by Gwynn White
Ran nodded, suddenly tongue-tied.
“Hot milk. Hot milk it is, then. Pop back into bed with you and I’ll be there in a trice.”
Ran shook his head. He jumped onto his nurse’s bed, shoes and all, and sat in the warm spot hugging his knees. When he was very little he used to sometimes wake up bawling, and Nurse would let him get into bed with her so that he ended up sleeping the night through out here. The hall was cold and softly lit by electric candles that gave a yellow tinge to the ancient stone.
His nurse sighed. “Stay there, then. Take those shoes off and get under the covers.” She plucked her dressing gown off the bedpost, jammed her feet into her slippers, and flapped off towards the back staircase, which led to the kitchens.
The instant she was out of sight, Ran fled the other way. He passed Hilburt, Smaghs, and Wollis, who were Guy’s and Mother’s varlets and Phyllicia’s nurse, respectively, sleeping outside their doors. None of the other rooms on this floor were occupied any more. He pattered down the stone stairs and stopped on the lowest landing.
The great hall at night always looked eerie and somehow wrong. The Swan Throne stood on the dais like a museum exhibit coldly lit. Two Sauvage liverymen guarded the doors at the end of the hall.
A faint crumping noise came out of the night.
The liverymen looked at each other.
Brrrump! And the distant noise of a klaxon.
One of the liverymen said into his walkie-talkie, “What was that? What’s happening?”
The other man pushed out through the doors. The walkie-talkie man followed, and Ran followed behind them, unnoticed, as they jogged across the bailey.
The bailey of Dublin Castle was a quadrangle with the Old Keep at the end. The university and the chapel were on Ran’s left, and the Lord Niall Building, headquarters of the Sauvage Corporation, took up the whole right side of the quadrangle. The other side was the wall with Cork Hill Gate in it.
The liverymen trampled between the elms growing in the middle of the quadrangle, over the flowerbeds.
The Cork Hill Gate stood open, and the portcullis was up, as it should be. Ran had never seen this gate closed, nor the portcullis lowered, in his life.
The windows of the the sentry kiosk at the gate glowed placidly. But there were no sentries inside.
One of the liverymen ran up the steps to the parapet of the wall. The other one hesitated.
Ran put on a burst of speed. His footsteps echoed off the barrel vault of the gate. The man-at-arm’s footsteps thumped behind him. “Hey! You! Kid!” He thought Ran was one of the servants’ children, some of whom still lived in the bondsmen’s quarters of the Old Keep.
Outside the bailey wall, Ran dashed along the road towards the paddock, heading for the mews. The liveryman was still chasing him and shouting. Over his own panting, he heard the klaxon wailing from the Cork Hill Gate.
We’re under attack!
The liveryman’s hand fastened on the back of his smock. “Got you! You little … m’lord?”
A low, strange cry issued from within the mews: a moan that died into a hoarse craking.
Dragons cheeped, their high squeaks signaling fear.
It took a lot to scare a dragon.
The liveryman, also startled, let go of Ran. He hurtled across the paddock and fumbled open the gate in the brick-walled mews enclosure.
The lorry-height door of the mews stood open. As Ran approached, a dragon burst out. It was big, golden Ambassador, fleeing from whatever had gotten in. Following Ambassador’s lead, the rest of the hunt emerged, barely touching the ground before they leapt into the air and dispersed like enormous starlings. But Honor was not among them.
Ran dropped flat and crawled on his stomach over the threshold.
In the dark, his hand met the warm bulk of a dragon lying on the floor.
“Honor!”
The liveryman’s boot came down in front of Ran’s face. The man tripped and sprawled headlong on top of the fallen dragon.
Somewhere in the dark overhead, a gun went off.
Ran crawled forward. The dragon was not Honor. It was Platinum, a juvenile male, and he was dead. His belly had been ripped open, the way the dragons themselves would rip open rabbits loosed in the paddock for their hunting practices.
The liveryman clambered to his feet, slipping on Platinum’s guts. He drew his sidearm and shouted, “Get out of here, m’lord!”
Overhead, the frr frr frr of wings. That eerie moan sounded again, and was answered by the huffing grunt of a dragon’s challenge. Ran, on his knees, stared up at the beasts tangling in the darkness. Honor—it had to be Honor—had taken refuge under the second-topmost perch platform. Clinging to the struts, she swiped at her flapping, jinking antagonist. What was it? Too big to get in and get at her. It was shaped like a dragon, more or less, but it seemed to have four wings, two big ones and two small ones over the shoulders. Its head was oddly lumpy-looking.
The man-at-arms fired his gun.
“Stop it!” Ran screamed. “You’ll hit Honor!”
The perch-frame shook. The four-winged monster landed on the topmost perch.
A man’s legs swung down from the rafter above.
“Halt, villain!” Ran’s liveryman bellowed. “Hands up!”
The man had a gun. He fired.
Ran’s liveryman grunted strangely and fell over.
The monster spread its wings. The stranger jumped onto its back. Honor dropped out of the perch-frame, preparing to launch herself at the enemy. “No!” Ran shouted. He glanced at the liveryman, who was moving weakly on the ground, like a sleeper having a nightmare. His eyes were open and blood was coming out of his mouth.
The monster settled to the ground in front of Ran. The stranger jumped off. “Hello there,” he said to Ran. “He called you m’lord. Just a figure of speech?”
The man was thin and shabby, black-moustached. His smiling mouth gave the impression that he was having a grand old time. He glanced without interest at the man he had shot and the dragon his beast had killed.
He had the Worldcracker stuck through the belt of his raincoat.
“That’s mine!” Ran tried to sound like the Lord Protector of Ireland, but he still sounded like a child.
Crump!
“Sounds like the diversion’s still going. But they won’t be able to keep it up much longer. Me, I’ll be off; and you—I think you are a lord, or at least someone important. You’ll come with me.”
A long arm cinched Ran’s waist and swept him off his feet. The man carried him out of the mews under his arm, one bony hand holding his jaw shut. The other dragons had all vanished, the big cowards.
The man threw Ran over the back of his monstrous steed and jumped on behind him. Sour-smelling frills of ruff scraped Ran’s face. As he filled his lungs to scream, the monster leapt into the air.
Spotlights spurted into life all around the curtain wall, dazzling wells of light, their beams swinging and interlocking.
The monster drove through a gap between the tilting lights, soaring into the wind. Behind them, small-arms fire banged.
The rhythmic motion of the monster’s wing muscles jogged Ran up and down. He had to cling to its horrid ruff to stay on. The wind rushed up his smock, ballooning it over his head.
Like a coal of warmth in his mind that rapidly grew to a flame, he sensed Honor. She was coming! She was gaining on the overburdened monster, and with a shrill scream, she dropped out of the night. Her claws deftly fastened on Ran’s smock, sparing his skin. She started to tug him off the monster’s back.
The man grabbed Ran’s braid. Dodging Honor’s wings, he drew his gun with his free hand.
Honor, no! Fly! Terrified for her, Ran flung the thought like a whip. Go, go and tell them …
What? How? Dragons could not talk.
The gun went off close to Ran’s head, deafening him. Honor sank into the monster’s slipstream.
32
Vivienne
The Next Day. Novem
ber 25th, 1979. Dublin Castle
Gone.
Gone, gone, gone.
The attack on Dublin Castle had caused great confusion. Vivienne had turned out the entire garrison, only for them to spend several hours stumbling around in the dark, shooting at hedges and each other. When dawn came they had found no enemy, but only a few homemade mortars hidden outside the walls.
And no trace of Ran.
Gone, gone.
The mortars pointed to the IRA, which meant that they could equally be false clues meant to throw suspicion onto the terrorists and away from the real kidnappers.
Guy, for one, had absolutely no doubt that Ran had been spirited away by Oswald Day’s spooks.
They’d shouted at each other until Vivienne retreated to her studio.
“I cannot endorse military action against the Crown to retrieve one small boy, even if he is my son and heir,” she repeated yet again.
“Of course not,” Sophia said. Loyal Sophia. She’d rushed to Vivienne’s side this morning, and Vivienne was so glad of her unconditional support that she did not think, as she usually did: Poor Sophia. “Have a drink, darling.” Her hands fluttered, spilling ice cubes. A drink: Sophia’s cure for everything.
“We do not even know who has taken him,” Vivienne said. “We must wait for a ransom demand to arrive.”
“Of course. Mustn’t go flying off half-cocked.”
That was one of their father’s phrases. The sisters exchanged a rueful smile. Vivienne’s smile faded as she reflected that in her place, Niall Sauvage would have ordered his hit squads of loyalists onto the streets at dawn, convinced that there was no situation which couldn’t be improved by rounding up the usual suspects and giving them a taste of the electric drill.
She would not turn into her father.
Bad enough that Guy seemed to be a second Niall in the making.
“Guy’s futile conspiracy with Llywelyn and York has already gone too far. I think the Lancashires may be in on it, too. I can hardly bear to say it, but I fear Guy is trying to use Ran’s kidnapping as a lever to force my hand … even if he is not consciously aware that that’s what he’s doing.”
“Darling, do you think …”
Sophia trailed off. But Vivienne knew what she had been going to say. Do you think Guy may have kidnapped Ran to give himself an excuse to move against Oswald Day?
Furious with herself for even thinking it, she rounded on poor Sophia, who had not said anything. “The only way to find out who has taken him is to wait for them to contact us! And in the meantime we must keep his disappearance a secret.”
“Yes, darling. Of course,” Sophia said, cringing.
“Which would be a great deal easier if you had not brought your damn sons, and their wives, and their varlets, and their talking monkeys!”
“It’s only Irene who’s got a talking monkey,” Sophia said in a small voice. “She needs something to love. Clive is such a sod.”
At least you know it, too, Vivienne thought. “I am sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Knuckles rapped on the door. “Auntie!” Speak of the devil. It was Dierdre, the wife of Sophia’s eldest son, Cyril. Vivienne’s teeth gritted a little tighter, as they always did when she heard Dierdre call her Auntie in that lilting Irish voice. “Guy is just leaving—”
“And? Therefore? Either come in or go out, Dierdre—darling.”
Dierdre did neither. She stood on the threshhold, clad in a sort of jumpsuit, as if she were preparing to leap out of a helicopter, except that her camouflage was pink and purple. Her silver high-heeled boots matched her chandelier earrings. A seal-fur vest completed the ensemble. “I thought perhaps you’d want to see Guy off,” she said. Her innocent tone belied her obvious hope for yet more family drama.
“Perhaps you should, Vivienne,” Sophia said.
“Why?” Vivienne turned her back on Dierdre and moved closer to her sister.
“It’s all talk, only talk,” Sophia said in a low voice. “They’re not serious. They’re only showing off to each other. But I think Guy needs to do this. He needs to do something. He can’t just sit around and wait for a ransom demand. It’s the way young men are made,” she concluded half-apologetically.
Vivienne raised her eyebrows. Each of them had raised three sons. All three of Sophia’s were shits, with the partial exception of Colin. But now she thought it was just possible, all the same, that Sophia knew more about this business of mothering men than Vivienne did.
For while Sophia’s three were thriving, Vivienne’s own sweet Piers was dead, and now her baby, Ran, was gone gone gone—
Guy was all she had left.
“Very well. I’ll see him off.”
Too impatient to wait for her car—afraid of missing him, now—Vivienne commandeered a motorbike from a knight courier in the bailey. Sophia and Dierdre piled into the sidecar. She roared out to the Overwhelm barracks, a cramped brick warren. Men trotted to and fro purposefully. Their salutes had something of the cringe about them, as if they feared her disapproval of their activities.
Guy stood in the barracks square near the Dragonet helicopter he used for leisure trips, talking to a couple of his friends. Catching sight of Vivienne, the pair jumped hurriedly into the helicopter. Vivienne had seen who they were. Hanna O’Cinneide, the girl Piers had been dallying with, and Alan O'Scolaidhe, that silly little pansy,.
“So you are set on this,” she said to Guy, her voice cold, colder than anything she had been feeling on the way here.
“It’s only a meeting.”
“Do be careful.”
“I will,” he said, matching her lack of expression. “Aren’t you ladies freezing?”
“Not me,” Dierdre said, adjusting her fur vest to draw attention to her cleavage.
“You appear to have taken sufficient precautions against the weather yourself,” Vivienne noted. Guy was dashingly clad in fatigue bottoms tucked into dragonhide boots, a Sauvage-green parka with fur trim, and a short sword and a revolver hanging from an exceedingly warlike belt.
“I’ll bring him home,” he said quietly. “If I have to cut my way through the entire ROCK, I’ll bring him home.”
“If I had my way, you would not move a step from this castle,” she hissed.
By coming to see him off, she was facing the bitter reality that had sneaked up on her in the last few days.
Threaten and command him as she might, she could not control him.
He was a grown man, and a bastard.
He grinned briefly. “Well, I’d better get going,” he said, and for a moment she hated him.
But as the helicopter lifted, she waved madly. “Come back safely!” Sophia shouted, and Vivienne took it up: “Safely … safely!”
She had not yet allowed herself to dwell on Tristan’s death, to think about all that had been left unfinished between them, but she understood one thing with perfect clarity: she had inherited his self-appointed burden. She must keep the peace.
33
Guy
Three Hours Later. Sanda Island, Scotland
Guy’s helicopter landed near the lighthouse on Sanda Island, an uninhabited island off the southeast coast of Scotland, owned by House Lancashire. With Alan O'Scolaidhe, Hanna O’Cinneide, and a couple of bodyguards, he ran under the rotors and walked away from the lighthouse. An anti-aircraft battery had been built here during the Second World War, but never used. The Worldcracker had ended the war in time to prevent the feared invasion of Britain.
Kim Lancashire, heir of his House, waited with his own retinue on the abandoned gun platform.
“Well met,” Kim said formally to Guy. He was always formal. “The grace of God be upon thee and thy House.”
“I’d rather have another three or four regiments,” Guy joked.
“Never fear,” Hanna said. “We have something better than either God or guns. Justice is on our side.”
They walked down the hill, along a path marked by rusted poles stuck in the brac
ken. The island was treeless. The only sounds were their boots crunching through the bracken and the distant crash of surf. They reached a stretch of turfy sand dunes. A dinghy was drawn up on the beach, and a speedboat bobbed on the swells. Kim explained needlessly, “We came by boat.”
“Let’s walk,” Guy said.
He and Kim walked along the beach, their friends and bodyguards following at a discreet distance. Kim made small talk. Guy wondered how to open the real subject of this meeting.
He felt Alan O'Scolaidhe watching him. Alan knew him as a fighter, the Bastard of Sauvage, the animal who could biff a dozen knights unconscious, drink a keg of beer, have sex in his car, smoke a bomber, and then do it all over again without going to sleep. But Guy was no longer that man. After his brush with death at Piers’s trial, he had woken up changed.
Piers was dead because of him. Because he was mediocre.
Yates-Briggs had not even thought him good enough to kill.
Now came his chance to mend that humiliation.
But he knew the dangers of the death-or-glory mentality. He must not die, or even think about dying. He must not think about glory, either.
All that mattered now was Ran.
He gave up on the idea of fancy gambits. “One of my brothers is dead,” he said bluntly. “The other may be dead. I can stomach Oswald Day’s treachery no longer.”
Kim raised his eyebrows. “I had wondered what made you change your mind about moving against him.”
“He has Ran.” With these words, Guy directly disobeyed his mother, who had made them all swear to keep Ran’s kidnapping a secret. “They grabbed him right out of Dublin Castle . Snatched him in the middle of the night, amidst a false-flag diversion—no one knew until hours had passed. He was in the mews, the little idiot. He loved—loves dragons ...”
Kim cleared his throat, tactfully covering up Guy’s moment of emotion. “So now the regicide holds at least one hostage from each Great House. Except Northumberland, of course, and they’re in it with him. Have you been allowed to talk to your brother at all?”
