Chapter Fourteen
Ostvald could not sleep. This was more than unusual for Ostvald; it was epoch-making. He was capable of falling asleep anywhere and anywhen, under any circumstances; more, within certain limits, he was equally capable of sleeping while he worked, and performing the task at his normal level of efficiency. Both Robert and Elfrieda had seen him doze off while repairing farm wagons, making hay, or even plowing a field, while his spokes remained perfectly identical, and his rows continued straight and clean. Teased about this, he would grunt in embarrassment, “Y’ought to wake me when you see me drop off like that. Might do someone a mischief, and not know.”
“But you look so sweet when you’re asleep,” Elfrieda would say. “Working away, snoring away.” Ostvald was never sure whether this came exactly to a compliment, but he cherished it as one, since Elfrieda offered him so few. The only other one he could remember was a moment out of their childhood when he had clumsily patched her lone pair of real shoes, and she had kissed him quickly in gratitude and run off to dance around Robert in her mended shoes. Slow and absent-minded as he was, Ostvald remembered, awake or asleep, the summer taste of her lips.
But tonight, three days after the consecutive rapid departures of Prince Reginald, Robert, and the Princess Cerise, there was too much to think about, and it all hurt Ostvald’s head. He put his shirt and sandals back on (he usually slept in his trousers, because you never knew), and wandered aimlessly down the road he usually took to meet Robert for work. The night was warm, with the scent of the flowers his midwife mother gathered daily for her remedies and birthing spells; the moon, rising slowly over the distant peaks that gave Bellemontagne its name, seemed to Osvald to have a smell of its own, sharp and elusive as the mountains. He wished Robert and Elfrieda were with him: having thoughts like that on his own worried him.
Passing the crossroad, he drifted on toward Robert’s house, on the vague off chance that his friend might have returned in the night. A light in the kitchen gave him a moment’s hope, but when he knocked at the door, it was Odelette who answered, fully dressed and wary until she recognized him. She said knowingly, “You couldn’t sleep either.” It was not a question.
Ostvald shook his head. “Did he come home before he left? Did he—you know—say anything?”
“No. But I know where he’s gone—Elfrieda told me.” Odelette stepped back to let him in, wrapping her arms around herself, as though she were suddenly cold. “I don’t think I’d be quite so nervous, except…” Even Ostvald could not have missed the abruptness with which she stopped speaking. She made tea for them both, while he fidgeted uncomfortably in the silent house, being much more accustomed to it aswarm with Robert’s brothers and sisters. Once, turning toward the back of the house for a moment, he thought he glimpsed a flicker of green between a chair and a coal scuttle, but he blinked weary eyes and it had never been there. I’ll have the tea, and then I’ll go on home and go back to bed. Not getting nearly enough sleep, with him gone.
Odelette asked as she worked, “Is Walter still angry about Robert taking his horse?”
“Well, I told him it was in a good cause. I don’t think he believed me, though.”
The tea was as strong and sweet as Odelette always made it. They sat together in the kitchen and made fitful conversation. Ostvald said, “I’m really pretty sure he’ll be all right. Them too.” Odelette said, “My boy has the heart of a dragon. I’m not worried about him in the least.” They drank more tea, as the silence stretched between them.
“He went after Prince Reginald,” Ostvald said for either the fourth or fifth time. “And the Princess went after him. So they’ll all be safe, and they’ll all come home together. Safely.”
“Of course they will. No question about it.” Odelette went to the sideboard and came back with a flask containing a deeply amber liquid. She poured a generous dollop into her teacup, hesitating before offering it to Ostvald. “You’re a little young.” Ostvald silently held out his own cup. “Well, it’ll help you sleep. My Elpidus made it himself.”
Ostvald only coughed a couple of times. “It’s… very good, Ma’am Thrax.” When Odelette turned away for a moment, he reached behind his right shoulder, trying to thump himself on the back. He said, a bit weakly, “They’ll probably be back tomorrow. I bet they’ll all be back tomorrow.”
Again the green flash, in and out of a shadowy corner, too swift to focus on. Odelette turned quickly, saying, “No. Not tomorrow, Ostvald. A mother knows these things.”
Ostvald took a second sip of the enhanced tea. It did grow on you, somewhat, if you were reasonably vigilant. He said, “Elfrieda will be sad. She likes Robert.”
“Yes, I know.” Odelette came closer, pointing a finger directly at his chest. “And you like Elfrieda, very much—you always have done. Tell me I am wrong.” She was smiling a little, as though happy to be diverted from fears for her son.
“I like her.” Ostvald swallowed heavily. “Sure, I like her. She’s… she’s Elfrieda.”
“And she is in love with Robert, I could see that when you were all children. But he is all wrong for her. She would never be happy with him.”
The heaviness had reached Ostvald’s chest now. He said, “How could she not be? He’s very smart, and she’s very smart, and he’s really handsome, and she’s…” His mouth dried up completely at that point, and he took a large gulp of Odelette’s tea. “And besides, they’re both… they’re quick, and I’m not quick, I never will be. I’m just…” He shrugged, almost dropping the teacup. “I’m me. Big old Ostvald. Slow old Ostvald. Me.”
Odelette smiled affectionately. “You are what Elfrieda needs. Whether you will have the courage to tell her so, that is another matter. Not everyone gets what they need.” She patted his shoulder, at the same time—he could not help noticing—positioning herself between him and the corner of the room where he had seen, or thought he had seen, the scurry of green. “But I think you are much braver than you imagine. A mother knows these things. Go home now. I promise you will sleep.”
When she had closed the door behind him, she said loudly, without turning, “Adelise, for goodness’ sake, go to bed! The lot of you—go to bed!” With Ostvald gone, the dragonlets were all in the kitchen, perched variously on chairbacks, shelves, and pots, plainly waiting for something: whether it was Robert himself or word of Robert from her, Odelette could not tell. She said, “You have got to stop coming out when there are people here.” And then, more gently, “I don’t know any more than you do. But he will be all right—he will be. Sleep now.”
They began finding traces of Prince Reginald’s passage along the road as they journeyed on. Here he had made a hasty meal and not buried his fire completely; here he had halted to drink at a stream and unknowingly dropped a worn neck scarf, which Princess Cerise snatched up and treasured in her bosom; here his horse had cast a shoe, and he had led it limping to a blacksmith in a nearby hamlet. “So like him,” the Princess sighed. “He would never, ever ride a lame horse.”
“The horse isn’t lame. It just needed a shoe.”
“You know what I mean. It’s a sign of his character.”
Robert looked at her but said nothing. The Princess said, “What?”
“Nothing. I don’t think it’s worth going into the village. We won’t find him there.”
“We’re getting close. I’m sure we are. He might be just a few hours ahead of us.”
“Do you know why that shoe came off?” Robert took gentle hold of her arm. “That happened because he’s pushing the horse more than we are. We’ve been stopping to rest, while Prince Reginald’s hardly stopping at all. He’s farther ahead of us every day. We’re not going to catch up with him unless—”
The Princess reined in her horse and turned to challenge him. “Unless he’s wounded or… or dead. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“No, I didn’t say that—I wasn’t saying that at all! Unless he wants us to catch him, that’s all I was saying!” But it wasn’t, and Robert knew the Princess knew it. He said quietly, “We have to be ready.”
Princess Cerise pulled her arm away from him and spurred ahead. Over her shoulder she said wearily, “I have planned all my life to love a perfect knight, a champion—a dragonslayer. Now I’m coming to think that I don’t want anything to do with heroes, ever again. They’re stupid, and they’re pigheaded, and you can’t tell them anything, and they run off to do heroic things, and then you have to go and”—she gulped or hiccuped or sniffled, and Robert almost missed the last words—“then you have to go and bring them home…”
Robert fell a little way behind her, deliberately, for the rest of that day’s ride; nor did she look back until they were camped beside a purple, star-crowded pond, with Robert feeding dead branches to their cooking fire, and the Princess turning a spitted rabbit, which she had killed with a thrown rock, over the flames. To Robert’s surprise at her accuracy, she remarked, “My father taught me. Daddy wasn’t always a king, you know.”
They were near enough to the village the dragons had destroyed to smell, even now, the ashy desolation and the lingering chill of the creatures’ presence. The ground here was too hard and rutted to show even the faintest hoofprint, and there had been no further sign of Prince Reginald all that day. The rabbit came out somewhat singed in some areas, tough and raw in others, but they left nothing but fur and bones, hardly speaking while they ate. Robert fetched water from the pond afterward, so cold that it made their heads hurt, and they laughed about this a little, which helped. The Princess said, “I feel that he is near us. There is no reason for it, none at all, but I just… do you know?”
“I know why you feel it,” Robert said cautiously. “This is where he was bound, to find more of those dragons and prove that he can… I mean, instead of…” Giving up all hope for that sentence, he tried another tack. “I mean, to find out whether there are any more of those dragons. I told you, they’re not like any I ever saw in my life, or ever heard about. We need to know where they come from, and if anybody’s actually breeding them, we need to know that right away. I’m sure that’s what Prince Reginald was after. I really am.”
She lowered her head, looking not at him but into the fire. “When he said he was making a lie come true, he wasn’t just talking about dragons. He meant himself.” Robert did not know how to answer her. Princess Cerise said, “He meant that he was a lie—that everything about him was a lie, from the way he looks in armor to the way he sits a horse, to the… to everything, everything. And it’s not true—I know it’s not! He can’t be a—a fraud, a counterfeit, he can’t be! I don’t care what he says, I won’t let him not be real!” She was crying, doubled over herself: deep, shuddering sobs from the center of her body.
Robert—wishing desperately that he were somewhere else—put an arm around her shoulders. Princess Cerise did not appear to have noticed. He tried to speak, but his throat hurt. He coughed a couple of times and tried again.
“My mother,” he began. “My mother, sometimes she says that everybody in the world is a donkey with the heart of a lion. Everybody. Only most people don’t ever discover it—they don’t have to, they get along all right just being donkeys. But it’s there, always, if you really need it. If you really want to find it. If you look for it. I think that’s what he’s doing, Prince Reginald.”
The Princess neither answered, nor looked at him, nor pulled away from his arm, but she did manage to stop crying. They sat together like that while the moon rose and their fire dwindled, and the frogs chunked out in the pond, from which a thin mist was beginning to rise. From their position they could see the road on which they had come to this place, running on out of sight toward the little wood into which their doomed and overdressed campaign had marched so bravely. Robert marveled at it: such a drab, spindly, ordinary road, after all, for the hope and foolishness it had carried, and the horror at its end… and the discovery as well. He stared down it through the darkness, smelling the Princess’s hair.
Which was undoubtedly why he never saw the dragon rising from the pond until Princess Cerise screamed.
It was bigger than any of the three dragons who had so ravaged village and expedition alike, but it was clearly of the same viciously lordly breed. It lumbered up out of the pond it could not possibly have hidden in, and no water parted to let it by, nor was there any water soaking the dark garb of the man who sat astride the dragon’s neck, commanding it forward with his staff. He was old, and looked gray all the way through, but his eyes were merry with such delight as Robert had never imagined, and was quite certain he didn’t want to imagine, ever. The old man spoke, and his voice had a ring of bronze in it, alloyed further by the savage resonance that justified spite always lends a voice. “Tell her to stop that noise. Waste of time and effort, squalling at an illusion.”
Princess Cerise stopped screaming abruptly, with a single sniff of derision. Robert said, “I knew you couldn’t be real. Dragons don’t like water.”
“Oh, my dragons don’t mind it at all,” the old man replied cheerfully. “You don’t know nearly as much about dragons as you think, Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax. What a pity you won’t live long enough to learn what you need to know.”
“If that’s a threat,” Robert began, “my little sister Rosamonde could—” But the Princess, on her feet and with her fists balled at her hips, interrupted him. “What have you done with Prince Reginald? Illusion or not, I will kill you if you have harmed him.”
“Oh, I like her!” the old man said to Robert. “Oh, I really do like her. Much too good for any son of Krije’s, that’s certain.” The dragon, illusory or not, growled fire at the name.
“You’re Dahr,” Robert said slowly. The old man bowed deeply over the dragon’s neck. “You’re dead. Krije killed you. Long ago.”
“Alas, yes. Alas, not well.” Dahr sighed sorrowfully. “Krije was always, shall we say, inclined to be a bit slapdash about his epic combats. A redoubtable fellow in many ways, but not what you could call precise. But yes, he did kill me, yes indeed. Just not—ah—properly.”
“Prince Reginald will finish the job,” the Princess said fiercely. “As soon as he returns from… from wherever you have imprisoned him. Where is he?”
The old man chuckled in an infuriatingly avuncular manner. Robert noticed that his eyes were the color of his dragon’s eyes: so black as to be almost purple. “One thing at a time, child, one thing at a time.” He bowed courteously over the dragon’s neck. “Princess Cerise of Bellemontagne, it is truly an honor to meet you. I know your parents well—a silly, weak-minded pair who will come to no hurt as long as they stay out of my way.”
The last words snapped like pine sap in the fire. Dahr’s chuckle deepened and darkened as he savored the fear on the Princess’s face, but it stopped altogether when he turned toward Robert. “Well,” he said softly, his voice caressing the one word until it hummed and rang like the polished edge of a wineglass. “Well,” he repeated. “You.”
“You won’t know my parents,” Robert said, holding his own voice as steady as he could. “I come of humbler stock than you would bother to notice.”
The old man raised a long, admonitory forefinger. “Ah, now, you can never tell what might interest a wizard. But in this case, you are quite right. My sole interest is in you—dragonmaster.”
That word came out in a chilling crack, and Robert recoiled from it as if from an unseen snake. Rising, he managed to respond, “I am no such thing, friend Dahr. I do indeed have some small knowledge of dragons and dragonlore, but I am no master, nor do I aspire to be. That honor is yours.”
“Do not pretend to play with me!” The bronze purr had fallen away, like the rotting flesh of a corpse, revealing the long, naked teeth. “At your word, my dragons—my children!—turned from their rightful prey and destroyed each other. At your word! There was never a dragonlord who could command such a thing—never before, never!” Dahr controlled himself with an audible effort: Robert actually heard a choking click in the phantom throat. “Until now.”
Robert’s jaws hurt from the effort of keeping his teeth from chattering, and his legs ached with his determination neither to tremble nor to turn and run blindly into the night, abandoning Princess Cerise, his stolen horse, and his mother’s prayer to bear a hero. He said in a small, clear voice, “I feel dragons. Perhaps I understand them as well, a little. But I am not their master.”
The old man smiled then, once again the grandfather with a sack of sweets to parcel out. “A pity, that—a true pity. Because, master or no, I cannot afford you, Gaius Constantine Thrax. I cannot afford to let you live.”
What Robert would have done or said, he never knew, because the Princess was suddenly in front of him, standing—with the fiery blue flash of a kingfisher—between him and the wizard Dahr. Her voice was astonishingly level. “You will not harm him. I am the Princess Cerise, and I will not have it so.”
Robert had his hand firmly on her shoulder to put her aside when the old man began to laugh: genuine laughter this time, not the benign chuckle with the blood and razors just underneath. “My, I like her! I may have to remove her from my path, after all, but I certainly do like her.” He bent his head ceremoniously to the Princess, his dragon-eyes actually twinkling. “Remember, girl, what you see is only a vision, a sending, without the power even to muss your pretty hair. I was merely curious to see you, and to meet your companion, who is neither what he thinks he is, nor what he dreams of being.” He spoke to the spectral dragon, and it lifted great ribbed wings under him. “When we meet again, it will be a different story, I am afraid.”
“Wait!” The Princess’s voice was as commanding as Robert had heard it arranging the order of march, a world and a life ago. “Where is Prince Reginald?”
Dahr blinked like any startled oldster. “Where? Why, child, he is on his way back to you, just as fast as his steed can carry him. Or he will be, I’m sure, as soon as he gets down from that tree.” He smiled, blood and razors once again. “He’s fast on his feet, your Prince, I’ll give him that. He has climbed out of reach of the dragon I set to guard him, and he has very nearly stripped the tree of every fruit it bears—none quite ripe, alas—and if he takes proper care not to fall asleep and fall out of the tree—”
Robert said to Princess Cerise, “Get the horses.” The Princess looked from him to Dahr and back; then ran off without a word to where their horses were tethered. Dahr said, “Well, now, a man who can speak so to a princess surely has an interesting future—”
“Where are you?” Robert demanded. “Say where you really are and we’ll face you there, you and your beasts—”
“Ah-ah,” Dahr chided, pointing the staff at him. “You, of all people? Who should know better than you that dragons are no beasts? Especially my children”—the wicked chuckle was back—“the slowest of whom is a scholar and a mystic, compared to your Prince Reginald. He may possibly have deduced by now that the dragon holding him in that tree is no more real than the one I ride—but then again…”
“Where are you?”But the old man was already fading with his mount, back into the real mist over the real pond from which their apparitions had arisen. Only his voice lingered. “Where are my children and I truly to be found? Ask King Krije—Krije will know. Oh, Krije will most certainly know.”