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It was beneath the dignity of the King of the Dragons to poke her nose into her Chief Cook’s kitchen too often – or so Cimorene told Kazul when she was trying out new dishes - so the only clues Kazul had as to what Cimorene was doing in there today were the smells, and the noises. Currently the smell was slightly sweet, but nothing distinctive, and the noises were of rattling metal and muttered imprecations. Cimorene, Kazul noted, had been learning a new language; she thought about telling her that her vowels were a little flat for proper Orcish, and then decided that since there hadn’t been any orcs seen in the Mountains of Morning for a good hundred years, it probably didn’t matter.
“Everything all right in there?” she called down the corridor, since the banging and the swearing hadn’t really stopped.
“Fine! Fine,” Cimorene exclaimed, and popped out looking almost guilty; maybe she’d been trying new magic, rather than a new recipe. But usually she liked to talk to Kazul about new magic and new recipes. “I need to go and visit Morwen tomorrow. You’re not going to need me for anything?”
“No, not until the dinner on Wednesday.” Being King involved a lot of talking to other dragons, and they were always much more agreeable after one of Cimorene’s puddings. It was almost better than having a princess to organise the extensive and disorganised royal library, and more than that, a princess who liked organising the library. And a princess Kazul liked to talk to. Really, she was very lucky. “Is it a spell?”
“Is what – oh. Oh, yes, it’s a spell,” Cimorene said. Kazul had trouble with human emotions sometimes because they were on such a small scale, relatively speaking – little twitches of the eyebrows that spoke whole paragraphs when you could interpret them – but she knew Cimorene’s voice very well, and she sounded…oddly relieved. “I thought I had everything I needed, but I don’t.”
“Well, Morwen will be able to sort you out.” Kazul stretched out one wing. “I’m going to visit Roxim; I won’t be back for supper.”
“Alright,” Cimorene said, sounding very cheerful now. “Have fun!”
Kazul was three hundred feet up in the air before she remembered she hadn’t asked Cimorene what the spell was; never mind, she’d ask tomorrow.
As it happened, she entirely forgot to ask Cimorene the next day, because Roxim spent the evening chewing her ear off about a territorial dispute with one of the dwarf kingdoms which Kazul thought could probably be resolved by everybody agreeing to let bygones be bygones, but which Roxim was insistent it was her responsibility as King to sort out. Roxim was getting on these days and had never been much for eating people even in his youth, so Kazul was tempted to let it slide. On the other wing, he had far too many grandchildren – even a few great-grandchildren who were almost large enough to have a gender if they wanted one – and if he didn’t get what he wanted from her then they would all hear about it, and then other people would hear about it, and then she’d have to do something anyway. Being King really was a lot of work. The trouble was, Kazul didn’t trust anybody else to do it properly. And, more to the point, neither had Colin’s Stone.
She assured Roxim that she would look into it. “It depends on what the records say; you know how it is these days. If there’s no enchantment or whatnot on the boundary, I’ll have to go on what’s written down, if we have anything. We have enough trouble with the Society of Wizards without starting squabbles with other people, especially over jewelry that nobody even has anymore.”
“You’ll get Cimorene to look it up, in one of those books, hmmm?” Roxim said. “That’s all very well for some. The last princess I had couldn’t even read Latin. The standards are very low for princesses these days. It’s all embroidery and dancing.”
“Perks of being King,” Kazul said, though of course Cimorene had been with her since before she’d been King.
“As long as she’s not reading any Dwarvish books,” he said sulkily. “If you consult the proper histories you’ll find that I’m quite right. I don’t care what they say about that archer –”
She didn’t make it home before midnight, so the next morning, when she saw Cimorene, the very first thing she asked her was, indeed, whether she could consult the records.
“The main point is over how this battle ended,” Kazul explained. “Roxim’s family claim that there was no agreement; the dwarves are quite certain there was.” Cimorene was grooming – no, brushing her hair, which was very long and had to be braided up out of her way. Princesses, Kazul had been advised by an aunt many years ago, took it badly if you called it ‘grooming’. But really that was what it was.
“You do have a lot of dragon histories,” Cimorene pointed out. “They might just agree with him. I’m sure I remember a few things about dwarves in the Historia Dracorum.”
“It’s hardly as if dragons agree on everything. And it’s the not-dragon ones I’m most interested in, which are the ones you’re most suited to look through.”
“You don’t have to persuade me, it’s part of the job,” Cimorene said, starting to braid her hair. “I’ve been wanting a chance to try out my Elvish, anyway. They do go on, so there’s got to be something from their point of view. But what are you going to do with a history book? Will it go to court? Do dragons have courts? Woraug hardly got a trial.”
Kazul licked her teeth in satisfaction. “Exactly, you’ve seen how these things tend to go. Anyway the dwarves won’t care what the King of the Dragons thinks, or any other dragons. If I can’t find some records to fob Roxim off with then we’d have to have a war.”
“But –” Cimorene sat up very suddenly and her eyes widened, which for humans meant they were alarmed.
“We’re not going to war.” Kazul thought this over. “Unless the wizards are making trouble again. But this doesn’t have anything to do with wizards, so far as I can tell.”
Cimorene frowned. “Are you telling me what sort of records you’d like me to find?”
“No, I’m not going to ask you to lie about it. I’m telling you what I’m going to do, depending on what you find.”
“Good.” Cimorene nodded, very sharply.
“By the way,” Kazul added, “did you get what you needed from Morwen? For your spell.”
“Ah – not quite. But I will,” Cimorene said, adding the last bit hastily, like she didn’t want Kazul to ask any more questions. Kazul wondered what on earth it could be. It was almost like Cimorene was trying to hide something from her. Mostly when princesses did that it was because they had arranged to be rescued, or were planning to run away, but Cimorene had been very clear that she didn’t want to leave.
Hadn’t she?
“That’s good, then,” Kazul said instead of anything else. Cimorene would feel very offended if Kazul suggested she thought Cimorene might run away, after everything, and she would be perfectly right to.
*
Cimorene found Kazul three days later, wearing several smudges of ink on her face. Kazul had never noticed those at first, human faces being so small, until Cimorene had complained that Kazul had let her go off to visit her friend Alianora and not said anything about it, after which she had started making a point to look. They were, Kazul, had learned, a sign that she was working on a difficult problem.
“I’ve hit a dead end,” she said. “There’s four separate references to a work by…” she checked a slip of paper “Hallaned of Merrowglade, but there’s nothing by an author of that name in the library; I know, I re-organized that section over winter. Who else should I go to?”
Kazul thought this over. “Have I introduced you to Prince Cedric yet?”
“He wasn’t the one whose armor I disenchanted last week, was he? Or the one who was supposed to rescue Emily – that’s Zareth’s new princess, I don’t know if you’ve met her – but then he broke his leg in the Swamp of Endless Stench and he still hasn’t come back, Emily is rather annoyed about it.”
“No, no, he’s not a knight,” Kazul harrumphed. “You know how I feel about knights. No, he’s got a very small kingdom three over from Gornul’s princess before last, and he probably would have ended up here making trouble but he had a little run-in with an enchantress a few years ago. She cursed him to be a hideous beast until he could make a maiden fall in love with him and break the spell.”
“Oh, one of those,” Cimorene said. “I do wonder what these enchantresses are thinking. It never seems like a very effective punishment, and really you’re just encouraging them to bother any passing woman. One of my cousins got married that way.”
“If they’re anything like some of the princesses we get, it’s a wonder any of them ever manage to break their curses. Anyway, Cedric is perfectly well-behaved these days, he’s terribly interested in rose-breeding of all things, and what I was trying to say is, he has an excellent library, and a lot of it is history. Morwen borrows books off him sometimes, that’s how I know him in the first place. It’s worth asking him.”
Cimorene lit up immediately at that, well beyond what Kazul would have expected at the offer of another library to consult; Cimorene did have a deep fondness for libraries, but the excitement in her voice was even stronger than usual. “That sounds perfect. Where is it? Do you need to introduce me? I’m sure it’ll be all right if you don’t. Most everybody I meet these days knows about your Chief Cook and Librarian.”
“Melting a few wizards helps word to spread,” Kazul agreed. “I don’t think I need to go, and anyway I have meetings.” She harrumphed unhappily, letting a wisp of flame escape – Cimorene wasn’t bothered by that these days. “You can get there through the Caves of Fire and Night if you go left after the Jewel Hall, then second right into the cave with the blue stalactites –”
“Let me write this down,” Cimorene interrupted her, and took diligent notes.
“Those won’t do you much good when the darkness comes along.”
“You’d send someone if I was away for long enough.” Cimorene frowned at her page, and underlined something with a flourish. “What else do I need to know? Does the Prince have much of a court? Or are they asleep, or turned into furniture, or something like that?”
“Invisible. I think that’s the main reason he worries about having the curse broken at all; it’s not very fair for the servants, being cursed as well. He doesn’t seem to mind being a beast.”
Cimorene chewed on the end of her quill. “Hmmm. Let me think. I could ask Alianora who she knows…princesses are never in short supply around here, really.” She wrinkled her nose. “Though some are nicer than others. I wouldn’t inflict just any old princess on him.”
“The last time I visited there was a young woman around the castle, but I think she was more interested in the roses than in Cedric.”
“Not a princess? Well, that might be better. Merchant’s daughters are really what you want for this sort of enchantment. I’ll see if I can speak with her.”
Kazul suppressed a small laugh. Cimorene never could resist the chance to set somebody’s life straight. And, if she was being honest with herself, it made her feel a little better to know that an enchanted prince with an excellent library didn’t seem to hold any attractions for her. Cimorene was, after all, a princess; Kazul was older than she sometimes thought Cimorene really understood, and she knew how stories went. Sometimes even if you didn’t want to be caught up in them – if you were improper, and read Latin, and knew how to fence, and spent your days off learning spells from witches in the Enchanted Forest – sometimes, even then, they wound you back up in their coils.
Cimorene came back from Prince Cedric’s castle very late, even allowing for the time it took to walk through the caves. She entered carrying two tomes under her arm, and put them down on an antique teak and ivory chess-table which had belonged to the King two before Tozak, and was dragon-sized, so the books only took up four squares, even though they were quite large.
“What’s that on your fingers?” Kazul asked. They were stained lightly red. Cimorene had the hands of someone who did a lot of cooking and polishing of armour and carrying around piles of books, so it wasn’t as noticeable as it might have been with one of Kazul’s previous princesses, but it was there nonetheless.
“What – oh,” Cimorene said, and lifted her hands to her face and smelled them. Kazul realised she could smell, faintly, roses. “We were in the garden.”
Kazul opened her mouth to ask why Cimorene had been in the garden, when she had gone to borrow a book, but Cimorene kept talking. “Also, why did you say there was a princess?”
“Isn’t there?” Kazul scratched her head with a wing-tip, searching her memory. No, she was quite sure there had been a young woman last time she’d visited, weeding the roses. It had been very noticeable since all the rest of the court were invisible. “I’m sure I saw her last time.”
“Well – ” Cimorene bit her lip. “There was a young man. Not a prince; a merchant’s son, in fact. But no young woman.”
“Curly dark hair?” Kazul said. “About your height? From…where was it…the place by the sea. Near the Bay of Golden Shores. The city.”
“Yes, but he’s not a young woman,” Cimorene said firmly. Then she looked at Kazul curiously. “Could you really not tell?”
Kazul sighed, and confessed “It’s very difficult, you know, when none of you have horns, and there’s all this hair and no scales or anything. Easy with princesses and knights and so on, or witches and wizards, that’s all very straightforward, but if you’re just wandering around otherwise…I’ve never got the hang of blacksmiths, for example. They all look like dwarves, more or less, but dwarves have completely different genders. And really most of the time it doesn’t matter to me, does it?”
She managed not to say “You all taste more or less the same”, because Cimorene didn’t appreciate that sort of comment. But it was very hard not to think it.
Cimorene was trying very hard not to laugh. Kazul eyed her. “Oh, go on.”
She did laugh. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you just know so many things! I never thought!” Then she sobered and shook her head. “But that’s why the spell hasn’t been broken. The enchantress said a maiden, and you know how it is with spells; the words matter very much.” Her eyes narrowed. “I have an idea or two, but I need to think about it…you won’t mind if I take the time to go back, will you?”
“If you hadn’t noticed,” Kazul said, “it’s all to my benefit as King for people to owe my Chief Cook favours.”
“I’m not doing it because I want them to owe me a favour!” Cimorene said hotly. “Just because…”
Kazul leant comfortably on her folded front legs. “Because what?”
Cimorene thought about it. “Because I don’t like to see people in trouble, I suppose.”
“Maybe you should have been a knight, not a princess.”
“And,” she said more reluctantly, “because I like being clever, and thinking of ways around things. Which is more like a wizard, isn’t it.” She wrinkled her face in the way that humans did when they were displeased by things, or smelt something bad.
“Like a witch,” Kazul corrected her. “It’s like a witch, and it’s why you’re friends with Morwen.”
“That I like better.” Cimorene stretched her arms out. “I really must figure out that sleeve enchantment Morwen uses – maybe I shall put it on a bag – carrying those books back was such a pain. But the library, Kazul –”
She talked approvingly about it for several minutes; it made Kazul unreasonably grumpy for a reason she couldn’t quite place. A small wisp of smoke trickled out of one of her nostrils. Cimorene noticed it and said at once that she had better go check on her stew, and left before Kazul could think what to say.
*
Cimorene went back two days later and didn’t return until the next day. Kazul’s entire day was taken up with holding court and then hearing some reports about what the Society of Wizards had been up to, so she didn’t have time to worry until she realised Cimorene had never returned, and then by the time she had nearly decided to send someone looking (she was, after all, the King) Cimorene arrived back. Once again, her hands were stained.
“I did it!” she told Kazul triumphantly. “The spell said servants, so he just had to banish them from the house. As soon as he did the enchantment stopped applying to them, and they all appeared. I waited to make sure it held the next day.” She laughed. “At least two of them hadn’t bothered to get dressed properly, because they’d been invisible for so long.”
“But Cedric is still enchanted.”
Cimorene shrugged. “He doesn’t seem to mind that much. Says he’s more or less used to it, doesn’t really know how he’d get on if he went back. And more to the point, I don’t think Jorelan minds.”
“And Jorelan is…”
“The young man who you thought was more interested in roses.” Cimorene looked down at her stained hands.
Kazul couldn’t help herself. “Will you tell me what the real reason is you went back?”
“I did tell you a real reason,” Cimorene said quite crossly, but she put her hands behind her back, and then went red. “It isn’t anything bad, I promise. I’ll tell you – you’ll know very soon. Alright?”
Kazul thought about princesses, and standards, and everything that had happened since Cimorene had walked boldly into the cave where she had been sitting and talking to Roxim and the others, a year ago – very nearly a whole year ago now – and said “Alright.”
But she went out that afternoon and complained to Morwen, who listened with a thoughtful frown and said “Well, I can’t say what it is, but –”
“Hah! You know what’s going on!”
“It’s nothing to make a secret of really, but Cimorene thought it would be a nice surprise.” Morwen shook her head. “And now I’m saying too much. Go and do some Kingly things, Kazul, you don’t have time to just hang around the Enchanted Forest anymore.”
“It’s maintaining diplomatic relations,” said Kazul, but went back to the Mountains of Morning anyway because she could tell that Morwen had been halfway through cleaning her kitchen when she’d got there (the telltale sign was that Morwen had served her tea in the third-best bowl) and really wanted to get back to it.
Her patience was rewarded the next evening when, after dinner, Cimorene said “So I said I’d tell you and – surprise!” and served Kazul a dragon-sized custard tart which was beautifully flavored with rosewater. She had her own, smaller than one of Kazul’s scales. It was delicate and melted in Kazul’s mouth; Cimorene had always been a good cook but her pastry had gotten very good in the last year.
“This is delicious,” Kazul said, and Cimorene beamed. “What’s the occasion?”
“It’s been a year since I ran away and found you and…everything,” Cimorene said. “And I’m still here. I thought that was worth celebrating, and you said once you liked rosewater but nobody used it anymore –”
Kazul didn’t even remember having told Cimorene that, but it was true; she’d had a princess fifty years ago who’d cooked with it all the time, and nobody since. That princess had stayed for two years and left a note when she’d been rescued, after asking Kazul specially to chase off several knights she hadn’t liked. Kazul had been quite fond of her. The only thing she hadn’t liked about living with dragons was how hard it was to grow things in caves. That had included roses –
“That’s why you were being all odd about going to see Cedric!” Kazul realised. “You need a lot of petals to make rosewater, don’t you?”
Cimorene nodded. “I talked to Morwen but it was the wrong time of year in the Enchanted Forest, and you can’t just magic up ingredients; it’s such a hassle. So I made a deal with him to have rose petals if I could figure out how to disenchant his servants, and Jorelan helped me with the distilling. I should have told you but I thought it would be nice if it was a surprise, and then…” She colored a little. “I had a plan and I wanted to see it through. But Morwen told me it just made you worried.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Kazul harrumphed, then relented. “I know you like your work, but you’ve tidied up the library and the treasury and there isn’t all that much for you to do; I don’t want you to get bored and leave.”
“It’s like you said. It’s a bit like being a witch, isn’t it? I like to find people with problems, and help them solve them. And if you’re happy to have a Chief Cook and Librarian and Problem-Solver –” She blinked. “Oh, I forgot to say! I found that record. There was a treaty, and there’s a copy of it, although I need to translate it out of Dwarvish. I hope Roxim doesn’t grumble too much.”
Kazul had almost forgotten about that little problem. “Oh – good. But yes, I’m happy to have you stay here for as long as you want to, as a problem-solver or whatever else you want to call it. But I do want you to want to stay. And you know very well how the story usually goes, with princesses.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Cimorene said, “I’m really not a very good princess, after all – I’m better at a whole lot of other things.”
“Indeed you are,” said Kazul, and they smiled at each other and ate their tarts, which were as light as Kazul’s heart.