The Dragon Prince Read online

  Nellie went to Johanna’s back, and her nimble fingers started unlacing the bodice. Johanna breathed in shallow breaths.

  The dress came off. Nellie hung it over the wardrobe door with a rustle of velvet. It had belonged to Queen Cygna. It was pretty, but Johanna wouldn’t be wearing it anymore.

  Then the corset. Nellie started at the bottom and with each hook Nellie undid, a little shiver of relief crept up Johanna’s spine. Just how tight it had been became evident when Nellie took the corset off. Johanna was overcome by a sudden wave of nausea when all her insides went back to their normal places.

  “It was very tight. You were right, mistress. You are becoming so big. You must get the modiste to make you some special dresses.”

  “How about I’ll do without the corset? That gives me a bit more room in the dress.”

  “Mistress Johanna, you can’t possibly do that. What will people say?”

  “No one will notice if you do the bodice up tightly. But it will be much more comfortable for me. I never used to wear corsets much when I lived with Father.”

  “That was different.”

  “Why?”

  “To start off, you weren’t a queen. You weren’t a married woman. You were always far too much of a tomboy.” Nellie counted off on her fingers.

  Johanna sighed. “Yes, well, I have to go to church now and I’m not wearing the corset.”

  “But—”

  “I’m not wearing it.”

  Nellie sighed. “Well, if you insist. But you should really get the modiste—”

  “That’s not going to help me for tonight.”

  “No, but if you would just stop being so stubborn, it might help you tomorrow. You have the little one to consider. How would you like being so squished up in there that your mother can’t even breathe properly, let alone eat? For what reason?”

  “You don’t understand, Nellie.”

  “I understand well enough. If you don’t look after yourself, you’ll regret it later. You’re going to be a mother. You should take things easy. You’re going to grow and grow, until you won’t be able to hide it anymore. Why hide it anyway? The people are going to love it, because they’re sick of bad news.”

  Nellie was probably right. The people of Saardam would love it. There had not been a royal birth since Celine, despite the Queen’s young age—she had been seventeen when Celine was born.

  The problem was not the people. It was the King’s Council.

  “Which dress do you want to wear to church, Mistress Johanna?”

  Johanna cut through the fog of her thoughts. “The brown one, thanks, Nellie.”

  Nellie helped her step into the dress and pulled the heavy material over her underdress. She then started doing up the lace at the back of the bodice.

  Johanna gasped. “Not so tight at the top.” Her breasts were swollen and very tender.

  “I know.” Nellie worked her way down, pulling the lace as she went.

  “It’s too tight,” Johanna said.

  “I can’t make it any looser. The lace isn’t long enough.”

  “Then make the lace longer. Just don’t make it so tight around here.” Johanna pulled the bodice down over her stomach. It pushed the bump of her stomach flat. Johanna ran her hand over the front of the dress. It was very, very tight.

  “Pardon me for saying this, but you’re very stubborn,” Nellie said. “Look at yourself in the mirror. Doesn’t that look like a woman with child? How long do you think you can hide it?”

  Johanna looked. Everything about her dress looked tight. Her bosom was about to burst out, the mid-section bunched up in the area between her bosom and her stomach.

  Without the corset, she looked like a poorly-made sausage.

  Yet she didn’t want to announce her condition officially. As soon as she did, the King’s Council would insist that she retire from all her duties. She did not think that Father and Master Deim alone could prevent the council making any stupid decisions. They certainly would not be able to carry out her plan for a cooperative of investors without her. They might get one or two nobles to support them, but they simply didn’t have the numbers.

  “Just do it up as much as you can. I’ll wear a cape over the top,” she said to Nellie.

  “You should celebrate your condition. Otherwise you will have a child one day and people won’t have known about your condition and they will wonder if the child is even yours.”

  “As soon as I let people know, the powerful men will want to push me aside because they will say that I can’t do my duties.”

  “But Mistress Johanna, you are already doing your duty. You are going to give birth to the heir to the throne.”

  She met Nellie’s eyes. There was not a shred of humour in them.

  “You should be proud. You’ll have seen already that it’s not an easy task.”

  Johanna mumbled some half-hearted comment. Memories of having to hurry out of meetings with some lame excuse because she needed to vomit were not far from her mind.

  But a fear grew inside her, along with the parasite child that kept taking more of her energy.

  She’d taken a peek at the sparse references to childbirth in Roald’s books, and had not liked what she saw. Did a midwife really ask the woman to take off all her clothes? Did the woman really lie on a bare bed with her legs spread so that everyone could see her private parts? Was there really so much blood? Apparently other women, ones who were not supposed to be the queen, invited their friends and sisters along to give support, but, having no sisters, Johanna was too ashamed to say that she had never attended a birth. Now she was afraid to ask, afraid that it would make her more scared.

  That dreadful fear of shaming herself, the fear of blood and the fear of pain was gradually taking over from the fear that someone would know straight away that the child wasn’t Roald’s. Because they wouldn’t, at least not at the beginning. All newborns were pink, hairless worms. And ugly.

  Why, again, had she wanted this?

  Nellie managed to lengthen the lacing and that made the dress less tight. She also took the cape out of the wardrobe. “People are still going to ask questions if you always wear it.”

  “I will announce it, Nellie. Don’t worry about it.”

  Nellie draped the cloak over Johanna’s shoulders. “Normally, that happens when the child has quickened.”

  “Yes. I’ll announce it then.” But she had felt the first movement two weeks ago. “Are you finished with me?”

  “You are so impatient, mistress. Church isn’t going anywhere. Let me look at your hair first.”

  Finally, after Nellie had re-pinned Johanna’s hair, she left the room. Whoa. That dress still felt tight. Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow she was going to ask a modiste to make new clothes for her.

  She collected two royal guards in the hallway.

  “Time to go to church, Your Majesty?”

  “Indeed.” Their cheerful smiles made her feel tired.

  The guards accompanied her across the forecourt to the coaches. Her personal driver waited there, while the stable boy brought out the two white horses. Johanna would rather have walked, but she had found that a certain level of ceremony was expected from the royal family, and as such royals did not walk through town.

  It was annoying and the church was only a short distance away, and Johanna would have walked to prove that she could, and to feel that independence that she had forgotten to enjoy when she was just Johanna Brouwer.

  But today she was happy to ride, because that dress was very tight and her stomach kept hardening.

  The coach took off through the palace gates.

  On the main market square, a temporary church had risen from the muddy building site where Alexandre had planned his monstrosity of a building for the Belaman Church.

  The trenches that had been dug by prisoners for the foundations of the building had been filled up with soil. The shepherd had put up a wooden building over the top. It was only temporary whil
e plans for a new church were made, but the new church building should be plain, the shepherd had said, and it should be built around the statue of the Triune that the king had ordered made and that the bandits had removed from the palace garden and had been dredged from the bottom of the harbour.

  As Johanna alighted from the coach, churchgoers on the steps into the entrance watched and cheered. The wind whipped up and blew strands of hair into Johanna’s face.

  Even if she had no wind magic, the feel of it on the air was strong.

  The tree that trapped Alexandre stood downwind in the market, its twisted branches reaching for the sky. Earlier this week, it had sprouted leaves, but they had grown twisted and mottled with white from the anger of the spirit trapped inside. Every time Johanna walked past, she felt a chill, a voice calling out to her to touch the tree and read its terrible history. And every time she had to keep telling herself not to give in to its call.

  Johanna went up the wooden steps of the church, flanked by the guards. As she took the top step, she felt something rip in the left side of her dress.

  By the Triune, what was that?

  With all these people around, she couldn’t feel up there to check, but it felt like part of the bodice had come loose, because cool air stroked her skin where it shouldn’t. She pulled the cloak closer around her. Something had also happened to her skirt, because the hem dragged over the ground. It got in the way of her feet and she had to be careful not to step on it.

  The pews were full of people: the merchants, the workers, the mothers, the common people. A murmur of voices preceded Johanna down the aisle.

  “Glad to see you, Your Majesty.”

  “You’re looking well, Your Majesty.”

  “Good evening, Your Majesty.”

  People bowed and curtsied. Johanna walked down the aisle, clamping her left elbow to her side in case the skirt of her dress decided to come undone even more.

  She arrived at the front of the church, where a row of pews was left unoccupied especially for her. Johanna sat down, flanked by the guards.

  She pulled the sides of the cloak over her knees and reached up her left side under the cloak. The entire seam on that side of the dress had come apart.

  This was so embarrassing. How could she make it back out of here? She could already hear Nellie berate her, You should have a modiste make special clothes for you. Yes, she should, but she hated standing still with people draping fabric over her and putting pins in. But there was no other option, unless she planned on going naked until the child was born.

  A bell rang. People stopped talking and turned to the front of the church. The Shepherd entered from behind the altar. He wore a cream-coloured silk robe with plain red lapels. His head was bare, with his blond hair tied at the back of his head. The only piece of jewellery he wore was a gold chain with the triangle of the Triune on it. He raised his hands. He began the service with the usual words.

  “Citizens of the fairest city in all the known worlds. Let us come together and celebrate the love, the fairness and the judgement of the Triune. Let us pray.”

  He spoke of destruction and rebuilding, of looking after the weaker people in the community. When he worked for Father, Johanna had never known that the timid accountant was such a mesmerising speaker. People listened, they hung onto every word, repeated soundlessly what he said.

  His words moved from looking after each other to defending the city against threats.

  “These people, they came to our town, tried to stamp out our church and our people with their filthy magic.” He balled his fist. “We stood up against them. We drove them out of our town. When we stand together, we stand strong. When we stand together, the Triune will guide us. Together we will drive the magicians from the city. We pray to the Holy Father, the spirit and the ghost.”

  People shuffled onto their knees, hands clasped in prayer. Johanna should get on her knees, too, but she was scared that the dress would rip further, and it had to hold out for a little longer because she did want to speak to the Shepherd after the service. She didn’t kneel, and found him watching her not just while she was not kneeling but throughout the rest of the service.

  When the shepherd had finished preaching, people waited for Johanna to leave the church, but she told her guards that she would be staying back, so people started leaving. Johanna rose, carefully holding the ripped side of the dress by pressing her elbow to her side while keeping it hidden under the cloak with the other.

  The shepherd bowed to her. He’d been preaching so vigorously that drops of sweat pearled on his forehead. “Your Majesty, I am happy to have deserved the honour that you pay me a visit.”

  Johanna glanced at her guards who were directing people away from where she stood. “Can we talk like old times?” Like when he was Master Willems and worked in Father’s office.

  He flicked his eyebrows in his oh-so-serious face. His face had aged noticeably since he had taken on the role of shepherd.

  “I need your help. The whole city needs your help.”

  “I am forever in the service of my flock and my city and my queen.” He bowed. “Tell me what you desire from your humble servant.”

  She thought she’d asked him to speak normally, as in old times. Then again, he had always been distant to her. With his new position, his aloofness had only increased. “I know that and thank you. I need your support for the decisions made by me and the King’s Council.”

  He gave her a sharp look. He was part of the council after all. “I will support anything that does not go against the teachings of the Triune.”

  “Going against the Triune includes denying the eastern trader the building that he would be paying for? Does the Triune teach against that?”

  Another sharp look. “The Triune teaches us to stand against the menace of magic—”

  “There is no evidence that the eastern traders have any magic.”

  “That ship of theirs! Is that not evidence? Is it not enough that the people who have tried to build these machines are all dead? Isn’t it obvious that some magic ingredient is needed to make it work?”

  “We know how the machines work. They boil water in a vat—”

  “Only to have the vat explode and kill everyone. All those people insisted that the writings of the heretic whose name I will not mention were simple instructions for building the machine. But it is more than obvious: we are missing an ingredient of magic.”

  “Then we find someone with this magic if that is indeed true. What Master Deim said is true: we cannot stand against evil magic unless we have magical help. The Red Baron and his necromancer son—”

  “Aiyyeee! Do not say words like that in this building! Triune have mercy.” He clamped his hands together and looked at the ceiling in prayer.

  A bit shaken, Johanna continued, “The Red Baron and his son are waiting to pounce on us. They have control over . . . magical beings. The Belaman Church—”

  “Aiyeee! Do not speak the name of that evil institution!”

  Johanna continued forcefully, “The Most Holy Father has banished the Church of the Triune from his institution. He now considers us an enemy organisation. His church allows magic. They foster magic. They teach magic!”

  He had clamped his hands over his ears.

  “Listen to me. You can’t make magic go away by ignoring it.”

  “Do not speak in here about the work of the Lord of Fire.”

  “Not all magic is evil. You should know that. It is about how you use it. Magic exists. People will use it. We must make sure it’s used for our good—”

  He turned his face to the ceiling and chanted, “There is nothing good in the deeds of the Lord of Fire. There is no salvation in his teachings. There is no redemption unless we renounce it. The strangers will unleash their fire dragons as soon as we show any sign of weakness. Do not speak to me of this terrible thing that brings us evil. Do not think of it.”

  Spit flew from his mouth. His voice grew ever shriller. He clamped his
hands in front of his chest.

  Whoa. Johanna backed away. What had gotten into him?

  He sprinted across to the statue of the Triune, that same one they’d fished out of the harbour. It still showed gouges where it had been dragged and carried stain from the remains of algae and barnacle encrustations. He dropped to his knees on the wooden kneeling bench in front of the statue, wailing that the Triune should protect him from evil magic and that he would do three laps on the church crawling on his knees to cleanse the holy building of the evil that had been invoked today. His shrill voice echoed in the cavernous space.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  JOHANNA WAS SO taken aback by his outburst that she didn’t even think of berating him for having spoken to her like that. When he was still the accountant Master Willems, he had always ruled in Father’s office. He was a couple of years older than she was, so his authority seemed natural to her, never mind that she now ruled him. This whole concept of being queen unnerved her. It made her angry, too. She spent most of her life kicking against habits and “proper” behaviour, only to succumb to pressure by others when it really mattered. Even when she was younger, she might have protested, but in the end she did what Father wanted. She went and had a dress made, she went to the ball, she danced with the prince.

  And now look at her.

  She was a pawn of those men with their powerful friends and their money.

  A real queen would order those nobles to do what she wanted. A real queen would never tolerate this silly King’s Council in the first place.

  A real queen would yell at her guards to give the shepherd ten lashes for saying what he had said to her. She shuddered at that thought.

  She left the shepherd sitting on his knees and praying aloud, glad that he had never come to Duke Lothar’s castle, Florisheim or the Guentherite farms where real magic and ghosts lurked in every bush. He would have been beside himself.

  She made her way down the aisle of the church, where the church boys were already blowing out candles now that the service was over and most people had left.

  The boys appeared quite calm under their master’s outburst.