“Ah. Then it is your mother,” said Marcellus. “That is where the ghost of the previous Queen always resides.”

“Does she? Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Jenna.

“Well, I assumed you knew,” said Marcellus.

“No. No one tells me anything,” Jenna declared. “Not even my mother.”

Marcellus stood up. “Then it seems to me, Princess, that as your nearest relative on the royal side, it is time I stepped in. I will tell you all I know from my dear dead sister and my, ahem, less dear but thankfully dead mother.”

Jenna looked surprised. She had never thought of Marcellus as a relative, but it was true; he was in fact a great, great—and then some—uncle. Suddenly she felt a weight lifted from her shoulders. The Dragon Boat was no longer her worry alone. “Thank you,” she said, smiling for the first time that day.

“My pleasure, niece,” said Marcellus. “Now, I suggest we repair to the boatyard and open the Dragon House.”

“But what for? We’ve lost the Triple so we can’t revive her,” said Jenna, exasperated. She wondered whether Marcellus had actually listened to what she had been saying.

“There is more than one way to skin a cat,” said Marcellus.

Jenna’s patience ran out. Angrily, she stood up, scraping the old oak chair back across the stone floor. “Stop talking in riddles, Marcellus,” she snapped.

Marcellus put his arm out to stop Jenna from going. “Forgive my obscure speech, Princess,” he said. “What I mean is, there is more than one way to revive a dragon.” He stood up and put his arm around Jenna’s shoulders. “The Magyk way is beyond us now, so I shall show you the Physik way.”

Jannit Maarten was sitting in her snow-covered hut in the boatyard, cooking her favorite sausage and bean stew when, to her dismay, she saw the new Castle Alchemist walk by with the Princess, the ExtraOrdinary Apprentice and then—as her tiny snow-dusted window filled with green—ohnonotthatwretcheddragon. Jannit muttered a sailor’s curse and got to her feet.

During the Big Freeze, Jannit hibernated like a tortoise in her hut. She looked forward to the peace and quiet that the first flakes of snow brought with them. She sent her Apprentices and dockhands home, and waited happily for the day the Moat froze over and not even the Port barge could disturb the serenity of the boatyard. For the rest of the year Jannit worked day and night, eating, sleeping and dreaming boatyard business, but the Big Freeze was her holiday. As she had grown older, Jannit had begun to look forward to it so much that she had recently considered barring the way through the tunnel to ensure she was not disturbed by anyone from the Castle. The sight of three Castle dignitaries walking by her tiny snow-dusted window, accompanied by a notoriously heavy-footed dragon, made her wish she had done just that. There was a sharp rap on her door and Jannit briefly toyed with the idea of pretending she was not there in the hope they would go away. But the thought of them poking unsupervised around her boatyard and, even worse, the heavy-footed dragon trampling on the delicate shells of the upturned boats, got Jannit opening the hut door with a growled, “What?”

The new Castle Alchemist spoke. “Good day, Mistress Maarten, I—”

Jannit bristled. “I am no one’s mistress, Alchemist.” Jannit, who disapproved of Alchemie, managed to make “Alchemist” sound like an insult. “Jannit Maarten is my name and Jannit Maarten is what I answer to.”

“Ah. Forgive me. Jannit Maarten. Yes. Indeed. Ahem.”

Jannit, who was nearly a foot shorter than Marcellus, folded her arms belligerently and squinted up at the Alchemist. “What do you want?”

Marcellus looked down at the small, wiry woman swathed in a thick blue-black woolen sailor’s coat that was far too big for her and reached almost to the ground. He could see she meant business. Her iron-gray hair was scraped back into a sailor’s pigtail that seemed to bristle with annoyance, and every deep-set, wind-burned line in her face showed just how displeased she was to see him. Marcellus took a deep breath. He knew that what he had to say was not going to go down well.

“We have come to open the Dragon House,” he said. “I am sorry for any inconvenience it may cause.”

Jannit looked flabbergasted. “You what?”

Jenna decided to step in. “I’m really sorry, Jannit,” she said. “But I think the Dragon Boat is dying. We have to get into the Dragon House. We have to try to save her.”

Jannit liked Jenna, who reminded her of how she had been as a girl: a confident, taking-charge kind of person. That, thought Jannit, was how girls should be.