Handbook for Dragon Slayers (18 page)

“Very.”

I frowned. I watched the handmaidens, trying to remember exactly what it was I had been planning to do that day. “Can you send my servant Judith to me?”

“She's resting.”

“Can I see my friend, Lord Parzifal?”

“He's also resting.”

“Perhaps my confessor, Father Ripertus, could come to visit me?”

“He is”—she paused—“
resting
.”

“Could I have my saddlebags?”

Frau Dagmar shrugged. “I don't see why not. I'll bring them to you. If you—”

“If I what?”

She spun the keys around, then caught them in her fist. “If you promise not to mention to Sir Egin that you have them.”

“Am I not supposed to have them?”

The handmaidens had paused in their work and stared at Frau Dagmar. Now she jangled her keys at them again, and they scurried back to action.

“Why is the door always locked?” I asked.

Frau Dagmar whipped her ring of keys at one of the handmaidens, just missing her. “Get out of here, you two! Out! And never speak of this!” They ran, and she kicked the door shut behind her.

She stared at me, eyes burning. “I am not your jailer, Lady,” she said. “Remember that. No matter what happens, remember that.”

I stared at her, frightened. I wasn't even certain what I'd said. “I'm sorry,” I said.

Now she stared at me pityingly. “You seem smarter than the others,” she said. “But not by much.”

I frowned. “I'm smart enough,” I said.

“Oh? And how did you get imprisoned in Thorn Edge, then, if you're so smart?”

I opened my mouth to object that I wasn't imprisoned! But then I thought about it. I thought about the locked door, and how I hadn't seen Parz or Judith or Father Ripertus since we'd arrived, and my dizziness, and her keys.

Thinking about it was like wading through honey.

“I wasn't brought here against my will,” I said slowly. “But . . . I can't leave, can I?”

“No,” Frau Dagmar said. “And you're not the only one who can't leave.”

“My friends? They're imprisoned, too?”

“Well, they
are
,” she said. “But that's not what I'm saying. There are many prisoners here.”

I squinted at her. What did she mean?

“You—you're a prisoner, too?” I asked.

“I—I—” She started to speak, but the words seemed to strangle her. She clutched her throat.

I stared at her and clutched my throat too, trying to figure out what was happening to her. My fingers reached for my horsetail necklace but didn't find it. I'd forgotten to put it back on.

“Shouldn't have spoken,” Frau Dagmar wheezed, her face turning purple. “God have mercy on you, maiden!” She staggered over to where her key ring had landed and fell to her knees when she bent to pick it up. She dragged herself upright and heaved herself out the door. “Remember what I said!” she croaked. “I am not your jailer!”

I stared at the closed door for a long moment.

The key turned in the lock.

I blinked. When was Sir Egin going to visit?

I
SPENT THE NEXT
quarter hour looking for my horsetail necklace, and found it half under my bed.

I put it on.

Immediately, it felt like I had uncrossed my eyes. Or surfaced from rinsing my hair too long in the bath. Or stopped holding my breath until spots hovered in my vision.

Sir Egin was wooing me. Sir Egin intended me to be his eighth wife.

And probably—one had to assume—he was going to kill me.

Because a man didn't just end up widowed seven times over. Not one as young as Sir Egin. He had to be killing them. But why?

I paced the tower room, tried the door a few times, and wondered what was being done to my friends.

When Frau Dagmar brought me my dinner, I asked, “You've served at Thorn Edge for a long time, have you?”

“All my life. Sir Egin hasn't always been master here, though.”

“You've probably seen a lot of weeping maidens at the castle since him.”

“Most don't weep. Most are pleased to marry him. He's a charmer. The only ones who weep are the ones who haven't met him yet. You'll see.”

I shivered. It was bad enough to dread the marriage, to dread my likely death; it was worse to dread the thought that I might welcome it.

“I hope I won't see,” I said, and my finger traced the line of my necklace.

“I didn't bring your bags,” Frau Dagmar said. “I didn't have a chance.”

I shrugged. It had been a lot to hope for. The
Handbook
would have been a nice distraction; as it was, I was nearly going out of my mind with worry. I was going to be married and killed soon. And I had no idea whatsoever what was happening to my friends. I was afraid to ask after them.

I paced the room, looking for weaknesses. I thought of a hundred ways to escape, and a thousand reasons none of them would work. The biggest problem was this room. The door was too thick, too well made; and the hinges were on the other side. The windows were impossible—even a baby wouldn't have been able to slide out those narrow slits.

I would ask for the liberty of the grounds, then, and see if I could figure out a way to climb over a wall. Or maybe there was someone I could bribe. Or maybe—

Maybe it didn't matter, until I got out of the room.

I paced some more, until my foot tired.

I had absolutely nothing else to do. Nothing to read. Nothing to write on—not permanently, anyway. I might have asked for some sewing, but by God, I wasn't going to thank Thorn Edge for my imprisonment by supplying them with darned stockings. Pretending I wanted to sew might give me some weapons . . . well. Sewing needles. They were probably too smart to leave me scissors.

I gave up on sewing and counted the boats plying the Rhine.

That grew boring in short order, so I practiced my penmanship with a splinter from the kindling and soot from the fireplace, on the surface of the small table in my room. I'd write out rows of even letters in perfect minuscule. My favorite practice was writing out the declension of
minimus
:
minimus, minimī, minimō, minimum, minimō, minime
. . . . The pattern of the downstrokes in the
m
's and
n
's and
i
's was soothing and regular.

It was a strange way to wait for one's doom, I knew, but what choice did I have? I couldn't seem to pray. I could tear my hair, weep, and cry. But that wasn't in my character. I was a princess. Every time I was tempted to cry, I thought of new words to practice writing in soot.

Mostly, I tried not to think of Parz or Judith or Alder Brook, and how badly I was failing them.

It was easier that way.

O
NCE MORE
, S
IR
E
GIN
seemed less handsome, though his hair was still as bright and he was still as tall. His pleasant appearance in the doorway of my chamber didn't make me like him any better, though.

His smile was full of toothy charm, and he bowed gracefully to me. “A pleasure to see you again, Agilwarda,” he said.

“I'm too young to marry you,” I said bluntly.

“On the contrary! Girls your age get married all the time, and to men much older than me.”

“The contracts may be signed between men and girls in those situations, but we both know that the marriages are not true ones until the girl is older,” I said. “And I don't think that waiting is your intention, since you'll just kill me in the end, like the rest of your wives.”

Sir Egin's charming smile twisted into an expression cruel, cynical, and deeply entertained.

“Further,” I said, “I do not consent to this marriage.”

“I already have consent, Mathilda,” he said, reaching inside his purse to pull out a scroll that dangled with seals. “Straight from your cousin's hand.”

My jaw dropped. “You know my name.”

“I know your name,” he agreed. “After we met for the second time, on the ferryboat, and you were so frightened of the man you saw, I took the time to discover who you were. . . . Imagine my surprise when I visited Alder Brook and met your cousin—he so easily consented to our impetuous marriage! It seems he finds you inconvenient.”

“Our ‘impetuous' marriage—and when is that going to take place?”

“It's lucky to marry at the dark of the moon,” he said. “Just a few days before Christmas. It is the perfect day for our wedding.”

“I've never heard that the dark of the moon was lucky before.” I frowned, perplexed. What was this game?

“You're very young,” Sir Egin said. “You've not heard of a lot of things.”

And he left.

Once he was gone, I practically fell onto the bed, deflated and defeated.

F
RAU
D
AGMAR BROUGHT MY
saddlebags the next day.

“Oh—thank you!” I exclaimed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. . . .” I pawed through the first one, and then the second, looking for the
Handbook
. It wasn't there. “There's something missing,” I said.

She shrugged.

“Why aren't you speaking?” I asked.

“He can't take all my words,” she said. “Just the—” and she stopped with an abrupt choking noise. She coughed for a long moment, then tapped her throat with her forefinger. “Just the important ones.”

“I'm missing a book,” I said. “Smallish, handbook-sized . . .”

“A book,” she said. “You're a reader, then?”

“Of course.”

She shrugged. “Haven't seen a book. Sorry.”

After she left, I went through the saddlebags again, hoping against hope that I'd find the
Handbook
folded into a dress or something. But there was nothing.

I kicked the bags and sat back down at my table, disgusted and annoyed.

I thought about the croaking and choking when Frau Dagmar was about to say certain things. “He can't take all my words.” Was she was under a spell? Did Sir Egin have that kind of sorcery at his command?

What had he done to Judith, Parz, and Ripertus to keep them quiet and subdued—the same spell? Or set of spells? I thought about my behavior the first night, how I had accepted so many things he'd said, and not thought twice about things that had seemed so urgent. . . . It had been like a fog cast over my mind. How much time had passed in that fog, before I—?

In the distance, I heard a neigh like a silver trumpet. It wasn't terribly far. It was within the castle.

Joyeuse.

I had to get to Joyeuse.

I leaped out of bed, stumbled on my bad foot, regained my balance, and tried the door. Just in case.

Locked.

I went back to bed and put my head on my knees, threading the long horsetail necklace through my fingers.

I lifted my head and stared at the necklace.

Could it be the
necklace
that stopped Sir Egin's enchantments?

“
T
ELL ME AGAIN THE STORY OF HOW YOU TRAPPED
the metal horses,” Egin demanded the next day.

I deliberately set the necklace down on the bed beside me, to where my hand would naturally fall if it weren't in my lap. Then I laced my fingers together and looked at Sir Egin.

I smiled fatuously at him, suddenly so pleased to be in his company. “It was Saint Martin's Eve. We were sleeping in a barn up in the vineyards. We heard a great roaring noise, and the whole barn began to shake—”

“Skip to the horses. What did you do to the horses to make them notice you?”

I couldn't stop smiling. “I stopped them from trying to kill Judith,” I said. I felt like the world was blurry behind him, and he was the only thing truly visible to me. “When we are married, will this still be my bedroom?”

“What? No. Tell me about the iron bridles again.”

“Well, I wanted to take the bridle off, and so I asked Judith how, and she told me how, and then I took it off—” My hand dropped to the shiny necklace that lay beside me on the bed. Immediately, the sense of blurriness faded. I shook my head. “And I—and eventually I—sorry, what was I saying?” I clutched the necklace and decided I was done with the experiment.

“About the iron bridle,” Egin said through gritted teeth.

“Right. You know, being trapped in this room is bad for my leg.”

He ignored that. “When you met the other horses of the Wild Hunt, did they seem interested in you?”

“I'm going to limp a lot on our wedding day if I don't get some time to walk outside.”

“I don't particularly care about your foot,” he said.

From any other bridegroom, that might have sounded loving.

He pounded his fists together, knuckle to knuckle, then lifted them to his mouth and bit them. I stared at him. “Tell me about the Hunt,” he whispered.

“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “it's hard to remember it all when my foot hurts so badly from inactivity.”

“I would have thought inactivity was the proper treatment for your foot,” he said.

“Not according to Sister Hildegard,” I said, which was mostly true.

He smiled. “Fine. I grant you the freedom of the inner garden for two hours a day. Enjoy it. It's about to snow.”

“Thank you,” I said with quiet calm, as though my heart did not sing at the thought of being closer to freedom.

“Now. Tell me about the Wild Hunt. Tell me about the Hunt leader.”

Emboldened by my success, I added, “I also want to talk to my confessor, on my walk.”

“Gaugh! Fine!
Tell me about the Hunter
.”

So I told him. Again. His face was closed and scowling, no matter what I said. I couldn't figure out what details he really wanted to focus on, or why, but he'd had me talk about my meeting with the Hunter more than any other part.