The Runaway Dragon (21 page)

“You mean Meg? Where is she?” Lex looked around for his sparks. “My messengers told me she’s in the sky, which makes no sense at all.”

Stefka tried again. “The guards are here, and there will be trouble. But you must understand—”

“What. Happened. To Meg?” Lex interrupted. At that moment he seemed very wizardly indeed.

“The mistress threw her in the dungeon, and then she fed her—” the woman hesitated.

“She WHAT?”

Stefka rushed through the next bit. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she fed her to the dragon. Since she was a princess, I mean. And now we need your help.”

Lex looked as if he were about to bring the walls down, and indeed, the bookshelves trembled a little. Then a strange look came over his face. “Dragon, you say?”

“Dragon,” Stefka repeated as the door started to shake. The other two women jumped away from it with twin yelps.

“There’s something very important I need to know,” Lex said. “What color is the dragon?”

But Stefka didn’t get a chance to answer. The door burst open and a pack of guards tumbled in, baying for blood like so many hounds. They seized Stefka and the other two women before Bain stepped forward from among them to restore order. “What are you doing here?” Bain said curtly to the women, but he didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he addressed Lex. “We’re looking for a flying creature. A sort of dark blue, cloth-like being about this long.” He showed the scarf’s length with his hands just as the scarf peeked curiously over Lex’s shoulder. Bain saw it, and his brows lowered. “Is the creature yours?”

“That’s what I want to know,” Malison said from behind Bain in the hallway. The guards parted to let her step into the room. “Is it yours?” she asked.

Something had changed, and it took Malison a second to realize what it was: for the first time since she’d met him, Lex didn’t smile when he saw her. Instead he said, “I have a better question, and this time I want a true answer. What have you done with my friend Meg?”

Skinny Zlota burst into the kitchen, just as Nallis had done earlier.

“Now what?” Imkuhl grumbled.

“You know the poor little princess we were talking about?”

“Yes.”

“She’s back, and she’s got that dragon with her—brought him right into the fortress!” Zlota lowered her voice. “I think she’s going after the empress.”

Imkuhl’s eyes grew steely, and she looked around the kitchen. “Well, ladies, we’d better get up there and help her.” She hefted her rolling pin. “Who’s with me?”

“What have I done with that princess of yours?” Malison lifted her chin. “Whatever I wanted to do.
I
am the one who decides, you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” Lex said hotly. “Where’s Meg? And no more silly stuff about picnics, either. I’ve been hearing things about dungeons and dragons.”

Malison gave the servant women a look, indicating that they would be held accountable for Lex’s having been told something she didn’t want him to hear. One of the women shrieked at the sight of the sorceress’s eyes. “Take them away!” Malison ordered. The guards seemed almost as glad to leave the room as their prisoners did, shutting the heavy door hastily behind them.

Malison turned her gaze back to Lex. “Forget about your friend,” she told him. “What matters now is that I’m tired of playing nice. I’m here to stop you, and it stops now.”

“What?” Lex said, confused.

Malison sucked her breath in before she sneered, “Listen very carefully. I am an evil sorceress, and I am
not
going to let you get in the way of my magnificent plans, Lex.” She said his name very sarcastically, as if it were a bad word—or worse, a stupid one. “Just because a few of the minor spells I’ve tried on you haven’t had quite the intended effect doesn’t mean I can’t make things very, very bad for you.” She really shouldn’t have told him that, showing her weaknesses. Not that she had any. Flukes, maybe. Not actual weaknesses.

“You’ve been throwing spells at me?” Lex looked enlightened. “That explains the grogginess. And the headache. I even forgot about my sparks for a while.”

“I turned you into a statue,” the sorceress said proudly.

“My legs felt stiff,” Lex said. “But I’m not a statue now.” He sighed, clearly so disappointed in Malison that she almost felt a fleeting inclination to experience a minuscule twinge of actual guilt. “Is this going to be one of those wizard duels, then?” Lex asked in a quiet voice.

Malison hardened her heart again. She nodded hard, too, one quick dip of her chin.

“Fine.” Lex flexed his fingers, ready because he had to be. For a moment, Malison didn’t do much of anything. “Well?” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

All of the rage she’d been feeling ever since this boy set foot in her fortress burned through Malison. At her
command, water poured down from the ceiling of the workroom as if it were a dark sky releasing the gates of the heavens. An avalanche of water from nowhere slammed down on Lex’s head, drowning him—only it didn’t. He just stood there, tilting one hand up, his mouth shaping a spell, and the water rode around him, seeking to hit the ground without hitting him.

Malison dropped her hands, and the water stopped falling. Enough of it had splashed around the room that she was a little wet herself, though her ordinary protection spells over the books had kept them dry. “Maybe we should do this in the throne room,” she said sullenly, but Lex shook his head.

“Here is fine,” he said, dismissing the water on the floor with a few words and a gesture. Then Lex snapped his fingers with both hands, calling out another spell.

Malison found herself surrounded by sparks that blinded her eyes. When the sparks faded, she saw that Lex was watching her with one bushy eyebrow raised quizzically.

The sorceress felt a surge of scorn. “Very pretty, but what does it do?” She sang a few words in an ancient language Lex couldn’t possibly know. Demons began emerging through the floor, gnashing their blue teeth and reaching for Lex—but he said other words in the same language, and the demons disappeared.

Even worse, the infuriating boy seemed pleased and excited about what he’d done. Where was his
dignity?
“Your turn,” he said, almost as if they were playing a game.

Malison tried not to think of all the spells that had failed her. She just needed something bigger and better. She threw a mind-blanker at Lex, her spellwords ugly and spiky. He looked bewildered for a second, but his face quickly cleared, and he lobbed a torrent of goop at her, declaiming his own spell.

Malison ducked so that only her shoulder and one side of her hair turned pink. She didn’t have time to wonder what else the spell was supposed to do. Malison slid a movement spell across the room, and for a few seconds Lex danced frantically, as if to an invisible fiddler.

She chanted.

He enchanted.

She hurled incantations—and accidentally hit the bookshelves. The books leaped from their shelves and started scuttling about the room, pages flapping.

Lex rebutted her incantations with alchemies.

The sorceress turned him into a salmon. He swiftly changed back.

He turned her into a dragonfly. She changed back, too.

She gave him old age. It faded away as he gave her infancy. With an effort, Malison babbled a spell to reclaim herself.

The words of their spells dove back and forth through the room, drawing magic after them like hooked fish pulling fishing lines through the water.

Malison focused again, trying a spell that wrapped the wizard boy in heavy chains.

Lex broke free and responded with a flock of chickens that flew at Malison, pecking her eagerly. Malison realized her arms were covered with kernels of corn. What kind of foolishness was this?

“Enough!” Malison roared. She spun around, flinging chickens and corn in every direction. Her anger grew larger than she ever thought it could, and she screamed her most terrible death spells at Lex.

His face calm, he answered her with a magic that rose on every side of the sorceress like a cylinder of glass, shimmering. None of her spells seemed to penetrate it, and when she put out her hands, they touched nothing, yet turned invisible where she should have seen them, sticking out into the workroom. Malison pulled her hands back hastily. She felt an unfamiliar twinge of fear as Lex moved toward her. But Bain was suddenly there, behind the wizard. He hit Lex on the head with a heavy bookend, and Lex fell to the ground. As he fell, his spell failed. The glassy cylinder was gone, and Malison was free.

Malison’s eyes met Bain’s. Had he realized she might have lost? Perhaps she should kill him before he could tell anyone else. No—for the moment at least, she wanted his help. “Very good, Chief Guard,” she made herself say. And now she would kill the wizard.

RAGONS ARE LONG AND NARROW, ESPECIALLY
when they fold their wings. It was a tight fit, but it worked, and Laddy flowed down the hallways of the fortress like water. Wherever he went, guards shouted and ran. When they got too close, Laddy spat fiery threats at them, and they kept their distance.

At first Meg was worried about someone coming up behind them. Her only rear guard was the magic carpet, and although it had been behaving itself ever since it got back from the beach, she was never quite sure when it would throw another tantrum and fly off in a huff.

Meg had only gone a little ways, however, when she saw that a dozen women servants had joined her, armed mightily with carving knives, rolling pins, and iron pots and pans. Every time Meg looked back, there seemed to be more women.

“Where are we going, exactly?” Meg asked Elva.

“To the mistress’s workroom. That’s where the wizard’s been since you got here.”

“Doing what?”

“Reading magic books, of course. She has a wondrous collection of magic books. My cousin Luli got to dust them once, and a big purple book bit her.”

“I see.” Meg rolled her eyes. All this time, while she’d been in peril of losing her life, Lex had been reading books. “I suppose he’s been drinking hot chocolate, too?”

“Why yes, he has.”

“I
see,”
Meg said again. She had to remind herself not to bother being mad at Lex till later. First there was Malison to deal with. “I don’t suppose Malison has some kind of perilous flaw we could exploit?”

Elva shook her head, then raised her voice over the noise of the fighting that had just sprung up behind them. Apparently some of the guards had attacked the servant women who were now acting as Meg’s rear guard, and the women were giving as good as they got. Or giving better, considering how many guards were now lying on the floor as if they were sleeping on the job. Meg was reassured to see that the women were knocking the guards out rather than killing them. Still, Meg’s little battalion managed to make up for their lack of deadly intent with the sheer force of their fury over the events of the past few weeks.

Lex’s magic carpet helped out, too, coming up
behind guards and wrapping itself around them tightly so that the women could hit them, then spinning away to dump the guards on the floor here and there like heaped-up darkness.

To Meg’s surprise, Elva wasn’t a bit perturbed by the melee. She simply went on with her explanation. “When all of this first started, we were hoping she kept her heart inside an egg inside a bird inside a fish inside a cask at the bottom of a bottomless lake or some such. But she doesn’t.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Isn’t it?”

They came around a corner and found themselves at the top of a broad stairway. Guards were pouring up the stairs toward Meg, while behind her the fighting had gotten fiercer. Battle cries rang through the air, or sometimes just recriminations.

“And to think I used to feed you supper every night, and a nice big breakfast every morning!”

“You always were a silly boy, Thomas Andrew Codriddle!”

“How dare you raise your hand to your own wife!”

“For the empress! Oof!”

As for Laddy, he sent the guards tumbling back down the stairs. But Meg’s little party was advancing very slowly, and Meg was afraid they’d never get there. She longed for the feel of her sword in her hand, but Malison’s guards had taken it away when they captured her.

Meg kept an eye out as they moved down the hall, till finally she discovered a sword. Meg guessed that the guard it belonged to was lying around somewhere with a big bump on his head, and she snatched up the sword with relief. It was longer and heavier than she was used to, but at least she was armed.

After three more turns, another stairway, and a lot of fire and shouting, Elva said, “Here we are. It’s that door up there.”

“Right there? Where the fifty guards are standing with their swords drawn?”

“That’s the one!” Elva chirped.

Do you want me to burn them?
Laddy said uncertainly.
Or should I just scare them a little?

Malison had been so busy concentrating on her battle with Lex, she hadn’t noticed what was going on outside her workroom. Into this new silence pounded the sounds of another battle, one raging in the hall. Malison paused. “What’s happening?”

As if in answer to her question, Meg appeared in the doorway.