Dragon Thief

  She raised her head just enough so that she was looking me in the eye.

  I shrugged. “We may not have met under the best circumstances, but everyone else lately has been more interested in me as a princess or as a potential victim.”

  “I’m sure some of that is because you’re a very attractive young woman.”

  “Potential victim,” I repeated.

  “That isn’t always a bad thing,” she said. “Seems to have worked out for me.”

  “Not the same thing. You were more accomplice than victim.”

  “You still tied me up.” I would have expected a bit more anger from a woman saying that. Instead I got that half-smile and her face half turned from mine. Suddenly I began feeling like an awkward teenager who had never tried to pick up a woman in a bar before.

  “I’m sorry about—”

  “Shh—” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. She whispered in my ear, “Accomplice, right?” I felt heat on my face and blamed Lucille’s body. Evelyn squeezed my hand as she sat back down and I felt an uncharacteristic surge of honesty.

  “Before we go on,” I said, “there are a few more things I should tell you—”

  “Like why you call yourself Frank?”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

  “I’m okay with it,” she said.

  “Brock?” I asked, trying to regroup.

  “He didn’t say anything.” She leaned over and quietly said, “But it’s not really a secret. Royal weddings are general topics of rumor and conversation even when they aren’t as strange as yours. You’re famous and . . .” Her eyes dropped and she began tracing patterns on my hand again.

  After a moment I realized she was blushing herself.

  “And?” I prompted.

  She sucked in a breath. “What’s it like to be the Dark Queen?”

  CHAPTER 2

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. It wouldn’t be hard to connect my last two trips to Grünwald. Like she said, it was no secret.

  However, I would have expected my checkered past to be at least a little bit off-putting.

  “Yeah, that . . .” I said, not quite sure what she wanted. “Queen Fiona didn’t leave me much choice.”

  “I heard stories about how she crumbled before you.”

  Torn apart by an angry Lord of Darkness was more like it.

  “Did you make her beg?” she asked.

  “Did I . . .” I trailed off as a few details about Evelyn began to sink in. First, she hadn’t actually shown any attraction to me until after I had threatened her. Sure she’d taken my bribe, but I had still ordered her to strip, help me dress, and then I had tied her up and left her in an empty beer barrel. For most people I knew, that would have been an ordeal.

  I began to realize that, for Evelyn, it had been foreplay.

  I watched her expression as she talked of my overcoming the prior monarch of Grünwald, the Dark Queen of Nâtlac—especially the way she bit her lip.

  The good news was, Evelyn found my exploits versus the last Dark Queen of Nâtlac exciting in the same, somewhat disturbing, manner as she had been excited by our last meeting when I’d basically kidnapped her, stripped her, and tied her up. . . .

  I guess that also counted as the bad news.

  “Can we talk about something else?” I asked quietly.

  “Of course, mistress,” she said, confirming my growing suspicions.

  I felt even more the awkward teenager.

  Not that I begrudged Evelyn’s idea of fun. But the idea of playing mistress to fulfill whatever fantasy role she had for the Dark Queen came a little too close to the reasons I was trying to avoid an assignation with someone from within the Lendowyn court.

  I think, when it comes to romantic encounters, I’m more egalitarian.

  But, after the effort I had put into bringing her here, and the faith she’d shown by following Brock here, I decided that I owed it to both of us to give it a try.

  • • •

  I took Evelyn up to the private room I’d been renting with my meager royal stipend for the past five days. I felt even more like some teenager on the cusp of losing his virginity. Even if it was, given my new body, the literal truth, it wasn’t how I’d expected to feel.

  In retrospect, it made sense for a number of reasons. I was still uncomfortable in my new skin, even after a few months with it. I also hadn’t been intimate with anyone for longer than that. And, while I had plenty of experience with women, none was as a woman, meaning my relevant prior sexual experience was absolutely nil.

  So there were reasons to be nervous, even with a willing, enthusiastic partner.

  But there’s also this running theme with my life: Whenever I am afraid things will go wrong, they never do so in exactly the way I expect them to.

  However, for a brief shiny moment I did forget my apprehension. Once I closed the door and we faced each other in private, she asked, with her head bowed and hands behind her back, “May I kiss my mistress?”

  “Well that was the idea behind bringing you here.”

  That, at least, was something that hadn’t changed with my new body. Even if our embrace had a few more curves involved than I was used to. I held on to her with all the desperation of the past few months.

  It went downhill from there.

  Somehow I had come to a point in my life where I had a woman ready, willing, and able to join me in activities that I had only been able to imagine for the past six months. I had her on her knees in front of me, calling me mistress. She looked up at me with a gaze that was equal parts lust, submission, and worship and asked, “What does my mistress want?”

  And I drew a blank.

  I had no idea what to tell her. It wasn’t just my inexperience with any sort of female-only relationship. I had spent years as a guy. Such things had crossed my mind.

  But the impact of this woman asking me to command her like a slave had managed, somehow, to completely wipe away any thoughts of an erotic nature from my mind.

  “Mistress?”

  I stood there, motionless. Inside I began to panic, and I didn’t even know why.

  “Is there something wrong?” To my relief, her voice lost its servile character and took on a note of actual concern. My panic started fading.

  “Frank?”

  I sighed. I guess I wasn’t going to do this. “Evelyn,” I said, “I don’t think—”

  Fortunately for my budding reputation as a dominatrix, I was interrupted by a scream coming from outside.

  While screams of terror were never a good sign, I ran to the window with the naïve belief that, whatever the emergency was, it had to be less awkward than my standoff with Evelyn. I opened the shutters to look out at what was terrorizing the townsfolk outside.

  “Oh crap.”

  It never goes wrong in quite the way I expect.

  “What’s going on?” Evelyn called after me.

  I turned around and ran for the door. “I have to go out there before things get out of hand.”

  As I went out the door, I heard her call after me, “Before what gets out of hand?”

  • • •

  I ran through the tavern, past a crowd of people who had pushed their way in from outside. My own personal guards, including Brock, were already outside to meet the threat. I had a brief impulse to find a rear door to the place, slip away from the royal guard, and the court, and what waited outside.

  The impulse was brief enough that I didn’t even slow down.

  Outside, waiting for me, was the worst-case scenario for any woman attempting to engage in any extramarital dalliance.

  My husband.

  It didn’t help matters that my spouse was a fifty-foot-long fire-breathing lizard. Apparently my efforts at stealth didn’t matter all that much once someone realized that I had
gone missing.

  “Frank!” the dragon greeted me as I ran out the door. Lucille filled the crossroads in front of the tavern, and a circle of people, mostly my escort, Brock, and elements of the city watch, had formed a perimeter around her at about forty paces. Her wings spread out to block most of the sky.

  “Lucille,” I answered. It was hard to keep the resignation out of my voice. It had sunk in that there wasn’t any way out of the box I found myself in.

  I stopped advancing, because something felt wrong. I could see it in my own retainers, who knew her as well as I did, and they seemed as frightened as the city watch.

  “Lucille?” I repeated, really looking at her now. I had become somewhat accustomed to her as a dragon, enough so that I really didn’t think of the implications of it anymore. However, I was good at reading her expressions by now, despite the lack of mobility in her reptilian face.

  This expression I hadn’t seen before.

  I thought I had seen her angry. I was wrong. She stood on her haunches, looming over me, neck twisted in an arc that pointed her face down at me. Every muscle under her scaly skin was drawn so tight she could have been carved out of obsidian. Smoke curled from her nostrils, and behind her snarl I could see the faint glow of barely suppressed fire. Her huge golden eyes were narrowed until they were little more than angry slits in her face.

  “What in the seven hells do you think you were doing?” Her words slammed down in a gust of choking brimstone hot enough to melt the snow at my feet.

  I heard a scream from behind me, and I realized that Evelyn had followed me out of the tavern. I glanced behind me at her; she was staring up at Lucille and fumbling at the doorway that had slammed shut behind her. Whoever was on the other side of that door wasn’t opening it.

  I placed my hand on my temple. I had misjudged how badly Lucille would react. “I’m sorry,” I said, hoping to calm things down a bit. “I wanted—”

  “You wanted? You’re sorry!?” She bellowed that last word up into the sky. A good thing since it came out in a ball of flame so intense that it was briefly dawn in front of the tavern. The city guard dropped their halberds and ran, and to all appearances my personal guard wanted to join them. Evelyn dove to the ground and cowered behind me.

  “Father has been working toward these negotiations for a decade! You risk disrupting them for what? For what!? What are you doing that’s more important than years of diplomatic work and peace between our neighbors? What’s worth putting the princess and heir to the Lendowyn throne at risk?”

  While she had a point, I couldn’t help thinking that she was being more disruptive than anything I’d been doing in the privacy of my rented room. I stepped forward and raised my hands. This needed to stop before it went too far.

  “Lucille, you’re right. Just calm down and we—”

  “Don’t patronize me! Don’t tell me to calm down! It’s bad enough you’re willing to upend talks with Dermonica. What’s worse is you did it just to degrade yourself.”

  I opened my mouth, but what she said sunk in and left me in a brief stunned silence.

  Wait a minute.

  “You’re part of the noble house of Lendowyn. You have responsibilities, duties. You need to behave in a manner appropriate to your station.”

  Is that what this is about? I stared at her in disbelief. Of all the things to be angry with me about, she picked this one? I thought she knew me . . .

  “I not only find out you’re missing, but I find out that you abandoned your duties to have a cheap dalliance with a common whore!”

  “That’s enough!” I shouted up at her in a voice that hadn’t been as commanding since I shouted down the late Queen Fiona.

  Her jaws snapped shut with an audible clack, and her head withdrew, eyes widening. Lucille wasn’t the only one in shock from my outburst; the circle of guards all turned their attention to me.

  I pointed up at Lucille. “Don’t talk to me about any so-called ‘nobility.’ You’re the only one of the bunch who’s worth more than a bucket of warm ogre spit—”

  “Frank—”

  “And this woman has a name! It’s Evelyn, and I’ll take one of her over a dozen self-important lords from the noble houses of any kingdom you want to mention. You might forget that she’s not the only one here who didn’t have the good sense to properly pick the set of ancestors who were more adept at beating people into submission.”

  “Please—” The anger seemed to leak away from the dragon’s voice. That was okay. I now had more than enough for both of us.

  “Your noble ‘obligations’ are just a rationalization to convince yourself that you really are better than everyone else, and a desperate attempt to convince everyone else that they actually need to be subservient. Gods help us all if all the farmers in the land suddenly realized that they can survive a lot longer without the lords than the lords can survive without them.”

  “This isn’t the place.”

  “No, of course not. Can’t say such things before the unwashed masses.” It was probably a bad idea to argue with her, though not for exactly the same reasons it was typically a bad reason to argue with a dragon. Exactly why it was didn’t sink in. Not then.

  “Why are you doing this to me? In my body?”

  “Your body?” I screamed at her. “Your body?!”

  “Please, Frank—” She must have heard what was coming in my voice, because she sounded more tentative than a dragon had a right to be.

  “You lost your claim on this body when you decided you wanted to be Crown Prince Dragon. Your body? How much time have you and your dad spent trying to get it back? What kind of nerve do you have to claim control of something you don’t even want?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “And after what I’ve done for you, twisted my entire existence out of shape . . . this is the thanks I get? What kind of ungrateful bitch are you? Evelyn’s beneath your station? Well so am I!”

  I don’t know where the line was, but somewhere along the way I had crossed it, kept going, and never looked back. Everyone fell silent, including her.

  After a long moment she said, “We should go.”

  Maybe I should, I thought.

  CHAPTER 3

  We made it through the last couple of days in Dermonica and the journey back to Lendowyn without more than three words passing between us. I did everything I could to keep it that way, remaining sequestered alone in my rooms whenever my so-called “duty” didn’t absolutely require my presence as window dressing. Lucille had been staying away from the talks themselves, for obvious reasons—her presence would have been distracting.

  Still, I kept to myself even more than usual. Better to feel sorry for myself.

  I did see her on our return trip. The draconic escort was a bit of pointless diplomatic swagger, the kind engaged in by kingdoms that had little to swagger about. I guess it was impressive to anyone who didn’t realize that Lendowyn had no money and the dragon represented about half the kingdom’s military prowess. Thus the importance of a peace treaty with neighboring Dermonica.

  Before she took off to fly alongside the caravan home, she did catch my eye. I doubt anyone else noticed, but, as I said, I’d been around Lucille enough to understand a dragon’s facial expression. I could tell that as she looked in my direction she was on the verge of tears.

  It was a measure of how angry I was that I didn’t walk over and try to smooth things over. I was at the point where I was mad at her for being upset. Why should she be? She had gotten what she wanted. She had become the Crown Prince of Lendowyn, and in a weird patriotic fervor, had become the most popular member of the royal court. And unlike my current experience as princess, she had some actual role in the running of the kingdom.

  I was not about to feel sorry for her, and an apology was out of the question.

  It was a long trip back to Lendowyn C
astle, and as soon as I could free myself from the obligatory return ceremony I retired to my own private chambers and locked myself in.

  After a side trip to the royal wine cellar.

  I knew from experience that, in my case at least, alcohol and self-pity rarely mixed well. I think I convinced myself that I was more angry than anything else. When I leaned against the door and took a swig from some local vintage, I told myself that my vision was blurred by tears of rage.

  I took another swig and thought I should have just left with Evelyn. I’d probably added a whole new layer to her fantasy mistress when I managed to argue a dragon into submission.

  “Mistress,” I whispered, half curse and half drunken giggle.

  The “drunken” part of that didn’t sink in until I took a half step, half stumble toward the bed and started toppling. Somehow I managed a pirouette that ended with my back flat on the bed, and more important, bottle high and unspilled.

  “Mistress,” I muttered again, with an unprincesslike snort.

  I hadn’t felt more powerless in my entire life. And, in addition to losing everything else, I had lost my tolerance for alcohol. That started me laughing and gasping, desperately trying to keep my bottle upright.

  I’d figured out a while ago that I had become a lightweight when I inherited the princess’s body, but I didn’t remember three sips of wine putting me over the edge this quickly. I narrowed my eyes at the bottle, convinced there was something wrong.

  There was. The bottle was half gone.

  “I guess that’s more’n three sips,” I said, and started giggling. “There you go, Lucille, I’m acting beneath your station again.”

  I sat up and swayed a bit, lifting the bottle to the window in a toast. “Here’s to the common folk.”

  I took another swig, downing a third of what was left.

  “That’s me,” I whispered to the bottle. “Common. Nothing special about old Frank Blackthorne. Wasn’t even the greatest thief.” My hand tightened on the bottle and I watched my hand—the princess’s hand—tremble as the knuckles whitened.