She stared at me, eyes widening.
“That power, combined with the ring of the Dark Lord himself, would ensure there’d be no question who was the true will of Lord Nâtlac in the world of men.”
She said nothing, and even in the pale moonlight I could see her face drain of color. Somewhere behind me, I heard Lucille’s draconic voice near breaking, “Oh, no. Frank, you didn’t . . .”
The queen echoed Lucille, whispering, “You didn’t.”
“How much more powerful is that soul when freely given unto him?”
• • •
“So how did she manage to avoid giving you her soul if that’s the price of the ring?”
“I never said she did not give it to me. I said I did not have it.”
• • •
“You are too late,” I told the queen, “and you are no longer the High Priestess.”
I was playing to the gallery, projecting my voice. By the noise level in the ranks, I could tell that it was having the intended effect. I don’t know exactly what kind of show happened when I put on the ring, but there was something. I’d seen it just from the reactions of everyone when I came back to reality. The arrow bouncing off the elf armor was just a random bonus. I knew I had some credibility now with a good fraction of the troops in earshot.
Given human nature, a ruler with a reputation like Queen Fiona only commands loyalty in direct proportion to the number of her subjects who believe everyone else is loyal. Enough people break rank at once, and you lose all the drones who only fell into line because they thought everyone was a good soldier. I had just handed a lot of people a reason to break rank.
I held up the ring between my thumb and forefinger so everyone could see it. “I’m talking to him now, and I have a message for you.” I took a step toward the queen, who couldn’t take her eyes off the ring. “His Darkness says he’s very disappointed in you.”
Queen Fiona screamed in rage and jumped me.
Even though I’d been expecting it, it still knocked the breath out of me, especially when she slammed my bruised shoulder into the ground. My grunts of pain probably were enough to shatter my illusion of portraying a new Dark Queen of Nâtlac, but they were fortunately drowned out by sudden shouts from the ranks of the massed Grünwald army.
She wrestled the ring from my hand and sprang away, laughing manically. “No! You can’t replace me! I am the hand of the Dark Lord moving in the world! And I will crush you, you little bitch!”
I got up and ran toward Lucille.
“What did you do?”
The sounds of chaos in the troops surrounding us became steadily worse, and I heard swords meet. “I improvised!” I ran up and hugged her forearm. “Fly!”
“Archers?”
“Busy. Fly!”
“You won’t escape me that easy!” the queen screamed at us as she put on the ring.
• • •
So, yes, I sold my soul to the Dark Lord Nâtlac. It wasn’t like I wanted to, but that was the price of taking possession of the ring. And I didn’t exaggerate; in exchange for my particular soul, the Dark Lord was willing to offer me quite a lot. I really could have become the head of Queen Fiona’s little cult, and—if I’d had it in me—I could have reigned in darkness for a thousand years, enslaving half the world to my will and burning the rest to ash.
I guess it’s lucky for everyone that I didn’t find that very appealing.
Compared to that, what I ended up trading my soul for was much smaller in scope, almost trivial. I just asked for a bit of a change in how the ring operated.
I had seen the way out of my dilemma the moment the Dark Lord Nâtlac said that the queen had sold her soul to him, but it was not currently in his possession. Clearly, the “rules” allowed you to exchange souls, all I needed to do to get mine back was to find some sacrifice of equal or greater value, take them to a site sacred to Nâtlac, and kill them with a weapon consecrated in his name.
Normally I’d object to that sort of behavior, but given the enormity of my situation, I had decided to make an exception. Especially since I already had two of the three things I needed back in the real world.
The princess’s body already stood on a sacrificial spot and—while I might still count as a royal virgin on a technicality—Queen Fiona had spent a few decades pissing off the Dark Lord. It wasn’t hard to figure which one he’d value more.
All I needed was a weapon consecrated in his name.
That, of course, was where the ring came in.
• • •
“Lucille! Now!” I screamed at her, hugging her scaly forearm with all my strength. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but I suspected that it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Lucille brought her wings down and started lifting off into the air just as Queen Fiona screamed in triumph, the ring on her finger glowing black in the moonlight.
Her screaming didn’t stop.
I glanced back as Lucille rose into the air. Queen Fiona had frozen in place, the hand bearing the ring outstretched toward us as if she meant to grab us out of the sky. The ring pulsed with an ebon blackness darker than the surrounding night.
Every muscle in her body was drawn tight, and the veins swelled and pulsed under her skin. The ring’s dark glow swirled around her like a mist, burrowing into her eyes, ears, nose, mouth.
She screamed long past the point any air could have been left in her lungs.
The ground beneath her feet cracked, fissures racing from her feet outward toward the edges of the circle. The queen’s knights, Sir Forsythe and the man carrying Dracheslayer, scrambled backward, staying ahead of the fissures.
“Faster!” I called to Lucille.
“I’m trying—”
Not all the archers were fixated by the queen’s fate. Arrows found their way out of the growing chaos below us. I felt one slam a glancing blow off the back of my elven armor, knocking the breath out of me. Unfortunately, Lucille was a much bigger target, and I saw one cut a gash across the foreleg I held, another slam into her neck. Lucille’s scream echoed the queen’s.
We began losing altitude.
Below us, something moved, undulating within the fissures that radiated from where the queen still stood. I cast a panicked glance back toward her and wished I hadn’t.
As I looked, ragged tendrils of pure black whipped out from the fissures around her feet, wrapping around her legs, arms, neck, barbed tendrils stabbing into her mouth, chest, abdomen . . .
The screams stopped just before the tendrils tore her apart.
I looked away, and down at the army. We dived toward it, and while several archers were still trying to shoot us down, the ground fissures had reached this far, and seemingly random soldiers were suffering the queen’s fate.
I shut my eyes and told myself that I should have been more specific when I asked the Dark Lord to change the ring into something that would execute the queen.
I felt Lucille wince with another arrow impact and she screamed something very un-princesslike. I opened my eyes just as she belched forth a stream of fire into the faces of the remaining archers.
Then we hit the ground and I was thrown down a hillside with bone-numbing force. I tumbled, rolling to a stop against a pile of corpses. I pushed myself away from the dead soldiers, barely noting that they were dead by conventional violence, not fire or being torn apart.
I turned around and looked back up the hillside and saw Lucille silhouetted against the night sky, underlit by the flames of what I supposed were burning archers. I saw soldiers run at her, swords drawn, only to be batted aside or immolated.
“Die. You worthless evil bastards. Die!”
Everyone between me and her had either already been killed, or had retreated. Behind both of us, back toward where the queen had been, I heard screams being cut short by a sound like tearing fabric.
I ran up the hill. As scary as an enraged dragon might be, it couldn’t compete with the anger of the Dark Lord Nâtlac.
“Lucille!” I called up at her. “We still have to get out of here!”
I heard a swordsman scream, and I saw his body tumble though the air above me.
“Attack a country your own size!”
As I ran up the hillside, I caught sight of a red glow behind her.
Dracheslayer.
“Lucille! Look out behind you!” I screamed, but she couldn’t hear me.
The glowing red blade came down toward her unprotected neck.
CHAPTER 28
“Lucille!” I screamed my throat raw.
Dracheslayer struck with a clang and a shower of red sparks.
Sparks?
I crested the hill in time to see that another sword had interposed itself between Dracheslayer and Lucille’s neck. Dracheslayer was held by the knight in full plate who had flanked the queen opposite Sir Forsythe. His armor was the worse for wear, dented and stained with soot and blood. His left gauntlet was missing, and his visor hung half off his helmet. The other man wasn’t in plate, but in black leather embossed with spikes and skulls, like the vast majority of the queen’s rapidly diminishing army.
What set this newcomer apart was the fact that he was much larger than average.
The bearer of Dracheslayer stepped back and held it in an awkward defensive posture. “Fool. Step back so I can slay the dragon.”
“No,” said his large opponent. “Brock will save the princess.”
Lucille turned, finally noticing what was happening. As she did, Brock rushed the other man. No. Rushed isn’t the right word. Strode briskly might be better.
In any event, Brock moved in, and Dracheslayer rose in a shaky defense as Brock swung his own sword. Sparks flew, and they moved slowly away from Lucille. I looked up at her and saw her readying to breathe hell down on the pair.
Damn it, she doesn’t know who Brock is.
I scrambled forward between her and the fighting men. “No, Lucille, the big guy is on our side.”
“Frank, you’re all right!”
I looked up at her and saw her side and leg peppered with arrows. Blood had slicked the ground beneath her. “You’re not.”
“Scratches. They aren’t taking down this dragon so easily.”
“We need to fly out of here.”
“Oh . . . Maybe they took me down a little.” She flapped a wing briefly, wincing. I saw a dozen arrows piercing it.
“You can’t fly—”
I was interrupted by a clang and a bellow of pain that, for some reason, found the pit of my stomach and turned it inside out. I spun around to face the two swordfighters, but it seemed to take an eternity. The bellowed rage, the sound, was familiar enough to send shivering dread throughout my body.
“Frank!”
I knew what I was going to see, and I didn’t want to.
I knew why the knight bearing Dracheslayer had sounded familiar. I knew why he held Dracheslayer so clumsily. I knew why his first impulse when the queen’s plans fell apart wasn’t to retreat, but to run across a battlefield to attack an enraged dragon.
Brock had scored a glancing blow, but it had been enough to knock his opponent’s helmet completely off. His victim bellowed in rage as blood streamed down his face.
My face.
“As close as possible,” said the elf-king. And he hadn’t said he didn’t know where the wizard was, the elf-king had said, “I can’t say.”
“Elhared,” I whispered, staring at myself wearing full plate, holding Dracheslayer two-handed to deflect another one of Brock’s swings.
“Brock will finish you.” Brock proclaimed between swings. “This is Brock’s destiny.”
Of course it was Elhared. Of course he was working with the queen. And now Brock the Barbarian was destined to kill off my body, and not only couldn’t I stop it from happening, but I couldn’t tell if I should have stopped it if I could.
The whole chain of events was clear now. Elhared’s plot—me, the dragon, the princess—it wasn’t just a power grab on his part. It might not have even been his idea. He was working with—for—Queen Fiona. The elaborate con to put Elhared on the throne in my body was just a means to put a compliant ruler on the throne of Lendowyn.
Elhared hadn’t chosen me at random from that dockside tavern. He had picked me because I was of interest to the queen, and possibly because wrapping my soul in the princess’s body made a particularly attractive sacrifice.
Even the damn book he was using, the elf-king almost flat out said that the evil tome was from Nâtlac himself. Like the elf-king had said, “souls were his business.” And where would the mediocre wizard Elhared get a signed first edition of the deep thoughts of the Dark Lord Nâtlac?
When the original plan went bad, about the time Elhared ran afoul of Prince Dudley, he must have returned to the queen’s fold and the queen decided to switch to Plan B, plain old-fashioned invasion.
When Plan B fell apart around the queen, Elhared had decided to return to the original one; kill dragon, take princess, rule Lendowyn.
I hate intrigue.
“You can’t kill him!”
I looked up at Lucille, “What . . .”
“Brock saves princess!” Brock swung hard against Elhared, knocking my body to its knees.
“That’s Frank’s body! We need it to fix this.”
Elhared raised Dracheslayer to deflect a blow coming down on his head. Brock didn’t seem to hear Lucille. He was grinning, and there was almost a euphoric expression on his face. I knew how he felt. The chance to be the hero of the story, however ill-suited you are to the task, can be intoxicating.
“He knows where the book is!”
Shouldn’t I be the one yelling that?
In desperation, I fumbled out the elf-king’s silver mirror. Technically we had Elhared, and he seemed to love technicalities. Maybe Brock wouldn’t flat out kill the guy before I figured out how to work the thing.
Brock raised his sword for another crushing blow against the raised Dracheslayer.
“Brock save—” Brock’s voice was cut short by a strangled gurgle.
“I know,” Elhared said, pulling a bloody dagger from Brock’s gut with his off hand. “‘Brock saves princess.’ ‘Brock saves princess.’” Elhared slammed the dagger home into Brock again, and the large barbarian let his sword slip from his fingers. “Brock will now shut the hell up.”
“No!”
“Yes!” Elhared said, slamming the dagger home one last time, and letting Brock topple slowly like a felled tree. Brock said nothing, but I saw tears on his cheek, glinting in the moonlight as he fell.
I held up the mirror, and watched as the last few pieces of the shattered glass fell out of the silver frame.
Elhared got to his feet. “Well, that was an annoying distraction.”
“You bastard, he was trying to save me!”
“There’s a lot of that going around. I think Lendowyn needs a better class of heroes.”
I dropped the useless mirror, drew my dagger, and ran at him while he faced Lucille. It was foolhardy, but I was relying somewhat on his reluctance to kill his ticket to royalty.
He saw me coming and knocked the dagger out of my hand with the back of his gauntlet. As my only weapon tumbled away into the darkness, he slammed my face with the pommel of Dracheslayer, dropping me to the ground next to Brock.
Elhared hooked a finger at me. “Best you stay there, unless you forgot, there’s a throne in this for you as well.”
Lucille took the opportunity to swing at Elhared. Given the way she’d been decimating trained soldiers, the blow should have sent Elhared flying.
But he spun, Dracheslayer almost moving of its own accord to block Lucille’s swing. He did so clumsily and with the flat of the blade. But even so, just contact with the blade resulted in a sizzling impact that caused Lucille to pull her arm away with a scream, a fresh wound burned into her flesh.
Elhared laughed. “Surprised? Did you think I hadn’t planned for this? You think I just wasted my years wi
th that conniving bitch?” He swung Dracheslayer and Lucille dodged, whipping her tail around to slam Elhared in the back. He stumbled from the impact. And Lucille brought her wounded forearm down to slam Elhared facedown into the ground.
“Drop the sword, you traitor! You’re going to undo this cursed spell!”
“Like hell, you spoiled brat,” Elhared’s voice came muffled from beneath her taloned hand.
I almost smiled. Lucille seemed to handle things pretty well by herself.
Then I noticed her grimacing. The muscles in her forearm trembled. For the few moments when nothing moved, I could see how badly wounded she really was. There didn’t seem to be a square inch of her body that didn’t glisten with blood. Steam came from between the fingers that held down Elhared.
She glanced in my direction and said, “I tried.” Hearing that voice crack was like the ground itself caving in under my feet. “I’m sorry, Frank.” Her words distorted into a scream of rage and pain as she pulled her hand up, clutching Elhared and tossing him away down the hillside. The inside of her hand was a smoking bloody wound.
Elhared got up from where he’d fallen. The bastard was laughing. Dracheslayer seemed to be glowing even brighter in his hands. “The more of your blood it tastes, the stronger it becomes.” He started walking up the hill toward her.
She was going to need help.
I started to push myself up, and I felt something grabbing my leg. I looked down and saw Brock clutching my ankle. “Great,” I told him. “Glad you’re still alive. I need to help Lucille.”
Elhared was halfway up the hillside. “The next taste it has will finish you.”
“No, it won’t!” she screamed down the hillside at him. She opened her mouth wide and vomited a pillar of brimstone and fire completely enveloping Elhared and Dracheslayer. The scalding wind from the blast knocked me back to the ground from twenty feet away. The ground where Elhared stood exploded upward in a cloud of embers and steam.
“My body,” I whispered.