The Whim of the Dragon (2 page)

“Flee the fire,” she said. “After the time it takes to boil six kettles, I will requite this barbarous rudeness.”

They hissed like a gallon of water spilled on a giant’s griddle, and were gone. The smoke grew thicker. She could not remember how many cats were in the house, and cursed the humor that made them all black cats. She called each cat’s six names, and in a little time had all nine of them climbing her skirts. No cat that had lived with her feared fire. But they were indignant, and disposed to be intransigent. She crouched and gathered them in, grinning. So those children had broken the mirrors in her house. Who would break the mirrors in her mind?

She spared a moment to look into one that offered no escape: not for her, and not for those she looked at. She saw Fence and Randolph, in High Castle, in its Mirror Room. They did not know what its mirrors could accomplish, and in any case were occupied with other matters. It pleased her to see them standing there as the outline of their doom took shape, surrounded by salvation and thinking it ornament.

Randolph was thinner than when she had danced with him at Midsummer Eve, his face sharper, his green eyes darker, his wild black hair limp and his bewitching voice hardly better than a croak. He looked as if he had been ill a fortnight.

“Truly I felt such nudgings and nibblings as thou ex-plainest thus,” he said, “but I tell thee, Fence, not once did I feel them regarding King William. That foul crime I did of my own will.”

She had never seen Fence look like this. Nothing she did could make him suffer so. Randolph could make him suffer worse, and, before the end, no doubt he would.

“Will you, then,” said Fence, “tell me why?” His round green eyes and innocent face beneath the untidy brown hair were not amusing, and his shortness was no cause for contempt. He was formidable.

“That you might be here to reproach me,” said Randolph. He suffered Fence’s look and countered with mere steadiness. He seemed to be bearing some pain so great that he dared not attend to it. She had never seen Randolph look so, either.

She reached out a hand, and frowned. Her mind-mirrors were but doors or windows; they were not, as the mirrors of her house had been, instruments of her will. She could work no nudgings and nibblings from here.

“Better far that I were dead, having had no doubt of thee while I lived,” said Fence, still looking up at Randolph.

“What? Dead, the truth undiscovered?” said Randolph. The mockery in his voice was mild, but she felt it in her bones like a curse. So, it seemed, did Fence.

“You made this truth!” shouted Fence. “Spare me your convolvings.”

“I had thought to,” said Randolph, and the mockery now was leveled at himself. “Edward, I thought, had killed me long since.”

“Edward,” said Fence, as though he still did not believe it, “is dead. You are the Regent.”

“I am a regicide.”

“A perfect jest, then,” said Fence. “Having killed King William, his heir dead already, you must take William’s place.”

“That is madness.”

“No,” said Fence, “it is justice.”

She laughed. She would not have thought of this. Had those children done it? Both men started at the laugh; Randolph drew his dagger. She chuckled, in her mind only, as they snatched back the tapestries covering the mirror. Their arts could not discover her, unless she continued so careless.

“An the very air laugh at us, is that not justice also?” said Randolph.

Fence’s mouth quirked, but he said nothing.

“Fence, it is not justice to make me king. What of the country? I am a poison as potent as that wherewith I struck down William, the only antidote thereto being my death.”

“If that were all, all would be easy,” said Fence. “You are not the poison. Your act is that. Though you die and enter the shadows and forget what you have done, yet you have done it, and all our history to come is poisoned thereby. At least stay and see your handiwork.”

“Stars in heaven,” said Randolph. As he had in the event, he looked far more poisoned than had the dying King.

“The lesson of Melanie was ever bitter to your mind,” said Fence. “Learn it now with your heart. Life gained by treachery is a pain sharper than death.”

In her fury at this statement, though it was an old axiom in the teachings of the Blue Sorcerers, she almost spoke aloud to them. But a brisk blow on her cheek brought her back to the burning house, where an unhappy cat resented her neglect.

“Quite right, small one,” she said to it. “All attend.”

She found in her mind a mirror that was a door, and sent three cats where they would be most useful. She found the second door, and pulled herself and the other six cats through it, to her House in the Hidden Land, four leagues from where Fence and Randolph turned and turned in the maze she had made for them. She must consider now whether it was still possible to bring them to the trap at its heart.

T
HAT was good,” said Laura mournfully, and licked an escaped drop of ice cream from her elbow.

“You don’t sound like it,” said her brother. The lock of hair on the right side of his face was sticky with chocolate ice cream, but he managed to look and sound superior just the same.

“I thought,” said Laura, who was used to this, “that maybe I wouldn’t like ice cream anymore.”

“You wanted the Secret Country to leave its mark, huh?”

“Well—”

“You just look at that scar on your knee if you want to see a mark,” said Ted.

Three small children pushed between them, and they moved slowly away from the drugstore and down the dusty summer street. Laura had never before thought it possible to be tired of summer.

“Let’s go home,” said Ted.

“I’m not used to it yet. If we get home before dark they won’t be
too
mad.”

“Oh, my God!” said Ted, stopping dead before a gas station.

“What’s the matter?” Laura said, looking at him carefully. It was hard to concentrate on his expression. He looked so peculiar in his too-short jeans and his too-tight shirt, with the thick, light brown hair down past his shoulders. Laura supposed she looked peculiar too. Her shorts fit well enough, but her blouse was too tight across the shoulders now and too short to tuck in.

“Shan’s Ring didn’t work,” said Ted, in a tone of outraged disbelief. “We’ve been gone for
months
.”

They
had
been gone for months, struggling through an imaginary world come gruesomely to life. Hence their old clothes no longer fit them, and Ted’s hair was too long.

“Looks like summer to me,” said Laura, taking in with a gesture the violent blue sky, the deep green of the oak and maple trees, the daisies blooming in the yards of old houses, the drooping peonies with their petals showered to the ground.

“Remember when we left?”

It seemed a very long time ago. Laura scowled. Sneaking down the stairs, she had fallen over her shoes; the refrigerator in the moonlight had looked like a polar bear; they had argued over whether, since they had deserved to be sent to bed without supper, they could take any food with them now; they had argued over whether it was right to bring a flashlight to the Secret Country, where such things were unknown—

“It was
night
,” said Laura.

“And it’s not night now. Shan’s Ring was supposed to bring us back within
five minutes
of the time we left.”

And from the scanty and anonymous evergreen shrubs that failed to decorate the ugliness of the gas station, a cardinal whistled its ascending song.

“I
told
you,” said Laura. From a distance of perhaps three feet, careful to make no sudden move, she addressed the cardinal. “Mysterious servant of unknown forces; minion of the Secret Country. What’s going on?”

“They can’t talk!” said Ted, with an enormous and hurtful scorn.

Laura looked sideways at him and decided that half of it was fear. She was frightened herself. “Can you take us to someone who can tell us what’s going on?” she said to the bird.

It flew halfway down the street and alighted on the wrought-iron arm of a bus-stop bench.

“Come on,” said Laura. She grabbed Ted’s hand. “How else are we going to find out what’s wrong with the magic?”

“We’re
finished
with magic,” said Ted.

The cardinal began to sing again.

“Maybe,” said Laura, in the manner of the Secret Country, “magic hath not finished with us.”

This had sounded merely clever as she said it, but watching Ted hear it she thought it had an ominous ring, and wished she had kept her mouth shut.

“You know what Shan said,” she offered. “If say No you will, then say it as late as may be.”

“Where did you get
that
?”

Laura gulped. It had come from the back of her mind, the part that knew more than she, and recognized things she had never seen. “I guess Princess Laura read it somewhere,” she said.

“You’ve still got Princess Laura? Because Edward’s gone.”

This was extremely disconcerting. Laura had Princess Laura still in the back of her mind, and Laura thought the cardinal meant something more than natural. Ted no longer had Edward, and Ted thought the cardinal was just a cardinal. “So,” said Laura, with a hideous feeling in her stomach, “I better go by myself.”

Ted stared at her and gave a most unpleasant laugh. “Serve you right if I let you.” There was a monstrous pause. “Feel free,” said Ted.

The cardinal hooted at them and rose fluttering from the bench. Laura was not sure she could move. She looked at Ted. He was looking at the cardinal, with about the same expression as he had worn long ago when he found out that Laura, reading his enormous copy of
The Mysterious Island
in the bathtub, had dropped it in the water.

“By the mercy of Shan,” said King Edward, between his teeth, “may we not all rue this day. Come on, Laurie.”

The cardinal had an upsetting understanding of traffic lights, sprinklers, children playing softball in the street, unsteady fences, unfriendly dogs, irate bicyclists, and the other hazards encountered by two people following a bird through unfamiliar territory. It led them through the little business district where they had bought their ice cream, past streets of huge old houses and huger older trees, through empty back yards and down crooked alleys, across a busy street, under a freeway, down a clean, white, empty road and into a housing development so new that half the houses had no lawns yet. The houses were very large, somewhat odd, and extremely expensive-looking. The cardinal shot past them all, waited in a little stand of trees the bulldozers had missed, and with one last triumphant whistle perched on a mailbox and folded its wings.

Ted and Laura panted up, sweating and red-faced. They stared past the cardinal over a long slope of blowing grass, at the top of which stood a house. It was like a stack of wooden blocks that somebody had brushed against: untidy and lop-sided, but not actually fallen over. Its windows were round or triangular, its winding flagstone walk absolutely bare.

“Gah!” said Laura. “What an ugly house!”

“Lucky for us, maybe,” said Ted. “You liked the Secret House. Remember who lived in
that
.”

Laura looked at the mailbox, which said, in gold letters, APSINTHION. “The name’s ugly too,” she said.

“Maybe the Apsinthions won’t like ours, either,” said Ted.

They walked up to the blank wooden door and pushed the button beside it. Inside the house they heard a melodious but disorganized rattle, as if somebody had poured a handful of marbles into a glass jar.

The door opened inward, and a man from one of Laura’s visions stood smiling at them. No, magic had not done with them.

Beside Laura, Ted jumped. Laura went on staring. The man, glimpsed so briefly in a vision she had hoped she wasn’t having anyway, really did, under this more leisurely examination, look like Fence and Randolph. He was short, as Fence had been. He had Fence’s straight brown hair, better cut; but Randolph’s sharper face. The long hand that held the edge of the door was Randolph’s. The grin was Fence’s, and so were the round green eyes. Randolph had had almond-shaped eyes, usually narrowed. In Randolph’s face, the eyes of Fence looked less ingenuous.

Stop thinking about Fence and Randolph as if they were dead, Laura told herself. She looked at the man’s eyes again for reassurance. They held a tiny spark of red. Perhaps, Laura thought hopefully, it’s just the way the light hits them. But he wore a red robe too. In style it was like the ones they had grown accustomed to at High Castle. But it was red, and so were his boots. Nobody at High Castle had worn red, except Claudia.

The man watched them looking him over, and the glint in his eyes deepened. He was still smiling.

Ted cleared his throat. Laura wondered how long they had been staring. “My lord,” said Ted, “the cardinal brought us.”

“In his name, be welcome,” said the man, and he stood aside to let them in. His raspy voice was only vaguely familiar.

Ted took her by the hand, and they walked boldly past the man into his house. Pale polished floors stretched all around them, gleaming in the light from high windows. Out of the corner of her eye Laura saw red cushions, and black, and white; and dark wooden tables.

The man in the red robe shut the door behind them with a hollow boom. Laura, starting, saw Ted jump too.

“Who are you?” said the man in red.

Ted hesitated. “Edward Carroll,” he said, and, defiantly, “crowned King of the Secret Coun—the Hidden Land. This is the Princess Laura, my sister, as royal as I.”

The Princess Laura, alerted by his tone, worked this out and grinned.

The man in red stood still, as Fence would do if you startled or intrigued him. “The name of the royal house of the Hidden Land,” he said, “is Fairchild.”

“So it is,” said Ted.