Once Upon a Marigold (17 page)

Just when he was about to acknowledge that it wasn't, there was a pop and then a
boom!
and the cell door blew out into the corridor.

"Wow!" Ed said.

Cate and Bub dashed out of the cell, barking excitedly.

"Quiet!" Christian hollered after them, and then lowered his voice. "Quiet," he whispered. "We have to be very sneaky now."

"Hey!" called the guard from the next cell. "Let me out, too."

"I don't think so," Christian said. "We don't want anybody running upstairs and blowing the whistle on us. Where are the keys to the dungeon doors?"

"Why should I tell you?" the guard pouted, turning his back. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the fact that his breeches hung down a little too far in the rear.

"Think!" Christian implored Ed. "We've got to get out of here and stop that wedding. Something's gone wrong. I know it, or Marigold and the king would have been here long ago to let us out. Where would the keys be?"

Without a word, Ed pointed to a hook on the wall
by the door. There hung a ring with many keys on it, right where Swithbert had tidily left it.

"Oh," Christian said, snatching the key ring and beginning to try keys in the big lock. Once, he dropped the ring and couldn't remember which keys he'd already tried, so he had to start all over. "Rats!" he muttered. "Rats, mice, and rodents!"

The last key on the ring was the one that finally turned in the lock.

"Hooray!" he said. "Now let's get the machine."

They wheeled out of the cell the cumbersome machine Christian had constructed, at one point having to turn it on its side to get it to fit through the doorway.

Dragging it up the steps to the dungeon doors was an even trickier maneuver. Christian was torn between the need to hurry and the need to go slowly enough not to damage the machine.

While they labored, the imprisoned guard wheedled, "Aw, come on, get me out of here. I can help you. I'm strong. I can get that thing up the stairs. What are you going to do with it, anyway? Looks like something put together by a blindfolded committee."

That did it.

Christian, who was very proud of this contraption whether it worked or not, wouldn't let that guard out
now if the building were on fire. Well, okay, if the building were on fire. But only then.

Ed was only minimally more helpful than the dogs, so Christian did most of the heavy lifting himself, finally muscling the thing into the wide corridor outside the dungeon. The corridor was empty, lit with burning torches in wall sconces.

"Nobody's around," Christian said. "They're not expecting any trouble from here. They must all be up at the wedding. We've got to find a way to the outdoors without being noticed."

"Who'd notice a caravan like us—two dogs, a strange machine, and a troll?"

"What about me, the mad scientist?" Christian asked.

"All right, a mad scientist, too," Ed added. "Who'd notice that?"

"Nobody, I hope," Christian said, pushing his machine down the hall.

Marigold, in her overloaded wedding gown, stood back from the arched entrance to the flagstone terrace, her hand on her father's arm. The wedding guests were seated on the terrace in little gilt chairs, dressed in their dazzling finest, waiting. Calista, Eve, and Tatiana, Marigold's attendants, had already gone down to the altar, which was set up at one end of the terrace under a bower of summer flowers. They stood looking back toward the archway, their expressions anything but joyful. Magnus, on the other side of the altar, exhibited a remarkably similar expression and was unable to keep his knees from knocking rapidly together.

The chamber orchestra played on and on, and the
guests began to shift in their seats. Where was the bride? This was the main event, and they were anxious for it to begin, to see if the wedding lived up to the lavish, no-holds-barred celebrating of the past couple of days. If they noticed how glum the bridesmaids looked or how agitated the bridegroom was, they put it down to wedding jitters.

Marigold and Swithbert would have stood there in the archway indefinitely if Olympia, carrying Fenleigh under her arm as always, hadn't come up behind them and said, "We're starting a new tradition.
Both
parents are walking the bride down the aisle. Let's go."

She took Marigold's other arm and practically dragged her and the king out onto the terrace. The music flared and the guests stood, craning for a look at this unprecedented arrangement.

Olympia smiled and nodded as she went down the aisle, singling out especially influential personages for her notice. You never knew when you might need a favor, and believe it or not, people remembered even such apparently trivial things as a special nod.

Marigold and Swithbert weren't smiling or nodding at anybody. They were moving like mechanical toys, stiff and expressionless. Marigold's mind whirled with anxiety. She could think of no other solution but to throw herself over the parapet and down into the
river, and she knew she could never do that. Not only would it break her father's heart, it would leave him at the queen's mercy. If going through with this wedding meant being shackled to Magnus for a lifetime—even a very short one—she knew she had to do it to protect her papa.

Swithbert was feeling like a failure. How had he allowed things to come to such a pass? He thought he'd been a decent king, but apparently he'd only been a weak one. Without his even noticing, Olympia had taken over, getting rid of most of the old familiar retainers at the castle; managing their daughters' lives; turning his soldiers suspicious and paranoid, ready for a fight when there was no good reason for one. Now he couldn't even protect his beloved Marigold from this tangled situation he'd allowed to come about.

But wait. Maybe he could! When it came time for him to answer the question, "Who gives this woman in marriage?" he could say he wouldn't. Then he sighed. Olympia would be standing right beside him. She'd say he wasn't of sound mind, everyone knew that, and, of course, they
both
gave up Marigold to Magnus, so proceed with the ceremony, please.

The opulently robed bishop beamed and began to intone the solemn and frightening words of the wedding ceremony: "in sickness and in health ... until
death do you part." Swithbert had never noticed how many ominous words were in the marriage vows—
sickness, death, put asunder.

Suddenly Swithbert heard murmuring behind him, spreading like a wave, becoming louder and louder until it was pierced by a scream and the sound of little gilt chairs toppling over. He turned and saw the wedding guests stampeding out of the way of ... of ... what the heck was that, anyway? It looked like a giant dragonfly, with wings that flapped ponderously up and down, sometimes more quickly than at other times. It weaved, dipping and rising at the edge of the parapet, disappearing below the rim and then coming into view again, seeming to struggle to make it over the terrace wall.

The next time it rose, Swithbert could see that it wasn't a real bug—it was mechanical. Powered by—could it be ... dogs?—running on a kind of treadmill belt in the center. When the dogs slowed, the flying machine dipped; when they ran faster, it rose. Behind him he heard Marigold cry, "Christian!"

And Christian yelled back, "You said the only way you could get out of here is if you had wings! I've come to get you and take you away!"

And overlapping Chris's voice was Olympia's yelling, "Get me Rollo! And all his archers! And hurry up!"

The wedding guests were panicking, trying to escape by squeezing through the arched doorway to the staircase, pushing and shoving and stepping on each other's ermine-trimmed capes and trailing trains in a most unroyal way.

As the guests rushed down, Rollo and his soldiers were running
up
the stairs, trying to reach the terrace. The collision was a terrible mess, but as usual, the group with the weapons won. The soldiers raced out onto the terrace, leaving behind them a trail of upended royalty sprawled on the stairs and on each other.

Among all the fairies in attendance, only Queen Mab, with her lousy sense of direction, didn't make it down the staircase but remained flitting haphazardly from here to there around the terrace.

"Shoot that ... that ... thing!" Olympia commanded, as the flying machine edged up over the parapet again. The archers quickly arranged themselves in two ranks, one standing and one kneeling, while Rollo bellowed at them.

The flying machine sank again and then, with one strong burst, came heaving over the wall just as the archers let their arrows fly. Arrows bounced off some parts of the machine and pierced others as it crash-landed onto the flagstones.

The dogs jumped off the treadmill and ran yapping hysterically (Hecate) and baying bravely (Beelzebub) straight at the soldiers. Ed untangled himself from the wreckage and ran, too, but in the other direction, down the whole long length of the terrace.

"Get him!" Rollo screamed. "He's a murderer!"

Several soldiers took off after him, two of them hindered by dogs attached to their pants legs. Even so handicapped, a young long-legged soldier could outrun an old short-legged troll any day of the week, and so they did.

While the soldiers grappled with Ed and the dogs, Christian was lying in the crumpled remains of the flying machine—an arrow protruding from the center of his chest.

Marigold screamed and ran for the wreck, stopping only to throw off her heavy crown and veil, and to rip off the voluminous train of her ridiculous wedding gown.

"Christian!" she cried, climbing over the broken flying machine. She slid to her knees and took his head into her lap. "Speak to me," she pleaded. "Tell me you're all right."

He moaned but didn't open his eyes.

"Papa!" she called. "Help me!"

"Stay right where you are, Swithbert," Olympia ordered.

"Or what?" he asked her. "I'm the king, in case you've forgotten. And it's high time I started acting like it."

"Well!" Olympia said huffily, and stalked away.

"Denby! Go for the castle doctor," the king ordered.

"I believe he's at the foot of the stairs, tending to all the people who fell down them on the rush to get out of here."

"Well, go get him anyway. I'm the king. He has to do what I say."

With that, Denby headed off and the king made for the pile of broken parts that contained his daughter and Christian.

Nobody paid the slightest attention to Calista, Eve, and Tatiana except for their husbands, who had rushed up in the midst of all the commotion exclaiming, "Where have you
been?
"

"Oh, Papa," Marigold cried when Swithbert reached her. "Do you think he'll be all right?"

"I'm sure he will," Swithbert reassured her, although he wasn't sure at all. An arrow in your chest didn't seem like a very hopeful sign.

"Did you see, Papa?" Marigold asked, her eyes shining. "He was flying! He was coming to fly me
away! Don't you think that's amazing? Don't you think that's wonderful?"

Swithbert waited for a moment before he asked the next question, afraid of the answer. "And why do you think he did that, precious? Why did he go to so much trouble and endanger himself so much? I know
I
wouldn't want to travel in anything that depended upon dogs for its locomotion."

Marigold didn't even need to answer. Her cheeks pinked prettily, making her look like the blushing bride she evidently wasn't going to be.

Christian groaned again just as Denby returned with the doctor.

"Step back, everyone," the doctor said, carrying his bag full of leeches, bloodletting tools, and trepanning instruments. "Let me have a look at him."

Marigold didn't move. "You can look at him just fine while I stay here." She held Christian's head firmly in her lap with both hands.

The doctor shrugged and then knelt, while Swithbert removed himself. Under the bridal arbor stood Olympia and Magnus. Swithbert heard Magnus ask, "Does this mean the wedding is off?"

"Must you act like such an idiot, Magnus?" Olympia said, and strode away to have a look at Ed,
pinned down by several soldiers. The dogs scampered around the group, snapping and growling and eluding the detail that Rollo had assigned to capture them.

"What's this about a murderer?" Olympia asked sternly. "Don't we have enough problems without that, too?"

Fenleigh took one look at Bub and crawled up onto Olympia's shoulder, as far away as he could get from that mouthful of big teeth.

"But this troll
is
a murderer, Your Majesty," Rollo said. "Remember, years back, when Prince Teddy and Prince Harry's older brother was lost in the forest and never seen again? And everybody decided he'd been eaten by wild animals because no body was ever found? Well, I discovered the boy's clothes in a basket in the troll's cave. He must have done the kid in. The clothes are old and musty, but there are no animal teeth marks on them."

"And how do you know those are the little prince's clothes?"

"Because of the pendant I found in the pocket of his suit. It's a golden phoenix. Everybody knows only the royalty of the kingdom of Zandelphia are allowed to wear that emblem."

"I didn't kill anybody!" Ed bellowed.

Olympia leaned over him, with Swithbert behind her. "Then what about that blue velvet suit?" she asked. "And the phoenix charm?"

"Phoenix, schmoenix—what do I know about phoenixes? Is that what it is? I thought it was just a weird-looking bird. And the suit's his, too; he said he never wanted to wear either one of them things again."

"Who? Who said that?" Olympia demanded.

"Well,
Christian.
Who else?" Ed said. "I found him in the forest when he was just a little boy. I wanted to send him home, but he said he didn't want to go. He said he'd tell everybody I kidnapped him if I tried to make him leave. So, well, he just stayed."

"Why, you're right," Queen Mab, who was still flitting around, put in. "I knew he seemed familiar when I first met him with you in the forest, but I never expected to see Prince Christian with a pushy old troll, so I didn't make the connection."