Quenelda slept, cocooned from the cold white world outside.
On hearing of the calamity that had occurred at Dragonsdome, the Queen had sent her own physician and commanded the Earnest and Ingenious Guild of Apothecaries to search for a cure. The men in the yellow-tasselled tricorn hats of the Guild, with their weights and measures, pestles and mortars, came and went. Quenelda was forced to swallow potions, but none of them made any difference to the pale girl with sunken, bruised eyes. Warm and dark in her dream, she slept on.
One by one, the apothecaries declared themselves at a loss as to her condition. ‘I confess myself baffled,’ one said as he looked down at the girl. ‘She has virtually no pulse, and its beat is strange and erratic. Her blood barely moves, she barely breathes.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s almost as if …’
‘As if …?’ Tangnost pressed.
‘It’s almost as if she’s gone into hibernation.’
Stricken to his core, the dwarf stood watch over the girl he thought of as his daughter, while Dragonsdome and the Seven Sea Kingdoms disintegrated and fell to disaster about him.
Spring came late – too late. The starving hobgoblins spawned and swarmed. Crossing the ice that joined the Westering Isles to the mainland in their millions, they fell upon every living thing in their path. While the dwarf clans of the high-cliffed Northern and Inner Isles fought for their very survival, hobgoblins on their Razorbacks entered the deep sea lochs of the west, carrying their hobgoblin masters deep into the heart of the Seven Sea Kingdoms. Unaware, Quenelda slept on as the undermanned fortresses of the Stormbreakers and Nightstalkers were isolated and besieged, and the hobgoblin banners swept across all the Northern Highlands virtually unopposed.
Abandoning the Howling Glen to the inevitable, their newly promoted Strike Commander, William DeBurgh, Armelia’s uncle, rallied his shattered regiment to protect the tens of thousands of refugees mired down in appalling weather on the military road south. Fighting a futile rearguard action, they fell to the last man and dragon. Mustering fresh troops from the Winter Knights, Shadow Wraith and Firestorm regiments, the new SDS Commander Jakart DeBessert, took the field north of the Brimstones to face converging hordes of over a million hobgoblins, and barely halted their advance at the cost of half his command. And there, where a line of crags rose up above the moorlands between the northern Brimstones and the mountains to the east, the SDS engineers began repairing the Old Wall, a relic of the First Age. Within half a moon, cut off by appalling weather that grounded their Imperials, and surrounded by hobgoblins and Razorbacks, the Nightstalkers’ fortress fell with no survivors. The panicking Guild called on the Grand Master to raise an army in the name of the Queen.
Hushed voices drifted in and out of Quenelda’s hearing. The belfry counted out the hours, then days and weeks, but her hearts beat to a different, slower rhythm. As the Sprouting Grass Moons gave way to the Corn Planting Moons, and the hobgoblins were finally beaten by the Grand Master’s newly formed army, Root quietly despaired for his friend’s life. The weight was dropping away from Quenelda, from her high cheekbones and slanting brows. There was no longer any doubt: the Earl’s daughter was dying. Giddy with relief at their belated victory over the hobgoblins, the rejoicing Guild called upon the Queen to bestow the new title of Lord Protector upon the Lord Hugo Mandrake, with a writ to raise taxes and an army of his own.
The peoples of the Seven Sea Kingdoms had found a new champion.