The Assassin Princess (Lamb & Castle Book 2)

by J M Sanford

  With a squeak, Bessie made a grab for the rat, but missed.

  “Stupid men can't catch me!” the startled creature taunted Bessie in her own voice, as Bessie lunged for it again, and it danced away into darkness. “I know this place like the back of my paw.”

  Amelia glanced back at the hatch behind them. She should get Bessie out of the Keystone's magical field: that had reversed the accidental spell before. Bessie had other ideas, though, scrabbling off down the tunnel after the rat.

  “Bessie! Come back!” Amelia shouted in vain, as her companion vanished into darkness in a commotion of squeaking and laughter, leaving Amelia sitting alone in the tunnel.

  Then a moment later, Bessie did come back, with the rat's scruff pinched meanly between her finger and thumb. The little creature fought valiantly, but its tiny claws only scratched her gloves.

  “Where's your whiskers?” the rat puzzled, panting heavily as it struggled in vain. “What kind of rodent are you?”

  Bessie squeaked indignantly.

  “Then where'd you learn to speak Rat so well that's what I want to know?” the rat demanded of her.

  Bessie squeaked something (presumably in fluent and accentless Rat) that made the rat laugh.

  “You think you're so clever!” it giggled breathlessly. “You're going up skyside I know but the stone men are up there I seen 'em and they'll put you back in your cage!”

  “That's quite enough of that,” said Amelia, hauling the furiously squeaking Bessie off down the tunnel, back towards the hatch. They tumbled out together into fresher air and brighter light, and the rat leapt up, disappearing down the corridor, peals of ratty laughter echoing behind it.

  Amelia picked herself up and dusted herself off. “Didn't I say the Keystone was too dangerous?”

  “All right, don't get your knickers in a twist,” said Bessie crossly, then looked shocked at the sound of her own voice.

  Amelia, determined this time not to let Bessie take charge and lead them into disaster, set off into the dragon prince's palace.

  ~

  The rooms they passed through were still those dusty half-abandoned places, set to sleep under the white drapes of dustsheets, while the palace held its breath, waiting for the King and Queen of the Dragon Lands to be married. Despite Amelia's hurry to be out of Ilgrevnia and back with her friends, her gaze lingered on rich tapestries and exotic rugs, the tantalising flash of gilt and jewels from beneath the dustsheets. This could be your home, an insidious voice whispered to Amelia, if only you take the crown and go to Archalthus… Dragon he may be, but dragons hoard gold, don't they? What you see here may just be scratching the surface of his wealth. You'd never want for anything… She scowled at that line of thought. Oh yes, take the crown to Archalthus, and he'd marry that girl Rose, and what would become of Amelia then? She hurried onward, through an enormous ballroom with a floor of some polished stone that took up every scrap of light and glittered like stars in the night sky. Here, the floor had been swept and the cobwebs removed. The covered shapes of chairs and tables had been pushed up against the edges of the room, and a chandelier hung high above their heads like an enormous iron spider watching for prey. Amelia couldn't help but pause a moment to admire the tapestries that hung from arched ceiling to glittering floor, and as she stared and wondered what other treasures the palace held, she noticed the walled off archway at the rear of the stage; the familiar carved face above it, with its crown and curls. The archway looked exactly like the one at the jade temple, where the stone had melted away before Amelia's presence, admitting the rightful candidate to the treasure trove where she'd found the Dragon Queen's crown. Pickaxes lay close by; the boards of the stage were grey with stone dust. Amelia hesitated, drew a breath to ask Bessie what she made of this, and then thought better of it. Amelia had the crown: most probably she could pass through the archway just the same as the one at the jade temple, but did she really want Bessie there when she did? Perhaps she should suggest that they went their separate ways at last, and then double back to the ballroom once she was alone… But just at that moment, Bessie suddenly dived for cover, scrambling underneath the nearest table. Amelia quickly followed suit, just in time to hear something charge into the ballroom, the thudding paws and squeal of claws on polished stone, the hiss and whine and sharp smoky smell of fireworks. Amelia lifted the dust sheet just enough to see the black griffin skidding across the ballroom floor, scrambling up onto the stage in pursuit of Stupid the fire sprite, who was fizzing and spinning as he bounced off the wall, showering the stage with rainbow-coloured sparks that danced down onto the polished dance floor.

  Amelia winced. “Oh, mind the curtains,” she muttered, after a near miss that could have taken down the whole lot. For all his showing off, Stupid couldn't burn hot enough to hurt for long, and the black griffin leapt and snapped wildly, energy to spare.

  Bessie had her knife at the ready, but it was only a small blade, and Amelia doubted the girl would get close enough even to scratch the griffin before it killed her. Pushing aside the dustsheet, Amelia readied a fireball of her own, and was just about to fling it when an anxious voice called out:

  “Please don't hurt him!” Scarlet stood in the doorway, glancing anxiously from Amelia to Stupid. “He doesn't mean you any harm, I swear it! Just please don't hurt him – he's my brother.”

  Amelia's fireball spell fizzled in her hands, sparks dropping to the floor where they quickly petered out. “That's your brother?”

  “Yes, I'm sorry,” shouted Scarlet over the fizzing and phweeeing of the fire sprite. “Sable! Stop playing around and say hello to these nice girls.” But the black griffin ignored her. “Sorry,” said Scarlet again, coming over to the table where Amelia and Bessie had been hiding. “He's just a bit overexcited. But my other brother is around here somewhere too, and he's a nasty piece of work.”

  Good grief, what might Scarlet's other brother be: a minotaur? A terrible wyrm? Amelia cringed back under the table as the black griffin skidded close by her on the polished glittering floor, bounding joyfully about the room as he snapped at the bouncing fire sprite. They looked like the living embodiment of trouble, the pair of them. Whoever had been foolhardy enough to let the fire sprite out of his cage while she was gone, anyway?

  “You forgot your map,” said Scarlet, handing it over, “so we came looking for you. What are you doing here? I thought you'd be up the Keystone shaft and on your way by now.”

  “We can't go that way,” said Amelia. “We met a rat and it said something about stone men waiting at the top of the Keystone shaft: it must mean the golems.”

  “What does it know about anything?” Bessie grumbled. “It's a rat.”

  “Stupid! Go back to Meg!” Amelia ordered, and the fire sprite shot away again, off into the labyrinth. The black griffin still pranced and whirled, whip-like black tail flying, so that Amelia didn't dare come out from under the table. Bessie stayed crouched where she was too, still clutching her knife and watching with fierce narrowed eyes as the black griffin danced. Then the beast stopped dead, screaming hoarsely at something out of view. With a cry of alarm, Scarlet dropped the dustcover back over the two girls.

  18: SECRETS AND DISGUISES

  Amelia peered out from beneath the dustcover just in time to see the white griffin pad ghostlike out of the shadows behind the stage, leaping soundlessly down onto the glittering dancefloor. Its hackles went up as it growled at its black brother, and the two griffins circled each other slowly like solemn dancers.

  Amelia held tight to Bessie: half for comfort; half to keep her from doing anything foolishly heroic. The Black Queen squirmed anxiously in her grasp, just like the wyvern before, except that Amelia had a much better chance of holding Bessie still. From her hiding place, all Amelia could see of Scarlet was her feet and her bead-spangled skirts.

  “What do you want?” Scarlet demanded, fiercely. “Coming down here, bothering decent folk who've got work to be getting on with, getting Sable all wound up…”
>
  The white griffin hissed, and Amelia flinched – the dreadful beast could be no more than six feet away from her hiding place, although she hadn't heard it approach. How good was a griffin's sense of smell, anyway? How sensitive were those feathery tufted ears? She'd learnt so much, and yet it was never enough.

  “Why don't you go back upstairs where you belong?” Scarlet demanded, the force of her anger weakened by the obvious shrill of panic in her voice. If she was trying to draw the white griffin away from the girls’ hiding place, she was failing: Amelia saw fluffy white paws hesitate close by; could smell the smell of hay and barns. “If you don't leave us alone, I'll beat you with my broom, you see if I don't!” shouted Scarlet in desperation, and the white griffin shrieked and leapt. Scarlet screamed, and a rain of glass beads suddenly came pinging and bouncing across the floor, rolling under the table.

  Forgetting her fear for herself, Amelia threw back the dustcover, green sparks crackling over her knuckles and fizzing underneath her fingernails. Two enormous beasts, one white and one russet red and gold, cartwheeled across the dancefloor in a tangle of claws and screaming, their enormous wings whirring and clattering. Chairs went flying with a terrible crash that echoed all the way up to the high arches of the ceiling. The black griffin plunged into the fight, and the three brawling griffins tumbled crashing and screaming all around the ballroom, perilously close to Amelia's table one moment, distant the next.

  Then silence fell, terrible silence, and Amelia didn't dare look.

  “You can come out now,” called Scarlet a moment later. “It's safe.”

  Amelia opened her eyes and peered out from under the table, preferring to trust her own judgement before leaving the flimsy protection it offered.

  The red griffin sat panting in the middle of the dancefloor, alone, beads and coins scattered all around, downy feathers of black and white and turmeric orange still settling. “There's another dress ruined,” the griffin muttered in a familiar voice.

  Amelia gasped. For one thing, she hadn't realised griffins could talk, and for another… “Scarlet! You're the other griffin who attacked our ship!” Admittedly Amelia couldn't be certain she could reliably tell one red griffin from any other, if there were any others, but the way Scarlet cringed and looked away showed her guilt clear enough. “I thought the pair of you were going to kill me!”

  “I'm so sorry for that,” said the red griffin. “Master sent us to frighten you away from the jade temple. We didn't mean any real harm by what we did.”

  The black griffin came running jauntily back into the ballroom, very proud of himself, and Amelia took a step back – she still had faint scars on her shoulder, more than real enough for her liking, despite Meg's quick work with the salve. But the black griffin seemed calmer now, satisfied with the outcome of the fight, and padded to his sister’s side.

  “Never mind all that,” said Bessie. “Where's the other one of you?”

  “Gone for now,” said the red griffin. She dragged a dustcover from a nearby table, wrapping the sheet around herself as she transformed back into a woman. Scarlet's thick ginger hair, freed from its usual bun, stood out in a mad tangle down past her shoulders, and in her eyes she still had the look of a wild creature confronted. Scratches covered her bare arms, red blood dotting the white cloth of the dustcover, and she still breathed heavily as she recovered from the fight.

  “I didn't realise you were people,” said Amelia, too curious to stay angry, and not quite so afraid of the black griffin now that she knew the truth about Scarlet.

  The black griffin glared, his blue eyes fiercely indignant. “Not people!” he protested, his voice hoarse as a crow's. “Griffins!”

  “Is nobody here what they appear to be?” said Bessie, obviously jealous of all these magical disguises. She pinched Amelia lightly on the forearm. “Tell me you're a real person, at least.”

  Scarlet knotted the dustcover more securely about herself, then turned to her brother. “Now, tell the nice lady that you're sorry,” she prompted him.

  “What for?” the black griffin snapped.

  “You hurt her, and frightened her!” Scarlet set to work scooping up some of the remnants of her ruined dress. “Didn't we agree we only wanted to drive the skyship off course?”

  The black griffin gave a low growl, but something about the noise sounded to Amelia like the discontented grumble of Meg not wanting to admit that she was wrong about something. She bent to help Scarlet retrieve some of her beads, scattered to the four corners of the ballroom.

  “You know,” said Scarlet, tentatively, “since you girls are still here, perhaps you could help us with our plan.”

  Amelia glanced nervously at the black griffin, who was kicking and snapping at the mess of feathers. Then she turned to Scarlet, who once again looked nothing like the red griffin who had attacked the Storm Chaser. The red griffin that, if she remembered rightly, had almost thrown the caged clockwork dragonette overboard to its doom… Perhaps they were on the same side after all. “What is your plan?”

  “We'd better not stop here talking,” said Scarlet. “Just in case you were seen. Come back to my kitchen and I'll tell you.”

  ~

  Neither Amelia nor Bessie had much wanted to retrace their steps: they'd wasted enough time aimlessly roaming the labyrinth, and each moment they lingered held the threat of a new meeting with golems or monsters. But Scarlet kept insisting that this plan of Sable's would be best for all of them. Amelia had a horrible feeling that going on without Scarlet would result in a battle between griffins and fireballs that would do nobody any good, and so she went along, silently and carefully testing how much magic she had in her reserves.

  Back at the chimney-shaped kitchen with its funny fishy paintings on the wall, Sable lounged across the open doorway, his tail flicking idly but his head held high and alert as he watched the empty hallway outside. Scarlet reassured the two fugitives that Sable would keep an eye out for any of the prince's men, but Amelia wondered if this fearsome guardian might be keeping her in rather than the golems out, and Bessie must be thinking the same thing, since she hadn't yet put away her knife, and looked every inch as alert as the fierce-eyed black griffin.

  Scarlet, the only cheerful person in the room and oblivious to the black cloud of discontent over everybody else, sat down with a half-finished sewing project, working on a new dress from scraps and offcuts and cheap little trinkets. As she sewed, she began to tell a story… “There's an old saying: where lamb's love grows, magic flows. Back in the old days, lamb's love was the name for a kind of sweet pining love, particularly of a shy person,” she explained. “And now it's the name of the plant, of course. You must've seen it before – the little white flowers in the thorns, wherever the soil and the stones are soaked in magic.”

  This made sense to Amelia, who'd learned in her father's library that different plants thrived in different soils. If burying rusty nails under a hydrangea turned the flowers blue, and burying a traitor's heart under a buddleia turned the flowers red, why shouldn't a plant take up magic from the soil?

  “They say those sweet pretty flowers can buoy up even the heaviest heart,” Scarlet continued, “but it's best not to let the thorns grow too far or too tangled…”

  Many years ago, there was a forest of oak, where the lamb's love grew so thick and so entwined with the trees that it always looked like winter's first fresh snowfall. In this forest lived a witch – a bitter, angry woman who spent her days alone, in a crooked little house, gathering what she needed from the forest.

  “Maybe she had good reason to be angry,” said Amelia, who’d become painfully aware of how rarely a fairy tale told the witch's side of the story.

  Scarlet nodded. “She did, too, by all accounts. The king of her land was a wicked man. She’d seen the way he and his courtiers went about running the kingdom, and it made her sick, but there was nothing she could do to change it.”

  The witch did what she could; concocting potions for the sick, for
poor women with their babies, for anybody she could help. But how much good can one woman do by herself? She ate the fruit of the lamb's love to make her magic stronger, but it would never be enough for her to right all the ills in the world. One day, while she was out gathering ingredients for her spells, she bit into a fruit, and broke a tooth on the biggest, most glittering stone inside the sweet flesh of the fruit.

  “What I could do with such a thing as this…” said the witch, sensing the pulse of life locked within the facets of the stone, waiting and wanting to be.

  “I bet that's not what she said,” muttered Amelia. By this time, she tended to picture Meg in every story that had a witch in it, and a broken tooth was enough to drive almost anyone to colourful language.

  So the witch gathered together the ingredients for a new spell: the glittering stone, the thighbone of a lion, the wingfeather of an eagle. She toiled all day and night over her fire, until in the morning there sprang forth from the ash and embers a shining new creature, a noble golden steed: the very first griffin.

  And the first griffin bowed down to his mistress the witch.

  “If only I had an army of these fine beasts,” said the witch. “Then no man could stand in my way. I would rule, and I would right all the wrongs in this rotten kingdom.” Did the forest hold more fruits with stones so large and alive with magic, such as the one that had given birth to the first griffin? Surely it did – the forest covered half the kingdom, from mountains' roots to the stony beaches of the wide restless sea. But if she cut open each fruit one by one, then she'd wither and die long before she had her army. There must be a better way…

  Some say it was the pollen of the lamb’s love flowers that drove her mad and made her do what she did next, and some say it was plain desperation, but no one’ll ever know for sure. Whatever it was, the witch set to work, striding through the forest with her broom, sweeping away the brambles and the lamb's love as she marked out the shape of an enormous sigil. As she went she chanted her spell, and at the end of it she retreated to a high rocky point to set the first spark of a fire so big it would consume the entire forest. She held back the tears as she watched her forest burn, for she felt in her heart that this was the right thing to do.