The Whim of the Dragon

With a dramatic suddenness that you do not expect from a world in which you have lived for three months, and which has rained all day on the road you have to ride tonight, the dark arch of Claudia’s tower window lit up with silver. The roiling depths of the golden globe stilled; the rich light dimmed to gray; and from a little spark of red in the globe’s center there grew the stately form of a dragon. It grew to the size of the globe, to the outermost diameter of its glow; and stopped, before Ted had to decide whether he was going to leave the room, possibly dragging Ruth with him.

The wind rattled the windows. Ted could feel his heart thumping in his ears. He had a good side view of the dragon, which floated with its tail to the trap-door and its head toward Randolph, at the window. The dragon was bright red with touches of black. It was a very twisty, decorated dragon, with seven claws on each foot and a great many tendrils and spikes and whiskers.

Ted didn’t want that huge, tapering head to look in his direction. It had black eyes with red pupils and could have looked at him, if it had wanted to, without turning its head. But its gaze was bent on Randolph. Randolph went down on one knee and bowed his forehead onto the other. It was the most extravagant gesture of respect that Ted had ever seen anybody in the Secret Country make.

FIREBIRD WHERE FANTASY TAKES FLIGHT™

FIREBIRD
Published by Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,
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Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

First published in the United States of America by Ace Books,
The Berkley Publishing Group, 1989
Published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003

eISBN : 978-1-440-68445-6

http://us.penguingroup.com

To Patricia Wrede,
whose patience has been so sorely tried

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am greatly obliged to David S. Cargo for the design of Heathwill Library; and to Michael Mornard for advice concerning the castle of the Dragon King.

As always, I owe more than I can say to Steven Brust, Nate Bucklin, Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey, Will Shetterly, and Patricia Wrede for providing kindness and censure in the appropriate doses.

Her Gentle and Fruitful Grace, Ruth, Lady of the Green Caves, formerly Princess of the Hidden Land and Lord of the King’s Forests, to their Excellent and Estimable Lordships Randolph, King’s Counselor, and Fence, Council’s Wizard, greetings.

3 September 490

Dear Fence and Randolph,

I did try to write this in your manner, but I was afraid you would never unravel it. I am going to write in plain English, and trust to your perspicacity to understand.

I am not Lady Ruth of the Green Caves. Edward, Patrick, Ellen, and Laura are also not who you think they are. We come from somewhere else, where, for years and years, the five of us played a game. The game was you, The Secret Country. We had the characters, the people, right, except for Claudia. We had never thought of her. And we didn’t have the story exactly right. But we would play the Banquet of Midsummer Eve, and Randolph’s poisoning of the King, and the battle with the Dragon King; and in the end Edward found out that Randolph had killed his father, and so he killed Randolph in the rose garden. These events and people seemed strange and wonderful to us, and altogether different from the lives we led.

This summer we couldn’t play. Ellen and Patrick and I were living about as far away from Ted and Laura as it’s possible to be, and we were all very unhappy. But Patrick found a sword under a bottle tree. It glowed green. It’s the one you called Melanie’s. Ted and Laura found a sword under a hedge. That one glowed blue, and you called it Shan’s. The hedge was the same as, or like, the hedge in front of the House by the Well of the White Witch. And that house was also in our world.

If you hold Melanie’s sword and crawl under the bottle tree, you come out in a place called New South Wales. If you hold Shan’s sword and crawl under the hedge, you come out in a place called Illinois. And if you begin in those places and crawl under with the swords, you find yourself in the Hidden Land. That’s how we got here. Benjamin thought we were your royal children. And yours weren’t around to contradict him. So we played our parts as best we could. You must understand that we did not, in the beginning, necessarily intend any deception. We were not certain that you were real at all; and yet you were the people we wanted most to meet in the world, and the Secret Country was the place we wanted most to be, and the princesses and princes you knew were the people whose parts we most dearly desired. We had doubts even then, and these doubts grew on us as we found our parts more difficult to play in truth than they had been in semblance; but by then we were entangled, and feared to do ourselves, and perhaps you also, more harm than good by a confession. Nor did we know what to confess. We thought we were in truth your royal children, or as near as you could get. It seemed to us that, if they were not back in our places contending with the strangeness of our lives, which we knew they were not, then they were nowhere except within us.

But when Ted was in the land of the dead, waiting for Lord Randolph and me to ransom him, he saw and spoke to all five of them. Edward told Ted that Claudia had killed them with a stratagem and a potion. This was not of our game. We grieve for your loss. If there were anything we could do to Claudia, we would do it. We think it best to go home, leaving you an account of what we know. We have left the swords, one under the hedge before the house, and the other under a bottle tree perhaps fifty yards to the right of it.

There is one other thing. Time flows in your world just as it does in ours. This startled us, because in the stories we’ve read, matters were better arranged. If we were a long time in the Secret Country, our guardians at home missed us and were angry, and if we were a long time at home Benjamin and Agatha missed us and were angry. So we bethought us of the Riddle of Shan’s Ring, that it might blow time awry, so we could stay a long time in your country and be gone but a moment from ours.

Ellen and I took Shan’s Ring to the hedge through which Ted and Laura had come into this country. And we tried diverse methods; and when we stood in our own world, and I stood outside the hedge, and Ellen stood in the yard of the house, I threw the Ring over the hedge to Ellen and said the verse aloud. There came a flash of purple light, and a gap opened in the hedge. I saw the Secret Country in it, so I came through back to this place. But Ellen saw the house light up, and a woman burst out of the door brandishing a broom and shouting incomprehensible things. This woman was the Lady Claudia, whom you know. Ellen ran for the hedge, and Shan’s sword, which she held, pulled her down to show her where the Ring lay, and when she retrieved it, she came through the hedge back to this place and fell in the stream.

Now I thought that what had happened to Ellen had taken longer than what had happened to me. So I took Shan’s Ring and went through the hedge. And I was in a strange country that looked like the Secret Country, in that it held the Well of the White Witch, and the plain, but that looked most unlike it in that the air and sky were glassy and felt altogether odd and unpleasant, and there was an army on the plain. So I came back quickly to the Secret Country. But you should note that this place in which I had found myself was the selfsame place in which Lord Randolph and Fence and I stood much later when we bargained with the unicorn for Edward Fairchild’s life.

Now, once I had gone through the hedge with both the Ring and Shan’s sword, I found myself back in our world again, and sat there for a little while, and came home. But for Ellen hours passed and the sun rose and she was greatly vexed. So we thought that Shan’s Ring had changed the rate at which time passed, and we would be safe to stay here until the story’s end.

But we find now that, knowing you and knowing Lord Randolph, we do not like the end of the story, and fearing to give you more pain than joy if we stay, we have gone.

Two more matters. First, in our game, Lord Andrew was a spy of the Dragon King; so have a care of him. And second, in sober reality, Randolph pledged his life for the return of Edward Fairchild. But he didn’t get Edward Fairchild. He got Ted Carroll, whom he knows not and doesn’t want. So you might try that on the unicorns if they get fussy.

We thank you for our sojourn in your country, which is one of the best ever we saw or heard tell of; and we repent of our deception; and we wish you well.

Believe me, good sirs, your most obedient,
most affectionate, most humble servant,

Ruth Eleanora Carroll

PROLOGUE

T
HEY had set free the fire of her house. That was noth ing. Her house had been burned by the master of fire, and she had restored it. She had burned in such fire as made this a dance of sunlight on water, bright but harmless. But if they had intended not her destruction but their own escape, they had succeeded. And there were others in her house less inured to fire. She called the water-beasts without the proper forms of their names. They would match this discourtesy by coming without further preliminaries, and thus escape the fire. As she thought so, they surrounded her, bubbling and spouting. The faint smoke in the room was overlaid with damp purple mist, and the fire’s crackling drowned in the rush and murmur of innumerable waters. She wished it were better than an illusion.

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