Dragon Thief

  “But—” I forced out through clenched teeth.

  “But that was who I am!” I threw the bottle. And despite the princess’s lack of upper body strength it flew like a missile at the window, slamming into the stone peak above it, sending red liquid and bits of bottle back into the room as if a small goblin with glass bones and a drinking problem had decided to climb into my room and explode.

  “I want my life back!” I yelled at the remains of the wine goblin. I grabbed the neck of my dress and tore at it in frustration. “I don’t want this! I want my own life! Something! A part of it back! Anything!”

  I tore at my neckline, but, as I said, the princess didn’t have the greatest upper body strength, and while I wanted to tear through chemise, bodice, and dress in a drunken rage, I just managed to strain my arm and give myself a friction burn on my neck.

  The princess’s neck. “Got to remember, like she said, it’s her body.”

  A bad idea crossed my mind, and it stuck there. Holding my neck, angry, drunk, and self-pitying, I was ready to contemplate something I’d been avoiding since my “marriage” to Lucille. I stood up, steadier than I had a right to be, and walked toward the wardrobe that dominated one side of my room.

  “Yeah, shouldn’t even be thinking this,” I slurred to myself.

  I still opened the wardrobe. Inside, on the topmost shelf, it was still right where I had left it shortly after my wedding ceremony. I had done my best to forget it, because when I’m sober I do try to make a pretense of having good sense.

  I pulled out a small box decorated in ornate carvings that were somewhat disturbing if examined too closely. I walked back to the bed with it.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, ignoring the spots of wine and pieces of glass. I traced the edges of the box with my fingertips, telling myself that it didn’t look that bad. Not for a wedding present delivered by the Dark Lord Nâtlac himself.

  I opened the box. Inside was a dark gem cut into facets that appeared to shift position when you didn’t look directly at them, mounted in a twisted silver setting that could have represented vines, or tentacles, or veins wrapping a shrunken black heart. It was pretty in a somewhat mind-twisting way that made your eyes hurt after a while.

  I still vividly remembered how the Dark Lord had appeared, wrapped in the voices of a million tortured souls, to present it to me. According to the Dark Lord Nâtlac, this evil-looking pendant could return me to a male form, if only temporarily. I had no idea what it cost, what I would sacrifice, as the Dark Lord had made his exit before I could ask any of the obvious questions.

  In my inebriated state, it still seemed a good deal. I wanted nothing more than to stop being a princess right now.

  If you’re wondering why I hadn’t used it before now, you probably should review the part where I said that this necklace was a personal gift from the Dark Lord Nâtlac.

  If you’re wondering why I was seriously contemplating it now, I should point out that the last time I was this drunk, desperate, and sorry for myself, I was picked up by an evil wizard in a dockside tavern and agreed to rescue a princess from a dragon.

  Drunk me came up with a foolproof plan. If the necklace did anything really objectionable, I could just take it off again. Also, how bad could it be if the effects were only temporary?

  Drunk me couldn’t muster any further objections, so I put the thing around my neck.

  CHAPTER 4

  Drunk me must have realized that he’d made a serious mistake, because he ran away immediately, leaving behind an angry invisible ogre to squeeze my brain in time to my pulse. The headache, nausea, and disorientation crashed over me like a devotion to the god of all hangovers. In a lifetime of unpleasant experiences with alcohol I had never produced a hangover this quickly or this severe.

  Which isn’t to say I’d never felt like this before.

  The sudden abrupt change in every sensation I felt in my body, and the dizzying wave of disorientation that followed in their wake only increased the sense that I had been through this all before. I blinked my eyes and managed to make out a starry night sky as my blurred vision cleared. A cold night wind bit into my face.

  “Oh Cra—” I began to mutter. I was interrupted when a weasel of a man strung together by leather, muscle, and hate decided to block the swing of his truncheon with my left kidney.

  I decided that the proper response to that was to vomit up a meal I never remembered having. Weasel dodged easily to the side and I realized that I looked down on the top of his head. The vantage from on high sent my brain spinning. I would have collapsed to the ground if a pair of goons weren’t holding my upper arms in a painful grip above the vomit-stained cobblestones of a back alley somewhere. I clenched my teeth to avoid heaving again.

  Weasel spoke to me. At least I think I was the one being addressed. “Thought you’d put up more of a fight, Snake.”

  I didn’t know who this guy was, and I had no idea who Snake was. All I was aware of was the fact that his voice ground broken shards of glass into my throbbing brain.

  “How did you get this reputation? Look like just another punk in over his head, don’t you?”

  I kicked him just to get the noise to stop. I had aimed higher, but I hit him right under the kneecap. The guy gasped and twisted to the side, his other foot sliding on the slick of vomit. The goons holding me pulled me up and back away from Weasel, and the sudden motion ignited a new flare of agony inside my skull.

  I kicked out again, this time at the goon to my right. I didn’t expect much from the attack, I’d never been a brawler, even before I became a petite young girl. For me, a fight involved flailing around hoping to hit something vital.

  Pain and panic must have fueled me because my boot—I’m wearing boots?—slammed into the goon’s knee, bending it sideways with a soft crunch that I heard as well as felt through my leg. He lost his grip on me as that leg collapsed under his weight. He fell onto Weasel as the latter was trying to get back up, dropping him back onto the filthy cobbles.

  The other goon still had hold of me and swung me so my back slammed into a wall. I gasped from another wave of shuddering pain that made my vision black out for a moment. I blinked in time to see three blurry fists descending on my head like a trio of falling trees. I half ducked, half slid, down the wall away from the blows. The goon still held my arm, so I only dropped about a foot. That was enough to take my throbbing head out of the path. I felt a single fist—still attached to a blurry set of goon triplets—brush the top of my head and crunch violently into the wall behind me. All three goons roared like a bull with his testicles caught in a thresher.

  I threw the fist on my free arm toward the center goon, again to make the painful noises stop. I aimed at the face, but the goon’s height and my position crouched against the wall meant I hit him low, in the throat. That still had the desired effect, shutting all three goons up. It also loosed the grip they had on my arm.

  I pushed myself up from the wall, and stumble-ran out of the alley into an unfamiliar city.

  • • •

  I don’t know how long I dodged through back alleys, but by the time my head cleared I realized I had lost Weasel and the goons. I also realized I was no longer Princess Frank . . .

  Actually, I had known that as soon as the supernatural hangover had hit me. It had been exactly the same as the last time I had switched bodies, when I had become the princess in the first place.

  Now, with my head clear and my pursuers nowhere in sight, it was the first time I had a chance to clearly think about it. Once I did think about it, I had to stop because suddenly I realized how much taller I was. It had taken some getting used to being the princess, being short and having everything in the world seem to grow in comparison. This was more disorientating. I looked down and felt a surge of vertigo staring down from a height about a foot above where I was used to. Every step my throbbing brain told me I was
in danger of toppling over.

  I stopped and leaned against a building, closing my eyes. I unconsciously reached up between my now nonexistent breasts for the necklace.

  Nothing was there.

  I opened my eyes and confirmed that the Dark Lord’s wedding present was nowhere to be seen.

  “Crap.” My unfamiliar voice came out in a puff of fog.

  The fullish moon stared back down at me. I repeated myself.

  “Crap.”

  Of course it made sense now that I wasn’t drunk off my ass. The enchanted necklace came from the Dark Lord Nâtlac, and the demon-god bastard dealt with souls as a specialty. There was a pretty good chance that he was responsible for the spell that originally displaced me in the princess’s body in the first place. I didn’t even need to imagine any particular malice on his part—and this was a deity who was made of malice and inconvenient suffering. If Nâtlac just wanted to give me the opportunity to be male again out of whatever goodness existed in his nonexistent heart, would he give me something that would magically transform the princess’s body into a guy? Or would he give me something that just took me out of the princess and dropped me into some random victim?

  The answer to that was distressingly clear to me now that I wasn’t under the influence of two-thirds of a bottle of bad wine.

  This goes on the list of my less intelligent decisions.

  At least my demonic benefactor had made a point of telling me that the effects of the enchantment would be temporary.

  I spent a moment feeling sympathy for the prior occupant of this body. He had probably just suffered a wrenching transition back into the princess’s body back in Lendowyn. I can only imagine what the aftereffects must have felt like when experienced in a body already saturated with alcohol.

  I shuddered a bit.

  But, now that I thought about it, I probably did the guy a favor. After all, he had been on the verge of being beaten to a pulp, and now he could be sick in the privacy of the princess’s chambers, complete with featherbed. He may have gotten the good end of the deal. When things wore off and we switched back, he would be safely away from Weasel and company.

  And, now that my head was clear, it sank in.

  I was a man again.

  I patted down my clothes, feeling my new body in near disbelief. I didn’t seem any older than I had been before I’d been princessified, and if anything I felt bigger and more muscular—though that may have just been a contrast with the princess’s body. The new parts certainly felt much larger than I remembered.

  I found a belt pouch containing a small pile of coins.

  “Well, stranger, you owe me for saving you from that fight.”

  If I was right in assuming this enchantment would last only as long as my opposite number wore the necklace, then I had only a limited amount of time to enjoy this.

  I started looking for an open inn.

  • • •

  What else should I have done? I knew I had made a bad decision, but would it have become a better decision if I had ignored the main reason I’d made it?

  One of the reasons, anyway.

  Besides, if you were expecting to hear some tale of existential angst you’re listening to the wrong storyteller, and the wrong story. I had already experienced my own identity crisis when I became a princess and had to kill of a wizard while he was wearing my body. Everything pales after watching your own body die.

  Besides, while I had been a bit surprised at the particulars, Nâtlac’s charm had worked as advertised. And now that my head had cleared a bit, I was back to being angry at Lucille—and I found it amusing to think she had to deal with some other guy in her discarded body. Maybe it would make her appreciate me when I came back.

  I can be shallow like that.

  Somehow, even after the shock of finding myself as someone else in a strange town, it was easy for my thoughts to return to Lucille, and my own anger. Enough so that, when I found an inn and used someone else’s gold to pay for a room and a woman, I was thinking less about my own long chastity than I was about how lying down with an actual whore was a perfect revenge for Lucille calling Evelyn one. It wasn’t rational thinking, but if I had been thinking rationally I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  Any sane individual could tell you that such a tryst would turn out to be disappointing, and they would be correct.

  I spent the balance of the evening with a young woman who knew her profession, but throughout the act, all I could think about was how angry Lucille had made me, and how stupidly I had reacted to it. My partner was willing, my borrowed body was functional and well equipped, and we successfully accomplished things that, for the last three months, had been little more than distant memory . . .

  But I really wasn’t there.

  I began in anger, and somehow, as things progressed, the anger turned into guilt. My body ran on hormones, instinct, and muscle memory, while my brain kept thinking back to Lucille, my fading anger at her, and how, whatever I’d been feeling at the time, I’d really been kind of an ass.

  I might be shallow, but I wasn’t nearly shallow enough.

  If my partner noticed the point where my actions became joyless and mechanical, she didn’t show any sign. I suspect it was not uncommon in her line of work. Once her task was complete, she wordlessly gathered her clothes, dressed, and left me alone, lying naked on the bed.

  Once sexual frustration was no longer at the fore of my mind, it began to occur to me that I had no idea how long the “temporary” effects of Nâtlac’s artifact were going to last. I assumed that it would last until the former owner of this body removed the necklace from the princess’s neck. But what if it didn’t work like that?

  I’ve been through this before, I told myself. Just work it out logically and I’ll sort it out . . .

  Because that had worked out so well last time.

  “I’m ready for it to wear off now,” I whispered up to the timbers above me.

  I stared at the ceiling and wondered what was wrong with me. I had received in one night everything that I had felt was missing from my life over the past three months, and it just felt empty.

  I could feel the Dark Lord Nâtlac and the whole pitiless universe laughing at me. Even when events conspire to give me exactly what I want—especially when events conspire to give me what I want—it never goes wrong the way I expect it to.

  It may have been my growing familiarity with living in the princess’s body, but I no longer felt comfortable in my own skin.

  Someone else’s skin.

  I rubbed my chin and my hand recoiled at the feeling of stubble. I didn’t even know what this guy looked like. I closed my eyes, made a fist, and pushed the knuckles against my forehead.

  “I know it was a bad idea. I know.”

  Eventually I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  I had gone to sleep hanging on to two small optimistic thoughts.

  The first, at least this time my foray into a new body was much less threatening to life and limb than the time I was displaced into Princess Lucille. Second, I had a small hope that when I did wake up I would find myself back in the princess’s bed.

  Wrong on both counts.

  “Wakey, wakey,” someone whispered into my ear.

  The voice did not belong to the woman with whom I spent the night.

  My eyes shot open and I tried to spring out of bed. That didn’t work so well. As I sat up, my face collided with someone’s fist, and I fell backward, head ringing. I shook my head and realized that my hands and feet were being held down by a quartet of very large men. Two of them were familiar. So was the man going, “Tsk, tsk,” into my ear.

  “Sloppy, Snake,” Weasel said, holding a very sharp dagger up to my throat. “I’m disappointed.”

  “You’re persistent,” I said, spitting blood from a split li
p.

  The dagger withdrew and he began pacing around the bed gesturing with it so occasionally it would reflect the cold winter sun from the window into my eyes. I could feel the icy draft on my naked skin. If they had come in that window, they must have been very quick, or very quiet, or both . . .

  Or I’d slept too deeply for my own good.

  “You’ve led me on a merry chase. Much farther north than I’m comfortable with. I’ve found you very annoying.”

  “Likewise.”

  He spun around and placed the dagger against my face. “I would like nothing better than to cut you into. Tiny. Little. Pieces.”

  The contrary self-destructive part of my brain decided to ask the guy, “Why don’t you then?” I think that part of me was still trying to punish me for last night.

  He drew the blade across my cheek, and I winced as it sliced a stinging cut under my eye.

  He whispered, his breath hot and foul against my ear, “Because I love money more than I hate you.” He stood up and said, “Bag him.”

  • • •

  Unlike our prior encounter, I didn’t have either luck or surprise on my side, and with four accomplices, Weasel could just lean back against the wall, paring his nails with the dagger. I would have shouted some questions, but the first thing his goons did was shove a rag in my mouth and tie the gag in place. They did a workmanlike job of tying me hand and foot before shoving me into a musty burlap sack.

  I suspect Weasel didn’t bother with my clothes just out of spite. The burlap was bad enough against my naked skin. But add to that the fact that whatever grain had occupied the bag before me had gone to mold and made the air incredibly unpleasant to breathe. And the less said about the weevils, the better.

  They hefted the bag and carried me across the room. I felt a sharp cold draft though the weave of the burlap and had a brief moment to think, They aren’t going to throw me—

  Then they did.

  There were only two stories to the inn, but it felt as if I tumbled forever in free fall. Bound as I was, all I could do was pull myself into a ball and hope I didn’t land headfirst.