The Golden Cage (13 page)

‘Your Majesty, Queen Beulah has married a commoner, a novitiate of the Order of the High Ffrydd. Rumour at Candlehall is she already carries his child. She has made him Duke of Abervenn.'

‘That won't be popular with the people, I'm sure. What of her army?'

Prince Dafydd sat quietly to the side of his grandfather's throne, watching as the odious Duke Dondal delivered his latest report from the border. Tordu stood nearby, his sour face describing eloquently his utter disdain for the duke. Dafydd's father, Prince Geraint, slouched in a chair behind a table topped with charts and
papers, eyes closed, apparently asleep though Dafydd knew better.

‘Peasant forces are mustering at Dina and Tochers, sire,' Dondal replied. ‘Not many at the moment, but they're being trained by the accursed warrior priests. And a call has gone out to all the provinces. She's building a considerable force.'

‘Which will need to be fed, equipped, clothed. She can't hold an army of any size together for more than a year. Beulah's young, impulsive and foolish. Let her throw her peasant army at the passes. No one has ever succeeded in breaking through before.' Tordu's words were clipped, impatient. Much like the man himself. ‘We have nothing to fear from her, and she has everything to fear from her own people. The way she treats them, there'll be an uprising within months.'

‘You're forgetting that she's an adept at magic fully the equal of Inquisitor Melyn himself, uncle.' Geraint opened his eyes and stared at the palace major domo. ‘And she's just as skilled at manipulation. Take this boy she's married, for instance. Yes, he's a commoner, but that works in her favour. She knows she needs an heir as soon as possible, what with young Dafydd here knocking up her little sister. If she takes a commoner, the people love her for coming down to them, and the nobles grumble but see no favouritism. They'll stay on her side for now. Especially after what she did to Angor.'

‘And her army?' The king leaned forward, his attention fixed on his son. From his seat Dafydd could see how the movement pained the old man. His joints were swollen and stiff, the fingers on his hands twisted and claw-like.
Ballah had been unwell for a long time, but lately his infirmity had begun to show more obviously. For now his reputation and sheer presence were enough to keep people in line, but how long would it be before the jackals began to gather around the throne?

‘Melyn will assemble enough men to attack through either of the passes, or perhaps both at once,' Geraint said. ‘If he can train them sufficiently well before the autumn, then we can expect him to move several weeks before the first snows. He won't want to retreat in the depths of winter or risk having his supply trail cut.'

‘Why doesn't he train them over the winter and launch his attack next spring?' Dafydd asked.

It was Tordu who answered. ‘An army that size eats like a glutton and drains gold from the treasury faster than the most profligate of kings. Beulah will have to tax her merchants to the point where they feel they're working for nothing. She'll have to pull almost every able-bodied man from the provinces to fight for her, leaving the old and the very young to tend the animals and bring in the harvest. If she has two big camps, then it won't be long before her soldiers start dying of disease. It's one thing to die fighting for your queen, quite another to drown in your own phlegm on some litter in a hospital tent. No, if she tries to keep her forces together over next winter, they'll rebel against her. She has to mount her attack this autumn. And like her predecessors before her, she will fail.'

‘So we just sit here and do nothing?' Dafydd asked. ‘Is that not a cowardly thing to do? Shouldn't we be taking this fight to them?'

‘The
passes are no easier to get through from this side, Dafydd.' Geraint leaned forward, rolling out a large parchment map of the Gwahanfa ranges and the country to either side of the mountains. He stabbed it with a blunt finger. ‘A large force, an invasion force, would get bottled up here. You wouldn't need a very big army to stop us dead, and the sort of numbers Beulah's gathering would wipe us out.'

‘But what if there wasn't a large force waiting for you? What if they'd been drawn away?'

‘Beulah's scouts will know if we make a feint to one pass, to draw the bulk of her army from the other,' Geraint said. ‘And anyway she could easily defend each pass with half of her forces. A diversion won't work.'

‘I agree,' Dafydd replied. ‘The two passes are too easily watched. But there are other ways to create a diversion. An army of skilled mages could break through from Tynewydd and take Tochers. I've seen the lie of the land around there; if you control the city, you control the pass. An invading army could march through unchallenged. In less than six weeks we could be at Candlehall.'

‘You have an idea for this diversion, don't you?' King Ballah shifted in his throne to look Dafydd in the eye. The old man might be frail, but he still radiated power. Dafydd felt the brush of that terrible mind against his thoughts.

‘Yes, Your Majesty, I do.'

‘In all my years I've never heard of such a thing. Not even in our histories. For a dragon to eat another sentient creature. It would be like cannibalism. No, worse than that. It would be feral.'

The lower levels of Castle Betel were gloomy and
damp, lit only by yellow flames from widely spaced torches. Melyn stood in a storeroom that had been turned into a makeshift cell; all the others had doorways too narrow for Frecknock to pass through. She had been brought in under cover of darkness, following the queen's train in a wagon. He had wanted her presence kept secret to avoid disturbing the people. Given the rumours circulating and the general state of unease in the province, it had turned out to be a wise precaution.

‘Something killed five of my warrior priests and ate two of them along with at least twenty other people they were meant to be protecting. Are you trying to tell me the creature that did this wasn't a dragon?'

‘I don't know, Your Grace. I didn't see it. I just know it's not the kind of behaviour I'd expect of our kind.'

Melyn seethed, as he always did in her presence. His every instinct urged him to kill her, to cut off her head like he had that of Morgwm the Green. But one small part of him held back. She knew so much, had so much innate skill, and she was so afraid, so attached to her life she would do almost anything to avoid death. Unlike most of her kind she was relatively young and inexperienced. He would break her spirit, if she even had one, and force her to divulge the secrets of her skill.

‘Tell me about your kind.' Melyn settled himself on to a squat barrel still sitting in the storeroom several feet away from where Frecknock sat in that oddly dog-like manner dragons had, her tail curled around her heavy feet. That was what made her look so docile, he supposed. It didn't fool him; he knew she would dissemble as much as she could get away with.

‘What
do you want to know?'

‘How many of you are there out there in the forest?'

‘I have no idea. None, I suppose. You killed us all.' Frecknock's voice was not accusing, not sorrowful either. It was just matter of fact, as if she were discussing one of Seneschal Padraig's drier treatises on logistics. It put Melyn on edge.

‘And what about the rest of Gwlad? Where might this creature have come from? What brought it here, of all places?'

‘Again, Your Grace, I don't know. Before you came, before you … Well, back then I thought our village the only dragons left in the whole of the Twin Kingdoms. I'd heard of a few living down in Eirawen, and it's said that in Llanwennog they parade us like circus animals, but those of our kind who chose the long road are surely all dead now. I called and called for someone to come, but all I got was you – a man. Your warrior priests have hunted us so long. Never would I believe one of us capable of what you describe. It can't be a dragon you're talking about. It's just so wrong.'

‘Do you think your queen a liar?'

‘Of course not.' Frecknock seemed to shrink in on herself.

‘Then what would you say this was?' Melyn nodded to one of the silent warrior priests who had accompanied him to the storeroom. The man stepped forward, carrying a wrapped bundle, which he laid on the ground in front of the dragon. ‘Open it up. Tell me what you see.'

Frecknock stooped, seeming almost to sniff the package before gently picking it up. She unwrapped the cloth
with slow, methodical movements. Melyn studied her face, looking for any telltale signs on those alien features. Dragons were difficult to read, but not impossible, and he had spent a lifetime studying them.

‘By the moon!' Frecknock shrieked, letting the bundle fall to the floor with a dull slap. The severed hand and forearm of the beast that had attacked the queen rolled over, claws clenched into a fist as if it were trying to pull down the ceiling.

‘This … this came from the creature?' She gestured towards the limb but seemed disinclined to touch it. ‘How did you … ?'

‘His Grace the Duke of Abervenn cut it off. I think he might even have killed the beast had it not turned tail and fled.'

Frecknock looked again at the grisly remnant, only this time she leaned forward, peering closely.

‘Could I possibly have a little more light?' she asked.

‘I know full well your capabilities. Make your own.'

‘Thank you, Your Grace.' Frecknock lifted her hand and a sphere of white flame appeared in her palm. She held it over the forelimb, pinched between finger and thumb, then released it to hover exactly where she had placed it, casting a harsh light over her task.

Bending down further, she took up the arm in both her hands, lifting it to her nose and sniffing it deeply from one end to the other.

‘It is definitely a dragon,' she said. ‘I'm sorry for ever doubting your word, Your Grace. But I still don't understand how such a creature came to be in the woods here. Nor have I ever encountered a dragon so large. Look.' She
held the forelimb alongside her own extended arm and even Melyn had to admit she had a point. The talons alone were as long as her entire hand outstretched; the muscle where the limb had been severed was almost as thick as her thigh. She put it back down on the cloth and re-wrapped it, then reached up and extinguished her light as if it were no more than a candle. For an instant, as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Melyn thought he saw her bathed in a thin skein of light, as if he had seen her form in the aethereal, but this disappeared as quickly as it had come.

‘So where did it come from? Where might it have gone?'

‘I really don't know, Your Grace. This is far beyond anything I've ever encountered before. A creature this size is something from legend, but the dragons of our tales never ate people. We never ate people. I can only assume this is something wild, a distant ancestor somehow brought here. A dragon in form, but mindless, soulless, a true beast.'

‘Then perhaps you can explain this.' Melyn reached into his pocket and pulled out a heavy silver band, its circumference large enough to fit over his hand. He threw it at Frecknock, who caught it easily, even in the poor light. ‘We found it on the creature's middle finger. Looks to me like a signet ring.'

Frecknock turned the band over in her hand, feeling the figures let into its surface.

‘Your Grace, may I try something?'

‘What did you have in mind?'

‘A simple conjuring. There may be a message within this ring for those who know how to read it.'

Melyn stared at the dragon, trying to decide whether she was up to some trickery. As always, her mind was almost impossible for him to fathom, though he could sense something of her thoughts. She looked on the world in so different a way, he found himself not knowing where to begin. And yet there was an underlying curiosity in her that reminded him of nothing so much as a classroom full of eager young novitiates. She truly had no idea where this other dragon had come from, and its behaviour appalled her in a profound way, but she was determined to solve the mystery.

‘Very well,' he said finally. ‘But don't do anything to upset your guards.' He nodded to the two warrior priests, who responded by conjuring their blades of light and moving closer. Frecknock nodded her understanding, then bent to the ring, holding it in one palm, sweeping the other a few inches over it and muttering in Draigiaith under her breath. Melyn felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise at the sound. It seemed to be right inside him. And then he could hear other voices speaking in the language of the dragons.