Searching for Dragons Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  In Which the King of the Enchanted Forest Takes a Day Off

  In Which Mendanbar Discovers a Problem

  In Which Mendanbar Receives Some Advice from a Witch

  In Which a Wizard Pays a Visit

  In Which There Is a Misunderstanding and Mendanbar Does Some Plumbing

  In Which Mendanbar and Cimorene Have a Long Talk and Mendanbar Reluctantly Decides to Embark on a Journey

  In Which a Wizard Makes a Mess and the Journey Begins

  In Which They Give Some Good Advice to a Giant

  In Which They Discover the Perils of Borrowed Equipment

  In Which Mendanbar Decides to Experiment

  In Which Mendanbar and Cimorene Are Very Busy

  In Which Yet Another Wizard Tries to Cause Trouble

  In Which They Return to the Enchanted Forest at Last

  In Which Mendanbar Has Some Interesting Visitors

  In Which Everyone Argues

  In Which Mendanbar Cleans Up

  In Which Mendanbar Grows Some Trees and Makes a Wicked Suggestion

  In Which Willin Finally Gets to Arrange a Formal Celebration

  Sneak peek of CALLING ON DRAGONS

  Buy the Book

  Read all of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles

  About the Author

  Text copyright © 1991 by Patricia C. Wrede

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Patricia C. Wrede

  All rights reserved. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Harcourt Children’s Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1991.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Wrede, Patricia C., 1953–

  Searching for dragons/Patricia C. Wrede.

  p. cm.—(The Enchanted Forest chronicles; bk. 2)

  Summary: With the aid of King Mendanbar, Princess Cimorene rescues the dragon Kazul and saves the Enchanted Forest from a band of wicked wizards.

  [1. Fairy tales. 2. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. 3. Princesses—Fiction. 4. Dragons—Fiction. 5. Wizards—Fiction.]

  I. Title. II. Series: Wrede, Patricia C., 1953–

  Enchanted Forest chronicles; bk. 2.

  PZ8.W92Se 1991

  [Fic]—dc20 91-8305

  ISBN: 978-0-15-200898-7 hardcover

  ISBN: 978-0-544-54146-7 paperback

  eISBN 978-0-547-54458-8

  v1.0915

  I would like to thank the

  RIGHT HONORABLE WICKED STEPMOTHERS’

  TRAVELING, DRINKING, AND DEBATING SOCIETY

  —Caroline, Ellen, and Mimi—

  for kindly granting their permission

  for use of their Society

  in this book, and for allowing me

  to inflict them with a Men’s Auxiliary.

  Introduction

  Like its predecessor, Dealing with Dragons, this book is one I never intended to write. I had turned in the manuscript for Dealing and was waiting for the letter telling me whether my editor, Jane Yolen, was going to buy it or not. Instead the phone rang.

  “I read your manuscript,” Jane told me, “and I’m going to buy it.”

  “Good,” I said. “That was the idea.”

  “And I reread Talking to Dragons, and I want to buy that, too. And I want you to write the book in the middle, and we’ll make it a trilogy.”

  “Um,” I said. After Jane had talked me into writing a prequel to Talking to Dragons, I had thought, off and on, about the possibility of extending the story into a trilogy. But I’d thought in terms of adding a sequel on to the current end of the story, not about filling in the middle. When an editor makes this kind of offer, though, you don’t dismiss it out of hand, and I could see the advantages of writing a book to connect Dealing with Dragons more directly to Talking to Dragons.

  Two things about the project worried me. The first was picking the viewpoint character. The obvious choice was Cimorene, the main character of Dealing with Dragons, since the story would be a continuation of her adventures, but there was a problem. Talking to Dragons was already written, and the main character was Daystar, Cimorene’s son. I was afraid that if I wrote two books with Cimorene as the main viewpoint character, the change to Daystar in the final book would be too abrupt and would make the trilogy feel unbalanced.

  The only other reasonable choice was Mendanbar. Like Cimorene, he had had a small part in Talking to Dragons, but unlike with her, I knew almost nothing about his background, or even his personality. The idea of working with a new and unfamiliar character appealed to me a lot, and it had the added benefit of making sense from the point of view of the trilogy—I’d have one book for Cimorene, one for Mendenbar, and one for their son, Daystar.

  Making Mendenbar the viewpoint for this book gave me a chance to explore more of the Enchanted Forest and the ways it worked. It also let me poke around the outer area of the Mountains of Morning, and look at the ways the mountains were similar to and different from the forest. In addition, having the King of the Enchanted Forest as my viewpoint allowed me to give more background on some of the inhabitants, such as Telemain and the elves, who hadn’t gotten into the other books.

  Early in Dealing with Dragons, I’d started introducing recognizable references to fairy tales and some of the tropes that occur over and over—for example, the princesses always having golden hair. In Searching, I was even more conscious and deliberate about using fairy-tale tropes and motifs and deliberately playing with them.

  Fairy tales, folk tales, myths, and legends have a logic all their own, which is just slightly skewed from the normal, everyday world. It seemed reasonable to me that just as real-life people learn to stop at stop signs, walk on the sidewalk instead of in the street, and ride bicycles, people in the fairy-tale world would learn what made sense in the world around them and would act accordingly—they’d automatically learn to fly magic carpets, pay attention if a squirrel gave them directions, and be especially polite to dragons.

  Searching for Dragons took me a bit over a year to write, which was a couple of months more than the first book. Partly, this was getting used to the new viewpoint, but mostly it was because I had only the sketchiest idea of the plot. I had given a summary of the characters’ history in Talking to Dragons, but I had thought mainly about the way the story began, which I’d covered in the first book, and about the specific events leading to the situation in Talking to Dragons. This book had to bridge the middle, and that meant making up a lot of new details.

  As the story developed, it became more and more a journey through a fairy-tale landscape replete with lost princes, wicked uncles, and rampaging giants. Some of them embraced the roles that fairy tales assigned them, while others disliked those roles and tried to find ways around them. The expectations of family and culture, and whether to live up to them or reject them, has been a background theme of the series since the very start.

  The second thing I was worried about was that in order to set up the situation in the final book, the middle book would have to end on a cliffhanger. As a reader, I strongly dislike cliffhangers, and I didn’t want to inflict one on my readers, but I didn’t see any other way to end the middle book, given where the final volume starts.

  I fretted about the end point for the first half of the manuscript. At that point, it became obvious to m
e that there was too much middle to cover in one volume. I phoned my editor (who already knew of my dislike of cliffhangers) and proposed ending the book sooner (and, not coincidentally, in a more satisfying place). Jane was agreeable . . . but immediately informed me that this did not mean I was getting out of writing the rest of the middle. Instead of a trilogy, we’d have a quadrology.

  Then we had a long discussion about exactly where to end the current book. I felt that the story ended with the proposal; Jane wanted the wedding. Once I started thinking about it, I agreed, and that final chapter turned out to be a lot of fun to write. It gave me the chance to wrap up the stories of some of the minor characters, such as Herman the dwarf, and the Wicked Uncle. It also allowed me to put off the problem of the possible cliffhanger for another book.

  1

  In Which the King of the Enchanted Forest Takes a Day Off

  THE KING OF THE ENCHANTED FOREST was twenty years old and lived in a rambling, scrambling, mixed-up castle somewhere near the center of his domain. He sometimes wished he could say that it was exactly at the center, but this was impossible because the edges and borders and even the geography of the Enchanted Forest tended to change frequently and without warning. When you are the ruler of a magical kingdom, however, you must expect some small inconveniences, and the King tried not to worry too much about the location of his castle.

  The castle itself was an enormous building with a wide, square moat, six mismatched towers, four balconies, and far too many staircases. One of the previous Kings of the Enchanted Forest had been very fond of sweeping up and down staircases in a long velvet robe and his best crown, so he had added stairs wherever he thought there was room. Some of the steps wound up one side of a tower and down the other without actually going anywhere, which caused no end of confusion among visitors.

  The inside of the castle was worse than the outside. There were corridors that looped and curled and twisted, rooms that led into other rooms, and even rooms that had been built inside of other rooms. There were secret passageways and sliding panels and trapdoors. There were several cellars, a basement, and two dungeons, one of which could only be reached from the sixth floor of the North-Northwest Tower.

  “There is something backwards about climbing up six flights of stairs in order to get to a dungeon,” the King of the Enchanted Forest said, not for the first time, to his steward.

  The steward, a small, elderly elf named Willin, looked up from a handwritten list nearly as long as he was tall and scowled. “That is not the point, Your Majesty.”

  The two were in the castle study, going over the day’s tasks. Willin stood in the center of the room, ignoring several chairs of assorted sizes, while the King sat behind a huge, much-battered oak desk, his long legs stretched out comfortably beneath it. He was not wearing a crown or even a circlet, his clothes were as plain as a gardener’s, and his black hair was rumpled and needed trimming, but somehow he still managed to look like a king. Perhaps it was the thoughtful expression in his gray eyes.

  Willin cleared his throat and went on, “As the center of Your Majesty’s kingdom, this castle—”

  “It’s not at the center of the kingdom,” the King said, irritated. “It’s only close. And please just call me Mendanbar and save all that ‘Your Majesty’ nonsense for a formal occasion.”

  “We don’t have formal occasions anymore,” Willin complained. “Your Majesty has canceled all of them—the Annual Arboreal Party, the Banquet for Lost Princes, the Birthday Ball, the Celebration of Colors, the Christening Commemoration, the—”

  “I know,” Mendanbar interrupted. “And I’m sure you have them all written down neatly somewhere, so you don’t have to recite them all. But we really didn’t need so many dinners and audiences and things.”

  “And now we don’t have any,” Willin said, unmollified. “And all because you said formal occasions were stuffy.”

  “They are stuffy,” King Mendanbar replied. “Stuffy and boring. And so is being ‘Your Majestied’ every third word, especially when there’s only the two of us here. It sounds silly.”

  “In your father’s day, everyone was required to show proper respect.”

  “Father was a stuffed shirt and you know it,” Mendanbar said without bitterness. “If he hadn’t drowned in the Lake of Weeping Dreamers three years ago, you’d be grumbling as much about him as you do about me.”

  Willin scowled reprovingly at the King. “Your father was an excellent King of the Enchanted Forest.”

  “I never said he wasn’t. But no matter how good a king he was, you can’t deny that he was a stuffed shirt, too.”

  “If I may return to the topic of discussion, Your Majesty?” the elf said stiffly.

  The King rolled his eyes. “Can I stop you?”

  “Your Majesty has only to dismiss me.”

  “Yes, and if I do you’ll sulk for days. Oh, go on. What about the North-Northwest dungeon?”

  “It has come to my attention that it is not properly equipped. When it was first built, by Your Majesty’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, it was naturally stocked with appropriate equipment.” Willin set his list of things to do on Mendanbar’s desk. He drew a second scroll from inside his vest and began to read. “Two leather whips, one Iron Maiden, four sets of thumbscrews—”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Willin,” the King said hastily. When Willin got going, he could read lists for hours on end. “What’s the point?”

  “Most of these items are still in the dungeon,” Willin said, rerolling the scroll and stowing it inside his vest once more, “but the rack was removed in your great-great-grandfather’s time and has never been replaced.”

  “Really?” King Mendanbar said, interested in spite of himself. “Why did he take it out?”

  The little steward coughed. “I believe your great-great-grandmother wanted it to dry tablecloths on.”

  “Tablecloths?” Mendanbar looked out the window at the North-Northwest Tower and shook his head. “She made someone haul a rack up eight flights of stairs and down six more, just to dry tablecloths?”

  “A very determined woman, your great-great-grandmother,” Willin said. “In any case, the dungeon is in need of a new rack.”

  “And it can stay that way,” said Mendanbar. “Why should we get another rack? We’ve never used the one we have.” He hesitated, frowning. “At least, I don’t think we’ve ever used it. Have we?”

  “That is not the point, Your Majesty,” Willin answered in a huffy tone, from which the King concluded that they hadn’t. “It is my duty to see that the castle is suitably furnished, from the topmost tower to the deepest dungeon. And the dungeon—”

  “—needs a new rack,” the King finished. “I’ll think about it. What else?”

  The elf consulted his list. “The nightshades are becoming a problem in the northeast.”

  “Nightshades are always a problem. Is that all?”

  “Ah . . .” Willin cleared his throat, then cleared it again. “There is the matter of Your Majesty’s marriage.”

  “What marriage?” Mendanbar asked, alarmed.

  “Your Majesty’s marriage to a lady of suitable parentage,” Willin said firmly. He pulled another scroll from inside his vest. “I have here a list of possible choices, which I have compiled after a thorough survey of the lands surrounding the Enchanted Forest.”

  “You made a survey? Willin, you haven’t been talking to that dreadful woman with all the daughters, have you? Because if you have I’ll . . . I’ll use you to test out that new rack you want so badly.”

  “Queen Alexandra is an estimable lady,” Willin said severely. “And her daughters are among the loveliest and most accomplished princesses in the world. I have not, of course, talked to the Queen about the possibility, but any one of her daughters would make a suitable bride for Your Majesty.” He tapped the scroll meaningfully.

  “Suitable? Willin, all twelve of them put together don’t have enough common sense to fill a teaspoon! And
neither have you, if you think I’m going to marry one of them.”

  Willin sighed. “I did hope Your Majesty would at least consider the idea.”

  “Then you weren’t thinking straight,” the King said firmly. “After all the trouble I’ve had . . .”

  “Perhaps Your Majesty’s experiences have given you a biased view of the matter.”

  “Biased or not, I’m not going to marry anyone any time soon. Particularly not an empty-headed princess, and especially not one of Queen Alexandra’s daughters. So you can stop bringing it up every day. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. But—”

  “But nothing. If that’s everything, you may go. And take that list of princesses with you!”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” With a final, fierce scowl, Willin bowed and left the room, every inch of his two-foot height reeking of disapproval.

  Mendanbar sighed and dropped his head into his hands, digging his fingers into his thick, dark hair. Willin meant well, but why did he have to bring the subject up now, just when it looked as if things were going to calm down for a little while? The feud between the elf clans had finally been settled (more or less to everyone’s satisfaction), the most recent batch of enchanted princes had been sent packing with a variety of improbable remedies, and the giants to the north weren’t due to raid anyone for another couple of months at least. Mendanbar had been looking forward to a quiet week or two, but if Willin was going to start nagging him about marriage, there was little chance of that.

  “I might just as well go on a quest or hire some dwarves to put in another staircase for all the peace I’m likely to get around here,” Mendanbar said aloud. “When Willin gets hold of an idea, he never lets go of it.”

  “He’s right, you know,” said a deep, raspy voice from somewhere near the ceiling. The King looked up, and the carved wooden gargoyle in the corner grinned at him. “You should get married,” it said.

  “Don’t you start,” Mendanbar said.