Blood and Royalty (2 page)

Chapter Two

“He has a few thousand, at the very least,” Marcherion explained to Jenka, Aikira and Clover, who were all gathered at Clover’s castle waiting for Rikky and Zahrellion. “And he is riding that blasted demon wyrm. He told me to tell Rikky that he killed Herald because the old fart killed Royal’s twin. He is stronger than even Gravelbone was. He nearly ended me had Blaze not been keen enough to snatch me from my fall.”

Jenka was dressed in green, and brown that matched his eyes, and he was wearing triangular-shaped shoulder armor very similar to the piece he wore back when March first met him. Only this newer gear was worth all the gold they had ever dreamed about back then.

Aikira still looked like an ebon goddess, in a long, yellow cloak over golden mail, belted at the waist with an ornate girdle. Clover, though, was clad, or not so clad, in the skimpiest set of clothing he had ever seen. She had only plated gauntlets and knee-high boots to protect her. The rest of her clothing did well to cover her feminine parts at all.

Mudges are attacking Three Forks,
Rikky called out.
Half a dozen of them or more.

“It has started, then.” This came from Linux, who just as always, somehow seemed to appear in the room with them.

March scowled at him, because Linux was still in poor Rolf’s body.

“He will do this,” March went on, as if Rikky shouldn’t need any help with just half a dozen mudged. “He will poke and stab and irritate us with his mudged until we are weak.”

Marcherion was left dumbfounded when he saw Jenka suddenly rise and step into a blur of motion, then disappear in a speedy streak of green.

“He does that sometimes,” Clover grinned, and March suddenly felt like a fresh slab of meat before a lioness.

“Should we go help them?”

Clover shook her fiery red mane. “Milly could kill that threat with a thought.”

“Milly?” March asked.

“Excuse me,” Clover chuckled. “Princess Amelia, Jenka’s daughter.”

“This means the attack a few weeks ago on Gull’s Reach wasn’t random,” Linux said.

“They will take Gull’s Reach first.” March knew this in his heart, as he’d long ago taken to studying tactics when he wasn’t hunting with Rikky. He’d studied from the same volumes Richard had. “They will then take Freeman’s Reach, and then King’s Island. Only after they’ve established themselves out there could they attack the Mainland.”

“If Richard was sane, I’d agree.” Clover’s mischievous look vanished, and her naturally green eyes bore into Marcherion’s like Jenka’s sometimes used to.

“He might have studied strategy with smart men and decided to take the kingdom seat first.” She shrugged at March and then looked at Linux. “He might just distract us with the mudged and try to kill his brother. If he does that, no one can deny his claim to the throne.”

*

When Jenka and Jade came slamming out of their hyper- movement over Three Forks, Jenka had to take a second to gather himself. Moving a hundred times faster than the world around them came naturally, but the moments of transition were disorienting at best. After taking in his surroundings, he was faced with a hard decision. He could feel his daughter and son. They were together and most likely on Crystal with their mother. He could see Rikky defending their escape from the trio of mudged that were pursuing, but two other mudged were attacking the town square. One building was already afire, and several of the good folk dead or maimed.

Jenka decided he didn’t have to make a choice, and he and Jade went back into hyper motion. A few heartbeats later, one of the mudged attacking the people was spiderwebbed over with crackling emerald energy. Then, in a bright yellowy flare, it disappeared from the sky.

The other tainted wyrm was sending weak gouts of flame into a huddle of people it had cornered. None of the blasts were harsh enough to kill them, but they were all blistered and hairless, and probably blinded.

Jade carried Jenka around in an arcing turn that would take them right over the low buildings. He ended up coming right at the mudged head-on. Everything around them was moving so slowly that Jenka took a few moments to contemplate whether he was actually moving faster than them all, or if he had gained the power to slow the world around him instead. Seeing Silva and three mudged dragons frozen in the distant sky made him think it was him moving faster, and not the other way around. Seeing them also brought his drifting mind back on track, and as they came back around, Jade sent out a pulse of force that went streaking from his maw but slowed to real speed just before it impacted and removed the mudged’s head. With a whack of his tail, Jade made sure the dead wyrm’s bulk would fall away from the crowd it had hemmed in, and then they were speeding toward Rikky.

*

Rikky knew Jenka was helping when the mudged wyrm farthest from him was enveloped in a sudden crackling yellow webbing and just vanished. He was thankful, for he had been training with men so much he’d almost forgotten what the dragon saddle felt like.

He had never been one to use magic to fight with, save for the few times he’d had no other choice, so he was relying on Silva and his bow, not his dragon tear’s magic.

Silva twisted through the sky, her smaller form undulating with her powerful wing beats. She put herself before one of the two mudged, forcing it to stall its forward motion and rear up in the sky. When it did, she blasted forth a gout of molten pewter spew that engulfed the surprised mudged’s head.

Rikky loosed an arrow at the other mudged and was pleased to see his shaft sink deeply into the thing’s wing joint. He then turned and shook his head as the mudged Silva had just blasted went spinning down out of the sky, its head now cased in hardening metal goo too heavy to keep aloft.

The wyrm Rikky had shafted, which had been fluttering and struggling to stay in the air with the pain, now burst into emerald flames and disappeared in an instant. Right into the green mist that remained came Jenka and Jade, slowing from a blur into themselves.

“Waass- thaat- all- of them?” Jenka asked slowly, his voice growing from a deep warble into its normal tone as he spoke.

“There was one more, Jenk.” Rikky was already urging Silva to catch up with Zahrellion.

Jenka and Jade flew right alongside them, and Rikky decided that once this last mudged was killed, he would spend more time with his wyrm. They needed practice. None of the others had ever been able to keep up with them in normal flight, yet here were Jenka and Jade keeping pace as if it were easy.

They had to hurry, though, for with three riders, Crystal couldn’t just turn and battle a mudged.

Rikky glanced at Jenka again, and their eyes met. Nothing was said, but Jenka nodded and went streaking away in a lime-colored blur, leaving Rikky and Silva to catch up on their own.

Chapter Three

Using the Nightshade’s ability to manipulate the mudged, King Richard was able to single out the least inbred of the many draci his hellborn mount was summoning for him. These less tainted dragons were more rebellious than the others. They were able to defy the Nightshade, which made them a risk, but it also made them more valuable.

Richard, with his black, sleek-skinned Nightshade’s influence, a few brutal torture devices, and his evil spell-casting, found cruel ways to force the defiant half-bred wyrms to sometimes shed a teardrop. The tears hardened on their way to the ground and held within them powerful magic.

These crystallized drops were not nearly as powerful as the one Royal had once cried for Richard, but he had seven of the lesser ones now, and all combined their power was easily threefold the power of Jenka’s or Rikky’s dragon tears. He wasn’t sure about Clover’s teardrop, because the lines between legend and reality had been stretched in tales of her over the centuries, but he was certain he would have to face her, and he had a few other tricks, too.

The people of all the Karian kingdoms thought of Clover as some sort of semi-evil goddess who sometimes sided with the people, and sometimes against them. They all feared her, and tales of the deeds she’d performed for King Amothy and his sons, and even in the following wars that split that once massive kingdom into a score of smaller ones, were recorded by monasteries, druidic cults, and all sorts of bards, poets, and story masters.

Richard sought out the official chronicles of Old Kar, as the people called the previously whole kingdom, and with the help of his wife, Queen Xawyn Azar, purchased them from the distant relative of King Amothy, who was presently sitting on that completely inconsequential seat.

After reading of the deeds of Clover and her violent dragon from firsthand accounts, Richard found he was a bit intimidated by her ability. He also learned of her association with the dwarves, and that she might have abandoned them in their greatest time of need. There was a chance he could ally with them in the slow, bloody war he was so looking forward to, but at the moment he was waiting on the newest extracted teardrop.

He had not only given his three men, Baru, Dinaqu, and Kovin, each a collared mudged, but a single teardrop as well, so that they might maintain control of other mudged wyrms, in other places, in his stead. They were loyal, perhaps out of fear, but mostly because they were revered by all of Vikaria as King Richard’s wizard warriors, for they were going to reclaim the New World for its rightful king and queen.

King Chad, Xawyn Azar’s father, who was only Richard’s puppet now, gave his blessing to it all in formal settings. The rest of the time he cursed and drank over his ill fortune. The poisons the castle wizards were giving him were slow acting. They would soon rot him from the inside, leaving his childless daughter and Richard the queen and king of Vikaria, as well as the actual rulers of several other smaller kingdoms they’d acquired. And soon the New World as well.

“Here it is.” Baru grinned as he knocked, but entered Richard’s map room without waiting.

Baru had the teardrop wrapped in thick leather, for the acolytes extracting them were killed instantly, if not from the intensity of the power the drops contained, than by one of Richard’s two cronies, who knew exactly what other men would do to gain such power.

Richard took the offered bundle and began peeling away the folds covering his prize. When he saw it, he gasped aloud, and then it was clenched in his fist, where it barely fit. His other hand reached into his belt pouch and grabbed a handful of his other, smaller teardrops causing a rush to slide over him like no other he’d ever experienced.

He laughed maniacally, because now he was beginning to understand why his spies all told him Jenka spent his days in a daze. Did his brother have a teardrop as big as Clover’s, too?

He didn’t know, and in that moment of raw bliss, he didn’t care.

Now, even Clover’s power seemed insignificant to him. The time to start taking the islands had come, and he was as ready as he had ever been to bathe the soil of the Mainland with the blood of those who had once called him king.

*

Clover hated the situation. Not the unavoidable war that was coming between Jenka and his brother, but the situation with the mystica. If Princess Amelia proved to be able to impose her will so absolutely that she could create willborn, then she would have to be killed. It was an age-old thing that certain elves were bound to do, and they would pursue her relentlessly, if she was one. Clover needed to know if Jenka’s daughter was just tainted with the same affliction her father was, or if she had inherited the unallowable ability to create some terrible thing from nothing more than her desire.

She’d left the castle as soon as the children and their mother had arrived. The girl’s ninth birthday had been ruined by her uncle’s wyrms attacking the Three Forks Palace, and Clover had to agree with Marcherion that it had been an intentional slight. Richard probably had spies enough to have known what day it was, and that there was a festival. Prince Jericho told her that Amelia’s conversation with her father and Marcherion was the only reason she hadn’t been outside on the dais, before the people, when the mudged attacked.

Worse, Clover heard that the mudged were singling out all of the pale-complected young girls with their hair dyed bright red, as if killing Milly was their sole purpose.

I’m insane,
Clover thought to herself. Here she was debating on whether she would have to kill the girl herself, to save her from the wrath of the elven hunters who would eventually come, while siding with the child in her heart for having such an ass of a king for an uncle.

“Are you leaving?” Aikira asked her.

Clover was standing on a balcony that overlooked the lush valley below the castle. She and Crimzon had long ago constructed the place with the help of ogres and dwarves, which reminded her that she needed to go see King Granitine, or whoever sat the throne now, before the coming war got too far out of hand.

“I am.” She smiled at the beautiful ebon-skinned girl her son had raised and then trained. For a second, she wondered if Aikira had learned enough to know of willborn duty, and the last laws of wizardry. She was suddenly sad, because she couldn’t remember if she’d passed them to her son, Vax Noffa. “I will only be gone a few days at the most. Marcherion is right. They will try to take Gull’s Reach first. Stave them off there as long as you can, and maybe I can find us a way to poke back at Jenka’s brother in a way he’ll not be expecting.”

Clover didn’t mention the issue with Princess Amelia being a mystica. She’d slipped the term accidentally before Zahrellion once, when the two were speaking privately of the girl’s strangeness. Zah seemed to understand something might be wrong then, but Clover wasn’t sure if Milly was, or wasn’t, one. The one thing she did know was that she had to find out before the girl matured.

After a hug, she and Aikira parted ways. Clover then climbed the long, circular stair that led to the dragons’ landing pads. She could levitate like the others seemed to prefer doing, but she wanted to keep her legs strong, and keep her arse firm. After all, she was more than three hundred years old.

She said a few quick words of respect to the other wyrms relaxing on the enchanted platforms that replenished them so, and then mounted Crimzon in the dusky light.

“Take me to see the Oracle of Everling,” she told her dragon aloud. The Oracle, if she was still alive, had the box. Clover remembered having to stick her hand in it, but she’d been an adult, and had been riding Crimzon only a few years, at the time. Someone had claimed she was a mystica, probably one of the gambling guilds she’d taken advantage of, and then the elves of Everling had hunted her. They fought her and Crimzon, and lost terribly against them, but eventually persuaded her that she needed to know the last laws of magic, the few things Master Zarvin never got the chance to teach her.

Once she learned those, she realized that she had to stick her hand in the box, for the legendary strawberry-haired, pale-complected mystica, who were able to give life to things born from just their will, had created horrible evils in the past. They had to be killed.

Clover wasn’t certain how the thing in the box could tell, but the elves swore it could. She had the characteristics, just like Milly. The red hair and white skin; the power to sway the will of men, and always be favored.

She remembered the thing touched her, and she’d felt that it was angry for being where it was. Then her arm was out and she was wiggling her tingling fingers before her face.

She chuckled, for the elves had been even more relieved than she at that moment. Had she been blooded by the thing, and then killed by the elves, they would have then had to deal with Crimzon.

There was the issue of the girl being a girl, though, and not yet a woman. Clover wasn’t going to steal away with Princess Amelia, at least not until she was sure the Oracle and the box would even work. She had to go see for herself.