The Dragon Queen Read online

  Lamb & Castle

  Volume III:

  The Dragon Queen

  J.M. SANFORD

  Copyright © 2017 J.M. Sanford

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1974385841

  ISBN-13: 978-1974385843

  CONTENTS

  1: THE NEW WORLD

  2: THE GRIFFIN’S SPELL BOOK

  3: THE SNOW GLOBE

  4: RUINS

  5: THE TALE OF THE THREE PRINCES

  6: THE ICE PALACE

  7: SOULSHINE

  8: QUEEN OF ROSES

  9: MEN OF STONE AND STARLIGHT

  10: IN THE WINTER GARDEN

  11: THE GRIFFIN TAMED

  12: UNCOMPLETED

  13: MAGIC IN HIDDEN PLACES

  14: BLACK DIAMONDS AND SECRETS

  15: ALONE IN THE PALACE OF THE RED QUEEN

  16: THE PRISONER BENEATH THE ICE

  17: THE HUNT RIDES OUT

  18: QUEEN TO QUEEN

  19: THE WHITE KNIGHT AND THE DRAGON

  20: THE PUZZLE BOX

  21: NO FAIRY TALE ENDING

  22: BAD MAGIC AND BROKEN GLASS

  23: THE INDISPENSABLE ARCHMAGE

  24: BLACK PRINCE

  25: WHITE PRINCE

  26: RUNNING OUT OF TIME

  27: OF GOLD AND DRAGON’S FIRE

  28: QUEEN OF SPIDERS

  29: BAD SPRITE

  30: THE CROW AND THE SHINY THING

  31: A WHITE WEDDING

  32: THE IRON DRAGON

  33: GHOSTS IN THE SMOKE

  34: FLIGHT

  35: PICKING UP THE PIECES

  36: SPRING

  1: THE NEW WORLD

  The Flying City of Ilgrevnia, ripped from her native world and displaced from the network of magic that had borne her aloft for centuries, fell slowly, breaking apart under her own weight as her streets burned. The new world’s magic was all wrong: as a new sky choked with deep purple storm clouds unfurled above Ilgrevnia's rooftops, the world-shifting Orb of Helemneum shrieked in protest at it. Below, the ground was far out of sight, lost in a sea of churning silver mist, and Ilgrevnia headed with slow inevitability down into the hidden depths, where who knew what rocks she might ground herself on.

  Archmage Morel, grappling awkwardly with the new world’s magic himself, still hadn’t the slightest idea what had happened. He stood in his workshop in the palace of Ilgrevnia, mumbling an endless string of prayers, charms and invocations while the floor shuddered beneath his feet and his master the dragon prince Archalthus screamed at him to save the City. Perhaps Morel could have managed it somehow in his younger days, but the elderly mage had been working far too hard. The City was a monster almost a mile wide, and in its death throes it couldn't feel the human hands on its reins. Abandoning Ilgrevnia's safety, Morel instead transported the dragon’s bride-to-be, Miss Hartwood, and her maidservant Scarlet to the workshop, knowing they'd have little chance of fending for themselves in the chaos, but he had to wonder if they'd be any safer with the furious rampaging dragon. Miss Hartwood clung to her servant, who pulled her into the comparative safety of a corner while Prince Archalthus raged and screamed incoherently. The dragon threw himself at the world-shifting Orb as if it was an enemy he could vanquish through brute force, but it was too late to undo what had been done. The Orb's restraints buckled, twisted and tore with shrill screams and growls, and then Orb and dragon went rolling towards the windows, gaining momentum as what remained of the City began to tilt. They crashed through the glass, the Orb leaping off the balcony. If it was glass it would have shattered into billions of pieces there and then, but the Orb was not made of common glass, and instead it rolled with unstoppable and momentous grandeur down Ilgrevnia's smoking and blackened Main Street, out into the silvery gloom. The brilliant blue moonfire of its light dimmed as curtains of mist folded gently around it. It slowed, shoring up against rocks, a dim and eerie glow in the dark below the Flying City.

  The Orb might have survived the fall, but Ilgrevnia would not. As the brink of the City struck the hidden crags, throwing Archmage Morel into the air, he shouted a spell which made the air crackle and crystallise into something as slow-yielding as treacle. The Archmage sank slowly to the ground, waving off the books and boxes and trinkets falling slowly around him as he waded towards the two women. “Are you hurt, my dear?” he asked.

  Miss Hartwood gulped the treacly air like a goldfish in a bowl, but it would do her no harm. She shook her head, mute with fear and quite unable to comprehend anything that was going on around her.

  “She's fine,” said Scarlet, patting her charge's lustrous black hair. “You'll be all right, won't you, pet?”

  The Archmage's air-thickening spell wore off quickly. The artificial world had no network of magic beneath its skin: no nodes or leylines. This world's magic came from its small artificial sun, and at night there wasn't much magic to sustain any spell for long. The air-thickening spell had protected a section of the palace, although how long that would stand without the buildings around it Morel wouldn't like to say, and it had taken up a considerable portion of his personal reserves of magic. As the snow quenched the last of the fires that had burned through Ilgrevnia's streets, Morel lit a lamp. The floor of the Archmage’s workshop – or what remained of it – tilted sharply downwards, waves of fog rolling in to cover it. The three of them picked their way carefully down, with Miss Hartwood still clinging to her protector Scarlet, and made their way towards the glow of the Orb. Their breath clouded in the cold air; fresh snow crunched under their feet. Some way from the wreckage of the City, smoke rolled in drifts away from the fallen Orb, clearing to reveal Prince Archalthus' human form lying in the snow.

  “Oh!” Miss Hartwood pushed Scarlet away and ran towards her fallen prince.

  Embarrassed, Prince Archalthus stood up, brushing snow from his fine clothes. Other than a severe injury to his dignity, it appeared he'd sustained nothing more than a few cuts and bruises. The snow seemed to have quenched his ire, too, even if it frustrated him that he’d been unable to maintain his dragon form for more than a few minutes.

  Archmage Morel was more concerned with the Orb than with his master, and climbed up to run his hands gently over the smooth, rapidly cooling surface of the glass, inspecting it for any cracks or fractures. The Orb had not only shifted the failing Flying City from the old world to the new, but brought along several hundred tons of mud from the surrounding area – far more than it had ever moved before. Still, the Orb had held up to the strain, and between the dragon and the snow, it had been cushioned from any serious impact.

  Miss Hartwood turned to Archalthus. “Where are we? Is this the new world?” Under the dark purple sky, the fog and snow shone white as far as the eye could see.

  Prince Archalthus had intended for the new world to be his wedding gift to Miss Hartwood – she shouldn’t have seen it until it was completed in all its glory. “It should be so much more than this,” he said. “I’m so sorry to disappoint you, my dear.”

  “No, no! It's beautiful as it is!” said Miss Hartwood, her ocean blue eyes shining. “I do so love the snow! Look how it sparkles!”

  The prince had no answer to this. His intended bride might not be able to see anything wrong with this world, but he could. In the old world, his wingless human body had still resonated with the ebb and flow of the magical currents that he had once flown on so easily. The feeling of the magic of the leylines curling and swirling and eddying around him had remained a part of his life even after the curse that had trapped him in human form, taunting him in his flightlessness. But all that was gone, and the air of the new world smelled foreign to those who had magic in their veins. Strange forces blanketed this untouched landscape, deep layer after layer, so different
from the old world.

  Archmage Morel, however, had built the new world himself, and become relatively well-accustomed to the strangeness of its magic some time ago. “If you love the snow,” he said to Miss Hartwood, “then you'll surely love the palace, too.” He pointed it out to her with his staff: the tall spires distant but standing clear of the silver mist. Pinprick lights twinkled in the windows of the towers. “I fashioned it entirely out of ice, and I think you'll find it most exciting. Surprisingly warm, too, out of this chilly breeze.” The Archmage was pleased to see a delighted smile on the girl’s beautiful face at the prospect of exploring an ice palace.

  Prince Archalthus took his Mage firmly by the elbow. “Archmage Morel,” he hissed, “the Orb… is there any way to use it and return to the old world?”

  Of course Archmage Morel had already considered this. Proud as he was of what he’d achieved in the creation of the new world, he had no desire to be trapped in it forever. He glanced at the remains of the Ilgrevnian palace standing precariously atop the rubble. The switch and the mechanism that had controlled the Orb before had been destroyed in the crash, but there was another way to activate the Orb. “There is one hope,” he said. “That is, if it wasn't destroyed in the fall…” He threw his long white beard over his shoulder and began prodding around in the snow and debris with his staff. Half the contents of his workshop had spilled out into the fog and snow; much of it had been destroyed before his eyes, first by the rampaging furious dragon and then by the disintegration of the City. He winced as he realised that some of his painstakingly created golems would doubtless have been smashed to pieces in the fall. Resilient as the stone gentlemen were, they still had their limits. And without the normal network of magic, those remaining would be standing around in the fog, useless but well-dressed statues. He'd meant to make some alterations so that they'd function in the new world, but with a 'to do' list as long as his arm, he simply hadn't gotten around to it. He must try to remember that his own store of magic would run low much sooner in the new world, too.

  “We must all search for it,” he told the others. “A spherical crystal Device, about the size of an apple.” With it, they could easily return to the real world, once the Orb had been given some time to replenish its energy. He was pleased at his own foresight in designing an alternative way to activate the enormous world-shifting Orb. “A simple thing. A child could use it.” But where could it have vanished to? He closed his eyes, probing the future gently. He just needed to find the few seconds in which he saw the thing glinting in the snow and cried out ‘aha!’, or the servant Scarlet held the crystal aloft saying ‘is this it, Mister Morel?’. Just enough of a premonition to point the search party in the right direction… Instead, what Morel saw filled his heart with dread: an image of the smooth round crystal cupped in the hands of the young White Queen, as she peered curiously into it. Did the girl have the slightest idea of the power she held over them all? Glancing over her shoulder, she began to speak the spell…

  2: THE GRIFFIN’S SPELL BOOK

  In a more familiar world, the skyship Sharvesh sailed through billows of cloud gilded by the first rays of the sun, streamers of white trailing away from the sleek dark sides of the vessel, her yellow sails glowing like liquid gold. Far, far below, glimpses of frost-rimed fields and hedgerows flashed through the gaps in the cloud, and the long-winged shadow of a solitary hunting wyvern flickered across the landscape. Sharvesh was eerily quiet, even for a skyship. Amelia Lamb, erstwhile White Queen, might as well have been the only person in the world as she stood at the railings with the wind running through her long golden hair. She’d grown up on the coast, so she’d seen plenty of fishing boats, and the sound of the fishermen shouting to one another as they worked had been a comfortingly familiar sound of her childhood. She’d read books about sea voyages in her father’s library, marvelling at the detailed illustrations of ships crewed by dozens of men all busy steering their vessel through strange seas. Skyships, so she’d learned, were different. They were like living beings with souls of their own, and even the biggest of them needed only a handful of skysailors aboard to manage them. Middle-sized Sharvesh could easily fight her own way through storms with just one pair of steady hands to guide her. And for now, everybody else on board was either still sleeping or absorbed in quiet occupations below decks. Even Harold, who spent most of his days trying to tame the scarred wyvern following their progress, was nowhere to be seen.

  Amelia, numb to the cold and caring only that she was alone, stood locked deep in thought. It had been a month since she’d spurned the cursed Dragon Prince and given up her chance to be Queen of the Dragon Lands. A month since Sharvesh and her passengers had fled the devastated place where the Flying City of Ilgrevnia had vanished, taking the prince with it. In the privacy of her own head, Amelia recited the words of a spell she’d never tried before. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself performing the precise hand gestures which would channel magic through her body. For now, she had her many conjuring rings stowed safely in the left-hand pocket of her skirt so that she didn’t accidentally trigger the magic before she was ready, for her timing and pronunciation must be flawless on the first attempt. In her right-hand pocket, kept carefully apart from the conjuring rings just in case, a small glass globe held a miniature fairy tale palace whirled about with snow. It weighed heavy: it was no ordinary snow globe. A month ago Amelia had copied out the words from an ancient and mysterious book, and folded the notes into the back cover of her own spell book so that she could commit the words to memory at her leisure, a task that had already taken her far too long. She didn’t know where the mysterious book had come from; didn’t entirely trust the individual who had given it to her; didn’t know what dangers the spell might hold for a careless or unskilled witch. She knew only that she must use it. An innocent girl was trapped in another world. Rose. Amelia frowned: amongst her travelling companions she counted a knight and two bodyguards supposedly fit for a queen. Three so-called gentlemen, all virtually made for rescuing damsels in distress, but they didn’t care. Amelia couldn’t lay all the blame at their feet, though: if she’d taken her opportunity to marry the dragon prince it would have put an end to the dangerous contest she’d been thrust into… but instead she'd banished him to another world, along with his city in the clouds. Really, it was Amelia’s fault Rose had been left behind in Ilgrevnia just before it vanished. And then, to top it all off, when she'd told her companions she wanted to mount a rescue expedition, they'd laughed. Poor Amelia, too soft-hearted by half. Disgusted with the lot of them, Amelia had made up her mind to take on the mantle of rescuer by herself…

  “Good morning, daydreamer,” Meg called across the deck. “I thought you’d still be snoring.”

  Amelia shook her head. She’d had trouble sleeping ever since she’d almost been pulled into that other world herself, unprepared and with no means of escape. She’d dived off the Flying City on a broomstick, a thousand feet in the air, just to escape that fate.

  “What’s all this?” said Meg, plucking at Amelia’s long blonde tresses, which ran through her hands like silk. “No braids today?”

  Annoyed, Amelia pulled back her hair, immediately beginning to twist it into tight braids. She still wasn’t used to this. Meg was her mother, but more or less on a technicality, since she hadn’t acted much like it until just recently – she’d been absent for most of Amelia’s life. The fat little witch, with her round spectacles and curly hair, didn’t even look that much like Amelia. And of course, Meg too had abandoned the damsel in distress Rose to her fate: ‘She wanted to marry a dragon – let her live with the consequences.’

  “Excuse me, I’m going to study,” said Amelia primly. “By myself.” And she stomped off to seek solitude and privacy below decks.

  All the cabins were decorated in carved dark red wood and ivory, with yellow cushions embroidered in gold thread. A living ‘ship, Sharvesh liked to be stroked, patted and admired, and while this in itself didn’t surprise Ame
lia half as much as it would have done only a year ago, what did surprise her was the way the skyship had reconfigured herself to provide bunks for seven passengers. Sharvesh had even made this individual cabin just for Amelia so that she had somewhere to retreat to the solitude she’d been used to at home, and still the skyship could fold and unfold hidden compartments of surprising riches – Sharvesh made a good merchant ship if only for her ability to hide jewels, fine wine, tea, and magical artefacts in places where thieves could never even look for them. Her captain had told them the story of how a band of pirates had been foolish enough to board Sharvesh once, and how the fiercely loyal ‘ship had disposed of them, just as soon as she was sure that the captain was safely out of the way of her crushing walls. When she'd finished, she'd left nothing of the pirates, not even bloodstains. That story hadn’t helped Amelia sleep any easier.

  She placed a saucer on the writing desk underneath the porthole, and forced a smile at her tame fire sprite in his golden cage, flashing and sparkling cheerful green at the sight of her. “Yellow flames now, Stupid,” she said. “Let’s do things properly, shall we?” Then she stretched out her fingers before putting her conjuring rings back on one by one. She could have practiced her new spell for walking through locked doors, particularly as she only had permission to practice fire spells off the stern of the skyship, where if they went wrong they could drift harmlessly away in the wake. Still, she’d become rather skilled at containing the flames by this stage, so she didn’t see the harm in summoning them in a saucer when nobody was looking. As long as she concentrated, she could even produce fire in natural, sensible colours. Apple-green flames were all well and good for a healthy, happy fire sprite, but other witches would poke fun at Amelia if she couldn’t master such a simple spell. She had to be a good witch: only her magic would enable her to carry out her rescue mission. But the yellow flames flickered to an eye-watering shade of pink as a memory intruded on her concentration: