There was also a second flaw in my plan.
Dermonica troops now filled the courtyard, and the prisoners and about a dozen Grünwald mercenaries were pinned down at the base of the keep, cut off from any way inside.
I watched Snake fly down to carve flaming swaths through the enemy in the courtyard, but while Dermonica seemed to have an endless supply of fresh reserves, we had only the one dragon. I saw the flame was weaker now, and as Snake flew low enough to do damage, a wall of arrows flew up toward him, fired from the walls to either side of me.
I saw one draconic eye turn in my direction, glaring. He coughed out a ball of flame to slam into the archers on top of one wall. As he pulled upward I heard a vile curse on the air, followed by one word.
“Enough!”
The dragon flew up and perched unsteadily on top of one of the highest towers in the keep. He was obviously near exhaustion, sides glistening with the blood from dozens of wounds and pulsing with his labored breathing. The dragon lifted one bloody clawed hand, and I saw something glitter in its grasp.
“Oh no, you’re not—”
He was.
“Crap!” I bellowed as my brain slammed into a point dizzyingly high above the courtyard. My vision blurred and the colors went all wrong. My mouth—my huge, huge mouth—filled with the taste of blood and sulfur. Every part of me was too big and too far away, and my head swayed in an impossible way above my body as my stomach began to rebel at my precarious location and my head throbbed with the multiple hammer blows of having my consciousness ripped from my body again.
I blinked with one eyelid too many and my vision cleared enough to see a tiny version of Snake lying on top of a soot-scarred castle wall, still far from any enemy troops. As I watched, he got unsteadily to his feet and started a wobbly run toward the outer parapets.
“No, you bastard!” I yelled as he climbed over the outside wall. The pain from speech caused my vision to blur. Disoriented, I reached out with a long muscular forearm to swipe at him with a taloned hand. My arms might have been way too long, but they weren’t that long. I leaned forward too far and I felt the huge mass of wings and tail fly out unconsciously to pull against my back to keep me from toppling forward with the swipe.
It surprised me and I made the mistake of looking behind me. My head whipped around on its impossible neck until I was staring straight down at my own scaled backside, massive tail, and a hundred feet of nothing between me and the top of the castle. The vertigo hit me full force, and everything around me began toppling. I grabbed the tiny bauble that hung around my neck and tried to grip my perch even tighter with my feet, tearing away chunks of the tower in my panic.
I spread my wings as the tower gave way with my balance, but the castle decided to wrap me in a cloud of rubble and the realization that a single dragon is not the be- or end-all of military supremacy.
I managed to cling to my consciousness and the tiny bauble in my hand as the castle came up and hit me. After a stunned moment, I began clawing my way out of the wreckage. I was strong, almost intoxicatingly so, but every stone I threw away ignited fiery pains all along my body. The pain didn’t go away. It got worse. As the throbbing mess inside my skull faded from my awareness, it only made way so I could feel the physical injuries full force.
I pushed the last of the rubble aside with a trembling taloned hand and stared at the smears of blood I left across the surface. In the distance I heard voices calling out, “Dragon! Get the dragon!”
Something finally connected in the front part of my mind.
I’m the dragon now.
Flying must be an instinctual aspect of dragonkind, because as that particular thought struck me I was already rocketing upward, shedding blood, ashes, and small parts of castle. I clutched my fist tighter around the Tear of Nâtlac, my thoughts tumbling in a worse chaos than the clouds around me.
Dragon.
Snake’s back in his body . . .
They think I’m still him . . .
Hurts.
My stomach suddenly realized where I was and rebelled. I looked down across my massive body and couldn’t see ground. Through my pain-blurred vision I couldn’t even tell up from down. I screwed my eyes shut to try and calm the welling sickness inside me.
That must have been when I passed out.
• • •
For a moment I woke enough to realize I had landed, painfully, somewhere in the woods. I had just enough energy to unclench my taloned hand to see I still clutched the tiny evil jewel. Then I groaned and passed out again.
• • •
I slowly became aware of myself and my surroundings some time later. I didn’t even have the small blessing of a moment or two to forget what had happened to me. Unlike my first few weeks as the princess, the sensations from this body were too radically different to allow me that small comfort. As soon as I was aware enough to realize I was conscious, I knew something horrible had happened to my body.
Lucille had been okay with this?
I blinked a bloody haze from my lizard eyes and saw a small clearing scattered with the broken remnants of small trees. Actually, the clearing was ringed by small trees. The forest was filled with small trees.
Not small trees.
I sighed, and white brimstone-flavored steam curled from my nostrils. I stared at it, then down at my nose. I didn’t have to move anything but my eyes, and I could see the black-scaled ridges that formed the upper half of the dragon’s snout dominating the lower part of my field of vision.
I had to admit the central flaw in my original plan. I had no idea what to do after convincing Snake to abdicate his coup of Lendowyn by returning to his own body. I certainly hadn’t planned for it to happen so . . . inconveniently.
Even when I win, I lose . . .
It was tempting to just use the jewel still clutched in my hand to run away from my problems again. It would serve Snake right to come back to a half-broken dragon. Fortunately, I wasn’t drunk, so it only occurred in passing as I mentally itemized all the parts of me that hurt, a list that included parts of me where I’d never had parts before.
One pain proved hard to locate. Somehow I felt a burning sensation that seemed to float outside my body. As it came closer, and became more intense, I turned my head in the direction it seemed to come from.
“Oh you’re kidding me,” I groaned.
About a hundred yards away, jumping over downed trees, I saw Grace leading the rest of the girls. They had managed to arm themselves again and, most importantly, Mary carried the unmistakable glowing red-runed blade, Dracheslayer.
I held up a bloody taloned hand and said, “Hold up there!”
They pulled up to a halt outside my reach, and the others formed a tight group behind Mary and the dragon-slaying sword. Except for Grace, who took a few steps in front. “You know what that blade is?”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“There’s a price on your head, Snake,” Grace said. “So I see two options. We take that head, or you start telling us where the rest of your treasure is.”
I lowered my forearm. It hurt to hold it up for too long anyway. I sighed and dropped my head to the ground.
The universe really loves me.
“Two problems with that ultimatum, Grace.”
“I know you must have left something in reserve. You couldn’t be sure this would have worked.”
“First, you’re actually assuming that a complete rat like Snake Bartholomew would honestly tell you where he hid something? It’s not like you can take several tons of lizard prisoner and have him lead you there.”
“Head then.”
“Second, you’re assuming that Snake hasn’t moved on with his plans.”
“What?”
“I’m Frank, Grace. How do you think I know your name?”
“No. He ran off. Left us
. . .”
“Flew off.” I pulled my other hand out from under my body and unclenched it. The Tear of Nâtlac glittered in my palm. “He always planned to take his body back. That’s why his soldiers wouldn’t kill me, and why he flew down to defend me when I charged the wall.”
“You’re trying to trick us,” Grace said.
“Look at me. I’m half-dead here. He abandoned this body after it took too much damage to be useful. Snake is probably headed right for his army on the Grünwald border, that’s what he cares about. Not the dragon, not Dermonica, not the chaos he left at Lendowyn Castle.”
“Damn it!” Grace snapped.
Mary sighed and lowered Dracheslayer and stabbed it point-first into the ground. “Great, so we went back after this thing for nothing?”
CHAPTER 32
It hadn’t been a bad plan as such things went. I had been out of it for most of the day. In the meantime, the Dermonica troops had spent a large amount of time and effort securing the castle and the surrounding town, enough time and effort to give Grace and company the time to slip into the keep and find the armory. They had known of Dracheslayer because they had overheard Lucille lamenting the fact that she hadn’t retrieved it and inserted it into a select part of the dragon’s anatomy back when she had the chance.
After slipping away from the castle, Grace’s plan had been something along the lines of, get information, slay dragon, be hero, and escape to retrieve gold and riches at leisure.
I almost felt guilty for screwing that up.
But we all had something else to worry about. In my unconscious flight, I had flown in the wrong direction. I had landed somewhere between the castle and the Fell River, putting the mass of the Dermonica army between us, Snake, and Grünwald.
And the mass of that army, once the castle was secure, would be moving in the direction of the nominal reason for their invasion . . .
Me.
Dragon or not, I was in no shape to face an army.
“You need to fly out of here,” Krys said. “They can’t be more than an hour or two behind us.”
I stretched, causing the girls to backpedal from a wall of black-scaled muscle. The movement fired off dozens of flares of pain across the whole of my body. When I tried to spread my wings, a spasm ran fifty feet down the length of my spine and back, slamming the back of my skull with white-hot pain that elicited a groan that set off a small bonfire in front of me.
The girls, remarkably tiny, had managed to put a hundred feet between me and them. They all stared at me and the fire.
“Sorry.” I shook my head. “I don’t know if I’m in condition to fly.”
“So what?” Grace said. “You give up? We leave you for them?”
Mary leaned against Dracheslayer. “I don’t think they’ll give you time to explain who you are.”
“We could go back,” Laya said.
“We’ll explain what happened,” Thea said, excitedly. “We could fix everything!”
“No one’s going to listen to us,” Grace said. “A bunch of girls playing dress-up? They’re going to take us seriously?”
“Grace?” Thea said.
“Grow up!” Grace snapped.
“This isn’t her fault,” Mary said.
“You don’t need to tell me whose fault it is,” Grace said. “I know!”
“She wasn’t saying—” Krys began to say.
“Shut up! I know what she was saying!”
“P-Please,” Thea said. “Don’t be angry.”
“Why not?” Grace shouted at her. “Why shouldn’t I be angry! Do you have any idea how bad things are? How they’re getting worse?”
Thea cowered from Grace’s outburst, shaking her head. “P-Please stop.”
“What? You think a whole army’s going to stop when they catch up with us? You think some tears are going to make anything bett—”
Grace’s tirade was cut short by a sharp slap. She turned to face Rabbit, who stood next to her now, glaring bloody murder. Grace rubbed the side of her face and said, “Rabbit?”
Rabbit hauled back and hit her with an open hand slap on the other side of her face. The sound echoed through woods that were suddenly silent. Grace took a shaky step back, staring at the mute girl in open-mouthed shock. “But . . .”
Rabbit turned away from her and started walking away.
Grace seemed to deflate, to look her age. “I’m sorry.”
Rabbit stopped walking away.
“I keep trying. But it just . . .” She shook her head.
“Don’t let that stop you.”
She looked up at me, startled, as if she had forgotten I was there.
“What?”
“Failure. It happens. It keeps happening. But if you let it stop you, it’s all you’re left with.”
“So do you have a suggestion on what to do now? You can’t move.”
“No. What I said was I couldn’t fly.”
• • •
Our best option was to continue to draw the Dermonica forces away from the castle. That meant a straight line toward the Dermonica border. And while I was too injured to fly, I could still move at a respectable pace overland.
However, there was only one way to do that without leaving the girls behind.
I think I was the one most hesitant about the girls climbing on my back. Given the size differential now, they all seemed too fragile to me. Feeling them climb up and perch themselves between my wings made me almost afraid to move, as if the lightest breeze might carry them away.
“What you waiting for?” I heard Mary’s voice and turned my neck in what felt like impossible ways to look down at my own back. All six of them had taken hold of part of a wing.
“Hang on,” I said.
They hung on.
I don’t know how fast I moved, but I think I may have outpaced a good horse for a few stretches. I was frightened when I heard someone screaming, but when I turned my head to check on them, Rabbit, of all people, had risen to her knees, hooking one hand under the base of my wing and waving the other above her head, making a guttural sound, looking like a war goddess riding into battle.
“Really?” I said.
She gave me a sheepish smile and crouched back down with the others. We came up to the Fell River as the last of daylight faded. I could hear the rushing water as we closed on it. Before we came in sight of it, I felt tugging at the base of my wing. I slowed to a stop and turned my head to see Rabbit on her knees again. This time, however, she wasn’t playing. She faced the evening sky, wrinkling her nose with an expression I’d seen too many times before.
I took a deep breath and I smelled it too. Wood fire.
“Get down.” I didn’t quite manage a whisper.
“What?” Grace said.
“Something’s ahead of us.”
They all scrambled off my back and I gestured for them to get back. I may have done it more aggressively than I intended, because they fell over each other backing away from me.
Once they were a safe distance away, I grabbed the trunk of the tallest, straightest tree in reach and pulled myself up on my hind legs. It ignited pains over the length of my body, but I managed to stand, breaking branches aside, shedding an avalanche of snow. I grabbed the tree with my other hand and pulled myself up. The tree groaned with my weight as my feet left the ground to dig their talons into the base of the trunk.
I only had to climb up a short distance—relative to my own size—before I could extend my head above the tree canopy to see the surrounding terrain. I craned my neck as the tree creaked and swayed with my weight. I tried to spread my wings to stabilize things, but they only caught the wind and made things worse. I heard something snap inside the trunk and immediately folded them back as tightly as I could manage.
The good news was there wasn’t another burned–out to
wn awaiting us.
The bad news was I had made an error in assuming we had left the bulk of the Dermonica army behind us.
From my vantage above the trees, I saw across the Fell River to an encampment of troops maybe five times the force that had taken Lendowyn Castle. I saw tents, horses, and a large pavilion flying a recognizable royal banner.
Then the tree shuddered with another snap and I suddenly tilted away from the river as my head fell below the trees.
“Watch out!” I called down as the tree and I crashed back through the forest canopy. I fell on my back with a thud that shook the snow from every tree around me. I groaned as the remains of the splintered tree rolled off of me to crunch against another tree that echoed my groan.
The girls ran up to me, Krys yelling, “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” I stared up at the sky through the large hole my descent had torn in the canopy. “That was not stealthy.”
“What?” someone said. Probably Grace.
I groaned again as I struggled to right myself. “This dragon thing,” I said. “It doesn’t play to my strengths.”
“What did you see?”
“We have a problem. And we better move downstream before we have more of one.”
• • •
Amazingly, my draconic pratfall did not draw a battalion of Dermonica soldiers to finish us off. I suppose that being a mile upstream and having the river between us made it less obvious. That, and anyone looking for a dragon would probably be looking up.
“You sure that it’s the duke?” Grace asked once we’d stopped again.
“I know the banners. They wouldn’t be flying over another commander.”
“Don’t that make that pavilion a target?” Mary asked.
I snorted. “It is a wonderful thing to be able to suspend the rules of logic and strategy by decree and divine right. Staying on the Dermonica side is probably the only concession the duke’s made to his generals.”