The Child Prince (The Artifactor) (21 page)

Sevana gave him a glare. “You must find it challenging to listen while you’re talking.”

Bel put a hand over his mouth, cupped a hand around his ear and looked up with imploring eyes. She had a sneaking suspicion he was laughing on some level, but couldn’t prove it, and so grudgingly continued. “The bed is designed to circumvent the stasis spell you’re under and overpower the curse so that you can actually grow. The inscription of my spell is carved into the frame of the bed and will only work if
all
of you is on top. So don’t dangle your hands or feet off the side.”

He lowered his hand and said, “Yes ma’am. Why is there a flowing water fountain as a headboard?”

“It takes the combined power of two elements to overpower the stasis spell and curse. Hence why the water fountain and wood bed frame. It’s actually an ingenious design,” she added with loving caress against the wood. “The frame comes from limbs of the 800 year old oak tree out back. I had a tree spirit help me scavenge the wood. And the fountain is directly connected to the inner spring inside of Big, so it has all of the power of flowing water.” Alright, surely he had enough information now. No, wait, one more thing: “The spell on the bed activates as soon as you’re on it. So don’t pester me about turning it on.”

He nodded seriously. “Is there a limit to how much time I can be on it?”

“No.” With growth potions, there would be. But the bed’s power could barely overtake both spells he was under. If he slept on that bed eight hours a day for a straight month he would only grow an inch. Actually…another thought struck her. “Baby.”

The mountain lion looked up at her, ear cocked.

“You will
not
sleep on the bed,” she said firmly.

He blinked twice, tail twitching slightly.

That hadn’t been an assent. She narrowed her eyes and said in a threatening tone, “I mean it. The bed will be more effective on you. You sleep on there, you’d age a year. So
keep off.”

He flattened his ears against his head and let out a disgusted groan.

Pointing at the cat’s head, she ordered Bel, “Keep him off.”

“I shall,” Bel promised.

“Good. Now, hop on. I want to make sure everything works.” She’d run the numbers three times before making anything, but magic couldn’t always be quantified. It had enough living essence to it to make it just this side of unpredictable.

He obediently got on, crossing his legs near his chest to make sure that nothing dangled off the side. Sevana pulled out her diagnostic wand and took a quick reading.

“I think it’s working,” Bel offered after a long moment of silence as she read the numbers. “I feel like I’m surrounded by warm water, if that makes sense.”

It did indeed and reinforced what her wand reported. “It’s working. Not quite as well as I’d hoped, but better than I feared.” Ending the spell, she put the wand back on the table. “Sleep here every night that you can. I can’t give you any aging potions—they don’t have the strength to combat the curse. If you want to grow, this bed is your only option.”

Bel gave her an odd smile, as if she had just said something funny. “I’ll be on here every moment I can.”

Good enough. “Then I’ll get back to the main problem.” With a wave, she went back to her research room, letting him be.

When Bel said that he would be on that bed every minute that he could, he meant that
literally
. Sevana saw him on there at almost every possible moment. If he wasn’t training, eating, or researching something at the library (more like flirting with Hana), she could find him on that bed. He stopped studying in his room entirely and simply moved everything to the alcove, sitting cross-legged with a book open on his lap. Sevana did a rough calculation and estimated that Bel had doubled the time she had originally suggested. At this rate, he would grow two inches per month instead of the one she’d predicted.

While she well understood that he wanted to make up for lost time and grow as quickly as possible, it didn’t mean that sitting here day after day with nothing but his swords and books was the right choice. He needed more life experience and holing himself up inside of Big didn’t gain him that. Frustrated, Sevana barged into his little room and yanked the book out of his hands.

Bel let out a noise of inarticulate protest and reached upward for it. “Wha—!”

“You gormless twit!” she snapped at him, looming over the bed. “You’re supposed to
sleep
on the bed not
live
on it! You’ve been doing this for over two weeks and you’ve already grown an inch!”

He smiled at her, a victorious gleam in his eyes and flush in his cheeks. “Have I really?”

“
That’s not a good thing
. Grow too fast and your body will be seriously hurting from being stretched beyond its limits. That doesn’t even account for how mixed up your hormones will become!” In fact, he should have been in pain all this time…her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You’ve been filching my pain-away potions, haven’t you?”

He rubbed at the back of his head and gave her a sheepish smile. “Big showed me where they were.”

She cast a dark look at the mountain overhead. “Did he.”

“Would you prefer that I suffer in silence?” he asked her dryly, obviously not worried about her irritable mood.

At the moment, she’d prefer to strangle him. Closing the book, she stopped looming over him and straightened so that she could look him in the eye. “You’re not going to stop behaving like this no matter what I say.”

“I won’t,” he agreed candidly with a half-shrug. “Now that I have the option to finally
grow
, nothing will stop me. Not even pain.”

Stubborn, obstinate, mule-headed git. She blew out a breath in resignation. “Five hours a day. No more than that. You need to train and gain life-experience otherwise what I’m doing here will be wasted later on. Promise me that and I won’t hide the pain-away potions.”

Happy to more or less get his way, he perked right up and beamed at her. “Deal.”

“Good. Your five hours are up for the day. Go train.”

Good-naturedly, he hopped off the bed, scooping up the swords from the bed as he moved and slinging them onto his back. Sevana watched in silent approval as she realized that this motion looked almost second-nature now. At first, Bel had been clumsy and unsure when he donned his swords. Now, it looked as if he didn’t really think about it, it had become so habitual.

She heard him call for Baby as he left the room, which took another worry off her mind. Baby, as with any cat, couldn’t resist a newly made bed even if it
did
add years to his life. She’d caught him napping on it more than once. With him safely occupied outside with Bel hunting things, she could focus on her work.

Satisfied, she tossed the book onto the bed and returned to her workroom, only pausing long enough to put another log on the fire before she regained her seat at the table. Sevana had been working on Bel’s curse steadily for over two months now, methodically going through each option as she thought of it, and investigating other options in the hopes that she had somehow missed a solution. She hadn’t.

Two main problems prevented her from reaching a good, cheap, solution. First problem: it would take a mystical being of some sort to gain enough power to break the curse. But most mystical beings by themselves just didn’t harness enough power to do this, not without either borrowing the power of an element or working in tandem with another mystical being. Most of the magical races in the world wouldn’t cooperate with another race, which drastically cut down on her options. For that matter, only a handful of mythical races could call upon the aid of an element with enough power to do what she needed it to, which narrowed her options even further.

It did, in fact, leave only three possibilities: water dragons, melusine or naiads.

She’d originally guessed as much (years of experience having honed her instincts in such matters) but she’d really hoped this time to be wrong. Melusine were little better than freshwater mermaids, really, and they were tricky to deal with when a young man became involved. They were just as likely to seduce and eat him as to help him. Hardly beneficial. Naiads were much more benevolent and helpful, but weaker than the other two races, so it would take weeks of their dedicated efforts to break the curse. In that time, they could either lose interest or be interrupted by other things. (Naiads weren’t exactly well known for their concentration powers.)

Water dragons, of course, could borrow the element of flowing water with ease and so could break Bel’s curse with nothing more than a few seconds of effort on their part. It was the ideal solution…or would be if she had a handy treasure trove lying about. Never mind being able to pay them, just approaching them would be dangerous. Water dragons didn’t particularly like humans encroaching upon their territory and were just as likely to eat you for lunch before you could get a word out of why you’d come and what you were offering. Even for an Artifactor, the trip there would be hazardous.

With a naïve prince in tow it would be suicidal.

She let her head thunk against the desk.
Maybe if I strap a bag of gold on top of Bel’s head, we’d stand a chance of talking to them, at least….

From the top of Big came a crashing noise, followed by a rumble as everything vibrated. Sevana looked up in alarm, having never heard or felt the like before. “Big? What’s going on?”

Dragon
, Big groaned in a pained way.

Dragon?
DRAGON?
“There’s a dragon on top?” she demanded incredulously as she launched herself out of the chair, snatching up the sword propped next to the door and a shielding wand from the table.

Yessss
, the mountain sighed, sounding almost worried.
Bel and Baby too
.

Stone the crows, what were those two doing topside?! Sevana had been running for the back door that led to the top of Big, but at this news, she increased her pace so that she fairly flew, her feet making a rushed staccato noise against the hard rock floor.

Even as she ran, her mind went through a list of possibilities. There were several dragon tribes in the world, but none of them lived in Windamere. Two different species
did
migrate through here during certain seasons, however, when they wanted to have offspring in different locations. Her scaly visitor could either be from the stupid, hard-to-deal-with Fire Dragon tribe of Haixi or the slightly more intelligent and temperamental Water Dragon tribe from the Dragon Sea. Frankly, either one would be bad news.

She burst through the door and skidded to a stop, taking in the sight with a sinking heart. A Fire Dragon.

An
upset
Fire Dragon, at that.

Sevana took her in from horned head to forked tail, scanning her with a professional eye. Not as large as a matron would be, so this one had to be a young adult—that still made her out to be about twenty tons of scaled muscle. Her underbelly didn’t have the off-white hue of an unmated female, though, but the deep gold of a mother. Her eyes were a dark red, too, matching the deep crimson of her hide, indicating just how upset she truly was.

Swearing under her breath, she frantically looked around for Bel and Baby. She found them both pinned against a rock side, on their guard and looking absolutely terrified. Couldn’t blame them. Baby’s fur stuck straight up along his back, his body language a contradiction in itself as he stood in front of Bel, clearly protective of his student, but his tail wound in between his legs in a clear sign of fear. Bel hadn’t yet drawn his swords (thank all the gods) but he was braced against the rock, knees shaking, and if he could have melted into Big he would have already done it.

No one had done anything to provoke the dragon outright yet. Good. That upped their chances of survival a little. Better yet, the dragon hadn’t yet paid her entrance any attention.

Sevana took in a breath and said in a calm tone that would carry without being too loud, “Bel. You need to return it to her.”

His eyes darted toward her but couldn’t look away from the hovering dragon for long. “Return what?” he protested, free hand reaching for the sword hilt over his shoulder. “I didn’t take anything from her!”

“
Don’t
draw that sword. That big red crystal in your left arm is not a rock, young prince,” she explained with a patience she didn’t feel. “It’s a dragon’s egg.”

His mouth opened, paused, and then closed. “Oh.”

Sevana pointed the wand in his and Baby’s direction. “I have a shield ready to protect you. Put the egg down and slowly back away, keeping your arms out to prove you’ve no intention to fight. And for the love of all that is holy do
not
unsheathe that sword.”

His hand flinched from the hilt and away, tongue darting out to moisten his lips in a nervous gesture. “She won’t attack that way?”

“I never said that,” Sevana answered curtly, upset with this situation. How had those two managed to find
this
much trouble in such a ridiculously short amount of time, anyway? They’d only been outside for an hour or so!
I’m rethinking about taking him anywhere near a dragon’s nest. He’ll surely get us both killed.