by Melanie Rawn
“Dannar? Ah, there you are. Will you carry this for me, please?”
He accepted a large, heavy bound book from the High Princess’ hands and read the title. “Lady Feylin’s book on dragons?”
“Yes. And we’re going to have to find her notes as well. Sweet Goddess,” she sighed, “as if I didn’t have enough to do today! But this is important—and we’re more capable of doing it than Princess Tobin.”
“She seemed very angry, my lady,” he offered as they walked down the hall.
“Lord Chaynal is a little overprotective.” She chuckled. “What he doesn’t know is that she’s been up and walking very nicely for some days now. But today he caught her at it.”
“What’s so important about the book?”
“The princess has quite rightly reminded me that the Vellant’im are very much in awe of dragons. Lady Feylin manages to demolish all misconceptions about them in her book.”
Dannar mulled that over. “Oh—I see! If they knew the truth about dragons, they wouldn’t be scared anymore.”
“Precisely.” She paused suddenly and smiled. “Listen to it, Dannar—the quiet.”
“Maybe they ran out of rocks.”
She laughed and went to open the library door.
To Dannar, there weren’t enough books in the room to merit its being called a library, not compared to Dragon’s Rest and Stronghold and his parents’ collection at Castle Crag. It was more like a workroom, the large table strewn with parchments and books and scrolls.
“We’re not going to burn all these books, are we, my lady?”
“Good Goddess, no! We’re going to hide them. But we must burn some,” she added grimly. “Just enough to make it seem we burned them all.” She went to the narrow bookshelf on the east wall, reached behind it, and muttered something before turning to him again. “Dannar, help me shift this aside.”
Mystified, he did so. She felt the stones with slim, clever fingers, and a few moments later tossed a smile over her shoulder.
“Your father says there are all sorts of secrets like this at Castle Crag. Did he ever show them to you?”
“I know about the one in his office. He showed me how before I left.”
“This one works along the same principles. You wiggle your finger into this space—so—and push in while pulling the little catch to the left, and—”
The wall moved back and to the side. Not just a section of stone, as at Castle Crag, but half the wall. Dannar gaped.
“Come on, let’s start stacking the books in here.”
They made quick work of it, as there were little more than a hundred volumes to be moved, but it was dusty work just the same. They were both coughing and sneezing before they were done.
“We’ll keep these for burning.” Sioned pointed to the scrolls and parchments left on the table. “And the dragon book as well.”
“There are other copies, aren’t there?”
“Quite enough. Although it grieves me to lose this one . . . .” She ran dust-grayed fingers over the leather binding.
“Isn’t there some way we can save it, my lady?”
Her head tilted to one side as she regarded him. “Do I detect the makings of a scholar?”
He shrugged, uncomfortable with the question. “It’s a beautiful book. It’s not right to destroy beautiful things.”
“I agree. But Tobin insisted. She says the one we partially bum has to look impressive.”
“Partially?”
She only smiled.
A little while later they had closed up the wall and moved the shelf back into place. They also made a sufficient mess of the room to suggest hasty sorting of vital scrolls and parchments. Walvis possessed no rare or unique volumes, but still Sioned chose ones she knew to be outdated or so common as to make scant difference if they died. That was how she thought of it: she was about to kill books.
With little to do besides practice walking, Tobin had had much time for thought. What puzzled her most, she had told Sioned on sunlight, was the reaction of the enemy to dragons. Andry says they fell on their faces—as if they were not just terrified, but worshiped the beasts. Goddess alone knew how many dragon legends were believed by the Vellant’im, but it was Tobin’s opinion that with Sunrunners able to speak to dragons, it might be possible to use them in some way. Any advantage we can get, had been her reasoning, and Sioned agreed.
But it reminded her of a conversation with Rohan after her first contact with Elisel. “Dragons in battle—if there’s a way to do it, someone will.” She swore it would not come to that. Still, if the Vellanti fear of dragons could be used against them . . . .
Which meant that they must not find this book, or Feylin’s notes. The latter she tidied as best she could and rolled into a scroll case for packing. But the book, Tobin’s copy with Maarken’s drawings faithfully copied and painstakingly colored . . . this book had to die.
She had Dannar drag over the large iron brazier that warmed Feylin’s feet on cold nights when she worked, and called Fire to it. They fed the flames with page after page of books and scrolls. Sioned hoped there would be enough ash and half-blackened parchment to suggest the burning of many, many books. She glanced around the library. Ransacked shelves with harmless volumes scattered on them and the floor; tallies of glass ingots and goats and other produce left lying there as if too unimportant to burn—yes, it just might give the right impression.
But the most important illusion was still to be conjured.
“You take half,” Sioned told the squire, and cut pages from the heavy binding with her belt-knife. It was hard going, but eventually the book lay in shreds on the table. “Look for things you’d want the enemy to know, things that would frighten them. We’ll save those pages and burn the rest.”
Dannar coughed smoke from his throat and said, “I’ve seen my lord speaking to his dragon, my lady. Is that something we’d like them to know?”
“Hmm. If you run across anything like that, let me look at it.”
She had the last-half of the book, including a section wherein Feylin listed all the superstitions about dragons without comment. If the author had been present, Sioned would have kissed her; nothing could be more perfect for her purposes than stories of princesses and virgins sacrificed to angry dragons, warnings about poisoned blood and teeth and talons, cautionary tales about not looking into their eyes and never entering their caves. That last was fine advice, actually—dragons would never use the Threadsilver Canyon caves again, for people had been gathering up gold there too long.
Sioned ripped those pages out and set them aside. The rest was the last bit of a comprehensive dragon anatomy. Feylin had worked from the skin in; Sioned scanned sections on heart, lungs, and digestion, recalling days at Skybowl when Feylin had systematically carved up a dead dragonsire to find out how he worked.
“I think all this has to go, my lady,” Dannar reported. “The first part makes fun of the legends.”
“Absolutely, it must go. But we’ll leave them some of the bones and wings to chew on,” she added, grinning. “And a bit of the guts as well.”
He grinned back. But they both sobered as the beautiful script and painted pictures were eaten by flames.
“Now for the hard part,” she muttered. “Hand me these pages one at a time, Dannar. I have to burn enough to make it look good, but not too much.”
Myths, warnings, superstitions, charms for appeasing or avoiding, a little anatomy—all of it was artfully scorched. Sioned held each page by the upper corner and directed a tiny fingerflame to burn most, some, or a little of the parchment. When a page was burned to her satisfaction, she let it drop to the floor where Dannar stamped on it a few times to put out the flame and then kicked it to whatever corner of the room he happened to be facing.
“Princess Tobin planned to do this herself, didn’t she, my lady?”
“Yes. Page by page, hating every moment of it—just like us. But she’s a clever woman. This book is more use to us half-bur
ned than whole.” She coughed at the smoke. “What do you think? Will they buy this little scene?”
Dannar stood at the door and surveyed their creation. At last he smiled. “I think they’ll pay more for it than they know, my lady. But the brazier should be kicked over. And a chair, too. We’re supposed to have done this in a hurry.”
“How did you learn to be so devious?”
“Not me—my sister Jeni.” He chuckled. “She was always the one who made it look like somebody else besides us did the damage.”
When all was arranged to their satisfaction, Sioned called Fire to the book’s cover—careful to leave the title intact. The back cover she singed and kicked into the pile of ash near the overturned brazier.
“That’s that,” she said, taking the scroll case of Feylin’s notes and locking the library door. “There’s something else I’d like you to help me with. In the kitchens, this time.” She smiled grimly. “That I can’t boil water is the joke of my whole princedom. But this recipe calls for sorcery, not seasoning.”
Pol’s headache succumbed at dawn to a noxious medicine. He went to Chayla for it because Feylin would have asked questions he wasn’t particularly eager to answer. Not that Chayla missed his bleary eyes and the wince brought by sunlight, but she only arched a brow and mixed herbs into half a cup of wine.
“I should warn you it tastes like a middens.”
He bolted it down. “I never met a medicine that didn’t.”
“That’s why I thought up this.” She handed him a small wafer. “Slide it under your tongue. It’ll cure the taste.”
“Thanks.” After a moment he nodded. “You’re right. Skillful and merciful as well as beautiful—you’ll have to beat them away with a stick, Cousin.” When she sighed, he shrugged an apology. “Been hearing that a long time, hmm?”
“It was old before I learned how to walk.” There was no smug pride in her voice, nothing but rueful resignation that people would always remark upon her beauty.
“Well, then, you ought to be used to it by now.”
“Are you?” she asked pointedly.
It had been a very long time since anyone had embarrassed him about his looks—though, unlike Chayla, he had long ago learned how to use them. He winked and left her to attend to her patients, himself seeking out Betheyn.
He had noticed something about the arrangement of deadfalls at Remagev that had escaped the others—perhaps because of them all, only he had built his palace stone by stone and watched Myrdal’s suggested “improvements” being constructed or installed. Remagev’s design herded invaders to the west door.
“What about the granary?” Bending over the architectural plans, Beth answered her own question. “No, I see—that discourages them from getting in through the kitchen side.”
“Right. I thought there might be some clue in the glassworks, but they were completely rebuilt in 710. Anything useful there is gone.”
“But why the west door?” She frowned, tracing the path with one finger. “It looks an ordinary hallway, my lord, inconvenient for the rest of the keep.”
“Locked and ignored for Goddess alone knows how long,” he agreed, assuming his most innocent face.
A delicate snort greeted his portrayal of virtue. “Let’s ask Lord Walvis.”
They found him up in the gatehouse, helping smash floor tiles. Spearheads, ruined in a good cause, were breaking through brightly colored Kierstian ceramic to reveal arm-length shafts beneath. The lower tiles shattered with more difficulty, being unworn by years of bootheels.
“The west entry?” Walvis asked when they posed the question to him. “No, we’ve never used it. Why?”
“How long has it been locked?”
“Lord Hadaan and I opened it one summer to see if it’d help ventilation. But it sucked up the afternoon wind like a blast furnace, so we locked it again. That was—oh, twenty or thirty years ago, now.”
Pol led Betheyn back down the stairs to the sound of more cracking tiles. “You see? It’s inconvenient, it’s useless for cooling, it’s got no purpose at all. So why build it?”
“Is there something like it at Dragon’s Rest?”
“There are ways of herding people where you want them to go—in our case, to the upper corridor of the servant’s quarters.” He did not elaborate on exactly what waited up there after proper preparation. “I’d make a pretty substantial wager there’s something about that west entry we can use.”
Feylin jingled with the key to every lock at Remagev on a chain attached to her belt. Unable to remember which applied to the west door, she gave them the whole collection.
“This could take all day,” Pol sighed, surveying the stiff locks set at shoulder level in the twin doors.
“Not at all.” Betheyn selected a key. Pol bowed an apology as the lock yielded. He shoved the doors open, hinges creaking a protest. “Needs oil,” Beth commented critically, and led the way inside. Sunlight didn’t reach very far in and there were no windows. He conjured a fingerflame, startling her slightly as she paced slowly forward.
“How would it work?” she mused as she walked. “They come in slowly, suspecting more traps. Double doors, no other exit. Hmm. Low wooden ceiling—not the floor of the room above, which is stone. They reach the door, open it—” She tugged at the heavy iron bar crossing the wood.
Pol heaved at the bolt and it slid into the stone wall. Halfway in it stuck, one door freed. He pushed harder. The iron moved, caught again, and sound snaked across the ceiling toward the entrance.
Betheyn gave a delighted cry. “The catch springs the outer doors by a connection through the ceiling! I thought they were a touch too stiff. Trap the enemy in here and herd them through—”
“To freedom,” Pol pointed out. “And access to the keep.”
“Not necessarily.”
He slanted a frown at her smug smile. “What do you know that I don’t?”
“It’s noon and the only light is from your little Fire. If they come in at night, and if we fix the catch, then the only way out is through this door, leading into the corridor. But that’s locked from the other side.”
“I’m beginning to like this,” Pol said with a grin. “But we can’t just trap them, Beth. We ought to entertain them while they’re trying to get out. And I think I know a way to do it.”
Chapter Nineteen
It took a while to hunt down ingredients for the recipe Sioned had in mind. Feylin gave over some of her medicines without comment, though her brows crept almost to her hairline at a few of the requests. Concoction took the better part of the morning, even with Remagev’s Sunrunner, Relnaya, helping. When Dannar came with news that everything was ready for departure, she had finished.
The squire peered into the vat of thick paste on the butcher block. “What’s that, my lady? It smells awful.”
“That’s the one drawback. Can you go find me a large amount of some very strong herb? Try the storerooms.”
“What about pemric?” Relnaya suggested. “That ought to do it.”
It did. Crushed seeds were added, and the resulting pungency masked the stench. Sioned spooned half the paste into a copper pot and thinned it with water until it was runny. “Dannar, please take this to Lord Walvis. He’ll know what to do with it.”
“But what is it?” the squire asked again.
“Don’t touch it!” she exclaimed as the boy extended a finger to a drop on the table. “That’s been diluted, but it’ll still burn like fire and cramp your hand. It’s something Lord Urival taught me how to brew from the Star Scroll.”
“Sorcery?”
“Yes indeed. There’s not exactly an oversupply of water here, and that or boiling oil won’t stay hot long enough to do any damage. So I made this.”
Dannar looked warily into the cauldron. “I think I know what you’re going to do with the paste—smear it on anything they’re likely to touch, right?”
“Door handles, chair arms—and the well-ropes, for when they try to wash it off.
I want Remagev to burn like fire up one side and down the other.”
“I’ll take the upper floors,” Relnaya said.
“Thanks. That frees Hollis and Beth for elsewhere. I’ll do the downstairs. We’ll wait until everyone’s out of the keep before we start. And take a pail of water along in case you get any on you.”
The squire departed, and the two Sunrunners were scooping paste into three large bowls when a muffled crash sounded. It came again, and again, and yet again. Suddenly there was accompaniment: a scandalous ballad howled at the top of two sets of healthy male lungs.
Sioned glanced up, curious but not alarmed. “Ingots, I should think. And I recognize my son’s charming voice. I believe the other is Lord Kazander.”
• • •
One crate of half-silkweight glass ingots, each about as heavy as a healthy newborn baby, was half empty by the time they finished all twenty-four verses of “The Lord and the Swordmaker’s Daughter.” It was easier to keep rhythm to the song Pol began next—“Swalekeep’s Secret Stair”—but Kazander didn’t know that one, so he switched to “How Many Times Tonight, My Lady?” By the fourth verse they were laughing so hard they could barely lift the ingots from the second crate, let alone smash them with sledgehammers.
The first glass had been demolished in grim silence. Then Kazander started humming. Soon they were bawling out lyrics emphasized by crashing glass. Pol had never had so much good, destructive fun in his life.
The “entertainment” for the Vellant’im trapped in the hallway had met with Kazander’s gleeful approval. The korrus had pointed out that the enemy wore soft boots, not stiffened leather; glass shards would slice right through to the soles of their feet.
“This is the only exit,” Pol had explained, showing Kazander how Betheyn had fixed and oiled the springs and hinges. “It’s made so that the outer doors close only if the bolt slides all the way into the wall, past the catch. And there’s no way to open it again without resetting the spring. They could burn the outer door down, true—but the really interesting part is that the ceiling comes apart on the catch. The wires were broken, but Beth fixed them. So we can fill the false roof with glass, too, and get them no matter what.”
