The Whim of the Dragon Read Online Free PDF

hole dug in the back yard without permission, “art thou returned?”

CHAPTER 4
    L AURA was so shocked by Randolph’s tone of voice that she forgot about the purple water. There was a calculation in the way Fence and Randolph looked at her that had not been there before. They knew who she was now; or, no. They knew who she wasn’t.
    Ted said, “We were sent back, by a man in a red robe.”
    Laura saw Fence’s head come up, like that of a cat who hears you open the refrigerator. But Randolph said, in the same unfriendly voice, “Wherefore did you let him do so?”
    “He said that if we didn’t, everything we strove to prevent would come to pass.”
    “Who was he?” said Fence. His voice was merely neutral, but in him this was as great a change as the hostility in Randolph.
    “The mailbox said Apsinthion.”
    “That’s wormwood,” said Fence, with a kind of skeptical surprise. “What manner of man was he?”
    Laura wished they could all sit down. But the room contained one sewing-table, on which Fence was still sitting, and Agatha’s high-backed chair with the tapestry cushions, on which she would have felt wrong sitting even before they left.
    “He looked like you and Randolph,” said Ted, “only mixed together. He had a house full of mirrors.”
    Fence and Randolph turned to one another; for a bare instant everything seemed familiar. Then Fence looked away, sharply, and said to Ted, “What else?”
    “Okay,” said Ted. He began with their encounter with Claudia in the yard of her house, in their own world; and ended with their stepping through the mirror into this room. At no point in his narrative did Fence or Randolph ask for any clarification. Randolph, in fact, showed no reaction whatsoever. Fence took the story in as though he were judging it for a contest. Ted saved the three riddles and the messages for last. The riddles evoked no response. “All may yet be very well” made Fence roll his eyes. “La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall” produced, finally, a reaction from Randolph.
    “What tongue is that? What mean those words?”
    “French,” said Ted, gloomily. “I don’t know.”
    “Two unhandily returned is already two more—” said Randolph; Fence glanced at him and he stopped.
    “It sounds ,” said Laura, “like it means ‘the beautiful lady who never says thank you.’ ”
    Fence actually smiled at this, but Randolph went on looking at the floor. Fence said, “Wherefore may we regard these words if we know them not?”
    “It’s Randolph who’s supposed to regard them,” said Ted. “You’re supposed to regard Shan’s. All may yet be very well.”
    “Anyone may quote Shan,” said Fence, “and most have.”
    The devil, thought Laura, can cite Scripture for his purpose. But Shan wasn’t Scripture—was he?
    Ted must have been thinking something similar; he said, “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some?”
    Fence slid down from the table and strode across the room in a swirl of black. He stopped in front of Ted, and the smell of burning leaves engulfed Laura two feet away. If Ted grew a little more, thought Laura crazily, he would be able to look Fence right in the eye. Fence appeared merely intent, but his voice was furious. “Where read you that?” he said.
    “ I read it in the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians,” said Ted. “But Edward’s remembering it.”
    Laura did not know what Ted had hoped to achieve with this revelation. She herself was relieved; she thought of the dead Prince Edward as an ally. Fence said, “Dear heaven,” in the tone of a man whose child has brought home a stray python.
    “What’s the matter?” said Randolph.
    “Edward speaks to him,” said Fence, without looking around.
    “How?” said Randolph to Ted, not altogether as if he were prepared to believe him.
    “In the back of my mind, somehow, or underneath.”
    “I suppose,” said Fence wearily to Laura, “that the Princess Laura