Yule Be Sorry--A Christmas Cozy Mystery (With Dragons)

by Kim M Watt

  “Lord Margery would!” Rockford bellowed, spitting furious purple fire with the words, and rose onto his hind legs with his forepaws hooked into weapons. “SHE would! She—” His words became a strangled yelp as someone grabbed his tail and pulled him off his feet and into the air, sparking a chorus of oohs from the crowd. He gave a surprised belch of flame, but didn’t even have time to flex his wings before he was dropped again. He smacked chin-first into the ground with a distressingly meaty sound, and Mortimer winced, despite thinking that Rockford thoroughly deserved it.

  “Lord Margery is utterly disgusted both by your actions and your ideas,” the dragon herself said, landing next to Rockford and trapping his tail under one paw to ensure he didn’t make a run for it. “Unfortunately, as she is no longer even in the running for High Lord, due to five of her voters being cretins, she can’t exile you. But she’s going to respectfully ask the current, esteemed High Lord if he’ll exile you instead.”

  “Ow,” Rockford mumbled, blood trickling from his mouth. There were a couple of teeth embedded in the cavern floor by his snout. He shook his head gingerly and peered at Lord Margery. “But you’d have made us into real dragons again,” he wailed. “Everything would have been better! None of this stupid human stuff—”

  “And what did you think then? That I’d let you get away with stealing sheep? Or worse? You have a better life with Beaufort as High Lord than you deserve.”

  “But you don’t like it either! The trading with humans! You said!” Rockford tried to sit up, and Lord Margery let go of his tail to give him a deceptively lazy slap that knocked him back to the floor.

  “I may not like it, Rockford, but I know you, and I detest what you think a dragon should be. You think dragons are better than anyone else. We’re not. No one kind’s better than any other. We’re all just different. And if you can’t see that, you don’t even deserve to call yourself Folk.”

  Rockford gaped at her, looking like he wanted to protest, but she gave his tail a warning tweak and he put his snout back on the ground with a groan.

  Beaufort looked at Rockford with his head low. “I thought we were smarter than this.”

  “Most of us are,” Lord Margery said. “Some of us take a little extra convincing, and some are just plain thick.” She tweaked Rockford’s tail for emphasis, making him squeak. “So what do we do now?”

  Mortimer watched Beaufort, his heart painful with fear. What would the old dragon do? He’d almost been ousted, had even volunteered for exile, thinking he was no longer the right dragon to lead them, and then found he’d been betrayed by those he’d spent his life protecting and loving. It was one thing suspecting it, quite another to be confronted with it. And it hadn’t even been a dragonish, tooth and claw type betrayal. No, it had been sneaky and underhand and just plain nasty, as nasty as the goals behind it. It was enough to make anyone lose faith.

  Beaufort looked over the expectant crowd, his wings low and his forehead furrowed. “I think,” he said, and paused, uncharacteristically unsure.

  The dragons held their breath.

  And Gilbert stood up and shouted, “Beau-fort! Beau-fort! Beau-FORT!”

  Other dragons took up the cry, quietly at first then louder, bellowing it until it shook dust from the walls and even Lord Margery was shouting, her voice fierce and carrying. Beaufort looked around with something like wonder, his wings snapping open behind him and his head rising, until he stood proud and old and unbowed in front of them, the High Lord of the Cloverly dragons.

  He sat back on his hind legs and raised his front paws, and the cheers slowly faded away.

  “Mortimer?” he said.

  “Yes?” Mortimer had managed to get some dust in his eyes from all the shouting and fighting. They were watering horribly.

  “Let’s go get your baubles back.”

  The dragons roared in delight.

  It wasn’t smooth going, getting out of the cavern. Rockford refused to cooperate and just lay in a corner cradling his injured jaw and whimpering, even after Lydia tweaked his tail and told him to pull himself together. Lord Margery tried shouting at him, but he folded his wings over his head and kept saying (with a slight lisp from the broken teeth), “It was for the good of the dragons. We were going to be real dragons again.” Eventually they gave up on him.

  Alex, on the other hand, agreed to help rather quickly, although it took all of Lord Margery’s not inconsiderable powers of persuasion to convince Lord Walter to stop hitting him and calling him a bad dragon. Alex was a very ashamed yellow and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, and kept mumbling that he’d only done it because Rockford had promised to let him eat a cow, and he’d always wanted to eat a cow, because they looked so meaty. Beaufort shook his head and told him that being beaten by Walter was a reasonable start to his punishment, and he’d have to think about what came next. Then he went to check on the other captives.

  “It’s not that the beating hurt, so much,” Alex told Mortimer and Amelia, sitting in the dust with the scales of his nose scattering the floor around him. “It was just really embarrassing. And I couldn’t exactly do anything. What if I’d hurt him?”

  Amelia looked at him with one eye squeezed shut and said, “You deserved it,” then tottered off to find her brother, bumping into a few dragons and apologising to a rock along the way.

  When Beaufort came back, he stood in front of Alex and stared at him for a long time while the young dragon scuffled uncomfortably on the dusty floor, then said, “I’m quite willing to believe that you were nothing but a pawn in this.”

  Alex’s forehead wrinkled. “Isn’t that some sort of fish?”

  Beaufort looked almost as puzzled as Alex, and Mortimer thought that the High Lord was quite right about Alex not being the mastermind behind anything.

  “Let’s not worry about that,” Beaufort said. “Can you take us to where the humans are being held?”

  “Oh. Yes. Is that what a pawn is? Is it some kind of guide?”

  Beaufort squinted at him. “No. Are the humans alright?”

  “Yes. Well, they were when I last saw them.”

  “Who’s guarding them?”

  “Um.” Alex went a nasty shade of yellowish-grey. “Well. Goblins.”

  A gasp went up around the cavern, and Lord Walter bellowed, “Bad dragon!” He took a few more swipes at a cowering Alex, then stomped over to Rockford and started hitting him instead. No one stopped him. Everyone was too busy clamouring to be included in the rescue party, while Beaufort shook his head at Alex and looked at him in a way that had the young dragon sniffling like a hatchling.

  Mortimer wished he were slightly more inclined toward violence, because he wouldn’t have minded hitting Rockford a few times himself. Goblins! Dragons are no fans of goblins. Dwarfs you could deal with, trade with, even have a beer with, as long as no one makes any jokes about beards or princesses. There’s a lot of mutual respect between dwarfs and dragons, no matter what the human stories say. Both species value good craftsperson-ship, and design ability, and honour. Goblins, on the other hand, are interested only in what can get them fast money and the easy rush of sugar, and plenty of dragons had seen hoards stolen and sold off, or even melted down, by a marauding band of the creatures.

  Beaufort was attempting to shout the Furnace of dragons to some semblance of order, but everyone was too excited. The idea of having the High Lord’s permission to engage in a little goblin-hunting was too good to be missed.

  “Dragons!” he bellowed. “Cloverlies!”

  “I don’t think it’s going to work,” Mortimer shouted over the din. “No one’s listening.”

  “Cloverlies!” Beaufort roared one more time, but only succeeded in making Amelia, who’d fought her way back to them through the crowd with Gilbert in tow, fall on her nose. “Sorry,” he said, and she nodded unsteadily.

  Beaufort put a paw on Mortimer’s shoulder. The cavern was heating up rapidly and full of the multi-coloured smoke of dragons spoiling for a fight. �
�This is no good,” he shouted in the younger dragon’s ear. “We’re going to need to sneak out. We’ll never convince everyone to stay back.”

  Mortimer nodded understanding, and Beaufort leaned in to Lord Margery.

  “Can you keep them here?”

  She frowned, and replied in a quiet bellow, “I had rather hoped—”

  “The smaller the party, the better the chance we have of passing unseen. And of avoiding any mishaps.”

  “Well, yes. I see your point.” She examined his little group critically, Alex still with his paws over his nose and Amelia leaning on Gilbert. “Ah, are you sure you’ve chosen quite the right dragons for the job, Beaufort?”

  “I am quite sure I have the right dragon for the job when it comes to keeping the rest of them here,” Beaufort shouted back, and headed down the tunnel to the fresh air, leaving Lord Margery looking a little orange and flustered.

  It was crisply cold outside, and they paused on the ledge where the cliff fell away to the lake below, stars captured in it, the fells rolling in deep, rich darkness under the sky. From here, the village was out of sight, and there were no lights, no sign of humans. It was wild and vast and silent, and Mortimer stood next to the High Lord, wondering what he saw out there that made him just so, well, Beaufort.

  “Thank you, Mortimer,” Beaufort said quietly, while behind them Alex was cautiously asking Amelia if she was quite alright to fly, and she was trying to slap him but kept over-balancing.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Mortimer said. “And I’m rubbish at fighting. I tried to help Amelia and she had to save me.”

  “Fighting’s not important,” the High Lord replied. “You are, though. You’ve never doubted me. Even when you had doubts about what I was doing, you never doubted me. And that’s everything.” Then he took to the sky with a swirl of his broad wings, a scrap of night wheeling against the stars. Mortimer watched him go, his chest tight and full and that silly dust in his eyes again, then looked at Gilbert and Amelia as they appeared next to him. Amelia was still squinting at things, and Alex was trailing her rather warily.

  “Good work, Gilbert,” Mortimer said. “How did you figure it out?”

  “Oh, I was chasing a turkey, and it ran into Rockford’s cave, and he had these basket rigs in there, like yours. One of them still had a bauble in it.”

  Mortimer considered this for a moment then said, “Why were you chasing a turkey?”

  “Long story. Can you help me? I don’t think Amelia can fly straight.”

  “But you can fly,” Amelia said proudly, and tried to punch her brother’s shoulder. She missed and hit Mortimer instead.

  “Ow.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Gilbert, can you fly straight?”

  “If I don’t think about it too much. Like when I realised it was Rockford, and I knew I had to get back straight away, and I was like, bam, flying!”

  “About time, too,” a raspy voice said behind him. “Baubles and humans and non-flying dragons. The world’s a mess.”

  Alex squeaked, and shoved past Mortimer to take flight.

  Mortimer stared at Lord Walter. “Um, sir? Is everything alright?”

  “Of course it’s not alright! There are goblins out there, dammit! Filthy creatures! And everyone seems to think I’m too old to do anything, but do they say that to Beaufort? No. No, of course they don’t. It’s all Beaufort this, Beaufort that. Well, if I had a fancy name …” He flopped off the cavern ledge, still grumbling, and spiralled after the High Lord.

  Mortimer licked his lips, and glanced at Gilbert and Amelia, who seemed to be holding each other up. It’d be fine. It’d all be fine. As long as Lord Walter didn’t eat the postmen.

  At least Miriam and Alice were safely out of it all.

  They were having a few technical difficulties.

  Amelia couldn’t fly in a straight line, and kept crashing into Mortimer and Gilbert. Gilbert was managing admirably, considering he’d never flown before this afternoon, but every now and then he’d forget to use his wings and start falling, while Mortimer and Amelia screamed at him and he tried swimming in a panicked doggy paddle across the sky. So they stayed high.

  Mortimer thought that maybe one concussed dragon and one still figuring out the fundamentals of flight, plus one that was grumbling and spitting a furious commentary on every sign of humans that they passed on the way, might not the best team for taking on goblins. But it wasn’t as if they could have told any of them to stay. Particularly not Amelia. There was something about the fact that she couldn’t actually focus that made her seem terribly formidable.

  “How many goblins are there?” Beaufort asked, ignoring Lord Walter’s current diatribe regarding the horrors of power lines.

  “Three on guard duty,” Alex said.

  “And they’re keeping the humans alive?”

  “Yes. I know Rockford doesn’t like them, but he wouldn’t kill a human for no reason.”

  “He gave them to goblins,” Beaufort said sternly. “It may not be killing them outright, but it is a death sentence.”

  Alex didn’t answer, but he was looking very grey, and after a moment Mortimer called, “Three on guard duty, and how many others?”

  “A whole clan in the immediate area. Twenty or so, I suppose.”

  Mortimer dropped back and watched Gilbert shepherd his sister back toward their route, then somehow get himself turned upside down, yelping that he couldn’t see where he was going and flailing his legs wildly. Yes. They possibly could have chosen a slightly better team. He wished he’d watched something about fighting on Miriam’s TV, rather than all those dancing shows. Although, if a goblin wanted to foxtrot, he’d be the best dragon for it.

  “Oh,” Alex said. “Oh, that doesn’t look good.” They were coming in fast over the fells, still keeping high so Gilbert didn’t crash.

  Dragons see in the dark the way cats do, movement sketched stronger and sharper than the background. And there was an awful lot of movement. The house was blazing with light, and all about it scattered shapes were running wildly and apparently without direction, as if someone had kicked over an anthill. There was screaming and shouting, and some of the shapes were waving flaming torches, and here and there groups of them collided and piled up, or raced off in different directions. Mortimer could smell sweat and blood and fear, and the slick stench of goblins.

  “Dragons!” Beaufort bellowed, all efforts at secrecy abandoned. “Now it starts! Be strong! Be brave! Be dragon!” He tucked his wings in on the last word, dropped his head, and roared as he plunged toward the fight. “To the battle, Cloverlies! Dive!”

  Lord Walter roared back, a savage and joyous sound, and arrowed toward the ground, spitting fire as he went. Alex plunged after them, flushing a furiously excited red.

  Mortimer watched them go, and realised this was something he’d never seen. Something probably only Walter and Beaufort had seen, in fact. Dragons in full cry, not hiding, not slipping through the shadows. Dragons in flight, driving back the enemy and taking what was won, and rescuing some princesses along the way. Well, postmen.

  He forgot all about Gilbert and Amelia, angled his wings, and dropped. The night air was smooth as ice water across his scales, the stars a high and beautiful roof above, and as he dived he roared, fire flaring across the sky. And for one perfect, endless moment he was nothing but purely, gloriously, dragon.

  20

  Alice

  The light went out, and the basement was plunged into utter, impossible darkness. Alice dropped into a crouch, and thought she heard a whisper of movement over the chorus of frightened screams.

  “Miriam, down!” she shouted, and swung the cane in a whistling arc as she straightened up, hoping the other woman had listened. She hit something that snarled in a way that stopped her breath and set the old, clever parts of her brain shrieking about predators and fire. The impact sent a shock jolting up her arms, and she pulled back and swung again, lower this time, hoping to catch whatever
it was if it ducked. Nothing but emptiness, and the momentum of her own blow sent her stumbling down a step. One left to the floor. Fourteen above her. She’d counted on the way down as well as the way up. Old habits die hard.

  She froze in a crouch, raising the cane over her shoulder, waiting. Her heart was the loudest thing she could hear, and she concentrated on her breathing, slowing it, trying to hear beyond herself. There, now she could hear the panicked chorus of frightened people breathing, and someone crying, and the clink of chains as someone moved. And a strangled hic. No footfalls, but the amount of dirt on the floor would render them nearly silent. She waited.

  Then white light flared in the darkness, making her flinch, and a phone landed in the centre of the floor, sending up a cone of light like some reverse alien abduction picture. Which meant she not only hadn’t hit Miriam, but that Miriam, for all her hiccoughs, wasn’t panicking. Alice smiled into the dark and took a careful step onto the floor. She kept low and eased away from the stairs. The phone shed enough light for her to see the bottom step to one side, the feet of one of the prisoners to the other. The rest was nothing but bare dirt. She withdrew deeper into the shadows, cane at the ready, the skin on her back prickling. It felt like someone was stalking her.

  They probably were.

  She spun, bringing the cane up, and someone caught it, stopping it so short that it jarred her arms. She let go and tried to jump back, but now there was a hard hand curled into the front of her coat, the cloth ripping under sharp nails, and breath on her face that made her gag.

  “Naughty, naughty,” the goblin whispered, and pulled her a little closer. She balled her hands into fists and slammed them both into his face, and he gave a startled yelp but didn’t drop her. She drew back to hit him again, her hands smarting, then there was a soft whistle and a rather final thud. The goblin fell forward, carrying Alice with him, and she tried to push herself free as they crashed to the floor. She managed not to land flat on her back, but her hip hit the ground hard, and she stayed there for a moment with her eyes closed, holding in a little cry of pain. The stone floor wasn’t as far under the dirt as it looked. Then someone rolled the goblin off.