The sun reflected off a plane of water covering the lower city.
“What about the drains and culverts?” Chantel wondered aloud. It always rained hard in Lightning Pass—sometimes as hard as it had rained today—but the drainage system sent everything out to sea.
The dragon glided down into Bannister Square. People scrambled to get out of his way, yelling and stumbling, their bundles tumbling.
Chantel dismounted to pick up a fallen child. A woman came running to claim it.
“What’s happened in the lower city?” Chantel asked.
The woman chuddered with fear. “Flood, Dragon Girl.”
“Why don’t they open the city gates and let the water out?” Chantel asked. “That would force back the attackers with the battering ram too.”
“The city gates don’t open,” said a bearded man carrying what looked like part of a sawmill on his back.
“Of course they open,” said Chantel. “I mean, I know they’re usually closed, but if they didn’t open, we wouldn’t have—”
“Oh, I see now dragons fall from the sky and girls correct men,” said the sawyer. “Excuse me. I should have realized the world had turned upside down.”
And he stalked off with his sawmill bits. The woman with the child turned and fled.
“But why doesn’t the water drain away?” Chantel asked the empty square.
Later, back in the cave, she asked the same question of Anna, as they worked together to invent octopus stew. This involved figuring out which parts of the octopus were to eat and which parts weren’t, and lighting a fire with broken furniture and dried seaweed, and filling the cave with a steamy octopus-scented fug which Chantel was sure would hang around for days.
“The drains must not be working,” said Anna, ladling up octopus stew for one of the smaller girls. “No really, you’ll like it,” she told the child. “Well, at least try it. Well, you can’t be that hungry if you won’t try it.”
All of this was said in the same patient, calm tones. Chantel felt an urge to bop the whiny child with an octopus tentacle, but she overcame it. “All of the drains at once? And the city gates?”
“Do the city gates open inward?” said Anna.
“Only if the architects are stupid,” said Franklin, wiping up octopus stew that one of the little girls had knocked over. “In a defensive wall, the gates open outward.”
“So the walls cracked, the drains and culverts sealed up, and so did the gate,” said Anna. “All of that happened when they did the spell.”
“Maybe it was because they weren’t doing the real Buttoning,” said Chantel.
“It was because they did the Buttoning without you,” said Anna.
“Without me?” Chantel was astonished. “They’ve always done it without me!”
“But you weren’t a dragonbound sorceress before,” said Anna.
“I’m not a sorceress at all!”
“But you are dragonbound,” said Anna pedantically. “And according to the books, when there is a dragonbound sorceress, also called a Mage of the Dragon, no great working can be done unless she has a hand in it. The Buttoning must be a great working.”
Chantel cautiously tasted a bit of octopus. It was just as she’d expected . . . rubbery. And salty and fishy and . . . rubbery. She disagreed with Anna. You could probably be quite hungry and not want to eat octopus.
I was helping the sorceresses, she thought. I was trying to summon that circle, whatever it is. I was probably helping wrong.
So the Buttoning had gone wrong because of Chantel. It was completely unfair. What was she supposed to do, anyway? “Can I fix it?”
“I don’t know,” said Anna.
“If the sorceresses did the spell again, and I helped them—”
“I’m not sure how you’re supposed to help exactly,” said Anna.
“Oh.” Chantel imagined a blood sacrifice, with herself in the starring role.
“I kind of think dragonbound sorceresses don’t ‘help’ so much as take control,” said Anna.
The sorceresses had put Chantel in a cage. This did not suggest a willingness to let her take control.
“Well, at least we sealed the cracks in the walls,” Chantel said.
“How?” said Anna.
“With fire,” said Chantel. “Lightning breathed flames on the cracks in the wall, and fused the stone where the Sunbiters were trying to pry it apart, and—what?” she demanded of Franklin, who was staring at her.
“Fusing stone doesn’t strengthen walls,” he said. “It weakens them.”
“How do you know?” said Chantel.
“Everyone knows it,” said Franklin. “Parsifal the Peacemaker used magic fires to seal the walls of his fort, and the marauding Coriscanders were able to pick the wall apart in a matter of weeks using the jawbones of asses.”
This was very depressing news.
“Chantel, I wanted to tell you . . . I’ve found a few things.” Anna led the way to a library table, with several books lying open on it. Silver hairpins and bits of velvet from the dragon’s storeroom were stuck in them for bookmarks.
“This,” said Anna, pointing to a page, “talks about Queen Haywith. She was one of the dragonbound sorceresses. In those days queens were usually sorceresses. All the kings and queens have always taken a vow to defend the city and its people. There are words to it here.” She pointed to a book.
“So that’s the vow she broke?” Chantel remembered how offended the queen had been at the mere suggestion.
“Some people might say so,” said Anna. “In fact, this book says so.” She tapped a page. “I think we have it at school. But this other book here says that what happened was that some of the people wanted to build a wall around the city—”
Chantel remembered her journey into the Ago. “There was no wall in her time.”
“Right. And Queen Haywith refused to have one. She said a wall becomes a wall in the mind, and she wanted no walls for her people. So this book”—Anna reached for another one—“says she broke her vow by refusing to build the wall and then by refusing to abdicate in favor of her son.”
“Then she left the city open to attack,” said Franklin. “She doesn’t sound like a very good queen.”
“She was an excellent queen!” said Chantel hotly, and then stood aside and looked at herself in surprise. When had she decided that?
“She said a wall wasn’t necessary,” said Anna. “She said there was no threat. She used to go out into the marshes—”
“Dressed like a man?” said Chantel.
“It doesn’t say. But she had a house out in the marshes, just an ordinary house, and people would come and talk to her and stuff. People from anywhere.”
“She had a dragon?” said Franklin.
“I saw him,” said Chantel.
“The Swamp Lady,” said Franklin. “I bet that’s who she was. I didn’t know she had a name, though.”
“Everyone has a name,” said Anna. “Who was the Swamp Lady?”
“A sorceress, you’d call her,” said Franklin with a shrug. “Very powerful, but she never did any harm. Advised people and stuff.”