The Runaway Dragon (20 page)

Nort breathed out and in, out and in for what seemed like the first time in days before he started to make his way down the cornstalk, listening with one ear for the return of the crows.

He thought he was imagining things at first when he heard voices below him. “Nort! Are you all right?”

Nort tumbled down the last stretch of stalk, landing on his hands and knees between two oversized pebbles. “I think so,” he murmured as he looked up at the very welcome sight of the worried faces of Cam and Spinach and Dilly.

“You’d better be!” Dilly snarled.

Nort blinked up at her. “Why?”

“Because I said so!”

“Oh. That’s a good reason.”

Dilly folded her arms. “Hmph. You can carry some of the vegetables.”

Meg and Laddy decided to wait till nightfall so that it would be easier to sneak into the fortress. Meg smiled grimly to herself, picturing what Malison thought was taking place down here in her treasure cave.

While they were waiting, Laddy told Meg more about his journey, and then Meg told Laddy everything that had happened to her since she’d left her parents’ castle. It took her quite a while to tell the story.

I’ve never seen a giant
, Laddy told her.
Are you ready to go? It feels like night now.
He helped Meg down with one scaled claw and watched as she picked her way across the chamber.
Isn’t it beautiful?

Meg was trying not to twist her ankle on the glittering landscape, which kept sliding beneath her at unexpected moments.
Yes, Laddy, it’s beautiful.

At last she reached the other side, and Laddy showed her a small ladder made of metal rungs pounded into the stone. Meg climbed up. On this side there was no door, only a tunnel. Meg walked into the tunnel, glad for the occasional torch set into its walls. Laddy came along behind her, his breath warm on her back and his claws clicking faintly on the rocky floor.
Where does this go?
she asked.

To the mountainside above the fortress.

She lets you out?
Meg had thought he was a prisoner.
She knows I won’t stay away from my gold for very long
, Laddy explained.

They were nearly to the end of the tunnel when something came flapping into the cave mouth. For a
second Meg ducked, thinking it was bats, but then she realized that the magic scarf and the flying carpet had decided to show up again. They were both covered in sand, and one of the scarf’s hems was torn out.

“Well!” Meg said, putting her hands on her hips. “You two should be ashamed of yourselves!”

The scarf and the carpet drooped in unison.

“You’re off cavorting with seagulls and—and fish while I’m getting thrown into dungeons and Lex is quite possibly having his soul reconstructed in some sinister way by that
girl!”

The scarf and the carpet turned to each other and shrugged, as if to say, We’re here now.

Meg couldn’t help smiling a little. “Come here.” The scarf approached. “Did you get sand in your eyes, you flibbertigibbet?” The scarf closed its dozens of tiny eyelids as Meg brushed the sand off. “Your turn,” Meg told the carpet, and Lex’s magic conveyance flew over to her. “You’ll have to hang sideways,” Meg said. The rug tilted to hover on one edge, looking as if it were hanging from an invisible clothesline. Meg brushed and dusted the carpet vigorously on both sides. When she was done, a pile of sand lay in the middle of the rocky floor of the cave tunnel.

“That’s better,” Meg said. The scarf and the carpet gave themselves a couple of good shakes and hovered about expectantly. “Now, here’s how you’re going to help me get Lex back.”

Lex sighed, putting down his book. It was a
very
good book, but Lex’s tiny worry about Meg had stopped whispering and raised its voice gradually until it was simply shouting in his ear, refusing to let him concentrate on the magical uses of the hairs from a bechling’s tail for another minute. Lex brightened. He couldn’t do the kind of long-distance finding spell he’d done with Laddy’s scale, but he didn’t need to. Lex snapped his fingers, and three sparks appeared. “Go find Meg,” he told them. The sparks twinkled, then split up, disappearing through three different walls with three faint fizzes. “Why didn’t I think of that earlier?” Lex asked himself before he picked up his book and turned the page, having properly appeased the shouting worry.

He might have been surprised to know that Meg’s scarf was doing exactly what he had sent his sparks to do, only the other way around, because Meg had told the scarf to search the fortress for Lex. However, unlike the sparks, the scarf couldn’t fly through walls, so it was having a bit of trouble accomplishing its mission. Then it had the immense misfortune to fly into a great big room where a sorceress sat holding court. When she saw it, she jumped up. “What is that thing? Guards, catch it!” Whereupon the guards started leaping about the room, trying in vain to capture a scarf which simply flew higher, skimming along just beneath the ornate ceiling. Somebody threw a sword as if it were a spear. The man missed,
but he gave Malison an idea. “Send for the archers!” she ordered.

The scarf shrilled angrily. All it wanted was to find the red-haired wizard boy, and instead strange people were throwing things at it. Pointy things, even.

The scarf dove, and one enterprising guard leaped, managing to catch it by one end. The others started to cheer, but their cheers changed to cries of astonishment and fear when the scarf twisted about in the guard’s hands and struck, biting him hard on the cheek. The man let go and fell back, clutching his bloody face.

Free again, the scarf lunged upward, veered around a pillar, then dashed out the nearest doorway.

“After it!” Malison cried, and her guards streamed from the room like a nest of black ants after an intruder.

Young Nallis appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “Something’s happening!” she announced.

Stefka looked around, but most of the women didn’t even bother to turn and listen. Alya had been turned to a statue, and that princess had been fed to a dragon. The servants had lost heart.

“What is it, girl?” Stefka wanted to know.

“I heard such a noise, and I peeped into the great hall, and they were all running around trying to catch a magic bird!”

“Magic bird?”

“Well, it looked more like a cloth to me, a scarf even,
but it was flying about like anything. They couldn’t catch it with their spears. So they’ve brought the archers, and they’re chasing the cloth through the halls!”

Luli put down her onion. “Magic scarves? What good will that do anyone, I ask you? It’s another of her tricks.”

“Or the wizard boy’s tricks. He was asking me about his friend this afternoon,” Nallis told them.

“Was he?” Stefka asked, interested. “What did you say?”

Nallis blushed. “Nothing. I didn’t know what to say.”

“You were afraid of her finding out, weren’t you?” Stefka said kindly. She saw that the other women had stopped their work to listen. Which was good, because she had just been struck by a useful thought. “If the wizard boy knew what she’d done, maybe he’d help us.”

“Get us turned to statues, more like,” fat Imkuhl said. “That Bain came around telling us we’re slaves now, not servants!”

“It’s the same work as yesterday,” Trena pointed out.

“She doesn’t need to know we’ve talked to the boy,” Stefka went on.

Imkuhl couldn’t argue with that, but she wasn’t finished, either. “The wizard is another one of hers, spell-struck with dreadful loviness and sorceress-pleasing. Just like my man Horth.” Imkuhl sobbed only once before she caught herself and forged ahead. “He may listen to us, may lure us in with his devious magic ways. And then he’ll tell
her
—two seconds after he refuses to help us.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Stefka said. “He’s not in the dungeon, and he’s not a statue like our Alya. He just sits in that workroom of hers, drinking hot chocolate and reading magic books.” She appealed to everything her audience knew about people, which was quite a lot. “I don’t think he’d be asking about the princess if he was under a spell.” Several of the women nodded at this. Stefka clunked the pot she was carrying down on the nearest table for emphasis as she concluded, “We have to talk to him.”

Malison gathered up her rustling night-black skirts and stalked through her fortress, trying to catch the attention of one of her guards long enough to find out where the creature had been seen last. They were clearly unable to catch it by their own efforts, and once again, she would have to provide her men with a magical solution. Magical—suddenly she stopped, scowling. Of course. The flying thing was probably some frivolous creation of that Lex boy. Malison turned to head for the library.
This time
she was going to show him exactly who she was: the Empress of the Southern Reaches, and soon of the Northern and Eastern and Western ones, too. No more hot chocolate and books for
him!
Malison was Empress of Absolutely Everything and Everyone There Was—including Lex.

EG AND LADDY FLEW AROUND THE FORTRESS
, peering in the windows of the second and third floors. Below them, Malison’s guards made their rounds, never thinking to look up. Like the handful of guards on the roof, they had seen Laddy flying overhead before. Even if they saw him tonight, they wouldn’t think much of it. At least, that’s what Laddy had promised Meg. She hoped he was right, and that the guards wouldn’t notice that their mistress’s dragon was accompanied by a girl on a magic carpet.

It wasn’t long before Meg and Laddy were treated to a glimpse of a horde of guards charging along a hall after something, arrows flying every which way.
Was that my
scarf? Meg asked, outraged.
That does it. I’m getting dizzy, and my scarf’s in trouble. We’re going in!

All right
, Laddy said calmly. He flew back to one of the larger windows. It wasn’t exactly built with dragons in
mind.
Don’t hurt yourself
, Meg told Laddy as they neared the window.

I won’t. Watch this!
Meg backed off a little and hovered as Laddy circled away into the night, then came swooshing out of the darkness, shooting a bright stream of flame at the window. The glass melted, the metal rods holding the window together melted, everything melted and dripped down onto the surrounding stones. Just inside the window, Meg could see an ornate rug catch fire.

Guards began shouting above and below them as Laddy made another pass at the window, this time fanning hard with his wings. The rug inside burned brighter, but it soon died into a sad streak of black ash on the stone floor of the hallway.
Things should be cooler now
, Laddy said.

An arrow came flying up from below, nearly hitting the magic carpet and Meg. The magic carpet sailed in through the exact center of the now-empty window frame even as another arrow sliced the air where Meg’s cheek had been a half second earlier.

As for Laddy, the dragon folded his wings tightly, rolled, and dove into the fortress on his back, a large red-and-gold arrow like the smaller rain of arrows that spattered harmlessly against his scaled back and sides as he went. Laddy slid monumentally down the hallway and hit a wall hard, crunching through it so that his head disappeared inside another room while the rest of him stuck out. His feet flopped about awkwardly.

Meg jumped off the magic carpet and ran to make sure her dragon wasn’t hurt just as Laddy pulled his head free and gave it a good shake.
Laddy
, she began, when she heard an odd noise behind her. She turned around to see a young guard pointing and gasping, apparently unable to speak, he was so stunned by the sight of a dragon inside the fortress. At the very instant Meg realized she should stop the boy from telling someone where she was, another dark-clad figure came up behind him and shoved him hard through the doorway of the nearest room. The guard’s attacker, one of the servant girls, quickly slammed the door, locked it, and pocketed the key. Then she turned to Meg. “I can see the dragon didn’t eat you,” she said cautiously, “but will it eat me?”

Meg smiled and spoke over the muffled cries and thumps of the guard trying to get out of his abrupt prison. “No, he won’t. Can you help us find the wizard boy?”

The sparks slipped back into Malison’s workroom and were beginning to tell Lex what they had learned when he heard a commotion out in the hall. “Just a minute.” Lex went to the door, opened it, and stuck his head out, only to get plastered in the face by some kind of fast-moving flittery cloth object, after which somebody jumped through the door and pulled it shut behind them, nearly bashing Lex in the nose.

“What—” Lex pulled the cloth out of his eyes and was amazed to see that it was Meg’s scarf, which seemed to be accompanied by three servant women. “What’s the matter?”

Two of the women locked the door and leaned against it. The shouting in the hall got louder and somebody, or several somebodies, started pounding on the door. “Wizard,” the third and oldest of the women said, “our mistress means to harm you. She has already done a horrible thing to your friend.”