A Dragon In the Palace

by William King

  Flames flickered from his nostrils. Smoke drifted towards the ceiling. I followed its rise and saw that my room had no ceiling. It was open to the sky. The moon hovered above me and something else, something large and dark and bat winged circled overhead.

  The thought of it frightened me. It was looking for me and it had not yet found me. I could feel it searching. I wanted to hide but I could not move. My limbs were weak, rubbery. My body was too. I was thirsty but I could not drink. I was hungry but I could not eat. I was tormented by all the things I wanted and could not have.

  The room grew dark round about me. Things lurked in the shadows that I did not want to find me. The darkness had tendrils. I knew if they touched me, I would be doomed.

  Whatever was out there wanted my soul, to claim the part of me that belonged to it already and everything else with it.

  Unreasoning fear filled me. I prayed but sensed only a vast absence. Nothing was there. Perhaps the Holy Sun had washed his hands of me. I was not worthy of his mercy or compassion. I had chosen to walk the path of the sorcerer.

  The shadows had almost reached my bed. They lapped around it like waves on a beach. It was as if I lay on a rock in the sea. My bed was an island of light with just me and Red on it and all around was a dark ocean.

  I sensed other presences, not the ghostly ones of my family but things harder and brighter, somehow more real. There were two of them, chanting.

  Their words transmuted from sound into substance, took shape. They became a glyph that hovered over the bed and rotated. I knew it, or at least parts of it. I recognised bits of the structure. It was the rune that meant light.

  However, that glyph was simply part of another, far more elaborate character, the nature of which I could barely make out. It was all complex moving lines that shifted like the view in a twisted kaleidoscope. I could not follow what was happening. I knew only that the glyph started to emit a light that pushed back the darkness.

  I tried to isolate the part that I understood, to superimpose the simple glyph that I knew beneath it, to add the light I could summon to the light that was already there.

  From my weakening body, illumination flooded, surrounding my physical form like a halo. It surrounded Red too. The little dragon whimpered and twitched.

  Somewhere far off a voice spoke like thunder, “No. You must not do that. You’re far too weak.”

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar. It belonged to a woman I knew but it was not the voice of my mother. It was somebody I had known somewhere sometime long ago. It was so hard to remember.

  All thought drained out of me, and life with it. The shadows gathered strength and flooded back towards me. The glyph hovering over the bed dimmed.

  A wave of power surged over me and everything went dark.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I opened my eyes. Two people loomed over me. They both looked very tired. One of them was Mistress Iliana. Her makeup had run in places. There were trenches in it that showed tanned skin beneath. Master Lucas was there too and his face looked far more lined than I remembered it.

  “There you are,” he said. His voice sounded a weak. “You’ve caused us a lot of trouble, young man.”

  I opened my mouth and tried to ask what happened. No words came out, only strange gabbling sounds. I closed my eyes to keep the tears in. Before I had been struggling to cast spells. Now I could not even speak words. It hardly seemed fair.

  “Just rest,” Master Lucas said. “You’re very weak. It was touch and go there for a while.”

  Something in his tone told me that it still was.

  I wanted to ask him what had happened. I wanted to know the answers to so many things. I could not ask. Once again I felt incoherent anger and frustration.

  Red stirred by my side and yawned and bared his teeth. His eyes had changed colour. They looked red. Not bloodshot, red. The iris itself was the colour of blood for a moment then the black pupil expanded to all but conceal it.

  He made a whispered whimpering as he moved over and licked my face. My skin felt terribly sensitive. It was like having very rough wood, full of splinters, dragged across my flesh.

  I shook my head to tell him to stop. When I did so, the room spun. My stomach heaved. Bile rushed up my throat and I coughed and spluttered and felt as if I was choking. It was a horrible sensation.

  Master Lucas and Mistress Iliana both raised me up and pushed me forward and began to slap my back. I wondered why they were torturing me and it slowly percolated into my mind that they were trying to stop me from choking.

  The servant entered the room with a bowl and shoved it in front of me. Greenish liquid erupted from my mouth. It spilled down into the bowl and acquired a crust of froth. The taste in my mouth was awful. Eventually it stopped and I slumped backwards and the two wizards allowed me to fall back down on the bed.

  “He needs to drink,” I heard Master Lucas say. “I have prepared some elixirs which should help.”

  He must have turned to the servant and said, “See that he gets these every second bell. He must drink all of them.”

  “What about food?” Mistress Iliana asked.

  “He won’t be able to keep it down.”

  “He needs something. His body is eating itself up.”

  “He is very thin,” Master Lucas said. “He was never exactly fat but whatever reserves his body has are being used up very quickly.”

  “That does not sound good,” Mistress Iliana said.

  I opened my eyes and I saw that Master Lucas was making a head-shaking motion again as if to tell her to be quiet. It was not the sort of thing that many men would have dared try with my mistress but she nodded agreement.

  I tried to ask what was going on once again but no words would come. I twisted and turned on my side and I just about managed to make my body do that.

  Red scuttled away, growling resentfully, because I had almost crushed him. I sensed the anger within him, stronger than ever. A small furnace of rage blazed in his chest. His eyes scanned the room as if looking for an enemy.

  I wanted to tell him to be calm but I could not. Instead I tried projecting the thought towards him. I tried to make myself calm down too. As my breathing slowed and my heartbeat stopped racing, I felt the anger and fear diminish. Red crouched and studied me and then laid his head upon his paws and flexed his tail in the air and lay still once more.

  “At least the dragonling is recovering,” Mistress Iliana said. “He looks better than my apprentice does.”

  “Yes,” Master Lucas said. “Strange that they both should fall sick at the same time. I’m going to take it as an omen. The dragon has recovered and so should he.”

  I caught a glimpse of his face out of the corner of my eye. There was worry there and something else. He was concealing something. I wondered what it could be.

  My thoughts felt very slow. It was difficult to link them together. Mostly I was feeling anger and fear and guilt and sadness. As each of those emotions in turn passed through my mind I saw Red stiffen, as if whatever disturbed me also disturbed him.

  I was too tired to think about it, too tired to think about anything. I just wanted to sleep. The voices droned on and I closed my eyes but then my tormentors lifted me up again and forced something between my lips. Liquid dribbled from a flask into my mouth.

  The substance burned as I swallowed it. Something about the taste and the smell reminded me of the stuff that Mistress Iliana drank when we were travelling. It hit my empty stomach like liquid fire. I felt as if I was going to vomit it up but I did not. Instead the heat spread from my stomach through my chest and limbs and with it came relaxation.

  My limbs did not ache and my stomach did not hurt so much. My eyes did not feel as dry. I took a deep breath and nodded my thanks to Master Lucas and closed my eyes just for a few moments.

  When I opened them again, it was dark. On the bed in front of me lay a sleeping boy. His hair was black and curly. His skin was a very dark brown. His nose had been broken. His che
st rose and fell peacefully.

  I raised myself up on all four limbs and scuttled along the bed. I twisted my neck and looked back along my spine in a way that no human could. I flicked my tail just to see how it felt and I spread my wings and hopped into the air.

  I flapped as I rose until I almost hit the ceiling. Everything felt natural and yet wrong at the same time. The fear inside my chest grew by the moment. Something resisted me as I tried to make myself fly across the room.

  One of my legs twitched, spasming, out of my control. My wings stop beating and I plummeted to the ground. Panic hit me and I closed my eyes in anticipation of pain. As I did so I relinquished control of my wings and they started to flap again naturally and I took to the air, almost like a passenger in my own body.

  I tried to relax and work out what was happening but thinking was hard. I was hungry and I craved sausage. I remembered the taste of it, not in the way usually I did when I was two-legged but as something far more subtle and satisfying.

  A sense of wonder slowly filled me. I had memories of being two-legged. I had memories of being that boy down there.

  As soon as that thought hit me, panic returned. I felt as if I was crashing to the ground in the grip of a gravity too strong to resist. My body weighed as much as a gigantic boulder. Somehow, I managed to land on the bed and just lie there, heart racing, tail lashing.

  The sensation of heaviness increased. It felt like I was falling not just into the ground but out of my body, as if I would descend through the bed right to the core of the earth.

  My eyes opened again. This time I was staring up at the ceiling. I tried to raise my hand. It moved feebly and I saw four fingers in front of my face. Not one of them had a claw. No wings flexed when I tried to do that. I had no tail to twitch.

  Instead I looked down at a huddled, shivering little dragon, who stared back up at me at once miserable and afraid. Clearly Red was wondering what had happened to him as much as I was wondering what had happened to me. The difference was that I had the tools to understand it. I had been within his body. I had looked out of his eyes. I had shared some of his memories. It had not been a dream.

  No wonder he seemed so panicky. I tried to imagine what it would be like for me if he suddenly gained control of my body, if my limbs suddenly started moving under the command of another will, like those of a puppet whose strings were tugged.

  I felt sorry for him and I understood his anger and resentment. I stretched out my hand towards him. I was so weak it took a long time. Whatever drug I’d been given had worn off and I felt bone deep pain.

  Red very slowly and warily moved towards my outstretched hand. He put his nostrils down towards my fingers and began to sniff and then stopped. I sensed his disgust through the link we shared.

  There was no sausage there. There was no food. I looked up at the window and I caught the flash of the lighthouse outside. It must still be dark. I had been sleeping. The servant who normally looked after me snored in a chair in the corner of the chamber. I croaked something. He stirred in his sleep and I spoke another word. It came out a bit louder this time and he started awake and looked over at me.

  I could see in the darkness better than I used to be able to. I could make out some details of his features. Perhaps it was just my imagination or the effects of the medicine or the fever.

  “Food,” I said. My voice came out very weak.

  He rose up, yawned, looked around sleepily. Red tugged at my sleeve. I knew the message he was sending. “Bring me a sausage.”

  The servant lit to a lantern and then set off in search of sausage. He also brought water and more of the elixir I’d been given earlier. I drank it down with his help and then some water. Red ate his sausage and snuggled down happily, belching brimstone. The servant boy retreated back into the corner and sat down in his chair once more. He covered himself in a blanket and went back to sleep.

  I lay awake for a little while, staring at the ceiling and listened to the boy and the dragonling snore. I had regained some control of my limbs and my voice. I still felt terrifyingly weak, hungry and nauseous at the same time. I wanted to eat but whenever I reached for the food my stomach rebelled. The elixir burned in my belly and slowly whatever was in it began to take effect. I returned to sleep. This time I had no dreams.

  In the morning Mistress Iliana was back with Master Lucas. I guessed from the way they were glaring at each other that they had been arguing.

  “There’s no need for you to be here,” Master Lucas said. “I’m quite capable of performing simple diagnostic spells. I would go as far as to say that I’m better at it than you. And I don’t need to be supervised.”

  “I’m not trying to supervise you,” Mistress Iliana said. “I merely want to see how the boy is doing.”

  “Well now you have,” Master Lucas said. “And I would greatly appreciate it if you would let me go about my business.”

  Mistress Iliana looked as if she wanted to argue. She was obviously not used to coming off second best in such discussions. Then she saw me staring up at her and she took a deep breath, composed her features, nodded to me and departed.

  “Your mistress is worried about you,” Master Lucas said, after I’d heard the door close. “That’s why she seems so irritated. She is always that way which she is concerned.”

  “Thank you for telling me, sir,” I said. My voice could barely have been described as a whisper.

  “You look a little better today,” Master Lucas said. “Let’s see if appearances are deceptive.”

  He reached out and placed his hand upon me. “Close your eyes, take a deep breath and count to ten,” he said. “Now would be good.”

  I did as I was told.

  He muttered an incantation. Power surged in the room once more. It was different from what I felt when Mistress Iliana invoked her spells. It felt less turbulent, calmer. I began to see why Master Lucas referred to the power as azure. His use of it had something of the quality of the open sky. It felt healthy and refreshing, like a breeze on the plains on a summer day.

  The web of the spell wormed its way through my body. It was not unpleasant, just strange, like being tickled but on the inside. I resisted the urge to squirm but Red did not. He began to shiver and dance.

  “My spell also affects your dragonling,” Master Lucas said. “The bond between you has deepened.”

  For the first time in I don’t know how long I felt capable of lucid thought. I began to remember that I had fallen ill just after my first experience of that deepened bond. I wondered if it was worth mentioning to him. Now did not seem to be a good time though. He was concentrating on his own spells. “You are a little better. Also stronger.”

  “I can move my arms again,” I whispered.

  “I don’t mean physically stronger,” Master Lucas said, “I mean there seems to be more power in you now, as if the well has deepened and filled.”

  “I don’t feel any different,” I said.

  “You are not exactly in the best position to judge, young man,” Master Lucas said. “The power in you has recovered faster than your body, but that is usually the case. The body needs to repair itself. The ability to wield the power does not.”

  “I have been sick,” I said.

  “You have a gift for pointing out the obvious, lad,” Master Lucas said. “Yes, you have been very sick but hopefully you’re on the mend now. We got to you in time.” Something in his tone let me know he was not quite as confident of that as he was trying to sound.

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “You were feverish and it was as if the life was being drained out of you,” Master Lucas said. “We transfused power into you. We had to repair your body at the same time.”

  “Transfused?”

  “We had to feed you our power. You were fading fast and it was the only way to stop you from being dragged down into unlife.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “I hope it did not do you any permanent damage.”

  “Ther
e was no chance of that happening. Otherwise we would not have done it. Still, it is a difficult spell, all the more so when two are trying to work it together.”

  “My mistress always said that she was never very good at healing,” I said.

  “She has no gift for it but that does not stop her from being able to work such spells when she needs to.”

  “I see, sir. I think I sensed the spell that you were trying to weave,” I said.

  Master Lucas looked interested. “You responded to it at the time. You tried to cast the light spell. Your whole body was glowing.”

  “I thought I was helping you,” I said. “I could see that the light glyph was part of what you were doing.”

  Now he looked really interested. He leaned over me and peered down at me. His head tilted to one side and a look of concentration passed over his face. “You could see it?”

  “Yes sir, I could. It was a thing of incredible complexity, constantly moving. The only part I recognised was the light glyph.”

  “I’m surprised that you could discern any components of it at all, given how weak you were. You were barely at the edge of consciousness.”

  “I saw it, sir. That’s why tried to cast the light spell.”

  “That’s why we needed to put you to sleep. You were interfering with the flow of our spell. It took the strength of both Mistress Iliana and myself to push against you. Something could have gone devastatingly wrong under the circumstances. The spell we were using was complex and delicate. We almost buckled under the strain.”

  “I’m sorry to have put you to such trouble, sir.”

  “Stop apologising, lad. You did not know what you were doing. You were trying to help. I appreciate it and I’m sure your mistress would if she was here.”

  “I am grateful to you both,” I said. And I was. I also felt ashamed of my earlier suspicions of this man. He had done nothing but help me and I had rewarded him by looking at him askance. I resolved to try and do better in the future.

  “I think you’re well enough to have some guests,” Master Lucas said.

  “Guests, sir?”