Literally.
Next to the path Sir Forsythe followed was a large wooden sign nailed to a tree. For the benefit of the illiterate, the upper half of the sign showed a grossly obese ogre whose body was half mouth chewing off the head of some unfortunate traveler. Next to the ogre was an arrow pointing helpfully down the path in the direction we were going.
Below the disturbing image was text that I only glimpsed as we galloped by. I saw enough to get the gist. More or less it said, “Entering the Black Woods. Bad things ahead. The Kingdom of Lendowyn takes no responsibility for anything that might happen to anyone stupid enough to enter.”
I suspect we passed more signs, but I only looked up in time to see one other, featuring an overly endowed demon abusing another unfortunate traveler. I decided that, if this was multiple choice, I would opt for the ogre.
Every glimpse I got of the woods when I lifted my head was becoming worse. It had to be full morning now, but where we rode the world was trapped in a gray misty twilight. Eventually the woods actually did turn black, the trees leafless and twisted, darkened as if they had recently burned. The road below us became a mix of ash, gravel, and bone.
“Let me guess, there’s an altar to Nâtlac around here. Looks like his sort of place.”
Beneath us, the proportion of bone in the composition of the road became higher and higher until we were traveling on a highway paved with half-buried skulls. Sir Forsythe brought our advance to a halt and I looked up.
I immediately wished I hadn’t.
We had stopped in front of a twelve-foot-tall, bat-winged demon. The thing was a slavering potbellied horror, shaggy goat legs, rotting flesh crawling with worms, with the skeletal head of a stag whose massive spread of horns were decorated by a garland of someone’s intestines.
I think the only reason I didn’t start screaming was because I was simultaneously trying to gag and the mixed signals paralyzed my diaphragm.
The thing looked down at us with empty eye sockets and belched.
“Whatcha got there, Forsythe?” the horror asked in a tone of lower-class familiarity that would not have sounded out of place at The Headless Earl.
Sir Forsythe responded, showing no sign of being disturbed either at the demon’s appearance or its overly chummy tone. “I have uncovered the thief Francis Blackthorne.”
“Don’t call me Francis,” I said. Not that anyone paid attention.
Sir Forsythe’s voice took on an air of annoyance, but it did not seem directed at either me or the demon. “What are you doing here? Is there actually a ritual going on? Now?”
“Sure enough. Prince Dudley is honoring the feast of St. Haggard of the Maggots, or some-such silliness.”
The demon took a step toward us, and the breath left my lungs as one fetid clawed hand lifted my chin to face it. It stared at me with those empty eye sockets, and now I was close enough that I could just barely sense something unpleasant moving within them. “This don’t look like the guy.”
If you took a dead muskrat and threw it in a bucket of piss, left it a week until the body turned black and swelled to twice its size, then boiled the fluid until the stomach burst, the resulting odor would be preferable to the abattoir stench of the demon’s breath.
“There was a soul-transference spell involved,” Sir Forsythe told it.
The demon mercifully let my head go and stepped back, leaving my head and stomach in slow uneasy tumbles.
“Well, that explains the last one, doesn’t it?” it said as it waved us onward.
It took several moments before I managed to gather myself to ask, “What ‘last one?’”
Neither the knight nor the demon chose to enlighten me.
I redoubled my effort to strain my neck to see where we were going. Past Sir Forsythe’s leg, I saw a rise in the middle of a clearing formed of cracked black earth. Dominating everything was a large obsidian obelisk covered in carved runes that would have probably made Elhared uncomfortable. About twenty black-robed figures surrounded the obelisk, their backs to us.
As Sir Forsythe rode to a stop and dismounted, I got a better view as one of the shorter figures broke from the circle and walked toward us.
“Well,” the figure addressed him. “The legendary Sir Forsythe. Are you finally taking time out of your busy schedule for us?” The figure lowered his hood revealing a pudgy face that looked somewhat childlike, despite the graying at the temples in his disheveled mud-brown hair. The weak attempt at a mustache and goatee didn’t help.
Worst of all, I recognized him. Even if he hadn’t been in the front row at my one successful attempt at maiden rescue, right next to his mother the queen, it still wouldn’t have been hard to place him. Crown Prince Dudley was a rather infamous bastard back in Grünwald, even for royalty. Being part of a dark circle devoted to the Dark Lord Nâtlac probably wouldn’t even break the top ten in his personal list of iniquities.
I heard Sir Forsythe sigh before he addressed Prince Dudley in appropriately decorous tones, “Greetings, My Prince. It is an unexpected honor to find you here in Lendowyn.”
Prince Dudley brought his hands up and brushed them together as if he was trying to remove something distasteful. “I’m on an extended diplomatic mission for the queen. Grand plans of the crown and such.” He leaned over and arched an eyebrow as he looked in my direction. “Still rescuing princesses, I see. Though isn’t it a little out of character for you to truss them up and sling them on the back of your horse?”
“I am afraid that this girl is not what she seems, My Prince.”
“Good,” said the prince as he straightened up. His tone became darker. “Because what she appears to be is Princess Lucille of Lendowyn. And while I do not begrudge my servants the odd hobby, at this juncture the kidnapping of a member of the Lendowyn Royal Court by a servant of Grünwald would be . . . disruptive. The queen has plans.” He took a step forward until he was barely a hand’s breadth away from Sir Forsythe. His posture would have been intimidating if not for him being a head shorter than the knight. “You don’t want to disrupt the queen’s plans.”
“No, My Prince.”
“Then perhaps you could explain why you aren’t taking this remarkable simulacrum of the Lendowyn princess back to the court of King Alfred the Oblivious?”
“That is a long story, My Prince.” Sir Forsythe launched into a summary of the whole soul-transference business that, while largely accurate, made me out to be both more of a villain, and more of an idiot, than I remembered being. I tried voicing an objection once or twice, but Sir Forsythe’s reach was long enough to introduce me to the back of his gauntlet without pausing in his storytelling.
I’d had enough.
“All lies!” I yelled. “I am the Princess Lucille of Lendowyn and I demand to be returned to my father.”
Sir Forsythe raised his hand again but Prince Dudley shook his head. The knight froze, staring at me with a look of murder in his eyes.
“So,” Prince Dudley said as he walked around the knight to face me directly. “You claim this is a fabrication, and you are actually the princess?”
“Of course I am. This man is a delusional lunatic.” It seemed a plausible claim to me. “He saved me from a dragon, and then he clubbed me on the back of the head! Unless you want a diplomatic incident between our kingdoms, I suggest you release me now.”
“Now isn’t this an interesting development?” Prince Dudley smiled, giving his boyish face a disturbingly cherubic look. “The woman claims you are a liar?”
“Such audacity,” muttered Sir Forsythe.
Prince Dudley bent so that our noses almost touched, and he brought a hand up to caress my cheek. I suddenly had a bad feeling about my improvisation.
“You said yourself how this would disrupt Queen Fiona’s plans,” I said, trying to inject as much royal steel into my voice as I could.
“Yes, Mother can be such a spoilsport at times.” He shook his head. “But you really aren’t the princess, are you?”
> “Of course I am.”
“No. I don’t think so. Sir Forsythe doesn’t have the wit to compose a credible falsehood. Also, I have wide-ranging experience in the world and its women. I have enjoyed princesses and prostitutes, and I would classify your attire as much more the latter than the former. Also, having met the princess on several occasions, I would have expected a few more tears.” He let go of my face, and I felt my skin shudder in involuntary relief. He stepped back to address Sir Forsythe, “This explains the last one.”
“What last one?” I asked, already getting uncomfortable pictures of the answer. My body was running around without me, and I couldn’t come up with any scenario wherein it ran into Grünwald nobility and ended with a good result.
“I suppose you intended to sacrifice this soul cursed by the Great One all on your own?” Dudley continued, ignoring me. “You’d like to have the favor of his dark embrace all for yourself, you greedy bastard.”
“Not at all,” Sir Forsythe responded, “that honor should be granted to the third legitimate son of my liege, since he happens to be here.”
Dudley waved over a couple of men from the circle of robed figures and gestured toward me. The pair untied me and roughly lifted me off the back end of the horse. They didn’t do me the courtesy of flipping me over as they carried me, forcing me to stare at the cracked earth as I dangled between them.
Prince Dudley still talked to Sir Forsythe as his minions carried me up the hill. “The virginal flesh is a bonus. Though, the body should ripen a little for a feast day. I suppose we’ll make do.”
Suddenly I was being swung back and forth, and I barely had time to suck in a breath before I was arcing up through the air. My side slammed into something cold, hard, and unyielding. I groaned as someone pulled my shoulder, rolling me onto my back. I stared upward, the obelisk jutting up from somewhere past my head to loom over me, pointing up at a blank slate-gray sky.
Then a dozen robed figures surrounded me like wolves around a freshly slaughtered sheep carcass. Sir Forsythe’s charm kept me from moving a muscle below the chain in the necklace, so all I could do was scream insults and obscenities as I felt their hands paw at the princess—at me—tearing off my leather. For some reason it pissed me off that they showed so little respect for it. The leatherworker in Doylen had been so proud of his workmanship.
Why was I thinking of that?
Even my own screams seemed far away from my thoughts, like I wasn’t even here. Somehow, though, it made sense. It wasn’t even my own body. Really, despite feeling the acolytes’ hands yanking off my boots and leggings, in some sense I was just an observer watching the violence done to someone else. The paralysis only served to enhance the dreamlike dislocation. The part of my mind that continued to think along these terms wondered if this was really the case, why was I still screaming?
Apparently, one of the acolytes wondered the same thing, and, after cutting part of my undergarments off, shoved some of the shreds into my mouth. Unable to scream anymore, I could hear Prince Dudley idly talking to some of the other Nâtlac worshipers by my feet.
Someone was asking whether they should deflower the sacrifice before or after they cut out the heart. Prince Dudley responded that there was no reason why the deflowering couldn’t happen before and after, something about the best of both worlds.
That was the point where the dislocated observer part of my mind decided to start screaming as well.
CHAPTER 11
I don’t have a real clear memory of the next few moments. It seemed to last an eternity with me paralyzed, naked, and gagged on the altar, black-robed acolytes holding down my arms and legs as if I could move, Dudley at my feet undoing his breeches. At some point I remember hearing someone say, “At least it’s not another wizard.”
But, as Prince Dudley started climbing up to take the princess’s virginity, a familiar shadow crossed above us. Dudley and the other acolytes looked up as a booming voice called down.
“I always thought you were overcompensating for something, Dudley.”
Above us, dropping out of the clouds, was a black dragon gliding on fifty-foot wings, snaking its long neck down in our direction, opening a set of toothy jaws that could comfortably envelop half the altar.
One of the men holding my arms screamed like a little girl.
Prince Dudley’s eyes went wide and the color drained from his face. He raised himself to his knees and slid backward off the altar, still staring at the sky. He reached down to the ground, where his breeches, belt, and scabbard had been left. He grabbed blindly for his sword, staring at the descending dragon.
It was a bad plan.
I didn’t see exactly what happened, but his sword only came half out of its scabbard as something tangled up in his feet and he fell backward, naked sword between his naked legs. He cursed in pain as he dropped out of my line of sight and I winced inside.
Then my field of vision was filled by a wall of muscle and dragon scales. The dragon had landed with its feet straddling the altar. I saw a scaled forearm make a sweep and I heard an acolyte scream.
Its head—her head—bent down to look at me. “Move! I’m trying to rescue you!” Her breath blasted my naked skin with the scent of sulfur and brimstone.
I’d never been happier to have a dragon yell at me.
“I can’t!” I called up at her. “Binding charm!”
The dragon uttered a word that I’m sure princesses weren’t supposed to know. Then she knocked back a line of acolytes with another sweep of her forearm, raised her head, and belched three cannonball-size balls of fire after them. I heard more screams from beyond my line of sight.
“I don’t believe this . . .”
She swung her tail and knocked aside another half-dozen black-robed figures as she reached down and grabbed me. She hugged me to her chest and flapped her wings, and suddenly we were airborne.
Below, I heard a familiar voice uttering an elaborate challenge up at her. We rocketed up out of the gray mists of the cursed black forest, and the Dragon Lucille asked me, “Did someone participating in a sacrifice to the Dark Lord Nâtlac just call me an unclean abomination?”
I gulped air and yelled over wind whipping past us. “That’s Sir Forsythe the Good. I think he’s a bit confused.”
She grunted and clutched me tighter to her chest, a gesture that probably would not have been nearly as uncomfortable with any other princess. As it was, I felt as if I was clamped between the thighs of an elephant wearing particularly baroque plate mail. It didn’t help that I was naked and couldn’t move.
At least she was warm, in stark contrast to the freezing wind tearing across my backside.
As she swooped up into the spinning blue cauldron of sky above us she said, “I can’t believe that heights used to make me sick to my stomach.”
I closed my eyes and said, “They still do.”
• • •
The flight away from the black forest was all sickening lurches and bone-chilling cold. It was a miracle of self-control that I didn’t empty my stomach during our escape—either that, or the ten-minute flight didn’t give my body enough time to realize what was happening to it.
She landed on a plateau overlooking more mundane-looking woods and scattered farms and gently set me down on my feet in front of her. Of course, I promptly fell over. She grabbed me and held me up in front of a giant lizard face that may have been showing the first signs of panic.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes!” I gasped, struggling to breathe against her tight grip on me. I managed to croak out, “Binding. Charm.”
She lifted me up and opened her hand so I was resting on her palm. It felt precarious because I was unable to move or shift my weight, but at least I could breathe again. I looked up at her face—her sharp, toothy, lizard face—and stared into eyes that should have been pitiless as any bird of prey’s. It was the first time I’d gotten a chance to see the dragon’s features in full daylight. It should have been horrif
ying.
It was, but not quite in the sense I expected.
Something of Lucille managed to leak out in the dragon’s expression; concern, compassion, worry . . . whatever it was, it was just enough to shift the focus from the gigantic killing machine staring down at me to the young woman who was trapped inside it.
Trapped inside, and staring at her own body frozen in the palm of her hand.
And I’d thought I had it bad.
“The necklace,” I told her. “Take it off of me.”
The massive head nodded and came closer, squinting. Her other hand lifted above me, extending a finger tipped with a talon almost as long as my forearm. When it lowered in my direction, it didn’t matter what I had seen in the dragon’s eyes; if I hadn’t been paralyzed I probably would have pissed myself.
The tip of her talon rested on my stomach and she slowly drew it up between my breasts until it hooked the charm and drew it back up over my head.
In response, my whole body shuddered and I clenched myself up in a ball on her palm.
“Oh, no! Is everything okay? Did I hurt you?”
“No. I’m just freezing.”
“Oh.”
She set me down again, and this time I was able to stand on my own, a little unsteadily. I rocked back and forth, hugging myself against the cold.
Lucille moved suddenly toward the edge of the plateau, and dropped out of sight.
“What? Princess?” I called out to her, the cold forgotten for the moment. I don’t know what distressed me more, the idea of being stranded alone and naked in the princess’s body, or the idea that the dragon might be suicidal.
I reached the edge of the plateau, and a steep drop by Lendowyn standards, just as Lucille flew back up the side. I stumbled back a few steps as she shot back over the edge, blasting me in a sudden downdraft. Clutched in her forearms was a large dead tree whose trunk had been weathered bone white.
“What’re you doing?” I asked as she landed.