The Eyes of the Dragon (37 page)

“Has she lost it?” Ben asked.

“No, she'll pick it up in a minute or two
I think,
Naomi didn't say aloud. ”It's just that she's found a whole tangle of scents in the road and she has to sort them out.”

“Look!” Ben said doubtfully. “She's off into the field there. That can't be right, can it?”

“I don't know. Would he have taken the road to the castle?”

Ben Staad
was
human, and he
did
slap his forehead. “No, of course not. I'm a dolt.”

Naomi smiled sweetly and said nothing.

In the field, Frisky had paused. She turned toward THE GIRL and THE TALL-BOY and barked impatiently for them to follow. Anduan huskies were the tame descendants of the great white wolves the residents of the Northern Barony had feared in earlier times, but tame or not, they were hunters and trackers before they were anything else. Frisky had isolated that bright-blue thread of scent again, and was in a fever to be off.

“Come on,” Ben said. “I just hope she's found the right scent.”

“Of course she has! Look!”

She pointed, and Ben was just able to make out long, shallow tracks in the snow. Even in the dark Ben and Naomi knew the tracks for what they were—snowshoes.

Frisky barked again.

“Let's hurry,” Ben said.

By midnight, as they began to draw close to the King's Preserves, Naomi began to regret the crack she'd made about how she could go on a hundred koner from the place where Ben dropped dead, because she had begun to feel as if that might soon happen to her.

Dennis had made the trip in better time, but Dennis had set out after four days of rest, Dennis had had snowshoes, and Dennis had not been following a dog who sometimes lost the scent and had to cast about for it again. Naomi's legs felt hot and rubbery. Her lungs burned. There was a stitch in her left side. She had taken a few mouthfuls of snow, but they could not slake her raging thirst.

Frisky, who was not burdened by a pack and who could run lightly along the snow crust, was not tired at all. Naomi was able to walk on the crust for short distances, but then she would strike a rotten spot and plunge through the crust into soft snow up to her knees . . . and on several occasions, up to her hips. Once she plunged in waist-deep and floundered about in a tired fury until Ben worked his way over and pulled her out.

“Wish . . . sled,” she panted now.

“. . . wishes . . . horses . . . beggars'd ride,” he panted back, grinning in spite of his own weariness.

“Funny,” she gasped. “Ha-ha. Ought to be a court jester, Ben Staad.”

“King's Preserves up there. Less snow . . . easier.”

He bent over, hands on his knees, and gasped for breath. Naomi suddenly felt that she had been selfish and unkind, thinking about how she herself felt, when Ben must be even closer to the point of exhaustion—he was much heavier than she, especially with the weight of the larger pack he carried added into the bargain. He had been breaking through the snow crust on almost every step, leaping through the long fields like a man running in deep water, and yet he had not complained or slowed.

“Ben, are you all right?”

“No,” he wheezed and grinned. “But I'll make it, pretty child.”

“I am not a child!” she said angrily.

“But you are pretty,” he said, and put his thumb to the tip of his nose. He wiggled his fingers at her.

“Oh, I'll get you for that—”

“Later,” he panted. “Race you to the woods. Come on.”

So they raced, with Frisky chasing along the scent ahead of them, and he beat her, and that made her madder than ever . . . but she admired him, too.

N
ow they stood looking across the seventy koner of open ground between the edge of the forest where King Roland had once slain a dragon and the walls of the castle where he had been slain himself. A few more snowflakes skirted down from the sky . . . and a few more . . . and suddenly, magically, the air was filled with snow.

In spite of his weariness, Ben felt a moment of peace and joy. He looked at Naomi and smiled. She tried a scowl but it wouldn't fit her face and so she smiled, too. A moment later, she ran her tongue out and tried to catch a flake of snow. Ben laughed quietly.

“How did he get inside, if he did?” Naomi asked.

“I don't know,” Ben said. He had grown up on a farm, and knew nothing of the casde's sewer system. Probably every bit as well for him, you might say, and you would be right. “Perhaps your champion dog can show us how he did it.”

“You really think he did, don't you, Ben?”

“Oh, aye,” Ben said. “What do you think, Frisky?”

At the sound of her name, Frisky got up, ranged along the scent for a few feet, and looked back at them.

Naomi looked at Ben. Ben shook his head.

“Not yet,” he said.

Naomi called Frisky softly, and she came back, whining.

“If she could talk, she'd tell you she's afraid of losing the scent. The snow will cover it.”

“We'll not wait long. Dennis had the snowshoes, but we're going to have something he didn't, Naomi.”

“What's that?”

“Cover.”

I
n spite of Frisky's growing restlessness at being checked on the scent, Ben made them wait fifteen minutes. By then the air had become a shifting cloud of white. Snow frosted Naomi's brown hair and his own blond hair; Frisky wore a cold ermine stole. They could no longer see the castle walls ahead of them.

“All right,” Ben said softly, “let's go.”

They crossed the open ground behind Frisky. The big husky moved slowly now, her nose constantly at the snow, puffing it up every now and again in cold little bursts. The bright-blue runner of scent was dimming, being covered by the white no-smell stuff from the sky.

“We may have waited too long,” Naomi said quietly beside him.

Ben said nothing. He knew it, and the knowledge gnawed at his heart like a rat.

Now a dark bulk loomed out of the whiteness—the castle wall. Naomi had moved slightly ahead. Ben reached out and grabbed her arm. “The moat,” he said. “Don't forget that. It's up here somewhere. You'll go over the side and land on the ice and break your ne—”

He got just so far and then Naomi's eyes blazed with alarm. She pulled out of his grip.
“Frisky!”
she hissed. “
Hai!
Frisky! Danger! Drop-off!” She darted after the dog.

That girl is absolutely giddy bonkers, Ben thought with a certain admiration. Then
he
darted after her.

Naomi needn't have worried. Frisky had stopped at the edge of the moat. Her nose was buried in the snow and her tail was wagging happily. Now she bit down on something and dragged it out of the loose powder. She turned to Naomi, eyes asking:
Now am I a good dog, or what? What do you think?

Naomi laughed and hugged her dog.

Ben glanced toward the castle wall. “Hush!” he whispered at her. “If the guards hear you, we're in the slate-cracker for sure! Where do you think we are? Your back garden?”

“Pooh! If they heard anything, they'd think it was snow sprites and run for their mommies.” But she whispered, too. Then she buried her face in Frisky's fur and told her again what a good dog she was.

Ben scratched Frisky's head. Because of the snow, neither of them had the horribly exposed sense Dennis had had when he had sat in the same place, taking off the snowshoes Frisky had now found.

“Nose of the gods, all right,” Ben said. “But what happened after he took off the snowshoes, Frisky? Did he grow wings and fly over West'rd Redan? Where did he go from here?”

As if in answer, Frisky broke away from both of them and went floundering and slipping down the steep bank to the frozen moat.

“Frisky!” Naomi called, her voice low but alarmed.

Frisky only stood on the ice looking up at them, hock-deep in new snow. Her tail was wagging slightly, and her eyes begged them to come. She did not bark; somehow she knew better, even though Naomi had not thought to warn her to silence. But she barked in her
mind
. The scent was still here, and she wanted to follow it before it disappeared completely, as it now would within minutes.

Naomi looked questioningly at Ben.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course. We have to. Come on. But keep her to heel—don't let her range ahead. There's danger here. I feel it.”

He held out his hand. Naomi grasped it, and they slid down to the moat together.

Frisky led them slowly across the ice toward the castle wall. She was now actually digging for the scent, her nose furrowing the snow. It had begun to be overlaid with a thick, unpleasant smell—dirty, warm water, garbage, ordure.

Dennis had known that the ice would begin to grow dangerously rotten as he got closer to the outflow pipe. Even if he hadn't known, he was able to see the three feet or so of open water next to the wall.

Things weren't so easy for Ben, Naomi, and Frisky. They had simply assumed that if the ice was thick along the moat's outer bank, it must be thick all the way across. And their eyes were of little use to them in the thickly falling snow.

Frisky's eyes were the weakest of the three, and she was in the lead. Her ears were sharp enough, and she had heard the ice groaning beneath the new snow . . . but the scent was too much on her mind for her to take much notice of the faint creaks . . . until the ice gave way beneath her and she plunged into the moat with a splash.

Ben clapped a hand over her mouth. She struggled to get away from him. Ben had now seen the danger, however, and held her fast.

Naomi needn't have worried. Of course all dogs can swim, and with her thick, oily coat, Frisky was safer in the water than either of the humans would have been. She paddled almost to the castle wall amid chunks of rotted ice and whipped-cream globs of snow that quickly turned into dark slush and disappeared. She raised her head, smelling, searching for the scent . . . and when she knew where it went, she turned and paddled back toward Ben and Naomi. She found the edge of the ice. Her paws broke it off, and she tried again. Naomi cried out.

“Be still, Naomi, or you'll have us in the dungeons by dawn,” Ben said. “Hold my ankles.” He let her go and then sprawled on his belly. Naomi crouched behind him and seized his boots. This close to the ice, Ben could hear it groaning and muttering.
It could have been one of us, he thought, and that would have been trouble indeed.

He spread his legs out a bit to distribute his weight better, and then grabbed Frisky by the forepaws just below her wide, strong chest. “Here you come, girl,” Ben grunted. “I hope.” Then he putted.

For a moment, Ben thought that the ice would just go on breaking under Frisky's weight as he dragged her forward—first he and then Naomi would follow Frisky into the moat. Crossing that moat on his way into the castle to play with his friend Peter on a summer's day, with blue sky and white clouds reflecting off its surface, Ben had always thought it beautiful, like a painting. He had never once suspected that he might die in it one black night during a snowstorm. And it smelled very bad.

“Pull me backward!” he grunted. “Your damn dog weighs a ton!”

“Don't you say mean things about my dog, Ben Staad!”

Ben's eyes were slitted shut with strain, his lips split open over clenched teeth. “A million pardons. And if you don't start pulling me, I'm going to be taking a bath, think.”

Somehow she managed to do it, although Ben and Frisky together must have been three times her own weight. Ben's prone, splayed body dug a channel in the new powder; a snow pyramid built up in his crotch, the way it will build up in the angle of a wooden plow.

At last—it seemed like “at last” to Ben and Naomi, although in truth it was probably only a matter of seconds—Frisky's chest stopped breaking the ice and slid onto it. A moment later, her rear paws were digging for purchase. Then she was up and shaking herself vigorously. Dirty moat water sprayed into Ben's face.

“Pah!” he grimaced, wiping it off. “Thanks a lot, Frisky!”

But Frisky paid no attention. She was looking toward the wall of the castle again. Although the ice was already freezing to her pelt in dirty spicules, the scent was what interested her. She had smelled it clearly, above her but not far above her. There was a darkness there. No cold white no-smell stuff there.

Ben was getting to his feet, brushing the snow off.

“I'm sorry I yelled like that,” Naomi whispered. “If it had been any other dog but Frisky . . . do you think I was heard?”