The Whim of the Dragon (18 page)

“Just one, I thought,” said Ruth.

“Ah,” said Andrew, “sith we know not which, we must guard ourselves ’gainst all. A monstrous dissipation of strength.”

“I don’t see what’s the point of doing any guarding,” said Ruth. She detached three fat, bloomy-purple eggplants from their stems, and decided that the others were too small to pick. “The whole nature of a whim is that it’s irrational.”

“Imbue thy kingly cousin with that thought,” said Andrew, in what sounded like complete earnest, “and this land will prosper under him.”

Ruth nodded soberly. They made a brief foray into the broccoli and then took their harvest back to the house.

Ensconced at the kitchen table, cutting up onions, were Stephen and a lithe young man with blond hair and a cheerful face. Julian, one of the King’s Counselors. Ruth gave him her basket of vegetables and felt, all of a sudden, extremely cold. She had had an argument with Ted, about three years ago, concerning who, exactly, should be killed in the battle with the Dragon King. She had wanted Julian to be among the slain. She tried to remember why; oh, yes. He was a friend of Matthew’s, and she wanted Matthew to be so distracted with grief that he would fail to discover that Randolph had killed the King. If she had insisted, Julian would not be sitting at Claudia’s scrubbed wooden table, slicing onions; his body would be in that mass grave at the desert’s edge and his ghost drifting foggy and forgetful in the land of the dead.

Ruth was shivering. She went and stood by the fire. Her cloak began to steam, which was very interesting. Andrew, appearing next to her on the hearth, held out his hands to the fire and said, “You were best to keep your eye from Julian, my lady. He honoreth Randolph exceedingly.”

Whatever that meant, it was nasty. Ruth cursed Lady Ruth and settled for saying, “And so do I also, my lord.”

Andrew said, “He did murder the King.”

Hell! thought Ruth. They were standing close together; the fire made a lot of noise, and so did whatever was bubbling in the iron pot hanging over the flames. Stephen and Julian were the room’s width away. Ruth stared Andrew in the eye and said, furiously, “That is a vile slander; I won’t hear it; if you bandy it about you’ll be sorry.” She was so angry she stopped shivering. She stalked over to Stephen and said, “Shall I wash the beans? They’re all over mud.”

Stephen nodded, and Ruth bundled the beans, mud and all, into the front of her skirt and hauled them over to the sink. Though made of slate, this was recognizable as a sink, and even had running water; but there was some sort of pump arrangement, not a faucet. Ruth was good at figuring out how things worked, but she found when she tried to use the pump that her fingers were shaking and she couldn’t think.

Andrew said, “If you will allow me,” and she got out of his way. He filled a large red bowl half up with water and put the beans into it. He said, “Hath your heart truly changed?”

Jesus Christ! thought Ruth, staring at him. Had that prize idiot Lady Ruth been secretly engaged to Andrew as well as to Edward? Or had she just told him her troubles, whatever they were? “I honor Lord Randolph,” she said, taking refuge in repetition, and also incidentally in the truth, “and I won’t hear slanders about him.”

Andrew drained the beans and rinsed the bowl. “Having spoke so many of them, thou hast perhaps a surfeit?” he said, still pleasantly.

Oh, hell, thought Ruth, again. God help us all. She didn’t want to marry Randolph and she told Andrew all about it.

“I’ve come to see,” said Ruth, as steadily as she could, “that speaking slander doth naught but harm.”

Andrew stared at her for a good fifteen seconds. “Do I then have thy help no longer in my enterprise?” he said.

Shit, thought Ruth, for the first time in her life. She did not know what to say. If she told Andrew she would still help him, she might find out what his enterprise was. Or she might just give herself away. She shook her head. She had just realized that this gesture was ambiguous when Stephen requested the beans. Ruth snatched the bowl from the sink and carried it over to him; and she stayed in the kitchen, close to either Stephen or Julian, cutting up vegetables and, later, stirring the pots and helping Stephen decide on the seasonings. Andrew hung around for ten minutes or so, looking neither angry nor puzzled, but not looking easy, either. Julian finally sent him to set the table.

At dinner, which they ate in a hollow, chilly room with a field of goldenrod painted on the ceiling and no other decoration at all, she contrived to sit between Ted and the Peony. This gave her a sense of security, and she was able to tell Ted quietly that she had to speak to him later. Then she was able to attend to the vegetable stew and the fresh bread, which were both good. She hoped there wasn’t anything unwholesome in Claudia’s cloves, or her flour, or her butter, or her vegetable garden.

The conversation was all of practical matters: when the moon would rise, how few rooms they could get away with lighting fires in, who should sleep right after dinner and who later, who was to go sit with the second Crystal of Earth, who was to stand guard outside the house, and who should wash the dishes. This last problem, thought Ruth, was never easily resolved in any world, real or imaginary. She grinned at Randolph’s suggestion that they scrape the dishes and leave them for Claudia, and set herself to putting names to the less-familiar faces.

The Peony was called Dittany. The Mallow was Stephen. Ted, Randolph, Andrew, Julian, she knew. That left the large, blond, gloomy man sitting next to Julian. Except for the size and the attitude, they bore a strong resemblance to each other. Of course, they were brothers. The large one was Jerome, another of Ted’s counselors. He had had charge of Claudia after she tried to kill Fence; and from his charge Claudia had escaped. It was impossible to tell if this meant that there was something sinister about Jerome.

As people began folding their napkins (and who’s going to wash and iron those? thought Ruth), Ted whispered, “Come upstairs. They can’t expect a King to help with the dishes.”

“Not just us,” breathed Ruth, who had doubts about his last assertion but did not think this the time to argue about it. “We can’t sneak off together.”

“Randolph doesn’t care now; he knows who we are.”

“I’m afraid Andrew might care.”

Ted raised both eyebrows; she shrugged. “Okay,” said Ted, softly, “you go on up, and I’ll bring Randolph.”

All the adults were still arguing, amiably, about the dishes. Ruth slipped out of the room, snagging a candle in a brass holder from the sideboard as she went, and climbed quickly up the steps. She went as far as the fourth floor, to the dusty hall lined with open doors. She went clockwise around it, peering into all the rooms. Most of them were empty, but the last one on the left held a rag rug in red and gold, and six carved chairs with gold cushions. Ruth put the candle on the floor and sat down in the nearest chair. It was not dusty here. Even the windows sparkled in the small light of the candle. Outside it was still raining.

After ten minutes or so, Ruth grew uneasy with her thoughts, which were turning on Andrew’s remarks and the probable character of Lady Ruth. She got up and went to one of the windows. It looked east, over a great many wet trees that faded into the misty sky. Ruth tried the other window. There were the garden and the outbuildings and a lumpy, thinly forested land through which wound dimly the rough road they had taken when they rode to fight the Dragon King. Ruth could pick out two minute white cottages. Nothing moved in the whole drenched landscape. It couldn’t be more than two in the afternoon, but it looked like twilight. Ruth leaned her forehead on the glass. Three crows flew in slow circles over the stubble fields around the cottages. Faintly, the back of her mind said,
Your future, your future I’ll tell to you, / Your future you often have asked me. / Your true love will die by your own right hand, / And crazy man Michael will cursed be.

Ruth jerked her head back from the glass, which was not cool as glass ought to be, and spoke aloud to the six chairs and the innocent rag rug. “You’re a fine sort of morbid person to have in the back of one’s mind. Why couldn’t you die decently? A fine murderer Claudia must be.”

Murder
, said the remote voice, tinged this time with a slight and indefinable accent,
though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ.

“Oh,
thank
you!” said Ruth, more or less automatically; in the central part of her she was extremely frightened, but this was a source of information that, unlike Andrew, could not betray her true nature. “I’ve always wanted to be a miraculous organ.”

“You’re wandering,” said Ruth, severely; and Ted and Randolph came into the room.

Ted had another candle, and Randolph had an iron lantern, which he hung from a hook on the wall. Ted put his candle next to Ruth’s and looked at her. “You’re talking to yourself.”

“I am not. I’m talking to Lady Ruth.”

“Is she answering?” said Ted, eagerly. “Edward doesn’t pay any attention to me.”

“Well, she doesn’t pay much; or at least, she’s easily distracted. Randolph, did Lady Ruth speak with an accent?”

“Oh, aye,” said Randolph, “through having been brought up her first five years in the Dubious Hills. We thought she had outgrown it this past summer.” He closed his mouth abruptly.

“Why don’t we all sit down?” said Ruth, doing so under the lantern. “Why was she brought up there?”

Randolph took the chair across from her, and Ted dragged another between them. Randolph said, “For that her lady mother loved her not.”

Ruth was disgusted. You couldn’t even enjoy a pure, just anger against Lady Ruth; she had had a warped childhood.

“Why did you ask?” said Ted.

“Well, I think there are
two
people in the back of my head; Lady Ruth, who speaks with an accent, and somebody else, who doesn’t.”

“What saith the other?” said Randolph.

“Lots of things,” said Ruth. “Most recently, it said, ‘The playing of the merry organ, / Sweet singing all in the choir.’”

“Well,” said Randolph, dubiously, “bear it in mind. Now. Wherefore calledst thou this conference?”

Ruth, who had practiced on her way up the stairs, repeated to him the conversation she had had with Andrew.

“Oh, Ruthie!” said Ted when she had finished. “Why didn’t you say you’d still help him?”

“Because,” said Ruth, “I thought I’d just give myself away. His ‘enterprise’ doesn’t have to be spying for the Dragon King. And even if it is, I don’t know what that entailed. Ellen remembers, for all the good that does us.”

“We do have a means of communication,” said Ted.

“I didn’t get the impression,” retorted Ruth, “that it operated as if it were a telephone. Lord Randolph? Can one talk back and forth as if the person receiving the message were in the same room?”

“No,” said Randolph, looking intrigued. “Thou sayest this telephone performeth so?”

“Yes,” said Ruth, “but you can’t have one here. God knows what it’d turn into. Anyway, Ted, I didn’t exactly tell Andrew I wouldn’t help him. But I refuse to talk to him again without some idea of what’s going on here.”

“Oh, come on,” said Ted. “You’ve been playacting with
Meredith
for three months and didn’t give yourself away. Andrew should be child’s play.”

Ruth was exasperated. Being King was making Ted entirely too autocratic. “Look,” she said. “I have the feeling that Lady Ruth’s relations with Andrew were not such that I would like to take them up. Okay?”

“What?”

“She was a baggage!” said Ruth, furiously. “No better than she should be! Getting engaged to people right and left!”

“Ruth, watch it!”

Ruth was consumed with confusion and remorse. She made herself look at Randolph, who had raised his eyebrows again but did not seem notably disturbed. “Forgive me,” said Ruth. “It was just a feeling I had. Maybe it was all Andrew.” She was sure it had not been all Andrew, but there was no point in harrowing Randolph’s feelings. If Ted would drop his insistence that she conspire with Andrew, she wouldn’t have to harrow them.

“It’s no matter,” said Randolph.

It occurred to Ruth that neither of Randolph’s women had been what he thought her. She wondered if he were stupid in that regard, or just unlucky. Either way, it seemed unwise to say more.

Ted said, “Did you want to marry Lady Ruth?”

Randolph’s head came up in a gesture of such affront that Ruth wished herself at the other end of the universe. Then his face cleared, as if he had remembered that allowances must be made for them. “No,” he said.

Ruth thought they should leave it at that. Ted said, “Then why—?”

“For the uniting of the two schools of sorcery,” said Randolph.

Well, thought Ruth, that explained a lot. She decided to risk it. “And why did the others want Lady Ruth to marry Edward?”

“To unite rival branches of the family,” said Randolph. “Look you; I believe that Edward loved her.”

“Ah; but did she love him?” said Ruth.

Randolph shrugged.

“I hate this,” said Ruth. Nobody having any reply to this, she went on. “We should keep an eye on Andrew.”

“We should anyway,” said Ted, “on account of the spying.”

They were quiet; Ruth supposed there was no point in going downstairs until the dishes were done. She tried to imagine Lady Ruth’s being in love with Edward. She could not conceive of being in love with Ted, though there was nothing wrong with him that a few years and a few inches wouldn’t cure. She supposed she had known him too long. But then, Lady Ruth had known Edward for the same length of time. It seemed far more likely that she had loved Randolph, regardless of what other slimy intrigues she might have been plotting. Ruth looked thoughtfully at Randolph’s bent head, and looked away.