The Dragon, the Earl, and

by Gordon R. Dickson

Mnrogar said nothing.

  "Why did you call her your granddaughter?" Carolinus said gently.

  "She is young," Mnrogar said.

  "And you, of course," said Carolinus, "are very old by comparison. I see. It was just a natural thing to speak of someone born just recently by your standards as granddaughter or grandson—am I correct?"

  Mnrogar did not answer.

  "There!" exploded the Earl. "More of his stubbornness—"

  "If you please, Hugo," said Carolinus. "I believe we can take Mnrogar's silence in answer to my question as evidence that he does so speak when addressing someone younger than himself. Otherwise he would have answered 'No.' "

  He turned back to Mnrogar.

  "But you had told us all that you were interested in finding another troll disguised as a human among the guests of my Lord Earl," he said to Mnrogar. "Yet, when you are given a chance to examine all the guests there, the one you choose to speak to is Lady Falon. If there had truly been another troll among the guests, and you knew that other troll was there, we would have expected you to put your attention on whatever person that was. Or will you tell us that there never was a troll among the guests to begin with, and your saying there was one was only a lie?"

  "Trolls do not lie," said Mnrogar.

  "Hah!" said the Earl derisively.

  "No, Hugo," said Carolinus. "He's telling the truth in that. This is something that because of my rank and knowledge I happen to know is a fact. I think we can take it for granted that he does have some knowledge of Lady Falon. Whether there ever was another troll in the stands, or what connection all that has with Agatha, I don't think we're ever going to be able to find out."

  Jim cleared his throat.

  "My Lord Earl—Carolinus," he said in his politest voice, "might I suggest something?"

  "Anything! Anything!" said the Earl.

  Jim produced the box from where he had been holding it out of sight between Angie and himself.

  "It happens I have a magic box—" he began.

  "Magick!" roared the Bishop. "There can be no Magick here! I have put the blessing of the Almighty upon this place and the Magick your box contains is useless here and now!"

  "I'm afraid, Richard," said Carolinus, turning to him, "that you may not be exactly right. No new Magick can be made here, of course. But that box is very old Magick indeed; and all it is concerned with is old Magick. It is therefore a part of the Everything; and since it has been a part, cannot be made to disappear by what in this case is an ex post facto blessing. Also, it is a box which was given by another personage to my apprentice; and therefore I cannot gainsay its use—although it concerns me that his use of it might possibly put him in some danger. I have an idea of how he intends to use it; and I must warn him—I must warn you very strongly, Jim—that what you evoke from that box must have an effect on your own future, either for Weal or for Woe."

  "Hah!" said Brian in Jim's left ear; and Jim turned to see his friend, thoughts of food left far behind and a martial glitter in his eyes.

  He turned to look at Angie, and read very clearly in her eyes and face that she was telling him it was up to him.

  "Whatever effect it has, I'll use it now; and maybe we can get some of the answers Mnrogar won't give us," said Jim. Mentally he crossed his fingers that what he was going to try would work. He was holding the box in his lap. He opened its lid and spoke into its apparently empty interior.

  "Is the father of Agatha Falon there?" he asked.

  "I am here," replied a hollow, but deep-toned voice from the box. It was a voice such as might have been heard above ground by someone speaking, far out of sight below, in an opened grave. The fire in the fireplace and in the cressets suddenly burned lower and the room dimmed. A chill and an earthy smell seemed to come into the whole room.

  "Tell us," said Jim, "anything you know about your daughter and any connection she might have had with a troll."

  "That I will tell," said the voice. "I am Sir Blandys de Falon. I was born nearly a century ago and she was the child of my second wife. I had only one son, who is now dead as I am dead. I had only the one daughter, my Agatha, late in life. I loved her dearly for that my son had turned out to be a bookworm, and showed no desire to live as a man should and wear the golden spurs of knighthood."

  The voice broke as if it was too painful to go on, and ceased. Indeed, in spite of its hollow, forbidding quality, as if it was speaking from a distant, vast and empty tomb, there was a pain to be heard in it that visibly touched everybody listening in the room. It was as if the voice would weep, but could not.

  "Go on," commanded Jim, after some seconds.

  "I loved her dearly," the voice went on, "until her age was of barely six years. Then, one day when her nurse had taken her walking in the woods near to our home, that same nurse came back without her, distraught, torn and bleeding from deep cuts and slashes.

  "It was then she told me she had lost my daughter. That a female troll had sprung out from behind some bushes and snatched my daughter away, though the nurse fought to hold her. But the troll was too strong, and she disappeared carrying my little girl; and that was the last I saw of her."

  The voice ceased again.

  "Who then—?" said the Bishop, but in a muted voice, looking at the adult Agatha Falon, expressionless, and motionless in her barrel chair against the far wall.

  "Can that nurse hear me now?" Jim asked the box. "If so, answer."

  "I am here," came a thin and wailing voice like a small breeze lost among dark trees in the distance.

  "Then tell us how you came to lose young Agatha Falon to the troll," said Jim.

  "I will tell," said the thin voice. "I am Winifred Hustings, the daughter of a poor knight, who on his death, my mother being dead, found a place and work with Sir Blandys de Falon as nurse to his daughter. I died but two years agone—an old, old woman. But well I remember the day I took the child Agatha walking in the near woods, the safe woods not far from the stout walls of the home of the Falons. But in those woods, as we were passing some bushes, barely in leaf—for it was but the first of spring— there leaped a female troll, as large as I was, and tried to snatch Agatha from me. Agatha clung to my hand and I tried to protect her. But the troll was stronger than I and her claws and teeth were cruel. Before I knew it, she had gotten Agatha from me and was gone; and I had only strength enough to get back with word of what had happened to Sir Falon. Then I fell and was unconscious for some days.

  "For a long time after that I lay abed, for the wounds made by the troll festered, and I was too weak to rise and do anything. When at last I was recovered, I was put to some small duties having to do with ordering the housekeeping of the castle—for Sir Blandys's second wife, Agatha's mother, had died in childbirth."

  The nurse's voice died as if all the strength had gone out of it.

  "And you never saw Agatha Falon again, either?" asked Jim.

  "Oh, yes," said the thin voice of the nurse, "she came back two years later. One morning as we opened the great gates in the main wall, there she was, with hardly a rag of clothing on her, dirty, scratched, and hardly recognizable by anyone but me. But I knew her. So we took her in, and cleaned her and cared for her; but she could not or would not tell us where she had been all that time, or what had happened to her."

  "She couldn't even tell you?" said Jim. "Would she talk to her father about it?"

  "Sir Blandys would have nothing to do with her," said the voice of the nurse, hopelessly. "He believed she was a changeling—"

  There was an indrawn breath from all in the room except Jim, Angie and Carolinus.

  "—Not the girl we had lost two years before," the voice of the nurse went on. "But he gave directions she was to be kept and cared for and brought up exactly as if she had never left us; and all were forbidden on pain of death from mentioning the fact that she had been missing those years—though it was known on his lands and possibly even further. But, with time, I think most forgot. Sir Blandys died only four
years after that, and everything fell into the hands of the Lady Agatha's older brother; and she was all but ignored and forgotten, and her story with her."

  "Sir Blandys!" said Jim.

  "I am here," said the voice of Sir Blandys.

  "Why would you have nothing to do with your daughter after she came back?" said Jim. "You said you loved her dearly."

  "I loved her dearly—but was this that came back to my gate my daughter? I did not believe so. Two years had gone by. She was not the same. She was a changeling, sent back by the troll that took her—"

  "And you actually had no more to do with her after she came back?" said Jim.

  "After that," said the hollow voice of Sir Blandys, "I could not bear the sight of what had been sent back to me. All that I had loved was gone. I did not find it in this new creature that wore her shape. But, for the good of the family name, I kept the fact of what she was secret. I gave orders that it be kept secret. And secret it was kept from then on."

  Sir Blandys's voice stopped.

  "A changeling," said the Bishop in a low voice, looking at Agatha. "Lady Agatha, on peril to your immortal soul, tell us the truth about what happened after the troll took you!"

  Agatha did not answer. In fact, she did not even seem to hear what the Bishop was saying.

  "If you will not answer, Lady Agatha," said the Bishop, "I must conclude that you are indeed a changeling. That—"

  Agatha woke suddenly and stared at him.

  "I am no changeling!" she cried. "These are only voices that mean nothing from an empty box. Magick, where no Magick should be, if the Church had had the power it pretends to have. It's true that my father would have nothing to do with me. But he never liked me, even when I was very young. Find anyone to tell you different. You cannot convict me of being anything but what I am, the true daughter of Sir Blandys de Falon, not on the basis of Magick alone. That is the law; I have heard it said so many times. Is it not the law?"

  "In fact, my Lord Bishop," said the Bishop's chaplain, "what the Lady Agatha says is true in the legal sense. The Church in its infinite mercy does not judge or condemn on the basis of Magick, alone. That is a principle long established and invariably respected."

  The Bishop brushed his words aside with an angry flip of his large hand.

  "We seek to find out if she is a changeling and a troll, not to punish her in law," he snapped. "Here are witnesses from beyond the grave who cannot lie, also a troll who was to find another troll by scent and picked her out of all else there."

  The Earl was looking aghast. Suddenly, he was looking old and crumpled.

  "My Lord Bishop!" said Angie, unexpectedly and in a carrying, cutting voice. "You are making some assumptions, aren't you? Who says these people from beyond the grave can't be wrong simply because that's where they're speaking from? Also what makes you sure that Mnrogar 'picked her out'?"

  "Lady Angela," thundered the Bishop, "you are not here to give us your opinion. Furthermore—"

  "Hold it!" said Jim—and, remarkably, the Bishop did.

  Jim had been startled at the note of angry command in his own voice almost as much as by its success. In fact, in the following split second he recognized that everybody else around the room was looking at him with startled faces too, with the exception of Mnrogar, who was expressionless, and Carolinus, whose expression gave the impression of a cat licking his whiskers after finishing a bowl of particularly thick cream. Jim hurried to take advantage of the transient opportunity.

  "Two of the witnesses from my box," he said, "have given us conflicting answers. I will ask again—'Winifred Hustings, do you believe that the girl found outside the gate and taken back into the family was the same girl that had been lost when you had been with her two years before?' "

  "I believe so," said Winifred's thin voice. "She was changed, it was true. She had something like a round rock she treasured and kept always with her; and she seemed to have forgotten somewhat of the manners of eating and dressing that she had known before she was taken away. But they came back to her quickly; and in every movement and in every tone of her voice, I heard the little Agatha I had cared for before she was taken."

  "A knight's word, against that of a mere servant," said the Bishop. "The nurse could well be working off some ancient resentment against Sir Blandys by lying to us."

  "I do not lie!" wailed the voice from the box.

  "She does lie!" It was the voice of Sir Blandys.

  "Carolinus," said Jim quickly. "Could you ask Mnrogar if he's willing to tell us anything more he knows about Agatha Falon, now that we've heard what her father and her nurse had to say about her being taken away by a troll early in life?"

  "Mnrogar," said Carolinus, "have you any more to tell us now about Agatha Falon?"

  Mnrogar said nothing.

  "Oh, leave him alone!" burst out Agatha Falon. "You all know nothing. You can prove nothing. It matters not to me, in any case, what you think or say!"

  There was a moment of silence in the chamber—baffled silence on the part of the Bishop, thoughtful silence on the part of his chaplain, and a still, stunned silence on the part of the Earl. Jim felt nagging at him Sherlock Holmes's words about the missing witness. There was somebody somewhere who had not been heard from. Well, there was one last thing to try.

  "Soothing box," he said, "is there someone else there who saw and knew Agatha Falon during the two years of her childhood she was missing from her home? If so, I call on whoever that is to speak."

  There was a short pause in which it seemed that everybody in the room was suddenly tense, and then a voice came strongly from the box.

  "I am Mnrogar and I still live!" said the voice—and it was the voice of the troll.

  A clanking noise was Jim's only warning. He looked up from the box to see Mnrogar hurling himself, a hundred pounds of iron and all, at Jim and the box.

  Chapter 41

  "Still!" cried Carolinus, pointing a finger at the troll.

  Mnrogar, suddenly motionless, but unable to halt his momentum, crashed forward to the floor at Jim's feet, still glaring up at him in awful silence.

  "All right, Mnrogar," said Carolinus sternly. "You can move now, but only to get up and come back and stand where you were. And don't try that again!"

  Mnrogar did so, his eyes still implacably on Jim, but swiveling toward Carolinus as he reached his former place in the middle of the room and stood still. It had all happened so quickly, that nobody else had had a chance to move or make a sound. Now the voice, Mnrogar's voice from the box, went on.

  "—I am Mnrogar, and I go where I will. None wait to face me. Sometimes I have gone far afield to see if there was not another troll who would not run at sight or scent of me—"

  "Still the thing!" said the chain-bound Mnrogar himself, suddenly and harshly. "I will speak!"

  Jim hastily shut the lid of the box, which was still talking, clipping off the voice from it in mid-syllable.

  "I was far from here once," said Mnrogar. "I smelled a female, her scent mixed with that of a human. I went to it, found her den, at least two days empty. But lying just outside it, almost dead but not moving, was a small human. A young human.

  "I was not hungry. I watched it a little while and it tried to crawl to me. I was not hungry. I picked it up and brought it back here with me. Here to my own den—"

  He stared at the Earl.

  "—And you know where that den is."

  The Earl said nothing.

  "On my own land here there are deer, swine, rabbits, many things. Here I have never been hungry. I offered food to the little human, but it could not eat as I eat. But living here, I have come to know humans. I went upstairs at night when all were asleep and brought down their kind of food, and water. This she ate. In time she became strong. The female had not known how to feed her. She had taken the small one to replace a pup of her own which had died—but it had been no use. This human pup could not eat the fresh meat she threw to it. It would not follow her when she went o
ut of the den to hunt. It was weak and useless. She left it.

  "I was wiser. I fed it and kept it. The little her grew. She would hide a small piece of rock, then tug and pull at me to look for it until I found it. Then, she would give it to me to hide, so she could find it. It came to me I liked finding her there when I came back from hunting.

  "But in time she ceased eating, and grew thin again. I took her back to her own human place, not far from that female's den and left her there before sunrise. Then I came back here."

  He stopped speaking so abruptly that it was a moment before those in the room realized that he was actually done.

  "This is all very well," said the Bishop. But he spoke in a somewhat less loud and angry tone of voice. "The fact remains that this troll before us said he smelled another troll among those who would have been in the stands this morning; but the only one he smelled out was Lady Agatha. If Lady Agatha is not a troll, or has no troll blood, how does she come to smell like a troll?"

  The question hung on the air of the room, it seemed to Jim, like the single strand of hair that had been tied to the hilt of the sword hanging directly above the head of Damocles as that unhappy courtier at the court of King Dionysius sat in his chair at a banquet. He looked at Carolinus for help; but Carolinus's face was expressionless and unhelpful. Then the memory of the suspended sword gave Jim a sudden inspiration.

  "Lady Agatha," he said, "your nurse has told us that you were very attached to a piece of stone after you had returned to your family home and carried it with you constantly. Would you happen to have it with you now?"

  Agatha Falon glared at him.

  "What matter to you whether I have or not?" she snapped.

  "Don't be a fool!" said Angie. "He's trying to help you and this troll."

  "If you've got it," said Jim, "may I see it?"

  Agatha did nothing for a moment and said nothing. Then she reached into the purse at her belt, and brought out something that appeared to be somewhat smaller than a tennis ball. For a moment it seemed as if she would throw it overhand with some force directly at Jim; then her arm dropped and she merely tossed it to him.