“Dennizz! It’s me. Gath!”
Dennis blinked. Why, so it was! The lad seemed to have grown in the past two months or so. Or perhaps it was the uniform.
“Gath! Has there been any word from Stivyung?”
The youth grinned. “We got a message only an hour ago. He’s okay. His balloon landed in a barony loyal to the crown, an’ he’s headed back with a column o’ troops to help chase Kremer!”
“Then Kremer—”
Dennis stopped in the middle of his question, because the Prince had turned and was walking over. Linsee was a tall, slender man, with a gray goatee. He smiled and took Dennis’s hand.
“Wizard Nuel. It is good to have you up at last. I trust you had a good rest?”
“Well, yes, your Highness. But I’m rather anxious to know about—”
“Yes,” Linsee said, laughing. “My daughter, and your betrothed, by my warrant. Linnora is communing in a nearby grove. She will be sent for.” At the Prince’s nod a young page hurried off with the message.
Dennis was glad. He wanted very badly to see Linnora again. On the night of their landing he had felt as nervous as any young suitor when the Prince arrived and she introduced him. He was greatly relieved when Linsee delightedly consented to their betrothal.
Still, it was the progress of the war that concerned him at the moment. From the air, on that tumultuous evening of battle, he had seen the tyrant’s gray-clad troops retreating on all fronts. Their multihued allies—the mercenaries and liege men of other barons—had melted away after the first pass of his flying machine, leaving the northmen to hurry their retreat, glancing up nervously over their shoulders.
But the retreating gray soldiers were not broken. In spite of their fear, they had pulled back in good order. They were excellent troops, who delayed the pursuing L’Toff fiercely so their fellows could escape.
When approaching darkness had forced him and Linnora finally to seek a landing in the L’Toff homeland, Dennis had worried that, come tomorrow, the enemy might reorganize and return.
“What about Kremer?” he asked.
“Not to worry,” Linsee grinned. “Kremer’s allies are all gone over to the King by now. And an army of volunteer militia is on its way from the populous east. Kremer has stripped Zuslik of everything movable and is even now on his way to his ancestral highlands.
“Sadly, I doubt even the armies of all the kingdom, aided by a flock of your buzzing and bobbing varieties of flying monsters, could pry him out of those craggy clefts.”
Dennis felt relieved. He had no doubt Kremer would cause more trouble someday. A man as brilliant and ruthless as he would find ways to pursue his ambitions, and regard this as only a temporary setback.
Still, for now the crisis was over.
Dennis was glad to have helped Linnora’s people. But most of all he was happy that no tyrant would force him to invent devices for which this world was simply unprepared.
He would have to watch that, in the future. Already he had unleashed on Tatir the wheel and lighter-than-air craft. And Gath had probably figured out the principle of the propeller by now, just by looking over the cart/airplane.
Dennis would have to see what the Practice Effect made of these innovations, once they were mass-produced, before unleashing any more wizardries on these innocents.
A page hurried up to Prince Linsee. Linsee bent to hear the message.
“My daughter asks that you meet her in the meadow where you landed the night before last.” He told Dennis. “She is there, by your miracle machine.
“No one has disturbed your craft since you arrived,” the prince assured him. “I let it be known that anyone who touched the great growling dragon-thing would be gobbled up alive!”
Dennis noticed from Linsee’s wry smile that he shared Linnora’s sharp wit. No doubt while he had slept the Princess had filled her father in on everything that had happened since her capture.
“Uh, that’s good, your Highness. Could you assign someone to show me the way?”
Linsee called forth a young girl page, who stepped forward and took Dennis’s hand.
2
Linnora awaited Dennis in the open meadow by the gleaming aircraft. She sat cross-legged in L’Toff leather and hose before the nose of the plane, while three of her gowned ladies whispered together at the edge of the glade.
From overheard snippets as he approached among the trees, Dennis could tell that the maids didn’t approve overmuch of their Princess dressing like a soldier, not to mention sitting on the turf in front of an alien machine.
The ladies gasped and turned quickly when Dennis said good morning. (Good afternoon, he corrected himself as he saw the lay of the sun.) The maids bowed and backed away. Their attitude was respectful, but it also nervously conveyed that they thought he was just a little likely to grow fangs or walk on air. Clearly the run-of-the-mill L’Toff weren’t all that much more sophisticated than the average Coylian.
That could change, though, Dennis reminded himself as he walked toward the plane.
Dennis frowned in puzzlement. Linnora was all scrunched over, her head poked under the front of the onetime cart. Although he admired the girl’s limberness, to twist about in such a contortion, he wondered what in the world she was doing.
“Linnora,” he called, “what are you—”
There was a sudden thud. “Ow!..” Her cry was muffled by the airplane’s undercarriage. Dennis blushed as there followed a quick chain of expletives Linnora could have learned from only one source. The words certainly weren’t in the Coylian dialect of the English language!
The Princess withdrew from under the craft and sat up rubbing her head. But her muttered invective stopped the instant she saw who it was. “Dennis!” she cried out. And then she was in his arms.
Finally, a bit breathless, he got a chance to ask her what she had been up to down there.
“Oh, that! Well, I hope it was all right. I mean, I hope I wasn’t fooling around dangerously with things I don’t understand well enough. But you were asleep for so long, and some busybody went and told Father I’d dressed for war, so he’s had me watched ever since to make sure I didn’t go ride off after Kremer’s ears or something. I was starting to get bored, so bored that I decided I wanted to see—”
She was clearly excited about something. But it was all coming just a bit too fast for Dennis. “Uh, Linnora, your ladies seemed a bit shocked seeing you burrowing under there like that.”
“Oh!” Linnora looked down at her muddy knees. She started trying to dust herself off, then stopped and shrugged. “Oh, well. They’ll just have to get used to it, won’t they? In addition to being your wife, I expect to be taught wizarding, you know. And that seems to be a dusty business, from what I’ve experienced so far.”
The twinkle in her eye told him that there were certain things she would expect from her lord husband. Clearly, he wouldn’t have to look far from home for an apprentice.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I came down here and found everything just as we left it when we landed. Your Krenegee was here, too. But he seems to have gone off, now. Perhaps he’s hunting. I’ve been under there a long time, and maybe I’ve lost track of time.”
Dennis despaired of his beloved ever getting to the point. “But what were you doing under there?” he insisted.
Linnora stopped for a moment, her torrent of words cut off as she traced her train of thought.
“The robot!” she declared suddenly. “I was bored, so—I decided to talk to that wonderful creature-and-tool you brought from your world!”