Dragon Rescue (16 page)

“They’ve surrounded poor Lexor!” Rosemary told the King. “The Rellings, I mean. According to the last pigeon-post message we’ve had from your Lord High Chamberlain, the city is yet holding fast...at least as of yesterday morning. They’ve plenty of food and water, according to Walden. The townspeople are manning the wall along with the Royal Guard and maintaining good discipline.”

“Good old Walden!” exclaimed the King with a relieved laugh. “How he’s improved! He used to be such a stuffed shirt, wasn’t he, sweetheart?”

The Queen nodded agreement while handing the sleeping Amelia to Rosemary, who snuggled her down with her own brood in the pleasant nursery atop Middle Tower.

“But, Father, what of Murdan?” asked Manda with concern. “He went ahead alone to Lexor and has since disappeared!”

“So it seems,” said the King, shaking his head. “Certainly Walden would have mentioned the Historian if he were safe in the city.”

“What must we do now?” Beatrix asked after they’d dined and were only waiting for someone to suggest an early bedtime.

“I’ll follow Ffallmar to Lexor,” decided the King. “The levees will expect me there, although Ffallmar of Ffallmar Farm will do perfectly well without my interference, I suspect. Sometimes a King must act the figurehead and let the people who know best work. You and Amelia should stay here, my dear. Overhall is the stoutest and safest castle anywhere in the kingdom.”

“I’ve visited here before,” the Queen reminded her husband, politely covering a deep yawn. “It’ll be as great a pleasure as possible under the circumstances, my dear! Isn’t anyone going to say, ‘Let’s to bed’? I can hardly keep my eyelids from falling shut!”

Eduard saw her abed and already sleeping soundly before he went to look into the nursery for a moment, and to walk the battlements, inspecting Murdan’s orange-liveried Overhall Guard where they stood their posts.

Captain Graham came to him and saluted gravely.

“Bad news, sire!” he announced. “They say Lord Murdan was captured by Rellings and imprisoned on an island in midst of the northern Blue!”

“Who sends this evil news?” cried the King.

“A Relling sergeant was captured by General Ffallmar’s scouts during a sortie from the southwest Lexor gate, sire. He said he was the one who captured my master, and that this leader of theirs, Great Blizzard-maker or whatever, condemned him to death by starving or freezing on an island of ice.”

The two, captain and King, stood in silent commiseration for a long while. A cold wind whipped the castle’s banners and pennants out straight to the east. The chill wind smelled of approaching snow.

“The others can wait until morning to learn of it,” decided the King at last, sadly. “Anything else?”

“There’s a report that a force of Northmen marches this way, sire, having outflanked Ffallmar...or missed him entire. No confirmation of that yet. We’re ready to defend Overhall. We’ve plenty of food and fod-der. Water’s no problem, thanks to Gugglerun. My entire force is on alert, as you’ve seen. I vouch for their courage and skill!”

“Of course you do!” cried the King, clapping him on the back.

“Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what comes. I was hoping to ride to join Ffallmar this morning, but this will hold me here for a while, I suppose. Somehow I’m not worried about Murdan, though. He’s surely a match for a petty Relling tyrant.”

“I believe so, too,” Graham agreed. “Lord Ffallmar and his main troops cannot reach the capital before tomorrow afternoon, however.

They’ll have their work cut out for them, especially if it snows yet again.”

“Ffallmar can relieve the city if anyone can,” the King said stoutly.

“No news from Sir Thomas and Retruance Constable, either, which means, I’m afraid, that they haven’t recovered your son, Lord King. If word comes, shall I awaken you?”

“Only if it’s good news,” decided Eduard, for he was a sensible man. “I need a good night of sleep more than evil tidings about which nothing can be done, save worrying.”

Graham saluted and watched him go stumping wearily down the stone stairs to the courtyard below.

“Keep your eyes peeled, you dairy-maid swains!” he barked in his best parade-ground bellow to the lookouts atop the three towers and along the encircling walls.

To his second-in-command he said, “Wake me if they see or hear anything. Anything at all!”

He clumped down the stairs to the outer bailey, making a mental note to have them swept clear if new snow fell during the night, and headed for his own bed. No good was served by staying awake and worrying, as the King said. Graham had long experience at soldiering to back him on that.

Despite his determination, he lay awake worrying for a long time before sleep captured him at last.

rs

Hoarling, who functioned best in subfreezing weather and winds, stopped twice on his way across the north slopes of the Snow Mountains to allow his passengers to eat, relieve themselves, warm hands and feet over a fire, and stretch their weary legs.

“Only a little bit better than that iceberg,” Murdan complained, pounding his hands on his forearms, trying to work up some warming circulation.
“Brrr!”

“If you’d been chained on that iceberg for fourteen days as I was,”

said Peter Gantrell, still chained and huddling close to the fire of dry twigs and pitchy pine-wood—lots of light and fragrant smoke but too little heat, unfortunately—”I’m just beginning to feel my toes again, as it is.”

Plume nodded glumly but made no comment. He’d avoided speaking to or even looking at Murdan, his former employer, shrinking from contact even when they rode the Ice Dragon’s slippery back scales.

“You people just don’t appreciate a pleasant season when you see it,” said the Ice Dragon, chuckling. “We’d better get up and going again, friends. It’ll be blizzarding here in half an hour. The farther west we go, the heavier snow we’ll meet. Not that I mind, but poor visibility could cause us to miss our way.”

The first night they flew until the Dragon complained his wings were growing weary. They sheltered until dawn in a deserted, half-ruined village surrounded by a sturdy palisade of upright logs.

Murdan recognized it as Plaingirt, once the stronghold of Gantrell’s hired soldiers, the Mercenary Knights. Inside its abandoned log huts and halls it was almost as cold as the outside air, but at least there was no wind and plenty of wood to burn.

The last of the Historian’s meager supply of bread had long since been consumed, but, poking about in the kitchen storehouse and pantry, Peter found a half sack - of wheaten flour and a moldy green smoked ham.

“These must be three, four years old!” protested Murdan.

“It never gets warm enough up this high on the mountainside, even in summer, to cause food to spoil very fast,” the Dragon explained with exaggerated patience. “It should be perfectly edible for you lesser types of life.”

“I remember how to make bread of a sort, from my campaigning days with the old Gantrell, your father, Peter,” the Historian said.

“Scrape the mold off and the ham will be quite good, I expect.”

He set the Accountant to work on the latter task while he tried his hand at campfire bread—without leavening, of course. Once pared, sliced, and warmed on sticks over the coals, the ham, along with the hot, flat bread and melted snow to drink, made a fair supper.

The fire in the log hall’s stone fireplace allowed them to spend the night in some comfort while the storm howled outside and dumped another foot of white on everything in sight.

Peter Gantrell did his share of menial chores despite the dragging chain: cutting wood, tending a boiling pot, or clearing away the clutter left by the Mercenary Knights when they left. Plume, on the other hand, stayed far from doing anything at all, unless ordered to it by Murdan or Peter. Then he performed his assigned tasks with disgust written all over his pinched face.

“I really can’t figure that man out,” muttered Murdan after he’d sent the Accountant out to fetch a bucket of clean snow to melt for drinking water. The village well had a half foot of ice plugging it. “His life was saved from the ice as surely as yours—and mine, for that matter—but he doesn’t seem very grateful for it, does he?”

“You know him better than I,” Gantrell said with a shrug. “He was ever very slick, subservient, and callow, I thought, when I had deal-ings with him...er, before.”

He meant “before” his defeat and exile, but refrained from saying what they both knew very well.

Plume returned and sullenly hung the bucket of snow over the fire to melt. When it was steaming, all three took turns washing their grimy hands, face, and feet. It was much too cold for further bathing.

Razors and soap had been taken from them by their Relling captors.

The Ice Dragon needed little rest, as he slept in glacial ice caves all summer, as suited his subspecies. He was nowhere to be seen when they arose in the morning.

Murdan shook his head in disgust. At least here they were warm, had shelter and some food, and wouldn’t have to swim to safety across a stormy sea. If the Dragon had deserted them, they could still hope to make their way back to Overhall in time.

But as they finished eating the last gristly chunks of ham, hard bread, and plain, hot water, Hoarling came swirling down from the overcast sky and poked his head through the front door of the hall where they’d spent the stormy night.

“Just off checking up on our Rellings,” he explained, accepting a smoking ham hock to crunch between his powerful teeth.

“Are they near, then?” asked Peter, startled by the thought.

“No, m’lord! The nearest Northmen are in a rough circle about the stockaded fort at—Frontier, isn’t it? I’m a stranger here myself.

South and east of here, it is.”

“Frontier that would be,” agreed Murdan. “We’ll continue on to my mother’s Old Place, if you please, Master Ice Dragon.”

“I keep my bargains,” said the Dragon huffily, and when they had packed their few belongings, he took them aboard and shot off north-west by west, trailing swirling streamers of ice crystals behind him in the weak winter sunlight.

The second night was spent under a thick clump of majestic blue spruce. Their haven wasn’t as uncomfortable as Murdan had feared it would be. The close-set boughs were layered heavily with snow and, once the travelers crawled under the wide-spread branches that swept the bare ground and lighted a small fire on a stone hearth, the air became quite warm.

Peter had built the fire close to a great bole where the smoke might, with luck, escape to the open air and the heat would not bring as much meltwater down on their heads from the overhead boughs.

They wrapped themselves in their cloaks, ate the last of Murdan’s unleavened bread crusts, which were toasted over the fire, and went at once to sleep.

Hoarling lay in soft snowdrifts outside, allowing a new, light fall to drift about his sides to camouflage his outline. In a half hour anyone passing within twenty paces of the grove would have seen nothing.

Even the glow of their fire was completely hidden by the heavy pine boughs and the snow covering them.

Breakfast consisted of a hot tea made from old, dry sassafras twigs Murdan found buried in the snow near the edge of the grove.

“Hot, at least,” he said.

“And remarkably delicious,” exclaimed Peter. “I always liked sassafras tea. My late, loved Lady Mother used to make it for Granger and me on cold evenings when we were lads.”

“I have trouble thinking of you as a little boy,” admitted the Historian. “I knew your Lady Mother quite well, of course. Fine figure of a woman, and very, very patient, I remember. Your father...well, he wasn’t the easiest man to have around, I imagine.”

“I’ve thought about them both often these past few weeks,” said Peter, sighing and pouring himself a spot more of the tea. “Being in mortal jeopardy seems to bring one’s memories flooding back, I think.

I don’t really
know,
but I suspect that much of what I tried to do as an adult was because...well, I was trying to best my father. He was a remarkable fighting man, an unquestioned leader. He wanted everything to be done just his way.”

“I remember him well,” said the Historian, nodding.

“I admired him greatly. He was a perfectionist, so I wanted to be one, too. Goodness knows, he was not easy to
like.”

“Children tend to credit their fathers and mothers for what they become,” said Murdan.

They climbed back aboard the Dragon, ready to fly.

“And I suppose that’s natural and logical,” continued the Historian, “when you consider we also give ourselves credit for having good parents, as well as bad ones. You’ll meet my mother soon.”

“I’ve not had the honor before, Lord Historian,” Peter said with a smile. “But the court people always spoke very well of Lady Murtal.”

“Well, when you meet her you’ll know why I’m proud to say I followed in her precepts, ofttimes. But in the end, Peter, we are what we make of ourselves, not what our folks made us into.”

Hoarling snorted derisively and leapt into the air, flapping his wings up and then down with a clap like thunder, sending loose snow flying in a great cloud that obscured the wintry sun.

After that, the roar of the wind was too great for conversation, which suited all three of them marvelously well.

rs

Murtal, the lady of Old Place, woke early, as she almost always did, with a strong intuition that important visitors were coming that day.

Her premonitions were so seldom mistaken that she bounced out of bed, despite her seventy-odd years of age, and called at once for her butler, a man even older than she, a great deal more dignified, and almost as spry.

“Garley! Visitors coming! Air out the guest rooms, lay good fires there, and have the upstairs maids change the bed linens and put out fresh towels. In this weather, they’ll appreciate warm baths ready when they arrive! Send the cook to me, at once!”

She rushed headlong through her breakfast, volleying orders this way and that, scattering her servants and soldiers to their tasks and trotting about inspecting everything, strewing praise and comments as she went.