The Whim of the Dragon (8 page)

Ellen did not snore, and the night was clear. The moonlight fixed her with its glittering eye, and she saw what she was meant to. The evergreen trees of the forest were enormous; their branches began yards above her head. Between their widely separated trunks were only piles and heaps of discarded brown needles, and fallen branches, and an occasional seedling, growing hopefully upward. The air was very cold and smelled damply of pine and cedar. There was also a fainter smell that Laura associated with Christmas. Blue spruce. Laura was confused by this sudden collision of her memories and Princess Laura’s. It was she who remembered Christmas, but Princess Laura who knew that that smell meant blue spruce.

“Deck the halls with boughs of holly!” shouted Laura, afraid that Princess Laura would move her to say something peculiar.

Her voice was frail and faint in this vastness of air and branch. Very high up, a sharp wind drove long clouds across a thin blue sky. She could hear crows quarreling.

Laura was cold and puzzled, and beginning to be bored. She listened to the inside of her mind, but nothing unusual was there. Princess Laura wasn’t going to be any help. Laura hunched her shoulders against an eddy of wind, and realized she was wearing a pack. She shrugged it off and knelt gingerly in the needles to open it. It was made of green nylon, and the tag said “Caribou.” Inside it were a squashed apple, a little ivory unicorn with green eyes, a pocket-sized copy of
Peter Rabbit
, with the original illustrations, and a silver flute that made her tentative hand shiver as if it were falling asleep. She had felt it before. This was the flute of Cedric.

Laura stared at this collection for some time. The unicorn was hers, a present from Fence. The food might have been anybody’s. She opened the little book, and encountered Ellen’s determined black script on the flyleaf. “EX LIBRIS ELLEN JENNIFER CARROLL. THIS MEANS YOU.”

The flute was Laura’s too. Somebody who had seemed to know what he was doing had given it to her, when Princess Laura was already dead. Fence said there was a saying that Cedric’s flute would save them at the end. Ruth, who had had flute lessons for eight years, couldn’t get a single decent note out of this flute. Laura, who couldn’t even play the piano, let alone coordinate her breath and her fingers at the same time, could play this flute to perfection.

She supposed she might as well play it now. It was very cold to the touch. She put it to her lips and blew a few experimental breaths. She played “The Minstrel Boy,” which had once summoned her a unicorn. This time it summoned nothing. She played “Sir Patrick Spens,” which had pricked Randolph’s conscience. Only her cold fingers tingled where she held the flute. She played “Matty Groves,” which she did not like. Whatever she hoped to wake up did not care for it either.

“You could at least let all the wild animals come and listen and be tamed,” said Laura, removing the flute from her mouth and addressing it severely. She gave up on Secret Country songs and, defiantly, played “James James Morrison Morrison.”

She was playing the last line when the tree nearest her burst violently into flame. A rush of hot air drove her backward. Laura considered running, but saw that neither nearby trees nor the needles at the foot of the burning one had caught. The flame was very clear and yellow. Laura looked at it hopefully; but the tears ran down her face from the heat and the brightness. She blinked them away, and when she opened her eyes again she was staring into a shaft of moonlight, and the cat had jumped down from the bed.

 

Ted and Patrick got up in the morning and found a note from Fence stuck to the inside of their heavy wooden door by no agency that they could discover. It peeled off neatly. It was folded in three and sealed with a blob of blue wax on which there was no imprint of a seal. Fence’s handwriting was round and earnest, like his face.

His sentences were more brisk and businesslike, and required Ted and Patrick to meet him after breakfast in the Council Room. This gave Ted an uncomfortable sensation in the stomach; but Fence had added a line at the bottom of the page to say that he would already have apprised Benjamin, Matthew, and Celia of Ted and Patrick’s true nature. Ted felt better, until Patrick said, “What do you suppose he thinks our true nature is?”

“Thanks a lot,” said Ted. Patrick just stood there on the stone floor in his white nightshirt, with his pale brown hair sticking up, and grinned at him.

“What are you so pleased about?” said Ted.

“I’m just looking forward,” said Patrick, serenely, “to being myself once in a while.”

“We agreed that we need to keep up the masquerade.”

“But not with anybody who knows.”

“Pat, come on, we’re only here on sufferance.”

“That’s right,” said Patrick. “Mine.”

Ted said, in as close an imitation as he could come to Benjamin’s abrupt tones, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

Patrick regarded him with the intent, blue, merciless stare he had used when he played Fence. Ted had never thought to ask him what he thought of the harmless-looking, untidy, abstracted reality that was High Castle’s resident wizard. He did not ask him now. “Let’s get dressed.”

“I hoped,” said Patrick, crossing the huge room to the six oak chests lined up against the wall, “that I’d never have to wear those damn stockings again.”

“Don’t we have any robes, like Fence and Benjamin wear?”

“I don’t want one like Fence’s,” said Patrick, rummaging. “I don’t want one at all. They’re probably as hot as the hose.”

“Well, it’s fall now. The hose won’t be so hot.”

Patrick looked over his shoulder, his hands full of embroidered silk, his face holding its most distant calculating expression. “It’s fall,” he said, “and it’s a hell of a lot warmer in here in the morning than it was all summer.”

“Maybe we burned Claudia up with her house,” said Ted, savagely.

“I hope not,” said Patrick. “What if the only way to find out what’s going on is to ask her?”

“No problem,” said Ted, still savagely. “You just go to the land of the dead.”

Patrick hauled the nightshirt over his head, flung it into the middle of their bearskin rug, and disappeared into the violet folds of the silk shirt, still with the calculating expression. He had lost track of what he was holding; he would never have put that shirt on if he had looked at it first. Ted put on one of the linen shirts Patrick had strewn on the floor.

“And ask her?” said Patrick.

“The ghosts don’t remember, unless you nudge them.”

“The sight of you ought to nudge her all right,” said Patrick, crossing the room and picking his jeans up out of the rocking chair. There was something strange in his tone. After a moment Ted recognized it as admiration. Admiration from Patrick was rare, and, just now, unnerving.

“When’s the council?” said Patrick.

“Eleven. We should go now.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Patrick, standing up abruptly. “I have to go check my watch.”

Well, thought Ted, Patrick would have to get the sword from Fence, who would say something to keep him in line. Ted waved him cheerily on his way and ran down to the Council Room. Randolph was there already, with the three girls. Ruth was wearing the sort of white flowing dress she had always worn in this country. Ellen and Laura had apparently, like Patrick, suffered a rebellion against the garments of the Hidden Land; they had put on their boys’ clothes from the battle.

Randolph was wearing blue as usual, although he was no longer of the school of Blue Sorcery. In the late morning light he looked, if not all right, at least better than he had. The table in front of him was piled with books and scrolls and maps. Most of them were dusty. Ted was nerving himself to ask what they were for when Celia and Matthew came in, also piled with books and scrolls. Matthew, a long, thin young man with red hair and a sardonic eye, looked at the children with an expression of uneasy reproach and said nothing. Celia moved briskly past him, dumped her burden on the table, and smiled. She was taller than Matthew; she had sleek yellow hair braided down her back, and pale eyes that might have been blue or green or gray, and a long, puckered scar on her forehead.

“Give you good morrow,” she said. “I am Celia, called Lady for my service to the last Queen; but in this company we dispense with sugary courtesy. Matthew is my husband, and the three yellow bees you’ve marked buzzing hither and yon making an upset are my children.”

There was a muddled silence. Ted collected himself and said, “Thank you. You know our names and we don’t have any sugary titles. Laura is my sister. Ruth and Ellen are my cousins. The Patrick with the superior smirk who isn’t here is their brother.”

Celia said, “You are welcome to High Castle.”

“I doubt it,” said Ruth. “But it’s kind of you to say so.”

Matthew grinned; Randolph actually looked at Ruth as if he were seeing her; Celia made a disapproving frown and then smiled too. “So,” she said. “Let plain speaking be the order of the day.”

There was another silence, less uncomfortable, broken by the arrival of Fence, who sat down in the chair to the left of the one that had been King William’s. Celia and Matthew sat down too, and Ted gathered his courage and sat in the King’s chair.

“Where’s Benjamin?” said Ellen. Ted knew that she was, as always, enjoying herself. He and Ruth and Laura, because they were not, would never have asked Fence that question.

“Recovering himself,” said Fence, sitting down and exchanging some look with Matthew.

“Is he terribly grieved?” said Ellen. She didn’t sound eager, but like somebody dispassionately in search of information.

“He is so,” said Fence. “More to thy purpose, he is wroth. A saith, if a should lay eyes on one of you before the day is out, a will break that one between his two hands.”

Ellen sat back abruptly. “We didn’t
do
anything.”

“You cozened and deceived him, and all of us; if there was a necessity in’t, yet thou shouldst give Benjamin some little time to see it clearly.”

“Can we
have
a council without Benjamin?” said Ted.

“Well enough,” said Fence. “He hath told me his desires; and given leave for all of you to accompany what embassies we have chosen for you.”

“Well, good.” Ted decided that this time he would out-wait Fence. Fence had called this council.

Fence said, “I have spoken also to Andrew. I’d thought to have some small difficulty in the persuasion, but he seemed well pleased to have thee, my prince, and Randolph also, in his train. So have a care.”

He looked at Ted until Ted nodded, and then looked at Randolph until Randolph put his head back and said to the ceiling, “Fear me not.”

Ted remembered, suddenly and unpleasantly, that there was another secret here they had not spoken of. Only the five children, Randolph, and Fence knew that Randolph had killed the King. Andrew suspected it, but had seemed unwilling to enter any accusation because of some plot of his, or of his sister Claudia, that he did not want to call attention to. Matthew and the other members of the King’s Council had all the information they needed to discover Randolph’s crime, but they had not discovered it yet.

“How,” said Ruth, rather diffidently, “did Andrew like the notion of having me along?”

“That pleased him also,” said Fence, “that thou, and Randolph and Ted, that he thinks are both besotted on thee, should be made to travel all together and endure one another’s company.”

“Do we have to keep up
that
masquerade?” demanded Ruth.

“In small things only,” said Fence. “A hasty withdrawing on thy part, or a gaingiving in thy look, those will serve.”

“I can hardly wait,” said Ruth, gloomily.

Ted could not look at Randolph, who had been betrothed to a girl he now knew was dead; and who had, when the present Ruth appeared, been treating Lady Ruth with distant courtesy and dancing every dance at the Banquet of Midsummer Eve with Claudia. Then Claudia tried to kill Fence, and Randolph avoided both her and Ruth. On the journey back from the battle, Randolph began, cautiously, treating Ruth as an affianced bride who had reason to be angry with him. Ted thought that Randolph hoped that Lady Ruth, who unlike their own Ruth had great pride and a hasty temper, would refuse to take him back after his dallying with Claudia. Randolph had told Ted that he did not, as a regicide shortly to be so proclaimed before the court, wish to encourage anybody to marry him. Ruth had been driven almost to distraction by this state of affairs. At least now both of them would be playing a part.

“Andrew,” said Fence, having considered Ruth and apparently decided not to comment on her remark, “doth require that those accompanying him be prepared to depart four days hence.”

“Oh, good,” said Ruth. “There’s an enormous Green Caves ceremony six days hence.”

Fence frowned. “’Twere better not delay our speech to Meredith,” he said. “She’ll need one can take thy place.”

“Give me today to poke around,” said Ruth, “and then you can tell her I’m resigning. I’m still in disgrace, you know, so the place she’ll have to fill won’t be very exalted.”

Fence nodded. “Well,” he said. “Matthew and I will also make ready to depart four days hence. We must devise some means of exchanging news.” His glance brushed Randolph and moved to Ruth. “What training hast thou?” he said to her. “Canst read a message in the grasses, or the stones along thy way?”

“Of a certainty I cannot,” said Ruth; she did not sound sorry.

“No matter,” said Fence. “We will send by music. Laura, wilt thou bring thy flute?”

“Yes,” said Laura, staring a little but seeming more pleased than otherwise.

“Dost thou play also?” said Fence to Ruth.

“Pretty well,” said Ruth. “On an ordinary flute.”

“Excellent,” said Fence. “Celia, who goes north with us, will aid Laura, and before we depart also will instruct thee.”