Chapter Twenty
The sound was oddly musical, like the deep chiming of vast icicles in the dead of winter. None of them had ever heard a sound like it before, but none of them was in the least doubt as to what it must be. Prince Reginald said, “Stay on the road. It can’t get down to us, the trees are too thick.”
But the Princess Cerise whispered urgently, “No—we need to get off the road right now and cut across the fields. Because that’s just what it wouldn’t expect us to do.”
Robert considered for only an instant before he nodded. “They don’t see all that well at night—there’s a chance it might not even notice us. Let’s go.”
They walked the horses, guiding them in single file down the low embankment into a stubbly field apparently left lying fallow for the season. The rhythm of the wings behind them did not change; whatever was following was not yet aware of the new tactic. The Princess was afraid to look back, but she looked back anyway, seeing only an owl in a tree, and the upper curve of the half-moon just beginning to show above the horizon. But the soft, chill chiming continued.
They did not dare to speak, but their thoughts were loud enough that each was privately certain they must be heard by the others, or by something worse.
When this is over, I am going to ask Mortmain if a dragonmaster can still be a valet….
When this is over, and my father himself again—all in good time, that—I am going to go very far away and get very, very drunk, and I’m not taking Mortmain. Then I’m going to lie in the grass and look up at the sky.
When this is over, I am going to scream. I am going to scream and scream until I have no voice left. No—no, I can’t do that, not if I’m… with Reginald. He wouldn’t understand. I could scream with Robert. Robert wouldn’t mind. Wouldn’t care, more likely, the selfish pig…
They were halfway across the field, aiming without consultation toward a covert that looked more sheltering than the trees along the road. Robert reached back without turning his head, found the Princess’s hand resting in her horse’s mane, squeezed it very lightly, and let go. She had only an instant to register the sudden startling comfort, when a shattering screech raked the black sky to shreds and replaced it entirely with fire.
The three horses screamed almost as loudly, reared as one, and galloped frantically off into the wood, leaving Robert, Prince Reginald, and the Princess Cerise to stare up at what was circling overhead.
A dragon, certainly, but a dragon like no other that Robert had ever seen. As golden as the half-moon, as golden as the throne of the wizard Dahr, it was more than twice the size of any two of his creatures together—Robert could not imagine how it got off the ground, and less how it maneuvered its vast body in flight. Nor did it husband its flame, as all the fire-breathing species do, but continued to light the sky with it, so that the moon turned gray and Robert could feel the heat in his chest, as the air burned around him. The Princess was already staggering from the lack of oxygen, and Robert and Prince Reginald moved close on either side to support her.
Prince Reginald had the Doppelh?nder out, its hilt tucked hard against his body as though he actually knew how to use the great sword, its point following every move of the dragon’s approach. His eyes sought Robert’s eyes in mute question, and Robert croaked, “A King. That’s a King.” Prince Reginald simply nodded and turned back to bracing himself for the coming charge.
It’s beautiful. It’s the most beautiful, magnificent thing I ever saw, and it’s going to kill us all.
No.
I’m a dragonmaster. Whatever that is. There has to be a way.
He called out to the dragon first. The King answered him with its sky-rending shriek, breathed out a blast of fire that turned the entire field to noon, and stooped at him. Robert had just time to notice that it fell, not straight down, like a striking falcon, but at a deepening angle, as an eagle skims the water’s surface to snatch a fish. Then he hurled himself to one side, as the gale of the King’s passing set him rolling violently over and over on the damp earth, among the sharp stalks of whatever had been growing there. Prince Reginald caught him before he slammed into the wild-apple tree.
The dragon swung away, climbing again, scaling the moon, turning to hover. So big, how does it do that? To Prince Reginald he gasped, “Move, move, get away, it’s after me. Get away!”
“Not bloody likely,” the Prince said quietly; and in the midst of terror and confusion, Robert had to gape and stare to make sure of the man. Prince Reginald was standing almost astride him, the Doppelh?nder still pointed unwaveringly at the golden flame wheeling high above them. He said, “You are the one who must stand away, my friend. This is the moment I was born for.”
“Actually, it’s not,” Robert said apologetically. He pushed himself to his feet, touching the Prince’s arm to urge him to lower the sword. “It was sent for me. Dahr sent it. I really don’t think anyone else can kill it.”
“I can,” Prince Reginald replied. “This is the one dragon I will ever kill.” He grinned at Robert then, a hero’s grin. “The rest are all yours—you can spare me this one.” He strode out into the center of the field, threw his head back, and shouted up at the King, “Here I am, worm! Crown Prince Reginald Richard Pierre Laurent Krije of Corvinia, at your service. Do not keep me waiting!”
The dragon took him at his word.
It came gliding in at the same high angle, astonishingly swift, the curious chiming of the wings now all but silenced. Robert and Princess Cerise both cried out as it seemed to home in on Prince Reginald, who stood his ground with the same triumphant smile on his face and the Doppelh?nder braced and pointed just as it should have been. But at the very last moment, with no more than a flick of a wing and a bare flirt of the crested golden tail, it veered in flight to head straight for Robert, catching him completely unprepared for the onslaught. He turned to run and promptly tripped, which spared him the full power of the King’s strike. Even so, the impact came as though the night sky had caved in, burying him under shards of stars and the moon. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.
When he came to himself, the dragon was on him.
The crushing weight was unbearable. He struggled under it, not to escape, but to find some way of softening the cold earth, making it cushion him even a little, squeezing his eyes tightly shut against the pain. The oven-breath on his neck set his body praying for a quick death; but his mind—or something that said it was his mind—called out, “I am a dragonmaster—obey me! I know your name!”
The pressure on his back and legs did not lessen, but for a blessed moment, the breath stopped. Something was tugging at him, a sense of enormous curiosity tugging at his entire being, like Adelise determined to get the coverlet off him in the morning. But Adelise had no such voice as the one that sounded inside him, deep and very clear, and terrifyingly amused. “Indeed? Tell it to me, then. Tell me my name.”
The name was in Robert. He spoke it.
The King did not respond in any way. Robert lay motionless, still dazed, flowing so easily in and out of consciousness that the state seemed to him entirely natural. Far away, he felt the huge, cold mind methodically ransacking him, turning his soul and spirit upside down and shaking them to see what dropped out.
This should be leaving me in madness. Why does it feel as if it’s all happening to someone else?
One thing he did understand, disoriented as he was, was that he could have closed his own mind as securely against any other sort of dragon, even Dahr’s rapacious creations, as against Lux or Fernand. Not this one. Not against a King.
The voice said, “A dragonmaster.” It came as a long, slow sigh, not friendly, not quite menacing either. “A dragonmaster… Is that what you think you are? Master know I none.”
All that Robert could feel beyond the pulse of the dragon’s voice was the body-shaking pounding of his own heart. It was all but impossible for him to draw a deep breath, but he did the best he could. “None? Then how is it that Master Dahr may snap his fingers and set you pursuing me like any paid assassin? Fit work for a King, that?”
For a moment he not only thought but knew that he had gone too far. The immense body crushing him to earth seemed to double its weight, the difference being made up entirely by a rage that kindled every inch of Robert’s skin as surely as if he had been caught in a full incinerating blast of dragonfire. The voice along his bones dropped so low that he felt it more as a wordless crackle that, somehow, he understood. I serve no one.
“No?” In for a sou, in for every franc in your purse.“Your word that you were not sent to kill me? I will accept the word of a King.” He closed his eyes against the sharp, damp grass and waited.
The dragon did not answer him. Emboldened, Robert spoke again. “And if you are not planning to kill me, might you consider letting me up? I am only a small human, and there is no way I can harm you.”
The weight eased, just enough for him to turn his head and shoulders. He was in time to see Prince Reginald, poised with the Doppelh?nder swung high in both hands to sever the glittering golden neck. His eyes were shut tight, he had risen on the tips of his toes, and he looked very much like a little boy straining to reach a sweet on a top shelf.
Robert screamed, “No!” and the King wheeled, far too swiftly for any creature so massive, to swing the endangered neck and head into Prince Reginald so hard that he careened halfway across the field, spinning as crazily as a poorly struck croquet ball. The dragon was on him instantly, jaws wide enough to swallow him whole. Princess Cerise beat at it futilely with her dress sword, which promptly snapped, and Robert labored hopelessly after, knowing that he could never reach them in time. In time for what? What could I do to save that fool who thought he was saving me? Nothing—nothing—but I have to think of something, I have to! He ran, feeling as though he were getting not an inch closer, and as though his heart would burst. Get back from it, get back, Cerise! Please, my love, get back!
The King turned its head and looked at him.
The dragon’s voice did not sound in his body, nor could he read anything in the scarlet diamond eyes—the only aspect of the creature that was not golden. But it was waiting, he knew that, waiting for him to do… what?
To dominate it, like a proper dragonmaster? He tried that, shouting at it as commandingly as his panting breath would permit, “Do not touch him—let him be! I order you to leave him alone!”
No response. The King did not close its jaws on the stunned prince’s throat, but neither did it move away. Its eyes remained fixed on his own; for whatever reason, he had all its attention. Damn you, anyway, what is it you want? You and the rest of them, big and little, vermin and Kings—what do you want? What is it you have always wanted of me?
Something was happening within that huge golden body. Robert could feel it in himself, see it without questioning it. The neck that he had preserved from Prince Reginald’s sword was arching increasingly to the side at an angle that looked painful, even for a dragon; the mighty front claws were dug into the earth, bracing the King against whatever invisible talons were clenching on it. Scrambling with Princess Cerise to drag Prince Reginald as far out of range as they could, Robert saw something that might have been an appeal in the scarlet eyes—something speaking to him almost as equal to peer. The King lugged its head from side to side, like a rebellious horse, and shrieked once again. In the distance Robert could hear trees wrenching loose in the ground.
He said to Princess Cerise, “Stay here with him.”
Kneeling by Prince Reginald, who was just beginning to regain his senses, she only looked up and said quietly, “Don’t be killed. Do you think you could manage that for me?”
Robert’s breath did something odd in his throat. “I’ll do what I can. You be careful too.”
He walked back toward the King with his hands up and the palms facing forward, to show them empty. The moon had grown smaller as it climbed, its color fading to a tarnished silver, and the night grown so still—even the wind is waiting, watching—that Robert felt himself wading through the silence as though through waist-high water.
The King could not see him. If Robert could be certain about anything, it was that the dragon was in actual pain: locked in implacable combat with itself, and losing. The terrible head thrashed and lunged constantly from side to side; the wings flailed aimlessly—not chiming now, but rattling like a horde of armored skeletons—and the violent rippling along the golden sides made it look as though the creature were about to give birth, as did the sounds—both earth-deep and shrill—that battered Robert like physical blows. A dragonmaster would know what this means. A real dragonmaster.
Standing altogether too close, he said aloud, “I am human, and have no power over you.” The King gave no sign that it had heard him, Robert said, “But I am a dragonmaster, and therefore you can do me no harm.” He had no idea whether this was true or not. “What do you want of me?”
The angled scarlet eyes finally focused on him, seeing and knowing him once again. But the voice that he had first heard in his bones and blood seemed now to be two voices, split and disjointed, answering sometimes together, sometimes in jagged fragments. When Robert repeated the question, the response came with swift, gleaming ferocity. “Your flesh… only your flesh…” followed almost immediately by a faltering, barely audible “No… not, will not… I am… am, am… what I?… what… am not…” It was a lost and wandering voice, and Robert found himself more frightened by the splintered, stammering words than he ever had been by the menacing rumble of a wyvern defending her nest. “What’s the matter?” he asked, as simply as he might have asked Reynald, had that smallest dragon caught a claw in a closing door, or slipped into the pantry and made himself sick on honeycake, which he loved. “What is wrong with you?”
The second voice answered more loudly this time, and more distinctly, but no more understandably than before. “Not, not I… coming cold… who is cold? Where? No room, no room, no I, never… never I…” There was a sound in it that would have been a whimper of fear in a human voice.
In the silence, the rustle of dry grass behind Robert might have been a roll of thunder. He turned his head to see the Princess Cerise coming to join him, and Prince Reginald slowly sitting up beyond her. She was dragging the Doppelh?nder, which was hampering her pace considerably. The moonlight showed up every tangle in her hair, every streak of mud and dirt on her face, every rent in her tunic, and every flash of stubborn resolve in her dark eyes. Robert reconsidered his earlier opinion of the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“Stay back,” he said sharply. “Stay right there.”
“Fat chance,” said the Princess Cerise, and kept coming.
The dragon was now convulsively snapping at its own flanks, for all the world like a dog driven mad by fleas. There was blood striping the golden sides, and the deep, swelling moan of a mountainside shuddering down into the sea. The King reared and clawed at the moon.
Speaking deeply and clearly in his mind, Robert said, “I am not your enemy.” The dragon ran out its red-gold tongue like a lightning bolt, and Robert flinched away despite himself but went on. “I may not be your friend, but I am a dragonmaster, and I wish you no ill. How shall I help you, say?” The words came naturally and spontaneously, and he spoke them with a confidence new to him.
The two voices again answered him together, speaking over and under each other, so that it was almost impossible for Robert to distinguish between them. “Far away, far away… gone where… fleshyourflesh, burn, burn… I who… I not… burnyou, tearyou… gone…” One voice touched his heart, and one froze it, and neither made any sense to him at all.
Behind him he heard Princess Cerise’s frantic command, “You will not do this! I am your Princess, and I forbid it!” Sounds like Mother trying to get Patience down from the roof, he thought absurdly. He had just turned to reassure her when she cried out in absolute terror, and he whirled again just as the King lunged. Even an ordinary dragon’s fire would have charred him in an instant, at that range, but no flame lashed from the wide-stretched jaws. Caught shamefully off guard, Robert could do nothing but leap back, tripping over a root and falling flat on his rump.
The King roared and loomed over him. Its fangs were crimson with its own blood, and its scarlet eyes were the end of the world.
And Princess Cerise hit it on the head with the Doppelh?nder.
How she ever got the great broadsword, almost as long as herself, off the ground, no one involved ever discovered. Nevertheless, she did, and with presence enough to aim for the dragon’s neck, as Prince Reginald had done. But the Doppelh?nder turned in her grip, so that she struck only a glancing blow with the flat on the side of the King’s head, barely hard enough to bruise a scale. In the next instant, she was on her back, the sword was somewhere far away—as far as my Bellemontagne, she thought dreamily—and her own head was ringing so wildly that she had no particular interest in whether the dragon made a meal of her or not. Princess Cerise realized in a casual, matter-of-fact manner that she was weary of dragons.
She also became hazily aware that Robert was standing unarmed between her and the King. That’s nice. That’s really nice of him, to do that. Then understanding rushed back, and she was on her feet, screaming, as Robert charged straight at the oncoming dragon and threw his arms wide. The King’s shadow devoured him.
Princess Cerise had been very carefully coached by Queen Hélène and an exhaustive (and exhausted) succession of tutors, but none of them had ever accomplished in teaching her that there are certain situations in which royalty—well-bred royalty, at least—is not only expected but strictly required to faint. The Princess had skipped her lessons whenever she could get away with it and gone off to teach herself how to build a boat, or brew beer. She did not faint now, but snatched up the nearest practical weapon—a rock the size of her two fists together—and headed for the King.
It was Prince Reginald who stopped her, by main force. Once—how long ago—his arms tight around her would have been wings bearing her up to palaces in the clouds; now she made every effort to hit him with the rock, but could never reach a vital spot. He yelped more than once, “Princess, you can’t—ow!—help him! He’s the dragonmaster, he’s—ow! Stop doing that! He knows what he’s doing. Will you stop?”
She did, finally. They stood together, with Prince Reginald’s arm cautiously on her shoulder, while the King dragon roared and convulsed, and at times seemed almost to be eating itself. The Princess was praying, loudly and fervently, to every deity she thought might know her mother; the Prince was simply gaping like any peasant at the thrashing, tormented shadow where Robert had disappeared. Once he made as though to retrieve the fallen Doppelh?nder, but Princess Cerise lifted the rock, and he stayed where he was.
For all its madness, for all the blood, the King still shone in the moonlight more brightly than the moon. Its wings whipped and pounded the air, blowing branches down like leaves and hurling leaves like thousands of tiny spears. For one moment the Princess thought she glimpsed Robert in the colossal shadow, not attempting to ride the monster like a hero out of legend, but clenched to it under one of the blurring wings with a ferocity equal to the dragon’s, as though he were trying somehow to merge with it. And in that dream-moment, to the Princess’s horror, it seemed to be happening.…
For Robert’s outline was fading, softening, melting into that of the King, his skin matching golden scales, his long brown fingers curling into talons where he clung, his face lengthening and swelling with fangs, his eyes tilting and reddening…
… and then he was gone, if she had ever seen him at all—or if he really had become one with the King, lost forever, lost to her forever. She had never in her life understood the word heartbreak, for all that she had used it as freely as anyone; now she learned that it was not in truth a cracking, but a rending, and not as neat as a simple, tidy split, but a mess of bloody ribbons. She felt it go in her breast, and wept with the pain.
… hold on hold on… nothing to hold anymore… like falling through clouds hot clouds hot clouds Mother’s laundry day… heart, the heart, THE HEART BEATS BEATS hammering hitting mace war club, clubbing me away, hold can’t hold hurts hurts… THE HEART… no MY heart, my heart clubbing drubbing make me let go, won’t won’t… dragonme dragonme DRAGONME won’t let, won’t let go dragonme…
Lost in the great golden ocean of the King, battered beyond his own recognition by waves of stupendous anger and fearful confusion, strangling on understanding, he held on.