“I told you, Your Majesty!” cried Miss Ellicott, as she and the king and the others fled.
The dragon crashed around the room. He smashed into the walls, splintering beams and sending chips of red and golden paint flying. Then he landed. He paced over to Chantel’s cage, claws clacking on the tile floor. He sat on his haunches, rather like a cat, his ridged tail curled around his feet.
He was golden and alive and beautiful, and his eyes flickered like deep orange flames.
Chantel was afraid, but not in a bad way. Not the kind of fear you feel when you face something terrible, but the kind you feel when it’s time to leave your old life behind, take an enormous leap, and hope you land on something.
“J-Japheth?” she whispered.
There were certain things that were the same. A way of tilting the head and flicking the tongue. The shape of the head around the eyes. Those told her that this enormous, fire-breathing dragon had been her little green snake Japheth.
He extended a claw and beckoned.
“I’m stuck in here,” said Chantel.
The dragon opened his mouth several times, his forked tongue struggling. It seemed he was trying to talk. But his throat and his mouth weren’t built for it.
“Come out,” he managed at last, rasping. If metal—gold, perhaps—could talk, its voice might sound like that.
Chantel examined the spell that had made the cage. It was complicated. It used the power and magic of each of the sorceresses. There was no way a lone magician could undo it.
“I can’t come out,” said Chantel, casting an anxious look at the closed doors through which the king and the sorceresses had vanished. “These bars burn.”
The dragon snaked his tail around and held it over one of the bars. Like a jet of water when you stick your hand in it, the bar of light stopped shooting upward, and sputtered every which way.
“Just a minute,” said Chantel.
There was no point in leaving the cakes and tarts behind. She bundled them in her handkerchief.
The dragon laid his tail across several bars. Droplets of fire splattered. Chantel winced as one hit her in the hand. She seized her robes and her bundle tightly and half-leapt, half-stumbled through the gap. She tripped over the dragon’s tail and fell sprawling. Her left leg had a stinging burn. Her hair smelled singed.
Footsteps rang behind the double doors. “I heard something,” said a voice.
Chantel scrambled to her feet and ran toward the hallway where she’d come in. She felt a jerk at her robes. The dragon had caught her with his teeth.
“’is way!” he said, around a mouthful of cloth.
“The way out is this way!” said Chantel, struggling.
The dragon made a growling sound in his throat and tugged. Chantel tried to pull free. The dragon held fast.
The door opened, and several men entirely dressed in iron clanked into the room, their faces obscured by iron helms.
“She got out!” cried one of them, in Prince George’s voice.
The iron men rushed at her. Chantel frantically started doing signs for an adhesion spell to stick their feet to the floor.
The dragon seized Chantel in his claws and took flight.
They flew around and around the room, dizzyingly. Chantel’s feet dangled just a few feet from the floor. She was still trying to do the adhesion spell. The dragon’s claws on her shoulders hurt. The prince grabbed at Chantel’s leg, and she kicked, struggling. Then someone grabbed the hem of her robe.
The dragon faltered in his flight, tottered, and brushed against the wall. Furiously Chantel tore at her robe and kicked, trying to get rid of the man holding her.
The dragon surged upward. There was a jarring crash that made Chantel’s teeth rattle. The stupid dragon had flown right into the ceiling!
And through it. There was a fury of plaster dust and tumbling bricks. The man who’d been clinging to Chantel’s robes was suddenly shaken loose, and Chantel heard him scream as he fell.
Then Chantel and the dragon were out in the bright blue world, sailing free. They soared high over the city, and out over the Roughlands, where the Sunbiter army was an anthill beneath them.
Then Chantel and the dragon sailed over the wide gray sea.
Have we misunderstood?
Is she not the girl we think she is?
That dragon was real.
That was no illusion. It breathed fire. It carried her, and it flew.
Of course it was real.
But the girl has fled.
She is not ours. She has broken free.
She
is
a
storm.
Nonsense. No human ever really breaks free. Certainly no girl. What are we without the rules and walls that contain us?
No one would want to live like that.
Yes, yes, that is all very well. But she, the girl Chantel Goldenrod, has broken free.
With the dragon, mind you. I think she will probably die.
And if she dies, that is no help to us at all.
16
IN WHICH CHANTEL SEES FROM VARIOUS POINTS OF VIEW
The dragon flapped down just low enough to set Chantel on a rock in the sea. For a moment she stood and gasped, catching her breath.
Then she looked at where she was. A brown ripple of stone, rising just a few feet out of the sea.
Waves crashed against the rock, sending up spouts of white water that splatted down almost at her feet, then slid away.
The dragon was high above her, flying around in joyful spirals and loop-de-loops. Then he dropped into a wide, wide circle, swept once around the sky, and glided toward the horizon.
Chantel watched in dismay as he became a smaller and smaller dot in the distance. She looked down at the bundle of cakes still clutched in her hand. She looked toward Lightning Pass, a barely visible toy city on a thin arc of land. Even the mountains climbing behind it looked small.
She jumped up and down and waved her arms. “Help! I’m stuck on this rock out here!”
No one heard her, of course. She hardly heard herself above the smashing waves.
There were small pools of water in hollows on the rock. Chantel dipped her finger in one and tasted the water. Yech. Salt. There was no fresh water here. There was no anything.
Maybe the dragon had thought she could swim.
Or hadn’t really thought about her at all.
A fog rolled in.
It hung low on the ocean, obscuring the land and then even the sea. Soon Chantel was completely enveloped in pearl-gray mist. She could hear the waves around her, and feel droplets of seawater splashing her skin, but she couldn’t see anything.
What if she jumped into the water? Maybe she would discover that she really could swim. But then a particularly strong wave smashed against the rock and splatted into her face, and she decided not to try just yet.
Maybe later. When she started to get thirsty.
Immediately, she started to get thirsty.
The important thing was not to panic, she told herself. You couldn’t make a rational plan when you were panicking.
Especially not when you were standing on a rock, invisible, surrounded by ocean, and nobody even knew where you were.