“You are...are...”
“Say my name, Dragon! Say Murdan! Murdan!”
Arbitrance gasped a great breath, and the Historian—and Retruance, also—braced for a searing blast of fire.
But the older Dragon, instead, let it out in a long, shuddering sigh.
“Mur...Murdan! Old Companion! What am I doing here, dear friend? My wing is broken, Companion. Can you help me rise and leave this dark, nasty place? Dear Murdan...good old Historian! I’m so glad you’ve come! I had a terrible, awful, endless dream!”
From the jumbled meadow outside the mangroves Tom, Manda, and Ednoll heard the unforgettable sound of a grown Dragon sobbing as if his enormous heart would break.
The three Dragons managed to set the injured elder on his feet and, carefully supporting his broken wing, led him, limping painfully, from the grove into the sunset light outside.
Tom, Manda and Ednoll rushed forward to help. The Prince now wept to see his friend in pain.
“There, little Princeling,” gasped Arbitrance, wincing as Murdan and Retruance carefully straightened his broken wing. “We must be brave, mustn’t we? I appreciate your tears, because I know they are of love, but...well, I’ll be fine in a day or two, I promise you.”
He put his right foreleg claws gently about the child’s waist and soothed him even as the Historian and his two Dragon sons examined his injury.
“I’m terribly sorry, Papa,” wailed Retruance, wringing his foreclaws in anguished regret. “But it was the only way I could think of to stop you, just then.”
“Ah, well...I’m a tough old Dragon, after all. Hello, Hoarling. Haven’t seen you for a century or more.”
“Of course,” replied Hoarling softly. “Good to see you again, old friend.”
“I seem to remember you, young lady,” Arbitrance said to Manda when she brought him a pail of water to drink from a clear pond near his cave.
“I was a child, young as Ednoll, here, when we last met, Arbitrance Constable. I am Princess Alix Amanda Trusslo.”
“Ah,
ah!
Little Manda! Yes, of course!” said the Dragon breathily, with as respectful a bow as he could manage, lying on his right side.
“I’ve missed too many years and you’ve grown to be a beautiful young woman, I see.”
“Married, too,” Manda said, chuckling as much in relief as humor. “This is my handsome husband, Sir Thomas Librarian of Overhall, to be very formal. We call him Tom, for short. He’s Companion to your older son Retruance.”
“Honored to meet you, Sir Thomas,” said Arbitrance Constable, nodding his head in formal greeting. “You’re a very fortunate young man to have this lovely lass as your bride and my son as Dragon friend.
Your father, the King? In good health, my dear Princess? Otherwise, I would expect you to be Queen, rather than Princess.”
Replied Manda, “My father, the King, is well and has remarried.
This is his son, Prince Ednoll.”
“Oh, yes, Prince Ednoll and I are old, old friends! Aren’t we, laddy?”
“Yes, oh, yes, Arbitrance!” the little boy said, sniffing manfully.
“Does it hurt a lot?”
“The wing? Well, I guess so, but seeing so many old and new friends makes it feel much better. We’d better ask the experts how I’m doing.”
Arbitrance and the boy turned their attention to his port side, where Retruance and Hoarling were binding heavy cedar trunks to hold the fractured wing immobile while it knitted.
“Lie still for a while, old fire-snort,” Murdan was saying soothingly as he rubbed the Dragon’s neck and shoulders.
“Comes from having husky, grown sons bigger than I am,” sighed the Dragon father. “Oh, well...I know you didn’t mean to hurt me, young Furbie!”
Furbetrance shook his head to dash tears from his eyes.
Retruance returned from the cave in the center of the island with a large, woolen blanket, which he spread over his injured papa with infinite tenderness. It was beginning to rain in hard, cold drops.
Manda shook her head at Tom, saying, “He doesn’t remember what he’s done these past four, five years!”
“Seems to me for the very best, for his sake and for the Prince’s sake, too,” Tom said, putting his arm around her shoulder. “Eventually they’ll both have to know, but there’s no hurry that I can see.”
“I think I’m married to the wisest, sweetest, kindest, bravest man in all Carolna,” said Manda, sighing.
“And I, the bravest and most...most...light-footed lady,” Tom said.
“You were wonderful, Manda! I was petrified when the Dragon awoke and chased you.”
“I’d no time to be afraid,” Manda confessed. “Beside that, I remembered I was a Princess, and Princesses shouldn’t show fear, should they?”
But she let her husband seat her on a fiat stone in the shade of the fragrant lemon tree, the quicker to recover.
Murdan tried vainly to brush sticky, fragrant cedar resin from his hands as he came over to them.
“Clean simple fracture,” he reported. “Painful for a while, I’m sure, but Dragons can handle a lot of pain and they heal very fast. He’ll sleep shortly, and the process of healing will be well under way.”
Retruance nodded his agreement with the Historian’s prognosis.
“We should get him to Overhall, perhaps,” said Tom. “There we can watch and care for him.”
“No, I think we’d best leave him here. He needs only quiet and some curing sleep. Sleep for a week or so, now, or I’ve missed my guess,” said Retruance. “It’ll keep him out of trouble, too, in case he has a relapse into his enchantment.”
“Retruance and I will take turns watching over his convalescence,”
said Furbetrance. “And perhaps we can prevail on the brave Ice Dragon to lend a hand, if we need it.”
“I’m sure you can,” said the Ice Dragon, forgetting to be sarcastic for the second time in a quarter hour.
“He’ll probably enjoy your company once he’s awake,” Murdan said. “Having flown alone for so long. You’ve been more than just a help, Ice Dragon. A true friend, I’ll be the first to say.”
Hoarling came as close to blushing as ever he had.
Manda picked an armful of lemons and made lemonade with sugar borrowed from the scholar’s stores. They sat in the evening dusk around a comforting fire Retruance had ignited to warm them and the patient, who was still sound asleep, breathing greenish-tinted puffs of smoke as he gently slept.
“He’ll be all right?” Ednoll asked with a worried frown.
“Yes, my dear,” Manda reassured her half brother. “His wing will take a week or so to knit properly and at least that long again to get its full strength back. After that he’ll be the same, wonderful old Arbitrance Constable.”
“I want to show Amelia to him,” said Ednoll, with a five-year-old’s logic. “After he’s well again, I mean. When are we going home, Manda?
My mother will be worried about me, I know.”
Tom answered for her, “In the morning, Princeling. We’ll fly off to Murdan’s Overhall, where your lady mother is worrying about you.
Amelia is there and the Ffallmar children to play with, too.”
“Never been to Overhall,” the Princeling said, yawning.
“You have, but you were too young to remember,” Manda told him. “Here, Arbitrance made this downy bed for you to rest upon. Go you to sleep, little Prince. Tomorrow will be busy and very exciting.”
“I was,” murmured the Prince, fighting the good fight against falling asleep, “looking forward to sleeping in the hunter’s hut over on that other island.”
He slept between one thought and the next.
Murdan wearily wrapped his cloak about his shoulders against the evening dampness, pillowed his head on his Dragon’s warm flank and fell into deep slumber also.
Retruance, Hoarling and Furbetrance chatted softly about family matters and how they would divide the nursing care between them these next few weeks. Furbetrance decided to send for his wife, Hetabelle, from their home in the far west to assist them.
“We’ve still got a whole nation of Rellings to chase home,” Hoarling reminded them.
“That’s our final concern,” agreed Tom.
“Except for one,” said his wife.
“And that is?” Tom wanted to know.
They’d found a soft, sandy spot near the fire on which to spread their blankets.
“Why is it nobody has asked any questions about Arbitrance’s terrible enchantment?” she asked. “Who enchanted him? Who wanted Carolna to suffer so? Who i
s
our enemy? So far we’ve dealt only with his tools and fools.”
“I agree. Someone or some force seems to be interfering,” her husband nodded. “Murdan has been quietly working on it for some time. He also seeks to learn who or what brought me to Carolna in the first place.”
“Is that connected with this, does he think! With this business of invasions and kidnapping babies?” his beautiful, sleepy wife asked.
“I don’t know, but the Historian may have some ideas.”
“There are obviously two forces at work,” Manda reasoned. “It was
a friendly
someone who brought you to us five years ago. You helped save the kingdom then.”
“Well, perhaps. Are you suggesting that a second person enchanted the Dragon to kidnap the Prince?”
“And that makes at least two interferers. One good, one evil,” replied Manda with a slow nod. “I think it’s time we found out who’s playing with our lives this way and force them to stop.”
“Perhaps,” repeated Tom. These things were very far from his realm of experience. “Well, it can wait until we get back to Overhall.
The library there and the Royal Library at Sweetwater Tower may have clues. Maybe even answers.”
“Once a Librarian, always a Librarian,” giggled Manda, snuggling even closer to her husband’s side. “Is every answer in a book somewhere?”
“Of course not, else why would anyone ever write a new book?”
replied Tom. “But a whole lot is hidden away in a good library, if you know where and how to look.”
The train of thought this started kept him awake for a while after everyone else in the camp was sleeping. But only a little while.
Chapter Fifteen
Retreat of the Rellings
Retruance handed Manda a red and a green stone, each about the size of a wren’s egg.
“Now, Princess,” he said. “We need to decide which of us will stay here with Papa and who will fly everybody to Overhall.”
Manda hid the stones behind her back and shuffled them from hand to hand several times.
“Brother,” said Retruance, “which color do you choose?”
“Red stone I stop, green stone I go.”
“Agreed!” said the older Dragon. “Let Hoarling pick! We agree he should return north as soon as possible. This is not his kind of climate.”
Hoarling carefully touched Manda’s left fist with a long, silver claw.
She opened it to show them the red stone.
“I’ll hang around, then, at least until Hetabelle arrives,” said Furbetrance. “Can you handle the passenger load, older brother?”
“I’m not
that
decrepit!” snorted Retruance. “I once carried a fully armed platoon of soldiers, youngster. Hauled a whole boatload of pirates, too! Besides, Hoarling will be flying with us.”
Manda left them to their good-natured squabbling to go find Tom and Ednoll. The Librarian had borrowed Findles’s fishing rod and was showing the Princeling how to catch his breakfast. The two were sitting together on a log fallen half in the water, casting for largemouth bass among the offshore lily pads.
“No breakfast fish, today,” Tom told her. “I think the fish were frightened by all the commotion yesterday afternoon.”
“Besides, fish never bite just before a rain,” said his Princess, pointing at the leaden skies again rolling over Sinking Marsh. Her odd bits of knowledge often surprised her young husband.
“In Iowa,” he insisted, “fish bit before, during, and after rain. Or so I remember.”
“I doubt it,” she scoffed. “Come and have some flapjacks with syrup and wild blueberries, instead. Findles has it ready.”
Ednoll, knowing a good thing when he heard about it, reeled in his line and set off for the open-air breakfast table, shouting with a five-year-old’s enthusiasm. A flock of white herons who had been watching the fishing and making delighted (and humorous) comments, followed them, hoping for some table scraps in lieu of the promised bass.
“You’re quite good with children,” Tom’s wife said rather thoughtfully.
“Thank you! I come from a large family in which I was the youngest,” he explained. “Youngest children of large families know very well what it takes to amuse other little ones.”
“I was all alone, a little girl with two faster brothers, which I guess is the same thing.”
“Foster,
rather,” Tom corrected her automatically.
“Boo to you, sirrah! They were
faster
as well
as foster,
you see. I used to pretend I was the eldest of a large family, left to care for my younger brothers and sisters in place of our mother. Poor mother always had perished in very tragic, very romantic circumstances.”
“Who will ever understand little girls or their dreams?” asked Tom, rolling his eyes in pretended mystification.
They walked arm in arm across the hummock to Findles’s campfire under the arching willows. The smell of bacon and pancakes met them halfway.
“I’m glad you like children,” resumed the Princess after a long, companionable silence.
“I love children,” said Tom, looking at her sideways.
“Good!” she said, and would say no more.
They waved good-bye to Findles and Furbetrance, swooped low to check on the still-sleeping Arbitrance once more, and shot away to the northeast as fast as Dragon wings could flap. Murdan rode the Ice Dragon’s back, after conning all the warm clothes he could garner from the others in the party.
Manda, Tom, and the little Prince Ednoll sat on Retruance’s broad brow.
The day had turned faultless, the autumnal rain having passed on over the waters thereabouts while they ate breakfast and prepared to depart. It was a gem of a midday, cool and diamond clear.
“Bright as a new penny,” Tom said.
Manda and her half brother wanted to know what a penny was, and the resulting conversation about money, metals, and coinage lasted for more than an hour.