Dragon Wizard (4 page)

A dragon-slaying sword made sense, but the Tear was another story.
That's crazy! Mix that with some unknown spell and even the Dark Lord himself can't predict what will happen!

My pleas were still inaudible, and only one of the girls seemed to realize how insane bringing the Tear of Nâtlac into this mess actually was. The mute girl Rabbit tilted her head and looked at Lucille as if she had just suggested ritual suicide.

I wished she was able to voice her objections.

“Four of you will come with me,” Lucille said.

“Four of us?” Grace said.

“Someone has to stay here and help manage the chaos.”

Grace nodded and patted the side of her crutch. “I guess we know who's staying, Mary?”

Mary sighed, looked down at her sling, and nodded.

“You stay, heal, keep an eye on Brock, and wait to see if Sir Forsythe comes back. The rest of us will return to my father, and hope this doesn't spiral further out of control.”

Lucille spent most of the night assigning jobs, and trying to convince delegates from various kingdoms that this wasn't the prelude to a war of conquest directed at their nations. I actually would have found that amusing, the idea of Lendowyn—of all nations—launching a war of conquest, except I'd spent too long playing at the leadership role and I knew the implications. The fear of war was too easily self-fulfilling.

Lucille managed much better than I could have. She even managed to reassure a terrified Baron Weslyess who was on the verge of defecting from Delarin and pledging loyalty to the Lendowyn Crown in return for keeping his land holdings and servants. If I was in charge, I probably would have accepted his surrender just on general principles.

In the hours just before dawn, Lucille took her first actual break since I had awakened behind her eyes. She knelt next to Brock's bedside, holding the large barbarian's uninjured hand, watching his fitful sleep.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered to him. “I wish you hadn't been hurt because of me.”

Because of me, Lucille. Because of me.
I knew our own history well enough that, knowingly or unknowingly, the
probability was that any major disaster rested on my shoulders, not hers. That probability approached certainty once the Dark Lord Nâtlac became involved.

Beyond my own sense of responsibility, I wished he wasn't the one on this sickbed if only because, had it been anyone else, we'd have Brock around to help treat the wounded.

“I promise you, we'll find out what happened, and why.”

She looked at his wounded face, then looked away.

“Frank,” she whispered, “what happened to you?”

I didn't do this. Lucille? Don't you know that?

She closed her eyes and squeezed Brock's hand. Brock groaned weakly and squeezed back.

“You better be alive somewhere,” Lucille whispered. “Or someone's going to pay.”

She stood and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Who am I kidding?” She looked down at Brock, this time without averting her eyes. No longer whispering, I could hear the dragon in her voice. “Someone's going to pay, regardless.”

I agreed with that sentiment. Not that it was worth much coming from a disembodied consciousness that couldn't even communicate with the rest of the world, much less extract a fitting vengeance on the architect of the current catastrophe.

Though, for all of Lucille's worry about conspiracies, the probability was that the conspiracy began and ended with the late elf-prince. Not that I'd say that to Lucille right now, even if I could. Sometimes self-deception is the only way we keep going.

She left Brock's side and said to herself, “Be alive, Frank.”

I'm doing my best.

•   •   •

Lucille left Brock's side to join the small caravan back to Lendowyn Castle. Four mounted guardsmen accompanied the royal carriage out into the pre-dawn light. Krys and Rabbit rode inside with Lucille while Thea and Laya drove the team pulling the carriage at a speed that stopped short of shaking everything apart.

I felt every inch of Lucille's fatigue. Our fatigue. Both our minds, and the body we shared, had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours now, and I had enjoyed precious little sleep the night before the ill-fated festivities.

Once she removed us from the immediate crisis, unable to do anything but sit and watch the gradually lightening forest slide by the carriage, the weariness swelled around us, pulling us down like heavy mud sucking at our boots.

“What's going to happen?” Krys asked.

“I don't know.” Lucille shook her head, watching the forest, distorted through the wavy glass of the carriage's small window. “It's bad. We had representatives from just about every royal house for two hundred miles—except for Grünwald.” She laughed to herself.

“Your Highness?”

Lucille rested her temple against the thick glass of the small window. “In a fortnight Grünwald may be the only kingdom we
aren't
at war with.”

“But it was the elf-prince, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” Lucille said quietly. “But it was the tooth, claw,
and fire of Lendowyn royalty that tore and burned their flesh. Where will they direct their swords?”

Krys was silent and Lucille closed her eyes.

After a time Krys asked, “Do you really want to let King Alfred believe you're still Frank?”

“If there's any chance it is Frank inside that dragon,” Lucille said without opening her eyes.

“But your father—”

“I won't have him order Frank's death out of convenience.”

Damn it, Lucille! That is not a good idea. Even if it was me, that's not a good idea.

“But—”

“That's enough!” Lucille snapped, the dragon taking her voice again.

Krys shut up.

All things considered, I should have been panicking, but the last twelve hours had drained the emotion from me, and I felt the full force of Lucille's exhaustion. At this point I even found the occasional mental scream at Lucille too tiring. She kept her eyes closed and may have exchanged another few words with Krys, but I managed to fall into something that might have been sleep.

My awareness drifted away into vivid imaginings that were half memory and half dream.

Maybe half hallucination . . .

I wore Lucille's body in my dream, and I stumbled across a familiar battlefield, the muddy ground strewn with Grünwald's dead. The killing ground spread out, away from a stone circle that had been recently reconsecrated in Nâtlac's name.

I knew that, because I'm the one who had done that consecration when I'd ritually sacrificed the high priestess of the Nâtlac cult, the last queen of Grünwald.

She hadn't left me much choice in the matter.

Ravens picked at the bodies as I stumbled past the carnage, and I felt a sharp burst of anger. Not at the queen and Grünwald, but at the Elf-King Timoras. He had been the one to drop me here with Lucille. I had bargained with him—never a great idea with an elf—to free the Dragon Lucille in return for a ring I had stolen from the queen. Among a list of other promises, I had extorted free passage back to the mortal world for both of us.

Unfortunately, I hadn't specified passage back to somewhere that wasn't inhabited by the Dark Queen Fiona and her army.

That's the thing about elves. They'll keep their promises to the letter, but they can be very creative about interpreting those letters.

Something crunched under my feet. I looked down and saw a small hand mirror, its broken shards ground to silver powder under my feet. I remembered that, too; a “gift” from the elf-king that had never seen any use. My anger flared because that seemed another way Timoras had passively betrayed me. Who sends someone into a battle with a magic mirror? Someone who expected it to break and relieve them of the burden of holding to the last part of their agreement.

And Prince Daemonlas was Timoras's son. How is the elf-king going to react now?

I looked up, and thoughts about the elf-king fled from me.

I stood at the base of a familiar hillside. The bodies at the base of the hill had been burned, and the source of the fire rested unmoving at the top of the hill.

I
knew
the dragon—Lucille—had survived this battle.

Still, I had fallen completely into this dream. I saw her giant body, peppered with arrow shafts blacker than her scales, and she appeared as inanimate as the burned corpses at my feet.

I screamed her name as I ran up the hillside. Carrion birds erupted into flight as I stumbled and slid up a slope slick with a dragon's life's blood. I reached the crest, hoarse from screaming, and everything fell suddenly quiet. Even the ravens' calls had faded to nothing, leaving only my breathing . . .

. . . and, from behind the dragon's body, the sound of metal scraping across stone.

I ran to see what made the sound.

Digging a hole in the earth on the other side of Lucille's half-severed neck was the wizard Elhared the Unwise.

“What the . . .”

“The gang's all here,” said the wizard.

“What are you doing?”

“Digging up a wedding present,” Elhared said.

Not Elhared
, I thought with the sluggishness of dream-memory. The mind in Elhared's body belonged to the dragon, displaced at the same time as Lucille and I had been. The mind of the wizard had—

“Oh darn,” said faux-Elhared, dropping his shovel with a clatter.

“What?”

“I don't think this is going to work.” He reached into the hole and pulled out a severed head that was little more than hide covering a skull. It seemed remarkable that enough hair remained for the pseudo-wizard to maintain a grip. “I'm afraid it's broken.”

He tossed it at me, and I caught it by reflex. It felt lighter than it should have been. As decayed as it was, I could still see recognizable traces of my own face in it.

It had been my body, but Elhared had been living in it when he had died. When I had killed him.

I dropped the skull.

“Never goes wrong in the way you expect, eh?”

I looked up and stared dully at the dragon wearing Elhared's skin. He should be in an elf prison somewhere, where I had left him. Some knowledge this was a dream leaked back into my awareness.

He continued. “But it's not just you, is it? No one's plans go the right way, in the end.”

“What are you trying to do?”

He laughed and said, “Be careful what you wish for, Frank.” The false Elhared faded as I became aware of the reality wrapping Lucille's body.

I felt a throbbing headache that I couldn't decide was mine or hers. She had been awake longer than I had been, and the sun was disorientingly low in the sky. I watched in mute confusion as she ordered a bunch of stable hands around, without knowing what time of day it was, or where we were.

By the time I figured that it was late evening, and we had stopped by a town to swap our exhausted mounts for fresh horses, we were back on the road to Lendowyn
Castle. Lucille was awake now, and shared the carriage with Laya and Thea, both in exhausted sleep from driving the horses all day.

We rode hard another six hours to reach the walls of Lendowyn Castle sometime after midnight. Lucille dismounted the carriage under a waxing moon and looked up at the castle walls wrapped in wooden scaffolding.

Now the fun begins,
I thought.

•   •   •

Alfred the Strident, my father-in-law and king of Lendowyn, met us in the throne room. Even here wasn't completely free of signs of the work being done to the castle. The tapestries, along with every horizontal surface, were coated by a veneer of fine gray stone dust. Stacked against one wall were long, freshly hewn timbers. The room smelled as if a kingdom's worth of stonemasons and carpenters had decided to air out their aprons simultaneously.

When Lucille entered, our four handmaids trailing her, King Alfred the Strident, Monarch of Lendowyn, was already waiting for her. He leaned against the throne rather than sitting on it, right hand massaging his temple under the band of a somewhat canted circlet. He stared, eyes unfocused, into the middle distance. I'd never seen him look so old.

I dislike the nobility on general principles, and I save the largest portion of my distaste for kings and their ilk, but for once I felt sorry for the man. Lucille brought herself up short when she saw him, and I knew that his pained appearance affected her as well. For a moment I thought seeing him like this might just dissuade her from her ill-advised plan to impersonate me.

However, she had inherited a stubborn streak from her father. No one else heard her subvocalize, “
Remember, you're Frank.
”

A heavy silence followed us in, and made itself at home as uncomfortably as an unwanted relative. King Alfred left the quiet unbroken for a full minute at least before he turned his head toward us. His eyes smoldered at us, ringed with red, sunk into wrinkles that the dim torchlight made into crevasses.

“So, Frank, since when do you lean so heavily on formality? We're family here.” I think I heard him choke a little on the “f” in family. “Don't wait on a doddering old man to give you leave to speak.”

I felt Lucille wince at the words. She opened her mouth, and I felt her almost say, “father.” She caught herself and began, “Your Majesty, I come with dire news.”

“Of course you do, Frank.” He rubbed his temple again. “What disaster have you plunged my kingdom into this time?”

Krys took a step forward and said, “Your Majesty, this was not Princess Frank's faul—”

The king stiffened as if his spine was a cable suddenly drawn tight. I almost heard the crack of the air as his finger snapped up to point at Krys. “Silence! Do not presume to speak here. My daughter's wife might coddle your insolence, but speak out of turn in my presence again, young man, and I'll have you in irons!”