The Dragon Queen (Lamb & Castle Book 3)

by J M Sanford

  “Very pretty,” said Meg. Gently she took Scarlet’s hand and examined the embroidery around her cuffs. “How do you manage such tiny stitches? Come and look at this, Amelia.”

  Amelia obeyed, making half-hearted noises of appreciation and mumbling “very pretty” while Meg fussed over Scarlet’s work until the poor creature blushed almost as red as her dress, declaring that it was nothing, and Mister Morel’s clever inventions did practically all the work.

  After being instructed to be a ‘proper griffin’, Scarlet must have despaired of ever having the opportunity to show her new dress off to anybody. Her face shone with joy now that they were on a safer topic of conversation. “I knit, though,” she said, dashing off towards the side room, pausing only to beckon her guests to follow. “I mean, when I have the time…”

  The room was just about as cosy as Scarlet could make a room carved from ice. A threadbare armchair hugged the small fireplace, a rag rug at its clawed feet, and a quilt spread neatly over the bed reminded Amelia of Scarlet’s more usual patchwork dresses. The entire room was padded with bright cushions and literally hundreds of balls of wool – a person could probably fling themselves down with considerable force anywhere in the room and get away without a single bruise.

  “Take some of the wool if you like,” said Scarlet. “Sable brought all this here for me. He must have fetched it out of the wreckage of the City, some of it was awful damp, but with the way Her Ladyship is going… well I don’t see myself ever getting round to using it. But you might be glad of something to do, if you’re staying long. There are needles in that box under the chair.”

  Meg picked up a ball of fine soft wool, then took more time selecting a pair of needles which would undoubtedly come in handy as weapons.

  “Sable’s all right, then?” said Amelia, selecting her own pair of needles at Meg’s prompting. “Good. I’m pleased to hear it,” she added, rather more woodenly than she’d intended. This cosy visiting was doing nothing to solve their problem.

  “Yes,” said Scarlet, “I really am trying to keep him out of the Master’s sight, ever since… um. Oh, but where are my manners! Let me get you both a cup of tea.”

  Soon, sitting at her new kitchen table, with her little finger stuck out from the handle of her china tea cup, Scarlet looked like the happiest creature in the whole world.

  Amelia took full advantage of her own cup of tea to warm her hands after the long rambling walk around the ice palace, and Meg sat in the best spot by the fire, clacking her knitting needles, while Scarlet busied herself lighting fires under pans and setting machines going all around the kitchen.

  “So, you’re a griffin,” said Meg, during a lull in the activity. She’d shown considerable restraint in holding back her many questions. “Are there many more of you?”

  “Just my two brothers,” said Scarlet. “One of them – you know Sable – will be here by and by, but the other one…” She grimaced. “Count yourself lucky if you don’t see him.”

  “No parents? No children?”

  The griffin in her human form looked about the right age to have both, but she shook her head, lowering her gaze. “Oh, no. It doesn’t work that way with us.”

  “You can say that again,” said Amelia, who had been half-heartedly listening to the conversation, in between worrying. “Archmage Morel made her from the thighbone of a lioness.”

  “How… interesting,” said Meg.

  “Not really,” said Scarlet, getting up in a hurry and attending to one of the simmering pots, pouring in a bowlful of chopped carrots and a hefty dose of some soapy-smelling herb that Amelia thought might be coriander, although after the first night’s meal with its horrible magicky taste, she wasn’t sure. “It’s not as if I can do anything special because of it. I’m just like you, honest I am.”

  “Not quite though, dear.” Meg and Amelia had both seen Scarlet wave a hand over one of the pots on the stove in a manner that looked suspiciously like gesture magic, though she wore no conjuring rings.

  “Well, I mean,” Scarlet threw up her hands in exasperation, “I stepped all grown up out of a magical fire, rather than the messy way your kind do it. Being hatched from an egg all tiny and helpless…” She gave a shudder at the thought.

  “We don’t hatch from eggs!” Amelia snapped. “That’s birds! And reptiles.” She noticed Meg raise her eyebrows at her. “And I’ve read about some kinds of mammals that lay eggs, too,” she added lamely. Embarrassed, she waved a hand quickly over her tea to warm it back up to a drinkable temperature. As she did so, she wondered fleetingly if dragons hatched from eggs, but she’d never uncovered any information on dragons at all in her father’s library, and besides, that train of thought only stopped at stations she didn’t want to visit. Her tea bubbled and spat all over the table top, and she snatched back her hand in alarm.

  Meg glanced across. “Keep at it, you’ll get there,” she said. “But I wouldn’t drink that, if I were you. You’ve turned it green.”

  Amelia stared in consternation at her ruined cup of tea, which looked more like pea soup. “Oh. How did I do that?”

  “Not the foggiest idea,” said Meg serenely.

  Scarlet, curious, pitched in with her own theories on the mystery of the pea tea. The conversation ran on smoother from there, but the cook became more and more absorbed in her work, and it was all too soon that she looked up at the clock and warned the guests they’d best get ready for dinner. “Master can’t abide lateness.” She’d grown agitated again, as if she expected Prince Archalthus to come barging into the kitchen without warning (however unlikely that was) and catch her indulging in being human. Meg, apparently feeling that she’d achieved enough for now in getting the griffin on their side, thanked her for the needles and wool, and took Amelia back to the guest parlour. “So, what do you think?” she asked along the way. “Do we have a friend there?”

  Amelia heaved a great reluctant sigh. “Probably.”

  ~

  After dinner, Amelia approached the golems guarding the guest chambers. Most likely she could have used invisibility to slip past them whenever she wanted, but she remembered Meg’s warnings against bodily spells until they had a better hold on the local magic.

  “May I visit the winter garden again?” she asked the golems. “So pretty,” she added, hoping to jog their memories of the Red Queen’s orders.

  They took out a pocket watch and consulted their Commander.

  “Again?”

  “We got lost along the way,” said Amelia, leaning into the conversation, “and had to hurry back in time for dinner. Please? I so wanted to smell the evening flowers, and talk to the pretty clockwork birds again – such fun!” She found it easy to enthuse about the beauty of the place, and though the Commander sneered at her vapid love for all those frivolities, he let her go. She wouldn’t try to leave the palace: that would be foolish, and she’d done enough foolish things lately that she thought she must be about due to do the right thing for a change. Heading in the general direction of the winter gardens at first, she soon changed tack to find somewhere she wouldn’t be disturbed.. She tested out her lock-charming spell, and the locks answered her, but the spell made her mouth feel like it was full of old rust, so she didn’t bother with it again once she’d proved to herself that she could do it if she had to. Then, as per Meg’s instructions, she found a quiet gallery of statues and set to practicing her light spells. In a world of proper magic, where spells behaved themselves as expected, the little full moon lights would have stayed where she set them, or otherwise she could enchant them to bob along at her elbow or over her head. In the new world, if she didn’t watch them ferociously, the light spells slid off on strange tangents, until they eventually ended up dribbling down a wall, leaving stains like snail trails. Sometimes she caught them slowly dribbling up the wall, which she didn’t understand at all and found most disconcerting. Meg had agreed that experimentation with simple light spells was a good way for Amelia to acquaint herself with the ne
w world’s magic, and an innocent enough activity should the prince or his men see her doing it, but as the evening wore on and Amelia grew tired, the light spells became more and more unruly.

  “Stop that!” she whispered, chasing after one silvery light as it rolled off down the hallway like a ball down a hill. She still wasn’t sure if those snail trail stains would fade, given time, and she was so preoccupied with this and with catching up to the light spell so she could get it under control that she almost ran straight into Archmage Morel. “Oh!” She leapt to steady him, grabbing him by the elbows. “Sorry!”

  He watched in bewilderment as the light spell splatted against a nearby wall and started inching sideways across it. “What do you think you’re doing, young lady?” he snapped at her, shooing her hands away. “Wasting magic on silly children’s games!” He shook his head. “What on earth makes you think we have the resources for such frivolity? No, don’t answer that, let’s waste no time here: Mister Breaker is suspicious of you already; the guards will track you down soon enough. Where is the Device?”

  Amelia’s heart raced. “You want the snow globe,” she said, as levelly as she could, “but you don’t want the prince to know about it, do you?”

  “The prince needn’t trouble his royal brain with such things,” said Morel dismissively, but Amelia noted he hadn’t used the prince’s name. “Give me the Device – it will be safer with me.” Hard to deny… “Have you forgotten the spell to use it?” he asked gently. “Women simply aren’t made for using magic, so I’d quite understand if you’d had a fit of hysterics and that had caused the words of the spell to evaporate from your brain… Otherwise you’d be home and safe now, wouldn’t you, poor thing?”

  She was just starting to stammer a rebuttal when she caught the sound of four feet locked in one set of footsteps, slowly approaching the place where she and the Archmage stood. The Archmage turned to see, and as the stark white light of twin heartlights illuminated the turn of the corridor, Amelia held her breath and blinked out of view, creeping away.

  “Curse that silly girl and her games!” she heard the Archmage cry. “Where is she now? Find her.”

  She daredn’t run: they would hear her footsteps; she could slip and fall and drop her invisibility spell. She was just glad that it worked here. She pressed herself into a corner, cringing like an animal, her heart racing and her eyes squeezed so tightly shut that she saw stars pulse and flash in the darkness.

  “There she is!” said Morel. “There in that corner!”

  The paired footsteps stopped in front of her. A stilted voice penetrated the starry darkness. “You are the White Queen, Miss Lamb.”

  Her spell had failed, she’d wasted all her energy on those stupid lights. She wished she’d thought to bring along the borrowed knitting needles, not that she expected they’d do much good against the near-indestructible golems, but if she jammed a knitting needle into one of their eyes it might give her enough time to get away… What was she thinking? Even if she had the needles, she didn’t have what it took to actually do such a thing. She opened her eyes to the glare of starlight ahead of her, the two figures made anonymous by it, but unmistakable in their identicality, down to the way they stood.

  “You were given permission to visit the winter garden, Miss Lamb. This is neither the winter garden nor the route thereto,” said the golems, taking turns. “Please explain yourself.”

  “I got lost!” she squeaked. “I didn’t mean it! Please don’t hurt me!” She was only glad Meg wasn’t around to see her cringing and pleading.

  “We are under instruction not to harm guests,” the golems reminded her, with just a touch of reproachfulness.

  “Yes,” Amelia whispered, “Yes, of course…”

  Archmage Morel was loitering some distance away, frowning and tugging irritably at his beard. Reluctant to discuss the snow globe in front of the prince’s men, as she’d suspected.

  Flanked by the two golems, Amelia returned to the pretty prison of the guest chambers.

  12: UNCOMPLETED

  Archmage Morel stomped through the darkened corridors, stabbing at the floor with his staff every step of the way. Witches! Females shouldn’t be permitted to have conjuring rings. There should be a law against it. What did that stupid girl think she was playing at? All that casting of needless spells, as if magic was water! Couldn’t she taste the sparsity of the magic in the air here? Couldn’t anybody, besides him? And she hadn’t had the Device! ‘Snow globe’, she’d called it, the ridiculous child. She must know where it was. He’d have to catch her alone again…

  But not just now. In hopes of stirring his mind to new vigour and pouncing on some solution to the problem with the sun, Morel set out to pick at the borders of an immense forest of evergreens, several miles from the ice palace. Miss Hartwood had complained that the edge of the forest was ‘far too wiggly’, and Morel could hardly bear to look at the imperfect treeline ever since. He collected the Red Paladin from the shed where it was stored. Eighteen feet tall when it stood at its full height, incredibly strong, it had been Morel’s first experiment with using stars to power golems. Probably risky, looking back on all the ways the experiment could have failed, but they never would have moved the thing away from the crash site otherwise, and Morel was tentatively happy with it so far. He dragged the script core (a bar of steel a yard long and inscribed with every magical instruction the golem needed) from its shelf. Installing it into the great beast’s chest was an awful kerfuffle involving a stepladder and every last ounce of Morel’s strength. It almost wasn’t worth it. Some time later, with its star pulsing bright in its chest, the enormous golem lumbered along behind Morel, until they came to a high ridge overlooking a sea of pines black against the snow.

  “Those four over there,” said Morel to the Red Paladin, indicating the trees that displeased him. “Move them fifty-seven feet northeast.” It paid to be exact with the numbers, and the massive golem trundled off uncomplaining, to set about transplanting the young fir trees.

  “And I don't like that boulder, either,” Morel called after him. “Move that… twenty-three feet to the west. That should do it.” He stood and watched the golem at work. Definitely one of his more successful efforts, quiet and docile, yet it had no difficulty in uprooting a tree when ordered to do so, and would throw its weight against boulders many times larger than itself until they yielded.

  But what was the point of it all, with the sun off on its stubbornly erratic wanderings, somewhere below the horizon? After a handful more shouted instructions to the Red Paladin – remembering of course to send the thing back to its shed when it had completed its work – Morel turned to make his way back to the palace, and the kitchens. It was past midnight, but he could wake Scarlet and she would happily make supper for him. That might improve his mood. For the time being, he could console himself with the thought that the young White Queen wasn’t going anywhere with his Device, confined as she was to the palace, unable to remember the correct spell.

  ~

  “Why can’t you behave yourself, just for one day?” Scarlet’s voice rang out sharply through the night chambers of the palace kitchens, and Morel hesitated as the echoes died in the brass of machines standing idle.

  Sable. Up to no good again. And yet Scarlet would do anything, suffer any fate, to protect her dear brother. Morel shuffled closer, quiet as anything in his soft old slippers. Concentrating so hard on not being heard, he missed whatever Scarlet said next, and couldn’t make out the black griffin’s grumbling answer.

  “Proof or not, Master suspects you played your part in it,” said Scarlet. “Don’t you ever feel guilty for anything? Mister Morel could have been hurt or even killed, and then you’d feel awful, wouldn’t you?” Silence, damning silence. “Wouldn’t you,” Scarlet pressed.

  The black griffin grumbled something else that Morel couldn’t make out, but that was only because the creature was mumbling into his chest feathers, for Morel was at the door by this point. There were ba
lls of wool unravelled and strewn all around the main kitchen, all across the table and the range. That may have been the igniting spark of the griffins’ argument, yet it was clearly not the crux of it.

  “Proof of what?” said Morel aloud, his voice shaking.

  Scarlet jumped so hard that she fluffed involuntarily back into her natural shape, quite ruining the dress she’d been wearing. “Mister Morel! My goodness, I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “You should be more careful with names,” he suggested sharply. He had none of a dragon’s innate ability to hear his name whispered across a mile or more, or from inside a locked room, but it wouldn’t hurt for the griffins to believe he did. He banged his staff on the tiles, making Scarlet flinch. “Proof of what?” He had a terrible feeling the answer was something he’d guessed at before. All the suspicious pieces fitted together: the many raids on his workshop; Scarlet’s nervous demeanour that day; the strange behaviour of the Orb of Helemneum, which could only have been the result of sabotage. “Proof!” He was shaking so hard that he didn’t think he could have kept on his feet without his staff. “You think there is no proof that you two were the ones behind the destruction of Ilgrevnia?”

  Scarlet cringed. “Mister Morel, please! Don’t speak so loudly of such things. What might the Master do if he heard?”

  Morel waved away her concerns. “Nothing you don’t deserve!” he cried, “For the destruction of the City! The destruction of my work, my home, my books…” He sagged, the tears coming suddenly, and Scarlet rushed forth to steady his weight on her strong shoulders. “My mushroom farm, in the cellars of the old house in Mardon Street,” he cried into the griffin’s russet fur, while she gently manoeuvred him into a chair by the stove. “I had so many beautiful specimens, did you ever see? And now they’re all gone…”

  “There, there,” said Scarlet, draping him in blankets, ever so gentle with her fierce eagle’s beak and her talons. “We’ll help you make a new mushroom farm, even better than the old one. Sable, fetch a bottle of wine from the cellars, please? One with lots and lots of dusty old cobwebs, and the swirliest letters.”