Dragonlinks

by Paul Collins

  Dragonlinks

  Paul Collins is a full-time writer of books for younger readers. He has been short-listed for several awards and has won the inaugural Peter McNamara, Aurealis and William Atheling awards.

  Since the age of eighteen Paul has tried his hand at various occupations. He served time in the commandos, trained with the Los Angeles Hell Drivers and worked in hotel security, various factories and for a couple of years was a film repairer for Twentieth Century Fox and MGM in New Zealand. He has played cricket, soccer, rugby union and tennis for various clubs and has a black belt in both tae kwon do and jujitsu. His kickboxing ‘career’ was short-lived although he did win his first fight with a 28-second TKO. He now weight-trains three times a week in a gym.

  Paul currently lives in a rambling bluestone house in inner-city Melbourne. He shares it with children’s writer Meredith Costain and a menagerie comprising a kelpie, a red heeler, a cat, two ducks, six chickens and fifteen goldfish. Visit him at www.paulcollins.com.au and www.quentaris.com.

  Also by Paul Collins

  The Wizard’s Torment

  Cyberskin

  The Dog King

  The Great Ferret Race

  Sneila

  The Glasshouse (illustrated by Jo Thompson)

  The Jelindel Chronicles

  Dragonlinks

  Dragonfang

  Dragonsight

  Wardragon

  The Quentaris Chronicles

  Swords of Quentaris

  Slaves of Quentaris

  Dragonlords of Quentaris

  Princess of Shadows

  The Forgotten Prince

  Vampires of Quentaris

  The Spell of Undoing

  The Earthborn Wars

  The Earthborn

  The Skyborn

  The Hiveborn

  The World of Grrym

  Allira’s Gift (with Danny Willis)

  Lords of Quibbitt (with Danny Willis)

  Morgassa’s Folly (with Danny Willis)

  BOOK ONE IN THE JELINDEL CHRONICLES

  Paul Collins

  Published by Ford Street Publishing, an imprint of

  Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond VIC 3204

  Melbourne Victoria Australia

  Text © Paul Collins 2002

  6 8 10 9 7

  This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to Ford Street Publishing Pty Ltd, 2 Ford Street, Clifton Hill VIC 3068.

  Ford Street website: www.fordstreetpublishing.com

  First published 2002

  This printing 2011

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Author: Paul Collins 1954–

  Title: Dragonlinks / Paul Collins

  ISBN 978-1-921665-24-0 (pbk.)

  Target audience: Fantasy – Juvenile fiction

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  Cover design © Grant Gittus Graphics

  Map © Marc McBride

  Printing and quality control in China by

  Tingleman Pty Ltd

  From a concept by Sean McMullen

  Dragonlinks was inspired by the short story

  “The Weakest Link” published in Dream Weavers

  under the pseudonym Roger Wilcox.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Chapter

  1

  As sunset faded into the night of a lunar eclipse in the second month of 2128, Jelindel dek Mediesar longed to be free of the festivities. She couldn’t leave too early – four generations of the Mediesar dynasty had travelled across Q’zar to commemorate both Grandmama’s 100th birthday and the auspicious birth on the same day of Jelindel’s new niece, Merinda.

  Preparations for the event had been a two-week affair, with exotic wildlife being shipped from as far as Gratz, and tropical fruits imported from the northern state of Bravenhurst. The vast array of food was mouth-watering and a tribute to her mother’s culinary expertise. There was soup made from slowly boiled pork liver and kidneys, plus whites of leeks, minced onions, vinegar, pepper and cloves, heads of wild boar, tusks included, with hot spicy gravy and a pudding of rice, spices, wine and honey; these were bordered by dishes of cygnets, chickens, pheasants and herons, all cooked whole, with the skin and feathers carefully replaced before serving, plus numerous puddings: custards, jellies, cream of almonds, and fruit in a syrup of honey, wine and cinnamon.

  Worn slightly ragged by the ordeal of helping prepare for the extravaganza – although nobility, the Mediesar family treated their staff well – Jelindel groaned inwardly as one of her brother’s friends demanded she dance with him.

  Lutiar. The very thought of her brother made her broil. But even he seemed to be enjoying the night, despite the fact that he had angered his parents by inviting several surly friends. She allowed herself to be twirled around the room as the string quartet played a lively tune then popular among royalty.

  A quick glance at the darkened window and Jelindel winced. The moment she had been waiting for was close at hand. She curtseyed to her dancing partner and smiled. ‘Thank you, Master R’mel – your prowess upon the floor has quite weakened me.’

  R’mel gripped her shoulder. ‘The night is young, Mistress Jelindel. My legs could dance the evening away.’

  Jelindel’s resistance wilted. Before she could draw breath R’mel had guided her back to the assembling parallel lines of dancers. Jelindel knew this was a court dance that would last for twenty minutes. How could this be happening to her?

  Twenty minutes. There might still be time at the end of it. She saw her father, Count Juram, being bustled through the melee to the podium. The master of the house always told the assemblage a story of two lovers who after many journeys finally meet one another. It was an elimination dance and the couple left at the end were crowned King and Queen for the night. The storyteller’s inventiveness or lack thereof had been the cause of both praise and embarrassment in high society over the years.

  After catching several unwanted glances from R’mel, Jelindel grew anxious. To be crowned his Queen for the night would be her ruination.

  But everyone else seemed very happy: her elder sister, Serain, resplendent in her turquoise ball gown and emerald-studded tiara; Grandmama, regal as ever in her elegant ruffled tunic and her tubular skirt; baby Merinda being adored and lavished with gifts by gooey-eyed guests. Jelindel so wanted to go to the bassinet and hold Merinda in her arms for the first time. The fact that she didn’t she would regret for the rest of her life, for as fate would have it she would never see her family again after this night.

  Jelindel remained in the line of excited debutantes. How could she take leave to satisfy her own desires when so many people had forsaken their time to celebrate this occasion? And the banquet! It would be the social gossip of the year! No, she would stay and make merry, dote on her new niece throughout the night, and yes, chance playing nasty R’mel’s Queen if that pleased her family.

  ‘Jelindel!’

  She turned at the hushed w
ord. It was her kindermaid, Jeme. Jelindel curtseyed and thankfully withdrew from the line which closed immediately. She ducked as R’mel craned his neck in search of her.

  Jeme had planned well. She drew a cloak over Jelindel’s shoulders and bustled her out through a door frequented mostly by house staff.

  ‘I really mustn’t!’ Jelindel giggled delightedly. ‘It’s not right. Jeme!’

  ‘You’ll be gone and back afore they know you went missing, young lady,’ Jeme chortled. Like the mother hen she was, Jeme pushed her charge up a flight of worn stairs, checked the way was clear, and swept Jelindel across the corridor to her bedchamber. When she closed the oak door she pushed her back to it for a chance to catch her breath. She crossed her chest and closed her eyes for a brief moment of penance.

  ‘We’ve both done wrong,’ Jelindel told her, and pulled her from the doorway and to the window facing the courtyard. She leaned out of the window, staring at the sunset. With the ornate leadlight panes flung wide open she watched the red glow bleed slowly from the tumble of clouds on the horizon. The second youngest daughter of Count Juram dek Mediesar of D’loom had a magnificent view from her bedchamber window in the family mansion. To Jelindel nothing was as glorious as the sky, and no fairground or revel hall could ever match the luminous celestial spectacle that was hers every evening.

  She hurriedly changed her clothes under Jeme’s watchful eye. The elderly chambermaid was regretting her duplicity. Downstairs the count’s telling of the folktale was already gathering momentum and eliciting much merriment.

  Jelindel smiled inwardly. Encouraged by his early success, her papa’s tale could last an extra ten minutes. The dance, depending on the antics of the participants, another twenty minutes. She could spare no more than thirty minutes then before returning to the dining hall. It was considered extremely ill-mannered to depart from one’s own family banquet.

  Jeme was deep in thought. She loved Jelindel like a daughter, but nobody really understood her. In some ways she was like a boy, full of energy and ready to take on any physical challenge. She roamed the rooftops of the mansion, explored the spaces within the ceilings and wriggled into the chimneys. She crawled within the spaces between the wall panels of her father’s study, listening in on conversations that foreign kings would have cheerfully killed to learn of, then lurked in the shadows of the basements, listening to carters complain about long hours, heavy loads and lazy horses as they delivered their sacks and barrels to the Mediesar household. Within the boundaries of the mansion’s outer walls she could go anywhere unseen and learn any secrets that she wished.

  This was not the sort of lifestyle that a daughter of the Skelt nobility was generally allowed to follow, but Jelindel knew this too and was careful with whom she shared her knowledge. Everyone knew a bit, but nobody knew everything. To her family and the servants, Jelindel was just a boisterous girl who occasionally did things that were not entirely suitable for a female child of the nobility. It was perhaps because of this uniqueness that Jelindel had many friends.

  There was yet another side to Jelindel, however. She travelled. She learned about the world by reading all the books in her father’s library, and even learning some of the languages used in faraway lands. She stole into the rooms of her brothers and borrowed the books that they were supposed to be studying, even Lutiar’s treasured books of the arcane; she did the same with official papers left lying about in her father’s study. She read the accounting books that her mother used to run the household, and even corrected mistakes in her arithmetic. Best of all, she studied books on the heavens, then spent nights lying on the roof slates of the Mediesar mansion and its outbuildings and studying the motions of moons and the patterns of stars. There was no book in the house that she had not read at least twice.

  Although Jelindel never ventured alone beyond the garden walls, she travelled further and saw more than any merchant who sailed the seas yet never looked beyond ships’ cabins, warehouses, wharves and inns.

  All day between chores Jelindel had gazed through the window at the patches of blue sky, imploring the family gods to keep the clouds away, and now at sunset the clouds were retreating over the horizon.

  Tonight was not only the lunar eclipse of Reculemoon, it was one of the few nights of the year when the other two moons would be absent from the sky. Even the glimmers of the faintest stars would be visible against the black vault of space. Jelindel was desperate to be outside to see the whole of the night sky for the few minutes of its full glory.

  If Jelindel thought the day both hectic and frustrating, Jeme found it no better. As dusk spread its mantle over the port city of D’loom, Jeme was doubting her own actions. She would now have done anything to dissuade Jelindel from going outside.

  She began telling the fourteen-year-old how dangerous it was on the stables’ roof, never suspecting that Jelindel would be far safer than anyone else in the mansion.

  ‘You’ll take care out there?’ she kept repeating hopefully in her peevish, worrying voice. ‘Just over to the lowest of the stables’ rooftops, mind, and no further than the outer wall.’

  ‘I love you and I worry about you too,’ Jelindel wheedled, ‘but do not worry, I have been out there dozens of times on dark nights. And thank you for the opportunity, dear Jeme. I knew you would rescue me.’

  ‘Hush, child. Last time you nearly got caught by guards.’

  ‘And that is why I am dressing as a stable boy this time, instead of just wearing a dark cloak. Now please, Jeme, just give me the breeches. The sky is clear and the eclipse is only minutes away. I don’t want to miss a single moment!’

  Jeme handed Jelindel a bundle of rough-spun clothes, holding it at arm’s length by two fingers.

  ‘I washed ’em three times but they still smell of horses and stables,’ she warned. ‘Stables especially. Horrid smelly things from horrid smelly men.’

  Jelindel wrinkled her nose as she held up the patched brown breeches, then gritted her teeth and pulled them on.

  ‘It smells as if these have not been washed in a lifetime,’ she said as she drew a stained cotton tunic over her head.

  ‘Until yesterday they hadn’t,’ said Jeme. ‘At least you both look and smell the part of a stable boy.’

  Jelindel sat back in her favourite reading chair and pulled on a pair of tattered boots.

  ‘Now the chair will smell too,’ wailed Jeme.

  ‘The boots are too big,’ Jelindel retorted.

  ‘’Tis why I gave you two pairs of woollen socks. Now mind to lace the boots tightly – and don’t scuff them; they’re Lutiar’s and he thinks they’re away being oiled.’

  ‘Lutiar’s a pig. I should return them full of horse dung.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that about your brother!’

  ‘Why not? He poisoned my rainbow fish last week. And poor Papa. Did you see his face when Lutiar arrived with his horrible friends? Had it not been for Merinda’s sake, Papa would have banished him from the dining hall. I am sure of that!’

  ‘Your brother is a worry,’ Jeme admitted. ‘It’s a boy thing, I am sure. He will grow out of it.’ She sighed. ‘It is the wild company he keeps that holds him back.’

  Jelindel buttoned her tunic and presented herself to Jeme.

  Jeme stood back more from the smell than to admire Jelindel’s new persona. ‘Oh, Jelindel, just look at you! Little white hands and face against all that dirty brown roughweave. You look like a shabby little barn owl.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jelindel said, regarding herself in a mirror. ‘All this disguise yet my hands are as white as milk.’ She went to the garb rack and selected a pair of fine leather gloves from a hook. ‘These will pass for dirty hands,’ she declared.

  She slung a bran bag over her shoulder, then stood before Jeme with her hands behind her back.

  ‘How do I look?’ she asked, chin up and grinning broadly.

  ‘Like you’re a grubby street urchin who’s just stolen a sugar fig and is proud of it.’

>   ‘As long as I look like a stable boy watching the eclipse from the roof, then I don’t care.’

  ‘Well, pull that cap down further or someone will see that you have long hair pinned up in a bun. Why don’t you forget all this nonsense? Stay within and read one of your father’s nice books about the heavens.’

  ‘I’ve read them all! I know them better than he does.’

  ‘As it is he’ll have a fit if he sees what you’ve done to yourself. He might even invite all the guests outside to the gardens to watch the eclipse.’

  ‘Knowing Papa he would rather be in his study, drinking plum wine and writing his next speech denouncing the Preceptor. Do you think I would dress like this if Papa was willing to spend ten minutes in the garden with his own daughter?’

  ‘All this fuss to watch a moon go dark.’

  ‘It’s actually to see the stars grow brighter,’ Jelindel sighed. ‘Papa’s charts and almanacs are filled with stars that are normally drowned by moonlight, Jeme. One of the three moons is almost always in the night sky, but not tonight.’

  Jelindel posed before the mirror again. ‘Besides, I think I look quite smart in a rakish sort of way. It could become a new fashion mode.’

  Jeme eyed the girl’s door dubiously.

  ‘What can I tell your mama if she comes looking for you?’

  ‘Mama rarely comes looking for me, Jeme. Why would she do so now?’

  ‘’Tis the way the world works,’ Jeme said despondently. ‘Now there’s one more thing you need, Jelindel.’

  Jeme held a handybelt out to her. ‘Strap it on tightly. There are a few coppers in the pouch and a knife at the side. Just don’t touch the knife. The stablehands use the cursed things for everything from scraping horses’ hooves to cutting cheese for lunch.’

  Jelindel pulled back. ‘Erk. Has it been washed?’

  ‘Not since the day it was forged.’

  ‘Do I really need it?’

  The kindermaid shrugged. ‘I know it’s only a detail, but “perfection is measured in tiny details”, or so say the sages. Be wary, Little Owl, and attend your stars quickly. I’m wanting to be back in my own bed, pretending to be none but myself.’