Dealing with Dragons - Wrede Patricia Collins - Страница 28

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George started killing dragons right away, and Art went straight home and pulled some sort of magic sword out of a rock. Even the ones nobody expected to amount to much have done something. All Jack wanted to do was go back to his mother's farm and raise beans, and he ended up stealing a magic harp and killing a giant and all sorts of things. I'm the only one who hasn't succeeded."

"Why not?"

The stone prince sighed again. "I don't know. At first it seemed as if I wouldn't have any trouble finding a king to serve. Every time there was a war, both kings asked me to lead their armies, and every king for miles around who'd lost his throne to a usurper sent a messenger to my father's court. It should have been simple, Only they were always so worried about whether I was going to side with their enemies that it was easier not to pick anyone."

"I see," said Cimorene. Privately she thought that the stone prince had been rather wishy-washy.

Some of her opinion must have crept into her tone because the stone prince nodded glumly. "You're right. It was a mistake. As long as I didn't pick a king to serve, all the messengers and ambassadors and envoys stayed, hoping to persuade me. The inns around the castle were stuffed with them.

It got to the point where I couldn't show my face without at least three of them pouncing on me.

"Finally I couldn't stand it any more, and I ran away. It was a relief at first, not having everyone hovering over me waiting for me to do something great. But after a while I started feeling uncomfortable.

Then I realized that even if nobody around me expected me to do anything special in the service of a king, I expected me to do something.

"I was so flustered that I ran up to the next palace I saw and asked whether the king needed any services done. It turned out that he was ill, and his doctors had told him that the only thing that would cure him was a drink of the Water of Healing from the Caves of Fire and Night. So I left to get it at once."

"So that's what you were doing!" Cimorene said.

The stone prince gave her another gloomy nod. "I should have known better. That king had three sons, and the first two had already gone off to get the water and failed. Anyone with sense would have seen that the youngest son was the one who would succeed; it sticks out all over. But I was too eager to do my great service and get it over with, and I didn't stop and "What happened?"

"It took me a long time to find the Caves of Fire and Night, but once I did, it wasn't hard to find the Water of Healing. The chamber's getting crowded. All the princes who've tried to get the water and failed have been turned into slabs of rock."

"I know. I've seen them," Cimorene said. "Watch out for your head; the ceiling is low along here."

"Then you know what it's like, and you've seen the two dippers on the wall by the spring." The stone prince's shoulders sagged. "I knew I should use the tin one. It was one of the first things we learned at school. But I thought it wouldn't do any harm if I just looked at the gold one, so I took it off the wall. And as soon as I touched it, I started to stiffen up."

"Um," said Cimorene. The stone prince was obviously well aware of how foolishly he had behaved. She saw no reason to make him feel worse by pointing it out to him again.

"So I stuck my arm in the spring," the prince said.

"You stuck your arm-oh, I see! That was clever," Cimorene said.

"Do you really think so?" the stone prince asked anxiously. "I thought that since the water from the spring is going to turn all the slabs of stone back into princes when someone finally succeeds in the quest, then the water ought to keep me from turning into a slab of stone in the first place.

Only it didn't work the way I expected," he finished disconsolately.

"I can see that," Cimorene said. "But at least you can still do things. It would be much worse to have to lie there waiting for the right prince to come along and break the spell."

"I wouldn't have had to lie there very long," the stone prince said.

"That king's youngest son is going to arrive any day now, I just know it.

Anyway, if I were a slab of stone, I wouldn't know about it until it was all over and I'd been turned back into a prince again."

"How do you know?" Cimorene demanded. "Have you ever been a stone slab?"

The stone prince looked startled. "No, I haven't. I never thought of that."

"Well, start thinking now," Cimorene said tartly. "Here's the service room. Wait here for me, and don't go wandering off if I'm late getting back.

I don't know how long this errand is going to take, and it would be very awkward for me if the dragons found you roaming through their tunnels."

"I'll remember," the stone prince promised. "But what do I do if someone comes in?"

"Duck into the banquet area," Cimorene said, showing him. "And if someone comes in there, too, curl up in the corner and pretend you're a rock."

"All right," the prince said doubtfully.

Cimorene did not like leaving him, but she was even less enthusiastic about taking him to see Roxim. Roxim probably wouldn't object to the prince himself, though Cimorene suspected that there might have been some difficulty over his proposed theft of the Water of Healing. But explaining everything to the gray-green dragon would take hours. Roxim was nice, but he tended to take a simple view of things, and the prince's situation was anything but simple. So Cimorene gave the prince one more warning, just to make sure he understood, and started off toward Roxim's cave to finish her errand.

The shortcut to Roxim's worked just as well as Cimorene had hoped, and she even made up some of the time she had lost earlier. Roxim was in, too.

She could hear the scraping of his scales as he moved around inside.

She stepped up to the entrance of the cave and called, "Dragon Roxim!"

Something round and shiny flew through the air, missing Cimorene by inches. It hit the wall of the tunnel with a loud clang and slid rattling to the floor. Cimorene jumped.

"Roxim!" she shouted at the top of her lungs.

"What's this?" the dragon said, poking his nose out of the cave entrance. "I am Cimorene, princess to the dragon Kazul, and I offer you greetings and good fortune in all your endeavors." Cimorene thought it best to be particularly polite, in case Roxim were in a bad mood. She suspected he might be. In her experience, someone in a good mood did not throw things at visitors.

"Very good," Roxim said. "Nice to see you again and all that, but I haven't got time for visitors at the moment. Sorry."

"I'm not a visitor, exactly. Kazul sent me with a message for you."

"Oh, well, that's different. Just hand me that shield there, would you?"

Cimorene picked up the shield from the floor of the tunnel. There was a large dent in one side where it had hit the tunnel wall, and several smaller ones over the rest of it from banging against things on its way to the tunnel floor.

"You ought to be more careful," she said severely. 'Just look at this?"

"Ha!" Roxim snorted, examining the dents. "Shoddy work, shoddy work, that's the problem. In my day, you could roll a knight in full armor down the far side of the Vanishing Mountain and bounce him off two or three cliffs without so much as scratching his surface, much less denting it.

This cheap modern stuff just doesn't hold up."

"If you know it doesn't hold up, you shouldn't throw it around like that," Cimorene said. "You almost hit me."

Roxim shifted uncomfortably. "Sorry. Didn't mean anything by it."

"All right, but next time look before you throw things," Cimorene said, handing him the shield.

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