CHAPTER 12: 'Treason Afoot?'
QUEEN
JUNELILLY MOSS ROLLED FROM THE TABLE
where she had been reading one of Aesop’s Fables…
Something about a tortoise and hare. In truth,
her attention was not entirely there.
Her eyes turned again to the Royal Stable.
Something was wrong, but she didn’t know what
and she’d long ago learned to trust in her gut.
It wasn’t the usual dragon distraction,
the ceaseless worry and endless action,
which tended to strand the mind deep in a rut.
No, this was different, much closer to home
than the far-flung places Snatchgrin would roam…
‘Nightmares are filled with many things.
Yet none are as dark as Snatchgrin’s wings, not molloch,
not Lillith, not gorgon, nor gnome…’
She had tired of all the children’s verses,
the Dragon Poets, the Snatchgrin curses.
While everyone turned their face to the clouds,
Lilly turned hers away from the crowds.
Like a dancer, alone, who rehearses.
The Dragon Council, she had come to conclude,
had bitten off more than it had chewed.
By that, she meant it was failing its task,
which led her a difficult question she had now to ask,
a question which caused her to brood and to brood,
The question defied all sense and all reason:
‘Was the Dragon Council stymied by treason?’
She turned her gaze to the great maple tree which
stood on a bluff overlooking the sea.
Its leaves had turned russett with the change of the season.
A hard wind blew and pulled off some leaves.
Out in the fields, they’d be rounding up sheaves….
They would, that is, if any remained.
But the fields had been scorched and dragon-stained.
The wind blew hard through the castle eaves.
Her eyes swung again to the stable door.
‘There!’ It moved, then it opened some more.
Out slipped a man in concealed royal cloak --
the Duke of the Thatchers, whose name was Pembroke,
looking as if he'd just robbed a store.
Lilly had seen him furtively slip in,
as if he were going to commit some dark sin.
He’d stayed a half-hour and now had slunk off.
Composing himself with a clearly fake cough,
he once again jutted his proud royal chin.
Lilly grew stiff, then wheeled around.
Vic Falco was napping, but awoke to the sound
of Queen Junelilly Moss in full regal bark:
“Falco, get up! Or you’ll be lunch for a shark!”
Then, she rolled from the room with her wheels spinning round.
In less than a shake, she had a report
from spies recruited from the royal court.
(To sit high on a throne, she’d long ago found,
you’d best know what’s happening down on the ground.)
What her spies had learned they told with a snort.
“The mighty Duke Pembroke,” said a maid with a sneer,
“was seeing a trollope, the kind that drinks beer!”
“That’s right!” said a stable boy as he picked at his nose.
“I hear what he brought her was a single white rose! And
they did it in straw, near that big royal steer!”
Falco’s eyebrows arose. The queen furrowed her brow.
She paid off the spies with some milk from a cow,
a treasure worth more than a week’s worth of pay, as
Snatchgrin had scared most cattle away.
Goat’s milk
was what most people drank now.
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