Dragon Thief

  “Daughter, please—”

  “I don’t breathe fire anymore, but that does not mean I’m the same damsel in distress you pimped out in payment for her own rescue. I will not hold my tongue. Especially since you are to blame for this mess as much as Frank is.”

  “W-What?”

  “What?”

  “As much as I am.” She let the king go and reached down to pick up the treaty. “You think Frank wanted this? You think he risked his life coming back here because this was his intent? All he did was leave, and he left because we treated him the way you used to treat me. The way you just treated me. The blood and death and destruction? That’s the fault of one bastard aristocrat who thinks his privileged blood justifies anything. If Frank is culpable for Prince Bartholomew’s actions, so are we for driving Frank away in the first place.”

  “Lucille—”

  She spun around and leveled a finger at me. “You hold your tongue!”

  I shut up.

  She faced her father and slapped him in the chest with the crumpled treaty. “Now, if you want our kingdom to go down in flames tear up the treaty, banish Frank. You know as well as I that it will be your last official act.”

  King Alfred reached up and took the parchment.

  “If you want to be a king,” Lucille said, “forgive him.”

  He watched as Lucille stepped away from between us. “You’ve changed,” he said.

  “No,” Lucille said, “I just haven’t changed back.”

  King Alfred sighed at the parchment. “My daughter, much as it pains me to admit it, has a point.”

  • • •

  When the combined forces of eight kingdoms marched across the frontier into Grünwald, I had a bird’s-eye view of the destruction that one bastard aristocrat had left in his wake. It was enough to make me forget how heights made me sick to my stomach.

  Seeing the damage, it was hard to imagine that he thought of Grünwald as his kingdom in the same way that Alfred or Lucille thought of Lendowyn.

  We reached the capital of Brightwood, and it was that much worse. A third of the city was in ruins. I flew over rubble and pillars of smoke as my stomach tied itself in a knot. The sick feeling was less for the ground whipping by so far below, and more for the fact that I was looking at the efforts of one man who thought himself entitled to the Grünwald crown.

  Someone, in Lucille’s words, “whose privileged blood justifies anything.” I felt a surge of shame for having once placed Lucille in the same category.

  Snake was in a class by himself.

  Then, below me, I saw the shell that used to be a tavern named The Three-Legged Boar.

  I didn’t know if Evelyn had ever returned from our aborted tryst in Dermonica, and in some part of my mind I did know that it was unlikely that the serving staff would remain in a tavern as a hostile army descended on the city.

  But that thought didn’t prevent me from screeching a sky-splitting roar and falling on Snake’s army in a brimstone-spewing fury. I introduced the allied army’s attack by tearing a smoking trench through the forces massed at the castle walls. As I swooped by, a pair of burning siege towers collapsed in an eruption of smoke, flame, and glowing embers.

  Before Snake’s army could reorient itself to concentrate return fire on me, the allied army broke upon their flanks. As the men laying siege were trapped between Dermonica and its allies, and the castle walls, I flew down their line and rained hell down on them.

  For a time, I think I went a little crazy. It wasn’t the troops I attacked, it was Snake. Below me, every enemy solider was Prince Bartholomew by proxy. Every one of them carried the responsibility for Snake’s evil and bore the weight in dragon fire.

  Blind fury and dragons are two things that really shouldn’t be mixed together.

  In retrospect, despite my less-than-tactical thought process at the time, I managed—by contrast with the debacle at Lendowyn Castle—to prove that a dragon was much more effective militarily when supporting a large attacking ground force.

  Fortunately for my state of mind, the dragon’s body was still recovering from the last two battles, and my ability to breathe fire was exhausted after a few passes over the enemy. Once the ability to literally vent my anger had dissipated, I had a chance to come halfway back to my senses.

  I wasn’t attacking Snake. I knew better than that. The bastard prince was here somewhere, directing the action against King Dudley, but probably not from the smoldering forces below me. I swooped up to get a good view of the surrounding area.

  The southern side of the castle was a mess. Dermonica’s allies were wrapping a crescent-shaped front against Snake’s forces, pinning more than half the defenders between their swords and the castle walls. Smoke still rose from the trenches I had burned through their ranks.

  I told myself that the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was the height again.

  This felt wrong. Snake had planned this attack for years, and it amounted to throwing a large army at the castle walls and hoping for the best? That seemed very conventional for someone who managed a coup in a neighboring country on the spur of the moment.

  Ever since I traded places with him, I’ve been looking at the wrong thing, making the wrong assumptions.

  So look away from the battle.

  I banked away from the south side of the castle to orbit above, looking at the ground to see anything we were missing. Anything I was missing.

  I’m supposed to be like Snake, I thought. The jewel and the wizard said so. If that was the case, however much I might loathe the idea, I should be able to think like him.

  So if I had years to plan this, with a thief’s tactics, no scruples, and unlimited funds, how would I pull this off?

  I’d want to breach the wall before Dudley knew there was a war.

  I’d be inside already.

  Oh crap . . .

  With my view up on high, I was able to find what I looked for in just a few moments. To the north, one small section of town had been thoroughly devastated, covering just a block or two that happened to be completely removed from all the other damage. Snake’s army had come from the south to lay siege to the castle, so there was no reason for any fighting past the castle. But there were the smoking ruins, still crawling with Snake’s men, nearly half a mile north of the main battle.

  And in the center of the misplaced rubble, a blacksmith’s shop stood, completely undamaged.

  As I swooped by, I also saw a column of Snake’s army, in full retreat from the collapsing siege. They marched double-time into the occupied area around the blacksmith’s shop, and, as I watched, they disappeared into it.

  Forty or fifty men vanished into the shop, and none came out.

  Time, funds, a thief’s sensibilities, and no scruples . . .

  The first three and a few guys with shovels gave you a route into the castle. The last gives you an army of paid cannon fodder to soak up enemy damage just to distract the defenders.

  “No! This isn’t going to happen!” That got everyone’s attention. Arrows started flying in my direction, but I was too high up. The few arrows that hit me had lost so much momentum that they bounced off of my scales.

  I still had no fire, so I swooped down to the edge of the field of wreckage they occupied, grabbing a large chunk of still-intact stone wall. It started crumbling in my arms almost immediately, but I held on until I was a few hundred feet above the blacksmith’s shop. Then I let it go.

  It crashed through the roof in a cloud of stone-dust and mortar. The floor caved in so that when the dust cleared below me, I saw a deep crater ringed by splintered wood and four sagging walls.

  Everyone below me now knew their secret was out, and an implausible number of arrows and quarrels sprouted from the ground toward me. Several found their mark as I kept flying upward, out of range.

  I’m not goin
g to manage that again.

  Fortunately, I wasn’t in this alone.

  I sucked in a breath and bellowed toward the castle. “The siege is a fraud! They’ve already tunneled inside! The entrance is here!” I bellowed it again, out over the battlefield, yelling my long throat raw.

  My voice carried.

  Only a few minutes of calling attention to myself—something the dragon was good at—and I saw a cluster of the allied forces break from the east flank of the battle to head north, toward me.

  The thing about mercenary armies is that their loyalty can be bought, but only to a point. Once it becomes unclear if their employer will survive to pay them, they become a bit more independent. They start considering things like the strength of the opposing force, the dragon flying above them, and the fact that a good part of their number was about to be trapped in a confined space underground, caught between two armies.

  Below me, Snake’s men scattered.

  I flew south, over the allied forces and over the castle walls. I continued yelling down, “Dudley! Your brother’s already tunneled inside! Forget the siege, send your forces down and you can trap him now! Do you hear me? Bartholomew’s inside your walls!”

  I yelled down as the Dermonica forces overran the remains of the tunnel entrance, until my voice went the way of my fire. But it proved the most effective military use of a dragon’s ability I had seen to date. The siege collapsed below me as I swooped above the castle, smiling inside at the end of the largest part of the fighting.

  I got you, you bastard.

  Then the thought gripped me.

  Snake would be the last person to bravely go down with his troops. He’d probably look for an escape the moment he saw how bad things were going. And there was at least one escape route I knew of that Dudley didn’t.

  He could be slipping away right now . . .

  “No, you’re not escaping this.” My voice was hoarse, dry and barely comprehensible. But even as I said it, I remembered something, and I think my lizard face managed a grin. “This ends. Now!”

  I swooped down toward the western edges of Brightwood that had so far escaped the battle.

  CHAPTER 35

  For all I knew, there were dozens of secret passages out of Grünwald Castle. However, I had only seen one of them in a prophetic vision.

  I had assumed that I had seen the Dragon Snake putting an end to me. It hadn’t quite registered that I was making some unwarranted assumptions about who was wearing the dragon’s body, and who was wearing Snake’s.

  I swooped down onto the ruins of Lysea’s garden burning with rage and filled with an unnatural certainty. As my shadow flew across the nearly unbroken snow between the broken monuments, I saw a lone figure trudging away from the woods where Sir Forsythe had led us out of the catacombs. Snake was tiny, easily missed if not for the contrast between his sewage-encrusted clothes and the pristine snow.

  He didn’t realize he was in trouble until my shadow caught up with him. He looked back up over his shoulder and I think he might have screamed. I screamed back; a draconic roar bearing enough fury that, had I not exhausted my fire during the battle, would have left the legendary Snake little more than a sooty stain between the mausoleums.

  The great Snake blubbered and dashed in a frantic, stumbling run toward Lysea’s temple. I finally saw the family resemblance between him and Dudley.

  As panicked as he was, no man on foot is going to outrun a dragon, even a clumsy, wounded one.

  I fell on him just like the dragon in my vision. Almost. My vision had been slightly less clumsy. The real me stumbled a bit on landing and added a bit to the cemetery ruins after a couple of lumbering steps reaching for Snake.

  Once in my taloned fist, he seemed remarkably tiny, even given my increase in size.

  “P-Please! Mercy! Spare me.”

  “Why?” I grumbled low in my throat. The sulfur-flavored word stung my throat as smoke curled from my nostrils.

  I felt something warm and wet spreading in my hand and I grimaced in disgust. Is this creature really the almighty Snake Bartholomew? The man who almost stole two kingdoms? I’d never been any great thief, and I had still managed not to wet myself the first time a dragon had grabbed me.

  “I can pay you, riches beyond your imagining.”

  “I can imagine quite a lot,” I grumbled low. “And your loot is safely in the Lendowyn treasury now, remember?”

  “I have more . . .”

  I shook my head slowly.

  “And I’m a prince. Help me regain the Grünwald crown and . . .”

  “You think I care about that? You think you have anything to offer me? You think there is anything that can compensate for what you’ve done?” I raised him up to my face, hesitating only because I couldn’t decide what was more appropriate: belching what remained of my fire into his face, biting his head off his body, or just squeezing him like an overripe grape.

  From somewhere below us, I heard a slow clapping.

  I glanced down and suffered from a sense of vertigo. Not from height this time, but from looking down at a ground that wasn’t where the ground should be. The red-tinted mist floated around us, carrying the distant wails of a legion of agonized children.

  Snake started blubbering again, “No. Not this. Anything but this.”

  “Oh shut up.”

  Below me, the Dark Lord Nâtlac walked into view, still clapping. “Impressive, Frank.”

  Even in my new form, the Dark Lord’s presence still felt incredibly unnerving, like maggots burrowing under my scales, or a thousand tiny Dracheslayers poking into my brain.

  “Why are you here?”

  I felt Snake vainly trying to kick his way free of my grasp. He screeched, “Lord Nâtlac, save me!”

  I briefly wondered why I was still a dragon in the Dark Lord’s realm. Then Lord Nâtlac spoke and his gimlet words bore into my ears.

  “There is something Prince Bartholomew can grant you. Some compensation for the troubles he has caused you.”

  “What?”

  Snake just shook his head and wept.

  “You gave me the queen. Give me the prince.”

  “No,” sobbed Snake.

  I shook him and said, “Shut up.”

  “Sacrifice that wretch in my name, and all that is his can be yours.”

  “He has nothing anymore.” Not even any self-respect.

  “Nothing?” asked the Dark Lord. Watching him smile was akin to watching an open wound give birth to a million spiders. “He has one thing you do not. Something you desperately want.”

  “What would that be?”

  “You know what it is, Frank. It is quivering in your palm.”

  “I just have . . .”

  Oh.

  “You see now, don’t you?”

  “I had his body. With his history it is more trouble than it’s worth.”

  For the first time ever, I saw the Dark Lord Nâtlac nonplussed. It lasted a fraction of a second before the spider smile returned full force. “I have many followers, Frank, many bodies. That confused oaf of a knight of yours is considered handsome, isn’t he?”

  Sir Forsythe? I shuddered internally.

  “Give me this wretch, on this ground, and you can name your price.”

  Even under assault by the gangrenous itch of the Dark Lord’s presence, I instinctively realized something. The Dark Lord Nâtlac was not negotiating from a position of power.

  What does he want?

  “Why do you hesitate, Frank? You know that he would gladly give you to me.”

  I looked at Snake, blubbering incoherently in my scaled fist. “I am sure it is something he would do.”

  “You know he deserves it.”

  “I am certain he does.”

  “What do you want, Frank? Name it.”

  ??
?I’m wondering what you want.”

  “Only his soul.”

  I laughed. It hurt, as if the air stabbed barbed fishhooks into the base of my teeth, but I couldn’t help myself. Even Snake had stopped blubbering enough to stare at me as if I’d gone insane.

  “What do you find amusing?” The slight displeasure in the Dark Lord’s voice was enough to melt iron, but the dragon’s bowels were made of sterner stuff.

  “I’m sure you have his soul already. He’s part of the Grünwald royal family. That’s almost a given. No, you want his blood spilled here, in your name, by a nominal high priestess.”

  “Meh, you’re speaking in technicalities.”

  Did the Dark Lord Nâtlac just say “Meh?”

  “You live by technicalities.”

  “That is all beside the point. Give me what I want and I can give you what you want.”

  “But ‘here,’ on ‘this ground’ you said. We haven’t left Lysea’s garden, have we? That’s why I’m still a dragon.”

  “Again, beside the point.”

  “This is still her garden, isn’t it? All it took was one offering and she took it back, and that galls you.”

  “Enough of this!” The Dark Lord Nâtlac tore free of his nominal human guise and suddenly loomed over me, the way I loomed over Snake. Everything about the Dark Lord’s appearance was wrong in ways that it is impossible for me to articulate. It glared down at us with a face swirling with eyes, teeth, and waving insectile things. “What do you want?” the Dark Lord demanded.

  I couldn’t look at it. I averted my gaze and said, “Your jewel thought me and Snake were alike.”

  “Kindred spirits, meant to be thieves and kings,” the Dark Lord said, half spoken, and half carved inside my skull with a rusty nail.

  “And he would sacrifice me to you.”

  “You know he would.”

  “So what do I want?”

  “Yes.” The word was filled with loathsome desire, like the lust of a bloated corpse.