Dragon Wizard

  Like we had in the courtyard, I held court next to her, seated on a throne, completely upstaged by her mere existence. I felt gratified being overshadowed. I’d never liked being the center of attention.

  Lucille, on the other hand, seemed to bask in it. More than making a full hall’s worth of the alleged nobility somewhat nervous, what made my efforts worth it was the obvious pleasure Lucille took from being the focus of terrified fascination.

  For what it was worth, the staging of this banquet, beyond the pedestrian diplomacy involved, had been my anniversary present to her. And if the shocked stares upon seeing her inside the palace weren’t enough for her, the pyrotechnics as she roasted a half-dozen spits’ worth of boar were quite the attention grabber.

  When she returned to my side, after her demonstration of apocalyptic cookery, she whispered, “Reminds you of the first time we ate dinner together, doesn’t it?”

  After Elhared’s spell had placed us in our current bodies, and as we tried to figure out what to do about it, we’d been stuck camping in the wilderness. Her presence had made up for my own lack of supplies and preparation. It was useful having a campmate who could not only capture a wild boar with ease, but cook it for you.

  “Yes, it does,” I told her.

  She settled back in, curling around my throne to watch our guests. I reached out and placed a hand against her neck, the scales not nearly as hard as they looked, still warm from her display of culinary pyromania. She grumbled deep in her throat and leaned in so I didn’t have to reach as far.

  About six months ago another magical mishap—entirely my fault that time, I had decided to play with one of the Dark Lord Nâtlac’s evil artifacts while drunk—had rendered a brief moment when we had both been human. That might have resulted in something, if it hadn’t been for that brink-of-war thing that had occupied our attention at the time.

  That’s what I told myself.

  I wondered what Lucille told herself.

  I know she loved being the dragon, as much as anything. Perhaps she didn’t need to tell herself stories justifying her actions. Maybe she had no regrets.

  Must be nice.

  Now that our official welcome was over, as servants moved dragon-fired carcasses from spits to table, the most interminable part of the evening began. Every delegation had the chance to toast the host couple and offer some form of gift.

  I have nothing against gifts, in theory. But each presentation was accompanied by the drone of some count or baron talking as if they were the initiate of some monastic cult that, rather than taking vows of silence, chose instead to say nothing using as many words as possible.

  As an example, the Baron Weslyess presented a gown incorporating a corset so tortuous in appearance that I suspected that if some unsuspecting woman actually wore it, the event might constitute an act of war. He presented it with a flourish and praised my virtue with a speech so filled with double meanings that it was remarkable that the gods of language did not appear to strike him dumb on the spot.

  “I really need that drink,” I whispered as he vacated the floor to the next presenter.

  “I know.”

  • • •

  After a long procession of increasingly inebriated well-wishers, we were finally greeted by someone whose bearing approximated his title. Prince Daemonlas strode forward wearing an outfit with more lace and ruffles than I wore at the moment. As he bowed to us he swept the ground with a heavy fur-lined cape that was anchored across his shoulders by an elaborately embossed gold brooch the size of a dinner plate.

  If he wasn’t a member of the elf-king’s court I would have thought him overdressed.

  “Your Highness, Prince and Princess, greetings from the Winter Court. To honor this occasion, I bear words from the court of His Majesty Timoras, lord of all realms under the hill.”

  “At least he isn’t drunk,” I muttered.

  I felt Lucille’s claw flick the back of the throne. “Shh!”

  “I am here to honor a bond, a pledge between two persons, however different, that must be respected. A bond that must be cherished. A bond that, if broken, must be avenged.”

  Something about the way he said that made me uneasy. Prince Daemonlas pulled a scroll from within his sleeve and the unease I felt became an overwhelming sense of wrongness.

  “Lucille—”

  This time her claw flicked the throne hard enough to move it forward about six inches. The prince looked up at the sound of wood scraping against stone, and I forced my most innocent smile. “Please continue,” I told him.

  My unease continued unabated as he finished withdrawing the scroll from his sleeve. For a royal communication, the parchment had not traveled well. Dirt and rusty spots dotted the surface and the edges were worn and ragged. For a moment or two the elf-prince stared at the scroll. I couldn’t help thinking of the way I tended to hesitate just before I did something stupid and irrevocable.

  He sucked in a breath. Then with a deliberate, almost mechanical, motion he broke the wax seal holding the parchment shut. Fragments of ebony-black sealing wax fell to the stone floor at his feet. As the pieces hit the floor, they melted, bubbled, and hissed, boiling into curls of black smoke the way sealing wax never does.

  I stood up.

  “That’s not right.” This time I didn’t whisper and Lucille didn’t prod the throne.

  Prince Daemonlas bent over the ragged scroll as it unrolled in his hands. His manner had changed, and something in his crooked body language sent an unpleasant wave of déjà vu through me. He opened his mouth to read the elf-king’s message, but the syllables that came from his lips belonged to no elven language. The words came from some language that was not designed for a fleshy throat.

  I was pretty sure that I had heard those inhuman syllables before.

  “Stop him!” I yelled out as a cracking blue-black glow wrapped the elf. “Lucille!”

  Next to me, Lucille reached for Daemonlas, and kept reaching. The movements of her body slowed, and one taloned hand froze in midair, the same blue-black glow cracking along the tips of her claws.

  Then Lucille started screaming.

  Remember earlier, when I mentioned the upper register of a dragon’s voice causing bleeding from the ears? I wasn’t exaggerating.

  The elf raised a shaking hand in our direction, and I did the only thing I could think of. I rushed him, fist raised, screaming something that may have been, “Not again!”

  Everything slowed around me. Daemonlas’s lips moved, the unclean syllables somehow an audible drone despite the dragon’s agonized screams. I moved between his upraised hand and Lucille, and it felt as if a million little spider knives burrowed through my body. Daemonlas’s face shimmered and blurred and I saw glimpses of things that were the visual embodiment of Lucille’s scream; eyes and teeth and tongues and tentacles and sights that wanted to slice my eyes and make them bleed. I heard something, a voice or a memory.

  “You have made an enemy.”

  Oh cra—

  Before I could even complete the thought, a human avalanche swept me away from Daemonlas, tackling me to the ground. I yelled at the oversize breastplate that pinned me to the ground. “No! Brock! Get! The! Elf!”

  I’m certain that my large retainer meant well. He was probably one of the smartest men in the royal court, knew too many languages to list, knew more herbal lore than most people who plied it as a trade, and had the unfortunate fate of looking like a terrifying barbarian warrior. Unfortunate because, smart or not, he didn’t have much tactical know-how or martial ability, and in a fight tended to carry himself like a large, confused, nearsighted puppy.

  I stopped yelling, because Brock’s weight pushed the breath out of me, and there was no way I could make myself audible over the cacophony of dragon screams and demonic chants. I pushed against him, and at least got enough of my meaning across to get hi
m to roll off me.

  When my view wasn’t blocked by clumsy barbarian, I saw my other retainers converge on Daemonlas, for all the good it did.

  The princess’s personal guard had good and bad points. They were capable, loyal, and somewhat bloodthirsty. They all shared with me histories as outlaws. They were also, by happenstance, members of a warrior religious order devoted to their martial training—though it was a warrior order devoted to the Goddess Lysea, patron of love, beauty, art, poetry, storytelling, and so on—an order where they were the only members.

  They also were all teenage girls.

  To be fair to them, Daemonlas cheated by having that evil black-blue aura do his fighting for him while he chanted, hand raised toward an agonized Lucille. I saw Mary, the largest of the girls, charge the elf, aiming for the kidneys. About a foot short of reaching him, she slammed into an invisible wall and an explosion of black lightning threw her back fifteen or twenty feet. Laya hung back and loosed a sling bullet, but the projectile never connected with Daemonlas’s skull, evaporating in a lightless crackle and a puff of toxic black smoke. Grace swung a sword and came back with a smoldering hilt. The others were just as ineffective in their attacks.

  The only person not attacking was arguably the most capable member of the royal guard, Sir Forsythe the Good. By all rights, he should have been the first one into battle. Quite often I’ve known him to charge in before anyone knew there was a battle. Instead, he knelt down before the possessed elf, his parade armor reflecting the twisted black glow around Daemonlas, leaning on his sword, head bowed.

  Praying?

  “Forsythe! You idiot! What are you doing!?” I screamed, even though I knew exactly what was happening.

  Like my girls, Sir Forsythe had a long and twisted story behind him. It involved both the Goddess Lysea and the Dark Lord Nâtlac. The Goddess, somewhat upset about the semisecret Nâtlac cult in the Grünwald royal court desecrating her temple, showed the children of the cult members the full glory of truth, beauty, and goodness, and then cursed them to serve the Dark Lord with a full self-awareness of what they were doing. It was a pretty effective revenge. The cursed children found endlessly creative ways to engage in self-destruction. Sir Forsythe had only survived the internal contradiction by going a little insane. His nickname, “The Good,” had been originally meant as an insult by his peers. After a rocky introduction, he had pledged fealty to me after I had defeated the Dark Queen Fiona of Grünwald, largely because I had inadvertently become the High Priestess of the Nâtlac cult.

  A role I had given up in such a way that the Dark Lord personally told me, “You have made an enemy.” Not a message you ever want to hear from a deity of evil darkness. And what I had seen in Daemonlas, and what I heard from the elf’s throat, was clearly Nâtlac.

  Whatever earthly pledge had been made by Sir Forsythe to me, his soul was still damned to serve the Dark Lord.

  Black lightning crackled across Sir Forsythe’s armor. I think I heard his voice say, “Let me serve you.”

  “What are you doing?” I screamed at him.

  The blackness tore at his armor, as if looking for an opening. “Let me serve you!” Sir Forsythe’s voice tore through everything. Even Daemonlas’s incantation seemed to miss a beat. The dark swirled from the elf to twist around Sir Forsythe like a whirlwind made of torn scraps of the void.

  “Let! Me! Serve! You!” Sir Forsythe slowly stood. I heard the creak of his armor and I realized that Lucille had stopped screaming. Under his feet, cracks appeared in the stone floor, leaking the same blackness that swirled around him. His sword rose unsteadily upward.

  “Let! Me! Serve! You!”

  He’s not praying to Nâtlac.

  The great windows exploded behind Lucille, scattering shimmering rainbow fragments of glass through the air. Sunlight streamed in from outside, striking Sir Forsythe’s sword. The blade reflected with a glow a hundred times brighter than the late sunset light striking it. The shadows tearing at Sir Forsythe vanished before that light.

  For the briefest moment I saw a ghost of a woman standing in place of Sir Forsythe. She stood eight feet tall, unbound hair flowing around her otherwise naked body. In both hands she held a golden sword engraved with the images of flowers in such detailed relief they appeared to sprout from the blade.

  Then it was Sir Forsythe again, thrusting his own glowing blade. It cut through the air like a goddess laughing, penetrating the elf’s black aura to bury itself into Daemonlas’s torso.

  For a moment the hall was silent except for the sound of stained glass tinkling to the ground.

  Then I heard laughing; this time less like a goddess, and more like those glass fragments burrowing into my ears.

  The elf lowered his arms and sagged onto the sword, the tattered scroll slipping through his fingers. Daemonlas shook his head and smiled. “Too late.”

  Daemonlas slid off the sword to collapse on the ground at Sir Forsythe’s feet. Sir Forsythe echoed my own thoughts, “Too late?”

  A geyser of black and blue lightning erupted from the wound in Daemonlas’s chest, throwing Sir Forsythe aside. The twisted spray of lightning shot at Lucille, splintering my throne. When it hit her, I felt it, as if something huge and invisible slammed inside my skull.

  I spiraled into darkness as Lucille screamed again.

  CHAPTER 3

  As I came to, my first coherent thought was, Not fair . . . I didn’t drink anything this time!

  From somewhere, I heard someone yelling.

  “What did you do? What did you do?”

  For a few moments I thought the shouting was directed at me. Given my history, my own inclination was to blame myself for any disaster even though it was difficult to imagine exactly how I could be responsible for this one. As my mind emerged from the painful black fog, I tried to answer the angry person . . .

  . . . and realized I was the one shouting.

  Huh?

  Sensation returned to me, and I could feel and hear myself shouting the words. The right side of my rib cage ached where Brock had tackled me, and the ache turned into a dagger in my side when I sucked in the breath to shout again. I smelled smoke and felt dirt in my eyes, and my eyes blinked all by themselves. I stood above the body of Prince Daemonlas, my hands balled into fists in his cape to either side of the bloodstained brooch. I had lifted him up to shout in his unmoving face, and I shook him to emphasize each word.

  Fine, I just blacked out and went insane there for a moment.

  I tried to remember what had pushed me over the edge like this, and suddenly everything in me screamed, Lucille!

  That was the cue for me to spin around and look for her and see what happened.

  But I couldn’t move.

  That wasn’t exactly right.

  I still looked down at the dead elf, I still shook him, and I still demanded to know what it was he’d done.

  And that still wasn’t right.

  It wasn’t me doing any of these things, even though I stared into the elf’s dead eyes, felt the blood-tacky fur of his cape sticking to my fists, and felt the hoarse tickle in the back of my throat as I screamed . . .

  I had no control over any of it.

  Worse, I smelled smoke and heard pained groans all around me. The dead Prince Daemonlas was the last thing I wanted to focus my attention on.

  “He’s dead, Your Highness.” I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder and someone else turned my head to look up at Mary, the first of my handmaids-slash-bodyguards to have attacked Daemonlas. She had her other arm in a makeshift sling, clutched against her scorched leather armor. Bruised swelling marred the left side of her face. Past her, in the peripheral vision of eyes that refused to move for me, I could see signs of chaos, broken tables, wounded diplomats, and the great windows open on a purple twilight sky . . .

  And no sign of Lucille.

  “Can we t
rack the dragon?” I heard myself say.

  “Sir Forsythe dived out the window after her—him—”

  “Is Brock . . .”

  The way I heard my voice trail off frightened me. What happened to Brock?

  “Bad, but looks worse than it is.”

  Someone shook my head without me and my voice lowered to be near inaudible. “Why did he have to . . .”

  “Your Highness?” Mary said, “If he didn’t, you’d be dead right now.”

  I watched as my hand rubbed my lowered face by its own volition. “How many people have to hurt themselves saving me?” I heard my voice whisper.

  My own brain still spun, disoriented, recovering from the blackout. It sank in. I felt myself breathe, I could see and hear and smell . . .

  But it wasn’t my body anymore.

  I felt my foot kick something that felt suspiciously like an elf corpse. My mouth snapped, “Why?”

  Then I spun around, looking at the wreckage of the banquet, our banquet, and understood what had happened.

  Lucille was home.

  Then what am I doing here?

  I heard my voice ask Mary, “Why would Frank do this?”

  Why would I . . .

  “It wasn’t Frank, your Highness.” Mary pointed at the ex-elf. “It was this guy. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, yes.” My head turned to look at the wreckage and my arm swung out in a gesture encompassing the broken and charred tables and a distressing number of bodies. “His spell pushed me out of my body. But the dragon did all this.”

  “You don’t know that was Frank.”

  No, you don’t, I thought.

  “Who was it then? And, more importantly, if it wasn’t him, where is he?” Lucille turned our body away from Mary and started shouting orders at the ambulatory servants.