Calling on Dragons Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  In Which a Great Many Cats Express Opinions

  In Which Morwen Encounters a Rabbit

  In Which Morwen Makes a Discovery and Some Calls

  In Which Morwen and Telemain Argue and Killer Discovers the Perils of Mixing Cosmetics and Magic

  In Which the Plot Thickens

  In Which the Plot Positively Curdles, and the King of the Dragons Loses Her Temper

  In Which Killer Rises in the World

  In Which Telemain Does a Spell and Morwen Misses a Call

  In Which the Expedition Leaves the Enchanted Forest at Last

  In Which Telemain Works Very Hard

  In Which They Make an Unexpected Detour

  Which Is Exceedingly Muddy

  In Which They Make a New Acquaintance

  In Which They Trade Stories

  In Which They Have Difficulties with a Mirror

  In Which They Learn Something Worth Knowing

  In Which There Is Much Excitement

  In Which They Concoct a Plan

  In Which They Confront the Villains

  In Which Disaster Strikes

  In Which Nobody Is Satisfied

  Epilogue Which Hints at Things to Come

  Sneak peek of TALKING TO DRAGONS

  Buy the Book

  Read all of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles

  About the Author

  Text copyright © 1993 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, 1993.

  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–

  Calling on dragons/Patricia C. Wrede.

  p. cm.—(The Enchanted Forest chronicles; bk. 3)

  Sequel to: Dealing with dragons; Searching for dragons.

  Sequel: Talking to dragons.

  Summary: Queen Cimorene turns to her friends Morwen, Telemain, and Kazul for help when troublesome wizards make their way back into the Enchanted Forest and begin to soak up its magic.

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

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

  Enchanted Forest chronicles; bk. 3.

  PZ8.W92Cal 1993

  [Fic]—dc20 92-35469

  ISBN: 978-0-15-200950-2 hardcover

  ISBN: 978-0-544-54147-4 paperback

  eISBN 978-0-547-53793-1

  v1.0915

  For my nieces and nephews,

  with love and the hope

  that they will grow up reading

  Introduction

  Calling on Dragons is not merely a book I hadn’t intended to write; it is the one book of the four that I actively didn’t want to write. It was the last of the four Enchanted Forest Chronicles to be written, even though it is number three out of four by internal chronology, and it is a darker book with a far more ambiguous ending than the others. It had to be, because it was the final bridge in the story line that linked Dealing with Dragons to Talking to Dragons, which meant that the end of this book had to set up the situation at the beginning of Talking. When I started writing it, I couldn’t see how to do that without leaving things in a horrible cliffhanger, and I hate cliffhangers. (I am the sort of person who buys the first two books of a trilogy and puts them on the shelf without reading them until the third one is available.)

  I was therefore expecting Calling on Dragons to be more difficult to write than the other three had been. In addition, I was starting to get twitchy. I’d been writing nothing but Enchanted Forest books for nearly four years straight, and while I was still having plenty of fun doing them, I was looking forward to working on some of the other ideas I hadn’t gotten to. So I had very mixed feelings when I realized, halfway through Searching for Dragons, that the “middle book of the trilogy” had too much story for one book and was going to require a second middle volume.

  I had other problems too, starting with the title. The pattern “----ing (preposition) Dragons” was by this time solidly established . . . and I couldn’t think of a single thing that felt right. I wrote the whole manuscript under the “title” “Enchanted Forest Book 3,” but my editors refused to let me turn it in that way. They were unsympathetic when I complained that I didn’t have any ideas, and they certainly weren’t willing to let me delay turning the book in until I finally thought of something workable. So, in a fit of pique, I came up with the silliest thing I could think of, and handed the book in under the title “Bowling for Dragons” (a deliberate play on the TV game show Bowling for Dollars). My editors laughed and agreed that we really couldn’t call the book that, and eventually suggested Calling on Dragons as a more acceptable alternative. I was just happy I hadn’t had to think of it myself.

  Once again, I also faced the question of which character to use as the viewpoint. I’d already wrestled with that problem when I was talked into writing Searching for Dragons. I now had three books (Dealing, Searching, and Talking), each of which was from the point of view of a different member of the eventual family. Unfortunately, there were only three people in that family, so I was either going to have to repeat a viewpoint or else find a completely different person who could be a central part of the story.

  All of the arguments against repeating a viewpoint still held. I didn’t want the series to emphasize one of my characters at the expense of the others. Fortunately, I once again had a character whom I really liked but who hadn’t had a really major role in the first two books: Morwen, my somewhat unconventional witch. The clincher was when I realized that Morwen understood her cats, which meant that I could show their side of the conversation if she was the viewpoint character.

  Morwen felt right for other reasons, though. I liked the idea of writing about Cimorene, Mendanbar, and the dragons from outside their family. A witch (however unconventional) also seemed like a good choice as the main character for a book touching on darker themes, as I knew this one would.

  As with the first two books, I began with only a sketchy idea of the plot. I knew there’d be a theft and the start of open conflict between the wizards, the dragons, and the Enchanted Forest; I knew that neither side would have a clear “win” and that the book would end with the prospect of a sixteen-year stalemate. I didn’t know exactly how to get from here to there any more than my characters did.

  Like Searching for Dragons, this book is a journey through the landscape of fairy tales. The characters meet up with ordinary people who are making the best of the roles they’ve been assigned by the stories they inhabit. But Calling on Dragons is very much a transition book, and I was always conscious of the fact that in Talking to Dragons I hadn’t had nearly as many obvious fairy-tale references as I’d put in the first two books of the series. There are still a lot of fairy-tale motifs in Calling, such as magic mirrors and the cabbages that turn people (or rabbits) who eat them into donkeys, but there are more things, such as fire-witches and invisible dusk-blooming chokevines, that I made up. I was hoping that this combination of tropes and bits I made up would provide a smoother transition to the fourth book.

  As I got closer to writing the ending, I got more and more worried about handlin
g it. Once again, my editor came to the rescue, suggesting the epilogue as a way of hinting that things would be settled eventually, even if the ending of this one left things more open-ended than I liked. It took me several tries to get a version I found acceptable. I probably won’t ever be quite as happy with the ending of this book as I am with the others, but I will now grudgingly admit that this is probably more a matter of personal taste (mine) than an actual problem with the story in this book.

  1

  In Which a Great Many Cats Express Opinions

  DEEP IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST, in a neat gray house with a wide porch and a red roof, lived the witch Morwen and her nine cats. The cats were named Murgatroyd, Fiddlesticks, Miss Eliza Tudor, Scorn, Jasmine, Trouble, Jasper Darlington Higgins IV, Chaos, and Aunt Ophelia, and not one of them looked anything like a witch’s cat. They were tabby, gray, white, tortoiseshell, ginger, seal brown, and every other cat color in the world except a proper and witchy black.

  Morwen didn’t look like a witch any more than her cats looked as if they should belong to one. For one thing, she was much too young—less than thirty—and she had neither wrinkles nor warts. In fact, if she hadn’t been a witch, people might have said she was quite pretty. Her hair was the same ginger color as Jasmine’s fur, and she had hazel eyes and a delicate, pointed chin. Because she was very short, she had to stand quite straight (instead of hunching over in correct witch fashion) if she wanted people to pay attention to her. And she was nearsighted, so she always had to wear glasses; hers had rectangular lenses. She refused even to put on the tall, pointed hats most witches wore, and she dressed in loose black robes because they were comfortable and practical, not because they were traditional.

  All of this occasionally annoyed people who cared more about the propriety of her dress than the quality of her spells.

  “You ought to turn him into a toad,” Trouble said, looking up from washing his right front paw. Trouble was a large, lean gray tomcat with a crooked tail and a recently acquired ragged ear. He had never told Morwen exactly how he had damaged either the tail or the ear, but from the way he acted she assumed he had won a fight with something.

  “Who should I turn into a toad?” Morwen asked, looking an unusually long way down. She was sitting sideways on her broomstick, floating comfortably next to the top of the front door, with a can of gold paint in one hand and a small paintbrush in the other. Above the door, in black letters partly edged in gold, ran the message “NONE OF THIS NONSENSE, PLEASE,” which Morwen was engaged in repainting.

  “That fellow who’s making all the fuss about pointy hats and respect for tradition,” Trouble replied. “The one you were grumbling about a minute ago—what’s his name?”

  “Arona Michaelear Grinogion Vamist,” Morwen recited, putting the final gold line along the bottom of the “L” in “PLEASE.” “And it’s a tempting thought. But someone worse would probably replace him.”

  “Turn them all into toads. I’ll help.”

  “Toads?” purred a new voice. A small ginger cat slithered out the open window and arched her back, then stretched out along the window ledge, where she could watch the entire front yard without turning her head. “I’m tired of toads. Why don’t you turn somebody into a mouse for a change?” The ginger cat ran her tongue around her lips.

  “Good morning, Jasmine,” Morwen said. “I’m not planning to turn anyone into anything, at the moment, but I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “That means she won’t do it,” said Trouble. He looked at his right paw, decided it was clean enough for the time being, and began washing his left.

  “Won’t do what?” said Fiddlesticks, poking his brown head out of the front door. “Who’s not doing it? Why shouldn’t he—or is that she? And who says so?”

  “Turn someone into a mouse; Morwen; I certainly don’t see why not; and she does,” Jasmine said in a bored tone, and pointedly turned her head away.

  “Mice are nice.” Fiddlesticks shouldered the door open another inch and trotted out onto the porch. “So are fish. I haven’t had any fish in a long time.” He paused underneath Morwen’s broom and looked up expectantly.

  “You had fish for dinner yesterday,” Morwen said without looking down. “And you ate enough breakfast this morning to satisfy three ordinary cats, so don’t try to pretend you’re starving. It won’t work.”

  “Someone’s coming,” Jasmine observed from the window.

  Trouble stood up and ambled to the edge of the porch. “It’s the Chairwitch of the Deadly Nightshade Gardening Club. Wasn’t she just here last week?”

  “It’s Archaniz? Oh, bother,” said Morwen, sticking her paintbrush into the can. “Has she got that idiot cat Grendel with her? I told her not to bring him anymore, but nine times out of ten she doesn’t listen.”

  Fiddlesticks joined Trouble at the top of the porch steps. “I don’t see him. I don’t see anyone but her. I don’t want to see her, either. She doesn’t like me.”

  “That’s because you talk too much,” Trouble told him.

  “I’m going inside,” Fiddlesticks announced. “Then I won’t have to see her. Maybe someone’s dropped some fish on the floor,” he added hopefully as he trotted into the house.

  Morwen landed her broomstick and stood up, just as the Chairwitch reached the porch steps. The Chairwitch looked exactly as a witch ought: tall, with a crooked black hat, stringy black hair, sharp black eyes, a long, bony nose, and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. She hunched over as she walked, leaning on her broom as if it were a cane.

  Morwen put the paint can on the window ledge next to Jasmine, set her broom against the wall, and said, “Good morning, Archaniz.”

  “Good morning, Morwen,” Chairwitch Archaniz croaked. “What’s this I hear about you growing lilacs in your garden?”

  “Since I don’t know what you’ve heard, I can’t answer you,” Morwen replied. “Come in and have some cider.”

  Archaniz pounded the end of her broom against the porch floor, breaking some of the twigs and scattering bits of dust and bark in all directions. “Don’t be provoking, Morwen. You’re a witch. You’re supposed to grow poison oak and snakeroot and wolfsbane, not lilacs. You’ll get thrown out of the Deadly Nightshade Gardening Club if you aren’t careful.”

  “Nonsense. Where in the rules does it say that I can’t grow what I please in my own garden?”

  “It doesn’t,” Archaniz admitted. “And I’ll tell you right away that you aren’t the only one who puts a few lilacs and daylilies in with the rampion and henbane. Why, I’ve got a perfectly ordinary patch of daisies in the corner myself.”

  “Daisies.” Jasmine snorted softly. “She would.”

  “But I’ve been getting complaints,” Archaniz continued, “and I have to do something about them.”

  “What sort of complaints?”

  “That the Deadly Nightshade Gardening Club is too normal for witches,” Archaniz said gloomily. “That all we grow are everyday plants like cabbages and apples—”

  “Apples are a basic necessity for witches,” Morwen said. “And everyday plants don’t turn the people who eat them into donkeys. Who’s complaining?”

  “Some fellow with an impossible name—Arona Mc-something-or-other.”

  “Arona Michaelear Grinogion Vamist?”

  The Chairwitch nodded. “That’s the one. I’ve gotten six regular letters and two by Eagle Express in the past month. He says he’s going to write a letter to the Times next.”

  “He would,” Trouble muttered. “I said you should turn him into a toad.”

  “That idea sounds better all the time,” Morwen told Trouble. Then she looked back at Archaniz, who of course had not understood a word Trouble had said. “Vamist isn’t a witch,” Morwen said. “He’s an idiot. Why worry about what he says?”

  “That’s all very well, Morwen, but if he convinces people he’s right, it’ll ruin our image. And if people think we’re not dangerous, they’ll come around asking for love potions and penny curses
whenever they like. We’ll be so busy mixing up cures for gout that we won’t have time for the things we want to do. Look what happened to the sorceresses!”

  “I haven’t seen many of them around lately.”

  Archaniz nodded. “They got a reputation for being kind and beneficent, and the next thing you knew everyone was begging them for help. Most of them moved to remote islands or deep forests, just to get away from the pestering. It’s all very well for you, Morwen, living out here in the Enchanted Forest anyway, but I—”

  A loud yowl interrupted the Chairwitch in mid-sentence. An instant later, four cats tore around the corner of the house. The one in front was a heavy, short-legged tomcat with yellow eyes and fur as black as night. Behind him came a fat, long-haired tabby tomcat and two females, one a large calico and the other a fluffy white cat with blue eyes. The black cat streaked out into the front yard, made a hairpin turn, and leapt for the porch, where he clawed his way up Archaniz’s skirts to a perch on her shoulder.

  The three pursuing cats jumped gracefully onto the porch railing and sat down, curling their tails around their feet, just as Fiddlesticks poked his head out of the front door.

  “What’s all the noise about? Who’s shouting? Is it a fight? Who’s winning? Can I join?” With every question, Fiddlesticks pushed a little farther, until he was entirely outside the house, staring up at Archaniz and the cat on her shoulder. “Who’s that?”

  “Mrow!” said the black cat in a complaining tone. “Yow wow mrrrum!”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Trouble. “Well, your father wears boots!”

  Morwen gave the black cat a speculative look. “One of these days, I am going to have to work up a spell that will let me understand other people’s cats as well as my own,” she said to Archaniz. “What was that about?”

  “We caught him nosing around in back of the garden,” the long-haired tabby growled.

  “He had no business there,” the white cat added primly. “He’s not one of us, after all. So we thought we would drive him away.”