"My deepest apologies Your Highness," said Jim. "It was inadvertent, I assure you. But every moment's precious, if we're to make good our escape before Malvinne wakes up and is in good enough shape to put pursuit on track after us. I think it unwise to waste our time looking through these viewing holes."
The high lift of the Prince's head lowered; and his haughty expression was replaced with a frown.
"No doubt you are right, Sir James," he said. "I should have thought of that myself. But, seeing these gentlemen looking led me to do the same."
"A couple of the gentlemen already have ladies of their own," said Jim severely, looking at Brian, Dafydd, and Giles, who had now also withdrawn their gaze from what was beyond the wall. "Possibly they would be better engaged in thinking of those ladies than looking at others now."
"Indeed—I stand rebuked!" said Sir Brian. "You're quite right James. I've not given the Lady Geronde Isabel de Chaney anywhere near the thought a man should give his love, when in foreign parts."
"And I," said Dafydd, his face solemn with sadness. "In truth I want nothing but my golden bird. As Sir Brian says, Sir James, you are right. We should think on our own, only."
"Sorrowfully," said Giles—and he did indeed sound sorrowful—"I have no lady. No lady would look twice at me, with this great lump of a nose I have. Nor do I blame them."
"Why, Giles," said Brian, "your nose is none that large. I have seen larger. I would not call it a large nose so much as a strong nose."
"Assuredly, Sir Giles," said the Prince, "you have my royal word that I have seen gentlemen at court with noses more prominent than your own, veritably surrounded by the ladies."
"You think so, Sire?" asked Sir Giles, doubtfully, fondling his fierce beak. "It might have some attraction then, rather than repulsing a lady?"
They all assured him that this was so; and he cheered up remarkably.
"But, as the good Sir James has just said," said the Prince, "we must on with all haste. Let us have no more of peeping through holes."
"I think so, too. By Saint Cuthbert I swear it!" said Sir Giles enthusiastically; and the others chimed in with assurances weighed down with the names of their own favorite saints.
"Humans!" snarled Aragh disgustedly. "Like dogs. No male wolf will force his attentions on a female one unless she is willing."
"Here's an impertinent wolf!" said the Prince angrily.
Aragh rolled a wicked yellow eye at the young man.
"Remember, I am of a different kingdom," he said. "I am not your subject, young Prince and I say what I please. I have, and always will. But, unlike others, you can believe whatever I say because I do not lie."
"It is true you're not an Englishman," said the Prince, suddenly thoughtful, "nor yet one of whom a gentleman's manner should be expected. As to your truth, that is a great thing, if indeed it is so. I have had many about me, even in my few years, and almost none I could trust to say as much and not be lying."
"Your Highness, the rest of you," said Jim, "remember, I mentioned time was slipping away from us. Let's move quickly."
Move quickly they did; and it was not more than fifteen minutes later when they came at last to a point where the passage proper ended in a solid stone wall. A flight of stain led off to their left alongside that wall to continue their route if they wished to go that way.
"Could this be another magic trap?" asked the Prince, looking at the steps distressfully. It was dark down where the stairs led; and a smell like that of damp earth came up from it.
"It is not, Highness," said Jim, with some certainty, for the stairway was nothing but plain stone in color. There was no sign of red anywhere. He went on.
"I think we've come to the outer wall of the castle," Jim said. "These steps may well lead down alongside it to the foundations; and then possibly underneath to some sort of escape passage or tunnel; or I miss my guess. Certainly, Malvinne would not want to be without some way of escape in emergencies."
"In that you are right, James," said Brian. "I know of no castle whose holder has not made himself some sort of secret way out, in case of necessity."
"Here we go, then," said Jim.
He created by magic a bundle of twigs, which Brian lit with flint and steel from his purse. They went down. This was no descent like that into the wild spiraling chute that had shot them downwards into the realm of the King and Queen of the Dead. It was more like going down into someone's long-unused cellar. They came out at last in a tunnel leading off at right angles, that soon ran beyond the walls. It was braced with timbers against both of its sidewalls and paved with stones. For all that, there was plenty of dirt about them, and their way smelled earthy.
They hurried along its dark length, the flames from the torch bent backward in their passage, and the shadows cast by those flames flickering amongst the timbers and on the stony floor. It seemed they went a considerable distance; and even Jim was beginning to wonder whether they might be heading into some trap, after all; when they came at last to a solid wooden door that ended the passage.
The door was secured by a heavy bar which rested in two L-shaped metal supports. The bar did not look difficult to lift, but Jim, still in the lead, hesitated. There was no color of red about the door, but he was still suspicious.
He turned to Aragh, behind him.
"Aragh," he said, "do you smell anything we ought to be careful about, either with this door or whatever may be beyond it?"
Aragh pushed forward to the door and sniffed it over thoroughly, snuffling particularly at the side and bottom cracks of it.
"There's nothing beyond, but dirt and growing things," he said at last.
"All right then," said Jim, "let's go through."
He took hold of the bar to lift it. It was not unusually heavy, but had been in its sockets long enough to become somewhat fixed there. Brian moved forward to help him; and together they took it out of its holding place. The moment it was removed, the door swung inward of its own weight.
At the top of a slanted earthen hole, above them, they saw a section of night sky, studded with stars and framed by the tendrils of either grass or bushes.
"I'll go up and take a look first," said Jim. "Brian, you and the rest stay back here to guard His Highness."
"You're a fool in some things, James," snapped Aragh.
"Let one go who knows more about such looking than you'll ever learn."
In a second, Aragh was past them and up the earthy slope. At the top of it, he occulted the stars for a moment; then he was gone.
They waited.
"Do you think he might have found trouble, or else decided to leave us for good?" the Prince whispered uneasily in Jim's ear, after some few minutes had passed without Aragh's return.
"No Your Highness. Neither," Jim whispered back. "What he said was right. If anyone of us can go up there safely, look around, and return, it'll be him. What's keeping him, I don't know. But I've no doubt he'll be back. We just have to wait."
They continued to wait, uneasily. As they waited, the restlessness, even inside Jim, increased. Suppose some accident had happened to Aragh? He dared not voice the thought aloud for fear of taking the heart out of those with him. But he thought it.
Then suddenly Aragh was coming down the slope back to them, and another figure blocked out the stars, standing upright at the top of it.
"All is well," growled Aragh. "One was even waiting for us. You see him up there."
"Who is it?" asked Jim, straining his eyes through the darkness to get some clear idea of who waited at the top of the slope.
"A friend," said Aragh. Jim could not see Aragh's jaws in me darkness, but from the tone of the other's voice, he imagined them open in laughter, that silent laughter that marked his own wolvish brand of humor. "Come then."
Jim, leading the way, with sword drawn just in case, climbed the steep slope. But there turned out to be no use for the sword; except as something to drive into the earth to help him up the vegetation-covered earthen angle
he had to climb. At the top a familiar voice spoke to him.
"It's good to see you," said the voice. "You are here, as I was told you would be."
The voice belonged to Bernard. Jim wiped his sword on some leaves and put it back in its sheath.
"Who told you?" he asked. "And why are you waiting for us here? How did you know this was where we would come out?"
"Those questions will all be answered in due time," said Bernard, as Jim stood aside to let the others up onto the level ground. "There is someone who can do a better job of answering them than I can. My job is only to bring you to him as quickly as possible.
"Sir Raoul?" asked Jim, at a venture.
"He is with the other," answered the voice of Bernard. As before, he had his back to what moonlight there was, so that his upper body was hidden in darkness. "But I will answer no more questions. If you are all up beside me now, follow me."
They followed him. They were in one of the garden areas of Malvinne's estate. He led them almost at a trot through this, with the black wall of the enclosing forest at their right, until he suddenly turned and led the way into one of the path openings that broke its solid wall of limbs and tree trunks.
Along this path, still at a jog, he led the way through perhaps another two miles of winding, beaten-earth path with a handful of stars showing through the interlocked branches above their heads, until, just as suddenly, they emerged onto the open hillside.
"Here, for a moment, we can rest," said Bernard.
He was careful still to stand so that no light illuminated his face or upper body directly, except for the feeble starlight, which was not able to resolve anything out of the dark gloom that was his upper shape.
As soon as they had rested, he led them on, into a cleft in the hills, very much like that dimple in which they had set up their temporary camp before entering the forest. But this cleft wound on back. There was no water flowing through it, as there had been in the dimple, but there must have been at one time, for underfoot in the base of the cleft there was no earth or grass, only rocks.
Their feet grated on these rocks for some distance; Jim tried to estimate how far it might be, but what with all the twistings and turnings of the cleft, he had by this time completely lost, not only his sense of direction, but a clear idea of when they had entered it.
They came out at last onto another hillside, enclosed by rises of sparsely treed grassland, where a fire was burning, illuminating the shape of a horse that cropped the grass nearby, and two figures—no, three—at the fire itself.
Jim stared at the third. For it overtopped the other two, even though he could see it only in silhouette from where he stood. It was the shape of a small dragon.
Jim and those with him came closer, circling around the fire so that they could see the three who sat there, who until now had their backs to the group led by Bernard. Jim's group rounded the fire and Jim stared at the three.
One was Sir Raoul, all right, his lean face sardonic in the shifting light from the leaping flames. The other, as Jim had guessed from the general shape seen in silhouette from behind, was Carolinus. That was a surprise, but not as much of a surprise as it might have been if someone else had sat there. Carolinus was capable of magically transporting himself from place to place. He had not only done this himself, but after their final victory over the Dark Powers at the Loathly Tower, he had moved them all to the inn where they later had their victory dinner.
But the third was a shock.
"Secoh!" cried Jim.
"Surprised, James?" Secoh preened himself. "Perhaps you'd have recognized me if I'd spoken first and in a voice like this—
"—I'm a French dragon. "
The words rang an immediate chord of memory in Jim's mind. They brought back the moment in which he had been bedded down for the night on top of a spine of rock and a small dragon, hidden in darkness, had clung to the rock a dozen or so feet below him and asked him questions about where he was going and what he was doing.
But the voice, to Jim's human ear, was unmistakably Secoh's.
"I lowered my voice and misled you completely," said Secoh.
Perhaps the voice had been lower, but to Jim's ear it was unmistakably Secoh's still. He tried to imagine it with his dragon hearing; but he still could not remember it as being that much deeper than the way Secoh ordinarily spoke.
The truth of the matter was, Secoh probably was not capable of lowering or raising the pitch of his voice very much. Perhaps no dragons were—including Jim. Jim made a mental note to try this out himself sometime when he was in his dragon body and in a private place where he could experiment without anyone else hearing him. This was beside the fact that, not expecting Secoh under any possible circumstances, he had simply taken it for granted that the dragon he had dimly seen on the rock was someone he did not know. So that, when that other dragon identified himself as being French, Jim had believed him.
But there was no point in hurting Secoh's feelings by puncturing his belief in his ability to disguise his voice.
"I guess you're right. I didn't recognize you at all," said Jim, "but what were you doing calling yourself a French dragon and asking me questions like that?"
"Well," said Secoh, settling down in a comfortable position, like any dragon about to recite a long tale, either about himself or some other dragon.
"Not now, Secoh," said Carolinus sharply.
"But Mage, I've got to tell him I'm an ambassador from the English dragons."
"Later," said Carolinus, in a tone of voice that effectively shut Secoh up completely. In contrast to Sir Raoul and Secoh, Carolinus was seated in something like a pillow-chair. A soft structure, that yet had a back and armrests. His quick, faded blue eyes caught Jim's gaze upon it.
"Old bones!" he snapped. "Get to my age and you can have one also, James. Meanwhile, the rest of you sit down on the other side of the fire there; and we'll get matters straightened out."
Jim, Brian, Giles, Dafydd, and the Prince all seated themselves. But Bernard still stood, back out of the circle of firelight.
"You too, man!" said Carolinus irritably to Bernard. "When I hold a meeting; rank doesn't count."
"I am not a man," answered the dark, shadow-hidden shape of Bernard, "and it is not rank that stops me from sitting; though it well might be, for at your fire sits the son of my former Lord. But I choose not to show myself; and that is my right, is it not?"
"Of course," said Jim quickly, before Carolinus could answer. "Although you might think about the fact that possibly Carolinus here can reverse what Malvinne did to you, and turn you back into a whole man again."
"What's that?" demanded Carolinus of Jim.
"He's half-man, half-toad, because Malvinne changed him that way from being a man-at-arms in my father's service," Sir Raoul answered for Jim. "Could you indeed turn him back into a full man?"
Carolinus stared at the shadowy figure beyond the firelight.
"It could be done, of course…" he began slowly.
"I thank you, no," interrupted the voice of Bernard. "If I stay as I am, I can stay close to Malvinne and maybe one day these hands of mine will let the life out of him. For that alone I live. I would not take my whole self back again if you gave it to me as a gift."
There was a moment of uneasy silence around the fire.
"It seems we are answered," said Carolinus, then. "You there—"
"His name is Bernard," put in Sir Raoul.
"You there, Bernard," said Carolinus, "you are not to be moved from that decision?"
"No."
"Then we are indeed answered," said Carolinus. He returned his gaze to those others seated around the fire. "Let's talk about the situation. First—you, Raoul, bring James and the rest here up to date in the matter of the English and French forces."
"It's no more than to be expected," said Raoul. His voice was slightly bitter. "Your English knights could not sit still long. Soon they grew tired of drinking and wenching and would march on our French King wi
thout waiting for the rest of your army, namely most of their men-at-arms and archers. Shortly after you left Brest, Sir Brian, they had begun to burn and pillage their way east through our fair France toward Tours, Orléans and Paris."
"In what force?" The words shot from Brian's lips.
"Four thousand horse and some four thousand archers and men-at-arms. So I was told," replied Sir Raoul.
"And how many of archers alone?" asked the soft voice of Dafydd.
Sir Raoul waved the question aside.
"I heard no exact numbers," he said. "Somewhere between one and two thousand, I believe. Of the total army"—his voice sounded as if he was going to spit in the middle of the sentence—"over half were Gascons, of course!"
In the silence that greeted this remark, Sir Raoul went on.
"But our good King John has gathered his own army of loyal Frenchmen, over ten thousand in number, and is proceeding southward even now to meet and give battle to your English intruders. He will have passed Châteaudun already; and may possibly have reached Vendôme. If you wish to get your Prince back to the English army before French and English meet, you will have to move swiftly."
"And the French forces?" asked Brian again. "Have they archers or crossbowmen in any number among them?"
"I know not the number," said Sir Raoul, once more with a dismissive wave of his hand. "A sufficiency of Genoese crossbowmen, I understand. We French do not depend upon footmen like you English."
"To their great loss, particularly in the matter of archers." Dafydd's voice intruded gently once again.
"We will not talk of that," said Sir Raoul. "Let me remind you that I would be with that army were it not for this matter of Malvinne. It is that, and that alone, that leagues me with a race I do not love against my proper King and people. Malvinne must be stopped for the greater betterment of France, no matter what else; or France as we know it will cease to be."
"That is a strange statement indeed, Sir Raoul," said Brian. "I do not see how one magician could make that much difference."
"That is because you do not understand!" flared Sir Raoul. "If you but knew—"
"I think it best that I explain matters from here on." Carolinus's old but authoritative voice broke in on the words of the French knight. "There are things involved here that all of you should better understand. As I once told James, here, perhaps it is time for one of my lectures. I charge you all sit still and listen—and remember. Particularly you, Edward. For all of you have things to learn from this."