The Shadow Dragons - James A. Owen [55]
“Good man,” said Kipling. “Would that others of our order had been as strong.”
“We should be looking to Jakob,” Hawthorne said brusquely. “After all, his own brother was a washout as a Caretaker, and we know he’s already sworn allegiance to Burton.”
“That’s a lie!” Jakob Grimm shouted, standing and placing his fists on the table. “He would not betray us, and never would he betray me!”
“What about Alexandre Dumas fils?” asked Defoe. “He made quite a show of leaving us, and was quite loud about his intentions to betray us all.”
“Forgive me,” Alexandre Dumas père said, “and my son. I hope that he would not have sold us out to Burton and his ilk, but I cannot say with certainty.”
“And would you betray us, for his sake, if he had?” Kipling asked.
“Never.”
“I’d be willing to give you both the benefit of the doubt, Jakob, Alexandre,” said Dickens. “I’ve been through similar situations myself, and I know how your loyalties have been tested.”
“Ah, yes,” said Charles. “Maggot.”
“Pardon?” said Dickens.
“He means Magwich,” Jack corrected. “We’ve had more than our share of difficulties with him.”
“I’m very sorry about that,” Dickens said. “It was an awful judgment call on my part to bring him in the first place. He was a very strange sort of fellow, but he had a good core—or so I believed.”
“It’s well and truly rotten now,” said Charles. “He betrayed us once to the Winter King, and I have no doubt that he would do so again.”
“I think he should be flogged,” said Shakespeare. “Posthaste. That will teach him the error of his ways, I think.” He looked around at the others, beaming, as if he’d just solved the world’s problems with a single remark—then deflated a little when he realized that no one was paying attention.
“Magwich has already been made the Green Knight,” Bert said mildly. “He’s paying his dues.”
“That’s just it,” said Charles. “He isn’t. The Green Knight isn’t on Avalon.”
There was a chorus of disbelieving remarks and more than a little grumbling at that.
“Charles,” Chaucer said skeptically, “the Green Knight cannot leave Avalon. It’s a binding of the Old Magic. Only the Dragons themselves might break such a binding, and they would hardly be inclined, since it was they who bound him in the first place.”
“What if he’s just faded into dust?” suggested Jack. “That’s what happened to his predecessor, isn’t it?”
“Charles Darnay had fulfilled his calling and was therefore released,” said Dickens. “Do you really think Magwich has fulfilled anything?”
“You make a good point,” said Jack. “He did prove helpful once, uh, in his own fashion. I don’t know that I’d say he could be trusted, but I’d begun to think better of him.”
“Extending trust to those who have already proven themselves untrustworthy,” Twain remarked, “is a bit like cutting off the end of a rope and sewing it to the other end to make it longer.”
John explained briefly the circumstances that had resulted in their arrival in the Nameless Isles, omitting only their suspicion of Kipling as an ally of their still unknown adversary.
“So Quixote is here?” Spenser said with a joyous expression. “My old partner! I would love to see him!”
“I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you,” Tycho Brahe muttered. “I’m sure he feels the same.”
“It’s all right,” said Cervantes. “The past is the past—I’m sure he’s forgiven you by now.”
“I would hope so,” said Brahe. “If you can’t get some leniency after you’ve died, when can you get it?”
“Hank told us what had happened,” said Twain, “and Ransom filled in the holes after. So we knew that seven years hence, you’d try to make your way here.”
“That was the plan,” said John. “It was a risk to use Ransom’s Trump, but we felt that once we had removed Rose from danger and had moved past Verne’s zero points, we’d have a better chance of preventing the war.”
“Prevent the war?” a quiet