Enchanted Forest Chronicles 2 – Searching for Dragons

Patricia C. Wrede's Searching for Dragons is a funny fantasy for 10 year olds about a king who only wanted one day off.

What happens

Mendanbar is twenty and rules the Enchanted Forest from a castle with far too many staircases. One of his ancestors liked sweeping about in a velvet robe, so he put steps in wherever there was room. Some of them go up one side of a tower and down the other without arriving anywhere. There are two dungeons and you can only reach one of them from the sixth floor.

His steward Willin is an elf about two feet tall with a list roughly his own height. This morning's items are a new torture rack for the dungeon nobody has ever used, and a wife.

Mendanbar declines both and goes for a walk. You would too.

Out in the forest he finds a patch of burnt ground with all the magic sucked out of it and five dragon scales lying about, each one a different colour. A squirrel tells him to ask Morwen, who turns out to be a witch with an enormous number of cats, a door that opens onto whatever room you need, and no interest at all in calling him Your Majesty.

Morwen does a bit of magic over the scales and proves they all came from the same dragon, disguised. Which means somebody wanted the forest to think a rogue dragon did this.

So she packs him off, with two bottles of cider and a book, to go and see Kazul, who happens to be the King of the Dragons.

The pleasure of this one is entirely in the arguing. Everybody is brisk and slightly cross with everybody else. There's a wooden gargoyle on the study ceiling that heckles the king about not being dusted, and Mendanbar settles it by squirting soapy water into its mouth out of thin air.

The magic works like invisible threads he can twitch, which is a lovely image and never over-explained.

This is the second of the Enchanted Forest books, and it opens on Mendanbar rather than on Cimorene, the princess from the first one. Your reader will manage perfectly well starting here. They'll just meet her partway in.

Nothing here is frightening, although Willin's list of dungeon equipment is read out in full, thumbscrews and all, entirely for laughs.

What to read next

If they'd rather start where it started, Dealing with Dragons is Cimorene deciding that being a proper princess is unbearably dull and running off to live with a dragon instead.