Dragon Wizard (26 page)

I blinked my eyes and focused. I held up the Tear of Nâtlac at the end of its chain, suspended in front of my face. As I watched the gem flared red and faded to a dull black that reflected no light. A bit of foul smoke curled up from it.

My hand shook and the chain slid from my fingers, the dead black gem falling to my feet.

Elhared's feet.

I fell to my knees and felt old bones creak. I shook my head, unable to take my eyes off the horrible alien runes that the wizard had scratched into the stone. They no longer glowed, but the scorched stone still steamed slightly. I felt the throbbing disorientation and headache that always seemed to come after the transition of bodies.

Despite the sense I had taken the sacrament of the God of Hangovers, what sickened me and made me tremble was the sense of age, six or seven decades plowing into me in less than a second. I felt like Nâtlac's evil jewel, burned out and smoldering.

I stared several seconds at my wrinkled, bony fingers, and gathered what was left of my will.

Not completely unexpected.

There were still things that needed to be dealt with, and Sebastian was one of them.

I turned and saw the black dragon watching me with his head cocked. I was—Lucille was—wrapped in a double fist before him, feet dangling over the stone ledge.

You're smart,
I thought at her, even if she couldn't hear me.
Follow my lead.

“Elhared!” I yelled, even though it made my head throb. “What have you done?” I pointed an accusing finger at Sebastian's fists.

Lucille's mouth was covered, but I still heard something like muffled curses. Sebastian glanced down and uncurled one finger from in front of her face.

“Sebastian, you dolt! Put me down.”

I held back a grin as I said, “You are going to pay for this, you misbegotten—”

“Elhared?”
Sebastian said, glancing from Lucille, back toward me.

“Who else? What do you think the point of this exercise was?”

Sebastian set her down on the ledge before him. She gave a very masculine “harrumph!” and made a show of brushing dust off her chemise.

“So it worked?”

“Obviously! And it would have worked the first time if you had kept that annoying thief restrained.”

The grin I held back vanished of its own accord. I watched her straighten up and look at the dragon next to her with thinly veiled contempt, and I wondered, what if Elhared's spell had worked? What if everything I had
just experienced had been some sort of meaningless dream?

It had felt real at the time, but the longer I looked out Elhared's eyes, the less real it felt.

“So now I can kill him?”

“Why bother? He's irrelevant now.”

“Irrelevant? After what he did? He deserves far more than—”

“Leave it. You're a prince now and we have a kingdom to take over.”

“Leave it? You aren't sounding like Elhared.”

“Priorities, Sebastian.”

“Yes, yes.”
Sebastian the Dragon turned his head and lifted it so he looked almost straight down at her. My doubts about successfully defeating Elhared were fading, but it didn't make me feel any better to see Lucille's deception slipping.
“There are more important things than punishing the man who left me to rot with the elves.”

“Yes, we—”

“After all, that was only the whole point to giving that addled prince your scroll.”

“But the bigger picture—”

“And you said he killed you.”

“What's important now is—”

Sebastian swept his forearm back and swatted her toward the stone wall of the cliff. I saw her petite body rise up and slam into the stone with bone-breaking impact. She dropped to the ledge like a rag doll that had lost half its stuffing.

“You aren't Elhared.”

Oh crap.

I fought the disorientation and sprang to my feet. As I did I felt like something literally jolted loose from my knee. “Wait! Sebastian! We still need her!” I tried to sound like the evil wizard I knew, but all I got was a sidelong glance from the dragon.

“Enough second chances,”
he grumbled through a roll of brimstone steam.
“I don't care if you're Elhared or the thief. You I finish next.”

“No!” I called out. “Stick to our plans!”

Sebastian didn't listen to me. He turned his head to face the fallen Lucille.

But she wasn't fallen anymore.

Sebastian did a double take when she wasn't where she had fallen. He swept his head around and finally caught sight of her. I squinted and saw her standing on the far end of the ledge, facing the dragon. She wiped blood from her lip with the back of her hand and spat at the ground. “You have to do better than that.”

“How?”

The answer came to mind unbidden:
were-dragon.

“You're pathetic,” Lucille said to Sebastian.

“What?”

I think both Sebastian and I were equally stunned by Lucille's bravado. Yes, I'd berated an angry dragon before—but that was when the dragon was Lucille and I was pretty sure I wouldn't be roasted.

“You heard me,” Lucille continued. “You have the gall to be angry when this was
all
your doing?”

“Francis Blackthorne—”

“—should have put you out of everyone's misery. You
indebted yourself to the elves, which was incalculably stupid to begin with. But instead of dealing with the consequences, you conspire with Elhared? An unstable wizard? Are you insane?”

“That had been a good plan.”
Sebastian actually sounded slightly cowed.

“It was an idiotic plan. You'd give up everything you are, all that power, and hide from the scary elves as a princess for the rest of your life? Married to
Elhared?”

“He would have found me a new body afterward.”

“And you believed that treacherous ass?”

Why was she taunting him like that? Did she want him to attack her? I saw an amber glow leak from between Sebastian's teeth, and his next words came in a cloud of steam.
“You're making me angry!”

Lucille laughed. “The only thing making you angry is that I was ten times the dragon you ever were.”

Sebastian reared and vomited a stream of flame.

“Lucille! No!” I screamed impotently from the ledge where I stood.

I watched the jet of flame tear through the air to saturate the half of the stone ledge where Lucille had been standing. I felt a blast of hot wind by my face, despite the distance. My heart sank. I couldn't see Lucille through the flames, but whatever capacity for healing Lothan's gift gave her, I couldn't imagine it would save her from being reduced to ash.

After ten or fifteen interminable seconds Sebastian stopped and the flames subsided, revealing nothing but cracked and blackened rock and the shimmer of heat in the air.

I called up to him, past caring. “She was right! I should have slit your throat when you wore this body!”

The dragon turned to face me. I could see steam and flickers of flames dancing around the edges of his mouth.

“Whatever the elves planned for you is too kind!”

“Big talk for someone so flammable.”

“She
was
a better dragon than you.
I
was a better dragon than you.”

“Nice try, but you aren't going to go as quickly. You, I'm going to make last.”

From behind Sebastian, someone grunted. I saw the dragon's eyes widen as he turned his head back around. I ran to the side to see around the dragon's bulk, and yelled at what I saw.

“Lucille!”

“I said . . .” Lucille's voice was hoarse and raspy as she pulled herself up over the ledge. Even at this distance, I heard the skin sizzle as it touched the still-hot stone. She was nearly bald now, her blonde hair little more than sooty streaks across a blistered scalp—a scalp that healed and regained its normal color as I watched. “. . . you have to do better than that.”

Lucille stood facing the dragon again. Her upper body had been burned, and badly. She didn't heal as quickly from that, but those wounds still faded as I watched. She stood now, her clothes charred rags, looking up at Sebastian with a scary smile.

“No. You can't . . . That's just not possible . . .”

It wasn't
, I thought. But she hadn't borne the brunt of the dragon fire. She must have jumped and dangled from the ledge as Sebastian attacked.

“You're also a cad,” she continued as if she hadn't been interrupted.

“W-What?
” Sebastian's voice was filled with complete confusion now.

“Your ‘harem'? Green and Blue fruitlessly searching for my friends right now? Do they know why you abandoned them?”

“I did not abandon—”

“You left them to become Elhared's princess.”

Sebastian let loose with the fire again, but now I saw Lucille move. It took close to a second for Sebastian to aim, open his mouth, and let loose, but Lucille had been watching him, and seemed to know when the flame was coming before Sebastian did.

She rolled and dodged, and only got splashed by the edge of the fire. The dragon, in theory, could have swept the fire to follow her, but she had rolled right into a blind spot where Sebastian couldn't see her through his own flame.

I couldn't believe it.

No, actually, it made perfect sense. She had
been
this dragon. She knew what it was to belch fire, and what she could see when she did. Lucille had had over a year to grow familiar with how the dragon moved and reacted. In that same year I'd been doing what I could to train her old body so it was probably in better shape now than when I had first gotten it. The healing provided by Lothan's gift was an edge, but it might not have been the decisive one.

She dodged and tumbled away from the dragon's flame a couple more times, yelling taunts and insults to keep him focused.

She's stalling.

I looked at the deep purple sky. The moon should be here any moment. She was tiring him, making him use up his reserves of flame before she changed again. She was right. She made a much better dragon than he did.

Come on,
I urged her.
You just keep it going for a little longer and then—

I heard a horrible screech from above. I looked up and saw a giant green lizard diving out of the twilit sky.

It all seemed to slow down as I watched.

The green dragon fell on the battle between Lucille and Sebastian. She opened her mouth to add her fire to Sebastian's.

Lucille saw her coming and dove underneath Sebastian, between his legs.

The entire ledge blossomed with fire.

As the green dragon cleared the top of the cliff above us, I saw a glint of metal and heard a cry.

Sir Forsythe.

The knight—
my
knight—leaped from the top of the cliff above us as the green dragon dove past his position. He arced into the air holding the black sword
Dracheslayer
in both hands, point aimed downward. The runes etched in its blade glowed like hot coals as he landed on the green dragon's neck.
Dracheslayer
plunged in, just behind the base of her skull before the dragon knew what hit her.

The green dragon slammed into Sebastian's ledge face-first, shattering the heat-weakened stone and continuing downward in a shower of gravel, leaving Sebastian perched on a rocky outcrop barely big enough to hold him.

At some point in the descent, Sir Forsythe had leaped aside and landed on the upper ledge where Rabbit and Laya had been. He still held
Dracheslayer.
He pointed the weapon at the black dragon.

“As I said to my liege, ‘One at a time.'”

Sebastian howled in fury and sprayed fire up at Sir Forsythe. I wasn't worried much. Now that Sir Forsythe held the sword
Dracheslayer
, dragon fire could do nothing to harm him. Sebastian made a furious effort, producing a massive jet that splashed up toward the ledge Sir Forsythe stood upon. For the space of nearly a minute, Sebastian's flame turned night into day.

The fire subsided and Sir Forsythe stood astride his rock. Everywhere around him the cliffside was stained jet black with soot, except for a sharp circle centered on Sir Forsythe and
Dracheslayer
that remained free of any sign of damage.

“Now foul beast,” Sir Forsythe said, “Prepare to face the wrath of—”

Sir Forsythe's words were cut off as a giant foot with blue scales and talons the length of my forearm scooped him off the ledge.
Dracheslayer
tumbled from the knight's hands as the other dragon lifted him off into the sky. I yelled something in frustration as the blade tumbled and struck the side of the mountain.

To my horror the glowing blade broke as it hit five hundred feet below. The halves of the blade flared red, then went dull as they tumbled the rest of the way to disappear into the cloud of dust that was just settling around the green dragon's body.

Sebastian howled. It was a sound to make my ears
bleed and tear the bowels free from my body. Gravel tumbled down the cliffside as his wail shook the stones loose. Looking up, I saw the beast spasming, muscles locking. He leaped upward, frantically beating his wings. As he lifted off the stone in a panic, I saw Lucille crouched between his legs, all her hair and clothes burned away, showing some wounds that were still struggling to heal.

Not
all
her clothes. I saw the end of her belt in her hands. The other end of the belt I couldn't see, but it rose with Sebastian. She held on to the belt, and her arms rose with it to give a final jerk, tightening it around something as it dangled from beneath Sebastian.

Sebastian's wail of pain rose so many octaves it became inaudible despite its volume.

I winced. Dragon or not, there are some places you never want a tourniquet.

Sebastian cried and tumbled in the air, tearing at himself with his talons so desperately that I winced again. He almost fell down next to the green dragon before he threw a broken strip of leather away so hard that it cracked like a whip. He wheezed as he beat his wings to bring him back up to Lucille's level.

“I. Will. Kill. You.”
He panted as he hung between the cliffside and the distant mountain.

Lucille stood on the broken shelf of rock, naked, unarmed, nowhere left to dodge. She stood straight and looked Sebastian in the eye. “No,” she said with a silver glint in her own eye. “You won't.”

Sebastian tried to immolate her, but his breath came out in a cough and little more than a roil of smoke. He had exhausted his flames.

“I can still crush you to a pulp!”
he screamed as he dove at her.

Lucille smiled.

I realized that the mountain behind Sebastian was to our east, because the silver glint in Lucille's eye was a reflection from the bright sliver of moon peeking just over the mountain's shoulder.

If I didn't know what was coming, I would have thought Lucille had started to cower just before Sebastian's hand slammed her into the cliffside, pinning her with such force that the remaining ledge crumbled away.

But I knew that what I'd seen hadn't been her ducking her head and raising her arms.

Her back and shoulders had been growing.

Sebastian didn't notice—or just ignored—the second set of arm-like growths springing from her back, or the lengthening limbs and torso. In his fury he just forced his own head over hers and snapped his jaws shut.

Or tried to.

His jaws didn't close completely. His teeth bit into the flesh of Lucille's neck, flesh that was red, scaled, and rippling with muscle. That neck kept growing as her torso swelled, pushing Sebastian's hand away from the cliffside.

I stared in horrid fascination as the black dragon's monstrous jaws were slowly pushed apart by the growth of Lucille's own skull. Then a white-hot glow erupted inside Sebastian's mouth, so bright I saw the light through the skin of his cheeks. Flame shot through his nostrils and his head popped off of Lucille like a cork flying off of some overfermented wine. He fell off her, hand going to his face.

“My noth! My noth!”

Lucille pushed gracefully off the cliff, launching herself into the air almost as if she was swimming. As she did, she spat out a leathery flap of flesh.
“Hurts when the backwash hits the sinuses?”

Sebastian shook his head.
“Thith ithn't happening!”

She dove suddenly, striking quicker than I could follow. A blur, then she swam through the air on the other side of the dragon and Sebastian bled from a half dozen parallel slashes across his face and neck. He didn't seem to notice. He flew upward, away from her,
“You're not the printheth!”

“I AM PRINCESS LUCILLE OF LENDOWYN!”
she screamed, in a fury that would make the Dark Lord Nâtlac shy away. She looped, became a blur again, streaking toward him. She slammed him into the cliff above me, raking another series of gashes along his back. He tried to push off, but Lucille fell on his back and her head dove at his shoulders like a giant snake snapping at a rat in a hole. In this case the rat was the joint where Sebastian's right wing met his shoulder.

He screamed as her jaw clamped on the base of his wing and twisted.

He tried to turn his head to bite at her, but he was too slow and she sprang off into the air and his jaws clamped on nothing. She spiraled around above us, looking down.

She was a magnificent sight, red and lithe and graceful. Sebastian, for all his size, seemed pathetic now. One broken wing draped itself, twitching, across his back. His wounds bled freely, spilling down the cliff, some pooling on my ledge now. One eye was swollen shut, and a third
of the teeth in those massive jaws were broken and missing.

Lucille called down,
“Frank?”

I waved up at her and called out, “I'm fine!” The shout made me cough and wheeze. I wasn't fine. I was half past ancient. But if I had to choose between decrepit and dead, I wasn't going to choose dead.

Sebastian's skull turned toward me. “
Francith? You're Franthith now?”

“Funny how things work out,” I said.

“Why I thould—”

I held up a hand and pointed at the sky, “You really want my husb—my wife to keep killing you?”

He glanced up at the orbiting Lucille and stopped moving.

Serves you right,
I thought.

I sucked in a breath and called up, “Do you see what happened to Sir Forsythe or that blue dragon?”

“No sign of them.”

I was about to call her down to grab me so we could look for them. Sebastian wasn't going anywhere. My thought was interrupted by a sound on the ledge behind me.

I spun around to face the Elf-King Timoras bringing his hands together in slow and deliberate applause. “I will say, Francis Blackthorne, you are never
boring
.”