Dragon Princess (14 page)

The bald man looked down from his effort to keep the horses in check and said, “But, Stavros—”

“‘But’ nothing!” He pointed at the dragon. “What idiot has us try and snag an enticingly nubile young thing left so conveniently alone on the road to a nefarious den of black magic and necromancy? One who couldn’t see a trap if he was hanging by his ankle over a pit full of stakes and shadow vipers, that’s who.”

The other men in the entourage dropped their weapons and slowly backed away from me and the dragon. I cleared my throat as loudly as I could manage, and they all stopped moving. Then I turned to whisper to Lucille, “Can you back off a bit now? You’re spooking the horses.”

“But—”
she tried to whisper, and her objection was cut short by an equine scream of pure terror. Instead she nodded, beat her wings, and launched up into the sky to circle above us.

One of the men stooped to start to retrieve something, and I said, “You don’t look so stupid that I have to
tell
you that’s a bad idea.”

The ringleader finally got his team of horses under control. He chuckled nervously. “I suppose an apology is in order?”

The only moral I can draw from this part of the story is that, if you are to engage in a career of highway robbery, it is extremely advantageous to partner with a dragon. That, and Stavros had a good point about being wary of unaccompanied nubile young women found at forest paths leading toward infamous cities of dark magics.

I freed the “cargo” from both wagons while Lucille watched from the sky with a literally smoldering gaze. The two dozen half-naked women I unchained were very appreciative, and I received a number of hugs and kisses. I don’t think anyone has invented a language to describe exactly how confusing the sensations from
that
were to me at the moment.

The men replaced the women, chained in the first cart, and the ex-prisoners got the trailing wagon to take themselves toward some outpost of civilization. I also bequeathed them most of their former captors’ weapons, boots, and clothing. I was in a generous mood.

They also wanted to take some of their former hosts with them, including Baldy. I drew the line at that. “We’d both hate ourselves in the morning,” I said. I told them they’d have to content themselves with the clothes, weapons, and the chest of gold on the second wagon.

They weren’t hard to convince.

Once they were safely on their way back in the direction the small convoy had come, I climbed up on top of the remaining cart and took a seat next to Baldy. He kept staring up at the sky, where Lucille was doing slow circles above us. When I took my seat and looked up, she tilted her wings, almost like she was waving at me.

I shook my head and turned my attention to Baldy.

“So,” I said, “You were going to take me to Fell Green, now, weren’t you?”

“You know, they don’t appreciate random strangers—”

He stopped because I placed the point of a dagger just above his kidney. It had come from one of Baldy’s subordinates, and unlike the one I had liberated from the palace weapons display, this one actually had an edge. “Funny,” I said, “I don’t think Lendowyn
or
Dermonica appreciates slave trafficking.” A small red dot stained the linen shirt where I had poked him.

“They were indentured servants, perfectly legal.”

“Like I was going to be?”

“Well . . . uh . . .”

“Please don’t make me get my one outfit all bloody.”

He didn’t put up much of an argument.

 • • • 

Baldy drove the wagon down the road for several miles. We traveled mostly in silence, because whenever the man opened his mouth he filled me with a desire to get stabby. When I thought about our destination, Baldy’s profession, and how folks like Dudley usually got their sacrifices. . . . It just reflected well on my self-control that I hadn’t disemboweled the guy already.

After about an hour of travel, we emerged from the trees onto a meadow bordered by what looked to be one of the wider spots of the Fell River. The road headed right toward the shoreline, to a wide bridge of black stone that crossed the river. The bridge was an impressive piece of work, and out of place so far from any sign of civilization.

I stared at the arches over the river, and the opposite shore that was barely in sight. Baldy pulled the wagon to a stop just short of the bridge. “Must be on the Lendowyn side,” I muttered to myself.

“You don’t know?” Baldy asked.

I prodded him with the dagger again, just because it made me feel better. He sucked in a breath and shut up.

“Why are we stopped?”

“We have to pay the toll.”

I was about to ask “to whom?” because the entire area seemed empty of anyone. But, in the space of my short exchange with Baldy, a figure had appeared on the bridge out of nowhere; an emaciated man, wrapped in black rags, leaning on a staff. His eyes were the same shade of gray as his stringy hair, and clutched in one clawlike hand he held a wooden bowl.

The man hobbled up to Baldy’s side of the wagon and shook his empty bowl in our direction. “Alms?”

That answered that question.

Baldy glanced at the dagger sticking him, then at a chest by his feet. I reached down and opened the chest and pulled out a leather coin purse. “How much?”

Baldy sighed. “A crown a head.”

I held the purse up in front of Baldy with my free hand and said, “Pay the man, then.”

“Are you sure you want to—” a poke ended Baldy’s train of thought and he started rummaging in the purse.

If the beggar noticed Baldy was a hostage, he gave no sign of caring. His expression didn’t change at all from the blind stare he’d greeted us with.

Not until Baldy filled his bowl with coins.

The old beggar looked at his take, then back at us. Gone was the staring senile visage, replaced by irritation. The old man’s grip visibly tightened on the staff, and he stood straighter. “You ain’t trying to smuggle someone in without payin’, are you?” He gazed at Baldy with an eyebrow cocked in a way to suggest that his gray-clouded eyes weren’t blind at all.

I got a feeling I didn’t want to annoy the man.

I put some pressure on the hilt of the dagger and said, “You forgot someone.”

“What? I counted everyone.”

“Nope.” I said, nodding upward.

Baldy followed my gaze, looking up to see Lucille doing lazy circles and loops in the sky above us.

“Oh, yeah. Dragon. Right.”

The beggar stared upward as well, jaw falling open as the last coin clattered into his bowl.

In response to that last coin, the air over the bridge shimmered, darkened, and turned opaque. It was like watching a mirage disappear as you approached it; the view of a bridge arching over the river vanishing as if it had never been there.

Fell Green was not on the Lendowyn side
or
the Dermonica side. It was actually on a long dagger-shaped island in the middle of the river, an island that had been invisible until now. The bridge, now much shorter, met a road that crossed the body of the island, and Fell Green squatted behind massive stone walls that dominated the entirety of the island to the west of that road.

Baldy shook the reins and started the team of horses across the bridge, leaving the beggar/gatekeeper staring up, slack-jawed, at Lucille.

 • • • 

Once across the bridge it now seemed that the island was much wider than the river that flowed around it. I tried not to think about that too much. Baldy’s wagon followed the road between a high stone wall covered with black-leaved ivy, and a dense forest that competed for ominousness with the woods where Dudley performed his devotions to the Dark Lord Nâtlac.

Between the two, I gave the woods here the edge for subtlety, inducing dread without any obvious theatrics. No burnt tree trunks clawing at an ash-gray sky from a field of crushed bone. These woods were lush, leafy, and a little
too
healthy. Something about the shades of green just seemed a bit off.

Once we came in sight of the gate to the town, I relieved Baldy of the last of his gold and ordered him to stop the wagon.

“Now,” I told him. “This is where we part ways.” I pointed the tip of my dagger down the road ahead of us. “Keep going, unless you like the idea of being set on fire by an angry lizard.”

As I climbed down from the wagon, Baldy said, “I need the keys to unchain my men.”

I shook my head. “You need incentive to go to the next town and find a blacksmith.” I waved my arm and Lucille began descending. “I suggest you get going.”

He looked up at the descending dragon and snapped the reins. The horses didn’t need to be told twice, and the wagon vanished down the road at a furious gallop as Lucille set herself down in a clearing next to the road.

“I think we make a good team,” I told her, hefting the bag with the remnants of Baldy’s finances.

“This island came out of nowhere.”

“Yeah, I can see why there’s some argument over jurisdiction.”

She turned her massive head toward the wall. Her eyes narrowed and thin trails of steam curled from her nostrils. I saw commotion along the top of the wall as multiple guards seemed to be rushing to cover the section across from us.

“He’s in there?”

“That’s what Prince Dudley said—”

“Let’s get him.”
Her voice was a near-growl, and her talons sank into the earth. Her muscles were so tense that I could almost hear them vibrate.

“Calm down.”

Her head whipped in my direction and she yelled at me,
“Calm down!”
Her breath was so heated that I thought I could smell my eyebrows burning. Her jaws snapped shut on the words like a trap designed to catch the deity of all bears and bearlike creatures.

There was less than an arm’s length between us, and I felt the vibration from her jaw slamming shut in the back of my own skull. I must have completely internalized the fact that she was the princess, because I didn’t immediately flee in terror.

“Yes. Calm down.”

The fact that I stood my ground must have made an impression, because she froze, staring at me. Her mouth opened to say something, but nothing came out but a few wisps of brimstone-flavored steam.

“First, we’re here on the word of Prince Dudley. While he was under threat of some serious pain when he said we could find Elhared here, do you actually trust him?”

“Uh . . .”

“Second, this is a wizard town. If you noticed, they’ve been massing on the wall since you landed, and I suspect they have a slightly better equipped and organized defense than Ravensgate.”

“But . . .”

“Lastly, if a dragon storms the gate of this town, and somehow makes it past the town defenses to the point of doing a house to house search—we’ll ignore the logistics of how
that
would actually work for the moment—do you think Elhared will conveniently stay put for you to find him?”

The rage had sapped from her. As immobile as much of the dragon’s face might be, it was becoming surprisingly easy for me to read her expressions now. If I had to describe how she looked at me after my tirade, I’d probably call it “pouty.”

“But I want to help.”

I shook my head and patted her nose. “You’ve been helping. There’s no way we could have gotten here without you. It’s just that quietly hunting down one guy in the middle of a town does not play to your strengths at the moment.”

She settled down on the ground, resting her head on her folded forearms with an intimidatingly resonant sigh.
“You have no idea how much it annoys me that you’re right.”

“Cheer up. I’m sure we’ll get a chance for you to lay waste to a small army before we change you back.”

“Now you’re mocking me.”

“I wouldn’t do that to someone who could bite me in half.”

She turned her head and snorted what might have been a draconic chuckle.

“Really, you’ve handled more than your share. You saved me—us—from being a sacrifice. You saved a bunch of women from those slavers. That’s not even mentioning traveling here in the first place. There’s a time for subtlety and diplomacy, and there’s a time for intimidation and cracking skulls. Right now, your job’s the latter.”

“I never really was ever that assertive.”

“I think you’re doing well.”

“Really?”

“You make an excellent dragon.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“And you’re still helping. After your unsubtle arrival, you think the town guard’s going to give me any grief?” I gestured up toward the wall, where a few bucket-helmeted guards peered down across the road at us. “Who’s going to mess with a girl with a pet dragon?”

She lifted her head and cocked it.
“Pet?”

“Uh—figure of speech.”

 • • • 

Lucille launched herself again, to orbit the town at what we hoped the guards would perceive as a safe distance. And, as I predicted, the guards at the main gate were very polite and helpful with directions—though some of that might have been habit given the kind of powerful masters of dark sorcery who must regularly pass through here. It’s never a good idea to roust someone who could turn you into a toad. Lucille’s presence probably just suggested I was part of the small club that belonged here.

So, without incident, I entered the black heart of the necromancers’ haven of Fell Green.

It wasn’t that bad.

I got a lot of stares, since I was a young woman traveling alone. But apparently,
because
I was a young woman traveling alone, most of the potential troublemakers seemed to follow the theory of Baldy’s ex-minion Stavros:
it’s a trap.

The marketplace tended toward the obscure and obscene in terms of spell components—I could have easily replaced the flattened pixie that Elhared had used as a bookmark. However, there were also more than enough merchants selling mundane gear appropriate to my chosen profession. I took the opportunity to lighten Baldy’s purse a bit, at least for the sake of more easily pumping a few merchants for info on the possible location of the unfortunately not-so-late Elhared the Unwise.

I was in luck. Elhared was a known and not particularly loved fixture of this town. I listened to several anecdotes of his activities prior to my meeting him. His status as a skinflint was something of a local legend. I suspected that meant Lendowyn’s financial difficulties predated him skimming the treasury. I even heard from someone who had spent several weeks on a custom replica sword for the wizard, only to be stiffed on the last payment.