A Dragon In the Palace

by William King

  They got me on my feet and each of them put a shoulder under my armpit to help me stay upright. After a few steps I shrugged them off. Red had returned to the battlements and was leaping from crenelation to crenelation, not in the least worried. Of course, he was not the one falling over. I felt a surge of resentment. How come I was the one who got sick? How come nothing bad ever happened to him?

  He paused and stared hard at me and I remembered the way I’d taken over his body and the sense of panic that had induced. Our connection cut both ways. Even if I did not realise it much of the time.

  We walked to the corner of the battlements and then turned left. We walked along a corridor which ended in an iron gateway. Ghoran tried the door but it was locked. The Northlander turned to go but Jay said, “Wait a minute.”

  He bent down and fiddled with the heel of his boot, producing a long sliver of metal then he bent over the lock. There was a click and the door opened.

  “What did you do?”

  “My father was a locksmith. There’s a trick to opening these things.”

  “That door was locked for a reason,” I said.

  “We’ll lock it again on our way out.”

  Ghoran shrugged and went through. I went with them. I remembered the strange comments Mistress Iliana had made about Jay being a locksmith.

  We emerged into an area that looked down over the harbour. The water was bright blue and cool-looking. I could see the rippling reflections of sails. I watched sailors sitting on the sides of the ship with fishing rods.

  Beneath us the docks were crowded. “It looks busy down there,” I said.

  “You think?” Ghoran said. He seemed genuinely confused.

  “You should see the harbour,” Jay said.

  “That is the harbour,” I said, playing along with whatever joke they were making.

  “That’s the Duke’s private anchorage.” Jay said. “That’s where his personal ships come in. The real harbour is over there.”

  He made an expansive gesture towards the East. I tried to follow it but I could not see anything. Then I looked closely and noticed what looked like a leafless forest. It dawned on me that those were masts.

  “Wait a minute, all those ships down there belong to the Duke?”

  “Yes,” Jay said. “And those are just a few of the total. Most of them are at sea, trading, patrolling the waters that he claims as part of the Duchy.”

  It gave me a sudden insight into quite how wealthy the Duke really was and how powerful. Each of those ships down there cost a fortune. I don’t know why it surprised me. I had already seen the Palace. It just seemed very strange that one man could own so much while so many other people owned so little. But when I paused to think about it I realised that the Duke could claim ownership over everything in this city and power over everyone. It was a mind-boggling thought.

  “Look like you thinking,” Ghoran said. “That never good.”

  “I was overcome by the thought of all those ships,” I said.

  “You should see fleets in Northlands,” Ghoran said. “If Thane call out alliance, hundreds.”

  “Yes, yes,” Jay said. “We know everything is bigger in the Northlands.”

  “It good you know truth,” Ghoran said. “Show you not totally stupid.”

  Red soared further and further from the walls. He obviously liked the look of the ships. He flew down towards one and settled upon the mast. I felt suddenly uneasy. It was the furthest he had been from me since I’d adopted him all those weeks ago.

  The distance seemed immense. I stretched out my arm and beckoned for him to come back. He was so far away that I doubted he could have seen it. He sprang into the air and flew towards me anyway, landing on my outstretched arm. I felt much happier as his weight settled comfortably in the crook of my elbow.

  “That’s one well-trained pet,” Jay said. “I don’t how you found the time to do that, sick as you’ve been.”

  “Yes, dragon train his boy well,” Ghoran said. We looked at each other for a long moment then burst out laughing.

  We stood there in the battlements, the sea breeze ruffling our hair, looking out over the warm waters, comfortable with each other. I felt pleased to have to friends like these. It meant I was not quite as alone as I thought. It was more than just myself and Red here.

  “I’ve got a pass out of the Palace,” Jay said. He was looking at me.

  “I know,” Ghoran said. “I have one too.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you, you great Northern oaf, I was talking to Raif here.” Jay said. He gave his attention back to me. “I’m going to visit my family for dinner on Sunsday. I was wondering if you want to come. Otherwise there will only be this big Northern lout. He’ll just embarrass me. I’d like my family to see I have at least one friend who can talk sensibly.”

  I thought about it for half a second. I wanted to get outside of the Palace, to see the city. Having two people with me who knew their way around would be really good way of doing that. Not only that, there was a possibility of meeting some local people and getting a meal into the bargain. I felt suddenly shy though. I had never been invited to anybody’s home before. Our farm had been isolated outside Khorba.

  “I would like to come,” I said. “But I need to ask my mistress’s permission.”

  It was an excuse anyway. And it let me slide out of giving a direct answer straight away. The thought of being around strangers made me feel quite self-conscious. Almost as self-conscious as I felt wandering around the Palace.

  “You ask,” Jay said. “I’m sure she’ll say yes.”

  He did not look all that certain but he was trying to sound confident.

  “I will do that,” I said.

  “It will be next Sunsday.”

  “Okay,” I said. I felt a sudden surge of relief. The decision to be put off. I had imagined that we were going this very evening and that was not the case. I would have time to get myself prepared.

  We wandered around the battlements a bit more, chatting amiably about our trip from Khorba. There was a lot to talk about. It had been full of incident as we measured such things in our young lives. We remembered most of the details, all of the insults and we exchanged with Vorster and his friends.

  After an hour I went back to my room. Jay locked the entrance as we departed.

  Mistress Iliana said of course it was okay for me to go with Jay and Ghoran to meet his family. She seemed quite pleased by the idea for some reason.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next day I found myself sitting once more in Mistress Iliana’s chambers confronting the wax tablet with the glyph of light on it. I stared. It seemed like an age since had last done this. I had barely thought about the glyphs over the past few weeks. I felt as if I was looking at it fresh. And I knew somewhere deep in my heart that things were different.

  “Are you ready?” Mistress Iliana said.

  “Yes, mistress.” And I was. My eyes traced the pattern as they had done that night on my father’s farm what seemed a lifetime ago. Red scampered over to the tablet. At first, I thought he was going to lunge at it and try and bite it but he did not. He inspected it solemnly, his gaze following the pattern in exactly the same way as mine.

  Was he simply parroting my movements or was he studying the tablet himself? I sensed something in his small mind but I could not tell exactly what it was. I recalled how I felt back when I first cast the spell almost perfectly. And the lines of the glyph lit up as my gaze fell upon them. I closed my eyes feeling an odd sensation spiral within my head. I recognised it as how it had felt on the previous occasions when I’d been able to cast the spell. I opened my eyes. The glyph glowed.

  “Very good, Mistress Iliana said. "You have made some progress."

  The glow continued to intensify and I started to laugh, pleased with my efforts. It seemed, after all, that I was still able to work magic.

  The light was so bright that it hurt to look directly at it. I felt myself growing weaker as if the spel
l was draining my strength. I wanted to stop it. It was then that I realised I did not know how. I had never thought past the moment of casting the spell itself.

  I tried to will the light to stop but nothing happened. It glowed brighter. I felt the strain inside my head increase. “Mistress, how do I stop it.”

  “Work the spell in reverse,” she said.

  “And how do I do that, mistress?” There was a note of urgency in my voice now because I was dizzy once more. It might have been the after-effects of my long illness that also might have been the side effect of the spell casting.

  “Picture the glyph in your mind,” she said. “And then erase it. Start with the last part that you imagined when you were creating it and slowly make the thing disappear.”

  I grasped what she was saying and tried to visualise the glyph. When I closed my eyes, it burned in front of my vision. It was like looking at a bonfire. I did not see how I was going to be able to reverse it. Nonetheless, I tried what Mistress Iliana had suggested.

  I imagined that one small corner of the glyph had disappeared among the last lines with which I completed the pattern. I focused intensely on looking at that and willed a small black spot to appear. Something happened. I did not know whether it was a floater in my vision or whether it was an effect of my concentration.

  I made it move and the line it touched vanished. I traced through the entire pattern and it winked out. The process grew faster and faster the more I did it.

  In the beginning it was very slow but the final effect happened in less than a heartbeat. I opened my eyes and the glow was gone.

  I had done it! I had not only cast the spell but had reversed it. I was glad I was sitting down at the desk. My legs felt weak and rubbery as they had when I had the fever. I could not have stood up at that moment if I had wanted to. It was as if the casting had drained me of all my strength.

  “I’ve done it,” I said. “I’ve done it, mistress.”

  She said, “Indeed you have.”

  I felt like cheering, like throwing my hands in the air. I could not lift them from the desk. Red moved sluggishly over to me and began to lick my face with his rough tongue. It was his way of congratulating me, as much of a celebration as either of us could manage.

  “I can see you are very tired,” Mistress Iliana said. “We shall take a break now and see if your strength returns.”

  I was hoping she would offer me some of the blue elixir but she did not.

  She walked around me as if she wanted to see me from every angle. I felt her invoke power and it flowed around me. She was working a spell although I did not know which one. Red whimpered and crawled up to me and took his place on my lap.

  “How do you feel?” Mistress Iliana asked.

  “Weak, mistress,” I said. I wanted to be honest. “But happy. I have finally been able to cast the spell you were teaching me.”

  “Finally?” She laughed. “You have learned in weeks to do a thing that took me months to master. You’re too impatient, boy.”

  “I’m sorry mistress but I cannot help it. I am who I am.”

  “That you are.”

  She moved back in front of me again and I could see that she was smiling. The white paint and the red that accentuated it gave her an eerie, rather frightening look but there was no mistaking the fact it she was happy. “You have done very well.”

  “I feel very weak, mistress.”

  “That is normal. You will continue to feel weak after you cast such spells for a long time. It takes years to build your strength up to the point when it comes easily.”

  “You have achieved it mistress. I watched you cast that spell every night when we were travelling.”

  “I have practised that spell for many years and I have adjuncts to aid me.”

  “Adjuncts?”

  “Things like this,” she said. She reached down and pulled a small amulet from within her tunic. It dangled around her neck in a chain so thin as to be almost invisible. I could see that it was a small glyph moulded from what looked like copper. I recognised the shape of it immediately. It belonged to the rune I had just cast.

  “Does such an amulet grant you power, mistress?”

  She shook her head. “It simply makes it easier to focus and ensures that I use the minimum possible energy when I cast the spell.”

  “Would it help me?”

  “It would probably make it easier for you to cast the spell once I showed you how to use it but that would be very far from helping you. You need all the practice you can get. You need to keep casting the spell again and again until it becomes second nature and until your power adjusts to the strain.”

  “What do you mean by that, mistress?”

  “The more you cast spells, the more your power develops. It’s like lifting weights. If a man lifts a heavy stone once, he might get nothing from it but a sprain. But if he lifts it a hundred times every day for a year, he will eventually get stronger. That is what you must do although the muscles are in your mind and not your body.”

  “Thank the Light for that, mistress. I do not fancy shifting rocks every day.”

  “We may have you doing that soon anyway,” she said.

  “Have I offended you, mistress?”

  “No. But having the power to cast the spell is only part of the process. You need a healthy body too. Casting spells puts a strain on your metabolism. You have already seen what that ends up doing.”

  I thought about my fever and I could see that she was right. “How will exercise help that, mistress?”

  “It will make you stronger. It will give you more endurance. Casting spells is not just about mental endurance, it also puts a strain on your body. You need to develop both in parallel if you intend to be a powerful wizard.”

  “I see, mistress,” I said. I could not keep from sounding sullen. It seemed never-ending. Nonetheless, happiness still filled me. I had cast the spell. There was no way she was going to be able to cast a veil over that achievement. “You’re saying that if I cast the spell a hundred times, I will get stronger.”

  “A hundred times. A thousand times. I don’t know. It varies from mage to mage. The way you’ve been going I would not be surprised if it happened after you cast it ten times.” She laughed. “But no. Not even you could be that strong.”

  I wanted to be told differently. I looked at the glyph again and I had to resist the urge to try casting the spell. The glyph sat there taunting me, daring me to make a second attempt. Before I knew it, the light started to glow.

  “What are you doing?” Mistress Iliana said.

  “I’m going to have to do this a thousand times I might as well make a start.”

  She looked as if she wanted to contradict me, thought about it for a few moments and then said, “you’ll learn.”

  The spell was much harder this time but I was determined to prove her wrong. I focused all of my attention on casting it but the more I tried the more it seemed to slip away from me. It was like going back to what I had been before. My frustration must have showed on my face.

  “You’re trying again too soon,” she said. “Give yourself some time. And try to rest. You would not run ten leagues after you’ve just jogged ten, would you?”

  “I don’t think so, mistress.”

  “When you have just done is the magical equivalent. Don’t judge your strength by mine. I have been doing this for decades. It will be a long time before you are capable of casting spells the way I can. But never doubt that you will be able to, providing you don’t burn yourself out or do yourselves an injury. Remember what happened when you got the fever. Don’t push yourself too hard.”

  It seemed very strange to hear her exhorting me to behave in such a manner. She had pushed me to repeat the exercise with the glyphs again and again and again with endless patience. Now she seemed to be saying back away from it.

  “I will do my best, mistress,” I said. “It’s just that… It’s just that I really want to be able to do this. I want to be a
wizard.”

  “We all start out that way. There is nothing quite like the sensation of casting your first spells. Sometimes I forget that myself. You can take the rest of the day off. Your concentration is going to be short anyway.”

  I could not quite believe what I was hearing. I looked up at her and said, “There’s only one problem, mistress.”

  “And what would that be, pray tell?”

  “I can barely get my legs to move, mistress.”

  I think part of me was hoping that she would offer me some of the blue potion. Once again that part of me was destined to be disappointed.

  “Take your time,” she said. “What you’re feeling is natural. Like I said it’s as if you have just run a very long race. You’re young. You will recover.”

  She was right, of course. As I sat there looking at the wax tablet and exalting in what I had done, my strength slowly returned. My limbs no longer felt quite so rubbery and my heartbeat slowed down.

  Red stirred as well. I looked down at him and he looked up at me and opened one eye, sleepily. I wondered why he was tired. He was not the one casting spells. Perhaps he simply took his cue from me.

  Mistress Iliana sat there reading her books. She did not seem to pay any attention to me but I knew she was aware of what was going on. She always was. Eventually I placed my hands palm down on top of the desk and pushed myself upright. “I shall go now, mistress.”

  “Good,” she said. “Be on your way.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I got back to my room and I lay down on my bed and I started going over what had happened that day. I thought I understood now what Mistress Iliana had been trying to teach me. It was about recreating an experience exactly. I needed to be able to conjure up the same feelings and emotions as I visualised the glyph. The scales had fallen from my eyes. Something once seen through mist was now clear. I had achieved a level of understanding, impossible even a few weeks before.

  Something had changed in me and I was not sure what. I just knew that I grasped the casting of the spell better. Red give a small whistling noise as if he agreed. I wondered if he was trying to tell me something.