“Perhaps.” I had the bad sense to count the elf-king’s smile as a sign of victory. “So, Frank Blackthorne, what would you be willing to steal?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“There is a ring of great importance—”
Of course there is.
He rubbed his finger absently as he continued. “It once belonged to me. However, I cannot recover the ring myself given the conditions under which it was lost. It is however one thing worth more to me than a pet dragon.”
“You want me to steal it for you?”
“No. I would not ask that of you. It would violate the terms of my agreement to directly pay any agent to act on my behalf to retrieve it for me. I only relate this to you to answer your question of what I desire more than the service of that dragon.”
“I see.”
“Once you return to your own world and resume your life of thievery, should you come across this object and decide on your own initiative to liberate it from its current owner, I would remain blameless.”
I watched him effortlessly bend the terms of that past agreement beyond recognition and I realized that this was the same guy with whom I was trying to strike my own deal. If I’d felt I had any choice in the matter, I would have been slowly edging away at this point.
The elf-king kept explaining. “Should you also return with this object and offer it to me, I would be obliged to reward you in an appropriate manner.”
I nodded. “So, perhaps you could provide some more detail on this ring, just in case I come across it when I get home.”
“Nothing remarkable to it. A simple gold band. The importance lies in the terms of the wager in which it was lost.”
“Wager? I thought the house always wins?”
“Eventually it does.”
• • •
Inevitably there was a catch.
There always was.
The ring in question, whose value the elf-king could only quantify in terms of the symbolic and the sentimental, happened to reside on the left hand of Queen Fiona the Unyielding, Monarch of the Kingdom of Grünwald, High Priestess of the Cult of the Dark Lord Nâtlac . . .
. . . former fiancée of the Elf-King Timoras.
The betrothal, I inferred, had gone less than well. So no wonder he found the incident with the entrails so amusing. I shouldn’t have been too surprised. The world of royalty was a tiny little cesspool where everyone was either trying to sleep with each other or trying to kill each other or trying to do both simultaneously. Still, I couldn’t help but be slightly in awe of a universe that somehow managed to keep making things even more complicated.
The only bright spot was that, because of the vague circumstances under which the elf-king lost the ring in question, I wasn’t subject to any official agreement with the fae. So there was no wager, no terms, no contract that could be reinterpreted in creative fashion. Everything I had seen about the way the elves conducted business was telling me that this was a good thing.
The elf-king summoned me a guide who could have been the first one who had brought me here from Fell Green, all pastels, lace, makeup, and aggressive androgyny. My guide led me from the steps of the frigid Winter Palace and toward the smell of fresh-turned earth.
“So did the young lady enjoy her stay under the hill?” he asked with a too-wide smile. If he wasn’t the first elf, he must have been a sibling.
“I’ve had more relaxing trips.”
He chuckled. “Are you tired? Perhaps you should lie down and take a short nap.”
“I think not.”
“Oh, a shame. Mortals are never really here until they take their meal and rest upon our shores.” He turned and gave me that unnerving smile again, “I guess you know that.”
My feet began crunching on the golden path, and I looked down and saw dead leaves drifting across. I looked up and somehow a forest had sneaked up around us without me noticing. It was the most natural thing I had seen in this place, the autumn canopy hiding the too-close sun and moon from view.
We walked a little farther, to a clearing in the wood. In the middle of the clearing a low ring of white stones sat waiting for us.
“Go to the circle, close your eyes, and turn widdershins within it three times and then walk straight for twenty paces before opening them. Then you will stand upon your own ground.”
I took a step toward it and felt the elf’s hand on my shoulder.
“Exactly three times, and exactly twenty paces.”
“Or?”
“Or you end up somewhere else.” The elf extended his other hand palm up, offering me a small elaborately carved wooden whistle on a loop of leather cord.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The king has granted you free passage back under the hill. This is the key for your return.”
I picked up the whistle. “I just blow into it?”
“And the path back here will appear to you.” He took his hand off of my shoulder and I hung the whistle around my neck.
I walked toward the circle and glanced back at the elf. “Close eyes, turn around to the left three times, then walk forward twenty paces?”
“Yes.”
I nodded, took a deep breath, and walked into the circle.
CHAPTER 20
I followed the elf’s instructions, and when I opened my eyes, the sky was back to normal. I stared up at a sky the purple-blue of twilight with just a dusting of stars above. I didn’t know if it was sunset or sunrise, but either way, I felt a great relief no longer being in an alien land worried about any misstep trapping me . . .
. . . which meant I immediately started wondering what the catch was. The past few days had been enough to make me suspicious of anything that seemed to go well.
I stood in a forest that could have been in Lendowyn, or anywhere else with a similar climate. I found my way to what appeared to be a major road. I kept to the side, using the woods for cover, partly because I was still a young woman traveling alone, mostly because I was tensed for the possibility of Sir Forsythe or someone like him attempting to save me.
The road was well-traveled. As I followed it, several mounted travelers and a half-dozen wagons rode past me, all in the same direction I was going. None noticed me, or if they did, they didn’t bother to stop. The wagons themselves gave me the first clue that not everything was going as well for me as it appeared. All of them were loaded down with harvest vegetables, melons, squash, pumpkins . . .
Problem was we had walked into Fell Green in midsummer. I’m no farmer, but I know better than to expect to find a twenty-pound pumpkin anywhere before midautumn. And as the sky lightened above me, I could see the forest canopy had turned brilliant shades of scarlet.
Unless the place where I stood kept a different calendar of seasons than Lendowyn, my two-day ordeal under the hill had cost me at least as many months. Possibly more.
Possibly much more. How did I know that the autumn around me belonged to the same year I left? I tried to tell myself that it made no sense to assume anything was worse than it appeared, but recent experience had been nothing but an extended lesson in the prudence of pessimism. However bad things appeared, they were more than likely worse.
But the universe, cold bastard that it was, always made certain that it was worse in a way I didn’t expect.
I had become so preoccupied with the possibility that anything between a year to a century had passed me by, that I didn’t spare any thought to where exactly I might be. Not until I emerged from the woods and faced the city I had been heading toward.
The place was vaster than anything in Lendowyn. A crooked crag of rock supported an angular black keep that loomed over a crowded walled city. Outside the massive blocky walls, a second city sprawled outward over a flat plain, surrounded by farms and meadows. Closest to me, a large portion of the meadows/pastures between the extended city and my rise by the woods had been given over to a tent city. Colorful banners and streamers hung everywhere, marking this as a festi
val day.
The devices and coats of arms I saw on many of the banners told me clearly whose harvest festival this was, even if I hadn’t recognized the black keep lording over everything.
“Welcome to Grünwald,” I muttered to myself.
• • •
Of course, if I was serious about recovering the elf-king’s ring and saving Lucille from a millennium of servitude, I would have had to come here sooner or later. It’s just that I would have preferred the latter. I was hungry, exhausted, and I wanted to have at least some time to plan exactly how I was going to accomplish retrieving something off the finger of the ruler of a kingdom where everyone wanted me dead.
Actually, that was an exaggeration. The whole kingdom didn’t want to kill me, just the armed portions with the legal right to do so.
At least, with the festival below, there was already a crowd to lose myself in even at this time of the morning. It was large enough that a strange face in its midst wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. I sighed and walked down to join the party.
I had to work my way too close to the city wall, and the city guard, to find an inn with a spare room. But whatever insanity I was about to attempt, I was going to attempt it after some rest and regrouping. According to the innkeep, I was lucky, it was only the second day of the harvest festival. By midweek people would be sleeping in the streets.
Yep, that’s me, lucky.
But, in a sense, the innkeep might have been right. The harvest festival was some warped providence, and I could make use of it to cover my theft. And the fact that it still had six full days to go meant that I had some time to plan things out.
I paid the innkeep out of the measure of slaver gold I still had, thanks to the elves’ disinterest in confiscating my possessions. Then I retreated to the tiny little room that he had left for me. It was windowless, and the bed was no more than a mat on the floor, but it was thankfully free of secret passages for any would-be assassins, kidnappers, or thieves.
Even so, I took the one chair and used it to barricade the single door. I seemed to have successfully avoided recognition, but a little paranoia at this point couldn’t hurt.
I stepped away from the door and stood still for several moments.
Then I started shaking.
“Damn it all,” I whispered and hugged myself. “Damn Elhared. Damn the dragon. Damn the elves.” I closed my eyes because my vision was blurring again. “Damn me.”
I was going to make this right, and beat the hell out of Elhared in the process.
I was overwhelmed with the same sense of loss that had plagued me off and on since I’d woken in this body, but, strangely the image that the emotion brought to mind wasn’t from the memories of the old Frank Blackthorne. It was the recent memory of me attempting to comfort the Dragon Lucille after she had saved me from the altar of Nâtlac.
The dampness on my cheeks burned, and I blamed the princess’s body. I couldn’t help but think she had handled the transition better than I had. She certainly seemed to make a better dragon than I did a princess.
I shed my boots and stretched out on the poor excuse for a bed.
In order to free her, I needed a ring off Queen Fiona’s hand. Nothing to it, thievery is what I did. And given the festival, the queen would almost certainly be making an appearance.
Simple.
I closed my eyes telling myself I was going to brainstorm some sort of plan, but exhaustion claimed me and I fell into a deep dreamless sleep.
• • •
I woke twelve hours later, feeling a now-familiar disorientation. I took care of the normal necessities upon waking, dispensing with the modesty I’d been clinging to. I was stuck in Lucille’s body, and I decided that going through the normal process of hygiene wasn’t an abuse of the privilege.
I took my waking meal in the inn’s common room as the rest of the guests were having their dinner. The house was roasting something vaguely pig-shaped on a spit, and the smell reminded me exactly how ravenous I was. I barely noticed a couple of lewd propositions in my preoccupation to get a meal.
I retreated to the end of one long table with a bowl of root-vegetable stew with a chunk of roast something floating on top, a hunk of black bread, and a tankard of ale the size of my head. I would have preferred to be alone, but I satisfied myself with the end seat on the far side of the table, putting an empty spot between me and my neighbor, a bald pile of fat molded in the vague shape of a man.
Fortunately, that gentleman was more interested in the large leg of animal he was consuming than he was in me, and his bulk blocked me from the view of everyone else on our side of the table.
I emulated him and bent over my meal in rapt concentration. I needed to formulate a plan. I needed to get close to the queen. Close enough to lift the rings on her fingers. I needed to get close, unobserved by her guards and retainers.
I was a skilled pickpocket, and given Lucille’s smaller delicate hands, I suspected my skills hadn’t diminished. So if I got close enough I was sure I could pull it off. But it should happen in the open to give me a chance to escape. I had a whistle back to elf-land, but I didn’t know what form the path would take, or how long it would take to appear. The ability to get a running start would be a plus.
Best would be pulling it off without anyone noticing, but I doubted that would be possible outside the keep, and I didn’t think attempting to slip in would be worth the risk. This wasn’t like finding Prince Dudley in a half-empty palace in the middle of nowhere, this was the seat of power in—
“Hey!”
I looked up from my meal, which was already half gone. I glanced at my oversize neighbor, who was still focused on his own meal.
“Yes, you!”
I turned my attention across the table. Facing me was a leathery old man with a gap-toothed grin and thick gray hair pulled back into an extremely long braid. He pointed at me with a hunk of black bread and narrowed his eyes at me. “Just arrived, eh?”
I nodded, uncomfortable at the attention. The last thing I needed was another proposition. The events from The Harpy’s Teat were still fresh in my mind.
“For the festival, I take it?” he asked.
I pondered graceful ways to slip away. I was constrained by the fact that I did not want to abandon the remnants of my meal, since it was my first in what seemed like days. So I nodded again, and quietly continued eating.
“Traveling alone?”
This time I didn’t nod. Instead I shifted the grip on the knife I’d been using to serve myself in case I needed to use it in a hurry. The man-mountain to my left proved not completely oblivious, as out of the corner of my eye I saw him set down his animal leg and turn his attention, ever so slightly in our direction.
“A young lady should be careful. The land is full of brigands, murderers, rapists . . . thieves.” He hissed the emphasis on the last word like it was an accusation.
Oh, crap.
I’ve done enough acting in my life to keep the shock from leaking into my expression and body language, but it didn’t keep gap-tooth guy from being inordinately pleased with himself for his subtlety. He leaned back in his chair and chuckled.
The large man was glancing from me to him then back to me again. I think I saw his eyes widen a bit, but he wasn’t my concern at the moment.
“Careful, yes,” said the gap-tooth-guy. “There’s a particular fugitive you should be concerned with. Someone named Francis Blackthorne. The Grünwald throne has offered a hundred gold crowns and a title to the person who captures him.”
I swallowed very slowly.
Gap-tooth-guy continued. “He must be a very bad person to be worth so much.”
I straightened up and said, “Well the man would be a fool to come into the capital city, wouldn’t he?”
“Oh, yes he would be. But take care, as I believe he’s shown an interest in young ladies like you. Steals them away in more than one sense.”
I bet you’re proud of yourself for that one.
&nb
sp; He stood up and clicked his heels and presented me with a short bow. “If you wish, I can provide you protection from the dread Francis Blackthorne. The third room to the left upstairs. I work for considerably less than a hundred crowns.”
The gap-tooth-guy sauntered away from the table with a bounce in his step and, undoubtedly, a song in his heart.
The large wall of man next to me had turned to focus his attention wholly on me. The attention was unnerving, and the last thing I wanted was another proposition.
He opened his mouth to say something and I cut him off. “I have no idea what that was about.”
I got up and retreated from the common room before this guy tried striking up his own uncomfortable conversation.
Gap-tooth-guy was a problem. He obviously knew my backstory, and it had propagated far enough that I had more to worry about than just the Grünwald guardsmen. In a sense I was lucky that my gap-tooth-guy was too clever by half. He had recognized me—recognized Princess Lucille—and instead of waiting to take me by surprise, he had come up with this blackmail scheme.
I still held my knife and the hunk of bread, and I realized I had abandoned the rest of my supper.
“Damn,” I said as I walked outside.
I wiped my knife clean on my hunk of bread and finished eating it as I sheathed the knife. Outside the inn the light had faded toward evening.
I had two options. I could disappear back into the city and find other lodgings. Or I could confront the guy. If it wasn’t for the fact that I needed to get close to Queen Fiona, I would have chosen the former, hands down. However, I had no doubt that if I vanished, my gap-toothed adversary would notify the Grünwald court of my presence. That would make an already difficult situation worse.
I was left with confronting the guy.
However, I wasn’t about to walk through the front door into an obvious trap. Not when the guy was lucky enough to have rented a room with windows that opened onto a narrow, secluded alley. At least, that’s where I estimated his room to be given his instructions and what I knew of the layout of the inn.