The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart

by Stephanie Burgis

  Silke raised one eyebrow. ‘If there are dragons flying towards us,’ she said, ‘I’d rather spend my last minutes having a wild adventure instead of cowering in fear.’

  He glowered down at her, crossing his arms. ‘You are only thirteen years old!’ he told her. ‘And if Mother and Father were here, they’d tell you how stupid and irresponsible you were being!’

  ‘No,’ said Marina abruptly. ‘Actually, she’s right. Horst?’ She looked at him. ‘I don’t know about you, but if this is the last hour of my life, I want to spend it doing what’s most important. Do you remember that question you keep on asking me?’

  Horst stared at her. Then he straightened away from the wall with a wild jerk. ‘Now?’ he said. ‘Now’s when you finally agree to marry me?’

  Marina snorted. ‘Are you mad? Where would we find a judge at this time of day, without any notice?’ She gestured at the stove. ‘No, I was talking about the chocolate.’

  ‘Of course you were.’ Horst rolled his eyes, but his shoulders relaxed. A half-smile broke across his face. ‘So you’re finally willing to try my experiment? You’ll actually make a chocolate custard to my recipe instead of yours?’

  ‘Why not?’ Marina smiled back at him as she picked up a wooden spoon. ‘It’ll taste horrific, of course, and it’s an abomination of my kitchen … but if we’re all about to be burned up anyway, I might as well make you happy, this once.’ She pointed the spoon at him threateningly. ‘I’m warning you, though: if we survive, you’ll have to eat every bit of this disaster, even if that means licking the whole pot clean. And I don’t want any complaints!’

  Horst’s smile thinned as he gave a gentle shake of his head. ‘Unlike the rest of you,’ he said quietly, ‘I’ve actually seen a dragon. It was a long time ago, and from a long way away … but no. I don’t think survival will be a possibility for us today.’ He sighed and pushed the kitchen doors open. ‘I’ll get a table and chairs from the front room. Dieter? Do you want to stay and enjoy the new recipe?’

  Dieter gaped at all of us, shaking his head. ‘Everyone in this kitchen is mad, except for me.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Silke said, her smile razor-sharp, ‘it’s no wonder I like it here so much. Step aside, big brother.’

  As the two of them locked gazes, I looked back at Marina, bracing myself. ‘I really do have to go.’

  ‘I understand.’ She gave me a firm nod. ‘Go. See if you can bash any sense into the king’s thick head. But then come back … because I’m not losing my apprentice again.’

  I’d genuinely thought, by then, that I must have walked through almost all the streets of Drachenburg. I was wrong.

  Silke led me down narrow twisting back alleys I’d never seen before, and under bridges where frightened people huddled together in clumps, many of them holding massive sacks that seemed to be filled with their most precious possessions.

  Every time I looked into the sky and saw those still-tiny but unmistakable winged figures in the far distance, I lost my breath. My chest felt close to bursting with so many emotions mixed together that I couldn’t even tell which one of them was the strongest.

  None of the humans around me seemed to have that problem, though. They were simply terrified.

  I thought about telling them that there was no need to hide under bridges. For one thing, the dragons were still too far away to shoot flames at them. For another, the bridges wouldn’t do them any good once the dragons finally did arrive. It would have made much more sense for all of these cowering people to stay outside, enjoying their city while they still could and savouring what might be their very last minutes.

  But it was always hard to tell how humans would react to good advice, and I had enough to worry about, protecting this whole city.

  ‘This isn’t the way to the palace, is it?’ I asked Silke, as she led me at a quick trot through the chaos of a busy second-district street clogged by carriages. Half the city – or at least anyone with enough money to own a vehicle – seemed to be trying to escape. The traffic had come to a standstill, with each horse’s nose nearly bumping the back of the next carriage. Drivers shouted at each other from every direction, and finely dressed men and women leaned out of the carriage windows to add their own screeching to the chaos, holding massive cases on their laps and looking just as panicked as the horses.

  ‘The palace? Why would we want to go there?’ Silke dodged around a snorting carriage-horse as she darted ahead of me towards the pavement. The horse reared, letting out a whinny of rage, and the driver screamed an insult that I didn’t understand. Silke waved a dismissive hand at the driver as I stopped walking to stare down the horse.

  ‘You couldn’t have moved forward anyway!’ Silke called back to the human. ‘No one’s going anywhere in this crush. So there’s no reason to be rude!’

  Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me away from my staring match to a gap between the two shops ahead of us. It led to a bare, unpainted passageway barely wide enough for the two of us to squeeze through, with a gutter running down it and sending a terrible stench into the air.

  ‘No one important will be at the palace,’ Silke told me as we hurried down the stinking passageway, skipping carefully around the channel of dirty water at its centre. ‘The king and the crown princess would never stay there in a crisis. They’ll be at the town hall, along with the lord mayor and the king’s privy council – they’re like the town council, but they look after the whole country. Oh, and the head of the army should be there, too, by now. They all have to be seen to be working together, for politics’ sake, even if the king is the only one who can make a final decision when it comes to war.’

  Humans. Their rules would never make sense to me.

  But at least it looked as if I would finally have a chance to meet the man who’d been trying so hard to destroy the Chocolate Heart from the time I’d first arrived in Drachenburg. My teeth bared in a menacing smile at the thought of the lord mayor, and my short human nails bit into my palms like claws.

  ‘No attacking anybody!’ Silke said, without even looking back at me. ‘Remember, let me do the talking.’

  ‘Hmmph.’

  I didn’t mind letting her do the talking, at least when it came to the humans in our way. But I wasn’t making any promises about the attacking.

  No one threatened my hoard without retribution.

  ‘Well’ – Silke blew out her breath as she led me out the other end of the passageway, on to the edge of a wide, open square – ‘it looks like everyone’s here already.’

  A massive grey stone building rose up at the far end of the square, covered with carved gargoyles that crawled along its rows and rows of arching windows. The whole effect was probably supposed to look impressive, but to me it looked as bumpy and over-decorated as the kind of fancy cake that Marina always sneered at. She said that real cooks cared more about taste than about appearance.

  Still, even I had to admit that it was big. High, pointed stone towers shot up from every corner. The central tower stood highest of all, with a huge clock facing out from the top of it. I’d seen that clock tower a hundred times before, from all around Drachenburg … and as my gaze fixed on it now, a real plan finally formed in my head, as clear and right as any of Marina’s recipes.

  Of course, even the best recipes didn’t work when the wrong cook tried them. But …

  From the top of that tower, a person would be able to see everything. She would be the first thing that a dragon would see, too.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I told Silke, and pointed to the clock tower high above us. ‘All I have to do is get up there!’

  ‘Oh?’ Silke sighed. ‘Well, good luck with that.’ She pushed down on my arm until it was pointing straight ahead at the city square in front of the building, packed with men in red-and-black uniforms, carrying weapons that glinted in the sunlight. ‘Because you’ll have to get past all of them first.’

  CHAPTER 20

  I scowled at the lines of stiff-backed men in unifo
rm. There must have been at least a hundred of them, all heavily armed, and every one of them was in my way. ‘What are they doing here?’

  ‘Protecting the royal family and the privy council, most likely.’ Silke gnawed on her lower lip, frowning. ‘I knew they’d have an honour guard, but I didn’t think there’d be this many soldiers here. They must be planning to hole up in the town hall if there’s a final siege. I guess this’ll be the last line of defence for the city, while the royals and the lord mayor stay safe inside those stone walls.’

  ‘Safe?’ I snorted, copying Marina’s favourite sound of disdain. ‘Do they actually think dragons can’t set stone on fire?’

  The whites of Silke’s eyes suddenly looked enormous. ‘They can?’

  I shrugged. ‘We’re talking about dragonfire, not kitchen flame.’

  ‘But – no, never mind.’ Silke squared her shoulders. ‘Later you’ll have to explain how you know all this. But for now …’ She gave me a firm look. ‘No clenching your fists. No meeting anyone’s eyes. Remember: you’re a lowly housemaid, and you work for someone just like that awful Greta woman. You know what that’s like. Head down … and go!’

  She grabbed my arm and started forward, dragging me behind her.

  She barely made it five steps before she was hailed. ‘You there!’ A soldier who didn’t look any older than Dieter marched forward to bar our way, drawing his sword. ‘What are you doing this close to the town hall?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Silke replied. I had my eyes firmly fixed on the ground, following orders, but even I could hear the eye-roll in her voice. She let out a heavy sigh, too, as she yanked me around to stand in front of her.

  Gritting my teeth, I let her do it.

  ‘I’ve found the crown princess’s maid at last,’ Silke said. ‘She’d made it halfway across the city by the time I caught up with her, trying to run away. Stupid girl!’

  ‘Oh. Um.’ The young soldier’s voice nearly cracked, but I could feel him eyeing me up and down, and every inch of my skin prickled with aggression in response. I wanted to lift my eyes and bare my teeth and glare him down until he went skittering back and …

  No! I whispered to myself. Not a dragon. Not right now.

  The moment seemed to last forever, but he finally let out a snort and shook his head. ‘Got scared and ran, did she? Abandoned her post?’ His voice came out bigger this time, as if he’d somehow put on an extra few inches of muscle just by looking at someone even more frightened than him. Worse yet, his tone sweetened, adding a sickly shade of condescension as he reached forward and tapped his finger under my chin. ‘You don’t need to worry, sweetheart. We’ll take care of any dragons that threaten this city.’

  My family would eat you in a heartbeat, I snarled silently. But I kept my mouth clamped shut with all my might, and I didn’t even try to bite his finger off as he pulled it back from under my chin.

  ‘Oh, you know what ignorant country folk are like,’ Silke told him. ‘But you’re from Drachenburg originally, aren’t you? I can tell just by looking at you.’

  The soldier’s shoulders straightened and his chin lifted an extra notch. ‘I am!’

  ‘I knew it,’ Silke said. ‘It’s just so obvious that you know what you’re doing.’ She leaned closer, confidingly, without letting go of my arm. ‘We’d better get this idiot back to the crown princess, though, as soon as possible. Of all the times to neglect her duties to the royal family …’

  ‘Of course!’ The soldier wheeled around. ‘Just wait here.’

  He marched away, moving every bit as stiffly as the little clockwork men I’d watched in that toyshop window, during my afternoon off. The idea of him fighting my family …

  I said, through my teeth, ‘If he touches my chin again, I’ll eat him.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ Silke said. ‘Worry about the next round.’

  Sure enough, when he came back a moment later he was accompanied by an older man with dull grey hair and two bright stripes on the shoulder of his uniform. ‘The crown princess’s maidservant, eh?’ The new soldier looked me up and down with narrowed eyes, and I didn’t need Silke’s warning arm-squeeze to keep my gaze lowered and my mouth shut. ‘I didn’t hear anything about this,’ he rumbled in a cave-deep voice.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Silke said. ‘It happened just on the way out of the palace.’ She shrugged. ‘We realised she’d gone missing before anyone had even stepped into the first carriage, so I promised the crown princess I’d hunt her down and bring her back. She’s new to service, you know, and she panicked at the thought of dragons, but she knows her duty now. She won’t abandon her mistress again.’

  ‘Hmmph.’ The man looked from one to the other of us. ‘And why aren’t either of you girls wearing palace uniform, if this little story is true?’

  I looked at Silke out of the corner of my eyes.

  She smiled straight at him. ‘She wasn’t going to keep her uniform on when she ran away, now, was she? She’s not that much of an idiot. And the princess prefers me to stay out of uniform, always, to be her eyes and ears in the city.’

  Then she cocked her head as she studied him just as frankly as he had studied me. ‘Right now, though, major, I have to ask you a question: exactly who do you think we really are, if you find the truth so doubtful? Do you imagine that we’re dragons in disguise?’ She snorted, even as my hand tightened on my scale-cloth. ‘I don’t know what you’re afraid of, but I know what frightens me … and that’s the crown princess, if she finds out we’ve been kept chinwagging out here when I was ordered to bring back her new maid as soon as possible. So –’ she took a step forward, dropping my arm, and met his eyes full-on – ‘if you have any more questions,’ she said sweetly, ‘why don’t you put them to the crown princess yourself?’

  I’d always known that Silke had a touch of dragon to her. But as I watched her stare down the big man, I could almost see the scales that she deserved glinting in the air around her.

  ‘There’s such a thing as friendship,’ she had told me in the market square.

  For the first time, I truly understood what she’d meant. Because I knew then that I would fight on her side forever.

  The man’s jaw worked as he glared back at her. His hand fell to the handle of his sword.

  But then he stepped backwards and lowered his head. ‘Very well.’ His voice came out as a low, angry growl. ‘Lieutenant –’ he jerked his head at the younger soldier – ‘don’t leave them on their own in the royal apartments. I want you to escort them to the crown princess personally and see exactly what she says. Then report back to me.’

  Silke nodded with cool authority. ‘Thank you, Major. That will do.’ She turned back to me but didn’t grab my arm this time. ‘Come along, Eva.’

  Oh, I would absolutely pay her back for calling me that!

  But not now. Right now I followed her and the young lieutenant past row after row of armed soldiers across the square, then through the big, iron-braced oak doors of the town hall. As the doors fell closed behind us with an ominous thunk, I didn’t even feel tempted to let out a single roar of triumph.

  Yes, Silke had taken care of her part of the bargain. Now, though, it was my turn. And if I was worried about how I could handle my own family … I had no idea how to make the royals see sense. Especially when they’d ignored everything I’d tried to tell them last time, in the Chocolate Heart.

  Human society was so complicated. Why couldn’t I just roar at people to make them do what was necessary?

  But then, from the sounds of distant shouting that echoed down the wide corridors of the town hall, it sounded as if some humans were already trying that method.

  There were even more soldiers lining the wide white-and-silver corridors inside, standing as still as stone between elaborate marble statues and tall windows. They stood stiffly in place with no expressions on their faces, no matter how heated the yelling in the distance became or how close to them we walked. Only their gazes flickered ba
ck and forth beneath their iron helmets, following us as we passed, to mark them out from the cold, sightless statues at their sides.

  I would have snorted in disgust at the view around me if I hadn’t been in disguise. This was the seat of all power in Drachenburg? This was the central hoard of the king’s town and privy councils, their greatest chance to awe the world? Really, marble was only another word for ‘dirty white stone’. I didn’t see a single gold plate or sparkling diamond anywhere. Even when I tipped my head back for a quick glance at the ceiling, the looping curlicues carved there were painted white-on-white and made of simple plaster. No dragon would take this place seriously for an instant.

  The thought of this city trying to protect itself against my family would have been laughable if it wasn’t so horrifying. This was my territory now, for better or for worse. But I wouldn’t even be allowed to defend it unless I could get past all the noisy humans in my way.

  The shouting grew louder and louder with every step I took. Even if the din hadn’t alerted me, I would have known exactly which door we were heading towards, because four tall soldiers stood guard outside it. They stepped aside at a word from our lieutenant, who opened the door to reveal a scene of total chaos.

  The room inside was as big as a cavern, with swags of deep purple velvet hanging from the high walls, and people crowding the space on all sides. A long wooden table filled the centre of the room, with the king sitting at one end in a chair like a throne, the crown princess sitting in a smaller chair beside him and a big, scowling man with a floppy red velvet hat sitting in a medium-sized chair at the other end of the table. Half of the other chairs were filled, but the rest had been abandoned as their owners paced around the table, yelling and waving their arms.

  And they weren’t the only people there. Even more soldiers lined the walls by the heavy swags of purple velvet, while women and men in fancy clothing sat in rows and rows of padded chairs, watching the show in front of them and whispering to each other behind decorative fans. Servants moved back and forth between all the different groups, seeing to their masters’ needs.