But Ymmen hates the Stone Crown! He hates me using it! I argued silently for myself. If only Abioye was right, and there really was another way forward…
And then a thought bubbled up into my mind.
“The Lady Artifex,” I said out loud, standing up from where I had been leaning.
“Huh?” Abioye looked up at me questioningly.
“The Lady Artifex!” I repeated, saying it loud enough for Master Johannes, Tamin, and Montfre to look up at me. “The Lady Artifex was a Dragon Rider, one of the early Dragon Riders in the service of Old Queen Delia, who had traveled to chart the Plains on the back of her red dragon,” I explained, earning an agreeing nod from Master Johannes.
“Artifex of the First Company?” Master Johannes asked.
“I guess so.” I felt more sure all of a sudden. It was her journal that I had found with my god-Uncle Tamin in a forgotten crypt in the depths of the Masaka mountains, and which had formed the basis for Inyene’s expedition to retrieve the Stone Crown.
I suspected that the Lady Artifex had been sent – or had perhaps even stolen – the Stone Crown upon the High Queen Delia’s death, and that her traveling journal had been a way to map the eventual hiding place of the crown that now sat atop my head.
For some reason, maybe it was reading through her journal about her joys and delights at the many discoveries of the Plains she had on her travels – but I felt that I would be able to trust the advice given by this long-dead, defiant Dragon Knight.
“She was close to Queen Delia,” I said. “Inyene had the Lady Artifex’s journal, which is how Inyene knew where to seek the Stone Crown,” I remembered. And from that journal had come the map of the Plains, which I had lost many moons ago in the battles against the mercenary captain Nol Baggar. Inyene must still have the journal, I thought. Could there be another copy of the Lady Artifex’s work? I hoped against hope that Artifex had been a prolific writer, as I cleared my throat. “If there is anything written by this Lady Artifex, then there might be more of what the Stone Crown does, and how — through Artifex’s eyes rather than through the Old High Queen’s.”
“Hmm… Yes…” The Master Johannes was stroking his long beard and nodding slowly. “You have a point, young lady!” the master said with a pleased, toothless grin before he turned back to the bookshelves, leaving Tamin to continue his work with the gigantic history of Queen Delia’s realm.
“Let me see now…” I watched as Master Johannes muttered and grumbled his way along the shelves. “It’s a good thing you mentioned the First Company, young lady – you see, the reports of the Dragon Riders themselves – personal diaries, battle-reports, that kind of thing – are all held in a different place…” His hunched form lurched and trudged out of our little reading lobby and down a different bookshelf-corridor to disappear with his circle of lantern light. I could hear more muffled grumbling and muttering coming from the labyrinth out there, as Tamin and Montfre mused over their finds.
“The Sea Crown…” Montfre murmured, directing our gaze to a diagram of a crown that looked almost like the one firmly in place on my head, with a large green gem as a centerpiece.
“I know of it! It was worn by Lila the Protector in the Battle for Roskilde!” Abioye spoke up, his eyes lighting up a little as he remembered the tales of his youth, before turning to explain these strange stories to me.
“This isn’t that Queen Saffron you keep talking about?” I said warily. All of these names were getting confusing!
“No,” it was my god-Uncle Tamin who laughed, seeing my puzzlement. “Queen Saffron and King Bower fought the Dark King Enric, a generation before. Lila the Protector and Danu Geidt the Dragon-Friend liberated the Western Archipelago, and its main isle of Roskilde, from the Army of the Dead.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling that the world that I lived in was far bigger and stranger than even I had given it credit for.
“Same magic. Same evil.” I heard Ymmen’s voice in my head, and I could feel once again his enmity for the Stone Crown upon my head.
“Lila the Protector was heir to the isle of Roskilde, but her uncle, Lord Havick, stole her realm and she and her mother took to the oceans, to become Sea Raiders, or pirates,” Tamin explained. “Danu Geidt was the only male witch to be trained with the witches of distant Sebol Isle—”
“The start of the Western Track…” Ymmen added, referring to the mystical journey that his dragon-kind were taking even now, to flee this world for something – else.
“—and together, they used the power of the Sea Crown, an ancient artifact of Roskilde, to stop the Army of the Dead from taking over both the Western Archipelago and the Three Kingdoms,” Tamin said.
“So…more magical crowns then!” I said, exasperated. You would have thought that someone would have got the idea that they were a bad idea, I thought a little grumpily…
“Yes, uh…” Montfre read the crabbed black lines carefully that surrounded the images around the image of the Sea Crown of Roskilde, “and here, it is quite clearly written that the Sea Crown was destroyed, because not even Lila the Protector could control its power.” Montfre looked sharply at me, and I shrank back a little under the scrutiny—
Ow! A flash of headache raced between my ears from end-to-end, as if the Stone Crown knew that we were trying to find a way to destroy it.
“It seems that these magical crowns concentrate power, collect it somehow—” Montfre was saying.
“Wait. How did they destroy this Sea Crown?” I asked, for Montfre to look blankly at the page, turn one side over to peruse the next side, and then the one after that before looking up helplessly at me. “It doesn’t say,” he said a little awkwardly – just as there was a loud cry of exultation.
It was the Master Johannes, hurrying back on his staff and tired feet, with a thinner tome in one hand. “I have it! Here, page 48,” he said, and I watched as he set the slim, leather-bound volume down. When he opened it up however, all I could see were small curving and curling lines, dots, and dashes.
“Huh?” I blinked.
“Old Rider Code,” Master Johannes cackled. “Not many can read it these days, but it used to be common practice to be trained in it—” He explained how the dots, curls, and lines could be used as either words or letters in an alphabet, or could even become different sorts of sounds. “Here, see?” He pursed his lips to let out long, looping, or sharp and shortened blasts of notes, a little like birdsong. Or dragon calls, I thought.
“This is a personal report written by the Lady Artifex,” Johannes explained. “All of the First Company were encouraged to write their discoveries and encounters down, as the practice of befriending and riding dragons was so very new in her time – at least here at the Academy…”
Just like her journal, I thought, thinking about the similarly slim volume Tamin and I had found in a sealed catacomb, deep under the Masaka mountains. That journal had claimed to be an expedition across the Plains, and it had held many beautiful and exact sketches of things and places that I knew welclass="underline" particular standing rocks, loops of rivers, the incredibly realistic depiction of the giant Plains Antelope, or the wings of a rare Sun Butterfly.