Dragon Wizard (19 page)

“It never goes wrong in the way you expect,” Lucille and I spoke through our single mouth in perfect coordination. The sentiment came out whispered without a hint of a slur.

“Oh boy,” Krys said.

The arena was filled to capacity—beyond capacity. If anything, the arena seemed much bigger than it had the first time I had seen it. The tall forms of the elves were wrapped in engraved armor of silver and gold. They held aloft silken banners covered by embroidery too complex for mortal eyes. Ranks of them stood, filling the arena, down to the floor below where a stage stood centered on the floor. On the stage stood Timoras, the elf-king himself, bearing the same icy armor he'd worn when he had issued his ultimatum. He had his arms raised in a gesture of martial incitement.

Or maybe he was trying to swat a bug; with the pose nearly frozen it was hard to tell.

Next to him on the stage was Queen Theora, just as I had seen her with Dudley; as tall as Timoras, her skin as brown as his was pale white, her leather armor bearing patterns as elaborate as any engraved in the silver and gold immediately surrounding us. Her forest-green hair
flowed behind her like a cape. In her hands she held aloft a familiar piece of curling parchment.

Past her I saw the half of the arena closer to the forest populated by elves of a different character than the ones nearer us.
Her
elves had the same leather armor, and the same dark skin.

Lysea's vision—or Lothan's, I suspected now—had shown me these two elven armies converging here. I had the strong suspicion that this convergence of Summer and Winter, Queen and King, was unique.

That did not make me feel better.

“This isn't good,” Krys said. “We need to get out of here before—”

“Shh,” came sloppily out of Lucille's side of our mouth. “Loosh.” She had meant “look,” but she had seen it before I had, and our speech wasn't coordinated.

Despite that, when Lucille pointed Krys and Rabbit got her message. So did I.

On the stage, along with the elven sovereigns Timoras and Theora, was a golden cage surrounded by an honor guard of elves, half dark, half light. Inside the cage was an old man. He was tall, white-haired, and had skin the sickly white of an underground denizen. He wore the same robes I had last seen him in.

Elhared.

Krys shook her head. Rabbit looked back at us with wide, incredulous eyes.

The bailiff and judge from our prior captivity stood on the stage, flanking the wizard's cage. As we watched through one open eye, I saw the bailiff's massive staff slowly land on the surface of the stage at his feet. I saw
the eruption of sparks as it struck, blue flashes that hung too long in the air. Moments after, the sound of the impact washed across us like a slow avalanche.

I realized that, aside from the king, queen, and bailiff, everyone on that stage faced Elhared. All of those, aside from the judge, bore crossbows that were loaded and cocked and already halfway up to point at the wizard.

“We can't—” Krys started.

They mean to execute him!
Lucille tried to use our mouth, but the words came out slurred and incomprehensible. Fortunately her mental shout seemed audible to everyone thanks to the shaman's flower. Around us the impact of the bailiff's staff still resonated like a passing stampede. On the stage his staff had already rebounded upward.

Everything seemed to be picking up speed.

Of course it would start wearing off now.

Lucille gave up on our voice.
Get him out of there while we still have surprise on our side. Run!

I had seen the doubt on both Krys's and Rabbit's faces, but Lucille managed the voice of command, and neither of them hesitated, rushing down the aisle between the no-longer-quite-paralyzed elves toward the stage.

Give him some of the tea!
Lucille thought.

Then we tried to run after them.

That had not been a good idea on either of our parts. With control of our body split evenly between us, navigating the stepped descent would have been a difficult process at a normal pace. At a run it was suicidal. We managed three consecutive steps before we fell, and
then only if you counted my frantic attempt to prevent the tumble as an actual “step.”

We rolled down the steps, lucky that both of us had the same idea of tucking ourselves into a ball to minimize the damage. The bruising descent seemed to last forever.

The good news—we rolled out onto the arena floor much sooner than we could have managed under our own control.

We opened our unfocused eyes in time to see another flash of blue light from the bailiff's staff. Blue sparks slowly arced across the sky like a shower of comets above us, cutting across the face of the too-large elvish moon.

The sound of the crashing staff came quicker this time.

Around us, the ranks of elves had visibly moved, turning in our direction. I could almost see them moving.

I remembered Crumley's words, “If you can see something, it can see you.”

Not good!

Tell me about it.

You have a plan yet?

I thought this was your plan? “Get him out of there.”

I tried to push us upright, and Lucille's arm belatedly scrambled to help me.

Not mu
ch time,
we both thought at the same time.

At the same time we both thought that, with all the paths leading to this arena, from the city and the woods, it probably counted as a crossroads. If that wasn't enough, we were still barely standing at the intersection of elfland and Fell Green. With our eyes unfocused, we could still just make out the wide cobbled road that
separated the city from the woods—though that image faded almost as we watched.

We glanced up, at the elf sun and the elf moon.

O
n
l
y
o
n
e
p
a
r
t
o
f
t
h
e
i
n
s
t
r
u
c
t
i
o
n
s
l
e
f
t
.

We wouldn't be able to tell you who thought that. We were no longer thinking simultaneously, because that implied two voices in our head. A single voice now spoke our thoughts. Panic gripped us, because, if it wasn't too late already, we knew that point was only moments away. Not only with our merging personalities, but with the elves that turned toward us. Soon we would be a prisoner, and whoever was that prisoner, it would no longer be us.

We tore at our clothes.

Our clumsiness faded as our limbs began working in concert again. That was no comfort, just another sign of the acceleration of our merging. As we tore the armor off our body, kicked off boots, and shed the chemise underneath, sparks flew from the bailiff's staff a third time, the sound quick upon it. Around us, the elves moved, visibly accelerating as they faced us, blocking our view of the arena. It was hard to tell, were they moving at a quarter speed now? A third?

We held Lothan's flask in one hand, Timoras's pendant dangling from its chain in the other. In the pendant sand had begun racing through the glass.

Naked, standing in the crossroads of that arena, under the moon, we broke the seal with our teeth and drank.

We tasted blood.

•   •   •

I should have known what was coming.

The flask was a boon from Lothan after all, god of
deception, lies, masks, metamorphosis, and transformation. He was not a cruel deity, but he was known for a juvenile sense of humor, often at the expense of those he favored. That wasn't an aspect you wanted to dwell on when you were relying on divine intervention, but that was probably why, even after millennia, Lothan's jokes still caught people unawares.

People like the Dragon Lucille and the Princess Frank.

Which is not to say he didn't grant us exactly what we asked for, or even what we needed; like I said, he was not cruel.

But it wasn't quite what we were expecting.

Even though the Wizard Crumley had explicitly told us exactly what it would take to solve our two-minds-one-body problem.

Even though the instructions about being naked under the moon had been a really big clue.

•   •   •

We drank, gagging at the taste of blood in our mouth. The unpleasantness didn't deter us, and not only because we had quaffed worse-tasting beverages in our lives—Brock's fungus-laced medicinal tea came immediately to mind. We drank because we knew it was our only chance to stop the merging that had been accelerating along with the movements of the elves. We were certain that if we had hesitated until the elves' movements and ours were in sync, it would be too late.

During the last swallow, as I felt something slightly clotted slide down my throat,
I
realized that
I
was feeling the nasty sensation of coagulated blood settle into
my
uneasy stomach.

Lucille?

That was nasty.

I blinked my eyes and realized that I could focus on the circle of elves closing around us. I raised my hands, and they both obeyed me.

Okay, we're naked, unarmed, and an army of angry elves is surrounding us.

At least we're still an us.

Slight improvement, but beside the point right now.

Plan?

We have any of that shaman's flower?

Wouldn't that just undo what Lothan's flask did?

Wouldn't it?

That didn't feel right. He had promised us our own bodies, not just a return to the status quo.

That wasn't the only thing that didn't feel right.

I belched as my stomach roiled.

Ugh.
Lucille's dragon voice filled my skull as my gut spasmed with rebellion against Lothan's boon. Everything lurched as I tried to vomit. That's what it felt like anyway.

I retched to bring up the swallowed blood, but instead of coming up my throat, the blood filling my gut slammed outward in directions it shouldn't have been able to go. I felt things twisting and pushing against my skin. I fell to my knees and, strangely, found my eye level did not drop. I threw my arms out to keep from falling forward and instead of my arms, I saw muscular forelimbs, covered by rippling red scales. I tensed the muscles in my jaw, and I felt the tension strain the length of much more neck than I should have. The elves fell back away from us, still at half the speed they should have been moving.

I felt our tail sweep out behind us as broad wings erupted from our back. We towered over the elves now, our head sweeping an arc a dozen feet above their heads.

Lucille glanced down and looked at herself. Her taloned hand lifted from the ground, the pendant dangling from its chain wrapped around a single long digit.

“Oh yes!”
she hissed in a cloud of brimstone steam as she closed it in a massive fist.

I realized I'd been relegated to the back room of our skull again. I didn't mind, Lucille was the one with all the dragon experience. Hoping she could still hear me, I thought at her,
Get out before they speed up to normal. They could capture the other dragon, they'll manage this one.

I don't know if she heard me, or had just thought the same thing, but she launched toward the moon above us at a gut-wrenching speed that I don't think the original dragon could have hoped to match. She glanced downward at the shrinking arena, and while my mental stomach churned with a queasy awareness of our velocity and distance from the ground, the golden cage on the stage below shot into focus. Elhared was gone.

“Yes!”
Her triumphant scream came out in a ball of incendiary joy.

She turned and flew across the elf moon toward the shadow of Fell Green.

I rode in Lucille's skull as she twisted, looped, and dove toward Fell River. As the sky regained its mortal nighttime hue above us, lit by the full orb of the mortal moon, I saw her reflection falling up toward the surface of the river below in a clarity sharpened by the pure terror of her descent.

She was not the same dragon, not remotely. Where her old body had been thick and heavy, fifty feet of blunt object, her new crimson skin wrapped a body like a lethal whip. When the old dragon dropped from the sky, it fell like a brick. This new body shot downward like a quarrel loosed from the deity of all crossbows, her narrow skull a flaming arrowhead.

Just before we struck the water, and her own reflection, she pulled up, sending a downdraft that blew spray against the moonlit walls of Fell Green.

Lucille can you hear me?

“Whoohoo!”

Lucille!

Frank?

She stopped rolling and dipping, for which I was grateful, and we continued at a considerable clip, banking around the walls of the city below.

Focus!

Um, sorry.
I could still feel her body, and I felt the lipless reptile mouth twitch in what I knew was a ghost of a grin. She wasn't sorry at all.

Not that I was angry at her. Far from it. I felt almost as much relief as she did. We had escaped something that wasn't quite death—but close enough for both of us. And trapped with the elves would have meant the real thing would have followed quickly along in any event.

And stop scaring the city guard.

Huh?
She looked down and saw the guards rushing to reinforce the walls, leveling crossbows in her direction. She shook her head and called down,
“I'm not attacking! Haven't you ever seen a happy dragon before?”

No one shot at us, so that was something. She banked another circuit around the city and came down to a landing on the road bisecting the island, in front of the city gate. As her feet clawed the blessedly solid ground she half thought, half vocalized,
“Frank? Where is your body?”

I—I don't know,
I replied.

That was the truth, since I hadn't had a spare moment to put two and two together yet.

She swung a taloned hand in front of her face, and I could see the elf-king's pendant dangling from one finger. She squinted, but in the moonlight we couldn't quite make out the state of the sand in the tiny hourglass. She sighed.

I guess the part about being naked makes sense now.

I felt her shudder. “
In armor? That would have been painful.”

At least. And if that thing would have been around our neck—

“Ack!”
She made a choking sound and clutched her throat with a free hand.

Now I guess we need to find—

“Is that you, Your Highness?”

Lucille swung her head on its whiplike neck so fast that I felt as if I sloshed all the way to one side of her skull. I wasn't the only one taken aback. Krys scrambled backward from the sudden attention so quickly that she stumbled halfway back toward the woods and sprawled on her backside.

“Krys!”
As a dragon, Lucille had managed, over time, to learn to modulate her voice. After several months of work, those who knew her were able to distinguish the difference in tone between, for instance, a hearty greeting and bowel-melting anger. I realized that this skill must have been due to her familiarizing herself with that one particular draconic incarnation.

Especially when Krys whispered, “Please don't eat me.”

This body had a different voice, but it was no less intimidating. It also didn't carry the same nuance that Lucille managed in her mental discourse.

“No! Krys? I'm back to normal!”

Krys got unsteadily to her feet. “Normal?”

Lucille ignored that.
“Where's Rabbit . . . And Elhared?
”

Krys frowned. “Where's Frank?”

“What? Ah.
” She reached up and tapped her skull with a talon.
“Still in here.”

“Still in there, huh?” Krys backed away, circling at a
distance, facing us and edging away from the woods at the same time.

“What's the matter?”

Krys gaped. “What's the matter? What's the matter? How can you— What do you— Do you— And Frank—” Whatever she tried to say accelerated to the point that only a word in three could make a sputtering escape from her mouth.

“Please, calm down.”

“Calm down?” Krys repeated, the force of the words breaking the jumble of language that had snarled in her mouth. “Calm down!? You're a dragon!”

“Yes—”

“Where did a dragon come from!?” Krys yelled up at her. “There was just an extra dragon lying around somewhere?”

“I—I don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“The tea was wearing off, the elves saw us. We drank Lothan's potion.”

“Uh-huh. It was supposed to solve things for you
and
Frank.”

“Yes—”

“And, again, where's Frank?”

Lucille sank back on her haunches. Her head retreated, and something shuddered inside her.

“How do I even know who you are? You don't look like the dragon I know.”

“It's me. We drank, and we . . . changed.”

I figured Lothan was busy laughing at us now, though I didn't know the extent of the joke yet.

“So the trickster's potion turned you both into a dragon.”

“Yes.”

Krys didn't look convinced.

“How can I persuade you?”

“I don't know. This is weird, even for you.”

“Wait, here.”
Lucille reached out toward Krys. Krys stumbled back as Lucille opened the taloned hand that still held the pendant.
“Take it. It's too small for me to see the hourglass clearly.”

Krys edged up to Lucille's hand and gingerly took the pendant, as if she was afraid a too-sudden move might cause Lucille to clench the hand shut on her.

“How much is left?”

Krys backed away and held the pendant up in front of the full moon. After a moment, she said, “Maybe an eighth left? Less.”

“All that time with the elves . . . Elhared better be worth it.”

Krys stared at us incredulously.

“You still don't believe me?”

“Do you blame me?” Krys asked.

“But—”

Lucille?
I whispered in her head, interrupting her.

“What?”

“‘What,' what?”

Lucille held up a finger.
“Shh.”

Lucille listened and nodded as I gave her my suggestion.

“What?” Krys repeated.

“Frank says to tell Rose that she's the one adept at detecting the real Lucille.
”

•   •   •

That managed to convince Krys of who we were. Not that I blamed her for the paranoia. Given the events of the past year, and the habit of half the people around me to alter their identities at inconvenient times, I'd take the sudden appearance of a strange dragon claiming to be someone I knew with just a little bit of suspicion.

Lucille might have been a little annoyed, but she understood as well as I did. I think she'd only been taken aback because she hadn't yet realized that she was a
different
dragon. She had just been caught up with being a dragon again.

I understood how she felt. The last time I'd been a guy, I had taken over a body that wasn't my own. I had spent a few hours reveling in being male again before I started worrying about the other little details, like who the body had belonged to.

Fortunately I didn't think that would be an issue with Lucille's new body. Nâtlac's forte seemed to be the shipping of souls back and forth; Lothan seemed more at ease with changing the physical body. Disguise, transformation, and metamorphosis were among his spheres. So it only made sense that he had created this new dragon from the body of the princess.

Which was par for the course because, after a year, I had become resigned to thinking of it as
my
body.

Oh well, easy come, easy go.

Still, I couldn't be too angry about the loss. I was in no worse position than I'd been after the debacle at the banquet, and Lucille had been given something I didn't think was possible. She now wore her own body, in most of the
senses I could think mattered. She had taken to the original dragon, but never quite perfectly, I thought now.

As much as she had filled the lumbering black monster Elhared had recruited, it had still been a stolen skin. It fit her better than the one she had left to me, but she grew herself to fit it and not vice versa.

This dragon
was
Lucille.

I had seen it as we'd descended toward the Fell River, and I still felt it in every serpentine movement. Her new red body was smaller, almost as long, but with far less bulk, and much more agile than its black-scaled predecessor. As she followed Krys into the woods, she moved with a lithe grace as if she had lived her whole life in this skin.

Also, I don't know if she had realized it quite yet, but unlike her prior dragon skin, this one was female. I wondered if that mattered to her. Given how much Lothan's work seemed to have captured Lucille's inner self, I suspected it probably did.

Good for you.

Frank?

Nothing, just thinking out loud.

Don't worry. We'll get you your own body again.

Yeah.

We have Elhared now . . .

I know.
There was still something amiss about Lucille's perfect transformation. Hadn't Lothan promised us both our own bodies? He might be the deity of lies and deception along with everything else, but that didn't feel quite right. I realized I was missing something.
About that, don't you think it's odd—

I didn't get to finish the thought because we broke through into a clearing where Rabbit and a still-bound Elhared sat by a campfire. The old wizard looked up, startled, and said, “Where'd you get
another
dragon?”

Lucille ignored him, focusing her attention on the third figure seated by the campfire.

“What is he doing here?”

“Good evening, Your Highness,” answered Robin Longfellow, half-elf and sometime highwayman.