by Patty Jansen
Nellie didn’t think it was going to be quite as simple as that. For one, not everyone in town would be happy to see the eastern traders in a position of power. Li Fai was in Anglia, and a return would bring Anglian people they might not be happy to see.
“Tell me how many rooms the palace has,” Bruno said.
What a strange question. “I’ve never counted them.”
“What did my mother do with all those rooms?”
“They are all different, and only a few of them are for the family to live in. Most of them are public rooms, for holding audiences and dinners and meetings and music performances.”
“Audiences, that’s where people come to bow to the king and ask him favours, isn’t it?”
The way he said that made Nellie feel cold. This boy needed to be taught a lot of manners, preferably before he came anywhere near the palace.
“An audience is where people from the general citizenship can come to have their problems heard. They will discuss it with the ruler, the king or queen or regent, and the ruler will then make sure that something is done about it, especially if a lot of people ask for the same thing, and if it is at all within their power to give.”
“But it is where people come to ask for things, isn’t it?”
“It is where common people come to discuss their problems,” Nellie repeated, more forcefully. “The king or queen who doesn’t listen to the voice of the people will not last very long.”
He gave her a blank look. “And how many of these citizens are there?” As if citizens were sheep or horses.
“I haven’t counted them. Thousands, tens of thousands? I don’t know. A lot. A lot more than any king or queen wants to make angry.”
“But if they are angry, the king has guards?”
“Yes, he does. But, like Henrik, they are people who will sometimes also have problems, and they have families who will have problems, so the guards might actually agree with what the common people coming for an audience are saying.”
His frown deepened. “But aren’t guards supposed to listen to the King?”
“They are, and they will, for as long as the king looks after the guards, by listening to their problems and attempting to fix them.”
“Oh, but I would feed them well and make sure that they are never cold.”
“And the guards have families who live in city.”
“I would look after the families as well.”
“And the families have neighbours, who might be jealous when they see how much the guards’ families are getting.”
“I would bring all the families in the palace.”
“I don’t think the palace is that big.”
“But you said it was very big.”
“Well, it is very big, but the palace is still not on an island, and if the citizens of the city don’t like it, they can rise up and burn down the palace, because there are many more citizens than any number of people who will fit in the palace.”
He had to think about that for a while, and the chill that Nellie felt grew into a blizzard.
Whatever was going on inside the head of this boy, he was assuming that everything was his far too soon. What had these priests and monks done to him?
She mentioned this to Henrik after breakfast, when he had sent Bruno with Wim to collect firewood.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. He’s a young boy, and so he’s very impatient,” Henrik said. “Believe me, I was once that young boy. I was going to protect the king all by myself. I was going to slay the fire demons, even if I had no idea how to do that or even what a fire demon looked like. I was going to protect my king from the evil Red Baron, and when I finally saw the Red Baron, even though he was much taller than me and twice the width I thought I could fight him. It is a very common thing for young boys to think like this. He wants to prove himself. He’s angry, and I can’t blame him. To me, it’s a wonder that his ordeal hasn’t turned him completely crazy.”
And Nellie wasn’t so sure it hadn’t. The mad King Roald was not the boy’s father, but there were some disturbing similarities.
But she had to trust Henrik’s judgement. She kept an eye on the two of them as they continued their training during the day.
The day was sunny but cold and frosty, and by the time the light turned golden and Henrik and Bruno came back inside, even Henrik looked tired.
“I hope you look after yourself,” Nellie said.
“Don’t worry about me.”
During dinner, Nellie noticed that when Bruno had finished eating, he could barely keep his eyes open. His cheeks were bright red, and he sat with his arms looped around his knees, trying to be brave and stay awake. He didn’t even listen to Koby’s chatter, and his eyes kept falling shut.
Everyone was tired, and they went to bed early. For a change, Nellie slept well because it was quite warm in the barn, and she didn’t have to worry about people invading.
Throughout the day, groups of people had still been talking about what they would do, but whichever way she thought about it, Nellie thought it would be better to stay here rather than go to the nuns and risk the mercenaries from the city finding them again.
She couldn’t imagine that Casper had anything intelligent to say about what needed to be done with the undesirable people the mercenaries found outside the city. From what Henrik had said, the Regent probably had little influence on these men anyway. And Casper would be far too busy making sure he didn’t get killed.
If the women were betrayed, the guards would find everyone in this group, throw them in jail and burn them at the stake. Once, there would have been citizens in the city who would rise up and protest, but by now they were all kept quiet with the shepherd’s magic.
Over the next few days, it became clear that it was not just Bruno who was impatient. Madame Sabine sent Jantien’s daughter Jette—who was enamoured with Madame Sabine’s curls—to the house to ask for pens and parchment. She demanded the right to correspond with acquaintances who could “help her escape this dreadful situation”. No word of thanks to Nellie for rescuing her. No word, either, about her sons.
Nellie hoped this didn’t mean that she didn’t care about the boys, just that she didn’t want to ask the group to help rescue them.
She remained a strange and very closed woman.
As for Nellie herself, it was hard to imagine that she could feel any worse about the situation. They may have saved the lives of the prisoners, but no one seemed to know what to do next, and they lived as virtual exiles, without the ability to organise themselves or to do anything about the dreadful situation in the city. With winter coming, it would be a long time before the weather was good enough to travel back, and then there didn’t seem to be any reason to do so.
Nellie mostly kept these thoughts to herself as she watched Henrik and Bruno do their regular training, and as she watched groups of animals congregate outside the barn.
The dragon was growing stronger, and had once been let out of the box so that he would keep the children warm at night.
Adalbert Verdonck didn’t care much about them, although Nellie spotted him going into the shed where Madame Sabine’s balloons were stored. As it turned out, he arranged for all the experiments to be packed up into crates.
Madame Sabine was not happy about this, and Nellie remembered the threat he had made to burn all her things.
She also heard that Madame Sabine had an argument with one of Lord Verdonck’s house staff about sending a letter. He would not pay for it, and she had no money. She argued that if he wanted everything out of his shed, he should give her the opportunity to arrange it, to which he said that she could take her horse, since it was roaming around the field stirring up his horses.
The attempt by Madame Sabine to capture the horse would’ve been amusing if she hadn’t been so angry.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into that animal,” she said. “It was trained extremely well. Someone has gone and spoiled it.”
Appar
ently, this someone was supposed to have been Henrik, because he often went and gave the horse carrots when he and Bruno were training outside.
Of course, Nellie felt sure it was the magical influence of the dragon. The horse didn’t understand what was going on but, like Mustafa’s animals, it felt the excitement of the presence of the dragon, and no longer wanted to listen to human commands.
But trying to command the dragon was another thing altogether.
Increasingly, he wandered freely around the fields. If the women shut the barn door and didn’t want him to come in or go out, he would revert to his ethereal form and slip underneath the door in the form of a cloud of sparks.
Bruno would sometimes try to make him come and, when he did, he would try to climb on his back, but so far the only person who had ridden the dragon was Nellie, and that had been a total accident.
Nellie could, however, ask the dragon to come inside at night, and usually he would do so for a short period. In a way, the dragon was like cat. He would come when there was food or he wanted to sit by the fire, but he got bored quickly and asked for the owner to open the door. The dragon didn’t need to do this. He would simply dissolve into sparks. Nellie usually got the dragon to come when the children went to sleep. She suspected that the dragon simply liked sleeping with the children, because the children were innocent, their intentions were clear, and they didn’t try to take advantage of the dragon.
But every time she called the dragon, Bruno was watching.
“I want to do that. He is my dragon,” he would say.
And several times she showed him what she did and told him to hold out his hand and what words to say so that the dragon knew it was bedtime. Which he probably knew anyway.
Bruno tried a few times, but she didn’t think he was genuine or polite enough. The dragon didn’t like commands, and didn’t like when people shouted at him. He also tended to protect animals more than people.
The stray horses that had been with Madame Sabine’s horse had all been recaptured by their owners, mostly people who lived on the estate, but a flock of sheep persistently hung around, and no one was clear where they’d come from. When the groundsman tried to chase them out of the vegetable garden, the dragon flew across and chased the man off. Bruno ran after them whistling and yelling at the dragon to kill the man, but Nellie had to explain that this was not something the dragon liked.
“How can he not like spitting fire? That’s what a dragon does. He’s a dangerous creature.”
“Yes, but when dangerous creatures are good and just, they only use violence as a threat. They try at all times to use their abilities to terrify people.”
And it seemed that finally Bruno was starting to understand. He had to be friends with the dragon before the dragon would do what he said. The dragon had to trust him. In the evening, he went into the paddock and called out to the dragon. He scratched the heads and ears of the sheep that always hung around with the dragon. Today, there were two goats as well, and Madame Sabine’s horse was never far.
He picked up the little kitten that was still following them around and was now a slightly bigger kitten. Only when he had shown his affection to all these animals would the dragon come in and take his position with the children. Bruno told them a story as well, even if he was a little upset that none of the children knew what a pulpit was, and then he was upset that some of them fell asleep.
That wasn’t really because the story was boring—even if it was—but because the children were tired.
All the while this was happening, Nellie was looking on, happy that at least something was going right. If they had to wait in this barn until spring came before they could do anything, they might as well use it to be as prepared as possible.
Chapter 11
IT WAS ONLY JUST LIGHT when Nellie woke to someone touching her shoulder.
She opened her eyes to see that Henrik had kneeled next to her. He held his finger to his lips and said, “The boy is gone.”
Nellie pushed herself up. “What do you mean?”
Next to her, Hilde was still asleep.
Henrik whispered, “The boy. Bruno. He’s gone.”
“Are you sure?”
“I can’t see him anywhere. We were supposed to start training.”
“Maybe he got really keen.” Bruno had not complained as much about getting up early recently.
“I don’t think so. Come, have a look.”
Nellie jumped to her feet and went to the place where Bruno had been sleeping with the other children. The children were all still there, fast asleep with rosy cheeks. During the last few nights, the dragon had slipped out of the barn during the night, and it no longer lay in the straw.
Henrik had been right. Not just the prince was gone, but all of the possessions he had collected were gone as well, including the habit Gisele had given him to disguise himself as a monk. And including the dragon box.
“Maybe he’s gone training,” Nellie said. She wasn’t hopeful that this would actually be the case. If he had taken those things, he was gone, and he was up to something.
“Let’s check outside.” Henrik set off past the dying fire to the barn doors. He lifted the latch and opened the door. The sun hadn’t yet risen, and a soft mist hung over the pale fields. The hoar frost had turned the world into a white wonderland.
It was completely silent, with not a sign of the prince or dragon.
Nellie shivered, pulling her coat around her.
Henrik crossed to the fence of the horse paddock. He pointed. “Look here.”
Nellie went to see.
In the frosted dead grass in the paddock were tracks of a very large animal. They went a number of paces into the white grass and then disappeared. The tracks were too broad to belong to any of the horses, and those stood very quietly down at the other end of the paddock.
She met Henrik’s eyes. They both knew what it meant. These were paw prints of the dragon. Where they disappeared, the dragon had taken off.
Henrik scratched his head. “I thought he was struggling to talk to the dragon, never mind climb onto its back.”
“He managed to call it yesterday,” Nellie said.
But either yesterday’s interaction had been more significant than she had realised, or he had been tricking them about how he couldn’t control the dragon all along.
Either way Bruno was gone. “By the Triune, where do you think he is?”
Henrik shrugged. “To kill the shepherd? To go to the palace? To find his father? Whatever, none of those things are good.”
No, they weren’t. Not only that, but if they had any hope of defeating the shepherd and reinstating the royal family, they needed the dragon and Bruno.
And what was more, she felt betrayed. Recently, she had assumed that people were right and that the dragon did listen to her. It was still a magical creature and did its own thing, but she thought she understood it better than anyone else. That it liked animals, that it attracted animals and would defend them, and that the way to get it to defend you was to treat it well and be an honest person. But if Prince Bruno had lied about being able to interact with the dragon, then her understanding was a lie, too.
She couldn’t imagine it.
When Celine and Bruno were little, Li Fai would tell them stories of legendary dragons of the past, and Nellie had also heard versions of those stories from the sailors who used to work for Mistress Johanna’s father. Stories of the Great Just Dragon were too common for them to be based on a fallacy.
Dragons stood up for people who did the right thing. That was a fact.
Nellie and Henrik went back into the barn, where Agatha and Mina had woken up and started on breakfast.
“Did anyone see Bruno leave?” Nellie asked them.
Mina shook her head. “No. Did he leave?”
“He took his possessions and the dragon.”
Mina frowned. “Did he take any food?”
That was a good question. “I don’t think so.”
“Then he can’t have gone far.”
Good old Mina always remained level-headed and practical.
After a quick breakfast, Nellie and Henrik went out to see if they could find out more about where Bruno might have gone.
First they went to the estate’s horse stables, where the stable master had noticed that the horses were very nervous early in the morning.
“They’ve quietened down a lot now, mind, so whatever spooked them has gone.”
Nellie and Henrik didn’t say anything about the dragon to these people. Lord Verdonck might suspect that they had it, but he hadn’t mentioned it since they arrived at the estate.
They checked in the village where the estate’s workers lived, but everything was quiet there.
They also checked in the shed that contained Madame Sabine’s balloons.
The crates containing the fabric and other material still stood in the corner ready to be taken away.
“It would be a pity if all this is lost,” Nellie said.
Henrik scoffed. “I’m sure some rich noble in Lurezia will continue to make balloons. It’s of no concern to us.”
“I think it is.”
“How so?”
She explained how an army could drop things on an enemy from the air.
Henrik gave her a disturbed look.
“When you’re in the air, no one can reach you, and no one can hear what you say.” And she knew this from the terrifying experience flying on the dragon’s back.
“But that would be all the more reason to destroy this.”
“Except that Lurezian nobles will continue with these balloons. And if they come to us with armies that have balloons, we want to have our own balloons.”
He raised his eyebrows. “We?”
“Well, Saardam in general. Because if invaders have balloons and use them to drop things on us, then we’ll be as defenceless as we are now against magic. And pretending this doesn’t exist isn’t going to stop other people using it.”
“Isn’t one of the problems with the balloons that they go where the wind blows and you can’t control their path?”
