The Dragon of Trelian (35 page)

Slowly, she reached out toward him one more time. “Wilem, please. Come with me.”

He said nothing. He just looked back at her and shook his head sadly.

“Do you think they’ll have mercy on you?” she asked. “If you stay, I have no doubt they will have their vengeance. They’ll kill you for what we’ve done. Don’t you understand?”

This time he did speak. “They have every right,” he said softly.

Sen Eva gave a final cry of anguish, and then the thing beneath her lumbered awkwardly into the air. Jakl tensed as if he might launch himself to follow, but Meg placed her hand against him and he stayed where he was. As much as she hated the idea of Sen Eva escaping, Jakl was the only one among them with any real power, and if he left them, they’d be totally defenseless. Of course, all the evil villains and monsters who wanted to kill them seemed to be flying away. But still.

Her gaze drifted back to Wilem. Still, indeed. She didn’t have the will to sort out how she was supposed to feel about Wilem now.

Finally, and too late, the guards came pouring through the doorway entrance — and stopped, staring at the scene before them in a strange tableau of confused horror. Nothing they were seeing could possibly make any sense to them at the moment, Meg guessed. A few more guards came running out onto the roof, and one actually plowed into the man in front of him, not expecting his comrades to be standing there in shock. It wasn’t really funny, but beside her, Calen started laughing anyway. Meg began laughing with him. Mostly it was relief, she supposed. Surely now, finally, things really were going to be okay.

The sound of their laughter roused some of the guards from their paralysis. The captain’s mouth dropped open as he took in the sight of Jakl standing protectively before them. Then he snapped it shut and raised his crossbow. “Princess!” he shouted once, and let fly. The shaft flew straight and true, right toward the dragon’s exposed neck.

“No!” Meg screamed. Everything, except the crossbow bolt, seemed to stop, frozen.
Oh, come on,
she thought miserably.
This really, really isn’t fair.
She watched numbly as the bolt came flying toward them, somehow impossibly fast and agonizingly slow at the same time. They hadn’t been ready; they had all of them been starting to relax and let down their guard, even Jakl, and no one could react in time. The danger was supposed to be over, gods curse them! And now, after surviving Sen Eva and that awful shrieking monstrosity she rode away on, her dragon was going to be killed by a stupid iron shaft through the throat. And then Meg would die with him. And she would never get to see her sisters again and tell them how much she loved them and never get to run or laugh or fly again or explore the full mystery of her link with Jakl and never get to grow up and fall in love for real and find out who she was and what she would turn out to be and never get to tell Calen how much he meant to her and how very, very glad she was to have him as her friend.

The bolt stopped a handsbreadth from its target. It hovered in the air a moment, then clattered harmlessly to the stone floor. All of them — Calen, Meg, Jakl, the guards, even Wilem — stared stupidly at it lying there.

“Please,” Mage Serek said quietly from the ground. “Let’s all just wait a moment, shall we?”

Several pairs of eyes turned in unison to look at him. One of his hands was still stretched out toward the fallen crossbow bolt. No one moved. Serek cleared his throat weakly. Then he continued, “Captain, I commend your eagerness to protect your princess, but I promise you she’s in no immediate danger. The dragon is, ah, on our side.”

Flooded with relief yet again, Meg let her head fall forward against her dragon’s smooth, scaly side, warm with the fire that lived inside him now. Then she heard a sound beside her and turned just in time to catch Calen as, apparently overwhelmed by one close call too many, he succumbed to unconsciousness at last.

Grinning fondly, she eased him to the ground and wished him pleasant dreams.

CALEN HAD NEVER BEEN TO A
wedding before. Of course, he guessed that even if he had, it wouldn’t have been anything like this one. At first it had all seemed rather boring. There was a lot of watching the members of the different families standing around repeating things back and forth to each other, and about a hundred different people got up to read long passages from various books, and then there were songs, and then possibly some other part he missed because he dozed off, but then finally people were shouting and cheering and he woke in time to watch Prince Ryant lean forward to kiss Princess Maerlie in full view of every living person that had been crowded into the enormous grand hall. Calen wondered if the prince was nervous.
He’d
certainly be nervous if he had to kiss a girl in front of an audience! Well, he’d probably be nervous about kissing a girl in any event, he supposed. But the audience would make it even worse.

Calen had woken up late yesterday afternoon in the royal infirmary to find Meg sitting by his bedside. After teasing him about his supposed fainting (deliberately failing to see that passing out from legitimate exhaustion was not the same as
fainting
), she filled him in on what he’d missed while he was unconscious. Mage Serek had managed to prevent anyone from doing anything else hasty or stupid while they waited for him to recover enough to wake up the sleeping members of Meg’s family. Wilem had been half escorted, half carried to the dungeons under heavy guard, and then there had been a rushed conference at one end of the rooftop to decide what, exactly, to tell the guards (the remaining number of whom had been sent to wait at the
other
end of the rooftop) and everyone else. Calen suffered an embarrassing vision of everyone standing around his splayed-out body talking over him while he lay senseless at their feet, but Meg assured him that a pair of guards had immediately been assigned to carry him down to the infirmary.

It had been decided that Jakl would officially be announced as the Royal Dragon, employed to help protect the castle and surrounding lands, with Meg assigned to be his keeper and trainer. The link would be kept secret from everyone outside her immediate family. And Serek and Calen, of course, who already knew. Wilem probably suspected, and Sen Eva had seemed to understand there was a connection between Meg and her dragon, but there wasn’t much they could do about that now.

They had also had to inform King Ryllin, Queen Carlinda, and Prince Ryant what had happened to their trusted senior advisor.
That
had to have been a difficult conversation, to say the least. Ryant had immediately demanded to see Wilem, refusing to believe he’d been betrayed until he heard Wilem’s solemn and regretful confession for himself. Wilem’s testimony went a long way toward convincing the Kragnirians the truth of what was, Calen knew, a rather extraordinary explanation of events. That, together with the diary, had finally been sufficient proof for the Kragnir king and queen and, eventually, Ryant. Calen guessed it had been hardest of all on him, since Wilem had been his closest friend for years.

So the wedding had been allowed to proceed as planned, with Richton standing as Ryant’s second in Wilem’s place. And now everyone was rising and talking and beginning to move toward the banquet hall, which Calen assumed meant the wedding part was over and now they could eat. He slipped into the stream of people heading for the doors and saw Meg waving at him from the front of the room. He made his way over to where she waited.

“Look at you,” she said, smiling. “All dressed up and everything.”

“You’re one to talk,” he said. “Can you even walk in that dress? I’ve never seen so much fabric in one place before.”

She stuck her tongue out at him in a most unprincesslike fashion and then took his arm, leading him past the elaborately arranged bunches of white and red ladylace blossoms hanging from nearly every available surface.

“So,” he said, “Maerlie’s married now.”

“Yes, thank the gods,” she said, making the sign of the Lady. “And now the marriage is more important than ever, of course. I’m so glad everything — well, you know. It’s silly to keep saying it, I guess.”

He squeezed her hand through her long white glove. “It’s not silly.”

“Do you think —?” She looked over at him, not needing to finish the question.

“Serek had me help him with another divination reading last night. I don’t know why he bothers, since no matter what the cards say, he just goes on about how divination is vague and unreliable and so on. . . .” He glanced at Meg’s face and changed tactics, quickly. “But of course I myself have developed a good amount of faith in spirit cards, and as we know I’m apparently some sort of divination genius. . . .”

“Calen.”

“Anyway, the cards look good. I mean, for the near future, anyway.” They both knew that Sen Eva would be back eventually, of course. But right now even a short time without immediate danger would be a welcome change.

They turned the corner, and the banquet hall opened before them, a landscape of black and white and red linens and flowers and fabrics. Calen noted all of that only in passing, however; he was too busy staring at the enormous banquet table piled with just about every kind of food he had ever seen or heard of or imagined. He leaned toward Meg and whispered, “This is the part of a wedding that people really get excited about, isn’t it?”

Meg laughed at him gently, releasing his arm. “Go forth and fill yourself a plate,” she said. “I’ll meet you at our table. You and Serek are both sitting with us on the dais.”

Calen nodded absently, already planning his plate-loading strategy. It was only after he’d piled as much as he could on two plates and turned toward where Meg had pointed that he realized the dais was like a big stage on a raised platform where the entire rest of the hall could see them. Well, at least it was easy to find. He climbed the steps, found the empty seat beside Meg, and sat down.

Meg was looking toward the end of the table, where Maerlie and Ryant were sitting, their heads bent close together in conversation. Calen watched her watching them, happy to see Meg so happy. They all knew, of course, that nothing here was really finished and that there was trouble waiting not so far ahead. But tonight, he suspected, every one of them was choosing not to think about any of that. Meg certainly seemed determined to spend one evening just being safe and happy, and he couldn’t think of anyone who deserved it more. He thought back to the day they’d met, trying to remember how it had felt to have so little he truly cared about. It was hard, now that he had so much.

He turned away and found Serek watching him across the platters of bread and cheeses. Serek quiet and aloof and seemingly unaffected by recent events, other than having finally and grudgingly admitted last night that, yes, perhaps some magical weapon training was in order. He had sent a lengthy missive to the Magistratum, detailing the crimes Sen Eva had committed and recommending that the order take steps to locate her and strip her of her magical abilities. He also reported everything he’d been able to discover so far about the slaarh, which apparently hadn’t been very much other than the fact that they were definitely not natural to this world. He still hadn’t been able to cure the effects of the poison that ran in the blood of the wounded guardsmen, but he had managed to keep any of them from dying so far, which was something, at least. Not enough for Serek, of course, but then he wouldn’t be Serek if he were ever satisfied with anything.

The mage was still looking at Calen with that unreadable expression. Calen waited, unable to look away or eat or think of anything to say. Surely Serek could let one evening, at least this evening, go by without a reprimand or rebuke or reminder of something left unfinished or not done well enough, but a long look like this one was rarely followed by anything good. Maybe if Calen ever developed the stone-hard exterior that Serek carried everywhere, he’d finally be able to shrug off his master’s criticism without feeling it the way he prepared himself to feel it now. It shouldn’t surprise him that even after everything that had happened, Serek would find something to complain about. But just once, he’d love to hear a simple positive statement with no modifiers. Something like,
You did well, Calen;
or maybe
I am unable, no matter how I try, to find any fault with your recent performance;
or maybe even possibly, someday,
I’m proud of you, Apprentice.

“Try the olives,” Serek said finally. “They’re quite good.”

He took in Calen’s fishlike stare for a moment, twitched his lips very slightly, then pushed back his chair and rose from the table.

And then he shocked everyone by asking Meg’s mother if she’d care to dance.