Chapter Twenty-Two
Her name is Marie-Galante,” Robert said to his sisters, as the ice-white dragon preened on his palm. “You must always call her by her full name, or she won’t pay attention.”
Patience bounced with utter delight at the pronouncement, but Rosamonde, always precise about such matters, frowned. “Marie-Galante? That’s a princess’s name!”
Even Odelette marveled somewhat. “Gaius Aurelius… are you certain? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a dragon—”
“That is her name!!” Robert was short with everyone these days, as he had been ever since he came home. “The others accept it already, so that’s all that matters.”
Patience was happily crooning, “Marie-Galante… Marie-Galante,” stroking the white dragonlet’s throat with a cautious forefinger. “She might even be a transformed princess herself….”
“Girls, you are late for school,” Odelette snapped at her daughters. Usually Patience and Rosamonde would have gobbled their breakfast and been well out the door by now, but they were both caught up in playing with the little dragon, unlike their older brothers, who were most often too weary for such matters. (Caralos had lately taken to sleeping with shy Reynald on his pillow, whenever he could get away with it.)
For his part, Robert simply stalked out of the kitchen and upstairs to the room that had once been the quietest, safest place in the whole world, only a few centuries ago. Now it had become noisy with memories, cluttered with disasters that no one would ever stop celebrating him for. Most often since his return, he slept in his brothers’ room, his moans and whimpers invariably rousing them. But they knew a hero’s horrors when they heard them, so there was nothing to be done.
“Go away, Mother,” he said, though she hadn’t knocked. Odelette did not speak at all, but by and by he got up and opened the door for her. He said, “I’m tired, Mother.”
“When you can’t sleep, I can’t sleep, Gaius Aurelius Constantine.” She marched past him and sat down on his bed, firmly patting the blanket for him to sit beside her. She said, “Ostvald and Elfrieda were here twice yesterday. Looking for you.” Robert did not respond, nor did he sit on the bed. “And Prince Reginald…” Odelette smiled fondly, as though at the pleasant memory of a relative in a faraway country. “The Prince was hoping to see you.”
Robert looked sideways at her. “What did you say to them?”
“What I always say. As instructed.” Odelette donned an air of slightly wounded courtesy like a favorite gown. “I told them all that you were properly engaged in the practice of your legendary profession—”
“I don’t do that anymore, not ever again!”
“—ridding noble houses of their intolerable pestiferous infestations.” As deeply as he knew his mother, Robert still marveled in the back of his mind at her way with a sentence. “Oh, and King Antoine sent two separate messengers—everyone saw them galloping to our door—”
“Dear gods, dear gods.” Robert sat down slowly, barely aware he was doing it. “Did they believe you?”
Has she always done that thing of turning her head so that she seems to be peering at me around the corner?“Well, I can’t be altogether sure, not altogether. You know what Ostvald says about kings….”
“Mother.” Robert made a particular point of keeping his voice low. It was not an easy task.
“But one thing I am sure about”—and it wasn’t so much that Odelette did raise her own voice as that her eyes widened and darkened until they looked annoyingly like another pair of eyes—“what I do know is that I would be ashamed of you, ashamed of my son for the first time ever, if he dared to slip away from Bellemontagne without any proper farewell to Princess Cerise. I am sure I raised you better than that, Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus….”
Robert had never seen his mother cry before. Not ever, not in eighteen years of confusions, tender bewilderment, and maddened acceptance. The whole notion of Odelette Thrax in tears made even less sense than the memory of the wizard Dahr with a Doppelh?nder still jutting through his body. But he saw the tears glinting in the twilight, and her hand furiously swiping at them to make them just stop, and he knew beyond doubt or language that he was a doomed man.
“Mother, tell me what Cerise and I could possibly have to say to each other? After everything we’ve been through together, we both know what we know. She can’t change what she is, and I’d never want her to.” He caught Odelette’s hands, making her look directly at him. “And poor Reginald… Reginald would give anything he owns to be anyone but the King of Corvinia, especially now that he understands he’s really the brave hero he just happens to look like. But sooner or later he and I will have to go to his home and free Krije from that golden throne Dahr stuck him into.” He chuckled slightly, in spite of himself. “It won’t do the old horror any harm, I shouldn’t think—and it’ll certainly do Prince Reginald a lot of good. How can you fear your father ever again, when you’ve seen him being a fancy footstool?”
Odelette managed to sniffle and giggle simultaneously. Robert went on, “And Cerise…” He said the name lingeringly, tasting it very slowly, “Cerise has to become the only Princess of Bellemontagne who ever taught herself to read and write… and may every single stupid god please bless her always. But she has no more choice than Reginald of Corvinia.” He spread his hands out to his mother, almost pleadingly. “So you see, Mother? You do see?”
“What do you expect me to see?” Odelette stood back from him indignantly. “Gaius Aurelius, I am a silly old countrywoman who only knows how to milk a goat and when to call the chickens in for the evening—”
“Mother, don’t you dare start—”
“But I will tell you, since you don’t ask, that wherever in the world you go, all dragons will know you. There is not one of them—whether great or tiny, King or wall-scuttler, who will not know your smell, your heart—”
“It’s not that simple! It’s never that simple—”
“And as for the Princess…”
“Mother, I swear I’m warning you—”
Odelette gripped his wrists and shook him harder than she had ever done in his life, even the time he put that snapping turtle in his father’s bed when Elpidus came home drunk and beat her. “And I am telling you that the Princess will follow you anywhere you go. Don’t you know that?” Gods, she’s strong. I’d forgotten! “Don’t you know? Even I know, and I’m only a foolish old woman! If you leave without telling her, she will be on your track while your horse’s shit is still steaming… don’t you know that?” Now her eyes were again wet, but she paid no heed at all to the falling tears. “Because that’s what I would do, and I’m no bloody princess. Because that’s just what stupid people do!”
Doomed. Doomed. Completely doomed.
“I’ll talk to her today. Before I go anywhere, I’ll find her and speak honestly to her. Today, I promise! Will that content you, you terrible woman?”
His mother smiled suddenly and widely at him, waving away the quite clean handkerchief he offered her. “Oh, I’m easy, Gaius Heliogabalus. I’m the easy one.”
He didn’t even notice Ostvald and Elfrieda when he finally stumbled out of the house, and they didn’t approach him directly. They simply walked beside him, as they had done on so many other occasions since their childhood. It even took him more time than it should have to become aware that they went hand in hand, and that when Ostvald dropped a coach spring he was awkwardly lugging along, Elfrieda stopped and waited for him to pick it up. Neither one spoke, but they smiled at each other.
Robert halted finally and turned to them. “I’m sorry, I really wasn’t ignoring you.” Then he said, “Yes, I was. I’m sorry.”
“We kept each other company,” Ostvald mumbled, a shade above inaudibly. Elfrieda blushed, but she didn’t contradict him, and she didn’t let go of his hand.
Ostvald added hurriedly, “I mean, while we were waiting. For you to talk, I mean.”
“You brought us home,” Robert said. When both of his oldest friends began shaking their heads vigorously, Robert continued, “You found us—Princess Cerise, Reginald, and me—lost and wandering as we were, and you brought us safe to our own doors, the two of you.” He put his hands very lightly on their shoulders. “I knew you were there, you were with me all the time, but I couldn’t hear you… not where I was. Do you understand me?”
After a small moment, Elfrieda ventured, “Reginald… he told us you were with him, with the King—”
“I was never once joined with the King,” Robert interrupted fiercely. “I never became part of him—that was Dahr’s dream, Dahr’s poor vanity, not mine. Never mine. Not for a single moment. Do you understand me?”
He never knew truly whether they did or not, but both of them reached up to squeeze his hands. They walked on in silence, halting occasionally for Ostvald to readjust the coach spring on or off his shoulder. Only when Bellemontagne Castle came in sight did Robert veer aside, nodding apologetically. He said, “I have something to do. I’ll find you later.”
“She isn’t there,” Elfrieda said. Robert turned to stare at her. His eyes frightened her, though she could not have said why. She said, “You know where she goes.”
Robert turned without answering her. Ostvald cleared his throat. “Except… except only she isn’t always there. Not always…”
For someone who had never once been where he was bound, Robert knew exactly how to get there. Across the Royal Lawns… then straight past the Royal Croquet Grounds, left at the Royal Folly… up a couple of miles, until you get to the Royal Grotto… after that, it’s all the Royal Woods, and in a while there’s the clearing with the tree….
Her clearing. Her tree. Cerise’s tree.
But only Prince Reginald was there. Reginald, sitting with his back slumped against the tree and his undeniably powerful chin cupped wearily in his long fingers. To Robert he looked like nothing so much as a lonely knight at arms, abandoned by a strange love and palely loitering in eternal despair. I could go into a lifetime’s training, study some special monkish discipline that enables me to walk up walls, and I could never, never look like that. Not a chance, Cerise.
Prince Reginald scrambled to his feet when Robert walked into the clearing, even backing slightly away, as though he had been caught trespassing. “Forgive me, my friend,” he muttered awkwardly. “I was just… I mean, I was thinking. Thinking…”
“Yes,” Robert said. It was really a very small, ragged sort of clearing; hardly more than a thicket, not actually. “But she isn’t here.”
Reginald shook his head. “I waited most of yesterday. I thought… maybe, just for a while…” He kneaded the back of his neck helplessly, pointlessly, beautifully. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll wait a bit longer.”
Robert nodded. He sat down in the grass, folding his legs under him, and after a hesitant moment so did Prince Reginald. They smiled briefly at each other, and then sat silently, both gradually leaning against the tree.
After a very long stillness, Reginald finally looked directly at Robert. “I meant what I said, the other day. That other day. About your wedding.”
“Oh,” Robert said. That other day, when Cerise curtsied so elegantly to the King dragon, and I knocked her down. “Yes. Well. That will have to wait for a bit, won’t it? You and I will have to journey back to Corvinia, you know, to deal with poor old Krije.” He found that he really liked saying that. “Poor old King Krije.”
“Ah,” Reginald said. “Poor old Father.” He plainly liked the sound of it himself. “Actually, I was thinking, I might perhaps do a little more adventuring before then? Before quite then, you know? Just a touch of adventuring… and perhaps a bit of drinking, as long as I’m at it?” He grinned suddenly at Robert, and it made him look shy and joyous, and very young. “Perhaps a lot of drinking.”
Robert grinned back at the Prince. “And Mortmain?”
Joyous or not, Reginald looked around the clearing hurriedly and cleared his throat. “Mortmain. Do you know… do you know, I was thinking about not telling him? Just… ah… being rather gone. I mean, I’d leave a note, of course. Certainly, I would.”
Half closing his eyes against the morning sun, Robert remembered rather fondly his last encounter with Prince Reginald’s spelling. “Um… I don’t know whether you could get away with it for long. Mortmain’s quick.”
Quick enough to realize well before I did that I had no least interest in becoming a great lord’s valet.All the same, the look of pained chagrin on Reginald’s impossibly handsome face touched a thoughtful place in Robert’s mind that it had crossed once before. He suggested diffidently, “Thinking about it, though… that is, really thinking about it, good old Mortmain might make a fairly good King of Corvinia himself. Just a thought, I mean—maybe just for the time being, until you returned….”
He never really noticed the sudden brightening in Prince Reginald’s blue eyes, because at that point his dearest friend in all the world stepped into the clearing, and he couldn’t move, and he couldn’t think, and nothing that mattered, mattered. One of the two people in the world said, “Well, it took you long enough,” and the other said at the same time, “Oh, do be still, my darling,” and neither of them ever remembered anything much beyond that.
Robert did manage to warn Prince Reginald, “When you go back to Corvinia, you will not go alone, my lord,” and Cerise kissed Reginald quite chastely on the cheek. Then she threw her whole weight into it, kissed him fully on the lips, and held Robert’s arm tightly as the Prince bowed royally and wandered off to get a jump on Mortmain. “I always wondered what that could ever possibly be like,” she explained unashamedly to Robert. “How could you not, after all, really?”
Robert arched his right eyebrow—a trick he had finally acquired from his sister Rosamonde after endless practice—and the Princess laughed and promptly kissed it. “Now,” she said. “Wouldn’t you think it’s time we went to see Mother?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Robert answered. His grip on the Princess’s arm became slightly firmer. “Cerise. You’re your parents’ only child—even if they’d let you marry somebody just this side of a beggar—”
“Oh, don’t you start that with me, Aurelius-smelly-us! You know you’re part of a higher ancestry than my people ever bloody imagined—”
“Even if that were true—which it certainly isn’t, believe me—would they ever, ever let you toss your crown over the windmill to run off chasing dragons on a moment’s notice with someone who’ll likely never know exactly who or what he is?” He covered her mouth before she could answer him. “Would I ever let you?”
She bit his hand.
Robert pulled his hand away and gaped at her, then at the blood. She had bitten him far harder than Adelise ever had, or even the new ice-white one, Marie-Galante. But her eyes were remarkably tranquil, as a dragon’s eyes could never have been. Her voice was a voice he had never heard before, as she said, “Robert, my one companion, love of my life forever, ‘let’ is not a word you will use to me again.”
Then she tore a strip off her silken petticoat and bandaged his hand while he stared. After which she smiled up at him warmly, delightfully yielding. “My father is the only one who knows this, but my mother is very romantic.”
At least, he did say it aloud this time. “I am so doomed….”
On the way down to Bellemontagne Castle, past the Royal Grotto, the Royal Folly, and the Royal Croquet Grounds, they met Mortmain walking alone. He greeted them pleasantly, asking if by any chance they had encountered Prince Reginald. They told him they hadn’t, alas, and went on their way together. But Robert did not have to turn his head to feel Mortmain looking after them: puzzled and wary and doomed, like himself and everyone else. The morning sun, as golden as the King dragon’s scales, warmed the backs of their necks.