The Whim of the Dragon (47 page)

He finally sought out Laura, who was the only one of his relations not constantly occupied, and asked her to help him go over his information, in case she knew anything he didn’t.

“Why?” said Laura, sharply for her.

Patrick hesitated. It was irrational. But then, this country was irrational. “I said,” he said, “that I wasn’t going home again until I understood what was going on here. And having said it, I don’t think I can, until I do.”

“Oh?” said Laura. “So you aren’t planning to break the Crystal of Earth any time soon?”

Patrick stared at her. He was not in fact planning to break it at all; but he was not, either, planning to disabuse anybody who had it of the notion that he might be dangerous. “No,” he said. “Not any time soon.”

Laura grinned. “I remember what you said in Australia,” she said. “Princess Laura says, we should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling.”

“Carl Jung said that!” said Patrick, furiously.

“You might think about it anyway,” said Laura.

The King of the Hidden Land received a letter from Lord Andrew. Andrew had stayed behind in the Court of the Dragon King. This, Ted had managed to figure out, counted as the vengeance with which Ted was supposed to reward oath-breaking. And certainly to leave a man who feared magic alone in a court of shape-shifters was punishment enough, whatever Andrew had done or contemplated doing. The letter said nothing of all this, but contained implicitly the assumption that Andrew had been left as a liaison and observer.

Nobody knew what Chryse and Belaparthalion had said to the Dragon King, but he looked far from benign when they finished saying it. Looking thus, he had made to Ted a speech so flowery and convoluted that Ted had not understood a word of it. Fence, consulted during the journey home, said it contained a promise of explicit treaties of peace, and the forwarding of damages for the late war.

Andrew’s letter, opening with brisk formality, detailed the treaties. Ted would have to show them to Fence and Randolph. If they contained innuendos or double meanings, he could not find any. It might be that their language was so plain that it was subject to too many interpretations. It appeared that the Dragon King had agreed to leave the Hidden Land alone except in the case of three particular kinds of provocation, none of which sounded either possible or probable of occurrence, in return for nothing whatsoever. He was also sending north a staggering amount in jewels and gold and fine cloth. Ted wondered uneasily if the shape-shifters of that court could turn themselves into emeralds.

Andrew’s letter contained a postscript. “My lord Edward: My philosophy altereth daily in this place of shadows. My heart is as it was always; wherefore, my liege, I do humbly beg your leave to sojourn here yet a little time. If by my return your grace shall have departed to your other realms, take with you my good wishes for your safety and happiness.”

That was clear enough. He hated it down there, and if he could possibly manage it he was going to stay there until Ted and the others had gone home. If they ever did. And that “If,” of course, was the payment made by the Hidden Land. The Hidden Land had lost its royal children and received in return a motley and reluctant crew bent, if not on abandoning it, at least on making sure they had the means to do so. The Hidden Land had lost its dragon and received a patched-up composite capable of nobody knew what. None of these reverses had profited the Dragon King, but in that coin just the same the Hidden Land was paying for the Dragon King’s friendship. And after all, the Dragon King had gotten an afternoon’s amusement out of it.

Ted felt oppressed. The upper hierarchies of the Secret Country dismayed him. Everywhere you turned there were magical creatures of capricious ability whose power of distinguishing between right and wrong was less developed than a politician’s. Recent events had shown that one was not exactly at their mercy; but one was always having to watch out for them. For the first time, he thought he understood how Patrick felt.

He presented this fact to Patrick later that day, at supper. Patrick heard him out gravely, but all he said was, “Consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

It came to Ted, with a more than minor shock, that he was going to miss Patrick. Not his part in the game; not even his genius for improvisation. Just Patrick. And if he felt like that, how would Patrick feel when he went home—if anybody could ever go home—and all the rest of them stayed?

If all the rest of them were staying. Ted did not know what he was going to do about his parents. He had thought of sending them a letter by Patrick, who was such an unlikely witness to all these events that they might believe him. Patrick’s own parents would probably haul him off to a psychiatrist.

Ted took a savage bite of bread. He would worry about all this when they found the way out.
Tomorrow,
said Edward, not altogether approvingly,
is another day.

 

On the sixteenth day of the awful weather, which had been broken twice, once by a day of watery sunshine and once by an inexplicable thunderstorm, Ruth took her courage in both hands and went looking for Randolph.

He was not in the Council Room, where Ted and Fence had buried the long table in books and grinned vaguely when she poked her head in the door. He was not in his own room, though the door stood open and a yellow dog thumped its tail from the hearth, where the fire was bright and new. He was, inevitably, in Fence’s tower, so that by the time she knocked on the door her courage had leaked away with her breath but she was bolstered by the belief that he was not there, and as soon as he had failed to answer she could be comfortably irate and give up for the day.

“Come in,” his voice called.

Ruth shoved her hair back and pushed the door open. Randolph, in two cloaks and a blue velvet hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, was also immersed in books. He looked up with the expression of pleased inquiry he reserved for Fence; it slid into blankness and then into a pleasant neutrality.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” said Ruth. “But there’s something I can’t remember, and I’d rather ask you than Meredith.”

Randolph put his pen back into the ink bottle and slid his hands into his sleeves. His breath made faint clouds in the air.

“For heaven’s sake!” said Ruth. “You’ve got a splendid fire in your own room for the dog to get spoiled by.” She made for the fireplace.

“It burneth not except by Fence’s command,” said Randolph. “There’s a quilt, if you’re cold.”

“Never mind,” said Ruth.

“What’s the question?”

“Did you promise Meredith we’d be married before
the
year was out, or before
a
year was out?”

Randolph grinned. “A year,” he said.

“All right. Now look. What are the choices?”

“To send thee home, can we contrive it,” said Randolph. “To tell all to Meredith and beg her release us from this bond. To marry, and make the best of it.”

“If you send me home,” said Ruth, “I’ll be safe, but as far as Meredith is concerned, you’ll have broken your word.”

Randolph looked blank, and then extremely uneasy. “We might marry first,” he said. “Then send thee home. Thou wouldst be safe, as thou sayest.”

“But I’d be
married,
” said Ruth. “To somebody I’d never see again. So would you.”

Randolph shrugged. “For me, that makes no matter,” he said. “’Twould keep me from the plague of marriage for policy.”

“And you wouldn’t, you think, when I was gone, ever want to marry anybody for any other reason?”

Randolph was silent. The rain clattered on the windows and the wind thumped the tower like an irate child kicking a locked door. Ruth was cold. The scolding she had given him for sitting here with the fire out replayed itself in the middle of her mind and sounded sillier every time it went by.

“No,” said Randolph. He gestured at Fence’s footstool. “Wilt thou sit down and recover from the staircase?”

Ruth sat, because she felt shaky.

“Now,” said Randolph, “if thou thinkst to marry at home, I’d not prevent it. It was not what Meredith had in her mind when she did extract this promise; but ’tis possible to marry for a term only; for five years, or ten.”

“Five,” said Ruth, “would do me fine, and prevent my enacting some folly in my rash and splenitive youth.”

“Well, then, we’ll do’t so,” said Randolph.

“Not,” said Ruth, “that I have anybody in mind at home.” And that, of course, she ought not to have said. Randolph looked at her with a kind of thoughtful puzzlement.

“Have you not, then?” said Randolph. “And yet you said to the Dragon King that your heart was given already.”

“Isn’t it permissible to lie to one’s enemies?”

“Did you so?”

She had done enough lying to Randolph to last her a lifetime. “No,” said Ruth. “I didn’t lie.”

Randolph pushed back the chair and stood up. Ruth watched him with trepidation. He looked like somebody who was about to do something foolhardy for the sheer joy of it. His face was not happy, precisely, but held rather the beginnings of wildness: Ellen, aged seven, just before she threw her favorite doll into the pond because the thought of Patrick’s face when she took up his dare held more attraction than the doll did. It was not a matter of spite, but the choice of a brief delight over a longer, settled content. Glory over length of days, thought Ruth suddenly, and pressed her hands together, hard.

Randolph walked over to the window and contemplated the darkness. Ruth could hear the little hiss of the torches burning. He was, no doubt, burying his crazy impulse, whatever it was. In the end, she couldn’t stand it and spoke to him.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

Randolph turned and leaned on the window frame. Above his dark head the carved story of Shan gleamed dully. “Faintheartedness,” he said. He walked across the room, and with no particular flourish, knelt on the floor a yard away from where she sat on the stool. “Let’s put this matter on some better footing,” he said. “Ruth. If I should ask thee, wouldst thou marry me?”

Ruth’s breath clogged in her throat. “Faint heart,” she said in a strangled voice, “never won fair lady.”

Randolph smiled. “Wilt thou marry me?” he said.

“So much,” said Ruth, “for the faint heart. Now.”

“The fair lady,” said Randolph, “is here.”

“Wait,” said Ruth. “I’m sure you can make pretty speeches. Don’t do it yet. I’d hate them to go around and around in your head for weeks afterward. Randolph. I would love to marry you.
Don’t say anything.
I am sixteen years old and I have a brain full of turnips. I don’t know when people marry in this country, but in mine they do it at twenty, or later.” She paused because she was out of breath.

Randolph had not moved. He said gravely, “I’m fond of turnips.”

“Oh, go to!” said Ruth.

“I understand you,” said Randolph. “It may be wise. Four years would settle many matters. We would marry, to fulfill our word; you must then do as you will.”

“I could go to Heathwill Library and study something,” said Ruth.

Randolph said, “An we do find the means to send you home?”

“I was thinking of staying,” said Ruth, “anyway.” There. She had said it. What would Patrick say? She added, “If they’ll have me. I just wish you could meet my parents.”

“So,” said Randolph. “This rubble being cleared, what’s thy answer, lady?”

“I’ll marry you,” said Ruth.

The fireplace bloomed suddenly with yellow light, and warmth flowed over them. “I am sorry I was so long,” said Fence’s mild voice. “Ted and I have found what we sought.”

Ruth and Randolph looked at him. Fence, his arms full of books and a too-large blue cap on his head, peered at them from under it with a gaze as sharp as the Nightmare Grass. He said to Randolph, “She is too young.”

Randolph said, “Four years.”

Fence smiled, and dumped the books on the nearest chest, and looked at them again. Ruth couldn’t have moved, but she thought Randolph’s knees must be getting sore.

“Shall I give you solitude,” said Fence, “or a celebratory glass of wine?”

Ruth looked at Randolph, and her bones turned to water. “Wine,” she said, “an it please you.”

 

It was the seventeenth of November, and still raining. The Council Room was full of books, but somebody had cleared enough chairs for the assembled company. They left Fence the chair at the head of the table, but he did not take it. He was blazing with excitement, as none of them had ever seen him. When they were seated, and almost before they were quiet, he began to speak, without preliminaries.

“Were any of us who sought this knowledge,” he said, looking at Patrick, “of an experimental temper, we had had it long since. But we have burrowed this month in Shan’s writings, and Melanie’s, and then asked again for Ted and Laura’s account of how they did arrive here, in the Mirror Room, sans any sword.” He looked at Ted.

Ted said, “Purgos Aipos is an old name for High Castle.”

“Oh, good grief!” said Ruth. “You put your hand on the mirror, and you say, ‘Apsinthion’; and you come out in the stark man’s house.”

“And then,” said Patrick, sourly, “you can just take the first flight to Australia. No problem.”

“Hold a moment,” said Fence. “Patrick; Ellen; Ruth. Hath your house any name?”

They looked at him blankly. Their parents didn’t name things. Ted said, “My father calls it the Coriander Castle.”

“What?” said Ruth.

“Coriander,” said Ted, “stands for hidden merit.”

“He would,” said Patrick. “And it’s going to work too; you know it.”

“When shall we essay this?” said Fence. “Need you a few days’ grace, to find if you will go or stay?”

Nobody answered him. Fence said, “You must know that you are, every one, most heartily welcome to stay.”