He tapped my arm and I looked at him. He touched his throat and mouth and then pointed around at all the dragons, shaking his head.
“The collars keep them from talking?”
He nodded.
At the sound of our whispered conversation, the dragon with the sawn-off horns opened her eyes again. At the mention of the collars, she stretched out her neck so that her head rested on the ground only a pace away from us, her eyes rolling in a piteous fashion.
Flinging my braids back over my shoulder, I stalked over to her collar in outrage. Fumbling, I tried to get the thing unbuckled but it wouldn’t budge. It was too dark to see properly, but it felt as if there was a strangely shaped keyhole at one side of the buckle.
“Fine,” I said aloud, and pulled the knife from my belt. I was busily sawing through the leather of the collar when I heard Luka call my name softly.
As I passed Tobin I jerked a thumb back at the dragon. “Would you?”
He gave me a grim smile and pulled a foot-long dagger out of a sheath strapped to one thigh. It was serrated like a saw.
“Why didn’t you show me that before?” I huffed, and went to find Luka.
Luka was on the far side of the cluster of sleeping dragons, standing by Niva. She was a little apart from the others, concealed from us by their bulk. She didn’t look good. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was irregular. She looked as if she’d been rolling in dust, something I knew the fastidious Niva would never do.
“Niva!” I ran to her head and stroked her muzzle, not caring if she thought me forward. “Can you hear me?”
Her eyes opened a crack and her tail twitched, but she showed no other sign of recognition.
“Let’s get this collar off,” I said, again wielding my small dagger with determination.
“But we don’t have one of ours to replace it,” Luka protested, even as he drew his own blade to help.
“I don’t care,” I told him. “No one’s around, and Niva is strong. If we can get this one off, we can get her away from here and then deal with the pull of the slippers or whatever it is. ” I sawed for a while in silence, then added, “I really wish we could find out what it is they’ve got, and who controls the –”
Page 21
I was cut off by the roar of a dragon nearby. The female with the sawn-off horns reared up on her hind legs, spreading her wings to their full extent. Blue and gold dragonfire lit the night sky and Luka and I instinctively huddled close to Niva, who still did not stir.
“By the First Fires,” the newly uncollared female roared. “Krashath will pay for this!” She crouched, preparing to spring into the sky.
“Help us,” I shouted at her. “Help us free our friend!”
She stopped, and her neck swivelled around to study Luka and me, crouched by Niva’s head. The freed dragon reached down and with a casual swipe ripped apart Niva’s collar with a claw. Then she launched herself upwards without looking back.
Niva screamed as though she had been speared, writhing in the dust and broken shells of the hatching grounds. We jumped clear of her thrashing, looking around wildly as other dragons now woke. Tobin came over to the cluster of eggless females, looking concerned as Niva continued to scream and flail.
Then more dragonfire flared across the sky, and we heard roars and shouts as the Citatian night patrol encountered the dragon Tobin had freed. She bellowed at them and burned one of the patrol dragons quite badly, forcing him to land on the hatching grounds. We would soon be discovered by the patrol, or one of the awakening females would raise the alarm.
My heart in my mouth, I dived at Niva’s head, wrapping my arms around it even as she tried to shake me off. “Niva! Niva! It’s me, it’s Creel,” I shouted, no longer worrying about someone hearing us. She whipped me around so that my head snapped back, and I knew that my neck would hurt for days. But I persevered. “It’s Creel, and Luka and Tobin! We’re here to rescue you!”
She stopped thrashing and began to shudder – long, rattling shudders that ran from her nose to the tip of her tail. Her cries turned into a series of raw, deep dragon sobs.
“Can you hear me, Niva?” I used a more normal voice, just loud enough to be heard over her sobbing.
“Yes,” she gasped out.
“Is there any … do you feel any power working on you? Do you need to fly somewhere? Can you feel them controlling you?”
“No,” she said. “I just … it was so terrible. ”
“You don’t feel any compulsion?”
“None. The collar is gone. ” Her shudders abated and her breathing slowed. She raised her head and looked around. “Get on my back,” she said. “I want to be as far from here as possible, as fast as I can fly. ”
I climbed on to her back, with Luka and Tobin immediately after. Niva lurched into flight, swatting at the cluster of silent, collared females with one of her wings. It made me sick and angry to think of leaving them behind, when only a little more time and some sharper daggers could have freed them all.
“Do you think there’s alchemy in each collar?” I tossed the question over my shoulder to Luka, although he hardly had any more experience with alchemy than I did. “The opposite of Milun the First’s slippers?”
“I don’t know,” Luka shouted back. “We’ll have to talk to Niva when we get to safety. ” His arm snaked over my shoulder to point to our right and just ahead. “Look out, Niva!”
The other freed female was in a pitched battle with the patrol. In the bursts of dragonfire, we could see that she was injured, and so were the two dragons she fought. Their fight was taking them into our path, and one of the patrol dragons had seen us.
Niva cupped her wings to stop her forward motion and then shot straight up, going high above the battle before levelling out and flying in the direction of the caves at top speed. We could no longer speak, only hold on tightly and pray to the Triune Gods.
They smiled on us, and we left the patrol dragon, which had attempted pursuit, far behind. Nevertheless, Niva made wide circles around various hills, flying low to make use of tree cover, before coming in to land at the mouth of our cave. To my great relief, Amacarin, Feniul and Marta were there to meet us, as full of questions for Niva as we were ourselves.
But they would have to wait, for a little while. Still near hysteria, it was not until Feniul helped her to the speaking pool to contact her mate, Leontes, that she calmed down. Even after that she remained subdued, and prone to startling at the least sound. She nearly cried as she thanked us for rescuing her, which was the most unsettling thing of all.
At last Niva was ready to tell us about her ordeal.
She had been left in the net for hours, with other dragons standing watch over her. Scales were torn from her shoulder and pasted on to a blank page in a huge book. An artist sketched a portrait on the page opposite the scales – a roster of the dragons belonging to the glorious army of Citatie.
Page 22
A collar was brought out, a heavy thing of leather with an iron lock the size of a human skull. The leather was doubled and sewn together with thick, scratchy thread. Bits of hair poked out of the seams and caught in Niva’s neck scales. It was a most interesting discovery that our three dragon friends did not need to wear their Feravelan-made collars to resist the mind control of the Citatians. Instead, a Citatian collar only worked on the dragon it was attached to.
Once collared, it was as though she lost control of her body. She ate, slept, walked and flew only on the command of a man named Xeran, who was assigned as her “protector”, as the Citatians termed it. Her own conscious mind was still there, hovering at the back of the Citatian-controlled part of her brain, powerless to act. With deep humiliation she was forced to submit to an examination to determine if she was healthy, and then she was “put through her paces”, forced to fly, flame and lift a series of boulders to determine her speed and strength.
/>
“In my head I was screaming,” Niva confessed. “But no one could hear me. ”
I reached out and put one hand on her foreleg. My heart swelled with affection as Luka did the same. His face was grave.
“Madam,” he said softly. “Thank you for sharing this with us. We will do everything in our power to make certain that the dragons of Citatie are freed even as you were. ”
I reached out and put my other hand in Luka’s and gave it a squeeze.
Making a Scene
Good day to you, Captain,” I said to the man barring our way. “We’re here to see the king. ”
Dressed in the white tunic and breeches of the Citatian army, and topped with the requisite spiked helmet, the guardsman gleamed in the sun. He squinted down at us in disbelief, visibly turning over my words in his head, searching for a translation that would make sense.
Marta and I, clad in our finest Citatian trousers and tunics, thin beaded slippers and brilliant sashes, stood on the scorching pavement and smiled. I had dyed two of my braids blue, and Marta had rubbed beeswax on hers so that they wouldn’t appear so frayed.
At our feet rested a basket containing our handiwork: a suit of clothes made of embroidered Feravelan satin and trimmed with mirrored silk. Luka had given us the king’s dimensions as best he could, judging the man to be slightly less than his own height, narrower in the shoulder but thicker in the middle, and we had worked with that.
“You want … to see … King Nason?” The soldier’s question was laboured, both from an uneasy command of Feravelan and from apparent disbelief at our request. He studied our clothes and the basket. “What … business?”
From what we’d heard of Nason, if you weren’t invited to the palace, you could spend months waiting for an audience. Luka, who had been an expected royal ambassador, had still waited on the king’s pleasure for six days. He had met a man wandering the corridors who said he had been living in an empty antechamber for nine months, trying to gain an audience to settle a land dispute. The man was haggard and his finery in tatters, but he knew that if he stayed nearby, Nason would eventually summon him.
I wondered if he was still here.
“We are the finest tailors in the world,” I said, opening my arms wide. “We are here to present his Effulgence with a new suit of clothes. ” I threw open the lid of the basket and showed the guard captain the scarlet and gold coat folded on top. He reached out to touch it with one dirty finger, and Marta slapped his hand away.
“No, no,” she scolded. “This is for the king. ”
Growing red, the man glared at her. “I must look for … danger. Weapons. ”
“Good man,” I said. I leaned down and, as delicately as if I were lifting a baby, drew the coat from the basket. Marta picked up the tunic and trousers with equal care, and we wafted them up and down to show that there were no concealed weapons or tiny assassins waiting to leap out at the king. The guard looked into the empty basket suspiciously and then at the shining fabric we held.
“Very well. ” An ugly grin split his face. “The king will … maybe … see you. This year. ”
While we refolded the clothing he stepped back and gave the order for the gates to be opened. Marta and I went past him with our heads high, the basket carried between us. I gave the man a courteous nod, as though he had been gracious.
“Well, we made it past the first obstacle,” Marta said out of the corner of her mouth as we went across the courtyard.
Then we had no more breath to spare. The front doors of the Crown Palace were at the top of a mountain of stairs made from gleaming white stone. It was nearly noon, and the heat beat down on us as we trudged up the stairs, holding the basket between us and feeling the baking-hot marble burn our feet through the soles of our light slippers.
Page 23
“I still think that Nason wants Feravel because Citatie is too hot,” Marta panted.
“And full of monkeys,” I added.
She shot me a dark look. “He’s still learning. ”
“He’d better learn fast, or Amacarin might eat him. ”
Marta had named her monkey Ruli, and even as we spoke Ruli was probably tearing apart our cave. He screamed constantly, shredded any parchment he could get his little hands on, and urinated on anyone who offended him.
And he was very easy to offend.
Grimacing as we reached the top of the stairs, I said in a low voice, “We may have to uncollar each dragon by hand. ”
“But first, the king,” Marta said.
Judging by the rumpled clothes and disarranged coiffures of the others waiting to see Nason, some of them had slept there at least one night. I gave Marta a despairing look. She tossed her braids over her shoulder and marched to the wide doors at the opposite end of the room, dragging me and the basket along with her.
“We’re here to see his Effulgence,” Marta told the guards at the doors. Her voice was bright, confident, and she showed not the slightest bit of notice of the outraged stares of the other people waiting. “Laan no tishbaln verr Nason-e,” she said, repeating our goal in Citatian. Luka had coached us in a few phrases, but assured us that the king spoke Feravelan as well.
The guard pointed to some chairs. “You wait,” he said, smirking. “Wait long time maybe. ”
“No,” I said loudly.
“Have to,” he said, smirking even more gleefully. “Wait, wait, wait. ”
Marta drew a deep breath. “We have to wait?” Her voice rose an octave on the last word. Lower lip trembling, tears welled in her big blue eyes.
Stifling my admiration, I stepped into the fray. “You’ve made her cry,” I snapped at the guard, patting Marta’s back. “You awful man! And imagine what the king will say when he finds out that you kept us waiting here … kept him waiting for us to bring his new clothes!” I swept an arm around the room. “We shouldn’t be here at all! Look at these people! Peasants with land disputes! Common merchants! Gah!”
The flood of words gave the guard pause, then his brow cleared and he gave me an appalled look. “King … wait? King … ask for … clothes?” He pointed at the basket.
I whipped back the lid to show him the satin coat, while Marta continued to blubber in fine style. “Yes,” I said, pointing to the embroidery of the coat. “The king’s new coat,” I said loudly and clearly, as though speaking to an idiot. Then I put the lid back on and patted Marta’s arm this time. “Don’t worry,” I soothed, still in a voice that carried. “We’ll tell the king this man wouldn’t let us see him. ”
A moment later we were ushered through the door and down a short corridor. We found ourselves standing before another pair of guards, very large men holding unsheathed scimitars. The doors that they guarded were plated with gold and inlaid with lapis lazuli and onyx.
“We have brought the king’s clothing, as requested,” I said boldly, before Marta had to start crying again.
The guards were so alike that I thought they must be brothers, if not twins, and now they raised their eyebrows in perfect synchronicity. They looked at us, then at each other, then at the basket. Once more, I pulled off the lid to reveal the contents.
At last they stepped aside to let us pass through the golden doors and we were ushered into the presence of King Nason of Citatie.
White As Bone
No stranger to courts and kings, and wanting to keep up my brash pose, I took several steps into the throne room before I noticed the silence and the emptiness. I drew up short, looking around the cavernous room with its dim lamps reflecting off marble pillars and gilded chairs that no one was sitting on.
Then Marta made a small noise and let go of her end of the basket, and I saw the dragon.
Curled at the far end of the room, just behind the throne of hammered gold, was one of the largest dragons I had ever seen. His body was easily as big as a good-sized cottage, and his neck and tail made him even longer and more im
posing. It was hard to tell, because he was coiled up, but I thought he might be as large as Shardas, who was the biggest dragon in Feravel.
This dragon, however, was as white as bone.
It opened its eyes, which were black and flat like a snake’s, and looked at us. Marta made that noise again, and I dropped my end of the basket, unnerved by the cold malice of the dragon’s gaze.
“Mehel? Mehel rioho?” A shrill voice cut the air and a figure climbed out of the coils of the dragon’s tail.
Page 24
It was a man, roughly thirty years old, and wearing fine, brightly coloured silks. On his head was an ornamental silver helmet with three enormous plumes on top; a large gold sunburst set with an egg-sized ruby adorned the front. The helmet was slightly askew, showing curly white-blond hair that reminded me of a sheep’s fleece.
“You’re not Citatian? Are you Roulaini? You’re not Feravelan, are you? Why did you wake me?” He rubbed his eyes and then straightened his helmet. He straightened his whole body, in fact, quite suddenly. His expression changed from confusion to disdain and he glared at us instead of blinking sleepily. “What is your business here?”
I curtsied deeply, which felt odd in the trousers I was wearing. “We’re here to fit your new suit, Your Majesty,” I said in Citatian. It was another of the useful phrases that Luka had taught me.
“Oh. ” He frowned. “I don’t recall ordering a new suit, and certainly not from Feravelan tailors. ” To my relief he spoke in Feravelan. I was reaching the limit of my Citatian vocabulary.
Giving a sigh of false regret, I bowed my head and Marta did the same. “Your Majesty is too clever by half,” I said mournfully. “We had hoped that your Effulgence would be so caught up in affairs of state that you would not see through our ruse. We humbly wish to be your royal tailors, Your Majesty, and so we have sneaked into the palace that we might present this gift to you. ”
With a flourish we took the lid off the basket and lifted out the suit of clothing. I held the coat with real pride: I had cut up my favourite riding dress to make it. It was scarlet satin, embroidered with a pattern of gold and orange and blue flames. I had added lapels and cuffs of the mirrored silk in bands of colour to complement the embroidery. The shirt and trousers were of straw yellow and blue, respectively, and the seams were stitched with scarlet thread for contrast.