Blood and Royalty (8 page)

Chapter Seventeen

“We can’t get past them,” Marcherion whispered. He, Rikky, teenage Pascal, and another boy, were all huddled in the crawl space underneath the statue of an old Outland pirate-turned-hero. A half-dozen mudged had found a sheep herd and were using the park-like area around the monument to land and feed. March couldn’t see any way to get the two boys through, but he had an idea.

“I’ll go alone,” March said. “I’ll come back on Blaze and light this place up. If you guys stay under here, you’ll be safe, and with Silva’s help, maybe we can cover your way back out to the forest, where there is room to mount up.”

“No use in me trying to sneak around.” Rikky tapped his peg leg on the ground angrily. This caused one of the larger mudged, one with prominent shades of blue and green to its scales, to look right at them.

“Shhhh,” Pascal hissed.

“It’s coming right at—” The other boy’s squeal was cut short when Marcherion’s hand wrapped around his face.

The mudged was coming across the ground fast, but Rikky stood there in the opening and drew an arrow. His ability to disregard the charging dragon was amazing, but then March realized that its head was way too big to fit into the opening that led into the hollowed out area in which they hid.

He watched his friend and saw the arrow fly. It went right into the mudged’s eye and disappeared completely, its full length passing through the wyrm’s ocular cavity into its brain.

The fargin’ wyrm didn’t stop, even though it was dead. It hit the granite slab, shaking the whole structure, and they were lucky it rolled to the side enough for March to sneak through.

They were far better protected now, though. March threw off his canteen and dug out a leather satchel full of jerked meat from his pocket.

“You can stay here as long as you have food and water.”

“You’re coming back, right?” Pascal asked, his ebon-skinned face looking almost exactly like his mother’s.

March nodded that he was, but he took a deep breath and then asked the question that had to be asked.

“Where is your father?”

Pascal sniffled and almost started bawling, but he caught himself and, with a good bit of pride in his voice, he answered. “He died staving off a mudged so Zephan and I could break away from the hold’s back way.”

He, too, took a deep breath, and ignoring the tear sliding down his cheek added a “Sir,” reminding March that he was as well-trained as any young man could be.

The other ebon-skinned Outland boy was a sobbing mess now.

“Once you’re gone, we will use one of those timbers.” Rikky pointed to a small pile of building and restorative materials that were stored in the crawl space. “We can get the opening wide enough that we don’t have to dally when we make our run.”

We can come nowsss,
Silva hissed into Marcherion’s and surely Rikky’s mind, for it was Rikky who answered her.

There are too many mudged here. Pascal is Aikira’s son. I won’t risk it.

March knew Pascal hadn’t heard them, but Pascal seemed to know they were talking to the dragons.

The exasperated sound Silva sent out across the ethereal let them know she didn’t like it. But she would wait for Marcherion, with Blaze, who March knew wanted to be charring these sheep for himself right now. It struck Marcherion that, only after the Dragoneers started having children, did the female dragons become so overprotective of them.

They’d had to spell Golden to sleep to keep her depleted core from failing her. She wanted Pascal safe more than she wanted to survive, which was unnatural for a High Dracus. She’d expended herself while constructing the shields.

Crystal hadn’t been nearly as bad, but she hadn’t been lending her magic, only her icy breath. The fact that, once a mudged was close enough to touch her scales, its wings would stiffen and fail from her chill, was amazing to March, but Blaze didn’t seem to like her.

“You men hold tight.” Marcherion gave Pascal a firm nod, and then clasped Rikky’s shoulder. “Even if I don’t make it, Blaze will come; but you are right. With two dragons and me covering you, you’ll have a better chance.”

“This ain’t no coffin chore,” Rikky said. “You’ve gotten too skinny to even make a morsel for one of them bastards. Just don’t take too long.” Rikky smiled, and March remembered just how much he’d missed his old friend.

Once those ranks of wyrms come down, it’s done,
Rikky voiced.

The last was said in the ethereal, Marcherion knew, so as not to scare the boys.

*

“This is Orn Spike?” Clover shook her head in wonder as she and Zahrellion stood looking at the unsheathed sword, where Jenka had laid it on a table.

Aikira was finally asleep, and Jenka was off doing something that he said had to be done, but hadn’t elaborated on what it was.

Both Zahrellion and Clover were about to go join the search for Pascal, their dragons having absorbed enough energy from the pads above. Zahrellion had used a druidic spell to freshen her own senses, and the great power of Clover’s dragon tear kept her ready.

Clover grabbed the sword by the hilt, sort of hoping for some reaction from the weapon, but there was none. She let out a sigh and then offered Zahrellion the chance. Zah laughed and declined, but here came Princess Amelia, levitating a few inches off the floor as she slid up behind them. Clover saw her in the reflection of the shiny steel.

“It is for Jericho,” Amelia said matter-of-factly. “If you grab the hilt, mother, the sword will ignite. If I touch it, or Jericho, it will too.”

“You’re serious?” Clover was suddenly feeling the sort of rush of excitement that she used to feel when she and Crimzon were about to go dominate a battle.

“Watch.” Amelia glided forth and wrapped her little hand about halfway around the hilt. The blade started glowing a light shade of blue, but flared out, and the whole room suddenly lit up with white-hot magic. This only lasted a moment, then she was gliding back, a grin of triumph on her face.

“Your father held the hilt earlier, while he was looking at the markings, and nothing happened.” Clover looked at Amelia, then Zahrellion in turn. “So it is you, Zah, who carries the blood of the demon-fighter in you.”

“I never knew my parents. Linux told me they died in a troll attack before I was born. The druids of Dou found me crying in the woods.” Zahrellion’s brown eyes suddenly narrowed, and she kneeled before her daughter. “Does your father know?”

Clover was confused, wondering why Zahrellion wasn’t taking up the blade to go fight Richard with it that very moment.

“The sword is for Prince Jericho, for when he becomes king.” Amelia gave her mother a look that Clover perceived as some sort of warning.

“I don’t know how to use a sword very well, anyway.” Zahrellion returned the girl’s look and then gave what could only have been a forced smile at Clover, but she stood and reached out, grasping Errion Spightre’s hilt anyway.

“Jericho can have it, but we need it right now, Milly,” her mother said as her eyes widened and slowly rolled back into her head, as if she were feeling total bliss.

Clover felt a rush of jealousy, but it was fleeting. The blade began to glow the lightest shade of blue she had ever seen.

“Can you hear it?” Zahrellion asked in a whisper. “Such a sweet symphony.”

“Mother!” Amelia yelled, causing Zahrellion to drop the hilt and look at her.

While mother and daughter stood staring at each other, probably having a conversation she couldn’t hear, Clover grabbed the hilt again, but nothing happened. Then Rikky’s familiar ethereal voice cried out.

I’ve got Pascal, but Marcherion and Blaze are swarmed over…

There was a long pause, and Clover’s heart started hammering.

They’re gone.
The sorrow in Rikky’s voice was so heartwrenchingly absolute.

“No!” Zahrellion yelled at her daughter. “You’re to stay here and watch over Aikira.
Do not
tell your brother about this. Not yet. But tell your father immediately. I’m going to end this nonsense, and end it now.”

Zahrellion reached out for the sword, and Clover obliged. Then Clover teleported herself up to the dragon pads and was glad to see that Zahrellion wasn’t far behind her, brandishing a blade that looked as red as Crimzon’s scales.

For what was to come, Clover was certain that Crimzon could tolerate Crystal. Poor Richard was about to feel the wrath of an angry mother, and an even angrier red dragon, for Crimzon shared Blaze’s line, and he would relish avenging his kindred.

Clover began warding herself and her dragon against anything she could think of, while she gained the saddle and told Crimzon where they needed to be. Then the wind was in her hair, and the feeling she lived for, the feeling of pushing herself into the unknown, overtook even the power of her dragon tear.

PART IV

Fire and Ice

Chapter Eighteen

Zahrellion had never heard such sweet harmonies, and they were sung by the voices of the heavens. Each individual melody was attached to a particular strain of magic. It was so complex she didn’t think even Jenka could understand it. But she knew it was to be Jericho’s blade, for he wasn’t a dragon rider, and this sword held the power of all seven dragons who’d lent their flaming breath to forge the ore. This was the sword for a true king.

The thought saddened her, for she hadn’t said goodbye to her husband before he went off to do whatever he was doing. Even with all his strange and exasperating ways, the one thing that could always be said about Jenka was that he was selfless, so wherever he was, it wasn’t for reasons he’d dictated. She knew this in her heart, and she knew there was a sky full of mudged on the other side of the portal Clover had just opened before them. Marcherion and Blaze were dead, and Rikky and Pascal couldn’t get to Silva, nor she to them.

Suddenly, the flaring red glow of the sword in her hand went white, and then she was through, sending mudged to the ground with the slushy, static-filled ice blasting from both her dragon’s maw and Pavreal’s ancient blade.

Jericho’s blade
, she corrected herself, and started toward the Pirattiton, where Rikky was pinned in.

Clover and her huge fire wyrm were right beside her, Crimzon scorching mudged, and Clover blasting them left and right with scarlet pulses of raw dour from her dragon tear.

It was a heartwrenching scene, but Zahrellion swallowed back her desire to vomit, and allowed her disgust to drive her will.

The sword was magnificent, and she ended a score of mudged with a concussive blast that caused even the wyrm formations just hovering in the clear, blue afternoon sky to break ranks.

It was then she saw Richard, riding one of the larger, clearly lesser mudged blue dragons, not the Nightshade. It made her think of Royal and the way she’d once thought the world of Prince Richard and his mighty blue dragon. She’d always felt sorry for him because she couldn’t imagine the hole left inside him, the pain he must have felt, after his bondmate died. She couldn’t imagine being without Crystal. Just the thought of it sickened her. Then she thought of Pascal, her best friend’s son, pinned beneath a statue, and of Marcherion. Almost of its own accord, for she only thought to do the deed, the sword responded to her will before she could stop it. Another, even greater, blast shot comet-like right at her husband’s brother and exploded.

The sound was deafening, even to her, and it left Crystal’s sensitive ears ringing, but more than a hundred mudged were flung from the sky, some straight down into the city with a force, some in great arcing tumbles. Not even the mudged that were sent upward from the blast lived, for the concussion left them either pulped inside or stunned unconscious.

By the hells, wench, warn me before you do something like that again,
Clover barked angrily.
Some poor mudged down there below us got the load of Crimzon’s shit you scared from him right in the maw.

Coming from angry Clover, being called a wench didn’t bother Zahrellion, and the idea of scaring the shit out of a dragon Crimzon’s size and age gave her even more confidence, but now she couldn’t find Richard in the sky. Had she gotten him?

Here. Over here,
Rikky called out.
Stop stirring them up and come get us.

For just a moment, Zahrellion understood Jenka’s drifting then. Magic could carry you away into its flow, carry you wherever it willed you. She was back on task now, though, and it took only moments for her and Clover to clear a path for Rikky, Pascal and the other Outland boy to where Silva was waiting.

*

Jenka had felt so impervious, so all-powerful, for so long, that being blasted like a leaf in the wind not once, but twice, was enough to bring forth his basic human instinct to fight. He’d run once, from Jade, scared witless by the sight of the, then puny, young dragon. He wasn’t afraid now, though. He was rattled and hurting, but already the alien essence inside him, and the teardrop Jade’s mamra had cried for them, held him together, and kept them both from dying. It was a close thing, and only his ability to go into hyper-motion saved him from the next blow.

He knew from reading his daughter’s thoughts that the Sarsaraxus could move hyper-fast, too. It didn’t surprise him when, just after he blasted it and the Nightshade with crackling yellow energy, they shot out from under his spell and started flying.

It took Jenka a moment to realize they were flying away. In fact, they were heading toward his land now, following the Sarsaraxus’s instinct to pollinate the spore there. Apparently, it wasn’t afraid of seawater, after all. Jade had to remind Jenka that they had to be stopped before they reached the Mainland. Jenka urged his emerald-scaled dragon after them, for he was thinking of ways to kill such a thing.

Jade pumped his leathery wings with all he had, and Jenka pushed his power to speed through time to its limits. The Nightshade was slightly faster, though, even in that elevated rate of time. Like a sailing ship pulling away from another that was using the very same wind, soon the doom of all humanity was but a speck in the distance out over the sea.

Wees snever catches themmmsss,
Jade hissed.

It was only then that Jenka realized they could get ahead of them, and how. But what they would do when they got there, he didn’t have a clue.