Pamela Dean - The Whim of the Dragon

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Table of Contents

THE CRYSTAL AND THE DRAGON

With a dramatic suddenness that you do not expect from a world in which you have lived for three months, and which has rained all day on the road you have to ride tonight, the dark arch of Claudias tower window lit up with silver. The roiling depths of the golden globe stilled; the rich light dimmed to gray; and from a little spark of red in the globes center there grew the stately form of a dragon. It grew to the size of the globe, to the outermost diameter of its glow; and stopped, before Ted had to decide whether he was going to leave the room, possibly dragging Ruth with him.

The wind rattled the windows. Ted could feel his heart thumping in his ears. He had a good side view of the dragon, which floated with its tail to the trap-door and its head toward Randolph, at the window. The dragon was bright red with touches of black. It was a very twisty, decorated dragon, with seven claws on each foot and a great many tendrils and spikes and whiskers.

Ted didnt want that huge, tapering head to look in his direction. It had black eyes with red pupils and could have looked at him, if it had wanted to, without turning its head. But its gaze was bent on Randolph. Randolph went down on one knee and bowed his forehead onto the other. It was the most extravagant gesture of respect that Ted had ever seen anybody in the Secret Country make.

FIREBIRD WHERE FANTASY TAKES FLIGHT

To Patricia Wrede,
whose patience has been so sorely tried

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am greatly obliged to David S. Cargo for the design of Heathwill Library; and to Michael Mornard for advice concerning the castle of the Dragon King.

As always, I owe more than I can say to Steven Brust, Nate Bucklin, Emma Bull, Kara Dalkey, Will Shetterly, and Patricia Wrede for providing kindness and censure in the appropriate doses.

Her Gentle and Fruitful Grace, Ruth, Lady of the Green Caves, formerly Princess of the Hidden Land and Lord of the Kings Forests, to their Excellent and Estimable Lordships Randolph, Kings Counselor, and Fence, Councils Wizard, greetings.

3 September 490

Dear Fence and Randolph,

I did try to write this in your manner, but I was afraid you would never unravel it. I am going to write in plain English, and trust to your perspicacity to understand.

I am not Lady Ruth of the Green Caves. Edward, Patrick, Ellen, and Laura are also not who you think they are. We come from somewhere else, where, for years and years, the five of us played a game. The game was you, The Secret Country. We had the characters, the people, right, except for Claudia. We had never thought of her. And we didnt have the story exactly right. But we would play the Banquet of Midsummer Eve, and Randolphs poisoning of the King, and the battle with the Dragon King; and in the end Edward found out that Randolph had killed his father, and so he killed Randolph in the rose garden. These events and people seemed strange and wonderful to us, and altogether different from the lives we led.

This summer we couldnt play. Ellen and Patrick and I were living about as far away from Ted and Laura as its possible to be, and we were all very unhappy. But Patrick found a sword under a bottle tree. It glowed green. Its the one you called Melanies. Ted and Laura found a sword under a hedge. That one glowed blue, and you called it Shans. The hedge was the same as, or like, the hedge in front of the House by the Well of the White Witch. And that house was also in our world.

If you hold Melanies sword and crawl under the bottle tree, you come out in a place called New South Wales. If you hold Shans sword and crawl under the hedge, you come out in a place called Illinois. And if you begin in those places and crawl under with the swords, you find yourself in the Hidden Land. Thats how we got here. Benjamin thought we were your royal children. And yours werent around to contradict him. So we played our parts as best we could. You must understand that we did not, in the beginning, necessarily intend any deception. We were not certain that you were real at all; and yet you were the people we wanted most to meet in the world, and the Secret Country was the place we wanted most to be, and the princesses and princes you knew were the people whose parts we most dearly desired. We had doubts even then, and these doubts grew on us as we found our parts more difficult to play in truth than they had been in semblance; but by then we were entangled, and feared to do ourselves, and perhaps you also, more harm than good by a confession. Nor did we know what to confess. We thought we were in truth your royal children, or as near as you could get. It seemed to us that, if they were not back in our places contending with the strangeness of our lives, which we knew they were not, then they were nowhere except within us.

But when Ted was in the land of the dead, waiting for Lord Randolph and me to ransom him, he saw and spoke to all five of them. Edward told Ted that Claudia had killed them with a stratagem and a potion. This was not of our game. We grieve for your loss. If there were anything we could do to Claudia, we would do it. We think it best to go home, leaving you an account of what we know. We have left the swords, one under the hedge before the house, and the other under a bottle tree perhaps fifty yards to the right of it.

There is one other thing. Time flows in your world just as it does in ours. This startled us, because in the stories weve read, matters were better arranged. If we were a long time in the Secret Country, our guardians at home missed us and were angry, and if we were a long time at home Benjamin and Agatha missed us and were angry. So we bethought us of the Riddle of Shans Ring, that it might blow time awry, so we could stay a long time in your country and be gone but a moment from ours.

Ellen and I took Shans Ring to the hedge through which Ted and Laura had come into this country. And we tried diverse methods; and when we stood in our own world, and I stood outside the hedge, and Ellen stood in the yard of the house, I threw the Ring over the hedge to Ellen and said the verse aloud. There came a flash of purple light, and a gap opened in the hedge. I saw the Secret Country in it, so I came through back to this place. But Ellen saw the house light up, and a woman burst out of the door brandishing a broom and shouting incomprehensible things. This woman was the Lady Claudia, whom you know. Ellen ran for the hedge, and Shans sword, which she held, pulled her down to show her where the Ring lay, and when she retrieved it, she came through the hedge back to this place and fell in the stream.

Now I thought that what had happened to Ellen had taken longer than what had happened to me. So I took Shans Ring and went through the hedge. And I was in a strange country that looked like the Secret Country, in that it held the Well of the White Witch, and the plain, but that looked most unlike it in that the air and sky were glassy and felt altogether odd and unpleasant, and there was an army on the plain. So I came back quickly to the Secret Country. But you should note that this place in which I had found myself was the selfsame place in which Lord Randolph and Fence and I stood much later when we bargained with the unicorn for Edward Fairchilds life.

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