Chapter Eleven
After breakfast (which the traveling kitchen staff deemed “not our best work” and spent nearly as much time apologizing for as serving), Robert privately shared his reservations with Mortmain, holding back only what he remembered of his dream and the fact that he had shouted at the Princess. On the subject of their very probable deaths, he wasn’t vague at all.
The valet listened carefully but in the end was undeterred.
“Just as well she refused you,” he said, his normally bland expression clouded. “Had you succeeded at turning this company around, my master would have used protecting the Princess as an excuse to return with them. That would have been—” He shuddered and did not finish the sentence. “I can hide a great deal from King Krije, in my reports, but I couldn’t have hidden that. And between King Krije and a hundred mysterious dragon-killers, I’ll take the mystery danger, thank you very much.”
“I’m not making this up, Mortmain.”
“Of course you aren’t. But it could actually turn out better this way, don’t you see? There’s no reason our plan shouldn’t work just as well against this… this whatever-it-is, as it would have against a rakai, assuming that concoction of yours is as effective as you promised. And if the Prince brings home the head of something truly new and unusual, something fierce beyond measure when unpoisoned, well—just think how much greater the acclaim! Show some faith in yourself, Master Thrax. I assure you that you have mine.”
Robert made a sound somewhere between a sour grunt and a snort and wandered off to help see to the saddling of every horse and mule in the Princess’s train. It had amazed him to learn that royalty and the servants of royalty knew so little about making a pack or a saddle actually stay on an animal’s back over rough terrain. Five, ten, a dozen times a day, for this and other reasons he would find himself thinking wearily, Oh, Mother, if you ever knew the truth. But Odelette would arrange not to know, no matter what he told her. It was a quality of hers that he was gradually coming to admire, and even envy.
The weather got no better, and the road grew worse as it wound up and up into the mountain passes. There had been more rain, diminished now to a heavy mist, and mud splattered the gay trappings of man and mount alike. Creepers got tangled in the wheels of the provision wagons, and the massive roots that veined the pathway frequently forced the drivers to jump down—if they were not walking already, to lighten the load—and gang up to lift the wagons over the obstruction. The great dark-gray boulders intruding on either hand made it necessary to ride, first three abreast, then two; and by the time the pass widened and the procession emerged into a comparatively level and less precarious area, the line was laboring in slow single file, with many of the horsemen afoot—including, Robert noticed from his position just behind her, Princess Cerise. Prince Reginald offered several times to take her up before him, but she shook her head and kept walking, so by and by he got down from his own horse and walked beside her. Robert also noticed that she smiled and accepted the Prince’s arm.
It was late in the afternoon when they rounded a sharp bend in the road and saw the village spread out ahead of them. Rather, they came to what most likely had been a village—they very nearly had to take the fact on faith. All the buildings seemed to have been torn apart, literally board by board, brick by brick, shingle and slate by shingle and slate. Not so much as a chimney or a baker’s oven was left standing; anything that grew had been crushed flat. Here the road itself was seared and split, and there was nothing at all recognizable that had not been burned black, nor was there a living soul to be seen.
The entire expedition stood in silence as complete as the silence of the ruin. Then, as the immediate shock receded, and the impossible scene did not change, at least a dozen of the company dropped to their knees and began to pray in muffled whispers.
The Princess Cerise’s voice sounded almost unhumanly clear—if a bit shaky—in the cold air. “Did dragons do this?” And suddenly everyone was looking at Robert.
He nodded without answering.
Prince Reginald said in a thick voice, “Must have been really big dragons…?” Mortmain spoke not a word but moved close to his master, as though to prop him up if it became necessary. Robert still did not speak but began to walk ahead very slowly, gazing down intensely at the blasted, trampled ground. The Princess came after without questioning his precedence, and the company fell into silent order behind her. Robert never looked back.
He guided them through the scattered and tangled debris, raising a warning hand when the horses had to step over one of the all-too-fresh humps that no one wanted to look at closely, some of them dreadfully small. It was like picking their way through a nightmare, and soon enough even the quiet praying stopped.
When they reached the blackened fields on the far side of the devastated village, darker still for lying under the shadow of the mist-curtained mountains, he paused, turning to catch the Princess Cerise’s eye. He nodded toward three ash heaps, rain-sodden now, but distinctly—even pointedly, by contrast with the mass of shapeless others—quite recognizable as having once been human. They appeared simply now like a small tattered pile of children’s abandoned toys, outgrown and casually, thoughtlessly tossed aside. One of them—Cerise imagined that she must be the oldest, though she would never ever be sure—had her toothless mouth open in a silent withered wail.
Robert’s own voice, when he spoke at last, sounded as hoarse as though he had not spoken aloud for a very long time. “These would have seen them first. And tried to warn…” He did not finish.
Prince Reginald spoke one word: “Rakai?”
“No, Your Highness.” Robert shook his head. “Excuse me.” Ignoring the Prince and everyone else in the party, he unstrapped an iron-tipped spear from the set hanging on the side of the lead wagon, then walked forward by himself, crossing the field toward the forest. He moved slowly, staring intently at the ground, stopping from time to time for no reason that anyone watching could discern. No one followed.
“We will go no farther today,” Princess Cerise announced. “Nightfall is only a few hours away, and the forest will not offer us a better place to make camp.” She began briskly directing the setting up of the tents and the traveling kitchen. Her face was without color, and her eyes altogether too large, but her tone was steady, and her orders were obeyed. Yet when she had a moment alone with Prince Reginald, she clung to his arm as though he were a raft, and she a castaway drifting far from shore. “I wish we had not taken this road,” she told him. “By the Savior, I wish we had not taken it.”
The Prince’s own dearest wish was to be anywhere at all but where he was standing. Yet he found that he could not take a step: somehow his feet knew that if they moved even an inch, they might carry him pell-mell downslope and away, not stopping until these mountains were a faint gray bump on the horizon. As much to comfort himself as Cerise, he took shelter behind the surface self-assurance that was his mask, his habit, his principal stock in trade. “When we find the creatures that did this, we will deal with them.”
“The people who lived here must have tried,” the Princess answered sharply. “I hope we do better than they. Thrax—the dragon-boy—he doesn’t think we will. You can tell.”
“Ah… yes.” Prince Reginald could indeed tell that from Robert’s manner, and it alarmed him a good bit more than he had already been, which he had not thought possible. He wanted very much to get Robert alone for some sort of reassurance—and perhaps a fast lesson in dealing with the sort of dragon that wiped out entire villages—but he was royal and therefore was assumed to know these things from birth. Gods, he thought, why was I born a prince? What bloody good has it ever done me? His father’s stern and unforgiving face rose in his memory, and for the very first time it seemed to him that there might actually be an answer to his own self-condemning questions. In such a moment as this, what indeed would King Krije do? Certainly not sit down in the mud like a Songhai baboon.
“We’ll just have to prove Master Thrax wrong,” he said, feigning a conviction he did not feel. “And in that proof do honor to your country. I suggest we begin by arming the company as best we can, down to the last pastry cook’s apprentice, and then organize a watch. Fear cannot breed where there is action.”
These were the right words, and he and the Princess set to with a will, but Cerise did not feel comforted. She felt guilty and alarmed. They were here now, all of them, because of her own stubborn decision, and she found herself urgently desirous of a way to take it back. The dragon-boy obviously knew nothing of correct comportment in the presence of a lady, let alone a princess, but he knew dragons, and looking around, she knew she had been wrong to place her pride above his knowledge. After the tasks at hand were complete, that failure would require correction. And if she were seen to be depending too firmly on the guidance of a peasant… well, so be it. There would be time to tend to appearances when this expedition was at an end, and the assembled company far away from this horrible place.
Each step carried Robert deeper into mystery. Everything here is wrong, he thought, unable to make sense of what he saw and smelled around him. His hands gripped the haft of his spear so tightly that his knuckles ached. For once he was glad of the weapon’s ridiculous weight—the Ostrya ironwood, a hop hornbeam imported from the south, had cost Elpidus nearly a month’s earnings, but there was nothing like it in Bellemontagne for merged strength and flexibility. Harder than oak, yet nearly supple as ash, strapped round with sintered iron in three places, and tipped with twin spikes ahead of a modified rondel. It was a device of many options, equally useful when thrust or spun or swung, any of which might be necessary depending on the dragon. Very practical.
He felt sick to his stomach, as he never had done. Tension coiled in all his muscles, a serpent to his soul. Everything here is wrong, he thought, prowling alone through the ruins of the devastated settlement, forced to face the limits of his understanding, as he had increasingly suspected he would be. Whatever dragons he was dealing with here, they were not any sort he had heard of, whether from his father or from anyone else.
Strangely, he found himself talking to Odelette in his mind. Mother, rakai kill and eat, whether their victims are mountain goats or human beings—they breathe fire when they’re roused or frightened, or sometimes during the mating season. But they don’t destroy wantonly, they don’t wipe out an entire village, not like this. I’m as ignorant, as far out of my depth as Reginald, the Princess, any of them. I don’t know what I’m looking at, Mother, what I’m seeing. I feel something, yes—there’s some part of me that knows something—but I don’t know….
And why do I have this very odd sense thatyou would?
By the time King Antoine’s jester had long since tumbled home to Castle Bellemontagne, most of the court followers had stopped following, except for the six princes, who plodded on grimly, still determined to share in any romantic glory that might accrue to Prince Reginald. As for the musicians and the men-at-arms, they too were showing distinct signs of wear, but they marched ahead almost as briskly as ever, playing the Bellemontagne anthem, “Our Beautiful Bellemontagne,” at least once an hour, as required by law. They were playing at sunset, also as required—King Antoine was really fond of that song—already entering the pleasant wood where the Princess had planned to make camp, when the first dragon struck.
The creature seemed to explode out of the ground before them, where it had been lying in wait in a deep trench scored across the shattered road. Vast and black, the green highlights on its scales glittering in the sunset, it reared over the terrified troupe with open jaws, from which issued no sound at all. Robert had covered his ears against the expected earthshaking bellow; but absolute silence from that blazing red gullet was more chilling than any roar would have been. The dragon spread great midnight wings, fanning them fiercely enough to blow the helmets off most of the men-at-arms, but it did not leap into the air to attack. Instead, it simply charged.
Robert had dealt with fire-breathers before—some of the common house-dragons could give you a painful singe when cornered, along with a mildly venomous nip. But diving for cover as a white-hot flame sizzled between his hair and his hat… this was terror, this was bowel and bladder and legs all turning to water together, this was abandoning all concern for any other person in the world. This was the moment when Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax, eighteen years old, realized that he really was going to die.
If the dragons—two others were converging from left and right—made no sound, the horses made up the lack. Screaming like the wind, they threw their riders and bolted, falling on the torn ground, scrambling to their feet and blundering in every direction, most often to fall again. The column panicked in the same way, some lying where they had fallen—stunned or worse—while others fled in such desperate madness that many headed directly toward the dragons. Robert saw the result of that. Ever afterward, for the rest of his life.
It was the horses that saved them. The dragons were plainly diverted and excited by the smells and cries of the frantic beasts, and more often than not passed over human targets in favor of horseflesh, roasted or raw. The scarlet dragon—the third was as greenish-black as the first—seemed to be laughing, the flames lapping out of its mouth like a playful dog’s tongue. That one preferred humans, and took its time in the savoring.
Cautiously rising onto his knees, Robert looked dazedly around for the Princess Cerise, whom he had last seen only moments—ages—ago, still riding in the lead, her horse the first to run mad at sight of the dragons. He finally discovered her, sprawled unconscious in a black-blistered clump of weeds at the side of the road. Prince Reginald was nowhere to be seen. Robert crawled toward her, almost on his belly, praying not to attract the dragons’ attention.
Everywhere around him, men staggered, wailing and crying, easy prey for white fire and red fangs. One of the men-at-arms fell directly in his path, burned almost transparent, his skin melted to his mail shirt. Robert crawled around him. Off to his left, a man-shaped cinder lay curled into a fetal position, recognizable as a musician only by the horn clutched in his two hands, as though he had brandished it against the dragon that killed him. Robert crawled on.
By the time he reached the Princess Cerise, she was trying to sit up. Robert pushed her back down unceremoniously and threw himself on top of her, shouting into her ear, “Keep low! Stay low and follow me!” An insane impulse to kiss her ear came over him, but he resisted it. “Follow me! Do as I do!”
He was starting to lead the Princess away on hands and knees, when she croaked out of her raw throat, “Reginald… where Reginald…?”
The slight twinge—very slight, surely—somewhere south of Robert’s lungs annoyed him, even in the midst of massacre. He said only, “We’ll find him. Stay low and keep moving.”
They found Prince Reginald and Mortmain together, as might have been expected. The Prince was berating his servant with as much energy as though his splendid mustache and half his hair hadn’t been burned off his head. “One dragon! You promised—‘guaranteed’ was the word, I seem to remember. And what do I find myself facing? Three! Count them—three dragons, and every one of them breathing fire. Mortmain, the moment we are safely out and clear of this nightmare, you are dismissed from my service. With no reference!”
“Yes, sire,” Mortmain replied meekly. “I don’t blame you at all, sire, not at all, I certainly don’t. But meanwhile—”
“Meanwhile, down! Down!” Robert’s voice was a cracking hiss, and his arms somehow managed to encircle three backs and slam three people flat on their faces. “Don’t look up—shut your eyes! The red one’s coming straight for us! Shut your eyes!”
But he could not help keeping his own eyes open, as though some dreadful enchantment were compelling him to watch the scarlet horror stalking toward them over the charred forms of the men he had been riding and singing with for five days. The dragon, still displaying a curiously sportive air, paused now and then to nibble almost daintily at a body, or merely to toss one high in the air and catch it on its flaming tongue—or not, as it chose—on the way down. Robert turned his head and threw up in the splintery grass.
Then a thing happened.
It happened, not so much to him as through him and over him, and all around him. The anger that had terrified him when the Princess Cerise refused to go back home with the Castle Bellemontagne crew—oh, gods, how many are left alive?—caught him up again, embracing him more fiercely than before, itself consuming as dragonfire. He stood up, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, so that the scarlet dragon could see him, and felt the fury inside him calling out to it, challenging, commanding. There were no words, no more sound than the dragon itself made.
And there was suddenly no room for fear.
The scarlet dragon sat back on its haunches—which is a comfortable enough position for a small dragon, but not at all for a really large one—and cocked its head to one side. Somewhere very far away, Robert thought, Oh, Adelise does that when she’s trying to figure out where Patience is hiding from her. He began walking toward the dragon.
Behind him, he heard the Princess call out, but he neither halted nor looked back. He felt his right arm come up of its own volition—he watched it with vague curiosity—and sweep in a half circle, pointing not only to the scarlet dragon but to the other pair, grazing among the bodies now like cows or deer. And if he remained silent still, the rage that roared up his arm echoed and pounded in his blood until he heard nothing else. The scarlet dragon took a step backward.
Robert had no idea, then or ever, what he wanted from the three dragons. He could never recall anything like a direct order; only an inchoate desire for them to go away, to go away and leave him and his companions with their dead. He would have said it in words, but there were no words left in the world just then, so he threw back his head and ran his own tongue out, to make them know. He tasted the bloody wind, and he tasted fire, and he licked the fiery wind, to make them know.
But what followed was nothing he could have imagined, even if there had been words to set around it. The two black dragons turned from their feeding, shook their heads sluggishly, as though they had just awakened from a long sleep, and began to breathe fire at each other. Wings flared out to their fullest, they charged together like warhorses, snapping viciously at necks and chests and bellies already seared to a crackling blackness that did not glitter at all in the last of the sunset. The scarlet dragon almost danced to the fight, ripping chunks of flesh by turns from the great bodies that could not be bothered to respond to its assault. And through all of this, adding to the sense of endless nightmare, there was still silence.
Robert came to himself then, suddenly as cold as though he were naked in the wind, watching the dragons tearing each other to pieces a long way off. He turned and stumbled back to the Princess, Mortmain, and Prince Reginald, falling down beside them, mouth agape, desperately thirsty. The Prince was first to recognize Robert’s need and carefully dribble what water remained in his canteen between his lips. He was also the first to croak, dry-mouthed himself, “Saved us… you saved us. Saved us, the dragon-boy…”
“What happened?” Mortmain asked in bewilderment. “What did you do?”
Princess Cerise was on her feet, staring around her at the burned, trampled, blood-dark earth. She said very quietly, “I killed them.”
Robert shook his head weakly, but did not speak. He thought he might never speak again.
“I killed them,” the Princess repeated. “If I had listened.” She turned to look at Robert, but he looked away, unable to bear the pain in her eyes. Prince Reginald put his arms awkwardly around her, but she stood stiffly, without responding. She said, “I cannot go home. How can I ever go home?”
Robert did face her then, and found his voice at last. He pointed beyond her, to the handful of men-at-arms, musicians, a few servants, one doctor and three princes: some on their feet, some struggling to rise, others twitching and whimpering where they lay. He said, “Because they have to. We will bury the others in the morning, but these must come home.”
“I will dig graves,” Prince Reginald said. “I am good for that, at least.” He did not look comical half-bald, but sad and shamed.
The scarlet dragon and one of the black dragons were already dead; the third—red itself now, except for the wings—perched on their bodies for a triumphant moment, before toppling over on its side. Mortmain said, “Your father would have been proud today, my lord.”
Prince Reginald said, “Another word about my father, Mortmain. One word.” He said nothing more, but he had never spoken in that tone before, and Mortmain moved slightly away from him.
But the Princess Cerise sat down on the ground and put her beautiful face in her hands.