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Dragon - Dragon Companion Part 24

The seamstresses and the tailor and their assistants gratefully departed. They had been at work with the princess since lunchtime and it was well after dark by now.

"A little supper will be welcome," hinted Tom.

"Tell me first what you and Murdan agreed upon, and then I'll let you eat," Manda growled. She patted the chair beside her and Tom took it, admiring the flustered, flushed look of her.

182.

Don Callander "You remember my talking about superstitions?" "Yes, of course. What has that to do with Murdan?" "Not Murdan, but with Queen Beatrix."

"Explain, please." He did so and when he was finished, she sat back, stretched her shapely legs straight out, and sighed. "I would like to go with you to Sweetwater Tower."

"Sweetwater Tower?" "My stepmother's castle on Brant Bay. Pretty place, for all it is often foggy and damp. You'll be going there, for there she will be delivered of my half brother or half sister."

"Ah! I had assumed she was in Lexer."

"It's a short ride southeast of Lexor."

"You and Queen Beatrix are friends?"

"I haven't seen her since her wedding three years ago, but we've written to each other, rather stiff and formal. I think I like her, although she's perhaps rather too quiet and withdrawn."

"Murdan says that's because she's frightened, alone in a strange part of the land."

Manda picked at the unsewn hem of her skirt, a richly brocaded, deep orange affair that suited her magnificently, even in its unfinished state.

"He's probably right. I was really still a child at the time, so I hadn't thought of her as being just plain scared. It fits, however. Perhaps now I understand her better."

"But you feel you'd be unwelcome at Sweetwater Tower?"

"Murdan says it would be folly to give Uncle Peter a chance to blame anything that went wrong on me. People expect me to be jealous, he said, even if I'm not at all. I do wish it weren't so. I would like to get to know Beatrix better. One day I shall."

"Of course you will! But for now, I must go alone and you must be a princess and prepare for Session. I'd like nothing better than to have you travel with me again. You know that!"

"I know, beloved. And I also know my duties and responsibilities, so I won't make any fussa-at least not in publica- about losing you for two months. But tell me, what will you do in Sweetwater Tower?"

DRAGON COMPANION 183.

"Get to know your father the king, for one thing. It's important that he like me and trust me, wouldn't you agree?"

"Absolutely so! What else?"

"There's this business of having a human nearbya-with all the supposed powers of a human. It maya-will, Murdan insistsa-make it very difficult for Gantrell to fake an evil omen, perhaps to cause a miscarriage."

"Yes, I see what you mean. Yes, having a human like you as an attendant and friend would help offset any wicked tricks Uncle Peter might be tempted to try. A good plan, I say."

"I suppose what I'm supposed to do is, when the king's magicians and wizards try to ward off evil with spells, I'll reinforce them with common sense."

"Human common sense, which has served us very well recently. All of Fredrick of Brevory's wards against being caught stealing Rosemary were brought to naught because they were intended to ward against our own magics. You used human sense and won through. And the matter of Retruance being trapped, also. If we'd sent for a divining sorcerer, we'd likely be baking and freezing on that canyon floor, still!"

Momie and Clem brought them sausage, cheese, and bread from the buffet. All four sat amid the bolts of cloth and piles of laces and brocades, tapes, scissors, and packs of needles and pins, to picnic at midnight.

Tom asked Clem if he would go with him to Sweetwater Tower. The trapper merely nodded his head and asked when they were leaving.

"After breakfast," Tom told him.

"Might not it be better to leave before dawn, by the postern?" Clem asked around a fistful of grapes.

"No, I want everybody to know I'm gone and where. We want Gantrell to know about it as soon as possible."

"Who will tell him?" asked Momie.

"Probably the comptroller. Plume," said Tom. "He seems to be in regular touch with the Gantrells."

"A spy in our midst!" exclaimed Manda. "Why doesn't Uncle Murdan clap him in Aftertower with that slime, Fredrick?"

"Because a known spy is of more use to us than he is 184.

DRAGON COMPANION 185.

Don Callander to the enemy," observed Clem. "I've got a bit of business with the sour-faced number juggler. He has yet to pay me for my services as tracker to Wall."

"You didn't lose your furs at least," said Manda, sym-pathetically. She knew, now, how much work it had been to collect pelts all the previous winter.

"They brought a good price, as we were among the first to come to Wall this season, thanks to the Dragon. As for the tracking, I didn't want to charge anything, but Lord Murdan insisted. He gave me a piece of paper instructing this accountant to disburse cash to me. I'll go to him first thing tomorrow, before breakfast, and demand payment. I'll put the money aside for our future, Momie."

"Ah, yes! And you'll accidently let slip the information that you go with me to Queen Beatrix and King Eduard?"

"Exactly."

"In which case, to make it seem more authentic, maybe we should leave quietly and before first lighta-as soon as you've got your money in hand," decided Tom.

"Thank goodness we'll be too busy to miss you men," said Mornie, making a face. "Will you write me, Clem? Can you write anyone at all, Clem?"

"Saucy miss! Of course I can and will write! My spelling is not that good, but you'll be able to ferret out my meanings, I'm positive."

The dressmakers trooped back into Manda's sitting room and soon were hard at work, leaving the young men with no more to do but say good-bye and go to their beds.

THE cocks in the roosts in the top bailey had yet to make a sound when Clem pounded heavily on the comptroller's door, deep under Foretower. After a long wait and two more bouts of pounding. Mistress Plume, looking quite disheveled in a faded old nightdress, opened the door to admit the ex-trapper.

"I must see your husband, mistress," said Clem. "I depart in minutes for the east and may not return for a quarter year or more. I will need my money."

"I'll awaken the old rat," said Mistress Plume. She seemed to relish the idea of disturbing her husband's sleep more than regret the loss of her own. While he waited in their bleak parlor, almost bare of furniture except for a large, high desk and a shelf of heavy, leather-bound books, Clem heard the lady rousing her sleeping husband with ungentle words.

"Going off on your own then?" asked Plume when he appeared, buckling his belt and rubbing the sleep from his small, close-set eyes.

"No, comptroller. I go with Master Tom, the Librarian, my friend."

He handed Plume the Historian's order. The other examined it closely as if suspecting a forgery.

"Well and good, then," Plume said at last. "All's in order. I am happy to serve you. Master Clematis!"

He tried very hard, but failed miserably, to seem cordial and helpful. He asked questions about the proposed journey.

"To carry a message to the king?" he repeated, pausing in his counting of silver vols into Clem's hand.

"I wouldn't know about that," replied Clem, watching in distaste the way the accountant lovingly fingered and caressed each coin. "Master Tom is to serve the queen, I hear, in her remaining weeks before childbirthing."

"He is a physician, too, then?" cried Plume in some surprise.

"I have no idea. He is, after all, a human. Humans have some strange and useful ways, they tells me. Thank you, comptroller! I apologize again for awakening you so early. We depart at once."

And he took his heavy bag of cash and his leave, noting as he shut the heavy door on the comptroller and his wife that the former seemed rather excited, while the other showed signs, clear to the sharp-eyed woodsman, of distressa and disgust.

DRAGON COMPANION 187.

^17^ The Heartland SOUTHEAST of Murdan's Overhall the rolling countryside, checkerboarded with newly plowed fields, and square woodlots, was pleasantly studded with stone farmhouses and sturdy frame barns, all surrounded by freestone fencesa- the small Achievements of freeholders whose forefathers had combined a sweet soil, careful husbandry, and hard work to build moderate wealth on grains, cattle, pigs, cheese, butter, and draft horses.

The day was hot but breezes blew from the northwest, promising a rain shower by afternoon. The sun glinted brightly off ponds and streams every few miles. Foals capered about their dams in the short-cropped grass of pastures on either side of the wide roadway. Their mothers stood watching the passersby with calm eyes, sometimes nodding in greeting as they passed.

At one freehold after another, the travelers called polite greetings to farmers and their field hands, but didn't pause. Their first destination was Ffallmar Farm, where they planned to spend their first of five nights on the road to Sweetwater Tower.

The two young men swung along the smooth dirt road at a good pace, chatting of this and that, mostly of the scenes through which they walked. They had agreed to travel lightly, so each carried only a thin backpack contain-ing changes of linen, toilet articles, and a fresh shirt or two. They both wore swords at their belts, balanced on the right by scabbarded knives.

"We'll have to find a place to get lunch soon," Tom observed, peering up toward the late-moming sun. "I'm getting hungry, aren't you?"

"A woodsman is always hungry," replied Clem with a broad grin. *There's a village just ahead. I saw it from the last rise."

"They'll have an inn, perhaps," said Tom, remembering the Slippery Slate at Wall. "They can give us something to eat, I suppose."

"These inns are required to have provender for men and beasts alike," Clem told him. "By the king's law."

"A sensible law," Tom said. "From a sensible king, do you think?"

"I never thought much about such high persons," Clem admitted, kicking a stone into the ditch without breaking his stride. "Those of us who work for our living have little time for discussing our betters."

"But surely you would have heard opinions over a pint of ale of an evening, perhaps in Wall?"

"Just gossip!" cried the trapper. "I pay no attention to that guff."

"But others do speak of kings and such, do they?"

"More than you would believe!"

"What, then, do these othersa-these gossipsa-have to say about the qualities of King Eduard?" Tom asked, pushing the issue.

"That he is a good man. That he seems to be sensible, if you like! That he is handsomea-that from the ladies, of coursea-and that he is strong of hand and sharp of eyea- from the men. They have no great complaints about the kinga ."

"But the new queen?"

"I know you spoke of her with Princess Amanda, Tom. What do you want me to add?"

"What your friends think or what you've heard them say. We'll shortly be in her service for some months. I'd like to know how she is perceived."

"Perceptions are chancy things," observed the trapper. "Well, since you insista Beatrix of Knollwater is a very beautiful woman, they say, but a quiet one, who seldom speaks out in public. Most men think she's cold and distant, maybe uncaring. Women say she is unhappya-or afrighted."

"Thank you, Clem. I know what Manda says, and Murdan, but I value an outside opinion. There's that village ahead!"

r 188.

DRAGON COMPANION 189.

Don Callander SPREND lay astride the roadway. A slowly winding, clear brook, known locally merely as the Brook, ran north to south through its middle. Just across the stone bridge stood the Babbling Bass, a substantial, rambling two-story inn fronted by an elm-shaded dooryard and backed by spacious stableyards and an apple orchard. The trees were already heavy with young, green fruit.

Along the Brook, on pilings driven down to hold back slips of sand or soil from the stream, a dozen men of all ages sat, fishing poles in hands and lines in the water.

As Tom and Clem came across the bridge, a youngster near the bridge suddenly jerked his line from the water and landed a flopping large-mouthed bass. He grinned up at the travelers and popped the fish into a reed-woven purse by his side.

"You've brought me luck, good sirs!" called the lad, while the other fishermen scowled, pretending to be displeased by the mere boy's catch and the interruption by strangers.

"Sell us your catch for our lunch?" Clem shouted back, leaning his elbows on the wide parapet.

"Gladly!" replied the lad. He grounded his pole and brought them his creel basket, in which the bass was still flopping on a bed of wet green cress. "The keeper of Babbling Bass will fry it up for you, quick as I can tell about it."

Tom paid him five new coppers for the fish and invited him to come dine with them at the inn.

"Ah, no, sir! I'm off to my own home, where my mother will have luncheon for me and a scolding for fishing instead of cleaning the henhouse."

"Wicked boy!" laughed Tom. "Here, have another pen-ny. *Twill make Mother feel the better for your playing hooky."

The boy thanked them, recommended them to the innkeeper, who now stood in the dooryard, his spotless white apron flapping in the breeze. Grinning from ear to ear, the lad dashed off, not forgetting his fishing pole on the bank of Brook. His fellow fishermen nodded at the strangers and returned their attention to their poles and lines.

They ate the freshly caught bass and found it delicious, in the dim, low-ceilinged common room of the Babbling Bass, and talked easily with the innkeeper, who, it turned out, was a retired guardsman of Murdan the Historian.

"Yes, I served him long before he built Overhall, even. We were young blades, those days, always fighting great battles and chasing beautiful ladies! I mind me one timea"

And he was off on a rambling tale of how Murdan had met his wife, the late Murielle, to which the travelers listened both because it was polite and because they learned a great deal about their Lord Historian at the same time.

"How did Murdan come to be so close to the king? They are related, I understand," Tom asked, pushing his emptied place away.

"They are half brothers and were friends from early boyhood. Shared the same tutors," said Fling, the innkeeper. "They fought the Barbarians, side by side in the snow. The prince, the king as he's now, was Commander of the Blue. His royal father was not at all in favor of his only son leading us in battle. We were ever in the center of every fight, proud and glory seeking, ye know! Ah, foolish, I might now say, what with all my years."

"A good commander, was Lord Murdan?" asked Clem.

"The very best! Old Gantrell, the young lord's father he was, was Commander of the Green. Much too stodgy! Wouldn't stray from a direct line for anything, they said. He did keep his men alive and well fed, however," added Fling, admitting, now that he was close to a hundred-fifty years, that this was a good idea, after all.

"We go to the king and his new queen," Tom told the innkeeper as they finished lunching and prepared to leave. "I'll give him your greetings, if you like."

"I would be a well, quite overcome with gratitude, sir, young sirs! Mayhap he won't recall old Fling, although we had some exciting times togethera-me and the king who was then Prince Royal, and the Historian, who I served as batmana-as valet, as they call *em these days. Give His Majesty Fling's love and fealty and good memories. And Her Majesty the queen, too, for I suspect she'll need all good wishes, poor thing."