Dragon Rescue (20 page)

“Pleased, I suppose,” muttered the ice-hued Dragon, nodding his head as cordially as he ever did to anyone. “Lovely weather you’ve got here, Clem! Could be colder, however, for my liking.”

“Wait a few days, at most,” said Clem with a dry laugh. “It’ll get almost as cold here as it does where you come from, Ice Dragon. My old friend Retruance Constable spoke of you, of course.”

“We were attempting to fly over the pass to Overhall,” explained Peter. “But the beast’s wings got too heavy with ice and forced him—

and us—down here.”

“Unlike the Constables,” said Hoarling in his own defense, “I cannot generate internal heat to melt ice from my wings.”

“What can you do, then?” asked Clem, who was really quite interested.

“Freeze just about anything I breathe on, if I choose to,” snorted the Ice Dragon. “Turn anything...or anyone...to solid ice.”

He blew on a patch of tarn that had melted in the afternoon sun.

It at once shivered, blurred, and solidified.

“Impressive,” admitted Clem, “although I fail to see its usefulness when you live in a place where it’s below freezing most of the year anyway.”

Hoarling chose to ignore his comment and sat down in a convenient snowbank instead. Actually, the thought had occurred to him in the past. Why should an Ice Dragon live in a land of ice?

“Wait until morning, what with this change in the weather,” Clem advised Murdan. “By noontime, when we reach the summit, you should be able to fly without danger. If not, he looks capable of plowing our way with ease.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” said Murdan, shaking his head.

“I had,” muttered the Ice Dragon. “Hoping nobody else would think of it.”

Clem and Murdan ignored the beast’s boorishness. “We’ll make camp here among the alders and get an early start in the morning,”

decided the latter.

“Children? Out here in this terrible winter wilderness!” cried Peter, catching sight of Gregor and Thomas for the first time when he turned to greet Lady Mornie politely. Mornie was cool but proper, as they had met before at Morningside.

“Our sons—Gregor and Thomas Clemsson,” she said proudly.

“My lads do fine as fish hair in this lovely country. They’ll fairly keep your ears from frostbite with their chatter alone.”

Murdan, who had spent the previous night huddled miserably under a giant fir before a tiny and rather smoky fire, was amazed when, within an hour after their meeting, the woodsman had assembled a clean, dry, and cozy camp in a sheltered nook between tumbled boulders the size of houses.

Supper was soon bubbling merrily on the fire. The smell of fresh-baked biscuits filled the air and even the sullen Plume moved closer, licking his lips while still trying not to be noticed by the newcomers who knew him of old at Overhall.

After the generous and hot supper, spare fur robes furnished by the Broken Land trapper, and a sleeping place of soft pine needles out of the worst of the night’s cold, the joined parties set out at dawn greatly refreshed, to climb drift-clogged Summer Pass.

Despite his dire grumblings, Hoarling broke their way through the deepest of these heavy drifts, and swept lesser accumulations away with his batlike, silvery wings. Where, in sunny places, the snow turned to deep mush, he blew his frosty breath on the path, refreezing the slush for firmer, if slippery, walking.

By high noon the party had topped Summer Pass and were looking down on the tops of clouds concealing the hills and plains to the south.

“Now will you tote us?” asked Murdan of Hoarling. “No snow falling and it’s all downhill to Overhall.”

“It’s pretty hot! Suppose we call our deal quits and I go my way north again,” the Ice Dragon suggested. “Or you could increase my fee.”

“I’ll do no such thing!” shouted Murdan indignantly. “I’ve had plenty and enough of your lousy, un-Dragonly carping and complaining, icy beast! If you’re not prepared to carry us to Overhall—well, just say so and we’ll proceed afoot, and save the fee you’ve already extorted from me!”

“Now, now, now, now!” sputtered Hoarling, taken quite aback in surprise. Few ever spoke thus to any Dragon, of course. “Calm down, fiery old Historian! I’ll do my best to carry you onward. No need to get angry! But even if I wanted to, I can’t carry all these new people, the woodsman and his lady wife and the tireless little boys who’ve been playing jump rope with my tail all morning, not to mention the horses.”

“I suspect he’s telling truth,” sighed Peter.

“We’re headed to Ramhold anyway,” said Mornie. “You must fly quickly to aid the King, Lord Historian. Clem and I and the boys will ride on, just as we originally intended. We’ll be perfectly safe, I assure you. My husband knows how to make travel easy, even in the worst conditions.”

“As we’ve already seen, Lady Mornie,” said Peter, bowing deeply to her.

“Let’s go on, then,” said Hoarling impatiently. “The sooner we reach this Overhall place, the sooner I can get back to the comforts of my ice cavern.”

Before they parted, Clem laid a fire in a sheltered cleft and warmed the last of Mornie’s good soup. The boys toasted bread from the day before on cleft sticks, offering some to the Dragon in apology for playing games with his tail.

When they’d all eaten, Murdan followed Peter and his sour syco-phant up onto the Dragon’s broad back, turning to wave good-bye to Clem’s family.

“I’ll send word to Ramhold as soon as I can, so you’ll know whether to come to Overhall or go on to the canyon,” Murdan called. “Stay cozy with Talber for a few days. I’ll send a Dragon to fetch you, if we need you.”

Clem and Mornie waved farewell and the boys jumped up and down with excitement to see the Dragon fall off the steep mountainside in a long, shallow glide, heading south and east beyond Summer Pass before turning due east toward Overhall Castle.

Chaper Thirteen

Back to Sinking Marsh

A soldier carefully stamped his cold feet on a narrow and slippery walkway atop tall Middletower, sixty-five feet above the inner bailey, and shouted the news to the sergeant of the guard, below the wall. The sergeant in turn leaned over the inner parapet and relayed the warning to Graham, seated on Gugglerun’s curbing and picking his teeth after an early dinner.

“Dragon a-coming!”

Graham shouted, “Man the battlements!” and sent a runner to tell the Queen and her party, just finishing their evening meal in Great Hall.

“Which Dragon, I wonder?” asked Manda, putting down her dessert fork.

“Furbetrance, I suppose,” said her stepmother. “Returning from Lexor. We’ll get news, at last!”

Tom was out of his seat and through the door when a second call came from above.

“Another
Dragon! A second Dragon! From the west!” they heard the tower-top sentry scream.

“Not Retruance,” said Manda to the Queen. “Certainly not Arbitrance, would you think?”

She caught up with her husband when he paused on the steps outside.

“Here’s Furbetrance, at least,” cried the Librarian.

The younger Constable brother bumped to a stop in the center of the courtyard.

“I don’t know who he is,” Furbetrance shouted, even before he was asked. “Stay under cover, all! I’ll check him out.”

He crouched, then leapt back into the air, roaring his wings and climbing steeply to meet the unknown beast coming from the west.

“Whoever it is,” said Tom, shading his eyes against the westering sun, “he’s carrying passengers. He doesn’t have the coloration of the Constables, do you see? Silver and black, it looks like. Hard to tell in this light.”

“How exciting!” cried Beatrix, who had followed them out into the bailey, trailed by the Ffallmar children and Rosemary with little Princess Amelia. “A stranger Dragon from goodness knows where! Can Furbetrance stop him? Is he planning to attack?”

“Trust old Furbetrance, Stepmother,” Manda told her. “But just in case, maybe we’d better take the children back indoors.”

Between them, the ladies herded the wildly excited young ones back into Great Hall. Young Eddie of Ffallmar insisted on peering up through the narrow clerestory windows, hoping to catch glimpses of the airborne Dragons.

“Maybe they’ll fight!” he shouted, pressing his nose against the glass. “Oh, no! Look, Aunt Manda! Mama! They’re circling each other almost overhead!”

“This is Hoarling,” called Murdan to Furbetrance. “You may have heard of him.”

“Both good and not so good,” replied Furbetrance Constable with some distaste. “My brother bespoke him some time back about keeping an eye on the Rellings, didn’t he?”

“Not the Rellings, actually,” said the silver-and-blue Dragon, eyeing the Constable Dragon warily as the two circled each other slowly, high over Overhall Castle. “He asked me to watch this exiled lordling Gantrell in case he tried to sneak back into your precious country. He never did, and I fulfilled my commission.”

“Huh!” snorted Furbetrance with disgust. “It never occurred to you we’d like to know about the Rellings’ attack?”

“Well, actually,” admitted Hoarling, looking rather sheepish, “I was still in summer sleep when they made their move. I
did
send word to Lexor, you know. The King was on vacation but the message went to someone named...Chamberlain, I think it was. When I went to see where Gantrell was, I found him—and the sour little Accountant and the Historian, too—on an iceberg.”

“That much is true,” agreed Murdan. “He warned Lexor and rescued us, all three, from certain death by freezing or drowning.”

“Come along, then,” said Furbetrance, relenting. “Better let me go first, however. There may be some itchy bowstring fingers on Overhall’s walls.”

When pleased greetings and shouts of surprise had subsided, explanations and exchanges of experiences were demanded by all sides.

Tom, Manda, and the Queen congratulated the Historian on his narrow escape. Furbetrance was given the floor—so to speak, as his body remained outside Great Hall—to report on the siege of Lexor.

“But first,” insisted Graham, who had immediately taken Peter Gantrell and Plume into custody with a platoon of archers, “what’s to be done with these fine so-called gentlemen? By royal law, Peter Gantrell must be held for reentering the kingdom without the King’s permission. And I imagine Lord Murdan has
some
questions to ask the Accountant.”

Murdan waved a hand and said, “No time for that now. Put ‘em up...in Aftertower...but not with the Relling officers. I promised Lord Peter I’d speak for him, when his case came before the King.”

“I accept imprisonment willingly,” Peter said quickly. “It’ll be so nice to be warm and dry once again, I’d agree to almost anything.”

“Put them to Aftertower, yes,” said Beatrix. “Keep them close, Captain Graham! I deem it’s a matter for the King to decide when he returns from battle.”

“Grand Blizzardmaker double-crossed Peter,” Murdan explained to Tom and the rest as the exiles were being led away. “It seems to have changed his attitude, somewhat.”

“I don’t trust him, nevertheless,” snapped the Queen. “We’ll be wise to hold him and his nasty little flunky close until we can sort this out properly.”

“Now, about Lexor?” reminded Furbetrance, mildly.

“Yes, yes! Speak of the King and Ffallmar,” commanded Beatrix, dismissing Peter from her thoughts at once.

“His Majesty and I found your husband, Lady Rosemary, at the head of seven thousand troops of levees, marching on Lexor. The Relling host was drawn up about the walls of the capital, evidently preparing to storm the city. All is well! I was able to give Ffallmar some badly needed intelligence after flying over the Relling lines to spot their weak and strong points.

“Early yesterday, Eduard and Ffallmar attacked them from the southwest and west. Walden saw us coming and sent a sortie in force from within the city. I helped as best I could—much fierce roaring and fire-belching smoke and flame—and the Relling allies to the south of the city withdrew after only a brief fight.”

He waited for a rumble of approval and applause to die down.

“The main Relling force was in the northeastern quadrant, however, and they resisted for a few hours longer, but surprise and the unseasonably warm weather proved too much for them.

“When I left Lexor early this morning the Carolnan army, which had been billeted inside Lexor, and our levees, too, were preparing to chase the Northmen, molting their furs all the way, toward Frontier. If they aren’t rallied, they’ll be forced to flee into the cold wastelands over the border. They won’t be able to mount a counterattack before spring, if then!”

He paused while his listeners cheered and applauded even more.

“And Grand Blizzardmaker?” asked Tom when the hubbub had subsided.

“Nowhere to be seen,” Furbetrance admitted dolefully, reaching for a hogshead of ale to wet his throat. “He must be in at the after guard, somewhere.”

Said Murdan, “This Blizzard-faker, or whatever they call him, was War Chief of the invaders, promising his men and allies all sorts of looting and pillage and...well, you know what that sort wants.”

“I wouldn’t be too quick to trust Uncle Peter,” warned Manda. “He had a hand deep in this from the very beginning, I’m positive.”

“The King and Ffallmar will see to it the Rellings and their friends are kept headed north,” promised Furbetrance. “As instructed, I has-tened back because of the other matter.”

“Indeed! My poor child!” cried Beatrix.

Tom took Manda by the hand and beckoned to Murdan, who was talking to Mistress Grumble, the Overhall housekeeper, about supper.

“Nothing frozen or even chilled, dear lady,” he was saying. “I want hot! Hot! Pepper soup! Spicy wine! Steamship round of beef, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” said Grumble. “Puffy-crisp cinnamon pudding and dilly carrots?”

Murdan sent her off to begin supper and followed the Librarian and his Princess to where Furbetrance’s great head was resting on a rug just inside the door.

Manda said, “We must leave for the south at once.”

“After supper!” begged Furbetrance and Murdan in unison.

“We’ve had several very long days of short commons, you know,”

the Historian added.