The Runaway Dragon (14 page)

A few minutes later, Loris’s mother returned with her daughter to tuck her in, and Loris showed her mommy what she’d done with the prisoners. They stayed very still, hoping Kitty Comprost wouldn’t think to lock them up in some way for the night. The giant woman had her doubts. She asked her daughter, “DO YOU THINK YOUR LITTLE TOYS WILL BE ALL RIGHT?”

Loris was more confident than her mother. “YES, MOMMY. THEY HAD THEIR DINNER AND THEY’RE GOING TO BED NOW. JUST LIKE ME.”

“To bed” sitting at the kitchen table, Dilly thought, looking across the rough table at Spinach with a wry expression. Spinach smiled back.

Kitty Comprost’s face must have seemed doubtful still because Loris said, “I COULD PUT THE BLANKET BACK.” With a heavy rustling sound, darkness fell over the dollhouse again. Darkness, and a stuffiness to the air.

“THAT’S BETTER,” Loris’s mother said. “NOW WINK-BINK INTO BED YOU GO.”

“GOOD NIGHT, MOMMY.”

“GOOD NIGHT, LITTLE ONE.”

Dilly smothered her laugh. Compared to Kitty Comprost, Loris really was little.

Even after the candles were blown out and the darkness deepened with Kitty’s departure, none of them dared to move for a long while, fearful that the giant child would hear them and get up to see what they were doing. But they could easily hear her breathing, and they waited as agreed till her breathing grew slow and even, telling them that Loris had fallen asleep. Then the five prisoners gathered in the dollhouse living room once more.

T DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR MEG TO CONCLUDE
that being a prisoner was boring. At least when she had been riding through the enchanted forest, there were things to look at. But she quickly ran out of things to look at in her cell. About the only interesting item in it was a spider, and the spider mostly sat on its web in a high corner, waiting motionlessly for a fly that didn’t seem to know it was supposed to make an appearance.

Malison’s laughter was still ringing in her ears, but even so, Meg attempted to use the only weapon she had at her disposal: her mixed-up magic. She managed to tint one of the walls of her cell a very pale shade of blue, change the iron bars on the door to an even stronger metal she’d never seen before, and make her blanket disappear before she gave up in disgust.

Hours later, someone brought Meg a tray of food.
She caught a glimpse of the old woman’s face peering in at her through the small barred window at the top of the door before the tray slid through a slot at the bottom. Meg sprang to her feet. “Wait!” she said. “Are you enchanted, too?”

The woman glanced over her shoulder. “Do I look like a man?”

“No,” Meg said, though truth be told, the woman had a bit of a mustache. In fact, Meg thought maybe she’d seen that particular mustache before. “Aren’t you one of Alya’s people?” Meg asked.

“Maybe. Who are you?”

“I’m Meg.” Meg realized the name might not mean much. “Princess Margaret of Greeve?”

“That
one.” The old woman nearly left.

“Please—what’s your name?”

“Stefka.” Named, the woman seemed more inclined to linger for a moment.

“Can you tell me what’s going on? Where’s Alya?”

“She’s locked up down the way,” Stefka explained. “Alya wouldn’t wait on the grand mistress. Went after that empress like a pack of wolves before they stopped her,” the woman said proudly.

“How did this whole thing happen?”

“We were tending to our own business, making a life for ourselves down in the village, when this fortress appeared on the hill. Overnight it was.”

“That’s not good,” Meg said.

“No. The next day, the girl-who-calls-herself-empress popped up in the middle of the village and ordered us to gather together Alya’s people, the fisher-folk, farmers from up the valley, everyone.”

“Couldn’t you have run away?”

Stefka shook her head. “She called us with magic and we came, like it or not.”

“Oh,” Meg said, understanding.

“Inside of an hour, she had stolen Alya’s gold and made us her servants. But the men …” Stefka’s face was a study. “She has a spell laid on them, makes them think she’s really an empress. Alya’s brother is the worst one, chief-guarding about the fortress like he was born to it. The rest of us are no more than slaves, cooking her fancy meals and washing her black gowns and polishing her black marble floors.”

Meg wondered if Malison’s food was black, too, but she had more important questions to ask. “So none of the women are under a spell?”

“Unless being locked up is a spell,” Stefka grumbled. “After those fool boys in black armor threw Alya in the dungeon, the rest of us shut our mouths and started scrubbing.” She looked over her shoulder again. “I’d best be going.”

“I don’t suppose you could let me out? You could say it was a mistake.”

“Don’t have the key,” the old woman said reasonably. “Eat up, Princess.” Then she was gone.

Meg was still bored, but she had a thing or two to think about now—such as how the stag spell and now Malison’s spell only affected men. She tried to imagine a spell that would only affect women, but all she could picture was how silly her mother’s ladies-in-waiting acted. Meg shook her head. At least she had supper—though the food should have been bread and water, if she knew anything about dungeons. Apparently Malison had forgotten to specify that the prisoners be given nasty food. Of course, anything would taste good to someone who’d only had stale biscuits to eat lately. Meg bit into her turnips and chicken with gusto.

Nort and his four fellow prisoners took down the curtains in the dollhouse and tied them together to make a rope. It wasn’t easy to make the rope in the darkness, but they managed to work together with only one mishap, when Crobbs fell down the stairs. Nort winced in sympathy, thinking that Crobbs could ill afford another bump on the head.

At last the rope was finished. The others passed sections of the rope to Cam, who secured it on a rafter and fed it out the window.

“Do you really think it’s long enough?” Spinach asked. She must have been feeling a little better, because she followed this up with, “Have you ever climbed down a rope before?” and “Do you want to use my hair instead?”

“Your hair’s gone, Spinach,” Dilly pointed out. Although it had seemed longer at dinner, now that she thought about it. “Is it growing back already?”

Spinach touched her hair. It had been shoulder length this evening, but now it reached to the middle of her back. “Oh. A little.”

“Besides, the curtain-rope will work.” Dilly hoped she sounded calm. She wasn’t thinking about how high up they were, not at all. Not her.

As they got ready to climb down the rope, Dilly moved away from the window, bumping Nort with her shoulder as she went. “Do you want me to help you?” he asked. “She’s afraid of being up so high,” he explained to the others.

“Well, sort of,” Dilly mumbled, humiliated. Nort privately figured it was worth having her mad at him if she got the help that she needed.

“Maybe Crobbs can bring her down,” Cam said.

“I’ll do it,” Nort said.

“Crobbs is bigger,” Spinach said. “He should do it.”

Nort didn’t say anything else, though he automatically tried to stand a little taller. He was still shorter than Cam and Crobbs—he knew that even in the dark. The important thing was getting Dilly down, he told himself. “I’ll go first, to check that it’s safe,” Nort said, trying to reinforce his image.

No one argued, so Nort climbed out the window. The rope swayed and swung about in the slim shaft of
moonlight that shone through Loris’s bedroom window as he descended. He continued to the very end of the curtain-rope before he looked down. To his dismay, the rope didn’t reach the floor beneath him. He guessed he must be about five feet off the floor by human standards. Nort wondered how giants would have measured it even as he made himself let go.

He hit the ground hard and rolled. As he lay there catching his breath, he could hear questioning voices from above. “I’m fine,” he called, pretty sure his own tiny voice wouldn’t disturb Loris. “It’s close, and I’ll help you.” But how? Nort bumbled around in the dim light as Cam began to descend, and then he saw it: Loris had left one of her socks on the floor, half-hidden under the dollhouse table or her mother would have surely made her pick it up.

The sock was heavier than he thought it would be. Nort slid it across the wooden floor till it was lying beneath the dangling rope. He got it in position just before Cam dropped to the floor. Cam’s landing was much softer than Nort’s had been, and Nort smiled with satisfaction at his own ingenuity.

One by one the others climbed down the rope. Or two by two, in Dilly’s case. She had gotten very quiet and had edged away into the dollhouse, but Spinach brought her back. Crobbs put one muscular arm around her, talking in the same tones he’d used to soothe the squirrels as he came down the rope with Dilly in tow.

Speaking of squirrels, Nort heard a small sound and glanced up to see the two escapees skittering down the rope. “Lieutenant?” he said, but the squirrels leaped off the rope and disappeared into the darkness.

“Come on,” Nort told the others. “We’d better be gone before sunrise.”

It wasn’t easy to sleep on a cot in a dungeon, especially without a blanket. Meg dozed on and off. The torch on the wall outside her door cast a square of barred light across the rough floor. Very late that night, Meg woke up and looked sleepily at the patch of light, only to realize that something was different. She sat up. A black line was painting itself across the floor, crossing the shadows of the bars. Meg got up and crouched for a closer look. Then she laughed. A line of ants was trailing its way toward her abandoned dinner plate.

Meg thought almost fondly of Quorlock. “So, are you here to help me?” she asked the ants, not expecting an answer.

But the line paused and blurred a bit. The ants broke rank and painstakingly reformed. To Meg’s amazement, they appeared to be spelling out letters. And what they spelled out was “no.”

“No? But I helped you. Or—your cousins. I went around an anthill in the forest.”

This time it took longer for the ants to spell their
reply: “common courtesy.” They seemed to confer a little afterward, however. Then they spelled out, a bit begrudgingly, “thanks.”

That was all Meg could get out of them. They were obviously too busy with food transportation and distribution to bother any further with a human girl. Of course, if what Quorlock had said was true, the only thing the ants could have done for her was sort grain, and Meg didn’t have any barley mixed with millet. She lay back down to watch the ants at their work until she fell asleep again.

Meg woke for the second time because of a sound. Listening herself awake, she knew that something was creeping across the floor. Meg pretended to shift in her sleep so she could turn and open her eyes a crack to see what it was. By this time the torch was burning low. A dungeon cell in darkness would be far worse, especially with things crawling around inside. Meg shuddered and strained her eyes the more, trying to identify her intruder.

The shadowy creature was bigger than an ant, but it was smaller than Meg’s fist. It not only scratched, it occasionally clinked as it made its way slowly across the floor toward her. Meg stopped pretending to be asleep and sat up. The thing could have been a mouse, although it was oddly shaped. “Hello?” Meg said.

The mouse froze, but it didn’t run away. After a
moment, Meg realized that it was waiting for her to do something. She slipped off her cot and sank down to the floor. “What is it?”

The mouse wasn’t shaped wrong, she concluded; it was carrying something, and the object was too large for it to carry comfortably. Instead the mouse had dragged whatever-it-was across the floor. The mouse tried to raise the object, but it wasn’t strong enough, and the weight fell back down with a little
clink.
Meg put out her hand to touch the thing. Metal. She took it from the mouse as gently as possible and felt as much as saw that it was an iron key.

“I saved a mouse from a hawk,” Meg said, remembering. Free from the weight of the key, the mouse gave her a little bow.

“Thank you very much,” Meg said. She wanted to say, “You’re nicer than the ants,” but who knew—maybe the ants had called the mouse. It’s not like the ants could have brought the key to her. So instead she resorted to court diplomacy language, proclaiming, “You are a true friend and have well repaid a debt of honor this night.”

The mouse bowed one last time before it scurried across the floor, squeezed beneath the door, and disappeared.

Meg smiled, holding the key in her hands. Good old Quorlock! He might talk too much, and he didn’t understand about girls in towers, but he knew a thing or two about enchanted forests, not to mention quests.

UCKILY, THE GIANT CHILD’S MOTHER HAD LEFT
the bedroom door open. Small though they were, Cam knew they wouldn’t have fit through the crack beneath the door. As it was, the five of them were able to leave Loris’s room and walk silently down the hallway. In the near darkness, it was like traveling along a canyon, with the ceiling as high as a sky overhead. They hadn’t gone far when Nort tripped over the head of one of the nails holding the floorboards down. Then Dilly gashed her leg on a dagger-sized splinter and they had to stop to bind up the wound with a handkerchief.