Dragonspeaker Chronicles Box Set

by Patty Jansen

  The crowd was utterly silent.

  The guard hung the first sack on the hook where it swung back and fro a few times before coming to a rest. The platform sat solidly on the ground. Surely the next sack would not come close to lifting the platform off the ground?

  But as the guard hung it on the hook, Nellie noticed that another guard was putting his foot underneath the platform where the woman stood.

  With the tip of his boot, he lifted the platform off the ground. It floated briefly before settling back onto the ground.

  “She is a witch!” the town crier shouted.

  The woman stuck her chin in the air.

  Several people in the crowd yelled out. The guards all sprang into alertness, including Henrik, who held his hand on his sword hilt.

  He wouldn’t turn on his own people, would he?

  Nellie’s heart thudded.

  Mina next her said, “Did you see that? He cheated.”

  The blood roared in Nellie’s ears.

  But the crowd calmed, and the guards returned to their positions. The woman was taken off the platform to join the other one who had been weighed.

  And so it went on with all the prisoners who had come out of the wagon. Big, small, young, old, man or woman, every one was declared a witch, even the ones who pleaded to the Regent for forgiveness.

  Jantien, Josie, Emmie, Yolande and Wim all followed the second woman’s example and remained stoic, but none of them were set free.

  The shepherd looked on but only spoke once or twice. His face was determined as he watched people fall to their knees and plead for their lives, and he did nothing. He had to know that the guard at the platform cheated by putting his foot under the platform. Was he so blinded by his hatred for supposed magic that he would allow this to happen in front of his eyes? A man of the church that called itself compassionate and claimed to care for the common people?

  Nellie could barely think for her anger.

  All this was a farce. She bet it was done by the order of Shepherd Wilfridus, who was a mean man. The Regent knew it and he played along with it. Maybe the shepherd told him that if he wanted to be king, he had to do what the church said. Casper knew it and also knew that if he lied as much as much as these men were doing at home, he’d probably cop a strap across his backside.

  He still sat with his hands jammed between his knees, but stared ahead as his father ordered the women to be taken away. His expression was distant.

  Henrik . . . she hoped to heaven that Henrik saw this and next time she met him, she would give him even more of her mind than she had last time and she would not be sorry about any of it. Or apologise.

  When all the prisoners had been weighed and found to be witches or wizards, the Regent announced that they were to be drowned in the harbour as soon as there was enough open water for the final test to be carried out.

  “Any person who floats is a witch and will be shot by our archers. Any who sinks deserves to die for scaring the populace and pretending to be a witch or consorting with peddlers of witchcraft.”

  The proceedings concluded, the Regent, his son and the shepherd rose from their seats and made their way into the waiting coach while rumbles of discontent rippled through the crowd. None of the protests were too loud but, away from the platform and out of earshot of the guards, Nellie didn’t hear one word in favour of the Regent.

  Nellie and Mina returned to the sea cow barn.

  Now that the weather had turned warmer, they had just a few days to save the Jantien, Emmie and all the other people from certain death in the cold water of the harbour.

  Chapter 10

  WHEN NELLIE AND MINA walked back to the barn, it was getting dark. It had rained a bit, and already a layer of water covered the ice.

  “There will be no ice left within a few days,” Mina said, her voice dark. “The Regent can hold the witch drownings by week’s end.”

  “What are we going to tell the children?”

  Mina shrugged and shook her head. Her eyes glittered before she wiped them with the back of her hand.

  Nellie said, “We’ll tell them we will have a plan.”

  She had no idea where that came from. She didn’t have a plan.

  Mina turned to Nellie. “What sort of plan? What can we do? We’re just a bunch of poor women. No one will listen to us.” Her voice cracked.

  “No idea yet, but we’ll make a plan. We’ll do something.” Mistress Johanna had always done something even if the situation seemed dire. Nellie wanted to believe they could do something. They had to try at the very least.

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Coming here is part of the plan. We’re safe for now, we’re dry, we have food to eat. That was the first part of the plan.”

  Mina snorted. “I can’t see how we can do anything at all that will defeat a bevy of heavily armed guards.”

  “We can’t defeat them. We need to surprise them with something smart.”

  “I’m not smart. If I was, I’d have married a rich man and wouldn’t be in this position.”

  “We have to think of something.”

  “I don’t know what, and I don’t know why you keep saying that.”

  Nellie tried to shut out Mina’s whining. Yes, things were bad, but that meant they had nothing left to lose. That meant they could do something utterly reckless.

  “We have a dragon.”

  “We don’t have it. It won’t do as we say and won’t even show itself.”

  “We could use him to scare people.”

  “In all the ways we don’t want it to. Look, I know that you can’t help it, but Agatha is right in saying that we never had any trouble before you came. You helped us and that was good, but I think it’s better if you went back to the palace.”

  “Do you really think I could do that?”

  Mina looked at her.

  “Do you think it’s that simple? Do you think anyone who watched me being dragged out the door by that dragon is just going to forget about it? There are whole armies looking for that dragon. Everyone in the palace is looking for him. Some people say he has killed a man, and they want either the dragon, or me, to be guilty. I can’t just pretend he wasn’t there.”

  “What were you doing with it anyway?”

  “I hope you don’t mean that as it sounds.”

  “I mean it however you take it. If you were doing stuff with that dragon, then heaven help you.”

  “I wasn’t. My father worked for the church and he knew the church bought that dragon box. Someone stole it from the church and I wanted to return it to its rightful owners.”

  “Maybe you should just stop worrying so much about what is right and think about the people you’re with. If that dragon hadn’t come out of the hayloft, then we would have been fine in the warehouse.”

  “So now it’s my fault? I’m a horrible person?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it.” Nellie let out a long breath. If it were possible, she would go back to the palace, since these people were so ungrateful. “The dragon is a creature with his own will. He’s no more mine than he is anyone else’s, except maybe prince Bruno’s, if he’s still alive. He cursed me with his presence. So stop blaming me for what he does. I’m trying my best, but no one here seems to appreciate what I do—”

  “Nellie, please, we do appreciate what you do, but can you please agree with me that the dragon is dangerous to us?”

  “Only if you can agree with me that I can’t tell him what to do and I’m still not going to let that stop me from trying to do something for Jantien.”

  Mina shook her head and then smiled and hugged Nellie. “You’re crazy. You have this thing where you’ll tell everyone you’re just a maid, but then you’ll travel to Florisheim and serve the Queen and the next moment you’re working in the kitchens, all without complaining.”

  “Well, I didn’t ask for the kitchen job.”

  “No, but you did it, just the same.”

&nbs
p; “Because life goes on, and you make the best of it. That’s how I was brought up. Complaining gets you nowhere.”

  They arrived at the barn where the others waited. Disappointment was clear on the children’s faces that their mother hadn’t come back.

  But they had few questions. Maybe Agatha, in her great bluntness, had found a way to tell the children that their mother would probably never come back.

  Well, that wouldn’t be true if Nellie had anything to do with it, and the more she thought about it, the more determined she became.

  If they blamed her for Jantien’s imprisonment, she would try to free Jantien. If they blamed her for killing Lord Verdonck, she would prove her innocence. Because out of all the things her father said, one determined her very essence: the truth always has the longest breath.

  No matter how bad the lies, the truth always won. Hopefully before people died.

  They prepared a simple meal, but because it had been so busy in the marketplace due to the platform for the judges being set up, Nellie had not been able to go to the palace for the leftovers.

  Dinner was nothing more than a dried out hunk of bread and soup made from the carrots that had been mysteriously left in the barn. Nellie knew she would be hungry in the middle of the night, and that it would be very cold.

  Maybe she should open the dragon box to see if the dragon would show himself, for all the trouble it would cause. At least they would be warm.

  Funny that now the dragon was no longer in physical form, she wanted him to return.

  That so-called judgement in the market place today made her so angry that she wanted to set him on the guards or the Regent or the shepherd.

  That latter thought chilled her. She didn’t want to harm people. She wanted to make a bright and bold plan, but she wasn’t smart enough.

  While the women sat by the fire discussing how they could earn money to maybe buy one of the prisoners out of jail, she went outside and stood in the last of the dusk to think about the plan she didn’t yet have.

  On the other side of the harbour, a couple of men arrived with a cart full of lengths of wood that they dumped on the quayside in front of the important offices. They laid four planks out into a square and began attaching lengths of wood over the top to make a platform. The sound of their hammering echoed in the stillness.

  This installation would probably be for the carrying out of the sentence although she wasn’t yet sure how it would work. Presumably they wanted to drop several people into the water at the same time. That was how they usually carried out hangings: all the criminals were led up to the platform and then the floor fell away under them. Seeing all the people drown one by one would not make a spectacle that the citizens would stay to watch. Too many people would get angry.

  Nellie shivered.

  Mina was right that there was not much chance that they, as a handful of ragtag women with some children, could defeat well-trained guards. But something outrageous, something that was so daring that no one would have thought of doing it, might accomplish their goal.

  But what?

  They had no authority to appeal to and no money to bribe with. No one in the city cared about a bunch of servants and poor women anyway. They had no weapons and no skill to wield them.

  They had no possessions useful for fighting, deceiving or bribing guards, no skills other than cooking and sewing.

  Nellie could ride a horse, badly, and she could use a sea cow team. They had sea cows and half a harness, but no boat.

  So her thoughts chased each other through her head.

  The last of the daylight glinted in the windows of the offices on the far side of the quay.

  Silhouetted in the orange light lay the magnificent ship that belonged to the Guentherite order.

  It was hard to believe the order preached modesty.

  But the ship was there, only a few paces from the place where the carpenters were building the wooden construction.

  Nellie wondered how many people were staying on board while the ship lay in the harbour, and whether the monks would be happy to look at an installation that would condemn people to death.

  Nellie had seen the ship manoeuvre into the harbour. It required a full team of fifteen sea cows. She presumed the animals were well tended in one of the quayside barns.

  Imagine what that ship could do if a larger team of sea cows pulled it.

  Imagine what it could do if it were pulled by a dragon.

  Yes, like that was going to happen.

  She walked along the deserted wharf and along the quayside. It was quiet. Other than a fisherman mending his nets, nobody was in sight, and only a single cat scurried away. She walked past the harbourmaster’s office to where the ship lay moored.

  The gangplank was down, but she couldn’t see any guards. For a ship of this type, especially one so pretty and from out of town, she would have expected someone to stand watch.

  Nellie walked along the quayside, taking note of the places where the bow had hooks for attaching the sea cow teams. She remembered doing this, many years ago, when she fled with Mistress Johanna up the river.

  The line of little cabin windows were all dark, and she wondered if the ship lay abandoned, because if there was someone on board, it was too early for them to be in bed.

  From working for Mistress Johanna’s family, she remembered that the captains would stay with the ships. Some would even have their families live aboard.

  Did the order’s ship have a captain? She couldn’t remember anyone ever speaking of one.

  Nellie grew bold.

  She went up the gangplank and stepped onto the deck. Most river ships would have doors for the cargo hold up here, but this was a passenger ship, so she came out on a deck area in between two cabins. A few days ago, she had watched people unload barrels of wine from this deck, but now it was empty.

  To the left was the captain’s cabin, with windows out the front and sides. That area was dark.

  She walked up to the cabin on the other side and knocked on the door.

  “Hello? Is there anyone there?”

  When someone opened the door, she would ask if he had seen a little runaway boy who was crazy about ships.

  But the door remained very much closed. The ship appeared to be deserted.

  Well that was odd.

  It was getting dark very quickly, and by the last of daylight she went back down the steep gangplank onto the quay.

  The fisherman still sat on the wharf. He had lit a lantern and his breath steamed by the light as his gloved fingers darned the net. The gloves were old and displayed several holes.

  “They never leave anyone on the ship when they’re in port,” he said, nodding at the Guentherite order’s ship. “It’s dumb, I know, asking for trouble if you ask me, but there it is. If you want to speak to the monks, you have to go find them in town. Guess they’re all landlubbers to begin with.” He chuckled. “A good captain would never leave his ship. I guess they’re more interested in the banquets.”

  Nellie nodded at his net. “You still go out fishing in winter?”

  “A man’s gotta eat. The neighbour’s wife sells the fish at the markets. The neighbour wants to eat, too.”

  “If you could save us some fish, I can fix those gloves for you.”

  “That would be swell. The wife’s been gone a few months and I haven’t picked up any skills in knitting.”

  “Give them to me, I’ll bring them back in the morning.”

  “Not afore I fixed my net. I’ll still be here in the morning. Come pick them up. I’ll bring you some nice juicy fish in the evening.”

  Nellie bade him goodnight and kept walking. The seed of a bold, ridiculous idea was growing in her mind. She might need his help.

  Inside the barn, they had everything she needed to set up a team of sea cows. There were enough of the creatures to serve as a team, if she could entice them into a harness. Most of these free animals had done the work before, and the promise of food was always a goo
d one to get them to do the work.

  All she needed was a boat.

  The prisoners would be thrown into the water. She would be there waiting for them.

  But supposing they could rescue the prisoners, there was no going back to hiding somewhere in the city, because the Regent would send all his men after them. Once they rescued these people, they should take the sea cows and the boat to a farm out of the city somewhere and stay there for the winter. So they needed a boat, and the fisherman might help with that if she was nice to him.

  They could hide a boat inside the barn and race out the moment people were in the water. A light wooden boat pulled by a full team of sea cows would do the job. They wouldn’t have much time, because it would be cold, but if they could rescue only some people, then it was better than none at all.

  The other problem was that once this boat was out in the open, the Regent would order his guards to shoot at it, so the people aboard had to be protected.

  There were many questions. What sort of boat would they use? How many people could go on it?

  But straight away, she saw a flaw in the plan: if the boat needed to be big enough for all of them and the rescued people, then it would be heavy.

  Some people would need to stay on the shore in safety. The children, most likely.

  But then what would they do when the prisoners were rescued and all the guards would be after them and maybe shooting arrows at them? She wouldn’t put it past the Regent to order his men to shoot at women and children. It might even be likely that the citizens would be too scared to show outrage about this.

  So: the rescuers would be on the water in the boat, being shot at by the guards from the shore.

  The rest of the group would be—no, that made no sense. When a boat came out of the sea cow barn to rescue the drowning prisoners, everyone from the party had to have left the building.