The Redundant Dragons Read online

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Dedication and Acknowledgements

  Advanced Readers’ Blurbs

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  The Redundant Dragons

  by

  Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © October 18, 2018, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  Cover Art Copyright © 2018, Karen Gillmore

  Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC.

  Lockhart, TX

  www.Gypsyshadow.com

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Gypsy Shadow Publishing, LLC.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ISBN: 978-1-61950-342-7

  Published in the United States of America

  First eBook Edition: November 23, 2018

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to its Kickstarter backers, especially Anne Young and Stephanie Bonsanti, as well as to Nelson's Blood, my sea shanty group, who inspired the nautical bits.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my editors and publishers, Charlotte Holley and Denise Bartlett of Gypsy Shadow Publishing, cover artist Karen Gillmore, cheering squad and first beta readers Becky Kyle and Tania Opland who helped me navigate the story and suggested Malady should be a major player instead of a minor irritation. Thanks also to my final beta readers, Carolyn LaPlant, Becky Kyle (again), and Morgiana Halley.

  What follows is a list of my Kickstarter backers for this book. Thank you.

  Linda Cork, Joanne Forster, CE Murphy, Daniel Vinette, Anne Young, Wooster, Charlotte Holley and Denise Bartlett, Julia Bonser, Ruth J. Burroughs, Kristal Dalgetty, Jory Bernstein, Katherine Roe, Curtis Berry, Lis Halliday-Tyler, Susan Mandel, Corey Liss, Isaac 'Will it Work' Dansicker, Donna Bailly, Gail Sullivan, Jean-Marie Ward, Cynthia F. Shelley, Chad Bowden, Laurie Hicks, Gwen and Steven Yaple, Diana Rehfield, Gavran, Joella Berkner, Stella Sloop, Liv Margareth Alver, Daniella Gembala, PyrrhaIphis, Marti Wulfow Garner, Deborah Fishburn, Laurie Weaver, Katrina Oppermann, Sandy Hershelman, Daniel Pelletier, Becky Kyle, Victoria L. Sullivan, Jesse Fitzsimmons, Janice Ziv, Shala Kerrigan, Cat Allen, Barbara A Denz, Stephanie Bonsanti, Paul Bullard, Shannon Scollard, Tania Opland, Kirsten Pieper-Schulz, Amy Browning, Kal Powell, Carol Guess, Sandra Doherty, Vicky DiSanto, Thomas Bull, Katherine L. Mock, Esha, Christine Boyer Maj, Erica Hamerquist, Tom Linton, Greg Hallock, Elizabeth Sloan, Kathleen Lane, Traevynn, Jane Anderson, Marketa Zvelebil, Marilyn L. Alm, Jeanne Evans, Karen Gillmore, Jamie Cloud Eakin, Arnd Empting, Ted Briggs-Comstock, Virgina Korleski, Debby Rodrig, Carol Berry, Barbara Chandler-Young, Jinjer Stanton, Sarah Frazier, Karen Bull, Otomo, Lee Jackson, Kevin Andrew Murphy, and Lynn Garren.

  Advanced Readers’ Blurbs

  Clever, amusing, and inventive. Don’t read it last thing before bed because you won’t be able to stop. A considerable gallery of well-drawn characters. Verity is a splendid creation and very sound on dragons. And there are Ghost-Cats. What else could we want?

  —Kerry Greenwood

  Author of the Phryne Fisher detective novels (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries TV series) and The Spotted Dog in the Corinna Chapman series

  The Redundant Dragons is a book chock full of quirky characters, effervescent dialogue and wicked humor. The story rockets from one character to another without a misstep. But underlying the fun there’s a serious theme reflecting the best and worst in humanity (and dragonity) and a reminder of how easy it is to find oneself on the wrong side. Although this is the second in a series, I had no trouble following the plot. Now I MUST find the first, which I expect to enjoy just as much.

  —Sharan Newman

  Author of the Guinevere series and the Catherine LeVenseur Mystery series

  Scarborough’s Redundant Dragons is a wicked swirl of humor, fantasy and astute social commentary that moves along so fast you almost don’t notice how deep it goes.

  —Joyce Thompson

  Author of Bones, Sailing My Shoe to Timbuktu, and the novelization of Harry and the Hendersons

  Elizabeth Ann Scarborough does it again with another fantastic light-hearted fantasy where dragons aren’t the villains, but likable heroes.

  —Pamela K. Kinney

  Author of How the Vortex Changed my Life, Haunted Richmond and Haunted Virginia

  Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s new installment of the Songs from the Seashell Archives series slides through fantasy, literature, sci-fiction, and song as easily as one of her time-traveling characters slips through the ages. A reluctant queen, a pirate’s curse, and a thunder of delinquent dragons are only the beginning in this fanciful tale. Oh, and ghost cats. We mustn’t forget the ghost cats!

  —Mollie Hunt

  Author of The Crazy Cat Lady Cozy Mystery Series

  Dragons, a bard, and witches, Oh yes! I made some new friends, and greeted some old ones. I even sang along with the bard. Elizabeth Ann Scarborough grabbed my attention with a Song of Sorcery and has kept it ever since.

  —Elisa Ballou

  I really couldn't put the book down. I had to know what was going to happen to the reluctant queen and her fanciful friends next!

  —J. M. Jennings aka Billie Maverick

  Author of The Drenching

  Chapter 1: Dragons At Large

  The controversial new queen watched from the battlements as the former drone dragons made their presumably joyous exodus from their workplace dungeons. More than one blinked nervously, poking its head out to look up and down the city streets. Then, claw by claw, each slunk out of its industrial den, abandoning the familiarity of the only home it had known for many years, if not its entire life.

  ‘Hooray, the dragons are free at last!’ thought the truth-and-justice side of Queen Verity, followed by the more realistic thought. ‘Oh dear, the dragons are free. Now what?’

  Malady Hyde, the queen’s personal assistant, her predatory eye keen for signs of weakness in her monarch, swooped in to stand beside her. The crumbling gray stone of the castle’s jagged roof had recently been reinforced with a lacework of wrought iron studded at intervals with the latest distant-viewing apparatuses.

  “Just look at what you’ve done now!” Malady said. “Liberating dragons is all very well, but the next question is who will liberate us from the tyranny of dragons once they figure out that without the kibble, they have the upper claw.”

  Malady was a stranger to truth as Verity knew it, which made their relationship even more antagonistic than it would have been solely because of their differing worldviews, but in this case the queen very much feared that Malady had a point.

  Verity had a feeling that the rest of the population of Queenston, whom she supposed she ought to think of as her subjects, were less than enthusi
astic about the turn events had taken since she was recognized as the first royal to reign in four generations. Her feeling, as usual, was not wrong.

  Verity knew she wasn’t good at queening. Her mother had assumed that Verity’s ability to tell the truth and be able to detect lies would be an asset in a leader. In fact, it made it almost impossible. The problem was that in politics, everyone was lying, all the time, in such tangled webs of interwoven falsehood that she couldn’t say who was being untruthful about what since it all gave her an unbearable, raging headache. The pain had never been so bad in her life. Malady, appointed her assistant by the same troublesome mother who had appointed Verity queen, kept going to court in her stead, since lies were her native tongue.

  In the politics of dragons, however, Malady was missing something. The dragons were no longer dependent on the kibble, but neither would they have anything else to eat for very long. The wild game was already much depleted in a matter of a few days, and the head of the Cattleperson’s Association had begun complaining of livestock predation. “It’s not like we’re made of coos,” were his exact words.

  When Verity consulted dragon-wrangler Toby, and his dragon Taz about the matter, Taz flew off and conferred with some of the other dragons.

  “They say that’s too bad,” Taz relayed via Toby. “But the humans made their living on dragon backs for long enough and it’s no good complaining now that the tables are turned.”

  “Well, yes,” Verity said. “I’d be the first to agree, except that humans have to eat, too, if they are to raise food for dragons. If dragons take whatever they like whenever, everyone will be starving very soon. I begin to appreciate the genius of the kibble.”

  Meanwhile dragons darkened the skies and crowded the streets. Actually, just one good-sized dragon was enough to crowd almost any street. Dragons lurked atop every building, like so much menacing architecture. Fire strobed overhead from dragons whose jobs had dictated timed releases of flame. Now that they were free, they couldn’t quite kick the habit of firing according to their old schedules.

  Horatio and Myrtle

  “Why don’t they go back where they came from?” complained Horatio the Hair, the Queenstreet barber, casting a glance of indignation not untinged with fear over his shoulder as he entered his shop. A grayish drake the size of a coach met his eye with a glare from a baleful yellow one.

  “I’m afraid that’s exactly what they’re doing, but perhaps you’d like to be the first to suggest it to them?” his wife Myrtle, replied.

  “The government should be doing something about this,” he said.

  “Perhaps that new lass, whatsername, the queen, will sort it out,” Myrtle said soothingly.

  He snorted. “From what I hear, she’s to blame.”

  Her Majesty’s Disability

  Verity was of the same opinion. She was indeed to blame for the dragon situation. Toby, the dragon-wrangler, and his scaly partner, Taz, had instigated most of what he called a strike on the part of dragons suing for better food and working conditions. Even prior to that, they had, perhaps rather impulsively, destroyed most of the kibble formerly used to control the dragons through their diet, and disrupted the breeding program.

  Verity’s mother, who had missed being queen by a hundred years or so before insisting that the burden of the crown become Verity’s, had also been responsible. But it was the queen’s job to take the blame for unfortunate ramifications of events she set in motion. Someone better at the job could have made the consequences look like part of a plan. Verity not only lacked the talent for such pretense, but was constitutionally incapable of it, due to her curse.

  Once her mother had forced everyone who was anyone in Queenston to acknowledge and honor the royal succession, she’d disappeared, off traveling, even time traveling, although Verity had not a clue what that actually involved, It had to be a real thing, or her curse would have let her know.

  Nor was her father any help. Since his near-fatal accident, he had undergone a radical transformation involving a fish tail and a musical career, and thus far did not seem to remember who she was.

  Her mother’s old traveling companion, the family solicitor, N. Tod Belgaire, was out of the city supposedly locating an old history teacher to tutor Verity in the ways of royalty. The country hadn’t had one since her grandmother, Queen Bronwyn, sat upon the throne at the beginning of the Great War. Since that time, Argonia had become a commercial client nation of neighboring Frostingdung. Verity’s return to the throne was supposed to break the chains of Frostingdung’s economic hegemony over her land. The breaking of those chains, both real and metaphorical, was to begin with those that bound the dragons to industrial servitude.

  It was a good plan, but she had failed to foresee that the solution to that problem could create many other, possibly worse ones.

  Her views were not undisputedly popular and received no validation from anyone, least of all the Crown Council, particularly the members who had owned interests in kibble production.

  “I do not know what to do,” she confided finally to absolutely the worst person possible, Malady Hyde.

  “Of course, you don’t, you idiot, um, Your Majesty. You have no aptitude for this any more than you did for needlepoint when we took Introduction to Ladycraft at school.”

  Verity still had no idea what she had ever done to her mother, absent for the best part of her life, that her un-maternal maternal parent would foist Malady on her as an advisor.

  “You don’t think she’ll give me good advice, surely?” she’d challenged her mother before they parted.

  “No, but you’ll know the difference and can just do the opposite from what she advises. I have my reasons.”

  That made sense, up to a point, but although she had never been wounded badly enough to know how it felt having salt poured into a wound, she suspected it must have been much like she felt about Malady.

  The worst of it was, the advisers and nobles all listened to whatever Malady said and in general seemed to get on with her in a way they did not get on with their queen.

  Verity’s initial meeting with them had made that abundantly clear.

  The Queen Game

  She had tried to conform to what a queen was supposed to be according to the history books. She did her best to look the part, wearing the blue satin gown made for her by Madame Marsha. She’d straightened her spine, so she stood imposingly tall, her full height only a foot short of the massive oaken doors leading from the castle’s entrance hall to the audience chamber and council room.

  She’d settled the family tiara on her red-gold hair, which was plaited into a braided crown, making a cushion to support the tiara so it didn’t dig into her skull.

  She’d cleared her throat and said “Scat!” as she waded through the crowd of short shadowy figures slithering over her feet, between her and the door. The ghost cats could walk through walls, of course, as was the ghostly custom, but they preferred to wait to see if someone else, someone two-legged and solid, would open the door properly for them, as was the catly custom.

  When no one else hastened to open it, as they really ought to for a queen (even if one doesn’t respect the person, she’d always been taught, one must respect the rank). she did it herself and the shadows slithered into the room ahead of her.

  At a great long table, nine prosperous looking men sat talking. The talking didn’t stop when she walked into the room. At the elbow of each man sat a young woman, each more comely than the last, and each seated at her own little table, and on each of these nine tables clacked a substantial Smythe-Coronet typing machine.

  This symmetry was broken only by the presence of an additional young woman, Malady (Verity had to hand it to her. She’d had to move fast to get to court and subvert everyone between the time Verity got off the train and the time she appeared at the door), whose brittle titter erupted when she stole a glance at her old schoolmate, now her queen.

  “Excuse me, Uncle Oscar, Uncle Horace,” the treacherous
cow said, “there she is now. Are we supposed to bow or something?”

  Verity tried out a royal glare. It was just the same as her usual one, which she actually didn’t use a great deal.

  “Malady, I wondered where you’d gone,” she said. “I thought you were supposed to be my assistant?”

  Not that Verity had ever imagined such an arrangement would work out. Her mother had used the dragon-calming kibble in baked goods that caused people to behave—quite temporarily—in ways so unlikely it would have seemed more likely if they’d turned into frogs.

  She recognized three of these kibble-influenced people among the men seated at the table from the conclave at Fort Iceworm.

  “I am assisting you, Bossy Boots,” Malady retorted. “I was telling my dear uncles all about you and what we might expect from your reign.”

  Except for the table, the typing tables, and the chairs occupied by the men, their assistants, and Malady, it was Standing Room Only in the vast chamber. Verity had once toured the castle with one of her classes, shortly before her expulsion from that particular school. She seemed to recall there had been more chairs then.

  “Looking for your throne, Majesty?” Sir Cuthbert, the head of the Crown Council, asked. “I fear it was in mothballs in the royal attic and it needs to be cleaned and reupholstered. There’s a bench against that window over there.” He swung his arm, flourishing the silken crimson sleeve of his robe of office.