Dealing With Dragons Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  In Which Cimorene Refuses to Be Proper and Has a Conversation with a Frog

  In Which Cimorene Discovers the Value of a Classical Education and Has Some Unwelcome Visitors

  In Which Cimorene Meets a Witch and Has Doubts About a Wizard

  In Which Kazul Has a Dinner Party, and Cimorene Makes Dessert

  In Which Cimorene Receives a Formal Call from Her Companions in Dire Captivity

  In Which the Wizards Do Some Snooping, and Cimorene Snoops Back

  In Which Cimorene and Kazul Make a Journey Underground

  In Which Cimorene and Kazul Pay a Call, and Cimorene Gets into a Fight

  In Which Therandil Is a Dreadful Nuisance, and Cimorene Casts a Spell

  In Which Cimorene and Alianora Conduct Some Tests and Disturb a Wizard

  In Which Kazul Is Unwell, and Cimorene Makes a New Acquaintance

  In Which Cimorene Calls on a Dragon, and the Stone Prince Discovers a Plot

  In Which Alianora Discovers an Unexpected Use for Soap and Water, and Cimorene Has Difficulty with a Dragon

  In Which the Wizards Try to Make Trouble, and Cimorene Does Something About It

  In Which the Dragons Crown a New King, and Cimorene Gets a New Job

  Sneak peek of SEARCHING FOR DRAGONS

  Buy the Book

  Read all of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles

  About the Author

  Text copyright © 1990 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, 1990.

  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

  Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were previously published in a slightly altered form as “The Improper Princess,” a short story in the collection Spaceships and Spells, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987.

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

  Wrede, Patricia C., 1953–

  Dealing with dragons/by Patricia C. Wrede.

  p. cm.—(Enchanted forest chronicles; bk.1)

  Summary: Bored with traditional palace life, a princess goes off to live with a group of dragons and soon becomes involved in fighting against some disreputable wizards who want to steal away the dragons’ kingdom.

  [1. Fairy tales. 2. Princesses—Fiction. 3. Dragons—Fiction. 4. Wizards—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ8.W92De 1990

  [Fic]—dc20 89-24599

  ISBN: 978-0-15-222900-9 hardcover

  ISBN: 978-0-544-54122-1 paperback

  eISBN 978-0-547-53864-8

  v1.0915

  For ALAN CARL and ANNIE BUJOLD

  Because they liked the other one a lot

  Introduction

  Dealing with Dragons is officially twenty-five years old this year, but the real beginning of the story is a good ten years older than that. Thirty-seven years ago, I sat down at my computer and typed, “Mother taught me to be polite to dragons.” That sentence became the first line of Talking to Dragons, which is now the fourth book in this series and which I wrote as a stand-alone (I thought then) in the early 1980s.

  I didn’t know that I was in the process of inventing a character who would become one of my personal favorites. I didn’t even know Cimorene’s name when I wrote that line, only that she was the hero’s mother. Her appearance in that first story was very brief, though her influence pervades the book. Yet even though she was one of the characters I liked best when the book was finished, I didn’t plan on writing a book about her. If I thought about writing another book set in the Enchanted Forest at all, I thought in terms of continuing the story I’d started in Talking to Dragons, not about filling in Cimorene’s backstory.

  Enter Jane Yolen, multifaceted writer, poet, and, at that particular moment, anthologist. She was collecting stories for a children’s anthology, and she asked if I would write one. I demurred, on the dual grounds that I have considerable difficulty in writing short fiction (I am a novelist by inclination) and that I didn’t write for children.

  “You wrote Talking to Dragons,” Jane said. “Write me something like that.”

  Almost immediately, I thought of Cimorene. I went home and reread the chapters in which she appeared, and decided that I could write a story about her early life. I was still dubious about my ability to write anything short, but I figured that it would be an interesting experiment, and if Jane rejected it, I would at least have tried.

  “The Improper Princess” took me about three weeks to write, as best I can remember, and Jane did not reject it. It appeared in her Spaceships and Spells anthology, and I thought that was the end of it.

  It wasn’t. A few years later, I got a phone call from Jane, who informed me that she would be editing a line of young adult books and that she wanted me to write one for her. Once again, I objected that I didn’t know how to write for children; once again, she pointed to Talking to Dragons. This time, though, she said, “Why don’t you take that short story and turn it into a novel?”

  And so, a little more than twenty-five years ago, I started writing Dealing with Dragons. The book took me roughly ten months to finish, which is faster than any other solo project I have ever written. The short story I began with takes up the first twenty-one pages and ends with Cimorene declining the Latin for “dragon” in preparation for beginning her new duties. This book was a tremendous amount of fun to write, because I liked Cimorene and her intensely practical approach to all the fairy-tale tropes I have always loved.

  Since Cimorene began life as Daystar’s mother in Talking to Dragons, her younger self in this book needed to be someone who would grow up to become that kind of person: strong, smart, self-assured, practical, curious, and willing to take on and solve all sorts of problems. From what I’d written in “The Improper Princess” and from the history I’d given in Talking to Dragons, I already knew the general outline of her adventures, which, again, required someone smart, practical, and sure of herself.

  Explaining this occasionally confounds people who think that I wrote Cimorene as some sort of feminist statement about what women can achieve. I find their surprise hard to understand. My real-life family and friends are full of women like Cimorene, from my twin cousins, who have been fur trappers in the Alaskan bush for most of their lives, to my mother, who became an engineer long before women’s liberation officially opened “nontraditional careers” to women, to my grandmothers, aunts, and cousins, who were office managers, farmers, nurses, nuns, geologists, and bookkeepers, among other things. None of these women takes any guff from anyone. They aren’t proving a point about what women could, should, or can do; they are ignoring that whole question (which none of them considers a question worth asking at all) and getting on with doing the things that interest them most.

  Cimorene, Morwen, Kazul, and the other women of the Enchanted Forest owe a lot to these real-life women, but they are none of them portraits of actual, specific people of my acquaintance. My characters aren’t even composites, deliberately constructed by reassembling aspects of real-life women. They are themselves, characters I invented as minor players in Talking to Dragons who came into their own, more fully fleshed out and realized, in this book.

  Working with them again was fun, as was adding new players such as Princess Alianora, Roxim, and the
Stone Prince. I also had a much clearer idea of the fractured-fairy-tale setting, which allowed me to be more deliberate about introducing twists on fairy tales than I had been in the original book.

  When I finally turned the manuscript in to Jane Yolen, I once again thought that would be the end of things. I was wrong; I still had two more books to write . . . but that, as they say, is another story.

  1

  In Which Cimorene Refuses to Be Proper and Has a Conversation with a Frog

  LINDERWALL WAS A LARGE KINGDOM, just east of the Mountains of Morning, where philosophers were highly respected and the number five was fashionable. The climate was unremarkable. The knights kept their armor brightly polished mainly for show—it had been centuries since a dragon had come east. There were the usual periodic problems with royal children and uninvited fairy godmothers, but they were always the sort of thing that could be cleared up by finding the proper prince or princess to marry the unfortunate child a few years later. All in all, Linderwall was a very prosperous and pleasant place.

  Cimorene hated it.

  Cimorene was the youngest daughter of the King of Linderwall, and her parents found her rather trying. Their first six daughters were perfectly normal princesses, with long, golden hair and sweet dispositions, each more beautiful than the last. Cimorene was lovely enough, but her hair was jet black, and she wore it in braids instead of curled and pinned like her sisters.

  And she wouldn’t stop growing. Her parents were quite sure that no prince would want to marry a girl who could look him in the eye instead of gazing up at him becomingly through her lashes. As for the girl’s disposition—well, when people were being polite, they said she was strong-minded. When they were angry or annoyed with her, they said she was as stubborn as a pig.

  The King and Queen did the best they could. They hired the most superior tutors and governesses to teach Cimorene all the things a princess ought to know—dancing, embroidery, drawing, and etiquette. There was a great deal of etiquette, from the proper way to curtsy before a visiting prince to how loudly it was permissible to scream when being carried off by a giant. (Linderwall still had an occasional problem with giants.)

  Cimorene found it all very dull, but she pressed her lips together and learned it anyway. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she would go down to the castle armory and bully the armsmaster into giving her a fencing lesson. As she got older, she found her regular lessons more and more boring. Consequently, the fencing lessons became more and more frequent.

  When she was twelve, her father found out.

  “Fencing is not proper behavior for a princess,” he told her in the gentle-but-firm tone recommended by the court philosopher.

  Cimorene tilted her head to one side. “Why not?”

  “It’s . . . well, it’s simply not done.”

  Cimorene considered. “Aren’t I a princess?”

  “Yes, of course you are, my dear,” said her father with relief. He had been bracing himself for a storm of tears, which was the way his other daughters reacted to reprimands.

  “Well, I fence,” Cimorene said with the air of one delivering an unshakable argument. “So it is too done by a princess.”

  “That doesn’t make it proper, dear,” put in her mother gently.

  “Why not?”

  “It simply doesn’t,” the Queen said firmly, and that was the end of Cimorene’s fencing lessons.

  When she was fourteen, her father discovered that she was making the court magician teach her magic.

  “How long has this been going on?” he asked wearily when she arrived in response to his summons.

  “Since you stopped my fencing lessons,” Cimorene said. “I suppose you’re going to tell me it isn’t proper behavior for a princess.”

  “Well, yes. I mean, it isn’t proper.”

  “Nothing interesting seems to be proper,” Cimorene said.

  “You might find things more interesting if you applied yourself a little more, dear,” Cimorene’s mother said.

  “I doubt it,” Cimorene muttered, but she knew better than to argue when her mother used that tone of voice. And that was the end of the magic lessons.

  The same thing happened over the Latin lessons from the court philosopher, the cooking lessons from the castle chef, the economics lessons from the court treasurer, and the juggling lessons from the court minstrel. Cimorene began to grow rather tired of the whole business.

  When she was sixteen, Cimorene summoned her fairy godmother.

  “Cimorene, my dear, this sort of thing really isn’t done,” the fairy said, fanning away the scented blue smoke that had accompanied her appearance.

  “People keep telling me that,” Cimorene said.

  “You should pay attention to them, then,” her godmother said irritably. “I’m not used to being hauled away from my tea without warning. And you aren’t supposed to call me unless it is a matter of utmost importance to your life and future happiness.”

  “It is of utmost importance to my life and future happiness,” Cimorene said.

  “Oh, very well. You’re a bit young to have fallen in love already; still, you always have been a precocious child. Tell me about him.”

  Cimorene sighed. “It isn’t a him.”

  “Enchanted, is he?” the fairy said with a spark of interest. “A frog, perhaps? That used to be quite popular, but it seems to have gone out of fashion lately. Nowadays, all the princes are talking birds, or dogs, or hedgehogs.”

  “No, no, I’m not in love with anyone!”

  “Then what, exactly, is your problem?” the fairy said in exasperation.

  “This!” Cimorene gestured at the castle around her. “Embroidery lessons, and dancing, and—and being a princess!”

  “My dear Cimorene!” the fairy said, shocked. “It’s your heritage!”

  “It’s boring.”

  “Boring?” The fairy did not appear to believe what she was hearing.

  “Boring. I want to do things, not sit around all day and listen to the court minstrel make up songs about how brave Daddy is and how lovely his wife and daughters are.”

  “Nonsense, my dear. This is just a stage you’re going through. You’ll outgrow it soon, and you’ll be very glad you didn’t do anything rash.”

  Cimorene looked at her godmother suspiciously. “You’ve been talking to my parents, haven’t you?”

  “Well, they do try to keep me up to date on what my godchildren are doing.”

  “I thought so,” said Cimorene, and bade her fairy godmother a polite goodbye.

  A few weeks later, Cimorene’s parents took her to a tourney in Sathem-by-the-Mountains, the next kingdom over. Cimorene was quite sure that they were only taking her because her fairy godmother had told them that something had better be done about her, and soon. She kept this opinion to herself. Anything was better than the endless rounds of dancing and embroidery lessons at home.

  Cimorene realized her mistake almost as soon as they reached their destination, for the King of Sathem-by-the-Mountains had a son. He was a golden-haired, blue-eyed, and exceedingly handsome prince, whose duties appeared to consist entirely of dancing attendance on Cimorene.

  “Isn’t he handsome!” Cimorene’s lady-in-waiting sighed.

  “Yes,” Cimorene said without enthusiasm. “Unfortunately, he isn’t anything else.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” the lady-in-waiting said in astonishment.

  “He has no sense of humor, he isn’t intelligent, he can’t talk about anything except tourneys, and half of what he does say he gets wrong. I’m glad we’re only staying three weeks. I don’t think I could stand to be polite to him for much longer than that.”

  “But what about your engagement?” the lady-in-waiting cried, horrified.

  “What engagement?” Cimorene said sharply.

  The lady-in-waiting tried to mutter something about a mistake, but Cimorene put up her chin in her best princess fashion and insisted on an explanation. Finally, the lady-in
-waiting broke down.

  “I . . . I overheard Their Majesties discussing it yesterday.” She sniffled into her handkerchief. “The stipulations and covenants and contracts and settlements have all been drawn up, and they’re going to sign them the day after tomorrow and announce it on Th-Thursday.”

  “I see,” said Cimorene. “Thank you for telling me. You may go.”

  The lady-in-waiting left, and Cimorene went to see her parents. They were annoyed and a little embarrassed to find that Cimorene had discovered their plans, but they were still very firm about it. “We were going to tell you tomorrow, when we signed the papers,” her father said.

  “We knew you’d be pleased, dear,” her mother said, nodding. “He’s such a good-looking boy.”

  “But I don’t want to marry Prince Therandil,” Cim­orene said.

  “Well, it’s not exactly a brilliant match,” Cimorene’s father said, frowning. “But I didn’t think you’d care how big his kingdom is.”

  “It’s the prince I don’t care for,” Cimorene said.

  “That’s a great pity, dear, but it can’t be helped,” Cim­orene’s mother said placidly. “I’m afraid it isn’t likely that you’ll get another offer.”

  “Then I won’t get married at all.”

  Both her parents looked slightly shocked. “My dear Cimorene!” said her father. “That’s out of the question. You’re a princess; it simply isn’t done.”

  “I’m too young to get married!”

  “Your Great-Aunt Rose was married at sixteen,” her mother pointed out. “One really can’t count all those years she spent asleep under that dreadful fairy’s curse.”

  “I won’t marry the prince of Sathem-by-the-Mountains!” Cimorene said desperately. “It isn’t proper!”

  “What?” said both her parents together.

  “He hasn’t rescued me from a giant or an ogre or freed me from a magic spell,” Cimorene said.

  Both her parents looked uncomfortable. “Well, no,” said Cimorene’s father. “It’s a bit late to start arranging it, but we might be able to manage something.”