Blood and Royalty (4 page)

Chapter Six

Richard was tired of waiting. The feeling of impatience, and the power of the latest teardrop, had given him all the confidence he needed to begin the first stages of the attack. He wasn’t so eager as to be careless, though. He knew what Marcherion and the others would be expecting. He was going to oblige them with that little charade and then unleash a taste of his real fury where they least expected it.

He summoned the Nightshade and told it to be ready to hunt. He was as thirsty for blood as the Nightshade was for getting to absorb all the pain, suffering and sorrow the war would bring.

The King of Karvacha hadn’t yet knelt before Richard and pledged his allegiance to the war with the New World, so this day’s feeding wasn’t part of all that. This was about respect and power, and making sure there were no enemies left on this side of the world to rival his Vikaria. Karvacha was going to be an example.

Richard summoned Baru, Dinaqu and Kovin to his study. He led them to the balcony, where there was a table with four goblets and a bottle of wine. Richard poured the three of them a drink and then sipped from the goblet that had already been full when they arrived. There was a short moment of uncertainty that passed among them, but they all grabbed their offered cup and sipped, almost in unison. Richard was making them show their loyalty, for only a guilty man would have balked there.

“I will be leaving for Karvacha immediately.” He opened his arm out toward the garden, and then pointed at the city beyond the elevated balcony. The Nightshade hovered up and glared at them, as if they were insignificant.

“Fetch your mounts and bring three of your most obedient henchwyrms each. I want you all to loom over the city in a great, hovering ring, while I remind all of you, and myself, why I am the one true king!” Richard downed his goblet and then gave a curt nod and a look of disdain. “If you do not hurry, Karvacha will be but a memory before you even get there.”

He then took three purposeful strides, leapt up to the balustrade, and mounted his hellborn wyrm with a smooth, graceful leap.

Karvacha was only a short distance away on dragonback. On the roads it would take two days, but the Nightshade carried him there in less than a turn of the glass.

He had the Nightshade blast its hot, roiling breath across one of the four towers in the darkness just before dawn, and not even an alarm sounded. They did the same with another tower, but didn’t have as much luck. The loud “Dinggggg!” of a single ring carried across the city, and slowly windows lit up with lanterns, and men began peering out of the door stoops to look.

Richard laughed. “A single ring has no meaning,” he chuckled like a kid who’d just solved a puzzle. “Watch, listen.” Suddenly, the far tower’s bell began ringing in a steady, repetitive alarm.

The people there didn’t even see the Nightshade as it swept down and landed in the street among them and began killing and destroying everything it could.

Richard sat confidently atop its back, and with the power of his cluster of dragon tears, began sending grey, nearly invisible dagger-like blasts at whoever he singled out. It was a random thing, for he was waiting on good King Rabbleton to send men out with his agreement of surrender.

Richard knew the man was stubborn, and as he urged his sleek black wyrm to go find a new place in the city to destroy, he decided he hoped the old fart held out for a while.

Dawn was breaking and bathing the city in long shadows and blood-red light. Richard hadn’t felt so much pleasure since he’d been held captive by Gravelbone. It was beautiful, and bloody, and delicious. Then the long, keening wail of some woman cut across the morning, and to Richard, the sound was like icing on a cake.

*

“I will have to see her,” the Oracle said. “Her blood will still have in it what the Basx despises, if she is one.” Clover shuddered as the Oracle went on. “The variations in the saffluxua only warn us of the potential after a girl is of age, but the Basx will know, even now.”

The magical yellow blaze fluttering in the center pot did well to warm the room without all the covers, but she looked a little more like an old crone sitting in her rocking chair with the blankets pulled up around her shoulders.

“Before she starts to bleed, she must come and brave the Basx, as you once did. If she waits, and the suffluxua points to her, we will come for her.”

Clover knew she meant that Princess Amelia would have to reach into the box that held the Basx or risk being killed by elven assassins when she came of age.

The Basx was an ancient, spell-carved chest that had a hole in one end. Over the centuries, questionable women were hunted down by the elves and brought here. Each would have to stick a hand in the hole and see if the thing inside tried to feed on her blood.

Clover remembered that the thing had wanted to feed on hers, but for some reason hadn’t. Her luck had held true, and whatever it was inside hadn’t broken her skin, and that was that.

If it had, they’d have killed her on the spot.

She remembered being hunted for a time before that, too, because these elves thought she had willed Crimzon to be; but that was ages ago, and when she willingly offered to put her hand in the box, they began to tolerate her, even though they feared her wyrm greatly.

“She is a princess with a father who has powers beyond our understanding,” said Clover to the Oracle. “Getting her here won’t be so hard, but if she is a mystica, and you kill her, you’ll have a war on your hands that you can’t win.”

“I wonder what would happen if Jenka De Swasso put his hand in the box.” The Oracle smiled an unintentionally frightening grin. “I wonder if what is in the box isn’t from the same world as the creature your Dragoneers killed. At the time of that happening, it rattled and shook, and even howled out with what I could only interpret as glee.”

Clover doubted it. She’d put her hand in the box long before she came across her first Sarax. It was more likely that the Oracle had gone mad. Clover knew she’d end her own life long before she let her body be crumpled by the weight of the world. “I will try to sneak her here and get it over with.”

“Yes.” The old elf stopped her chair and leaned forward, catching Clover’s eyes for emphasis. “And soon. The will of a child can be most terrifying; and if she is a mystica, and her father is as strong as you say, who knows what her whimsical desire could conceive?”

Chapter Seven

Rikky, Jenka and Marcherion were using their dragons to lift the heavy dragon guns from the bailey up to the turrets of the small island’s stronghold. Marcherion doubted these folk out here had a chance against even a handful of mudged. Four shiploads of women, children, and a few of the older men were off to the Mainland, though, so at least it wouldn’t be a slaughter of innocents.

Marcherion wasn’t sure if a Dragoneer would be able to stay behind when it was time to go fortify Freeman’s Reach, and then King’s Island. They were getting nowhere fast, save for Jenka, who would sometimes move so swiftly they couldn’t see him at all; but even he wore down after two full days of work. Setting the heavy ratchet bows was no easy task. They were once used to protect the survivors of the
Dogma
wreck from the mudged wyrms nested here back then. It was amazing that they were still in working order.

Aikira was as angry as a hornet that no one was helping her prepare the Outland defenses, not even Clover. Clover was at her castle with Zahrellion and the children. Marcherion wasn’t sure why, but he’d been unnerved by Jenka’s strange daughter, and since Clover’s hair was as red as the child’s, and she was more than three hundred years old, he was just as unnerved by her. Crimzon and Blaze were both fire drakes, anyway. They couldn’t be agreeable about much, unless there was something to do; then the fire-blood they shared helped them fly in concert. If they were here now, he thought he could probably get thrice as much work done.

There was a part of him that couldn’t stop thinking about Desira, too. He had half a mind to just go back and snatch her up. Once the war began, Jenka would take it to that land, too. That was the one thing of which March was certain. Desira would probably be better off here, and safer at Clover’s castle.

“Hey! Pay attention,” a nervous man called from the top of a nearby roof, where he was affixing long, freshly sharpened window spikes.

March turned just in time to see Blaze’s arse bump into a spike on the next building over. The dragon bucked, but maintained himself. The growl of pain Blaze tried to hold back was loud and excruciating to hear.

Blaze finished setting the old dragon gun in place and dove away from the hold. March could only shrug at Rikky and Jenka. Blaze had jabbed himself deeply and needed to land so he could treat his wounds.

The instant his injured dragon’s claws touched the cobbles of a deserted city square, a hole opened in the sky. A dozen mudged flew through, one with a rider, and then the portal sealed itself behind them with a great “WHOOMP!” that clearly startled Rikky and Silva. March looked for Jenka, but he was already a streaking blur.

Blaze twisted his head back and blasted the stab wound on his arse with dragon fire, then leapt after the mudged carrying a man. Marcherion hoped it was King Richard, but didn’t think it was. He’d heard of the henchmen who did Richard’s bidding back home. This was probably one of them, and it was the perfect time to send a message, because none of the mudged had seen him down in the city, nor Jenka in his blur.

When Blaze’s dragon breath came up out of nowhere and swallowed the rider and most of his wyrm, Marcherion learned a great lesson about the enemy. His dragon’s breath bent around the man and his mudged. Then a grin spread across the rider’s dirty face, and a blast of grey energy hit Marcherion and his wyrm so hard that it sent them tumbling back down into the street.

*

Jenka could do little about Marcherion, for he was keeping Rikky and Silva alive. The mudged-rider had sent a massive blast of energy at the one-legged Dragoneer. Even with his hyper-movement Jenka was almost too late, but once the world around him slowed he was able to divert the blast with a blast of his own. He saw that the intense-looking, wild-eyed man had a grey crystal, or maybe a dragon’s tear, in his hand, but he couldn’t worry about that at the moment.

Once Rikky was out of harm’s way, Jenka raced to cast a spell that would keep March and Blaze’s impact into the street from ending them. Then he was back on the attack, streaking toward the nearest mudged he could see.

He blasted two of the mudged into yellow-green crackling energy that faded into a mist he and Jade passed right through. Two more were ended with fast, lime-green pulses from Jenka’s dragon tear.

They are attacking the Outlands in swarms!
Aikira sang, nearly screamed, through the ethereal, her melodic voice resonating so cleanly as to be unmistakably clear. It occurred to Jenka that he had heard her song in the normal rate of time she and the others were in, and suddenly he realized he wasn’t in hyper-speed anymore.

Had her voice reached him so deeply? Had she pulled his concentration away from his task? It didn’t matter. Jade clawed out at the mudged that swept past them, and only Rikky was left to save the men on the wall tops fighting for their lives, for the mudged rider blasted Jenka and Jade sideways, so hard the blow itself nearly ended them.

PART II

Blood

Chapter Eight

When Crystal and Zahrellion left to help Aikira in the Outlands, Clover seized the moment and took Princess Amelia by the hand. With her powerful dragon tear, she teleported them up to Crimzon’s side.

“You’re going with me,” Clover said simply.

“To see the elves?” Amelia asked, stopping Clover cold.

“Yes.” Clover didn’t see the point in lying. “You’re going to stick your hand in a hole in a box, and if the thing inside draws blood, the elves will kill you.”

“They didn’t kill you.”

“The creature didn’t draw my blood.”

“Yes, it did, but Crimzon healed you faster than you could pull your arm out.” The little girl was looking at Clover in a way that unnerved even her.

“I’m going to kill the thing in the box.” Amelia crossed her arms across her chest, her expression as firm as her stance.

Clover felt a chill slide up her spine. At this point in her long life, such a happening wouldn’t surprise her. “Well, I’m not sure what the elves will do to us if you do such a thing.” She helped the child into Crimzon’s saddle and then mounted behind her. “Besides, you don’t even know what is in there.”

“Do you know what’s in there?” Amelia asked.

The genuine curiosity in the little girl’s voice scared Clover. What the over-intelligent nine-year-old said next scared her even more.

“Do you know what my father and mother, and the other Dragoneers born from your own will, will do to you and those elves if you do not return me unharmed?”

“I’m no mystica, girl,” Clover scoffed. “Were I that powerful, I would have willed myself free of that bastard priest’s prison. I spent nearly three centuries in that hell.”

“You are a mystica, Clover,” Amelia said. “Just ask Crimzon. He won’t lie to you. The Dragoneers are your willborn, but I am more than a mystica, and I will pull that thing out of that box and kill it, if it is the last thing I do.”

“You have a will.” Clover decided she liked the girl’s boldness. “And at least you have one thing right. If you pull that thing out of its binding, it might be the last thing you ever do. Now tell me, lass,” Clover was the one curious now, “how do you know of the elves and all of this?”

“I can read anyone’s thoughts I want to.” Amelia giggled, and gasped as Crimzon lifted into flight and banked away from the castle sharply. “Even the dragons’.”

Hearing this made Crimzon and Clover both shiver.

*

Rikky, sensing that Jenka had just bought him some time, had his wyrm use the dragon tear to cast a shielding around them. He didn’t quite understand why Marcherion and Blaze didn’t actually hit the stone-covered street, but he saw they did get injured, and were struggling now. He cast as potent a healing spell as he could from a distance. Jenka suddenly appeared, as Aikira sang out:
They are attacking the Outlands in swarms!
Then Jenka was blasted sideways by the same mudged-riding bastard that had hammered March.

Rikky didn’t often use his power to attack. He was a healer and a woodsman at heart, and the idea of this war sickened him, but this was his homeland, and Jenka was his friend, and the rightful king. Richard was nothing but a murderous torturer who was as much demon inside as Gravelbone had been. Rikky’s angst reached a peak, and he shot a blast with his teardrop at the rider’s mudged wyrm, just to trick the thing into position for Silva to let loose a gout of molten pewter liquid that hardened as it flowed around the wizard’s shielding spell.

Rikky let out a roar of his own. “Tell your foul, demon-riding king that I am the one who killed Gravelbone, and I will kill
him
, and his hell wyrm, too!”

What happened next was just as surprising to Rikky as it was to the man on the mudged wyrm.

The weight of all Silva’s hardened spew caused the man and his wyrm to suddenly flip upside down and fall from the sky, as if they were tethered to the pull of the field inside the bubble.

Rikky had known the weight would bring them down, but he hadn’t figured on it getting under them. Either way, the men on the ground who tried to fill the rider full of spear holes were shocked to find themselves jabbing their pike blades into nothing but air and a destroyed mudged. At least the bastard dropped his teardrop before he teleported away.

“Don’t touch that crystal,” Rikky called as a man picked it up.

The poor soldier shook violently, and then his eyes made a popping sound and slid down his cheeks as he crumpled to the ground.

Rikky didn’t have to worry about it after that. No one else dared get near it.