“You?” The queen smiled. “I’m sure you weren’t.”
Chantel knew she ought to have felt horrible; she had failed at deportment so badly that she had welcomed a snake and caused a dragon. Miss Ellicott had done no such thing. Miss Ellicott had dismissed the snake, and gone from being shamefast and biddable to being proper and correct.
Chantel failed to feel horrible.
“He grew in your head,” said the queen. “And this means that until his next incarnation, he is under certain constraints.”
“Constraints?”
“He won’t do anything you wouldn’t do,” said the queen.
“But I wouldn’t fly or breathe fire!”
The queen made a dismissive gesture. “Of course you would, if you could. And you, of course, have been changed by the dragon. I can see that quite clearly from here.”
Chantel pressed her lips together to keep from making an angry retort. The queen was talking in riddles when Chantel needed plain answers.
“You are becoming a Mage of the Dragon,” said Queen Haywith. “But it is a difficult journey, and it is easy to fail along the way, as—”
As you did, Chantel didn’t say.
“—as your Miss Ellicott appears to have done.”
At this point Chantel actually did forget herself so far as to sigh in exasperation.
The queen smiled. “You are more concerned with your immediate situation.”
Chantel was immediately embarrassed. Belatedly, she offered the queen a cake.
“No, thank you,” said the queen. “I am not quite here, you know. Besides, you may need them. Lightning is not a poor host, except that he himself eats only every year or two, and he forgets that humans are different.
“In fact,” said the queen, “he tends to take a long view, which is often rather useless to us humans.”
“Like leaving me on a rock and forgetting the tide would come in,” said Chantel.
“Precisely. So, you will return to the city, and there you feel you must choose between two equally distasteful powers?”
“Yeah.” Chantel sat down at the table, put an elbow on it, and leaned on her hand, then remembered herself hastily and folded her hands in her lap. “Yes. The patriarchs are power-hungry and deceitful, and the king is just the same. I’m sorry,” she added hastily. “I didn’t mean to speak ill of your family.”
“My family? The king? It’s possible.” The queen shrugged. “After five hundred years, it’s equally possible that you are my family. You must realize I have no idea who this king is.”
“King Rathfest the Restless,” said Chantel.
“Indeed?” said the queen, without much interest. “And is he?”
“Is he . . . oh, restless, you mean? I’m not sure. Maybe. He seems to actually want to be king,” said Chantel. “And I guess he might have killed his cousins who were kings before him. No one really dies of lettuce, do they?”
“Only in the most unusual circumstances.”
“Hm.”
“Well, I can’t advise you about the king, except in a general way. I can advise you to set little store by what men say, and much by what they do. Women too. What do you think you should do, Chantel?”
“What’s best for the city,” said Chantel. “I said that to the dragon, and it seemed like he thought that was the right answer. But you said that was too small.”
“The city cannot survive alone. And even if it could, mere survival is not enough to offer to the world.”
“Oh,” said Chantel.
“Now, what are you fighting against?”
“The Sunbiters,” said Chantel promptly.
The queen dabbled a hand in the water. “I would have expected you to say, ‘Anything that can hurt my people.’”
Chantel looked down at her hands, as she always did when she got a question wrong. “Yeah. I mean yes. I mean that is what I meant.”
The queen looked at her impassively, not answering. The dragon let out a loud snore, and two orange-pink puffs rose from his nostrils.
“Which I guess . . .” Chantel stopped, and thought.
Still the queen said nothing.
“The patriarchs are hurting the people,” Chantel explained. “Just to make money and have power. And the king doesn’t really intend to help. He just wants money and power himself.”
“That is so often the case,” said Queen Haywith unhelpfully.
“That question that I asked you before . . .” Chantel trailed off uncertainly.
“What question was that?”
“Um, well, the one you didn’t like very much.”
“You’ll have to remind me.” The queen was clearly not going to make this any easier.
“Um, about breaking a vow.”
The queen’s dark eyes sparked. “I have taken only one vow in my life.”
“Would—would you mind telling me what the exact words were?”
“‘By the power of the dragon, I swear to protect the city of Lightning Pass and its people from any force, within or without, that may harm it,’” said the queen.
Obviously the queen had broken the vow, but it wouldn’t do to rub it in. “So. I . . . I think I should go and check on the girls and Bowser. And Miss Flivvers,” said Chantel.
“You may be arrested.”
“Well, what would you do?” said Chantel.
“I would establish a position of strength. And then I would try to gather as much information as possible,” said the queen. “Does that help?”
Chantel thought about it. She was in a position of strength. And the books in the library were information. It was possible that— “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem,” said the queen graciously. “And now I really think I’d better be going.”
She skirted the edge of the pool and stepped into the stream. Then she sloshed away down the dark tunnel.
“Oh, and Chantel.” The queen’s voice echoed weirdly from the tunnel. “Don’t forget—at the third summoning a price will be exacted. Good luck.”
Then she was gone.
Chantel did not go back to sleep. She paced around the library and thought. She took books down from the shelves and piled them on a table. She paced some more.
There was no escaping it: if Queen Haywith was telling the truth, then having had a snake in her head made Chantel more like Queen Haywith than like Miss Ellicott.
Well, Chantel could still make choices. And she could be more like Chantel than either of them.
She went back to the dragon’s chamber and found that Franklin was just waking up and the dragon had opened one orange eye.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’m going to go back to the school and check on the girls, and Bowser.”
“King,” said the dragon drowsily.
“I’ll try not to get caught by him,” said Chantel. “Franklin, there’s something I’d like you to do, please.”
She took him into the library and showed him her stacks of books. “Can you read through these, please, and see if there’s anything about Queen Haywith? I especially want to know how she opened a breach in the walls, and what happened to her afterward. How she”—Chantel hesitated, because it seemed a strange thing to say about someone she’d just been talking to—“died.”
“I—” Franklin began, then stopped.