The Dragon Queen

by J M Sanford

  So the snow globe was one use only, was it? The griffins could have warned her. And what use was a one-way trip into the artificial world? You couldn’t rescue anybody with that. All she’d done was doom herself and her companions. She’d been stupid to trust the griffins, and she knew it. If only she’d been able to read the rest of the ancient spell book, she might have known.

  “Amelia?” Harold’s voice was close by. Footsteps tramped through the snow, and she could hear the miserable whining of the fire sprite. “Where’d you go? Are you all right?”

  Amelia cursed her lack of foresight: she’d probably left footprints in the snow. Pale yellow flames flared into life from behind a tower, and Harold came into view a moment later. In a panic Amelia dropped the useless snow globe in the shadows, pausing only to kick snow over it before she hurried back to her bodyguard’s side.

  5: THE TALE OF THE THREE PRINCES

  Bessie had filled the pockets of her borrowed coat right up to the point of risking the seams, so she stopped her salvage efforts, reluctantly turning her attention to the extent of the ruins.

  It must be the worst nightmare of anyone who ever lived in a Flying City, to see the bricks of all those houses, shops and temples scattered across the landscape. The Keystone lay broken off at the root and she shrank from the sight as she would shrink from a dead body, her dyed-in-the-wool reverence for that great symbol now mixed with horror and dread. To think that she had brought this about, that she had committed this unthinkable act of destruction… And though Ilgrevnia had been no innocent merchant City like the others, the pangs of remorse took Bessie quite by surprise.

  But there was no time for maudlin thoughts: for one thing, she couldn’t stand around doing nothing while the others searched for a place to shelter for the night; for another, her preferred spell for keeping warm in bad weather was no use here. It had become virtually impossible to balance the temperature of the spell, and there’s nothing comfortable about being scalding hot in one leg and freezing cold everywhere else. She’d felt relief at the sight of Amelia failing so badly at a simple light spell. It would have been bad form to pass comment, but she breathed easier knowing that she wasn’t struggling alone.

  The snow had abated. Hugging the soft fur of the coat tight around herself, Bessie scanned the white landscape spread beyond the dark tumble of stones. Though they hadn’t yet found bodies in the rubble, she couldn’t imagine anyone surviving the fall of a Flying City, either. Not unless they could fly, of course… Ever since she’d recognised the Orb she’d been watching the snow-streaked skies for the unmistakeable silhouettes of griffins, just in case, but so far it seemed that nothing lived here. The griffins had probably made good time in absenting themselves from Ilgrevnia, while Bessie and Amelia had barely escaped by a whisker. She shivered with more than cold as she remembered her desperate flight across the moor, in the shadow of the doomed City. The magic had been pulling at her even as she ran, and she remembered the giant drawn into a hideous well of magic: she imagined it must lie dead somewhere beneath Ilgrevnia’s ruins. She shivered, trying not to think about that, but even as she gazed across the boundless white, something caught her eye. Was that an ice-bound road? Or a trail of giant footprints tramped and scuffed in the snow, leading out to where – barely visible in the distance – a palace stood, its roots set in light, its spindly spires reaching into a starless black void. A road might well be worth investigating and a palace doubly so, Bessie thought rationally, even as the vacuum left by the absence of stars sucked at her attention. What kind of a world had no stars? Not only no familiar constellations, but no constellations at all to navigate by or tell the time. These ice fields seemed set adrift outside time and space as she knew it. Would the sun rise here? There was the moon in the sky, offering some small measure of comfort. Or rather, there was a moon. Bessie had no confidence it was the same moon that aided thieves and assassins in their night-time business back home in Iletia.

  Something grey flashed fleetfoot out of the shadows not ten yards from Bessie, and her heart beat fast as her hand went automatically for her knife. She heard Amelia cry out in alarm, a thin animal scream, but the silent grey shadow was nothing more than a deer bounding through the snow, swiftly followed by the rest of the herd. Bessie re-sheathed her knife, trying to comfort herself with the fact that there was game here.

  Treading gingerly amongst the splintered boards and shattered stones, she made her way back down the slope, to where Greyfell was waiting. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said, quietly. Bad enough now, but the thought of seeing these ruins in stark daylight…

  “Best not hang about,” Greyfell agreed. “Our supplies are limited.” He gazed out across the snow and ice, towards the horizon where those tall white spires reached up into the starless night. Then he turned to Meg, who had taken all she could from the Archmage’s workshop, too. “Best take advantage of this lull in the weather,” he told her, “and throw ourselves on the mercy of whoever lives in that palace.”

  ~

  Despite Bryn’s claims that Sharvesh could fly them to the palace in no time at all, Meg and Master Greyfell agreed that it would be better to approach on foot, keeping the skyship as a hidden advantage for the time being. More importantly, nobody besides Bryn entirely trusted the skyship’s use of magic here. Amelia understood both these reasons well enough, but resented the final decision regardless. Her sturdy walking boots couldn’t save her toes from the bitter cold for long, and the armour fashioned for the White Queen and her cohort really was heavier than before: Amelia felt it keenly and even Harold was trudging wearily along, his shoulders sagging. Though Meg had ordered him to stick close to Amelia, he was for the time being more concerned with his mentor Sir Percival. Encumbered by the full suit of armour, Percival lagged behind the others even though they made slow progress. Bessie, the smallest of the party, sank almost up to her knees in the snow with every step. She shivered, although nowhere near so violently as Bryn, born in tropical climes. Amelia had tried giving him her fire sprite’s cage to hold onto, but Stupid wailed so at being separated from his mistress, even at a distance of a few feet, that she’d had to take him back for the sake of the peace. Even when it wasn’t snowing, a bitter wind skirled about, and while the horizon had developed a thin line of lavender against the jagged mountains, the forerunner of a dawn of some sort, Amelia was doubtful that it would bring any warmth with it.

  “How’s Tallulah doing?” she asked. Earlier on, she’d seen Meg gingerly weaving a spell to protect the snail, who’d grown from the size of a horse chestnut to the size of an apple. Now the two of them stopped while Meg opened her bag just enough to peek in, smiling gently upon her snail companion.

  “Looks like she’s gone to sleep for a bit,” she told Amelia. “They do that when it gets too cold, so you can imagine we never did get much travelling done in the wintertime.”

  Amelia nodded. Meg preferred to travel by that one-of-a-kind contraption she called a snailcastletank: a miniature iron castle pulled by two giant snails. Amelia, who had seen one of the giant snails dig itself into the earth to sleep and wait, could easily imagine the snailcastletank settled for the winter in some sheltered valley, both snails underground. There would be a roaring fire in the fat black stove, and Meg and Percival would quietly while away the long cold months, reading books and playing chess. Compared to this, Amelia thought it sounded like heaven.

  “Should we put her somewhere warmer?” she asked, still worrying about the snail.

  “Where did you have in mind?” asked Meg, glancing around the icefields. “No, look: she’s sealed herself up,” she opened the bag to show the still form of the snail, and pointed out what is called the operculum by people who know all too much about snails – the door that closed her shell to the hostile world. “She’ll be happy enough to stay that way for months, so the cold can’t hurt her for now. The mage who put the spell on her in the first place did do a pretty good job, after all.”

  This admi
ssion eased Amelia’s worries about Tallulah. As she’d tried to get to grips with how these strange planes of magic worked – and what they did to her own simple light spells – she’d been plagued by the dreadful idea that different parts of the snail might unshrink at different rates, and that the poor creature might crack her shell and die… But Meg would hardly praise a mage without good reason, so the shrinking spell must be more than adequate. “And how’s your sprite?” asked Meg, tapping the bars of the cage Amelia carried, getting almost no response from the sprite within.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

  “You’ve kept him too long in that cage,” said Percival sternly, as he finally caught up with them. “I’ve no doubt he’d benefit from some space to move around.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Meg. “You don’t know what a nuisance that creature can be. He’d be forever picking fights with birds twice his size, and probably go after a dragon if he ever saw one in flight. Now there’s a fight we don’t need.”

  Not that they’d seen any birds, no matter how large or small. The wind wouldn’t stop howling, and all around them it had sculpted the packed snow into bizarre and improbable shapes. Amelia flinched at every unexpected noise, half expecting snow monsters or ice sprites to appear at the mouth of every cave, or in the glacial channels.

  Meg showed no such fear. She’d borrowed Amelia’s spell book and ended up dawdling by herself at the tail end of the group. “Amelia!” she called. “Don’t leave your old mother to get lost in the snow!”

  Guiltily, Amelia stopped at once to let her catch up, worrying all the more when Meg gripped her arm and leaned on it heavily as they progressed. The older witch gave every visible appearance of suffering with the exertion of the journey, but when she spoke again, her voice was steady and even. “Right,” she said, the wind cutting between her voice and the party ranging ahead. “No bodily spells for you here, young lady. That means no levitation or invisibility, although you might use a fireball if you can aim it straight. Not that there’s much chance of you managing that, if your earlier display was anything to go by…” She leafed through the spell book, her furred gloves clumsy not just with their thickness, but with the conjuring rings they hid. “Oh, my word. No Eye of Cat, Ear of Bat, or Nose of Hound either.”

  That was a pity: Eye of Cat was a marvellous spell for gaining an advantage over an adversary in the dark, but of course Amelia wouldn’t dare risk the unpredictable magic in this world recoiling and striking her blind if she tried it. Ear of Bat she hadn’t yet learned, and she couldn’t imagine many uses for Nose of Hound.

  “Oh, heavens, and the next page is even worse!” Meg interrupted her thoughts. “Certainly none of these.”

  Master Greyfell, noticing something amiss, stopped in his tracks to watch the stragglers. “What are you doing back there?”

  “You wouldn’t understand, you’re not a witch.”

  Master Greyfell ignored this comment as the group gathered together. Then, looking uncharacteristically uncertain, he cleared his throat. “I’d discovered something, before our sudden transportation, something which I’d hoped would be irrelevant after Miss Castle and Miss Lamb had banished the Dragon Prince. A mere curiosity. I had been reading the book given to Miss Lamb by the griffins…”

  Amelia’s heart stuttered: had he discovered the spell; the use of the snow globe? Was he preparing to tear away her tissue of lies and reveal that all this was her fault?

  Sir Percival growled. “I warned you, didn’t I?” he said to Meg, not exactly quietly. “It’s just like a Greyfell to keep secrets and feed us duff information.”

  “Shut up and save your strength,” said Meg. “Now, what’s this idea, then?”

  “In the griffins’ book –” Greyfell stopped, still reticent. “Keep moving. There’s no sense in standing here until we freeze solid.” He began to tramp off through the snow again, raising his voice for all to hear as he began: “In the griffins’ book I found a chronicle, written in High Mirendorean and annotated with cryptic notes. I took it at first to be a fairy tale, and translating the book to be a diverting exercise. However, in the course of this work it occurred to me that even fairy tales tend to be rooted in reality. Now, in the interest of honesty, I did suspect the White Queen and her companions of foul play, when we were first transported. However, this fairy tale – amongst other things – gave me cause to reconsider. I have come to the conclusion that we have a mutual enemy in this place.”

  “Yes,” said Meg. “Prince Archalthus.”

  “Meg!”

  “In a manner of speaking, Madam. I believe the cursed prince plays his part here, as you will see:”

  Many thousands of years ago, three young princes of the Dragon Lands quarrelled over what quality made a great queen. The first brother, dark and sombre, said that a queen’s wisdom should be treasured above all her other qualities, so that she might aid her king in ruling the kingdom. The second brother, handsome and fiery-headed, argued that beauty was the greater virtue, so that she would be beloved by all the kingdom. The third brother, with skin like snow and a heart like thin ice, refused to agree with either of them, saying instead that her great compassion and gentleness should be a foil to her king's fearsome strength.

  “'A heart like thin ice'?” Meg interrupted. “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “I confess I don’t know, Madam,” said Master Greyfell, who'd rarely found much time for poetry. “Some obscure metaphor.”

  “What a lot of rubbish. Carry on, then.”

  With each of the princes immovable in his position, the argument might yet have remained academic, but for the dying King of the Dragon Lands making a pronouncement that he would soon choose an heir for his throne. Of his three sons, the one that showed the best judgement in finding himself a suitable queen would win the kingdom. From his deathbed, the King of the Dragon Lands commissioned the great Council of Mages to hide the crown and the throne room, and decreed that those wise men must preside over the Queens' Contest. Each prince invited one of the great noble families of the three Northern Kingdoms to send a marriageable daughter. Each girl was to embody their chosen virtue, above all others, and the three would compete to prove which one of them would make the most worthy queen.

  The White Queen, as you know, must make the first move. She journeyed out in a great Warship - the grandest and fastest skyship ever seen - with the fiercest warrior of the age, a man undefeated in five hundred battles, sent to guard her as her Paladin. She had not just one Mage, but a dozen great practitioners of the arcane arts to guide her on her way. Her Commander had a nation’s worth of men for a White Army. With the Queen’s skyship at the forefront, her army stretched back countless miles across the countryside as they ventured forward to discover the crown. The candidate White Queen’s mother and father had warned her that she must be victorious at all costs. The price of failure was too high to speak of.

  “The 'price of failure' was death, I'd wager,” said Bessie. “Dragons…” she gave an exaggerated shudder.

  “Ignominious death to the losers, indeed,” said Master Greyfell, still trudging through the snow as he spoke.

  No surprise, then, that the sweet-tempered and gentle young lady lost her nerve. She resolved to flee her fate however she could. In an effort to gain her Paladin’s love and trust, and with every intent of betraying him, she unwittingly fell in love with him. How could a girl of such kind heart and gentle ways possibly have carried out a plan that would have ended in her loyal guardian’s destruction? But the White Queen’s love was not unrequited, so Queen and Paladin escaped together one night, leaving behind an army with no one to lead them.

  On hearing the news of the White Queen’s elopement, the three princes at once turned to scheming and fighting amongst themselves, raising armies of their own, making bloody battlegrounds of every wheat field, village green and town square in their path.

  The Black Prince, thinking himself a master of strategy after all his
reading on the topic, was nevertheless too keen to be King, and rushed in first at every battle, no matter what prizes might have been won by a more cautious approach. Having gained an initial advantage over the Red Prince, the Black Prince’s horde hounded the weaker army all through the caves and canyons of the Stacks, only to find themselves outmatched by the mysterious natives, who despised intruders in their land. A wise Queen might have aided the Black Prince in honing his plans, but such a woman was nowhere to be found for him.

  In the wild forgotten lands of the Stacks, the Red Prince learned of a tower that contained a great hidden treasure of the Queens’ Contest, but without a Queen he could not enter the tower to win the prize. Desperate to draw his brother away from the hidden treasure, he struck on a plan to burn down the Black Prince’s grandest library, bigger than any city. The plan worked well in that regard, but with the Red Prince’s army divided, they were the next to stumble: as the cruellest months of winter drew in, the men refused to fight in the deadliest regions of the inhospitable canyon lands, and ceded the tower to the Black Prince’s army. The Red Prince raged at this mutiny, cursing an army of cowards. Would they have showed more courage if they’d fought with a portrait of their beautiful Queen in every man’s breast pocket? The Red Prince feared so.

  The White Prince, who had sorely tested his patience by watching and waiting, joined the fray in earnest, believing himself on the brink of victory. But he was the cruellest master, lashing his army on like stubborn dogs through every trial, the deaths of countless thousands meaning nothing to him in the pursuit of victory, until every man amongst them hated their prince with a passion. As they fled or rebelled outright, their enemies rallied. If only the White Prince had a gentle and compassionate Queen at his side, she might have had the power to soothe him and stay his hand…