Dragon Wizard

  Maybe. Maybe not. I thought as I picked up the dangling thought I had right before Dudley’s attack.

  What do you mean, “Maybe not”?

  I think Crumley explained everything, and if I’m right, we have to do something about the elf-queen.

  The elf-queen? What does she—

  I’m going to need to talk to our half-elf guest.

  Uh . . .

  Rabbit?

  Yeah, Robin . . .

  Is there a problem?

  About him . . .

  Given the embarrassment dripping from her words, I knew that the dashing Robin Longfellow had managed to escape several paragraphs before she actually got around to stating it.

  All he did was talk! Rabbit thought at me in frustration. I watched him, and he talked. That was it! Then Krys was there, he was gone, and I had no idea what happened!

  I’m sorry. I felt for her.

  Krys thinks I fell asleep.

  Did you?

  No! her mental voice snapped. Then, after a moment she added, meekly, I don’t know.

  You don’t know?

  One moment I was looking at him, the next Krys was shaking my shoulders. I still stood where I remembered, but he was gone.

  I don’t think it was your fault.

  I didn’t.

  Robin had been a suspicious character since the moment we had picked him up. He’d been much too sanguine about being captured and restrained, as if he had wanted to come to Fell Green with us. The bastard—again literal, I thought idly—was admittedly at least half elvish. That meant he probably had twice as many tricks up his sleeve as a human con artist.

  Blame Rabbit or not, the missing Robin pissed me off. The captive elf had been our best guide into the realm under the hill, and I had questions about the Summer Queen and what she might want with her late prince’s scroll.

  Worse, if my thoughts about the late Elhared the Unwise were close to accurate, we would need to pay the elves a visit.

  • • •

  “So what do we do now?” Krys asked when we returned to our rooms at The Talking Eye. Lucille spared a glare at the empty chair where Robin Longfellow had been tied. Then she took the metal flask that held our gift from Lothan from the belt pouch where I had placed it.

  Inscribed in the metal were the words, “Consume while naked, standing at a crossroads, under the light of the moon.”

  It was early evening, edging toward suppertime. At least a few hours before moonlight entered the picture. I wondered if Lucille intended to strip here in town. Fell Green probably had a higher tolerance for oddity than most places, but a naked princess would probably still draw some unwanted attention.

  That made me think of Dudley and his entourage.

  I chuckled.

  Lucille chuckled.

  We froze for a moment, and I realized that she had not been thinking of anything remotely funny. To her, the small laugh came out of nowhere. I felt her hand tighten its grip on the flask. I reached up with her other hand and touched it gently in what I hoped was a reassuring gesture. She flinched a little in surprise, but didn’t pull her hand away.

  I felt her bite our lip and watched as her vision of the flask blurred. “I hope this works,” she whispered.

  Me too.

  She nodded as if she heard me.

  “Your Highness?” Krys asked, a note of concern in her voice.

  Lucille closed her eyes and said, “Get a fire going in the stove.”

  “A fire?” I heard the incredulity in her voice. I understood. It was summer, and it was anything but cold.

  “A small one.” Lucille elaborated.

  “Oh . . .” I heard the realization in her voice.

  Lucille nodded. “Brew up some tea from Crumley’s herbs. You’ll have to pass Frank’s words on to me.” She looked at the pendant. “We don’t have much time.”

  • • •

  Evening light streamed into our room in The Talking Eye as we formed our war council. The shaman’s flower tea was powerful enough that Krys and Rabbit only had to sip from a shared cup. From the smell, I think the essence of the slimy fungus nature of Brock’s tea must have come from other ingredients; possibly actual slime and fungus.

  We sat on the chair that had held our one-time prisoner and Krys and Rabbit shared space on the bed. Krys spoke for everyone when she asked, “What do we do now?”

  Lucille hefted Lothan’s flask in her hand. “We have a solution to our body issues . . . at least according to a trickster deity known for illusion and deception. We have to wait for moonrise though.”

  “What about Timoras?” Krys asked.

  Lucille raised the pendant and looked at the sand. She shook her head. “I was hoping knowing the origin of the scroll might . . .” She shook her head. “This whole trip has been useless.”

  “No,” Krys said. “You found Frank and we’re going to get him back now.”

  Lucille glanced at the flask as if she didn’t quite believe it. “What does Frank think?”

  Frank? asked the voice of a young man in my head.

  Elhared, I thought, my mind almost gagging on the name.

  “Elhared?” Krys said aloud.

  “What do we want with a dead wizard?” Lucille asked.

  He’s not dead, I thought.

  “What?” Krys snapped, echoed by Rabbit’s voice in my head.

  “‘What,’ what?” Lucille repeated.

  Krys relayed my assertion.

  “What does he mean ‘not dead’?” Lucille asked.

  Krys repeated me, point by point. However, everything she said boiled down to a single chain of logic: the dragon had been resident in Elhared’s body ever since the original spell misfired; the scroll, according to Crumley, had been authored by Elhared in order to reverse the original spell; if the scroll had reversed the effects of the spell—placing Lucille in her original body, the dragon in his original body, and only skipping me because my original body was gone—it left a single very relevant question.

  Who now inhabited Elhared’s body?

  Lucille argued, and I argued back with Krys as a proxy. She asked why didn’t the dragon’s absence just leave Elhared’s body a dead empty shell without any animating spirit? I doubted it. Given the logic this particular brand of magic seemed to follow, if nothing had claimed Elhared’s body I’d have expected my displaced persona to take up residence. I strongly suspected that the scroll did its job, as much as possible, returning the original spirits to the original bodies.

  Yes, Elhared might be dead, but that probably didn’t mean that he was out of reach of the spell, since he was probably suffering eternal torment in Nâtlac’s realm of the dead, and the spell was an invocation of Nâtlac’s power.

  Eventually Lucille ran out of objections.

  “Not that we need Elhared. As long as Lothan’s cure works out.” Lucille hefted the flask and looked out the unshuttered window at the evening light. Rabbit followed her gaze.

  “Actually we do,” Krys relayed for me.

  “Why? Even if he’s rotting in elvish captivity instead of the dragon now—I still feel no desire to rescue him.”

  “The queen,” Krys passed on for me.

  What would Queen Theora, ruler of the Summer Court of the elves, want with Elhared’s scroll? When she talked to Dudley, it sounded as if she was much more keen on the coming war than Timoras—if we were to believe Robin’s assessment of his uncle. She had said, more or less, that using the scroll would preempt us from fulfilling the elf-king’s ultimatum.

  “How would . . .” Lucille trailed off and I knew she got my point.

  So did Krys. “By her logic, Elhared is the one responsible for her son’s death.”

  Right. And if that’s the case, forget any other logic, it’s her definition that matters to Tim
oras, since it’s her—or her followers—he needs to appease to prevent a war. We have to give him Elhared.

  Krys passed that on, and Lucille responded with an impressive string of curses.

  “That means we have to try and save the bastard,” Lucille said. “Only so we can give him back.” She rubbed her temple with the hand she still controlled. “I hate dealing with elves.”

  Rabbit had gotten up from the bed and walked to the window.

  “We don’t know where he is,” Krys said.

  “And at this point I don’t think the elf-king would be too willing to let us come by for a visit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how does Frank think this will work? Does he have some sort of plan?”

  “I don’t kn— What is it?” Krys turned to look at Rabbit, who was gesturing wildly at the window. I heard Rabbit’s mental voice, You need to see this.

  Lucille stood and looked over at Rabbit as Krys walked up next to her. Krys stared out the window with wide eyes.

  What the . . . I heard her young man’s voice trail off blankly in my head.

  I felt uneasy, remembering a few months ago looking out the window of a rented room, and seeing an angry dragon waiting for me. However, when Lucille walked up next to the other two, there was nothing outside the window but the cobbled street outside The Talking Eye, washed by a ruddy evening light.

  “What are we looking at?” Lucille asked.

  You don’t see it? Rabbit asked me.

  See what? I responded.

  “Crap. I think you may need some tea,” Krys said.

  CHAPTER 20

  Lucille had been initially reluctant to take the tea—no question I was as well—but Crumley’s admonishment about possible side effects were somewhat ameliorated by the weight of Lothan’s flask in our hand. So at Krys’s and Rabbit’s urging I picked up the cup and held it up to Lucille’s face. I waited until she moved her lips to meet the cup before I tilted it. She took a mouthful of the tea and I took the cup away.

  She swallowed and the power of Crumley’s herb hit full force, like we’d been stripped naked and tossed screaming into a near-frozen lake. We took a deep breath and staggered back a moment. If anything, the absence of the other foul components from this blend made it worse. Maybe Brock had added the slime mold and fungus to tone things down.

  Wow! The dragon’s voice exploded through my skull like a crossbow bolt through a rotten cabbage.

  Don’t yell! I yelled back at her.

  Our hands went to our temple to press at the throbbing pulse there. Our hands? My hands?

  “Lucille?” I whispered, and my voice came out of our mouth.

  Still here . . . that was a jolt.

  I know.

  I think you’re in charge right now . . .

  Am I?

  I lifted our head and lowered one hand from my temples. The left one hesitated a moment, then lowered on its own accord.

  Almost in charge . . .

  That thought was in a weird echoey hybrid of my voice and the dragon’s. I shuddered, and Lucille’s arm hugged me. I imitated her, wrapping my own arm around, over hers.

  “Are you all right?” Krys asked.

  “Fine,” I whispered. “We just weren’t expecting—”

  I finally looked out the window so we could see what had captured the two girls’ attention. The voice dried up in my throat.

  Through the window to our room, I no longer saw the evening sky we’d been watching with half an eye ever since reading the inscription on Lothan’s flask. Instead, I saw moon and sun near their zenith occupying the same too-purple sky, almost touching.

  That was the sky I had seen under the hill.

  Inside my head I heard Lucille’s voice echoing my own thoughts, but fortunately not exactly.

  “It tears down the walls between your self and reality.”

  Fell Green was a wizard town, it had been built between worlds, and it seemed as if it was closer to the land of the elves than any place in the world of men. The barriers between here and there were thinner, and under the herb’s influence, we now all saw parts of elfland bleeding through, nestled in the cracks between this city and itself.

  I know that doesn’t make much sense, but I can’t really describe it accurately to anyone who isn’t under the influence of a magical hallucinogenic herb. What had before been a normal static city-scape, seemed to breathe or pulse, expanding without changing size or position, to reveal glimpses of a shining other place just around a corner that otherwise didn’t seem to exist.

  Sometimes the universe hands you an answer so obvious that you just have to take advantage of it, no matter how insane it might be.

  • • •

  Of course we had to test the theory.

  We brewed a batch of the powerful herbs and poured it into a waterskin that Rabbit had been carrying. Then we left The Talking Eye and walked into the shifting almost-there landscape. We had barely gone a dozen paces before it became obvious that we all saw the same thing, not just a close approximation due to a shared hallucination. We saw something that was actually there in the real world.

  Of course, “real world” had become a somewhat fuzzy concept by then.

  As we approached a wall that had been a row of shops across the street from the inn, it seemed to fold inward until we stood at the mouth of an alley that had not existed when we stood across the street. Rabbit walked into the alley, where there should have been only a blank wall.

  We followed.

  Yes, it’s very strange.

  Lucille was obviously responding to someone. Since Krys had been responding to mental conversation aloud, I guessed she was talking to Rabbit. Apparently the tradeoff for the tea giving me control of the body—most of it, anyway—was the loss of my ability to “hear” anyone aside from Lucille. I suppose there was some sort of logic to it, but I found it annoying.

  We walked through a space that seemed to pass between two buildings that seemed almost there, and through another that almost wasn’t. The buildings we passed between were made from the elaborate white crystal I had seen the last time I’d passed under the hill.

  When we reached the other end of the alley, it folded out into a city that was not Fell Green. On this side of the passage, it seemed the wizard town was the one that pulsed and tried to push itself through the cracks in this world.

  “Welcome to elfland,” Krys said quietly.

  I don’t believe it either, Lucille responded to the unheard Rabbit.

  “Now we just need to find Elhared,” I said.

  When I say it like that . . .

  . . . It sounds so simple.

  “What’s the plan?” Krys asked both of us.

  I felt Lucille’s hand go to the pendant around our neck. I glanced down and she turned the pendant so we both could see it. The sand was visibly moving faster. The side trip with Dudley had cost us; it looked as if we’d lost almost half the sand we’d had left when we’d visited the Wizard Crumley.

  That confirms it. We’re here, and running out of time. I involuntarily finished her thought. It left uneasy echoes in our skull.

  We were running out of time in more than one sense. Maybe four hours in the glass, much less than that in our own head.

  Plan. I was supposed to have a plan, wasn’t I?

  Below us, in the city that was almost here, I saw elves almost moving. I looked at them and said, improvising aloud, “We need to find Elhared, wherever he is.”

  “Yes,” Krys said. Her tone reminded me that I was stating the obvious.

  Are you making this up as you go along?

  It’s worked so far.

  No it hasn’t.

  “Let me think.” I paused, staring down into what might have been a city square, although there was nothing square about it. The roads below were
laid out in a geometry that I think might have inspired a severe headache if I had thought about it too much. I could almost feel the accelerating sand in the hourglass through the surface of the pendant Lucille still gripped in our hand.

  “Frank?” Krys asked.

  “The trial,” I said, thinking about the last time I had been here.

  “What?” Krys said.

  “The arena . . .” I remembered the place of the trial where the elves had convicted Lucille in her dragon skin, and the dragon in his Elhared skin. It had been hollowed into a mound on the outskirts of this city; a mound that—I realized now—the Goddess Lysea had shown me in a vision.

  If that had really been the goddess.

  Dream-Lysea’s identity aside, anyone who wanted to write that dream off as coincidence had never dealt with prophetic visions before. “We need to find the arena where they held the trial for me, Lucille, and the dragon.”

  Is going there a good idea?

  Is going anywhere here a “good idea”? I thought at Lucille. But what choice do we have?

  I shuddered when she answered for me, even though I was certain it had been my thought.

  Deep down, I understood that she felt exactly the same way. And that was the problem, wasn’t it?

  I hefted the flask and glanced up at the elvish sky, sun and moon in the same sky, almost touching. That should count per Lothan’s instructions.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Wait, Frank.

  Why?

  We should take care of Elhared first. We don’t know if that “cure” will have any side effects.

  I almost thought, “Like what?” But I knew better. The only certainty with this kind of magic, especially the kind with a god involved, was that something unexpected would happen. I didn’t know what, but given that Lothan was known for deception, trickery, and an unfortunate sense of humor, I accepted that Lucille was probably right. We should wait until solving our personal problem wouldn’t interfere with solving the larger issues. We probably had a little time before the “cure” became urgent.