The Redundant Dragons Read online

  A few of the ghost cats already reclined on the bench, while more stood in the window well, looking out the narrow, arched slit as the eye of something else, no doubt a curious dragon, looked in. Other ethereal felines sprawled across the middle of the conference table. One jumped onto the shoulder of a typist and peered over her shoulder as she pecked at her machine. The girl looked up from her machine and gave the feline apparition a startled glance. Verity recognized the typist. She started to say her name, “Fi—” But her former classmate, Fiona Featherstone, shook her head ever so slightly. She rolled her eyes then dipped her head to return to her typing machine. The cat rubbed itself through her cheek, sprawling across the keyboard so Fiona’s fingers had to tap through the transparent form with every keystroke. Perhaps it tickled. Fiona Featherstone kept her head down.

  Fiona had been in the first level at the second of the schools Verity had flunked out of, but Fiona left first. Verity hadn’t known her well, but liked her. She didn’t put on airs and was irreverent and outspoken. Verity was sorry to see her go.

  At the schools they attended, one could get expelled for a variety of reasons, such as non-payment of fees or behavioral or social gaffes. The worst offenses involved boys and there had been some wild stories about Fiona after she left, though later Verity heard that Fiona’s widowed father had died recently so her departure had to do with the financial offense and not with boys after all. Verity was glad to see she seemed to have landed on her feet.

  At any rate, she didn’t seem to want to be recognized, and Verity knew better than to ask Malady about her. Doing so would probably bring down some punishment on the poor girl’s head, if not cause her to be dismissed.

  Verity headed toward the bench, feeling eyes on her back and hearing snickers, only one of which sounded like Malady’s. If they thought she was going to park herself clear over there while they conducted court business without her, they were very much mistaken. Because of her Frost Giant heritage (on her mother’s side), Verity was not only quite tall for a girl, but very strong. Slinging the bench over her shoulder, scattering ghost cats, she carried it to the table, set it down, and tapped Sir Cuthbert’s shoulder. He was seated at the head of the table.

  “I believe you’re in my chair,” she said, and indicated the bench. “You may sit there.”

  He started to protest, then apparently thought better of it. Even had she not been the queen, she was bigger than he was.

  The council sat as still as deer lacking sense enough to run away when a hunter drew a bead on them. Not that Verity wanted the council to run away. Not that she meant to frighten them. It was ridiculous to think of seasoned captains of state and commerce being intimidated by her, but if she was going to change things at all, she required their respect, or their willingness to listen at the very least. The problem was, other than a few monarchs she’d read about in history texts, she knew nothing about ruling. If her mother had actually stuck around back in the day when she would have been heir to the throne, for one thing, the Great War probably wouldn’t have happened. On the other hand, since her mother did not become queen because she and Mr. Belgaire scampered off to experience life in other times, such as the current one, if she had become the queen, Mother wouldn’t have met father and Verity wouldn’t have happened. As it was, Mother felt entitled to pass on the crown she’d never worn to her daughter, expecting Verity to do a job she herself had avoided.

  Verity had returned to Queenston with all of the dragon-kibble-drugged town leaders thinking the return of a Rowan to the mothballed Argonian throne was a good idea. Except everyone seemed to also be drugged into thinking that somehow or other her bloodline would fill Verity in on what queens did and how they behaved, and nobody seemed to want to insult her by telling her how.

  The council members seemed to have gotten over any such reluctance.

  “Now then,” Verity said. “Why don’t each of you introduce yourselves? I’ll start. My name is Verity Brown, er—Regina. You, sir?”

  The man she addressed said nothing, staring stubbornly ahead of him.

  “Fine then, how about the next gentleman?”

  More silence.

  “Are you shy?” she asked, but she knew they were not. Malady made little noises behind her hand that sounded like suppressed giggles. Verity was being given the silent treatment. She had been snubbed and bullied often enough in school to recognize it. These august statesmen were just older, richer, plumper male versions of the mean girls who had made her academic career miserable. One of those girls had been Malady, who her misguided mother had appointed as her assistant. When Verity complained, Mother had put her finger on the side of her nose and said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, so you’ll have advance warning what they’ll try to do to you next. Also,” she said, “If necessary, you’ll be close enough to slip a little something into their cup.”

  Verity cleared her throat and said, conversationally, “I only ask your names out of courtesy. You are eminent gentlemen currently of high position. Of course, I know your names. As you may have heard, I recently escaped from a dragon’s den. Your attitude does not impress me.”

  “Ah, yes, the dragons,” said Sir Cuthbert. “So you do intend to threaten us with them, so we do your bidding?”

  “Of course not," she said, pleased to have found the topic that broke the silence. “There’s no need for me to threaten you with them. They’re capable of being quite threatening on their own. I thought we might discuss their position, however, and what to do…”

  “To keep from being roasted in our beds?”

  “No boiler room blowhard had better threaten my family,” said Lord Weems, who was, Verity noted, young and clearly inexperienced in the ways of dragons. She had harbored a similar attitude before she met the dragon Vitia, having seen dragons only in menial positions until then.

  “Perhaps it has escaped your attention what it is that they blow when blowing hard,” Sir Cuthbert said. “These creatures can and do smelt iron more efficiently than a blast furnace.” The very image appalled him enough that he buried his head in his hands for a moment before collecting himself. The anger and fear he focused on Verity when he looked up was not feigned. “Madame, what have you wrought?”

  Verity said, “They were our allies. They did not deserve to be enslaved, have their wings clipped and their tails docked to fit the tasks we have for them.”

  “And the city doesn’t deserve to be burnt to the ground because you favor wild and dangerous animals over your own people.”

  “All they want is to be fed and not be hunted.”

  The Lord Treasurer snorted. “You do know what their traditional cuisine is, do you not, Madame?” She had no time to answer before he did. “Us, that’s what. Historically, dragons eat people. The development of the kibble kept their hunger at bay and their tempers placid, so their homicidal impulses could be moderated, and their temperaments rendered more biddable, but you and your friends have taken care of that. What did you think they were going to eat when you destroyed the food we’d trained them to rely on?”

  “Animals, of course,” she said. “Sheep and cattle and pigs and such. The farmers in other countries supply them to dragons to keep them peaceful.”

  “In Glassovia, you encountered three dragons, I believe?” Sir Cuthbert said. Verity nodded, and he gave her a withering look. “We have hundreds.”

  “There are many more than three dragons to feed here,” Lord Oswald said. “Our breeding program was extremely successful.”

  Lord Remington-Sharpe looked up from inspecting his nails. He had been an acquaintance of her father, with an interest in both metallurgy and explosives. “Milords and Madame Queen, you are considering only the advantages of the dragons. Progress for man has not stood still while these beasts were in our employ. There are other means of controlling the dragon population—even convincing them to go back to work. They are not the only ones who can employ firepower.”

  Council

/>   Following the queen’s petulant departure, the council members continued consulting. Lord Remington-Sharp coughed into his fist. “She’s worse than I feared.”

  “Won’t do at all,” Sir Horace agreed. “Not to the manor born, whatever her ancestry indicates. I can’t believe the rest of you agreed to allowing her to assume the throne.”

  “Just because she assumes it, doesn’t mean she can remain there,” Sir Cuthbert said. “There are ways of dealing with undesirable queens.”

  “Marry her off to a distant king or princeling whose custom requires the wife live in his home.”

  “No treasure,” Lord Murdo reminded them. “Therefore, no dowry. No dowry, no husband.”

  “Marriage would be one way, but there are others,” Sir Cuthbert said.

  “Find her guilty of some crime and execute her?”

  “The circumstances of her ascension to the throne were rather casual,” Lord Remington-Sharp said. “I don’t think we need to stand on formality. I know someone…”

  “What about the dragons?” Malady asked, twirling one of her golden curls around her finger. Supposedly her uncles had only her best interests at heart, but this talk of doing away with people made her nervous. “They seem to like her. And now that they’re loose, might they not take revenge or something if she’s not around to control them?”

  “The wrangler boy does most of that…” Sir Horace said.

  “But he’s friends with her too. And he won’t like it if she is dead.” Why was she defending Verity, anyway? She was a scary tall gawk and prissy, too about what was true and what was not, which to Malady very much depended on what she wanted at the moment. The big prig, on the other hand, seemed to have no opinions to call her own. You could hardly talk to someone like that! In spite of her great height, she had no real regal presence the way Malady did. Her skin was too dark to remind anybody of milk or alabaster, and her hair was frizzy. She had no grace or daintiness. She could not possibly wear ruffles or the color pink.

  “Who said anything about dead?” Remington-Sharpe said. “We must ask ourselves, ‘what would Marquette do?’ He would find a way to keep her alive and somewhat available, but unable to cause trouble.”

  “A sanitarium perhaps? Nice lunatic asylum with chains and padded walls. For her own protection, of course.” Sir Cuthbert added, “There’s an alienist giving lectures at the opera house. Perhaps she might be persuaded…”

  “The boy or the dragons could easily free her from the madhouse if they got wind of it. And you know how hard it is to foment a decent intrigue in a small city like this. I have an idea,” Sir Eustus said. “Since the dragons have stopped work, the ships that convert to sail are short-handed, I hear. Fiona, take a memo…”

  Fiona Featherstone tried not to tremble as her keys clacked beneath her competent fingers. The fates they were dreaming up for her unwitting former classmate were very dire indeed. Personally, she much preferred a fate worse than death and moreover knew where to find one. It paid better too.

  Chapter 2: Fiona

  Two weeks after the dragon’s ‘coming out party,’ as Captain Lewis put it, Verity was at Madame Marsha’s salon in the former Brown family mansion, empty now that Verity’s stepmother and associates were banished under threat of being eaten if they returned. She had put it to Madame Marsha that her old home might make a good premises for an upmarket design studio, seamstress/tailor shop and clothing boutique. Captain Lewis, an avid follower of fashion, was already there.

  Verity told her friends how Malady had wound the privy council around her little finger to side against her.

  “Well, most of them are Frostingdungian,” Madame Marsha said, while stitching on a blue-green gown with a brocade panel embroidered with birds. “So she speaks their language and you don’t.”

  “But that’s not addressing the dragon in the drawing room,” Captain Lewis said, eyebrows arched as he peeked over the top of his china cup. “Priorities, people. Verity, dearie, a good leader needs to do two critical things: establish priorities and delegate authority. Trust me, I’ve been a ship’s captain for more years than you’ve been alive. As a matter of fact, I need to go be one again now. Farewell!”

  Verity remembered the captain’s words while walking back to the castle. She could have taken a coach, of course, but walking gave her a chance to monitor the positions of the dragons and also to look for Toby. She ought to have had a guard, if she’d been a proper queen, but she was not exactly sure whose side they were on.

  The edifices of the city had aged greatly in the last few days. The weight of dragons on the rooftops crumbled brick and mortar, and dragons who did not flame regularly, on their unaccustomed raw diet, deposited streams of steaming sulfurous stinking scat all down the sides of the buildings.

  The castle’s turrets and towers now were embellished with dragons too, one particularly large specimen having wrapped itself around the privy tower. The courtyard was filled with four dragons diligently using their tails to whap a large ball back and forth. She guessed they might have worked in a textile mill where throwing a shuttle accurately was a useful skill. Between the whapping tails and the projectile, however, their activity made getting from the outer bailey to the great hall very tricky.

  A series of menacing growls from above alarmed her until she smelled fresh sulfurous emissions and realized the growls were digestive rather than emotional.

  With a sudden crash, a boar carcass dropped into the courtyard and the game of dragon volleyball was abandoned as all four players pounced on the prey, bashing heads and tangling tails.

  “Oops,” a voice said from a few feet above. “Sorry. It slipped.”

  The voice was Toby’s, but all she saw was the soles of his boots on either side of Taz’s now quite substantial neck, just in front of her wings. Her blood-stained talons spread as she soared in for a landing, well away from the happily lashing tails of the feeding dragons.

  Toby scratched the base of Taz’s ear. The first time Verity saw her, she was small enough to sit inside the mouth of a hot air balloon and use her breath to inflate it. Now she was large enough for Toby to ride and still a growing girl.

  “How’s she holding up?” Verity asked.

  “She’s worn out. Do you know there are 350 newly freed dragons now who haven’t a clue how to feed or look after themselves?”

  “Odd that they didn’t just pick it up, as Taz did when she became hungry.”

  “Most of them had indoor jobs in cramped engine rooms. They never saw a prey animal from a distance. Taz was used to a healthier lifestyle, and she had me to help her. The others don’t know how to be proper dragons. They’ve been thoroughly conditioned to be drones and drudges who do what they’re told. I’m afraid now that nobody is in charge of them, they’re an aimless lot.”

  Toby’s eyes looked a bit sunken, with dark circles under them. His lips were parched, and his brown face wind scoured and ruddy. He seemed excited and determined on the course he and Taz had decided. He knew it was the right thing for him, but also knew there was a cost and had begun to see that it would be higher than he was prepared for.

  “You think they might have been better off where they were?”

  Toby stared at his boot.

  “A lot of them don’t have wings—were bred that way. No need for wings in a boiler room. More efficient to never have them in the first place. No. Not better off, but this is going to take some adjustment is all. They’re living creatures, not automatons to have parts added or taken away as men wish.”

  “Certainly not, and people will realize that if they live through the times when the dragons figure out we humans never had any real power over them. That may get tricky.”

  “If there’s trouble, people have only themselves to blame.”

  “I doubt that will be a lot of consolation,” Verity said. “And, Toby, these days there are firearms—look what happened to the Dragon Vitia, and she was much bigger and fiercer than any of our town dragons. In the old
days, when dragons were wild, humans had no firearms. The explosives weren’t as powerful as they are now.”

  “No, but they had magic.”

  “True, but it had rules and had to involve spells and rituals and a lot more forethought than firing a weapon. It could only be used by magicians with talent and training, not by just anyone. If the dragons choose to be hostile, they would do great damage to begin with, but the people they didn’t kill could wipe them from the world as if they had never been.”

  The dragons on the turrets impatiently huffed cinders, Taz nosed Toby in the back, and he remounted. “We have hungry dragons to feed, so we’d best get to it, Highness.”

  Before she could respond, they were airborne. They cleared the turret, just above the heads of three dragons poised there, looking upward, when suddenly the dragons in the courtyard and those on the turret seemed to come to a simultaneous decision. With wings flapping hurricane-force gusts the seven dragons took to the air as well.

  For a moment, her heart lifted with them and she was happy for them, able to fly away and be themselves for a while. She would have liked to join them. Then, as it had so often done, the truth dragged her down again and she trudged into the castle where, after a short visit to her quarters, she would dutifully attend the council session for another lesson in queening.

  But when she entered her chambers, the first thing she saw was a typed note propped against her pillow.

  “Run,” it said.

  The Train

  Typed. It had to have come from Fiona. Of all the people in the council chamber, she was the only one Verity might have counted as an ally. Besides, the ghost cats liked her. Fiona was in terrible trouble, Verity was sure. Where had she gone after leaving the note?