“What the hell?” I whispered.
Even roughened by inhaling more than my share of carbonized Elhared, I could tell that was not my voice. I’ve never uttered a single word in what could be described as a husky contralto.
My eyes shot open to look down at myself, the glare making my vision blur. I told myself that it was the painful light making my eyes water, or maybe the stinging ash. After all, the sight of a woman’s bosom had never before moved me to tears.
“Soul transference spell,” I whispered to myself in the Princess Lucille’s voice.
I stared at myself, at Lucille, and couldn’t decide if I was more disturbed by sitting here in her body, or by the thought of her running around somewhere in mine. I didn’t spend long feeling sorry for myself. It seemed that Fate had decided to take every impulse of self-pity on my part as a cue to show me exactly how much worse things could be.
As I stared, still disbelieving, down Lucille’s dress, my thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of arguing. I glanced up and saw three men just a few steps away from my feet. They did not look the type to be rescuing princesses. Rescuing anyone, really. In fact, the trio of unsavory gentlemen had more the look of people princesses were rescued from.
Actually, princesses were probably out of their league. They were the type you would need to rescue a tavern wench from.
Then, as I listened to them arguing among themselves, I had to re-revise my revised sentiment. I seemed to be princess-by-proxy, and as Princess Lucille’s stand-in, it sounded as if she—I—needed some rescuing from these unpleasant characters.
The smallest one, a nervous mousy sort barely taller than Lucille, had his back to me and stood facing the other two. He was engaged in an animated discussion, waving his arms and causing his stringy ponytail to dance about. He had captured the others’ attention, explaining why they hadn’t noticed me wake up yet.
“I’s the one found her, right?” Mouse said. “I’s the one says what we do with her.” He said it with a force and intensity that would have been intimidating if he didn’t have the voice of an asthmatic teenage boy.
The man to Mouse’s left made up for him in the intimidation department. He was grossly fat, half as wide as he was tall, all wild hair and beard so dense and tangled that the only visible parts of his face were small strips of eyes, brow, and nose. “Listen to you. Sounds like your marbles finally dropped.” If a bear could speak, that would be the voice it would use.
“You recognize the woman?” asked the last man, to Mouse’s right. He was mid-height between Mouse and Bear, as hairless as Bear was hirsute, and wore an eye patch over his left eye socket that wasn’t quite as large as the scars it covered.
“I’s told you, a princess. Lucille of Lendowyn. We bring her back and should be some reward.”
Bear laughed like he had some idea of the state of the Lendowyn treasury. Or he just imagined Mouse being the recipient of Lucille’s hand in marriage and found the image amusing. I might have shared his mirth if I wasn’t in Lucille’s place at the moment. However, his suggestion as to the proper use of their found princess was considerably less amusing.
By then I had recovered enough of my senses to use the trio’s distraction to make an attempt to escape my bonds. You might think that a career as a thief meant I was adept at such things. Sadly you would be mistaken. While a daring last-minute escape from impossible bonds makes an exciting tale, in reality, a good thief spends much more time learning how not to get caught in the first place.
At least Princess Lucille’s stature helped make things easier for me. Her small hands and additional flexibility allowed me to work her hands free without drawing the undue attention of the forest brigand debate society in front of me. I’d just started working free the knot binding my ankles when I heard Eyepatch make the sage announcement that he was going to split the difference between Bear and Mouse. They would all have their way with the princess, then they’d bring her back to Lendowyn for whatever award might be offered.
And that, my friends, is why they made him the leader.
I barely had time to undo the knot and resume my post-unconscious posture on the ground, against the roots of a tree, hands behind my back, before they shoved Mouse down at me. He fell down, face against my stomach, to the sound of Bear’s laughter. “You found her, right? You get the first taste.”
Mouse pushed himself upright, so he was on all fours above me. He was trembling, and didn’t look me in the eye. “S-sorry, Princess.” The guy was almost making me sympathetic for a potential rapist.
But not enough to keep me from slamming my knee into his crotch, sending his marbles back where they came from.
“Apology accepted,” I told him, slamming my fist into the side of his head. I don’t think he noticed the punch. I’d never been a brawler, and Lucille didn’t have any significant upper body strength. It did direct his collapse so he didn’t fall on top of me as he clutched his groin.
Bear had stopped laughing, and I suddenly had an angry, hairy wall descending toward me. One look at his face and I knew that this bastard would probably take a kick to the testicles as a form of foreplay. I pushed myself up and bolted for deeper in the woods.
What Princess Lucille’s body lacked in upper body strength, it made up for in speed and dexterity. I felt as if I practically flew to my feet, and I was racing for the cover of the woods before Bear had made it a couple of steps.
All of which meant I wasn’t aware of the abnormal pain pitching me forward into the forest mulch until my face planted into a pile of dead leaves.
When I rolled onto my back and looked down at my feet, I expected to see a pair of bloody stumps. Instead, I saw what must have been the most ornate implements of torture ever devised by man. I knew the princess was short, but compensating for that with the heels on the jeweled monstrosities imprisoning her feet was a cost far too high. They were more effective restraints than the ropes I’d slipped out of.
I spat leaves and mulch and managed to remove one offending shoe before Eyepatch caught up with me. The guy was not much bigger than I had been before I found myself filling in for the princess. Currently, however, he had close to a foot in height and probably sixty pounds on me. He hooked one hand under my armpit and yanked me to my feet without showing a bit of strain.
And I’d been worried about Bear.
He sneered at me and grabbed my throat with his free hand. “Now, don’t give me any more trouble, you little bitch. I have no problem cutting—”
His threat was cut short with a gasp as I brought the princess’s shoe up and slammed it heel-first into his good eye. Eyepatch screamed and let me go, clutching his face in a way that showed that the shoe was at least as painful for him as it had been for me. He lunged at me in a literal blind fury, and I scrambled backward, kicking off the remaining shoe of death.
Bear caught up with us, and he made the mistake of touching Eyepatch’s shoulder. Bear didn’t get out so much as a grunt before Eyepatch lunged for him. He probably should have realized that Bear’s throat was both higher and furrier than the one I wore at the moment. Then again, Eyepatch seemed really angry. Bear tried to peel the guy off of him, but that only made Eyepatch attack harder, and they both fell to the forest floor.
I took the opportunity to run out of there as fast as I could.
CHAPTER 5
I ran for a long time before I realized that I wasn’t anywhere near the hillside where Elhared’s dragon had been stashing the princess. I wasn’t familiar with the landscape of Lendowyn, but the wizard had given me a pretty good briefing on the landscape near the lair, and what I ran through right now wasn’t it.
For all I knew, I wasn’t even in Lendowyn anymore.
I stopped once I was certain that I had made it clear of Eyepatch and his crew. I leaned up against a tree to catch my breath. I had just run a mile or two in bare feet. Now that I’d stopped, I realized how badly torn up the princess’s feet were. They hurt almost as bad as they had with the
shoes of doom on.
I slid down the side of the tree to sit on a large root. I groaned with relief as I took the weight off the princess’s injured feet. I lifted one foot and looked at the sole. It was a mess. Despite wearing footwear that should have toughened them up, the skin of her feet was as delicate and soft as her own backside. At least as delicate and soft as I presumed her backside was. Since I was using it at the moment I didn’t feel an urge to test the hypothesis.
The effect of the forest floor on the princess’s unprotected feet resulted in a bloody mess that looked like her shoes had made them feel. I winced as I started pulling out splinters, pine needles, and pieces of pinecones.
“Whatever happened, Elhared, you twisted bastard,” I whispered to a passing squirrel, “I hope it hurt.” The squirrel sat up on its hind legs and chattered at me. I flicked a bloody piece of gravel at it and it ran away.
It was clear that I had disrupted Elhared’s spell a few incantations later than I should have. The soul-transference bit happened, but it looked like it had been me and the princess who had swapped rather than me and the wizard. That was probably for the best, since last I remembered, Elhared’s body had vanished in a pillar of magical fire. I didn’t know why the princess ended up in the middle of the forest an indeterminate distance from Elhared’s self-immolation, but I’m not a wizard. It probably had something to do with the dragon throwing me into the spell.
Now that I had a moment to think, I started coming up with a plan. The plan was simple enough, but the objective was pretty obvious. I needed three things. I needed to recover the lexicon of nastiness Elhared had been cribbing notes from. Books like that tended not to run into multiple editions, and if someone were to undo what Elhared had done, they would probably need a copy of the exact spell that Elhared had muffed. Of course, for that to be of any use, I needed to find the princess and, presumably, my body along with her. Lastly, I needed to find a slightly less corrupt wizard who could make sense of the whole mess and fix things.
Simple, really.
I shredded strips off the bottom of the princess’s dress, grumbling because the rest of her outfit seemed as inappropriate to the situation I found myself in as the shoes had. I fostered that resentment because it was the only thing keeping me from staring at my—her—legs and thinking about exactly how it felt when I bent over to wrap my feet. The pain also helped distract me from paying too much attention to where the princess’s clothing tugged at me—or the one important place it wasn’t tugging at me.
Three things, that’s all I needed. Of the three, looking for a sane wizard was pointless until I took care of the other two. Looking for the princess/myself was also going to be difficult if we were both randomly teleported to parts unknown.
Since I knew where the dragon’s lair was, that left me with finding Elhared’s evil tome of maleficence as my immediate logical first step.
Sometimes I hate logic.
But, besides fixing one third of my problem, if I had some luck, Princess Lucille would come to the same conclusions and go to recover the book herself and I’d take care of another third of the list at the same time. Then it would just be a matter of traveling back to the king, who would most likely help us find a wizard for step three. Even if the treasury was bare, there was a position for a court wizard that had just opened up.
My plan was a thing of beauty, simple, elegant, and flawless. Except for the state of my feet, and the issue that I had no idea where in the wide world I happened to be.
I pushed myself to stand on my bandaged feet and whispered, “One thing at a time, Frank.”
Step one-half, find a village, a farm, or a traveler a bit more civilized than the brigands I’d left behind that could tell me where I was and point me in the right direction.
• • •
The simplest plans always prove to be the most difficult to execute. Finding a road or a village shouldn’t have been this hard. I began to suspect that Eyepatch and company had not chosen their campsite for its accessibility.
The sky was edging toward dusk before I found a mud track that had seen use by more than the local wildlife. As the light faded, it began to sink in how bad my situation was. Hobbling through the woods in daylight, it was easy enough to avoid thinking of anything but my pained feet and finding signs of human civilization. Now that I had found those signs, and night was coming, it sank in that I’d be walking along an empty road in the body of a young, injured, unarmed woman.
The non-human predators that would soon be waking up in these woods would probably be a bit easier to reason with than the human predators that traveled this road at night. I had no desire to run into another group like Eyepatch’s crew, if for no other reason than that I’d like to return the princess’s body in a state close to how I’d found it.
I picked up a fallen branch that could double as a staff and a walking stick, and began looking for a safe hole where I could hide myself through the night.
But, before night fell, and before I could find a good hidey-hole, I heard the sound of approaching hoofbeats.
Oh, crap.
In one sense, it was exactly what I was looking for, a traveler who could tell me how best to get back to the areas of Lendowyn that I was somewhat familiar with. But I wasn’t in a position to defend myself against anyone whose interest in wayward princesses was less than savory. I had an urge to run into the woods and find cover, but between my initial indecision, the lack of good cover on this stretch of road, and my tired, bandaged feet, there wasn’t any way for me to get out of sight before the galloping horse was in view of me.
So I stood my ground and gripped my branch as if it might do some good. If I had been the princess, I might have been a little reassured by the appearance of the lone rider approaching me. The man rode a black charger, and wore mail that almost gleamed underneath a tabard bearing a device that marked this guy as a member of the nobility, a knight at least.
That might have reassured the princess, but it didn’t reassure me. In a long career on the outside of the law, I had gotten to know plenty of people in the shiny armor of noble birth. The differences between such men and the dregs hanging out with Eyepatch were more teeth, better weapons, and nicer clothes. Honestly, most nobles I’d met didn’t even edge out Eyepatch in the cleanliness department.
The knight drew his horse to a stop next to me on the road, and somehow he managed to keep his mount from kicking up a soup of mud and horse crap on me. He had long blond hair tied behind his head, and a long mustache whose ends curved down below a chin so broad and stonelike that it seemed as if he could sharpen his sword on the cleft. He called down to me as if he were performing an oration for the benefit of an unseen audience. “Ho! What evil has left a maiden alone to wander this dismal wood?”
I gripped my makeshift staff and, even though my present appearance had been the foremost worry in my mind for the past few hours, I still found myself glancing around for the maiden he was referring to. I sighed, returned my gaze to the knight, and said, “It’s a long story.”
The knight’s eyes widened and he exclaimed, “My lady! Are those the arms of Lendowyn upon that ill-treated frock?”
“I suppose they are—” I hadn’t really paid much attention to the princess’s clothes, aside from trying to tear them into something slightly more appropriate to hiking in the woods. Though, strictly speaking, complete nudity would have been more appropriate.
The knight vaulted off his horse and landed in the road in front of me. Again, he somehow managed to keep from splattering mud over either of us. His tabard rustled in a slight breeze, along with his hair, as if he had been granted special favor by the gods of high drama. He bowed down to one knee, effortlessly finding the single patch of road that was not a sloppy mess in which to genuflect. “It is an honor. I am Sir Forsythe the Good, slayer of monsters and savior of fair maidens. As fate would have it, I was on my way to Lendowyn to offer your father my service in rescuing you.”
Of course you
were.
Somehow, my perfectly simple plan had overlooked the fact that there was an outstanding bounty on return of the princess. Just because the princess was no longer in the clutches of an evil dragon didn’t mean there weren’t still all manner of freelancers out to save her.
That complicated things.
“Well, uh, Sir Forsythe? I think I’ve managed to rescue myself, thank you.” I bit my lip because I wasn’t used to talking to people bowing at me. It was a little disconcerting. “You can get up.”
He stood, slowly enough that it gave me a really good sense of how much he towered over me, how much he would have towered over me even before I had been princessified. I was suddenly very grateful for the privileges of rank. I straightened up, looked Sir Forsythe in the eye, and tried to muster up all the royal arrogance I could manage. “I appreciate your effort, Sir Knight, but all I require right now is proper directions toward . . .” I hesitated. Despite steeling myself and trying for a tone of royal command, the sounds that came out of my mouth were more of the frightened teenager variety. But I couldn’t very well turn back from the attempt now. “T-the nearest inn where I can get my bearings.”
“Your Highness,” he said in a way that made clear exactly what was coming. “I cannot in good conscience leave you alone in these woods. You have no retainers present to protect you.” Of course he wouldn’t. I’m a thief with no respect for authority, chivalry, or noble blood, and I wouldn’t. “However,” he bowed his head to me, “I would be honored to personally escort you to such an inn, and at daybreak take you to the castle gates themselves.”
I opened my mouth to object, but the sane part of my brain kicked some sense into me. I was alone, unarmed. This guy was loaded for bear, and had transportation. Even if I didn’t want to confront Princess Lucille’s dad without the princess available, I couldn’t see any logical objection to Sir Forsythe’s offer.