Dragon Castle Read Free

what he was disclosing was just between him and me.
    But what he whispered to me was puzzling. “They need less help than one might imagine, young sir.”
    Then, to confuse me even more, Georgi tapped his fingers together and patted me on the shoulder, adding, “They are not thinkers like you, young sir.”
    Thinking of thinking, I think I am about to lose my mind. If the message that discourteous courier delivered was true, our uninvited guests will arrive in time for the evening meal. That’s less than three hours. What should I do? Prepare for their arrival? Continue looking for my delinquent sire and dam? Who knows what they might have stumbled into! Stumbled into?
    An unbidden and highly unwelcome image suddenly comes to my mind. The moat!
    In old stories, such as those Baba Anya told Paulek and me when we were little, castle moats always hide fearsome creatures. Their dark waters are full of predatory fish or great snakes or reptiles, floating menaces waiting to devour anyone foolish enough to attempt to swim across.
    Our moat is full of floating menaces too, but none of them are living. I doubt even the hardiest reptilian horror could survive long in its noisome depths. The springs have never had sufficient flow to overcome the stench of the sewage dumped into it daily from our privies.
    In my fevered imagination I see my hapless parents returning in the middle of the night. Absentmindedly they forget that the drawbridge is up. They both tumble into those horrid waters. Then—the image is as inexorable as a bad dream from which I cannot wake—they sink beneath its surface, too dignified to shout for help.
    This time I don’t just think the old oath that harkens back to the founding of our line. I blurt it out.
    â€œBy the head of the dragon!”
    I sprint to the stables and grab the long pole-hook that Edvard, our junior groom, uses—rather too infrequently—to fish things out of the thick brown water. I rush to the edge so fast that I almost lose my balance and fall in myself. Frantic, I set my feet in a solid swordsman’s stance. I start stabbing, probing, prodding. Greasy bubbles rise to the surface and break, releasing gases so foul that my eyes water as I begin to lever things out and flip them onto the shore.
    Nothing living, of course. Not from this poisonous stew. A worn jerkin. A coil of rotting rope. A broken-legged stool. A tangle of rotting chicken bones, guts, and feathers. Then the hook catches on something heavy and dead and man-sized. A fist clenches itself inside my belly. The submerged body is stuck on something, but I bend my knees and put my back into it. A shoulder breaks the surface and a sob escapes my throat. My eyes blur with tears.
    Then I see the horns, the collar around its neck, the silent bell clogged with brown, slimy weeds.
    A hand rests itself on my shoulder. “Sir,” a familiar voice says, “you’ve found Matilde. Poor old blind goat. We all feared the worst for her when she vanished a week ago.”
    I turn to look down at Georgi’s untroubled face. He lifts the pole from my grasp with one hand and twists it to flip the goat’s corpse up from the moat’s brown, grainy surface and onto the far bank.
    Despite his slender frame, old Georgi is one of the strongest people I know. I’ve seen him pick up a horseshoe and absentmindedly twist it into a circle. (And that is no easy thing to do. It took me two tries to bend that iron back into its original shape.) Though Georgi’s face is as wrinkled as a date and he’s as bald as the top of a mountain, he’s still straight and supple as a birch tree.
    I’m now a head taller than our loyal aged overseer, but I still look up to him. He’s unfailingly polite, always self-contained. I’ve never seen Georgi either angry or visibly delighted. Of course, I have caught a twinkle in his eye every now and then when my parents or brother have done