The Whim of the Dragon (38 page)

The others were milling around, shaking the blood back into their feet, yawning, and scanning the sky. Laura looked up too, but there were only two crows. Chryse stood still, her head cocked as if she were listening for the beat of scaly wings.

Fence was watching Chryse. The irrational dread of Laura’s dream clutched at her stomach. There was something that Fence must not find out; that was what that dream had told her. Fence had intimated to them all there were things Chryse ought not to find out, that they should say as little on any subject as they could get away with. Both these circumstances and all the natural inclinations of her character told Laura to keep her mouth shut. But she thought also of her talk with the unicorns, long ago it seemed now, when they had hinted to her in their cheerful way what might be the consequences of a failure to shout abroad every vision she had.

“Chryse,” said Laura, not caring if it was rude. “What color is Belaparthalion?”

“Red, curdled with black,” said Chryse, readily.

“Somebody’s got him,” said Laura. “I saw him. He’s in a big, glowing golden globe.” She paused to disentangle her tongue, thinking, with a saving lightness, say
that
five times fast. “In a high room somewhere; a house, I think, not a castle. At least, the walls aren’t stone. And he says, ‘To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’”

“Does he so?” said Chryse, slowly, and with a very unpleasant intonation. “Melanie’s elder brother said so also.”

“Chryse,” said Fence, very gently, “have a care.”

He and Chryse looked at each other, and Celia and Matthew looked at the two of them.

“I know where to seek him,” said Chryse, suddenly. She took four strides for the edge of the clearing, and paused. “I can carry one,” she said.

“Laura?” said Fence. “ ’Twas thy vision.”

It seemed impossible to refuse. Well, Laura thought, it hadn’t killed her last time. She took a step toward Chryse, and considered again. The worst thing about being a coward was the risk that you would choose the wrong moment to stop being one.

“I’ll go if you think I should,” she said to Fence. “But Ellen would
like
to go; and you, or Matthew, or Celia, might be a lot more use.”

“But not Patrick,” said Patrick; his voice was unperturbed, but he had chosen to say something.

“Send Patrick!” said Ellen. “He’s the one who
needs
it.”

“Patrick is incorrigible,” said Matthew. “I’ll go, Fence.”

“Lady?” said Fence.

And Chryse, the omnipresent glint of humor magnified and shining like the sun in every syllable, said, “Patrick likes me well. Let him come and be witness.”

I
F Claudia is Melanie,” said Randolph, rubbing the thumb and finger of one hand under his eyes, until they met at the bridge of his nose, which he pinched vigorously. He dropped his hand, looking no better for the exercise.

Ruth had lost track of the number of times it had been said. She sat, with Randolph and Ted, back on the floor of Claudia’s diamond-paned sun porch, because it was cleaner there, and warmer, and because they hoped the windows might still show them something useful. Andrew was ostensibly exploring the rest of the house, also in search of something useful. He had not ranted anymore; he had not even asked quietly for some explanation. Perhaps the King and the dead children had told him something. Ruth was glad to be out of his presence. She thought his docility in the face of such discoveries boded no good.

Randolph had not finished his sentence. Ruth decided to sum up for him. “She’s about five hundred years old,” she said, “infinitely accomplished in Sorcery, marvelous wise in the ways of the unicorns, and bears a grudge against the Hidden Land and everyone in it that you never have explained properly but that we will grant to be weighty. What else?”

“She’s not Andrew’s sister,” said Randolph.

“Unless Andrew’s not Andrew,” said Ted.

“He might really have been the villain all along,” said Ruth, cheered. Then she scowled. “But I doubt it. He rings true, if you know what I mean. There was always something sleek and odd about Claudia, but Andrew I believed in.”

“Yes, so did I.” Ted pushed the thick hair out of his eyes. “So Andrew’s just one more victim.”

“Well, he might still be a spy for the Dragon King.”

“Okay, leave him on the suspected list. Back to Claudia. Randolph, if she’s so old and has such great sorcerous knowledge, why’d she have to apprentice herself to Fence and Meredith?”

“Her knowledge is of the Red School, now dispersed,” said Randolph. “Each school hath its secrets that the others know not. One of the dearest goals of Heathwill Library is to abolish this secrecy, but they have not achieved it yet. Also, there surfaceth from time to time new knowledge; easier to pry it from some teacher of the art than to seek it out laboriously oneself.”

Ruth looked at him. There was an edge of malice and disillusion in his voice that you had to expect, but that disturbed her just the same. Randolph and Claudia had kept company for almost a year; he had presumably been fond of her, and he was no doubt thinking now of all she had pried out of him: not only the knowledge, but the trust, the time, the confidences which remembering would scald the heart once he knew to whom he had so blithely given them. Damn Claudia, thought Ruth.

“Why did she lock Belaparthalion up in a golden globe?” said Ted.

“He’s a protector of the Hidden Land, with Chryse, against the Outside Powers, and what other capricious forces may measure a ladder ’gainst our bulwarks.”

“But she didn’t lock Chryse up somewhere?” said Ruth.

“Who can say?” said Randolph.

“Well, she hadn’t, as of our bargaining for Ted’s life.”

“Melanie is an old enemy of the unicorns,” said Randolph. “And the unicorn is cannier than the dragon.”

“
That’s
what’s been bothering me!” exclaimed Ruth, smacking her hand down on Claudia’s hardwood floor. “I thought Melanie was dead. I thought Belaparthalion killed her because she broke her word to Shan.”

“Oh, he did burn her house and she inside,” said Randolph. “So the story goeth in some quarters that he did kill her. But look you, Melanie’s original crime was that she did conspire in the death of a unicorn, and that meaneth immortality. She’ll die when she wills it, and the Lords of the Dead will have her.”

“Oh,
splendid,
” said Ruth. “Why—”

Randolph held up a long hand, smiling. The smile did not reach his eyes with their dark circles underneath, nor his voice. “Ask not me,” he said. “These answers will come only from Claudia.”

“How do you propose to find her?” said Ruth.

“Why should you want to find her?” said Ted. “Why should she want to answer any questions from us, and how could we make her?”

“For the first,” said Randolph, still smiling, and in a lighter voice, “these events tend all to a purpose; and when it is accomplished, she will find us. For the second, I give less than the scrapings of an indifferent banquet for what she wants; and for the third, th’event will show us.”

“You’re just giving in?” said Ted.

“She will not come out,” said Randolph. “We must needs walk in where we may find her.”

“If the purpose is to kill us all,” said Ted, hollowly, “won’t the opportunity for questions come too late?”

“If that is the purpose, aye. But I think ’tis not so. She’ll want a fate that hath some relish in’t.”

He sounded as if he were talking about a recipe, not his own fate. “How can you sit there and say things like that?” said Ruth.

Randolph looked at her. She could not tell if he was trying to frame his answer properly, or only to decide whether to answer at all. She remembered what Fence had said to Ted, in response to a similar question: “What is the matter with you? We will do our best in the battle, and live or die as it falls to us.”

But Randolph, when he answered her, did not quite say that. “I do not hold my life,” he said, “at a pin’s fee. As for yours, my dear children, I hold them something higher. But that, see you not, shall serve very well.”

Ruth had some trouble catching her breath. “Don’t you dare sacrifice yourself for us,” she said at last, in rising tones. “We’re not your dear children! And what the hell good do you think our lives would be to us without—” She stopped, horrified. Ted was staring at her. Randolph merely looked resigned; he either had not understood or didn’t care.

“Isn’t this a little premature?” said Ted, also rather breathlessly. “Let’s just wait ’til we get there.”

“Get
where?
” snapped Ruth, venting her anxiety and all the hideousness of her new discovery on her cousin’s innocent head, and feeling a fresh flood of irritation because she could not keep herself from doing it.

“We have an embassy to accomplish,” said Ted.

“Andrew doesn’t look in any case to accomplish anything,” said Ruth. “Lady Ruth must have been a—” She stopped for the third time. “Boil my brains!” she said. “Boil them and mash them and serve them up for turnips, for it’s damned well all they’re good for!”

Randolph actually laughed, which was perhaps more alarming than everything else. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said. “She’s naught to me; but do you school yourself in Andrew’s hearing.”

“Was she ever anything to you?” asked Ruth; and wished she had stopped for a fourth time, before she ever started the question.

Randolph said, “What was she to me in thy game?”

Ruth was so relieved to be spared any direct consequences of her own question that she answered at once. “Not a
great
deal,” she said. “We didn’t pay much attention to that part of it. The romances were just flourishes that we put in because they’re expected in stories.”

“I thought,” said Ted, “that Lord Randolph had a soft spot for Lady Ruth that he didn’t indulge because he thought it would be better if she married Edward.”

“As well he did not,” said Randolph, apparently exclusively to Ted, “for she was not what she seemed.”

That
was an uncomfortable remark, thought Ruth, no matter how you interpreted it. “If this discussion isn’t going to get us anywhere,” she said, “why don’t we go see how Andrew’s doing?”

Ted and Randolph got up promptly. They all went upstairs, past the three landings and their little square windows, each having a border in red stained glass alternating with clear and with an occasional clump of grapes or wildflowers, to the wide hallway lined with open doors on the fourth floor.

In this house, those open doors led to rooms full of books. In the largest of these, they found Andrew, leaning on the window frame as if he would have liked to climb out and fall four stories. Randolph thumped the woodwork and Andrew turned around.

“What have you found?” said Ted. Andrew gestured at the table, which was covered with coarse paper densely written over. “Melanie’s journals,” he said.

Ruth noticed that he did not call her Claudia. Maybe he was good at facing facts, once you had put them where he would have to notice them or fall over them.

“Have you read anything useful?” said Ted.

He walked into the room; Ruth and Randolph followed. Randolph sat down on a red velvet sofa with its arms carved like dragon’s heads. Ruth wished she could see a good honest lion, or even a griffin, for a change. She looked at the sofa again, and perched herself on a ladder probably intended for reaching the upper bookshelves. Andrew was still leaning in the window, which was convenient, thought Ruth, because it meant his face was in shadow.

Randolph pulled out the grapefruit-like object they had used to light their way to this house, and said to it, “Strike a light or light a lantern.” It lit up, and the gray, neglected room was suddenly warm and pleasant, as if the writer had just stepped out for a cup of tea.

Ruth, startled into a burst of laughter, completed the quotation. “Something I have hold of has no head!”

“Oh, no,” said Ted, laughing too. “I hope that hasn’t happened here.”

“It had a happy ending,” said Ruth.

“More of your fictions?” said Andrew.

“How do you know about that?” said Ted.

“She hath writ much of them, and of you,” said Andrew. “It seems that you are ignorant and presumptuous, but not evil.”

“But the fictions?” said Ted.

“The idea did give Melanie some little trouble,” said Andrew. “But she did gnaw at the nut till it did crack for her.”

Ruth marveled at how dryly he spoke. He sounded like Patrick expounding materialism; except that Patrick loved materialism, and Andrew must hate what he was saying. But he had come to understand it in the few hours he had been in this room. And after that display in the land of the dead, you could not accuse him of having no feelings. You had to admire him.

He said, “This is the way of things. Both your fictions, and all our sorceries, have their origins in the same impulses: the desire to make things; the lie told not to scape consequences, but as its own art. Now in your country, these impulses do grow to fictions; but in ours, mark you, they do grow to sorcery.” Andrew made a sound that was probably supposed to be a chuckle. “We know our wizards young, by the greatness of their falsehoods. Wherein we who call them liars only have our excuse.”

“That seems very odd to me,” said Ruth, taking refuge from her thoughts in this theoretical discussion. “Don’t children play games of make-believe? And how do you ever
teach
them anything, if everything you make up has to come true?”

“It has not so,” said Andrew. “The games of children trouble no one; they may have the strength, but they have not the skill. As indeed the five of you had not the skill, though Melanie saith, you had the strength of five Shans amongst you. You troubled her sleep for ten long years fore she did see that you were not within the boundaries of the world.”

“And Melanie, I suppose, had the skill,” said Ted.