“Your Highness! We tried, honestly . . .”
“Sire, it’s not our fault the queen is still . . .”
“Please, Your Majesty. We’re not fireproof . . .”
“Highness, that dragon seems to like having the queen there . . .”
Chris held up a hand to silence them after he noticed three women sitting on tree stumps, holding out sticks with weenies stuck on them for the dragon to roast . . . and one of the women was Queen Marigold.
“Marigold!” Christian shouted. He thrust the laundry basket at the court doctor and dismounted. “Are you all right?” He hesitated to rush directly to her, considering the unpredictability of the dragon’s flame-shooting propensities.
Instead, Marigold dropped her stick and ran into his arms. “Oh, Chris!” she cried. “I knew you’d come back for me. What about Poppy? Have you found her?”
“Yes. I have her. Are you all right? Have you been harmed?” He held her face in his hands and looked down into her eyes as if no one else even existed.
Phoebe looked on with awe and envy. No one had ever looked at her quite that way.
“No, no, I’m fine,” Marigold said. “I could even have enjoyed myself if I hadn’t been so worried about you and Poppy. Is she all right?”
“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Just yes?” Her voice wavered. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Doctor,” Chris said, turning back. “Hand me down the basket.” He had learned not to keep the truth from her, however distressing.
Marigold bent over the basket. “It is Poppy!” she cried, picking the baby up and looking down into her peaceful, unconscious face. “But what’s wrong with her? Did they do something to her? Did they hurt her?” Her voice rose. “Where are they? Did you catch them?”
“I got them. They’re on their way to the dungeon. But Poppy has been the victim of one of Vlad’s sleeping potions.” Chris refrained from telling her that the Terrible Twos hadn’t bothered to keep feeding Poppy. There was such a thing as too much information—especially if the time when the information would have mattered was over. He could tell her later—much later—when the impact would, with luck, be less.
“I know this is awful to say,” Marigold said, clutching Poppy close to her chest. “But right now I would like to do every single thing to them that they ever did to any of their victims.”
“See?” Sebastian whispered to Phoebe. “Everybody thinks awful thoughts sometimes, even Queen Marigold. But only bad people actually do them. So she won’t.”
“We need to get back to the castle,” Chris said. “I want to make sure those vermin are locked up tight, and I want the court doctor to make Poppy comfortable. And I want to get you away from this beast.” He’d lowered his voice, just in case the dragon took offense in an incendiary way. “How hard will it be? The guards said the dragon wants to keep you here.”
“Oh, you have that all wrong,” Marigold said. “She’s not a beast. Oh, well, yes, she is a beast. She’s a dragon, after all. But she’s not bad. She’s just unhappy. And misunderstood. And she has a medical problem, too. But she took very good care of me. And she did like having me as a guest. And Anabel and Twyla, too.”
“Who?”
“Them.” Marigold pointed to the two women sitting in the shadows near the entrance to the lair, their weenie sticks dangling forgotten in their hands as they watched. “They’ve lived with her for a long time.”
“Lived with the dragon? You mean, in the lair?” Chris’s eyebrows had climbed up quite high on his forehead.
“I’m incredulous,” Sebastian whispered to Phoebe. “So is the king.”
Incredulous, thought Phoebe. I’m incredulous that he used that wonderful word.
“Yes,” Marigold said. “They feel very safe in there. They’ll all understand I have to leave now, but I do have to say goodbye.” Still carrying Poppy, she went to Anabel and Twyla, showing them the sleeping baby before they hugged her goodbye.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, Marigold did the same with the dragon, first showing her the baby and then draping her arm around the shimmering scaly neck. She pressed her forehead against the forehead of the dragon—who lowered her eyelashes in what could have been a bashful way—for a moment, before she went to join Christian.
Then the dragon blinked her long lashes in the direction of the waiting group and sent a series of white, heart-shaped puffs of smoke at them.
Uneasily they headed for home, the two singed guards bringing up the rear. Marigold held the baby and rode in front of Christian, who was happy to have them safe in his arms. But there was something he didn’t understand.
“Marigold,” he said. “I have to ask you something.”
“Of course,” she said. “Anything.”
“If you insist that the dragon is simply unhappy and misunderstood, but not bad, why didn’t you escape? It sounds like you could have just walked away.”
“I was so desperate when I first ran in there, I wasn’t thinking straight. But when I calmed down and saw that there was no danger, I realized that if I left, I would just make things worse by getting lost in the woods. You know I have no sense of direction. Then, when the guards showed up, I thought I could leave, but by then, Winnie was feeling very protective of me, the same way she feels about Twyla and Anabel, and didn’t trust them to take good care of me. I know she was overreacting, but it’s hard to argue with someone who keeps erupting. So I figured the smartest thing I could do was to wait for you to come back, after you’d found Poppy and caught the Terrible Twos. I know it was rash of me to rush into Winnie’s lair, but I was nearly out of my mind about Poppy.”
“Winnie?”
“The dragon.”
Christian was touched by her confidence in him, at how certain she was that he could find Poppy, capture the Terrible Twos, and wrest her from the dragon. But he also worried. “Will you promise me that next time you’ll think first before rushing off somewhere that seems dangerous? It worked out all right this time, but . . .”
“I know,” Marigold said, abashed. “You’re right. But what do you mean next time? How many times do you think something like this is going to happen?”
He shrugged. “Maybe not just like this, but something will happen. That’s just life. Something always happens. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but we need to have cool heads for whatever it is.”
“I know that’s good advice,” she said. “But it’s so hard to do.”
“I know,” he said. “But we have a whole kingdom to think about, not only ourselves and Poppy. We have to try harder than anyone, and be good examples.”
Marigold considered how easy that was to forget, since she’d never expected to be a queen. But Chris had never expected to be a king, either. “You’re a good example to me, too,” she said. “Thank you.”
Nobody ever gets enough appreciation, even kings, so it warmed Chris’s heart to hear those words. “You inspire me to do my best,” he said. “So I thank you, too.”
They rode the rest of the way home grateful to be together once again.
Back at the castle, Marigold hustled off to the nursery with Poppy and the doctor, and Christian went to the dungeon.
“I want double guards down here all the time,” Chris told Rollo. “They’re staying put right here until the trial.”
The king knew how eager a prisoner could be to escape. And how hard one could try to do so. And how it was not impossible.
With the excitement over for a while, Phoebe headed back to the library. She doubted anyone had tried to check out a book while she was gone, but she had left a note saying she’d get their books to them if they would leave their names and the titles on a slip of p-mail paper.
To her surprise, Sebastian tagged along. “Do you mind?” he asked. “I thought I’d get a book to help me fall asleep tonight. I’m a little too wound up to go to sleep easily.”
Phoebe didn’t like the idea of someone using a book as a sleep
ing pill, but she supposed she should be happy about anything that got someone reading. There was always the chance that he would like the book enough that it would keep him awake.
“Of course,” she said, noting with disappointment that no requests for books waited at the door.
As always when she returned to the library, she felt as if she had come back to the only thing close to a home she had ever known. It was quiet, and safe, and pretty—something her childhood home never had been, what with her father always noisily building some ugly torture device. Or using it.
“It’s nice in here,” Sebastian said. “Quiet. Pretty.” And after a long pause, he sighed and added, “Safe.” Part of what made the place feel safe to him was her—her competence, her calmness, her radiance.
Phoebe stared at him. “I was just thinking that.”
He gave a little nod and wandered over to the shelves, looking for his bedtime book, while Phoebe gazed after him. How was it possible, she wondered, that he shared any genes with Vlad?
18
DOWN IN THE DUNGEON, Vlad at last broke his silence. He waited until the two guards had wandered over by the stairs and were having a chat about the new upstairs chambermaid. Then he began rummaging through his pockets, pulling out little bits of this and that, things that didn’t look like anything but lint or strips of p-mail paper or string or sand. He laid them all out on the bottom bunk in the cell he shared with Boris.
“What do you say we get out of here?” Vlad whispered.
“Yeah, right. Have you noticed we’re behind bars? And that there are two guards over there carrying so many weapons, it’s a surprise they can still stand up?”
“Not a problem.” Vlad fiddled with his little pile of things.
“Right,” said Boris again, and lay back on the upper bunk. “I’m beat. That was a long walk. We didn’t even have a chance for that dragon to help us! You’d think she would be more friendly, considering I named a torture instrument after her—a very effective one, too, I have to say. And you named your best poison after her, too.”
“I didn’t expect her to help us. She’s spurned every overture we ever made to her—usually with lots of fireworks, too. You were living in a dream world if you thought she would come to our aid. The only one you can really depend on is yourself,” Vlad murmured as he continued fiddling. “It pays to always be prepared.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Boris muttered, thinking what a know-it-all Vlad was. Thought he knew better than anybody about everything. Boris wished he’d insisted on separate cells, even if the guards thought they’d be easier to watch if they were locked up together the way Emlyn and Fogarty were. The guards over there in the corner, gossiping, weren’t even watching, Boris noted.
Soon Boris was snoring, while Vlad continued with his project. So the kidnapping hadn’t been a success, he thought. True, that was a disappointment, but not everything worked out the way one wanted it to. One had to be willing and able to roll with the punches, to survive to fight again another day. Naturally, it meant he would have to go far away, but he’d planned to do that, anyway—maybe just not as far away as would now be necessary. So there was no great loss—aside from all those ducats, of course. But there were opportunities elsewhere, other places where his talents would be appreciated, where there would be chances to make more ducats. The important thing was to escape. Until that happened, his possibilities were seriously limited.
Taking Boris with him wasn’t ideal, but there were times when having a big, strong, rather dim brute with you could be useful. In his experience, a lot of women seemed to feel that way, too. Vlad hummed a little as he worked.
The afternoon passed into evening, and then into the dead of night.
In the deepest part of the night, Boris snored so loudly he woke himself up. He turned over and peered down to see Vlad, outlined by the light from the wall torches, sitting peacefully on the floor, his back against the wall.
“Oh,” Vlad said, getting to his feet. “You’re awake. Just in time.”
“Time for what?” Boris scrubbed his face with his hands, trying to wake up.
“Time to go,” Vlad whispered.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Vlad shook his head. “I’m going to blast the lock off this door, then I’m going to blow my sleeping powder on the guards. But you’re going to stand by to bang their heads together, just in case the powder doesn’t work fast enough. And then we’re going out the disposal tunnel, where I’ll blast out the door that opens onto the riverbank.”
“Hey! I’d forgotten about that tunnel. They used to dump the torture victims through there, out into the river.” Boris rubbed his hands together. “What are we waiting for?” He jumped off the upper bunk with enough of a crash that Vlad flinched.
“Quiet, you oaf!” he hissed. “We don’t want to wake those guards until we have to. And we don’t want to wake up Emlyn and Fogarty, either. They’re not coming with us.”
That was fine with Boris. He’d never really liked either of them—probably because he didn’t really like anybody—and trying to escape with four would be more than twice as hard as trying to escape with two.
They held still for a moment but heard nothing more than heavy, sleepy breathing coming from both guards and the prisoners in the other cell.
Vlad began packing something squishy around the lock in the cell door. He whispered, “Interestingly, this is the same stuff King Christian used to get out of the dungeon years back, in those crazy days before he married the princess. I learned the formula for it after I found out he’d used it. You never know when an odd bit of knowledge like that will come in handy.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Boris said. “Get on with it.”
So Vlad did. And with a loud pop! the lock on the cell door blew off and the door swung open. The pop! was enough to wake the guards, who scrambled up and came running. As soon as they were in range, Vlad dipped a hand into his pocket and blew powder into their faces. The guards came to a sudden stop, rubbing their eyes. They probably would have fallen of their own accord, but Boris couldn’t resist. It had been too long since he’d been able to do damage to anyone. He took their heads into his large, meaty hands, and banged them together. The impact made the sound of a bowling ball striking pins, and the guards went down in a heap. Boris thought he could almost see stars circling their heads, and he felt better than he had in a long time.
By that time, Emlyn and Fogarty were on their feet, standing at the door to their cell. “Hurry up!” Emlyn called. “Get our door open, too.”
“Sorry,” Vlad said, moving swiftly by. “Not this time.”
“What do you mean, this time?” Fogarty asked. “There’s not going to be any other time.”
“Oh,” said Vlad, halting for a moment. “You’re right. So sorry. And goodbye.”
“Hey!” yelled Emlyn. Fogarty joined her, but yelling was futile. Vlad and Boris had disappeared into the mouth of the disposal tunnel.
Emlyn and Fogarty yelled for a while longer, just on principle. Finally, Emlyn, whose throat was getting sore, flopped down on the lower bunk. “We should have known we couldn’t trust them,” she said. “After all, they did have the worst reputations in the kingdom.”
“I feel like an idiot,” Fogarty said. “And a dupe. And a failure.”
“Well, you are!” Emlyn assured him. She didn’t want to say that she was thinking the same thing about herself. She curled up, determined to go back to sleep. Might as well. All the excitement was over, and it hadn’t included her.
Sebastian selected a book at random from the library shelf. What he’d really wanted was to spend a few more minutes with Phoebe, but that wasn’t working out so well. He had thought he felt her gaze on him as he perused the stacks, but when he darted a peek in her direction, she was sitting at her desk paying no attention at all to him. He cleared his throat and she raised her head.
“I guess I’ll take this one, then,” he said, holding out a book.
; “Ancient Agrarian Practices? Really? Well, it ought to do the job of putting you to sleep.” She wrote the title in her ledger and handed it back to him.
“Well. Good night, then,” he said.
She avoided his eyes. What was the point? They’d shared an adventure that was now over. She would go back to being the daughter of Boris, the reviled torturer-in-chief, whose grisly reputation would now be resurrected just as it had begun to fade a little. And her own name would be unfavorably linked to his all over again.
“Good night,” she said to Sebastian.
He had no choice but to leave, even though her voice had had a trace of something curious in it. Regret? Resignation? Loneliness?
Instead of going back to his cramped room over the blacksmith shop, Sebastian went up to the broad terrace that spanned the width of the castle and looked down over the river. A lot of dramatic things had occurred on that terrace, Sebastian thought as he leaned on the parapet. But to other people. Nothing was going to happen to him now. He would live out his life as an isolated blacksmith’s assistant, entertaining himself by making faithful models of King Arthur’s exploits, not having any adventures of his own.
Now that Vlad was back in the limelight, Sebastian was sure he would never escape the pall that his father’s reputation continued to cast over him. This kidnapping episode would be merely a blip in his life—a blip connected to his father, just like everything always was.
Sighing, he gazed down at the river flowing past in the darkness. He could hear the gurgle of the water as it passed over rocks, and see the light from the security torches around the castle sparkling on the surface.
This idyllic view was interrupted by the sound of a blast. Sebastian leaned farther over the parapet to see what was happening. To his amazement, the flickering torchlight revealed his father, followed by Boris, tumbling out of a doorway in the castle wall and onto the riverbank. They stood there for a moment, apparently arguing, and then headed off along the river’s edge toward the Zandelphia-Beaurivage Bridge.