Free Dragon Rescue by Don Callander

to the Queen, except that Beatrix threw herself into the Librarian’s arms for a farewell embrace.
    “Are you going to find Edney?” lisped Amelia when he picked her up to give her a buss.
    “I am that! You can depend on Retruance and me, little Princess,”
    Tom promised, wishing he felt as confident as he had made himself sound.
    Forewarned by the Librarian and his Dragon, the remaining royal escort and the local levies rowed off by canal boat to intercept the raiding party of Rellings. Before nightfall they discovered the ten men in furs, trying to ford a deep, dark channel, sweltering in the unaccustomed humid heat of the southern land.
    “Surrender at once!’ cried the Captain of Guards, waving his sword threateningly. “Move, and you die to a man! You are our prisoners—or you may choose to fight us or drown!”
    “Mercy!” begged the renegade Rellings as one.
    They’d come south on their own venture, they soon admitted, deserting the army of Rellings and allies well to the north of Lexor.
    “We surrender! Take us away! This is a terrible, fearsome land!”
    “I suppose it seems that way to men used to snow and ice nine months of a year,” chortled a veteran Royal Guards sergeant. “Bind them tight and lead them back to Knollwater! There’s a nice, dry barn there to keep them safe!”
    rs
    “How can we trace him?” asked the Librarian, once they were aloft.
    “How can I hear you call from half a world away?” retorted the Dragon. “I’m sure I don’t know, but I seem to smell or feel or hear or taste or see my father somehow, Companion. We’re as close to Papa as I’ve been in years, I know.”
    Tom fell into silence, letting the great scaled beast find their way over the endless-seeming land of thickset woods, ponds, canals, and cattailed marshes to the north and west of Waterfields proper.
    He tried to sense the strange Dragon He’d never met, also, straining his eyes and ears and even his sense of smell, but to no avail. The wetlands of Waterfields sent up a dank and musty odor that might have masked the presence of the rogue Dragon.
    “Fortunately,” said Retruance after an hour of silent flight,’ ‘the wind is still, so any trace of...of Arbitrance this morning is still in place.”
    “We’ll have to depend on your senses, then,” decided his Companion, settling back. “I detect nothing except the marshes and the slow-running streams. What lies ahead?”
    “According to my geography of Carolna, we’re heading out of Waterfields proper toward a vast area called Sinking Marsh. It’s not really a swamp, you realize, but a very broad, flowing river, mostly very shallow and often choked with vegetation.”
    “A sort of Everglades, I suppose,” Tom thought aloud. “And the waters come down originally from the Snow Mountains, then sink under the Hiding Lands desert, do you think? Yes, and emerge once again south of the Cristol. Interesting!”
    If he heard the Librarian’s musings, the Dragon didn’t answer but flew swiftly on, making wide sweeps to left and right to focus on the faint trace of his poor papa.
    rs
    The royal party, riding fast as the King had decreed, passed the first night on the road just short of the farthest northern border of Waterfields as guests in a rickety old stone-and-timber keep long since near ruin. It was inhabited by a large family of cattle herders who had preempted the stone walls and replaced the ancient wooden roofs of the castle with woven reed thatching.
    “Never met a King of any sort before,” said Frost, the boisterous head of his clan. “I’m admitting to being flattered, even if ye’re running away from yer enemies. Discretion being the better part of...whatever the saying is, Sir King.”
    “We’ll pay you for our night and food,” said Eduard, somewhat testily.
    He was tired and sore and unaccustomed to such casual treatment, even if it was basically polite and even cordial.
    “Nonsense!” cried Frost’s enormously fat wife,