“Thank goodness you’ve come, Dragon! Princess! Librarian! Port your arms, men! Stand at ease!”
Manda slid from the Dragon’s lofty forehead, followed by her husband.
“What news, Colonel?” she asked at once.
“The poor little babe’s been stolen away! Snatched during the early-morning hours, soon after breakfast. It’s just horrible, my Lady Princess! No one saw or heard him come ‘til it was too late! We could do nothing to stop him!”
“Babe! Which child?” demanded Manda, running full tilt toward the main entrance to the mansion.
“Get yourself together, man!” Retruance snapped quite sharply to the shaking officer. “Order your men to put up their weapons before someone gets hurt!”
Tom followed Manda at a run.
They were met at the main door of Knollwater House by King Eduard Ten himself, who through his bedroom window had seen them arrive.
“He took little Ednoll!” groaned the King, catching his older daughter in his arms and holding her tight. “A Dragon came and stole my son! It was...”
“Arbitrance?” asked Tom, who had discussed his suspicions with Retruance as they flew.
“Was it truly Papa?” wailed Retruance, aghast at hearing the thought said aloud.
“I...I’m afraid it was!” the King admitted with a catch in his voice.
“Several people saw him who know him well. As he departed...”
“But.. Just Ednoll, Father? What about Amelia? Is she safe?”
“She’s with her mother,” Manda’s father assured her, relaxing his embrace enough to clasp Tom’s hand and put his hand on Retruance’s forepaw. “Up in the master bedroom.”
“I want to look about and ask these guards some questions,”
muttered Retruance quickly. “Go comfort the mother, Companion! I’ll try to find out where Papa flew off to when he left here, and all else I can.”
Tom nodded and followed the King of Carolna and the Princess up the sweep of stairs to the second floor. On either hand stood Knollwater and royal servants, many in tears and all with shocked, sad, or angry expressions. Their eyes fearfully followed the Dragon as Retruance turned to speak to the guard officer.
“The danger’s over for the moment, I suspect. Fall your men out, Colonel! Tell me what you know to have happened.”
Beatrix seemed calm but greeted her stepdaughter and son-in-law with an unaccustomed frown, pale countenance, and strained voice.
“It was Arbitrance, they say,” she said to Tom as Manda embraced and kissed her and then took the little Princess Amelia on her lap to stroke her hair.
“I’m afraid ‘tis so, ma’am,” replied the Librarian. “All indications point to it, at any rate. As soon as Retruance gathers information from those who witnessed the terrible deed, he and I will set off in pursuit.
If anyone can find Ednoll, it’s Retruance.”
“Retruance and you, Tom!” said Manda, turning to her stepmother.
“Oh, if we had only come a few hours sooner.”
“Nothing you can do about that, and you came as soon as you could, I’m certain,” said Eduard Ten, seating himself wearily on the foot of the canopied bed and taking his four-year-old daughter on his own knee. “I’ll go with you, Tom. My son...”
“No, and I’m sorry to say it to you, but there’s more to this than just a wanton kidnapping,” said Tom, shaking his head.
He told the royal couple of the invasion of the kingdom from the northeast and the expected attack on the capital.
“It can only be that wicked Peter Gantrell!” cried the Queen. “Who else would do such a terrible, terrible thing to a mere child, to us, and to Carolna?”
“We don’t know that, my dear,” said Eduard. “A King, I fear, has more than a single enemy.”
“We’ll certainly discover who’s responsible,” Tom assured them.
“First, however, we must rescue little Ednoll and try to save Arbitrance.
He’s under some sort of a spell, we think. Everyone agrees that Retruance’s papa is normally a most gentle beast. He’s Murdan’s Companion, too.”
“I’d forgotten that,” sighed Beatrix. “Does it make the matter better—or worse? Now, little Princess, ‘tis time for your lunch and past the time, at that. Go find Mistress Nannah and see if she’s set it in the arbor as we asked.”
“But I wanted Ednoll to eat lunch with me,” wailed the little girl, with tears in her huge blue eyes. “What am I to do?”
“Ask Nannah to invite your cousin Merry to lunch with you. You’ve wanted to show Merry your new dishes, have you not?”
“Well, all right,” sighed the four-year-old Princess. “Will you come to see my new luncheon service, Manda? It has all kinds of birds painted on it, you know.”
“For a little while, darling,” her half sister agreed, taking her hand.
“Let’s go find Nannah, shall we?”
“We’ll go see if Retruance has discovered anything we can use,”
the Librarian suggested to his distraught father-in-law. “Come with us, madam,” he added to the Queen. “No need for you to sit alone and fret.”
“I’ll come and still fret,” said the young mother with a slight smile.
“I feel much better now you and Manda are here, my dearest Tom. You always have a way in such emergencies.”
They descended the wide, winding stair to the central hall and went out into the hot, humid Waterfields sunshine of a formal garden.
Retruance was there, surrounded by a score of servants and soldiers, under a spreading oak festooned with gray-beard moss. At the approach of the King and Queen with Tom, the servants bowed quickly and scattered back to their duties. The soldiers braced to attention.
The Dragon turned solemnly to greet them.
“Oh, Retruance, my very special, dearest Dragon friend!” cried Beatrix, rushing to hug the beast. “Can you find my baby boy? I’m so very sorry it was your f-f-father! I never met him, but everyone who knows him says he must be enchanted by some powerful wizard to do such a terrible, t-t-t-terrible thing!”
“Dearest Queen, my lovely Beatrix,” murmured Retruance soothingly, circling her waist with a gentle emerald claw. “Yes, I’m positive Papa is a victim of this as much as poor little Ednoll. Yes, we’ll go at once to his rescue, Tom and I, you can be sure.”
“Have you found out which way Arbitrance flew when he left?”
Tom asked.
“Seen clearly by at least five guards and three household servants. He stooped like a hawk and took the child in his fore-talons just as the boy left the house to go riding this morning,” the Dragon answered, sitting down in the shade of the old oak, the better to talk to the royal parents and his Companion. “Amelia had music lessons at that hour, so she was not present. That was less than five hours ago, I understand. The guard had just been changed.”
“Yes, that’s what they told me,” agreed Eduard Ten.
“And he mounted up straight away and shot off to the west,” continued Retruance. “That’s about all anybody could tell me as sure and true. It certainly was Papa, however, from what they said. No doubt about that. He didn’t breath fire nor roar. What he did, he did coldly, not in any sort of anger or heat!”
“I could send for several good wizards the Crown retains,” Eduard told Tom. “They would be able to assist. But with the rivers up north running over their banks, it’ll be days before they could arrive, I’m afraid.”
“If it will make you and the Queen feel better, do so anyway! Mayor Fellows of Lakehead warns of a company of Relling soldiers marching this way, bent on pillage and creating confusion. A crowd of wizards could only help.”
“I’ll order my Guards Company to intercept those Rellings,” the King assured him. “How many, do you know?”
“Not exactly—likely just a small handful. Probably acting for their own gain, I think. Retruance and I discussed it at length. They’ve stolen a boat or two on their own hook, we believe, acting on
information about the kidnapping they somehow learned about as their forces approached Lexor.”
“My soldiers will welcome action, and it’ll be good for their mo-rale, after what happened here this morning,” Eduard thought out loud. “I’ll set it in motion at once!”
“We’ll not await the outcome, however,” Tom decided. “Retruance and I are best suited to deal with this rogue Dragon, however enchanted.”
“Magic has little effect on Tom,” Retruance reminded the King and Queen. “He’s Human. We’ll go this very moment! No time must be lost, although I cannot imagine Papa harming the boy or anyone at all.
Still...”
“What should I do?” asked the King and Queen together.
“We’ll send word of anything we discover, and bring the child to you as soon as we rescue him,” Tom answered. “Manda will escort you and the little Princess to Overhall.”
“To Overhall?” asked the King.
“Lexor is about to be attacked by the Northerners, Walden wrote,"
Tom reminded him. “If it isn’t already under siege or even captured.
We can trust old Walden to make a stout defense, given the chance, with Murdan there soon to help him, but you and the Queen and the Princess will be safer in Overhall. And it’ll be to his own castle that Murdan will return, if he can, once he’s organized the defense of the capital.”
“Perhaps...well, yes, you’re right,” said Beatrix, sighing, and the King nodded.
They went off together to find Manda and Amelia in the sunny flower garden.
Chapter Five
Dragon Chase
Manda saw the wisdom of taking the Royal Family to Overhall at once, although she said she’d much rather fly with her husband and Retruance.
“I know the way,” she told Eduard. “If we leave at once, we can ride through to Overhall in three days—or less, if the floodwaters have subsided. At any rate, a moving target—”
“Is harder to hit, yes,” her father agreed with a firm nod. “We’ll travel light and fast, then. I’ll send my guards here to Lexor, after they’ve caught this marauding bunch of Rellings and clapped them under lock and key. I’ll take only a half dozen, my best archers, with us. I’ll go on to Lexor after. That’s my place, I deem, with the army and levies.”
In little more than three hours after the Dragon’s arrival at the Queen’s parents’ house, both parties were ready to depart.
Tom held his wife close for a long moment but said little. Manda was very good in emergencies. She had a more level head than even her father, the King, at times like this, and experience of dangerous adventures he had not. She was solid, smart, and unflappable.
“Go!” she said to Tom and Retruance. “We’ll make haste to Overhall. Come to us there when you find the boy or send us news.
We’ll be anxious—very anxious!”
Tom bowed to the King and would have bowed to the Queen, except that Beatrix threw herself into the Librarian’s arms for a farewell embrace.
“Are you going to find Edney?” lisped Amelia when he picked her up to give her a buss.
“I am that! You can depend on Retruance and me, little Princess,”
Tom promised, wishing he felt as confident as he had made himself sound.
Forewarned by the Librarian and his Dragon, the remaining royal escort and the local levies rowed off by canal boat to intercept the raiding party of Rellings. Before nightfall they discovered the ten men in furs, trying to ford a deep, dark channel, sweltering in the unaccustomed humid heat of the southern land.
“Surrender at once!’ cried the Captain of Guards, waving his sword threateningly. “Move, and you die to a man! You are our prisoners—or you may choose to fight us or drown!”
“Mercy!” begged the renegade Rellings as one.
They’d come south on their own venture, they soon admitted, deserting the army of Rellings and allies well to the north of Lexor.
“We surrender! Take us away! This is a terrible, fearsome land!”
“I suppose it seems that way to men used to snow and ice nine months of a year,” chortled a veteran Royal Guards sergeant. “Bind them tight and lead them back to Knollwater! There’s a nice, dry barn there to keep them safe!”
rs
“How can we trace him?” asked the Librarian, once they were aloft.
“How can I hear you call from half a world away?” retorted the Dragon. “I’m sure I don’t know, but I seem to smell or feel or hear or taste or see my father somehow, Companion. We’re as close to Papa as I’ve been in years, I know.”
Tom fell into silence, letting the great scaled beast find their way over the endless-seeming land of thickset woods, ponds, canals, and cattailed marshes to the north and west of Waterfields proper.
He tried to sense the strange Dragon He’d never met, also, straining his eyes and ears and even his sense of smell, but to no avail. The wetlands of Waterfields sent up a dank and musty odor that might have masked the presence of the rogue Dragon.
“Fortunately,” said Retruance after an hour of silent flight,’ ‘the wind is still, so any trace of...of Arbitrance this morning is still in place.”
“We’ll have to depend on your senses, then,” decided his Companion, settling back. “I detect nothing except the marshes and the slow-running streams. What lies ahead?”
“According to my geography of Carolna, we’re heading out of Waterfields proper toward a vast area called Sinking Marsh. It’s not really a swamp, you realize, but a very broad, flowing river, mostly very shallow and often choked with vegetation.”
“A sort of Everglades, I suppose,” Tom thought aloud. “And the waters come down originally from the Snow Mountains, then sink under the Hiding Lands desert, do you think? Yes, and emerge once again south of the Cristol. Interesting!”
If he heard the Librarian’s musings, the Dragon didn’t answer but flew swiftly on, making wide sweeps to left and right to focus on the faint trace of his poor papa.
rs
The royal party, riding fast as the King had decreed, passed the first night on the road just short of the farthest northern border of Waterfields as guests in a rickety old stone-and-timber keep long since near ruin. It was inhabited by a large family of cattle herders who had preempted the stone walls and replaced the ancient wooden roofs of the castle with woven reed thatching.
“Never met a King of any sort before,” said Frost, the boisterous head of his clan. “I’m admitting to being flattered, even if ye’re running away from yer enemies. Discretion being the better part of...whatever the saying is, Sir King.”
“We’ll pay you for our night and food,” said Eduard, somewhat testily.
He was tired and sore and unaccustomed to such casual treatment, even if it was basically polite and even cordial.
“Nonsense!” cried Frost’s enormously fat wife, whose name they were never told. “Anyone travels this way, we puts ‘em up and thank
‘em for the company!”
“I appreciate your hospitality so very greatly,” sighed the Queen.
“May we help you with supper? We’ve brought some foodstuffs that we would share with you.”
“Now here’s a real lady!” cried Master Frost with a pleased cackle.
He had seven sons, an unspecified number of daughters and daughters-in-law, and several other dependants whose relationship to them was obscure. Plus what seemed to be two dozen or so children of all ages running about, shouting excitedly.
Manda and her stepmother speculated between themselves but decided not to ask more deeply as to who, exactly, was who in this boisterous crowd. It didn’t seem to matter to the Frost clansmen. A few awkward minutes after their arrival at Pinkleterry, as Frost called his old keep, daily life resumed its even if rather noisy way.
Several of the young menfolk quickly rounded up a half-grown beef and led it off outside the crumbling curtain walls. When the King’s party next saw it, the beef had been skinned and was basting, turning slowly
on a spit over a bed of glowing oak coals that lit up the outer bailey of the ruined old castle.
“Do you rest easy,” Frost advised jovially. “Be a while yet afore the bobby-cue is burnt enough to chaw. Take yer ease away from the smoke, Majesties. Me ‘n’ the boys have herds to bed down and hogs to feed and the ladies, bless ‘em, have cows to milk and baking to attend to, and such.”
He showed them to an open-air pavilion of beautifully cured and tanned leather hides stitched neatly together and supported by slender poles, not far upwind from the open fire pit. There were surprisingly comfortable old chairs and divans to sit upon, brought from the castle, Manda assumed.
One of the women brought the Queen a horn cup of fresh milk, still warm from the udder, for Princess Amelia. Beatrix had doubts about its cleanliness and contents, but the King nodded for her to give it to the tired child.
Amelia had no such qualms, and within ten minutes the little Princess was sound asleep on a soft, clean lambskin on the dirt floor beside her mother’s chair.
“A King ought to travel thus to get to know his people,” observed Eduard to Manda. “These are rough, bluff folk but honest and good-hearted and hospitable to strangers.”
“I recommend you don’t lay your wallet aside when you sleep, and keep your knife handy, too,” advised his oldest child in a low whisper. “You must beware of surface appearances, Lord King.”
“Princess Alix Amanda Trusslo!” cried the King, shocked.
“Well, that’s my advice, free for the taking,” retorted Manda with a fond chuckle. “Take it or leave it, Papa dear! Personally, I plan to keep my blade near to hand and sleep with an eye and both ears open.”
As it happened, they were fed huge quantities of deliriously roasted beef, entertained with fireside tales of birthings and deaths in the back country, of ancient doings and yesterday’s musings.
They all slept—with both eyes closed tight—in complete safety on the second level of the ancient keep, and woke at first light to a hot breakfast of coarse yet very tasty porridge with fresh cream and wild honey, and wild raspberries and cranberries with the dew still upon them.
Dragon Rescue Page 6
