gone, still backward.
“Toady,” Ostvald commented absently. “Worse than kings, you ask me.”
But Robert wasn’t listening. Dulled by work, lack of sleep, and his troubled emotions, he hadn’t really been paying attention to what the stranger had said. Now the most startling part registered. He stared after the vanished Mortmain, whispering, “A valet… a prince’s valet…”
Ostvald could barely hear him. Then Robert said, plainly, “He’s a real valet. From Corvinia.”
“Yes,” Ostvald said. “Got that. Don’t much care.” He shook his head wearily, thinking about how big the castle was and dreading the next several days. Not for the first time, he wished that dragon-exterminators had a guild, like hod carriers. “What did you mean about there being a really big dragon somewhere, bigger than all the others?” he asked. “Is that true?”
Robert did not answer him immediately; he seemed still to be lost in visions. Finally he said, “It’s supposed to be the oldest of the Kings, sleeping in a cave for a thousand years, but I don’t know. I’d like it to be true.”
“I wouldn’t.” Ostvald felt his stomach shrivel at the thought. “Not if it’s going to wake up while I’m around.”
“Ah, it’s just talk, for all I’d have it otherwise. The Kings are gone. You and I will never see them.”
They worked on well into the morning, Robert driving himself as ruthlessly as he did Ostvald, until both of them were dazed and giddy and had no choice at last but to rest, even with two high walls of the Grand Hall yet to go. Neither of them had strength enough to speak: they sat back against a pillar, eyes closed, taking what warmth they could from the sunlight limping through the stained-glass windows.
They were both nodding off, despite themselves, when the Princess Cerise walked into the Great Hall.
She was accompanied by someone who could only have been the Crown Prince everyone had been talking about. He was almost grotesquely handsome, if such a thing could be: tall and golden-haired, with dazzlingly blue eyes, the bones of his jaw, cheek, and brow as sharp as swords and yet gentle as well, as if softened from inside by the warmth of an early summer sky. It was a heroic face, a champion’s face—a dragonslayer’s face—and Robert hated it on sight.
Nevertheless, he and Ostvald scrambled to their feet and bowed deeply to the newcomers. The dragonslayer type bowed elegantly back, in complete disdain for his own station, which made Robert hate him more.
The Princess Cerise said, in genuine alarm, “But you are utterly exhausted, you poor men! Have you worked all night on my account? Oh, I am so sorry—I never, never meant you to go without rest! Please, will you tell me your names? It is so hard to apologize properly when you don’t know whom you are speaking to.”
“Ostvald Grandin, begging your pardon, please.”
Cerise looked at Robert. “And you, young man?”
“We are already acquainted, Princess. I am Robert Thrax, son of Elpidus Thrax, the former exterminator. I was my father’s apprentice for six years, and in that position helped him here many times. My own memory of our first meeting is a vivid one.”
Cerise looked puzzled, then abruptly not. Her eyes widened. “Oh. Oh my. The boy who broke into my bedchamber! That was you?”
Now it was Prince Reginald who looked puzzled. He blinked at them both.
“In my defense,” Robert replied, “let it be noted that I was holding on to the tail of a breeding thivette at the time. It dragged me down two hallways, through your door, and nearly out the window before my foot caught on your nightstand. It got away—”
“And you broke everything on the table—”
“Not by choice.”
“And I called you horrible names—”
“Yes.”
“And it was quite the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I told my father about it that evening and we laughed and laughed.” She smiled fondly at the thought.
“Really. When I told my father about it, he beat me. Said I should have known to reach for the thivette’s neck instead of its tail, and just twist.” Robert turned to Prince Reginald, who still looked somewhat puzzled. “The Princess and I were both nine.”
“Wait,” Cerise said. “You can’t be the dragon-boy. He had some sort of Latin name. I remember now because it was so old-fashioned, and I used to tease him by making rhymes with it.”
“?‘Aurelius smelly-us,’ ‘Heliogabalus bother-and-babble-us,’ ‘fool of a boy’… Yes. I remember. These days I prefer plain Robert.”
An uncomfortable pause settled into the space between them. In truth it was brief, but all such instants feel like forever. Cerise retreated from it, taking refuge in the ready shielding supplied by her birth.
“Well,” she said, “I must say, how charming to meet you again, and I am so grateful that you have come to my family’s aid. Will you be done soon?”
Robert was too tired to offer reassurance. “No. Four days? A week? Perhaps more. I cannot truly say, Princess. The castle is infested, as you must know.”
“Indeed I do,” Cerise replied, returning to herself and the problems of the moment. “Infested by other things than dragons—infested by age, by carelessness, by habit and routine and…” She turned an imploringly apologetic face to her companion. “This is our Great Hall, Reginald. I am so embarrassed to be bringing you here now, when it should have been properly restored so long ago.”
“No need, no need, my dear,” the Prince replied placidly. “My father’s just the same as yours, won’t change a thing around the old homestead.” He had a deep, rolling, round sort of voice, just as he should have had. It irked Robert all the more. But even so he noticed that while the Princess held tightly to Reginald’s arm, gazing up at him like a starving cat at an empty food dish, her guest appeared somehow less enraptured—benignly affectionate, perhaps, but not hungry in quite the same way.
Robert asked, “Did your valet find you, lord?”
“Who, old Mortmain?” Prince Reginald smiled down at the Princess and patted her hand. “Yes, yes, he caught up with us. Finally got him to understand that wherever he finds Cerise, he’ll find me. Simple as that, really. While I am in Bellemontagne, I am at her service.”
The Princess blushed—all the way down, Robert could not help imagining, to the tips of her toes. She said simply, “I will see that you are brought refreshment—but please, the Great Hall must be free of dragons by afternoon, for Prince Reginald’s presentation at court. You may take your leave then, and return tomorrow to continue with the rest of the castle.”
Robert and Ostvald heard her saying to the Prince as they turned away, “I do so hope you won’t mind our country simplicity—I know it won’t be anything like the grandeur you’re used to in Corvinia.” Prince Reginald winked back at them over his shoulder.
“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Ostvald announced, once they were gone. “Been hearing ‘the Princess Cerise this’ and ‘the Princess Cerise that’ for years, but ask me, Elfrieda’s much prettier.” Robert would have answered, but something appeared to be wrong with his throat.
Eventually servants appeared with a late breakfast, no doubt sent by order of Cerise, after which they labored on past noon. Their biggest task now was one of disposal: it took twelve trips with the cart to carry all the corpses off to temporary storage in the castle’s deepest keep, and by the time they were done the pile of bodies there stood taller than their heads.
Robert and Ostvald could hear trumpeters warming up outside as they returned to the Grand Hall to collect Robert’s equipment and remove the last traces of their presence. Barely able to stand straight, they loaded things back onto the wagon and swept up the last of the now-harmless drachengift. Ostvald watched Robert out of the corner of one eye, observing—without always interpreting them—the emotions that pursued each other across his friend’s face. The grief and guilt were easy enough to read, Ostvald having his own human associations with these; but they were succeeded by a look that he had never seen before on his friend’s face or anyone else’s. It was anger—that, yes, certainly—but a kind of rage that seemed actually to alter the features themselves into something that Ostvald barely recognized as a face. This shadowy metamorphosis lasted only a moment; then Ostvald couldn’t see it anymore, just the face familiar to him since childhood, albeit weary to the bone. Robert grunted, “Let’s go, then.”
Ostvald hung back. “Do you think we could watch the—what she said—the presentation? I’d like to tell Elfrieda about it, account of she’s never been to court. Just for a little bit?”
Robert sighed. He wanted nothing more in the world than to be out of the Great Hall, out of Castle Bellemontagne altogether, away from everything to do with the death of dragons. But Ostvald so rarely asked him for anything other than a day off or a second mug of ale that Robert could not find it in his heart to deny him. He said, “Very well. For a little.”
They found room at the back of the hall to stand and lean against a pillar, watching as the trumpeters and drummers marched in, the other musicians took their places in the gallery, and the aisles began to fill with people in full court dress, splendid enough to keep Ostvald’s eyes round and his jaw slack wherever he stared. Adding to the crowd were the assorted princes, none of whom wanted to be there any more than Robert did, but all of whom felt they had better be, knowing full well that the level of competition had just risen drastically. They all wore their best royal and semi-royal regalia and glanced anxiously around for a sight of their new rival.
Then a dramatic flourish of the trumpets announced the entrance of King Antoine and Queen Hélène, both clad in their grandest style. The King welcomed everyone—very nearly name by name—to this reception for Prince Reginald of Corvinia. Ostvald kept exclaiming, “Elfrieda would love this!” and muttered wistfully that he couldn’t possibly memorize all this magnificence for her. But Robert had been up for most of two days without any real rest, and nothing here really mattered to him. Ostvald could tell him about it later. He closed his eyes and sighed, letting go.
He had almost fallen asleep on his feet when the trumpets flared again, the drums went off in a hysterical eruption of celebration, and the Princess entered the Great Hall on Prince Reginald’s arm. They looked so perfect a couple as to make the notion of perfection meaningless. Robert was profoundly annoyed to feel a twitch in his heart at the sight of Cerise, and an absurd surge of jealousy over the way she gazed up at her companion. “Enough,” he growled. “Enough, let’s go.”
But Ostvald remained mesmerized by the spectacle and wouldn’t be budged. There was nothing for Robert to do but wait, with no possibility of closing his eyes again.
Now the Princess Cerise spoke, in the warm, gentle tones that affected his insides altogether too much, saying, “Father, Mother, I present to you Reginald Richard Pierre Laurent Krije, Crown Prince of Corvinia, Archduke of Bornitz, Hereditary Sovereign-in-Waiting of Southeastern Selmira.” The trumpets went mad with joy, and the princes looked at each other in horror. This was as bad as it could possibly be.
King Antoine rose, extending his hand to Prince Reginald as the latter bowed deeply, dropping to one knee to do so.
I’d never learn to do that in a thousand years,Robert thought.
The King spoke out clearly, saying, “Good my lord, you do honor to our land and our people, and we receive you as is your due.” Cerise looked slightly annoyed, and Robert, who felt himself distantly understanding her in wordless ways he didn’t want to think about, could see her point. He’d seen warmer greetings between brothers sparring over the family will.
King Antoine continued, “Reginald of Corvinia, son of King Krije, who overthrew the dread wizard Dahr ere you were ever born… Krije, scourge of evildoers and—ah—doers even thinking about being evil… Krije, master of land and sea, and most of his neighbors—” Queen Hélène clutched a handful of his robe, but the beaming King was not to be diverted. “Krije, terror of the mighty, trampler of the triumphant, destroyer of the—well, of the really rather feeble, actually—” The Queen was hauling now like a fisherman trying to boat a grampus, almost yanking him off his feet. The King went on valiantly: “Krije, never in his life desirous of another’s territory, but only for what joined his own—”
At this point he did finally lose his balance against the Queen’s grim tugging, and fell onto his throne with a last determined cry of “Reginald, son of Krije, we bid you welcome to Bellemontagne!”
Under the thundering music, Robert heard Prince Reginald’s deep, mellow voice as he returned the royal greeting, first pressing the King’s extended hand between both of his own, and then taking Queen Hélène’s hand to kiss it in dutiful humility. He turned away, after a moment’s formal conversation, to pay his respects to other court dignitaries, with Princess Cerise still holding his arm, and Robert said to Ostvald, “Now. We’re leaving now.”
Pushing and guiding the cart out the door, they passed Mortmain, who stepped aside, bowing graciously, to let them by. Robert paused, feeling himself full of questions to ask the man. But the moment was all wrong, even though there might never be another. He bent his shoulder again to the task his father had left him.
That night, Cerise went to her parents’ chambers to speak her mind on the twinned subjects of personal public humiliation and the normal treatment of honorable guests. Both the King and Queen did their best to soothe her indignation, but neither seemed to be putting the right feeling into their reassurances, and she left for bed more upset than before.
When the echo of her footsteps had faded down the hall, Queen Hélène said, “That went rather well, I think.” She smiled in deep satisfaction. “If he’s here for her and not saying so, a suspicious father is simply one more obstacle in the quest. If he’s here to scout for Krije, to seek out our weak points before invading, let him try—now he’ll know we are onto him, and he’ll be lucky to find five waking minutes to himself without Cerise trying to make up for your horrible behavior. That means the only person we really need to keep an eye on is the other one, the valet—if that’s what he really is. Mortmain.”
“I don’t like using Cerise this way, dear. I truly don’t.”
“She plays her part, as must we all. And it was your idea. Don’t worry—when the time comes, one way or another I’m sure I will be the one to explain it to her.”