Dragon Thief

  With that one word, I finally put together all the elements I’d been missing.

  “Get off of her!” I yelled at the girls.

  Grace looked up at me from the pile with an incredulous expression. “What? If this is Snake—”

  “No. It’s the princess!”

  “But you’re the princess?” Krys’s muffled voice came from near the middle of the pile.

  “Not right now. She’s the original.”

  “How do you know?” Grace asked.

  “Frank!” Lucille gasped.

  “Just get off of her!”

  • • •

  It was all so glaringly obvious in retrospect.

  It never made sense that Snake would disappear from Lendowyn in the princess’s body. He’d known about the cursed jewel I had used. It would be simple for him to put it on again to send his soul back home. If he didn’t, it meant he had figured out how to leverage where he had found himself.

  Not only leverage his identity as the princess, but leverage the rift I’d put between me and Lucille.

  From her perspective it had been out of the blue, and Lucille still didn’t quite understand what had happened. “Princess Frank” had come to her the day after my drunken use of the artifact—meaning “Princess Snake” had actually come to her—to give her a gift. At this point, I don’t think anyone listening to her story—aside from Brock—needed to be told what the gift had been.

  “I was so happy,” she said to me. “I thought you had forgiven me.”

  I didn’t think I could feel worse about what had happened. I was wrong.

  “And ever since I became a dragon, I’d never worn jewelry. That was the only thing I really missed, dressing up. Making myself pretty. And somewhere you had even found a chain long enough to fit my wrist. So tiny, but it was beautiful.”

  I barely listened as she explained what happened next. She placed Snake’s gift on her wrist, and the next thing she knew, she was standing in her own body staring up at a laughing dragon. Before she had gotten a grip on what had happened, before she had recovered from the disorienting perception shift, a squad of guards appeared to take her prisoner.

  Even that made sense in retrospect. A good proportion of the palace guard were former Grünwald soldiers who had pledged their service after I had defeated Queen Fiona. But they had pledged themselves to me as Princess Frank, not Lucille or Lendowyn. If Snake had come to them with a plot for a coup, especially one that hinged on an artifact from the Dark Lord himself, I doubt they’d express any reluctance.

  I asked Sir Forsythe why Snake hadn’t tried to recruit him.

  “There was a faction in Grünwald that supported the bastard prince. I was never among them.”

  And neither were the rest of the men that Snake sent with you to save a princess that he’d taken prisoner himself.

  Snake’s plans were horrifying in their efficiency. If his interest was Grünwald, not Lendowyn, how better to exploit his new position in the Lendowyn court than by pointing Lendowyn itself at its rival, Grünwald. What better way to do that than disappear the princess and blame Grünwald for it? Then send a core group of potentially disloyal royal guard, led by Sir Forsythe, off to rescue the missing princess. Then, when they’re disappeared as well . . . just blame Grünwald again.

  There was no denying that Snake was way more a thief than I ever could hope to be. He had managed to steal an entire kingdom.

  It was Lendowyn, but still . . .

  And doing so from inside the skin of a murderous fifty-foot, fire-breathing lizard was just a bonus.

  It fit together so well that I spent most of the description of Brock’s rescue of Lucille mentally berating myself for not seeing it sooner. Both dragon attacks, Grünwald and Lendowyn, had to be Snake. It never made sense from Lucille’s point of view, but from Snake’s it made nothing but. He wanted war between the two kingdoms. The only thing I couldn’t figure was how he intended to win given the state of Lendowyn’s treasury.

  I didn’t realize that I had almost answered my own question, because I forced myself back into listening to Lucille.

  After Brock pulled her out of the dungeon, they both made their escape from Lendowyn Castle. There was no telling who served the legitimate crown, and who served the usurper dragon. They had come here because Brock knew that most of those who would be loyal to the real princess had been sent here with Sir Forsythe to save her.

  “Wait,” Grace asked. “I’m confused now. Loyal to what princess? You or Frank?”

  “Yeah,” Mary added. “Didn’t those guards think Frank was taking over?”

  Lucille turned from them to me and Sir Forsythe. “Who are these girls?”

  “That’s Grace, that’s Mary, Laya, Krys, Rabbit, and Thea.”

  “You’ve taken to abducting acolytes from Lysean temples now?”

  “We’re not Lysean virgins,” Krys snapped.

  “The abduction was mutual,” I said.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” Lucille said. “We came here and I saw—” She waved toward the burned campsite around us. “I thought y-you did . . . but if you’re not . . . Who’s in my castle?”

  “The Bastard Prince Bartholomew of Grünwald, whose body I’m wearing.” The explanation poured out of me in remarkably coherent fashion considering how much of Snake’s thought processes I had to extrapolate. But still, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. He knew the Tear of Nâtlac and what it did. The weird status of the Lendowyn court was public knowledge, so he knew exactly what he was doing when he gave her the jewel. Even more diabolical, he wasn’t even stuck as the dragon as long as he held on to the Tear, if he put it on he’d reclaim his own body.

  “So it wasn’t ever you?”

  “No.”

  She stepped up and backhanded me across the face.

  “Ow! I’m sorry. I screwed up—”

  She backhanded me on the other cheek.

  “Ow!”

  “You did this! You ran off and left my kingdom to this monster!”

  She lifted her arm to strike me again, and Sir Forsythe grabbed her wrist. “That is enough, Your Majesty.”

  Brock put his hand on the hilt of his sword. “Let the princess go.”

  “I cannot permit this attack on my liege.”

  “Let me go.”

  “Brock will not let you harm the princess.”

  “Stop it!” I yelled. “She’s right!”

  Everyone stopped the bickering to face me.

  “It is all my fault! I got drunk on self-pity and used an artifact from the Dark Lord Nâtlac when I had no real clue what would happen. It was terminally stupid, and she’d be better off slitting my throat where I stand if it wasn’t for the fact we don’t know what it would do to the effects of the Dark Lord’s little toy.”

  “Frank?” she said.

  “It was bad enough when I thought you were so upset at losing track of me that you burned a town to the ground—”

  “What town?” she asked, weakly.

  “—but it’s because I gave him access to that artifact, and to you. I can’t forgive myself. I certainly can’t ask that of anyone else.” Everyone stared at me, and I turned around so I couldn’t see their eyes anymore. “Ever since I realized what I had done, what I’d really done . . . I had some hope I could fix it. I can’t.”

  I walked away from everyone, not knowing or caring where I was going.

  • • •

  I didn’t go far. Just to the edge of the woods where a tree had fallen, giving me a place to sit down and feel sorry for myself. I’d never felt more helpless than I did at that moment. Even if I could connive some way to undo what had happened, what really mattered was the damage already done. I had not only betrayed Lucille, I had betrayed the position in Lendowyn I had inherited from her. I hated the
idea of aristocracy, and I felt unclean just becoming part of it, but it was what they had in Lendowyn. Backing away from it didn’t undo the idea that some people were fit to rule others; it just left a hole to be filled by someone infinitely worse.

  I sat there for a long time before I heard a familiar voice say, “Why?”

  I looked up and saw Lucille. Oddly enough, it almost didn’t seem right looking at her in her own body. There was something about her posture, and the tilt of her head that I could recognize from the dragon. How much had I taken from her?

  I shook my head and laughed into my hands; it only sounded like sobbing.

  “Frank?” She sounded alarmed, and probably with good reason. The sounds coming from me probably edged a little too close to the gibbering that followed the Dark Lord Nâtlac around.

  “Five months ago,” I said, catching my breath. “This would have been perfect, wouldn’t it? You back in your original body, like I promised. And I get something close to mine . . .” I looked back up to her and I had to blink a few times because she was unaccountably blurry. “I am so sorry.”

  “Just tell me why, Frank.”

  “Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.”

  “You’re no idiot. Tell me why. What did you think would happen?”

  I was about to glibly beat myself up again, but I could see something in her eyes that went deeper than the anger, something I recognized because I felt it myself. Grief. A sense of something that might be irrevocably lost, and no sense of how it could be saved.

  She deserved better than me. From me. It pained me to put away the self-pity, having barely tapped my supply, but I decided to try being honest for once. “I thought I could just go back to being a guy for a while. I thought if the necklace was really a problem, I could just take it off again.” I shook my head. “But really, I was drunk, and angry, and in retrospect I wasn’t thinking at all. After what happened the last time we brushed against this sort of magic, I should have known better. Even drunk I should have had the sense to tell myself to wait until I sobered—”

  “I wasn’t thinking either.”

  “—up and could think cle—what?”

  “I took you for granted. What you did for me, my kingdom. Our kingdom.”

  “Yeah, I certainly screwed all that up,” I mumbled.

  “I didn’t really understand what it was like for you. Not until you told me off.” I heard her sniff, and I realized she was crying. “Damn it, Frank. I thought I lost you!”

  “I thought you didn’t know it was Prince Bartholomew?”

  “You’re not an idiot, but sometimes you act like one.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you were gone long before that!”

  I stared at her, unsure how to react. I stood up and reached for her. “Lucille—”

  She batted my hand away.

  “Do you understand yet? When that usurper came to me in my—your—this body. I thought it was you. I thought you might have forgiven me, and when you didn’t, when the dragon laughed at me and your guardsmen dragged me away, I still thought it was you. I thought it was you because I thought I deserved it!”

  I shook my head. “No, I would never—”

  She laughed, and the sound was sad and bitter. “But you did, didn’t you?”

  “But not—I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t lie to me, Frank.”

  I sighed and turned away. “It’s one of the few things I do well,” I whispered. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, I added, “I am really sorry this happened. I’m sorry I left and let that bastard take my place. And I’m sorry I said those things to you.”

  She sighed. “You have more than enough to be guilty for. Don’t be guilty for yelling at me.”

  I turned around. “But—”

  “But what? That, at least, I deserved after pushing you into this stupid royal play-acting. I couldn’t stand the role Father put me in, the pretty little thing decorating the court while the serious men did their serious business. If you saved me from anything, you saved me from that. And I thanked you by letting Father put you in the same position.”

  “Yeah, I probably still could have handled it better.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I was so wrapped up in suddenly being a functional part of my own kingdom that I completely forgot about you. That was shabby of me, and completely worthy of your horrid opinion of nobility.”

  “No, Lucille, you were never that bad.”

  She covered her face and shook her head. After a moment I realized she was laughing.

  “What?”

  “No,” she said. “You aren’t an idiot, but sometimes you act like one. Everything you said about so-called ‘noble blood’ is right. You’re right, you screwed up, but you know what it is you did?”

  “I think so?” I said tentatively.

  “At first I thought we’d pushed you so far into the royal role that you made up your mind to embrace the part—with all the backstabbing, betrayal, and lust for power that entails. Now I find out that people are dead, not because you decided to play royal, but because you were inadvertently replaced by someone with actual noble blood in their veins—”

  She looked at me, then at her own hands. “Metaphorical blood, anyway. Someone who believes his ancestry alone legitimizes any atrocity he commits.”

  I wasn’t able to respond to that.

  “But you said you didn’t know what the jewel would do before you wore it.”

  “I just wanted to be a man again.”

  “So that, thing, chose Prince Bartholomew.”

  “As far as I know.”

  She sighed and looked at the ground.

  “Lucille—”

  “Why come back?”

  “What?”

  “I drove you away. This was never your kingdom. What do you care what happens here now? Why come back at all?”

  “I do care.” I care what happened to you.

  She started crying again and when I reached for her this time she didn’t push me away. She sobbed into my chest.

  “I’m still angry at you,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  CHAPTER 21

  So here I was, with the woman I cared most about in the world in my arms pressing against me. As an added bonus, we were alone in the woods, and for the first time since we’d been declared husband and wife, our bodies reflected the common understanding of the institution.

  I know exactly where the story is supposed to go from this point. I’ve heard enough heroic ballads.

  Have I mentioned that I’m not a hero?

  I have a long history of less than reputable pursuits, resulting in the allegedly more reputable pursuing me. I’ve always moved around a lot, and the few women who’ve had the bad sense to get close to me did so as a prelude to having their heart broken.

  I stared into her eyes as she searched for me in Snake Bartholomew’s face, and all I could see was her inevitable disappointment. After all of this, it was remarkable that I didn’t see it already.

  Our faces were inches apart, and I felt her breath on my cheek.

  I felt the panic build, and did what I always do when I see an angry troll lumbering down an alley at me.

  I dodged.

  “I think I have an idea how to fix this.” I took her wrists and started back toward the others by the burned camp.

  “What?”

  • • •

  The others had been busy salvaging things from the wreckage. The girls seemed to have perfected the knack of adapting savaged armor to smaller sizes. By the time I’d returned with Lucille, they looked a lot more like they had when I had first run into them, except for the jewelry and hairstyles, which made an unnerving contrast with the sooty armor of debatable origin.

  Even S
ir Forsythe had managed to find his own armor. Apparently he had worn something a bit more subdued into Grünwald.

  Everyone converged on us as I reached the top of the rise.

  “We need to go to Fell Green,” I said.

  “What’s Fell Green?” Grace asked.

  “A wizard town,” Sir Forsythe said. “A vile congregation of all manner of dark artisans and unsavory cultists.”

  “Hey,” Laya said, “aren’t you an acolyte of the Dark Lord What’s-His-Name?”

  “Hardly representative,” Sir Forsythe muttered.

  “We need someone who knows what they’re doing to solve this whole evil cursed artifact thing,” I said. “Without an actual wizard, we’re just guessing.”

  I heard Lucille mutter behind me, “So now you think of asking a wizard about this thing?”

  I couldn’t argue with her there.

  “Brock has heard of this place,” Brock said, “and Brock doesn’t like what Brock’s heard.”

  “Fell Green has another advantage, besides being a place where a blind drunk goblin could trip over a wizard before leaving the tavern.”

  “And that is what?” Grace asked.

  “No one claims jurisdiction over it. Dermonica is after us—”

  “After Snake,” Mary added.

  “—Grünwald is after us—”

  “Snake again,” Mary reiterated.

  “—and now that Prince Bartholomew has taken over, Lendowyn is going to be after us as well. Fell Green is the only place reasonably close by that avoids all of them.”

  “We’ll need the toll,” Lucille said.

  “Toll?” Grace asked.

  “You can’t get in without a toll,” I said.

  “So you can’t sneak us in, mister master thief?” Mary asked.

  “No,” I said. “You can’t get in without paying.”

  “Like I said—” Mary started.

  Lucille sighed and said, “He means, if you don’t pay the toll, the city isn’t there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘isn’t there’?”

  “It isn’t fully in this world,” I said. “It’s a wizard town. What do you expect?”

  • • •