The Dragons of Winter by James A. Owen Page A

seemingly endless corridors. He had once been Jacob Grimm’s familiar, but he seemed to have bonded himself to John. He was, however, still a cat, and he came and went as he chose.
    “So,” Grimalkin said as his hindquarters appeared, “you’re going to see the Raven, are you?”
    “We are,” said John.
    “Mmmmrrrr,” the cat growled. “We do not like him. He has no place.”
    “What do you mean?” John asked, puzzled. “Jules said he has a room here.”
    “Not room, place ,” the cat spat back, clearly irritated. “The Raven has no place. He is here, but not here. It’s very confusing, and it vexes us.”
    “What the Cheshire is trying to explain,” said Verne, “is that Dr. Raven is unique among the Messengers, and even among the Caretakers, in that he has no trumps.”
    Again John stopped and looked at the older man. “He doesn’t travel by trump? So how does he get to where you need him to be?”
    Verne shrugged. “We aren’t really sure. He just . . . goes to wherever he is needed. We tried to press him about it once, and he vanished for six months. When he returned, he acted as if nothing had happened, so we never addressed it again.”
    “No place,” the cat repeated as it started to vanish again. “We will be watching, Caretakers.”
    “Can we really trust him then, Jules?” John said as Verne indicated a rather plain green door at the end of the last hallway. “He sounds more like someone we should be worried about than entrusting with our future.”
    “The best assessment we were able to make is that he is a fiction, like Herman Melville, or Hank Morgan,” said Verne. “Or possibly an anomaly, like Bert himself. But he has never acted against us, and in this war, we may be less able to choose our friends than we are our enemies.”
    He rapped sharply on the door, which swung open immediately. The room was small, obviously an antechamber to a larger warren of living spaces, but it was utilized fully. There were desks and shelves filled with antiquities and relics of the distant past—and, John observed, some from possible futures. Toward the right side, sitting in a tall, straight-backed chair, was a slender, slightly hawkish man who immediately rose to greet them.
    “You assess correctly, Caveo Principia,” Dr. Raven said, noting John’s interest in the items of the collection that were not antiques. “We once kept most of these items at the Cartographer’s room in Solitude, but for obvious reasons, they had to be relocated.”
    John gave a slightly formal nod and handshake to the other, still chewing over what Verne had been telling him in the hallways. “I recognize a few things,” he said, moving over to a shelf filled with record albums. “Merlin was very fond of his Marx Brothers collection.”
    “He also enjoyed the films of Clint Eastwood,” said Dr. Raven, “although you’d never have gotten him to admit it.” He spoke in afriendly and courteous manner, but his eyes never left John’s face, and John had also noticed that Dr. Raven addressed him using his most formal title.
    The Messenger was hooded, but enough of his face was visible that John could see the honest smile of greeting, and the well-earned wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. The other Messengers had been roughly John’s contemporaries, but this Dr. Raven was somewhat older, perhaps closer to Bert in age. Regardless, John understood some of what Verne saw in the man—he seemed immediately trustworthy, which bothered John, because nothing else he knew about him was.
    “So,” Dr. Raven said, rubbing his hands together. “What may I do for the Caveo Principia?”
    “Harrumph.” Verne cleared his throat and stepped slightly in front of John. He was used to being deferred to, and Dr. Raven’s seeming interest in John was off-putting. “We need you to be a chaperone, basically. No time travel will be involved, simply spatial travel—to the Soft Places.”
    “Ah,” Dr. Raven said, as if he