Dragon Princess (4 page)

Great, they were both heckling me. I shook the remains of
Dracheslayer
. “I was cheated on this sword.”

“That’s the least of it. You have no form, a weak swing, and you left yourself wide open for any counterattack. Are you sure you’re a knight?”

“I . . .”

I trailed off because the dragon had turned its massive head away from me, not waiting for an answer. It looked deeper into the cavern and called out,
“Is this a joke, Elhared?”

Both Lucille and I had the simultaneous reaction,
“What?!”

Emerging from the deeper shadows in the cave, Elhared the Unwise strode out, carrying a large book wrapped in tooled leather of unfortunate origin; the kind of evil tome of wizardry that makes the death rolls of the Dark Lord Nâtlac look like a compilation of love poetry.

He looked up at the dragon and said, “I chose the thieving sot for his looks, not his fighting prowess. Now don’t mess up his face.”

I don’t think I can adequately convey the rush of conflicting emotions I felt at that moment. The fear goes without saying, the kind of bladder-freezing fear I don’t think anyone can understand who hasn’t been restrained four feet away from something with both the inclination and the capability of eating you. Then we have the embarrassment at being so obviously conned, worse for someone like myself who often prides himself on being the one doing the conning.

I blame the Mermaid’s Milk.

Then there was the dull shock from the fact that in all the scenarios I had seen this particular bad idea get the best of me, I hadn’t seen it go awry in quite this way. And, I am ashamed to say, underneath everything else, I felt a small surge of self-congratulatory vanity as the wizard complimented my looks. Though I wondered what my appearance had to do with facing down a dragon.

Elhared gestured to the dragon, and it moved to hold me before the wizard, who gave me an appraising look that would have been more appropriate on someone haggling over pumpkins with a street vendor.

Above us, I heard Princess Lucille call down, “Elhared? You old coot, what are you doing here?”

Elhared chuckled to himself as he opened the evil tome he carried. “I’m saving you from the dragon, my princess.” From where the dragon held me suspended I could see more of the pages than I cared to. The sight of the written language in that book had something of the same effect as looking very closely at a worm-infested wound on a none-too fresh corpse. It didn’t help that Elhared had marked his place in the tome with a pixie that had been flattened and dried in the midst of some obscene act.

I looked up from that unpleasant display and tried to look the wizard in the eye, but his head was bowed to pore over the open pages. Still, I cleared my throat and said, “So, Elhared, isn’t this where you amaze us with the description of your intricately crafted plans?”

He just grunted in response.

“Seriously, if you wanted to win her hand in marriage yourself, why recruit me?” Even as I said it, I got an uneasy feeling about his comment about my looks.

Above us I heard the princess say something about how she appreciated Elhared’s efforts, she really did. And she liked him well enough, just not
that
way.

I tried again. “No boasts? No gloating? No regaling us with your genius?”

By now I think he was just making a point of ignoring both me and the princess. I turned my head until I could just catch sight of the dragon holding me. It cradled its head with its other forelimb, and while its face wasn’t particularly expressive, its body language radiated boredom.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Shouldn’t you be rampaging across the countryside? Why are you hooked up with this guy?”

“He agreed to cover my marker.”

“What?”

“I didn’t beat the spread on the last three-kingdom jousting tournament.”

“You’re working with a diabolical wizard because of a
gambling debt
?”

“I’m temporarily short of funds at the moment.”

“But dragons . . .” I trailed off as I realized that, now that it was well lit, I could see a distinct lack of a dragon’s hoard in this cave. “You’re broke? You’re really broke?”

“Just a dry spell. I’m due for a big payoff any day now.”

Elhared finally looked up. “Will you all stop babbling!” he snapped at us. “This spell requires perfect concentration!”

“What spell?” I asked.

Elhared leveled a bony finger at the dragon. “You, cover his mouth! Just don’t mess up the face.”

I sucked in a breath to say something more, but one of the dragon’s fingers wrapped around my face and it was suddenly all I could do to tilt my head back enough to breathe. I could just barely see Elhared over the dragon’s knuckle. He bent his head down to return to his spell, and winced as above us Lucille said, “Honestly, Elhared, you’re older than my father.”

“Should I cover her mouth as well?”

“Everybody shut up!”

“Can’t you just let the young knight save me?”

He looked up at her and shouted. “Damn it woman! He
is
going to save you!” He returned to peruse his tome, muttering under his breath, “Just after a little soul transference spell.”

That did
not
sound good.

The princess didn’t quit while she was ahead. “Well, he is—”

The wizard slammed the book on the flattened pixie and told the dragon, “Yes, cover her mouth too!”

Elhared stood impatiently as the dragon stretched to reach the struggling princess with its free forelimb. She started screaming and kicking, both of which came to a halt as the dragon wrapped its fingers around her. All that remained visible of her was her head above the bridge of her nose, dominated by a pair of blue eyes glaring icy murder at the wizard.

The dragon held us both up in front of Elhared and the wizard stood a moment in contemplation, as if waiting for another interruption. I might have heard something muffled and very un-princesslike coming from my left, but then it might have been the dragon suppressing a belch. Without any more interruptions, Elhared opened his book again and resumed reading.

After a moment, I saw his lips start moving. It could have been a symptom of advancing senility, but that was a little too much to hope for. Especially when the text on the page he read began to glow with a light ominously akin to what I’d seen on the doomed
Dracheslayer
.

My right arm, hand still gripping the heavy hilt of that bogus sword, jutted out between two of the dragon’s fingers. I had just enough freedom of movement to throw the hilt at Elhared.

I put all the effort I could manage into the swing, and I imagined the hilt striking the wizard square in the forehead and knocking him cold, if not killing him outright. Unfortunately, my aim wasn’t quite that good, and given my restricted movement and my clumsy underhand toss, the force of the missile wasn’t anywhere near disabling. The hilt tumbled lazily through the air to bounce harmlessly off of Elhared’s chest, landing on the open book, knocking the flattened pixie off to flutter slowly to the ground.

Elhared’s reaction was a startled glance toward me and a puzzled, “Huh?”

Someone, I am sure, has written a standard primer for those with an interest in pursuing the wizardly arts. Somewhere in there, in with the recommended beard length and the best materials to use for one’s robe, I am certain there exists the following sentence: “When casting complicated spells of nefarious origin, uttering a random monosyllable three-quarters of the way in does not yield optimal results.”

In response to the interruption, the glow from the text exploded into a burst of light fountaining up from the pages of the book. Elhared fell back as if the expanding light dealt him a physical blow, and I lost sight of him in the glare. The book fell to the floor of the cave and rolling smoke began filling the cavern. I felt a prickly heat from the pillar of red-blue light that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. To all appearances, Elhared had vaporized in a flash of light and smoke.

The expanding light still grew toward us, and the dragon jerked backward. The pillar of light curved and rippled toward the dragon, as if attracted to it. The dragon made a startled sound that was almost a yelp, and threw me at the pillar of magic fire as if my flailing body could beat it into submission.

I hit the light, felt a burning tingle, and blacked out.

 • • • 

And I had thought the hangover from the Mermaid’s Milk had been bad.

My first conscious thought after hitting that light was that I had been so very wrong. I would have embraced the return of the eyeball-gnawing skull-troll if it meant the eviction of the goblin army that had now taken up residence. Thoughts of more than one syllable caused me physical pain, so when I inhaled and started coughing up wizard soot I almost blacked out again.

The coughing fit subsided. I dropped my head back with an agonized moan. My head hit a tree root, and I gasped. I tried to reach to push myself upright, and I realized my wrists were bound.

Not good.

More troublesome sensations began filtering through the pain of the goblin orgy doing violence to my brain. I tried to move my legs, and they were bound as well. And things just didn’t feel right, beyond the throbbing in my head. My body felt wrong, arms and legs shorter, my hair catching in ways it shouldn’t underneath my neck, my torso—

“What the hell?” I whispered.

Even roughened by inhaling more than my share of carbonized Elhared, I could tell
that
was not my voice. I’ve never uttered a single word in what could be described as a husky contralto.

My eyes shot open to look down at myself, the glare making my vision blur. I told myself that it was the painful light making my eyes water, or maybe the stinging ash. After all, the sight of a woman’s bosom had never before moved me to tears.

“Soul transference spell,” I whispered to myself in the Princess Lucille’s voice.

I stared at myself, at Lucille, and couldn’t decide if I was more disturbed by sitting here in her body, or by the thought of her running around somewhere in mine. I didn’t spend long feeling sorry for myself. It seemed that Fate had decided to take every impulse of self-pity on my part as a cue to show me exactly how much worse things could be.

As I stared, still disbelieving, down Lucille’s dress, my thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of arguing. I glanced up and saw three men just a few steps away from my feet. They did not look the type to be rescuing princesses. Rescuing anyone, really. In fact, the trio of unsavory gentlemen had more the look of people princesses were rescued
from
.

Actually, princesses were probably out of their league. They were the type you would need to rescue a tavern wench from.

Then, as I listened to them arguing among themselves, I had to re-revise my revised sentiment. I seemed to be princess-by-proxy, and as Princess Lucille’s stand-in, it sounded as if she—I—needed some rescuing from these unpleasant characters.

The smallest one, a nervous mousy sort barely taller than Lucille, had his back to me and stood facing the other two. He was engaged in an animated discussion, waving his arms and causing his stringy ponytail to dance about. He had captured the others’ attention, explaining why they hadn’t noticed me wake up yet.

“I’s the one found her, right?” Mouse said. “I’s the one says what we do with her.” He said it with a force and intensity that would have been intimidating if he didn’t have the voice of an asthmatic teenage boy.

The man to Mouse’s left made up for him in the intimidation department. He was grossly fat, half as wide as he was tall, all wild hair and beard so dense and tangled that the only visible parts of his face were small strips of eyes, brow, and nose. “Listen to you. Sounds like your marbles finally dropped.” If a bear could speak, that would be the voice it would use.

“You recognize the woman?” asked the last man, to Mouse’s right. He was mid-height between Mouse and Bear, as hairless as Bear was hirsute, and wore an eye patch over his left eye socket that wasn’t quite as large as the scars it covered.

“I’s told you, a princess. Lucille of Lendowyn. We bring her back and should be some reward.”

Bear laughed like he had some idea of the state of the Lendowyn treasury. Or he just imagined Mouse being the recipient of Lucille’s hand in marriage and found the image amusing. I might have shared his mirth if I wasn’t in Lucille’s place at the moment. However, his suggestion as to the proper use of their found princess was considerably less amusing.

By then I had recovered enough of my senses to use the trio’s distraction to make an attempt to escape my bonds. You might think that a career as a thief meant I was adept at such things. Sadly you would be mistaken. While a daring last-minute escape from impossible bonds makes an exciting tale, in reality, a good thief spends much more time learning how not to get caught in the first place.

At least Princess Lucille’s stature helped make things easier for me. Her small hands and additional flexibility allowed me to work her hands free without drawing the undue attention of the forest brigand debate society in front of me. I’d just started working free the knot binding my ankles when I heard Eyepatch make the sage announcement that he was going to split the difference between Bear and Mouse. They would all have their way with the princess,
then
they’d bring her back to Lendowyn for whatever award might be offered.

And that, my friends, is why they made him the leader.

I barely had time to undo the knot and resume my post-unconscious posture on the ground, against the roots of a tree, hands behind my back, before they shoved Mouse down at me. He fell down, face against my stomach, to the sound of Bear’s laughter. “You found her, right? You get the first taste.”

Mouse pushed himself upright, so he was on all fours above me. He was trembling, and didn’t look me in the eye. “S-sorry, Princess.” The guy was almost making me sympathetic for a potential rapist.