Dragon Thief

  I started to think of demands. I had negotiated with the elf-king himself, I was certain I could leverage this momentary advantage into an overall solution. Even if Snake just took the dragon and flew off to bother Grünwald without any soul-shifting—there were worse fates than consoling a permanently human Lucille. There would be legal ramifications but—

  The dragon was laughing at me again.

  “Don’t try anything!”

  The dragon shook its head and said, “Look down to the courtyard.”

  “Why?”

  “Humility.”

  I glanced over the edge of the parapet beside me, down to the courtyard in front of the keep. I saw a mass of armed men wearing black Grünwald armor. It was obvious even though they wore tabards with the Lendowyn colors, as the spikes and embossed skulls were something of a giveaway.

  Unfortunately, they weren’t the only ones down there.

  A group of ragged and bloody men had been herded into a small area surrounded by Grünwald troops three deep. I recognized them as part of Weasel’s army. There were maybe a dozen of them. I wanted to believe that meant the majority of them had made their escape, but Weasel stared upward with an expression that told me that optimism was a sucker’s game.

  “Did you really think I’d allow a group of petty thieves to take away the work of years?”

  “To be honest, that wasn’t my idea.”

  “Of course, you used them to distract me. Slightly more competent of you, but just as futile. Return that bauble, Frank.”

  “Why should I give up my one bargaining chip?”

  “You should look down there again.”

  I did.

  Oh crap.

  Lucille and King Alfred were both imprisoned with the thieves and outlaws. Normally I’d be all for cutting the royalty down a peg, but nothing about this was normal.

  “Tell me that there isn’t someone down there you would prefer to continue living?”

  I shook my head. “You’re bluffing. You can’t kill her.”

  “I don’t bluff, Frank.” He called down to the courtyard, “Captain, kill someone trivial.”

  One of the larger Grünwald goons pulled someone out of the crowd of prisoners. “Wait, don’t—” The sword came out and down before those two words were out of my mouth. I didn’t know the man who crumpled at the Grünwald captain’s feet, but I now saw at least three of my girls in with the prisoners.

  No this is going so wrong—

  The dragon turned its head toward me. “Only one person down there matters to me.”

  “Stop this—”

  “Captain!”

  “Stop!” I kicked the jewel away, between us.

  A set of talons the size of my forearm came to slam point-down on the flagstones between me and the jewel. “Now,” the dragon said, “you’re showing some good sense.”

  He dragged the jewel back toward him, slowly, talons screeching on the flagstones. “While we wait for the guard to come up here, maybe you could enlighten me on how you were planning to make me wear this token before I was ready?”

  I shrugged. “I like to improvise.”

  CHAPTER 30

  There wasn’t anything I could do with everyone held hostage by Snake’s men. At least nothing that came to mind before a pair of Grünwald-armored thugs came to escort me down to the rest of the prisoners.

  Like the bridge at Fell Green, my escape was blocked off not by physical restraints, but by the potential consequences of my attempt. Snake had too many hostages and I couldn’t endanger them like that. Especially since I was already feeling the guilt over the three girls I hadn’t seen with the prisoners. I couldn’t help but blame myself for the whole catastrophic sequence of events.

  Another unwanted similarity between me and Snake: the death and destruction we left in our wakes.

  I suppose the smart thing to do at this point was to let Snake follow through on his plan and trust his word that he didn’t care about Lendowyn and would return the reins of the kingdom once he attained his own throne.

  For some strange reason, I didn’t find his promise reassuring. I had never known an aristocrat to willingly relinquish power once acquired. Aside from that, there was the question of how much of Lendowyn would actually remain once Snake had successfully stomped King Dudley’s army.

  At this point, Fate would have had to go through some severe contortions to make things worse.

  Fate was up to the challenge.

  • • •

  A pair of Grünwald thugs marched me down through the castle, down toward the courtyard and the prisoners. I guessed from the fresh armor that these guys were new men, brought in via Snake’s attempt to beef up the anemic Lendowyn army. The men who had followed me, in my role as the new Dark Queen, tended to have more worn and battle-scarred armor.

  Not that they were any more battle-hardened than these guys, but new armor costs money. I also strongly suspected that most of those men had followed Sir Forsythe in the doomed mission to Grünwald.

  It’s funny how I had managed to live my whole life up to now without truly hating anyone. Even the damn Wizard Elhared who had so screwed up the lives around him, thrusting me into the princess’s body in the first place . . . I don’t think I truly hated the man. He had pissed me off beyond all reason, caused me and Lucille no end of grief, but what I felt about him was barely a flicker compared to the bonfire of loathing I felt for Snake Bartholomew.

  If I could get my hands on Dracheslayer . . .

  Then I could what?

  Yes, there was a magic dragon-slaying sword in the armory, and I would dearly enjoy plunging the thing through Snake’s neck. But I wasn’t Sir Forsythe, and I doubted that I’d ever get close enough to land a killing blow. It might protect against dragon fire, but not from a rock dropped from a sufficient height, or from a castle full of the dragon’s allies.

  Get the sword and get it to Sir Forsythe.

  Really, that possibility—even if my momentary escape didn’t trigger a wholesale execution of hostages—had the same faults as wielding the thing myself, though he’d probably kill a lot more of the dragon’s allies before a rock got dropped on his head.

  As we moved through one of the corridors in the upper reaches of the keep, one of my escorts drew his sword and held it up in front of me, blocking his partner with the flat of the blade. “Hold up, Leo. Something’s up.”

  “What?” his companion asked.

  “Ahead. Right.”

  We both stared ahead of us to see what he was talking about. We stood in the middle of a long corridor hung with threadbare tapestries. Forward and to our right, one of the tapestries bulged from the wall at the base. The bottom, where it touched the floor, showed a spreading dark stain.

  The man with the sword walked up to the tapestry and used the point of the sword to pull it the rest of the way from the wall, revealing a corpse hastily hidden behind it. The tapestry rippled and fell down at his prodding, dropping down over the body. Almost simultaneously, the other guard released my arm. I turned to my side, as he dropped to the ground next to me.

  The man with the sword turned to face us. “We have to raise—” When he saw his comrade on the floor by my feet, the sword came up to point at my throat. “Don’t move!”

  I raised my hands in a hopefully inoffensive manner. “I didn’t—”

  “What did you—” He was interrupted by something round and shiny suddenly appearing across the bridge of his nose with a solid wet thud. His head snapped back and he dropped like a bag of wet barley through the hands of a drunk brewer.

  I spun around and saw Laya step out of the shadows behind us, a leather sling dangling from her hand.

  “You’re all right!” I said.

  “So are you,” she said, smiling a bit as she bent down to retrieve a shiny yellow object from next to
the first guard’s head. Mary and Krys ran ahead and stationed themselves at the end of the corridor, past the body and the tapestry.

  “You’re all all right!” I said, feeling a relief completely aside from the fact I was suddenly free to think of some way to fight Snake, or at least free the hostages.

  “We can take care of ourselves,” Mary said.

  “The others?” Krys asked, looking over her shoulder at me.

  “Grace, Rabbit, Thea—they’re in the courtyard with a bunch of hostages and more of Snake’s troops.”

  Laya ran up and grabbed the other shiny blob from the remains of the swordsman’s face. She shook some of his face from the object and I could see that it was a heavy gold nugget. She saw me looking and Laya sighed. “I only have three of these. It was a mess down in the treasury, I had to improvise some ammo.” She faced the tapestry. “So why’d you kill this guy and not the ones holding you?”

  “Why’d I?” I ran up to the tapestry. “I thought you had.”

  “We were coming from the other direction,” Mary said. “Hurry up. We’re exposed out here.”

  I pulled the tapestry away from the body.

  The body on the floor sported a dagger in the throat, and it was a dagger I recognized.

  Yep, it’s gotten worse.

  • • •

  Snake was right. I had been using Weasel’s thieving expedition as a distraction to take the attention off of myself as I tried to recover the Tear of Nâtlac. The girls had tried to use it as a distraction to cover their own escape.

  It was such a good idea, why wouldn’t someone else decide to appropriate it?

  What if, just for the sake of argument here, the three turncoat assassins Weasel had used to open up the way to the treasury weren’t really turncoats? What if, upon being recruited by Weasel and company, those assassins reported back to their employer exactly what he was planning? What if Prince Oliver wasn’t as obtuse as both Weasel and I had been assuming? What if, knowing what Weasel had known about the movement of Snake’s assets, Prince Oliver had come to the same conclusion Weasel had, that Snake had taken over Lendowyn in a secret coup? And what if, despite his protests to the contrary, Oliver had believed what I had told him about Snake vacating this body in favor of that of the Dragon Prince?

  What if all of this was Dermonica’s feint before the real attack?

  All of which would be a somewhat weak chain of reasoning based on the presence of one misplaced assassin’s dagger, if it wasn’t accompanied by the sudden sounds of battle outside the keep.

  • • •

  We were still high enough in the keep proper for us to find an arrow slit to look down on the outside of the castle walls.

  It was bad.

  “Prince Oliver,” I said, “why’d you have to be smarter than Prince Bartholomew?”

  “What’s going on out there?” Mary asked.

  I stepped aside and said, “Look for yourself.”

  Mary peeked out and whistled.

  “Those aren’t just assassins and mercenary thugs,” I said. “That’s the entire Dermonica army.” And what I had seen was a military force larger than anything I think Lendowyn could have managed, even with Snake’s financing.

  “How did they get here unopposed?” Mary said.

  “Between massing on the Grünwald border and preparing for a fifty-thief invasion here, I think our friend Snake left the entire Dermonica border undefended.”

  “Wait,” Krys said, “that doesn’t make sense. Prince Oliver didn’t believe you, and his father didn’t even know . . . Oh.”

  “He fed everyone a bucket of goblin crap,” Mary said.

  “We were all played for fools,” Laya said.

  “Well,” I told her, “I’m sure Snake feels worse.”

  • • •

  If I had any good sense—which I obviously didn’t, given the situation I found myself in—I would have found a way to slip outside and run for my life.

  Instead, while the mass of the Dermonica army worked to breach the outer wall, I led our way down to the courtyard. We met no other living guardsmen inside the keep. The trio of non-turncoat assassins had been keeping themselves busy eliminating most of the defenders inside the building. The only ones left to defend the wall were the men Snake had massed in the courtyard for my benefit.

  In the interests of keeping myself calm in the face of adversity, I did not attempt to calculate the ratio of attackers to defenders. After five-to-one, did it really matter?

  Down in the courtyard, the prisoners had been clustered into a group behind a single thin line of guards who faced outward at the new threat across a now nearly empty courtyard. Attackers poured over the wall, engaging the bulk of Snake’s men who had rushed up to defend against the breaches that appeared to come from all sides simultaneously.

  Lucky for everyone, I and a trio of girls sneaked out of the keep to their undefended rear instead of one of the assassins who must be still at large.

  The four of us were able to slip into the rear of the crowd of prisoners and start cutting bonds. I worked my way to the edge of the group and slit the rope binding the wrists of Sir Forsythe.

  Without warning, someone grabbed my collar and pulled me away from him. I landed on my ass at the feet of a huge Grünwald mercenary. He raised his sword, and I brandished my recovered assassin’s dagger as if it could provide an adequate defense.

  The man started a lethal swing, then halted himself, sword in mid-stroke, eyes widening. I saw him curse in frustration, right before Sir Forsythe tackled him.

  Of course, Snake wants this body intact. Everyone would have orders not to kill me.

  “What does he think he’s doing?” I heard a familiar voice yelling. I turned away from Sir Forsythe’s pounding of the unfortunate guardsman to see Princess Lucille stepping out from the mass of prisoners, rubbing her wrists. She stared up at Snake the Dragon doing lazy circles in the sky above us. The guardsmen turned, raising swords uncertainly at her. Snake had obviously given similar orders in regard to the princess as he had me.

  “Look at him up there,” Lucille said. “Why doesn’t he strafe the enemy?” She yelled up at him, “Don’t you know how to be a bloody dragon?”

  “He can’t hear you,” I said.

  She turned around and saw me. “Frank?”

  Just then, the guards around her lost their indecision. They whipped around and ran off toward a column of Dermonica troops that had broken the defensive line and were storming down one of the staircases to the courtyard.

  I remembered my vision of Lendowyn Castle being overrun.

  “I think we may be in trouble,” I said.

  CHAPTER 31

  The girls finished freeing the prisoners and we stood in the center of a slowly contracting circle of calm. There were no guards left as such, as all had run to defend against the Dermonica troops pushing down from the walls. The dragon flew above us, doing nothing.

  We moved toward the only defensible position left, the keep itself. But as we moved, a group of a half-dozen Dermonica troops broke from the surrounding melee to rush to meet us. Sir Forsythe raised his captured sword and yelled, “For Honor!” as he ran ahead to meet the attackers.

  Snake finally acted. He swooped down, flew over Sir Forsythe, and immolated the attackers less than a dozen feet from him. The flame shot out in a cone, washing over the six Dermonica attackers to splash against the base of the wall near the keep, catching a few of his own mercenaries.

  The fighting around us seemed to pause for a moment as everyone suddenly realized a dragon was part of this fight. For a few seconds all I heard was the crackle of flames and the screams of the poor bastards who hadn’t been killed instantly.

  Two things occurred to me then.

  First, Snake did not have a particularly precise weapon.

  Second, he did
n’t engage the enemy like Lucille wanted because he was preoccupied with keeping us alive. To hell with the keep, or the people defending it, he couldn’t let me or Lucille die.

  Some think courage is the absence of fear.

  Some think courage is acting in spite of fear.

  I think courage is just not having the time or inclination to fully contemplate how stupid or dangerous what you’re doing actually is.

  Sir Forsythe stumbled back from the dead Dermonica attackers missing a substantial amount of his once-grand facial hair. As he did, I stepped forward and grabbed his sword. He looked at me with wide eyes and said, “My Liege?” before breaking out in a fit of coughing.

  I don’t blame him. Burned hair smells awful.

  Sword in hand, I ran toward the thickest part of the melee. I heard Lucille and several of the girls call out to me, and I supposed from their perspective I was engaged in a stupid suicidal gesture.

  But that was beside the point.

  As I placed myself shoulder-to-shoulder with the Grünwald defenders, swinging a too-heavy sword in a particularly ineffective manner, I wasn’t expecting to add much to the sum of Lendowyn’s defenses.

  That was Snake’s job.

  I barely got three swings in before a shadow passed above us and a wall of fire fell down just behind the line of Dermonica troops we were fighting. In moments, my section of the defensive line—no thanks to my efforts—began pushing back the attackers.

  I couldn’t help grinning even as my blade hit helmets and shields with uselessly bone-jarring force. I might not be a factor in the defense of the castle, but I could damn well encourage Snake to participate to keep his own borrowed skin intact. The dragon laid waste to dozens of Dermonica attackers almost before we reached them, and we waded through charred carnage all the way to the top of the wall.

  That’s when the flaws in my plan became apparent.

  Despite the endless supply of attackers, we had run out of them. The Dermonica command wasn’t stupid. They had seen quite clearly that the dragon had focused its attacks on one section of the wall, so—quite logically—they had dropped the attack in front of me to concentrate on the unburned flanks.