The Dragon King

by Patty Jansen

  Nellie looked at her full figure and found it a bit hard to believe.

  “I was a lot skinnier back then. That is one of the problems when you’re not allowed to do anything. You end up eating too much.”

  Not that that had any ever been a problem in Nellie’s life.

  “But instead of casting me into the street, the commander had plans for me. He wanted me to infiltrate the Science Guild to see if there were useful developments in technology the army could use. So I visited all the meetings because they were not as difficult for a woman to get into as they were for a soldier. This is how I found out that the army wanted to use balloons, and began to consider the study of them as more than a frivolous pursuit. I studied everything there was to know about them, I made diagrams and sewed sheets together into huge gasbags. I helped make the baskets and I helped with the first very short flights. But once the project was starting to look like it might be successful, people didn’t want me to get any credit for it. I had an argument with the commander and that was the end of my involvement with the army.

  “But I didn’t want to give up working with these new balloons. Especially not once the Eastern traders came with the iron ships and dragons. We can’t sit and do nothing while people in other parts of the world develop new things. But I had no money and no one to support me. That was when I met Bernard, who offered to help me out if I married him. It seemed the lesser of two bad options. Whore myself honourably or dishonourably. The only thing he ever wanted from me was an heir, so when that was done, we lived separately.”

  Nellie wanted to ask whether she cared for the boys at all, but she was almost afraid to hear the answer. It was clear to her that Madame Sabine did not.

  Madame Sabine continued, “I later discovered that Bernard was a great deceiver. He pretended to have lots of money, and I only found out that he didn’t after I had married him. He thought I had money because of my family. But my mother and I had not been nobles for years. That is my story.”

  “But what about the things you have in the young Lord Verdonck’s shed that he said he was going to burn?”

  “His father and I collected many items that would be helpful in our study of flight. We started to construct balloons. It would be a tragedy if they were burned.”

  “Can I see them?”

  Madame Sabine gave her a suspicious look and shook her head. Nellie had expected her to say no, but then Madame Sabine said, “Why not? It’s not far from here.”

  She looked around the countryside. “I don’t think anyone will be watching. The fields are empty, and no one will see us.”

  Nellie wasn’t so sure, but she wanted to know whether these things in the shed were worth her loyalty. She still wasn’t quite sure whether to trust Madame Sabine, and history had proven that she probably should not, but she didn’t want to make any decisions without knowing what all of this was about.

  They set off along another lane. For a while they said nothing, and they walked next to each other with breath steaming in the misty air. The horses in the paddock barely moved. If Nellie had the dragon with her, they would be more interested.

  “It’s a tragedy that Ronald’s son is so much against my work,” Madame Sabine said eventually.

  “Has he said why?”

  “Don’t ask me to explain the thoughts of men.”

  “Are you sure it’s your work he has a problem with?”

  A sharp look. “Well, he himself is not exactly a paragon of loyalty to his wife.”

  “Is he married?”

  “He was, but his wife couldn’t give him children, so he’s looking for a new one.”

  Sometimes Nellie was glad she was not part of the noble class. These people were so horrible to each other. You would think they would look out for each other, instead of always stabbing each other in the back.

  After walking for a while, they arrived at a second barn. From here, you could see a couple of houses in the valley.

  “That is where the farm workers live,” Madame Sabine said. “They’ll probably notice us here and tell Adalbert that we have been here. He might think I’m going to remove all this from his shed.” She opened the door to the shed, and they went inside.

  At first Nellie didn’t know what she was looking at. The floor of the barn was full of strange pieces of equipment. Wooden frames, metal struts, structures made from baskets.

  On a big wooden beam that crossed the room and supported the roof hung a big piece of fabric. Next to it was leather harness much too big for a sea cow.

  And now Nellie understood. “You wanted to get the dragon to pull you.”

  “It was a good idea, but it didn’t work. The problem with these balloons is that they get carried by the wind. Another problem is that they are either too heavy or too light, and it is very hard to control how high they fly. You need to carry weight, and once you have dropped the weights the only way to get down is by letting air out of the bladder. That means you can’t go back up again, and if there is a wall in your way when you’re flying over a city, you don’t want to be in that situation. So we heard of these magical flying creatures and wanted to try it for ourselves.”

  “How did you know where the dragon was?”

  “Are you kidding? How did you know?”

  Nellie knew through her father, obviously, but had Sabine ever met him? “How well did you know my father?”

  “Not very well. When he died, I had just arrived at the palace. He was already old and bitter and had stopped working for the church. He didn’t come to the meetings of the society that he started, and he said that we were all twisting his ideas.”

  “He was not a very easy man to get on with,” Nellie said. It felt great to have finally admitted this. She was sick of defending her father. He might be dead, but he would not have liked her defending him. He would have been very capable of defending himself.

  “He must have told some people about the dragon, because soon after I started going to the Science Guild meetings, two deacons broke into the church crypt and attempted to open the dragon box. We heard about it from a monk. The two deacons never said a word about what they had seen, but they almost burned down the crypt, so it was clear to us. Rumour went that when the dragon came out of the box, they had panicked and tried to kill it.”

  “Why did you think you wouldn’t suffer the same fate?”

  “We were different. We weren’t going to harm the creature.”

  Then Nellie also noticed the scorch marks on the beams. “Let me guess. You paid someone who had access to the crypt to steal the box. You brought the dragon here, you opened the box, and then you tried to tie him into the harness as if he were a sea cow.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And the dragon decided that he didn’t like to be treated that way and he attacked you.”

  “That was a wild night. We opened the box and the dragon came out in a ball of flames. We tried to tie it in the harness, but the creature ended up bucking and flying like crazy, dragging the gasbag behind it until the bag caught fire when it emptied and the dragon knocked over the oil lamp. All our work was ruined. I’ve had to make an entirely new balloon, but the good thing is that I could try a new design.”

  “How did you get the dragon back into the box?”

  “Ronald managed to catch it with a magic net. We were lucky it didn’t escape.”

  “I don’t know how much the dragon can escape. I’m pretty sure he needs to stay close to the box. If you have the box, he will always come back to the area.”

  “And it will probably stay close to its owner. I don’t think anyone else knew that the Prince was still alive, but the dragon did. It did not want to be in this barn without the prince.”

  And that, eventually made Nellie decide to trust Madame Sabine, at least for the time being. And even if she didn’t trust Madame Sabine, she could see some uses for this contraption. She would do everything she could to prevent Adalbert Verdonck burning all this work.

  And tha
t meant they had to find another place to live.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  AS ADALBERT VERDONCK had promised, a guard came to the barn later in the afternoon.

  Before that time, Nellie had scoured the ship to find something suitable to wear. She only had the clothes she had left the palace with, and they were very dirty. Not suitable at all for a visit to a lord’s house. The cupboards below the deck held a few habits, and while Nellie hadn’t expected to find any women’s clothes there, she’d hoped for something to make herself a bit more respectable.

  Not finding it, she tried to fix up her hair, but she had no comb, and she’d lost some of her hairpins.

  Henrik still wore his smudged uniform. No amount of rubbing would remove a black stain from the lapel, and Nellie decided it was not that important. Running an agricultural estate, the young lord would be used to people coming into the house looking like peasants.

  So when the guard turned up, Nellie and Henrik still looked very much like peasants, and dirty ones at that.

  It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was already setting over the fields as they walked along the tree-lined lane through the fallow fields and leafless orchards. The estate lay in the middle of a well-tended garden with clipped bushes and a garden house where the lady of the house, if there was one, would entertain guests in summer—if they ever received guests this far out of the city.

  A moat wide enough for a river ship surrounded the garden, and a drawbridge provided the only crossing to the safe island haven that surrounded the house.

  This house was a sprawling affair, two storeys tall at most, with an attached stable, servant housing and storage sheds.

  They went in through the main doors, where a servant took Henrik’s coat. His shirt underneath had also once been cleaner. Nellie was a little embarrassed to see that there was a rip in the back of his shirt.

  She herself probably looked no better.

  They went across the hallway past a sweeping staircase into an audience room on the ground floor.

  Through the tall windows, Nellie could see over the fields on the other side. They were full of sheep standing around feed troughs.

  Adalbert Verdonck waited by the fire, seated in a broad armchair with a velvet covering.

  “Well met and thank you for your hospitality,” Nellie said.

  “Sit down.” He made a sweeping gesture at the couch opposite him. He wore a number of gold rings on his fingers. Nellie recognised the Verdonck family seal.

  Nellie and Henrik sat, Nellie remaining on the edge of the couch because she was afraid to make it dirty.

  He gestured at a tray with bread and tea that stood on a low table. “Help yourself.”

  Nellie was quite hungry, but felt too embarrassed to start attacking the food.

  Henrik had no such inhibition, and he grabbed a hand full of biscuits. He held one out to her. Nellie took it, feeling self-conscious.

  “You may ask why I invited you here,” Adalbert Verdonck began.

  “Well . . . ,” Nellie said.

  “You did wonder, because if you were in the city you would never be asked to come to the house of the lord of an estate. It’s different here. We need each other to survive. We need each other for news and must look out for each other. I treat my servants and workers well so they will be loyal to me.”

  Why was he saying this? Was there a reason he thought that his workers had not been loyal? Did this have to do with Madame Sabine? Was it a warning?

  At any rate, it made Nellie uncomfortable, because he was drawing a clear line, telling them, don’t get too comfortable, because I will put you in your place at the first opportunity.

  “Now, tell me the reason you’re here,” he continued. “Tell me who you are, and who you are working for.”

  He was looking at Nellie while he said this, and Nellie had no idea what was safe to say. And didn’t he already know who they were?

  Henrik said, “We have already told you who we are. We are refugees.”

  The Lord’s eyebrows flicked up. “That includes you? Last time I saw you, you were working at the palace as a guard, which is a coveted position no sane man would give up. How did you end up here with this stolen ship that, frankly, I’m going to get into a lot of trouble for sheltering?”

  Henrik stiffened ever so slightly.

  Nellie said, “Why worry about the ship? Your father was no friend of the church, and he would have been delighted to play games with the shepherd or the Regent over returning the ship. You can have it and play the games on his behalf. All we ask is a safe place to stay.”

  Henrik gave her a wide-eyed look.

  Adalbert Verdonck looked merely amused.

  Nellie continued, “We can work, we can clean, we can sew.”

  “My rules are simple: I am happy to have you, but that harlot is not staying on my land. She will be taking all her rubbish with her or I’ll burn it.”

  “Do you know what it’s for?” Nellie said.

  “Witchery,” he snorted. “I don’t know why my father was taken with it. As if people could fly. Can you see us all flapping our hands and taking off into the air? We have enough chaos on land to deal with; we don’t need people flying about the air. I don’t need my neighbours attacking my sheds for it.”

  “The things she is doing are known to work. They don’t strap wings onto people’s arms anymore. They use bags filled with hot air.”

  “I’ve heard enough of it. It’s all witchery. I want it gone. I want her gone. My father is dead because of her.”

  “All right, then lend us a wagon in exchange for the ship and we’ll leave.”

  He looked taken aback. “What? All of you?”

  “Yes. Either we all stay here or we all leave. We came here together, we all escaped death, and we’re not leaving anyone behind in the middle of winter.”

  “You know who she is, do you?”

  “We are not leaving her behind. Lend us a wagon and we will leave, with all her things.”

  “You won’t find a wagon big enough.”

  “Then we will come back as many times as needed.”

  He looked at Henrik, then turned back to her, frowning, a perplexed look on his face. Oh, Adalbert Verdonck wasn’t dumb. He would think if Nellie was so keen to hold onto Madame Sabine’s balloon then he might be missing something.

  “No,” he said simply.

  “What no?”

  “I can’t allow you to leave. It’s very dangerous out there.”

  “Then Madame Sabine stays as well.”

  “I can arrange for her to travel back to her family, if that pleases you.”

  “She has no family that she cares about.” In all the discussions with Madame Sabine, she had not mentioned going back to Lurezia even once.

  Adalbert Verdonck’s face twitched.

  Henrik said, “Is there anything that could make you change your mind about her? Anything she can do?”

  “As a guard, did you ever deliver mail or messages?”

  What? Nellie frowned at Henrik.

  “Sometimes. Why are you asking?”

  Adalbert Verdonck got up from his seat. He walked across the room to his desk, picked up a letter and gave it to Henrik. “Does this strike you as real?”

  Seated next to Henrik, Nellie looked over his shoulder.

  The single-page letter was written in a neatly schooled hand. It bore the Regent’s seal.

  It said,

  Most exalted of court advisors,

  The news will have reached you that our father is dead. After his passing, things happened in the palace that are best left unsaid, except that all the paths laid out for the future of the Regentship were unpalatable to me, namely that all of them would result in the death of me and my brother or our banishing. I have chosen to prevent my own demise at the hands of the same cowards who killed my father and have declared myself Regent of Saardam. The first order of my tenure will be to establish good relationships with neighbou
ring estates. The custom of the city of Saardam has allowed you to live in a great deal of luxury. In order for this relationship to be mutually beneficial, I shall have an urgent need of a minimum of fifty men, supplied and fitted out for active guard duty, to serve the Regentship for a period of ten years. You will be well rewarded in our return custom of your produce.

  Yours most kindly,

  Casper

  Henrik shook his head. “He even signs his first name only, like a reigning king. The hide of him.”

  “Is it real, though? Will his mother be able to tell the writing?”

  “And if so, will she tell the truth?” Henrik asked.

  “Those are all questions I’m wrestling with. In short, this is plea for help. Send soldiers.”

  “Only fifty.”

  “I suspect he thought asking for more would make me laugh. I don’t have that many men to spare. If it’s not a trap.”

  “You can ask Madame Sabine if she recognises her son’s handwriting,” Nellie said.

  “And if he wrote it, how do we know whether he wrote it of his own volition or was forced?”

  No one replied. It was impossible to know that.

  Henrik spread his hands. “Why would anyone force him to write that?”

  “To lure me into the city. I’ve asked for the repayment of loans. They try to make me sympathetic to this . . . boy who, when I last saw him, was behaving abominably and getting involved with families we would all rather not see increasing their influence.”