"That's the trouble. I've been doing too much of 'just this once' up until now. Wait a minute!"
"What?" Angie stared at him.
"It's simple," said Jim. "I'll just make you into a dragon, too. That'd take almost no magical energy at all, by comparison."
"Me? Into a dragon? You could do that?" The startled look on Angie's face changed to one of pleasure. "Yes. Why not? I've never been a dragon. Why didn't we think of that before?"
"I suppose because we didn't have to," said Jim. "But you'd better put some outside clothes on for the weather, just in case we have to turn back into humans while we're still outside." He was already moving toward his own clothes rack to get a travel cloak.
Properly dressed, they mounted to the open top of the tower, and Jim nodded at the man-at-arms currently on duty.
"You can go downstairs for a few minutes and warm up, Thomas," he said.
Gratefully, the guard disappeared down the stairs.
"When are you going to change me into a dragon?" Angie asked.
"Right now," said Jim. "Come along with me."
He led the way over to the platform on which rested the great cauldron—empty now, of course—that could be filled with oil to be heated, lit and poured down on anyone trying to storm the gates to the castle keep. He stepped up on the platform and gave Angie a hand up. Here, they were level with the top of the battlements, looking out from a flat surface into thin air and down onto the open space surrounding the castle and the trees beyond.
"Move over from me a little bit to give yourself room," Jim said. "Just a few feet there. There. That's good enough. Now here we go."
Jim visualized both himself and Angie as dragons, their clothes having vanished, but ready to come back on them immediately they were turned back into humans. It was a far cry from his early days of using magic to change himself into a dragon, in which case he invariably ruined whatever clothes he was wearing, or else had to strip them all off first.
"You make a good-looking dragon," he said to Angie.
"Do I?" said Angie. "Or are you just saying that?"
"No," said Jim. "You are a good-looking female dragon. If I was a full-time male dragon—"
"Well, I'll believe you for the moment," said Angie. "Now what?"
"Now," said Jim, "all you do is jump off the edge of the platform, into the air, spread your wings and start flying. I'll be right with you and you just do what I do, flap your wings when I flap mine and stretch them out and soar when I soar."
Angie looked at the edge of the platform and the empty air beyond.
"Jim," she said, after a moment, "I've changed my mind. I don't think I want to be a dragon today, after all."
"Don't be silly," said Jim.
"I'm scared," said Angie.
"Remember what you said to me when I was in a dragon body? I'd turned up in the Cliffside dragons' caves and I was alone with you. You suggested I might fly to Carolinus's for help. I wasn't too eager, either, to jump out of that cave into thin air. But you said I could try it. You said, 'It'll probably just come to you. I'd think it would, instinctively, once you were in the air.' Remember?"
"Did I say that?" said Angie. "Well, I was wrong."
"No," said Jim. "You were right. It'll come to you instinctively, once you're in the air. That body you have now has its own instincts and reflexes, you know."
"I don't care if it does," said Angie.
"Besides," said Jim, "I'll be right there to catch you in mid-air with magic even if something could go wrong."
"I don't care," said Angie. "I'm scared. I've changed my mind about being a dragon. Change me back—Jim, stop that!"
Her last words ended in a scream. Jim was using his greater weight (he was a much larger dragon) to simply push Angie off the edge of the stone platform into the air. She tried desperately to hold on with her claws, but the claws only scraped the stone and slid. As she herself slithered toward emptiness.
"It's what mother birds do with their nestlings when they're ready to fly," said Jim. "And father birds," he added, as Angie reached the edge, teetered there for a second and dropped off it.
She dropped out of sight, but almost immediately there was the thunder of wings and Angie shot up past him, climbing frantically for altitude, like a fighter plane reaching for its best operating height.
It was exactly what Jim himself had done, the first time he had taken off into the air from the Cliffside cave he had been talking about. The first thought in his mind had been to keep from falling; and that human message, translated to his dragon body, had immediately made use of every ounce of the powerful climbing ability that a dragon's wings could produce.
Hastily, he leaped off and followed her, climbing after her.
This sort of intense activity was possible for a dragon, but it exhausted them in a hurry; and, he saw, after a bit, that Angie was ceasing to pump so hard and was beginning to slow down. Finally she stopped, and her wings instinctively reached out and stiffened in soaring position on an updraft. Jim swam up through the air to soar beside her.
"Where am I?" Angie asked him wildly.
"Oh, I'd say about two thousand feet above the ground," said Jim.
"Two thousand—" She looked down. There was a long silence. "I am!" she said.
"Of course," said Jim. "But that's more than enough for the straight flying we'll be doing to Malvern Castle. Now follow me. I'm used to finding thermal updrafts—that's what you're riding on now—and using them. From here on we soar to Malvern. You can think of it as coasting."
"All right," said Angie, but in a voice that signaled she still really did not trust what she was doing.
Nonetheless they went on, moving from thermal to thermal, circling upward on the warmer air of its updraft, planing down in the direction of their destination, finding another thermal and riding it up to where they could start planing onward again. It was some time before Angie spoke once more. Jim had not been saying anything to her, leaving her to get used to her new way of traveling. But finally she did speak.
"This isn't the right direction to Malvern Castle," she said.
"We have to go roundabout, because of the way the wind's blowing," said Jim. "Not far roundabout. But it's just as if our wings were like a ship's sails and we have to trim them to the wind to a certain extent. We're coming in toward Malvern Castle on a curve."
There was another long period of silence while they shifted from thermal to thermal, mounted the updraft from dark patches of trees below them, which had picked up heat from the sun and were warming the air above them to cause updrafts; and after a while Angie spoke again.
"I'll never forgive you, Jim," she said, but almost in a conversational tone. "I'll never, never forgive. That was a terrible thing to push me off the side of a building where I could have fallen to my death!"
"But I knew you wouldn't," said Jim. "Just like I didn't, the first time I tried it. You couldn't have if you'd wanted to. Your body reacted without your even thinking, just the way the body of a young bird does when its mother pushes it out of the nest."
"I'll still never forgive you," said Angie. "But—oh, Jim, this is a marvelous way to get about. I love it! Why didn't you turn me into a dragon before this?"
"Because I knew you wouldn't want to jump off the top of the tower," said Jim.
It was not strictly true, of course. Actually, it had never occurred to him to think of turning Angie into a dragon before. He hurried to take advantage of the change in her mood, though.
"But you do like it?"
"I love it!" said Angie. "And you know something? I don't feel cold at all; and it must be icy out here with the wind blowing on us."
"Dragons don't feel cold," said Jim. "They do feel heat—you'll find out about that for yourself. Also, you're moving with the wind most of the time, so it's not really blowing against you."
"Just think," said Angie, "now you and I can go places together this way!"
Jim had not thought of that, either. He
was still considering the ramifications and possibilities of such traveling when Malvern Castle appeared in its clearing and he led Angie on a long gliding descent toward the top of its tower.
The Malvern tower top, like their own at Malencontri, had a single sentry on it. Besides his sword he had a short stabbing spear in his hand. He stood transfixed as they came closer and closer to the tower top.
When they came down with a double thump about fifteen feet from him, he gave what could better be described as an honest shriek, rather than the ritual male shout of alarm Jim was used to from his own people—and bolted down the hole in the tower top, where the stone steps led to the floor below.
They heard his footfalls clattering away; a door slammed, then opened again; and Geronde's voice floated up to them from what was obviously the floor just below.
"What the hell?" it snapped.
Chapter Five
Jim and Angie heard the patter of lighter feet coming back up the stairs in a hurry, and Geronde popped up onto the roof, with the sentry's stabbing spear in one hand and his naked sword in the other. She glared at Jim and Angie.
"All right, you dragons!" she said. "You're at the wrong castle. You want Malencontri. It's twelve miles west that way—" She pointed with the sword.
"It's just us, Geronde," said Jim. He was working his magic; and in the same instant he said this, he and Angie turned back into their human shapes, in their human clothes. Geronde stared at them, and the weapons in her hands drooped.
"You two?" she said after a long moment. "And you're a dragon as well, Angela?"
"Jim just made me one for the first time," said Angie, with perhaps a touch of smugness in her voice. "It's enjoyable. But Geronde, what in heaven's name did you think you could do against two dragons with that spear and a sword?"
"Make them sorry they ever tried to bother me—if they did!" said Geronde. "Jim turned you into a dragon and you decided to come here?"
"The other way around," said Angie. "We were going to come here, and we decided to fly instead of riding over. It was quicker."
"Oh? Well, it was kind of you to think of visiting—" she began, but the sound of two pairs of feet scuffling up the steps interrupted her, and up through the opening of the stairwell, now, came a tall, black haired, long-nosed man who was Bernard, the Chief man-at-arms at Malvern, hauling along the sentry by his collar. He stopped and held his captive still, as Geronde turned to face him.
"Shall I hang him, m'lady?" he asked. "He left his post—as well as running from the enemy in cowardly fashion."
"I suppose," said Geronde through her teeth, "though useful men-at-arms are not that easy to pick up… On the other hand, he's no use to us if he hasn't got the guts to fight—"
The ex-sentry, who had been half-fainting in Bernard's grasp, on hearing this all but collapsed; so that Bernard had to hold him upright by main strength. Jim hurried to get a word in.
"If I could crave a favor, Geronde," he said, "might I beg this lad's life for him? He had just a moment to see the two of us coming; and I think he ran off the top of the tower, pushed more by a feeling that it was his duty above all to warn and protect you; and that was what made him seem to abandon his post so wantonly."
"He hasn't got the wit," said Geronde, looking angrily at the half-collapsing sentry, held tightly in Bernard's grasp.
"Why, yes," said Angie quickly, "if I also may pray the same favor from you, Geronde, I'm almost sure I heard him shout something—I think, something like 'must save m'lady'—before he ran down the stairs."
"Hah!" said Geronde. "A likely—Well, all right, Bernard, take him away. Send a man up here. As for this one, let him go without food for three days. It'll give him time to think about following his orders first!"
Bernard hauled away the suddenly joyous sentry, and Geronde turned back to Angie and Jim.
"Will you step below to the solar?" she said. "You must forgive its appearance, Angela. We will go to the Great Hall in due course; but it comes to me that you may want to talk privily for a little while first. In truth, I have been thinking of going over to Malencontri to speak so to you two."
She led the way downstairs.
Her private bed-sitting room, the solar at Malvern, was nothing to be ashamed of by medieval standards. It was just that, by contrast with Jim and Angie's own at Malencontri, its lacks showed up. But there was a good-sized fireplace with a good-sized fire in it; and, after Geronde had seen the advantage of the glass-filled window apertures at Malencontri, she had had her own windows glazed also, since she had the money for it.
Still, the room had a rather barren look to it compared to Jim and Angie's solar—although it occurred to Jim that possibly some of the feeling of barrenness about it came from the fact that the chairs were unpadded and the floor unheated, as he and Angie were used to having it at their own home.
But the fire was bright; and there was an unusually large bed, with its four tall bedposts holding up a canopy as well, thick bed-curtains hanging from them. Those curtains were the first defense against the coldness of nighttime for medieval sleepers of quality.
To further balance the difference between the two castles, Geronde's servants were very well trained indeed. There was a scratching at the door, shortly after they had sat down; and when Geronde bade whoever it was enter, a servant came in, carrying cakes, wine and water from the serving room and asking if his lady would care for them.
Since it turned out she would—it could hardly have been otherwise with guests there—these were put on the table.
"Now, leave us alone unless there's a fire in the castle," said Geronde sharply.
"Yes, m'lady," said the servant. He bowed his way back out.
"As I say, I was of a mind to come and visit you in any case," said Geronde as soon as the wine and water was mixed and they had all both drunk and nibbled at what was before them. "But perhaps I should let you tell me first why you wanted to come here."
"No, no," said Angie hastily. "You talk first, Geronde."
"Well…" said Geronde, slowly looking down at the table. "It is not my place really to speak for Sir Brian. He is a knight and a gentleman and can speak for himself. No doubt he told you there need no more be said on a certain subject; and yet it is that subject I would wish to discuss with you."
"Discuss away, Geronde," said Jim.
"You have a somewhat strange way of expressing yourself sometimes, James," said Geronde. "Nonetheless, I think I take your meaning. I will indeed discuss away, since that was what I was going to do if I came to see you. Now, both of you learned almost from the beginning of our acquaintance that Brian and I were betrothed."
"Yes, indeed," said Jim. "Almost the first thing he did was show me your favor."
Geronde's eyes misted slightly.
"He would do that," said Geronde. "Yes, that is the way he is. But perhaps when you first met, it was as two knights who might decide to debate something or other. Was that so?"
"He did suggest," said Jim, "that the two of us might have a go at it on behalf of our individual ladies. I had just told him that I was in love with Angie and he said that was a coincidence, because he was in love with you."
"He said that!" said Geronde. "But you did not fight?"
"No," said Jim. "It was rather awkward at the moment, because I was in a dragon body and couldn't get out of it; and then later on when I was back in my human form we had been Companions. So, for the two of us to fight would hardly have been right. But I knew almost from that first moment of the closeness between the two of you, as something that had endured for some time."
"Yes. Longer than you might think," said Geronde. "Indeed, longer than we can remember ourselves, he and I."
"You knew Brian most of your life, then, Geronde?" asked Angie.
"In truth, we knew each other all our lives," said Geronde. "Though we were not kin, he was motherless almost from birth and we were close neighbors, of course. His father and mine were good friends. In fact they were two of
a kind, those fathers. The result was we grew up together, Brian and I. I was almost never at Castle Smythe, but he was here much of the time."
Angie looked at her curiously.
"Strange, is it not?" said Geronde. "It was almost as if we were to have no choice but to end up as we have. Brian's father was very much involved with his cousins, the Nevilles of Rabe; and I believe intended, or at least expected, to mend his fortunes by doing things for them. At any rate, he was always going on trips, mostly to the continent for them—the Nevilles have connections all over, there; particularly in France and Italy. When he went, Brian was left here at Malvern."
"Brian must have been closer to your father than his own, then," said Angie.
"No," said Geronde, "because my father was gone often, too. But here at Malvern, there was a well-trained staff; and, after my mother died, when I was seven, women to look after us both when we were very young. All things in order. Whereas Castle Smythe was—well, you see how Castle Smythe is nowadays. There was really no other place for Brian to be put, Sir Edmar Claive and his cousins, who then occupied Malencontri, were not the sort of men any young boy could be left with; and there were no other suitable households close. So, Brian was left with us; and, as I say, he and I grew up together."
"How young were you when all this started?" Angie asked.
"The first time, Brian was seven and I was five," said Geronde, "although we might have been brought together as babes too young to remember it also. But the earliest I remember is, as I say, when I was five; and after that we were together at least for a time almost each year; so much in each other's company, like brother and sister, that you'd think it would be the last thing in the world for the two of us to fall in love."
"You did, though," said Angie.
Jim looked out one of the windows at the cloud-flecked sky and a hawk, almost certainly wild, circling high above the trees beyond the clearing. There had been an interested, prompting note to Angie's voice that he always dreaded. The heat of the fire and the wine, half a cupful of which he had been foolish enough to drink straight, was making him not so much drowsy as dull-witted; and he was a little afraid that this would turn into one of those "Oh, was your great-uncle living in such-and-such a place, then? I wonder if he knew some of my relatives who lived there?" He struggled to keep his eyes open.