Dragon Thief (21 page)

There wasn't anything I could do with everyone held hostage by Snake's men. At least nothing that came to mind before a pair of Grünwald-armored thugs came to escort me down to the rest of the prisoners.

Like the bridge at Fell Green, my escape was blocked off not by physical restraints, but by the potential consequences of my attempt. Snake had too many hostages and I couldn't endanger them like that. Especially since I was already feeling the guilt over the three girls I hadn't seen with the prisoners. I couldn't help but blame myself for the whole catastrophic sequence of events.

Another unwanted similarity between me and Snake: the death and destruction we left in our wakes.

I suppose the smart thing to do at this point was to let Snake follow through on his plan and trust his word that he didn't care about Lendowyn and would return the reins of the kingdom once he attained his own throne.

For some strange reason, I didn't find his promise reassuring. I had never known an aristocrat to willingly relinquish power once acquired. Aside from that, there was the question of how much of Lendowyn would actually remain once Snake had successfully stomped King Dudley's army.

At this point, Fate would have had to go through some severe contortions to make things worse.

Fate was up to the challenge.

 • • • 

A pair of Grünwald thugs marched me down through the castle, down toward the courtyard and the prisoners. I guessed from the fresh armor that these guys were new men, brought in via Snake's attempt to beef up the anemic Lendowyn army. The men who had followed me, in my role as the new Dark Queen, tended to have more worn and battle-scarred armor.

Not that they were any more battle-hardened than these guys, but new armor costs money. I also strongly suspected that most of those men had followed Sir Forsythe in the doomed mission to Grünwald.

It's funny how I had managed to live my whole life up to now without truly hating anyone. Even the damn Wizard Elhared who had so screwed up the lives around him, thrusting me into the princess's body in the first place . . . I don't think I truly
hated
the man. He had pissed me off beyond all reason, caused me and Lucille no end of grief, but what I felt about him was barely a flicker compared to the bonfire of loathing I felt for Snake Bartholomew.

If I could get my hands on Dracheslayer . . .

Then I could what?

Yes, there was a magic dragon-slaying sword in the armory, and I would dearly enjoy plunging the thing through Snake's neck. But I wasn't Sir Forsythe, and I doubted that I'd ever get close enough to land a killing blow. It might protect against dragon fire, but not from a rock dropped from a sufficient height, or from a castle full of the dragon's allies.

Get the sword and get it to Sir Forsythe.

Really, that possibility—even if my momentary escape didn't trigger a wholesale execution of hostages—had the same faults as wielding the thing myself, though he'd probably kill a lot more of the dragon's allies before a rock got dropped on his head.

As we moved through one of the corridors in the upper reaches of the keep, one of my escorts drew his sword and held it up in front of me, blocking his partner with the flat of the blade. “Hold up, Leo. Something's up.”

“What?” his companion asked.

“Ahead. Right.”

We both stared ahead of us to see what he was talking about. We stood in the middle of a long corridor hung with threadbare tapestries. Forward and to our right, one of the tapestries bulged from the wall at the base. The bottom, where it touched the floor, showed a spreading dark stain.

The man with the sword walked up to the tapestry and used the point of the sword to pull it the rest of the way from the wall, revealing a corpse hastily hidden behind it. The tapestry rippled and fell down at his prodding, dropping down over the body. Almost simultaneously, the other guard released my arm. I turned to my side, as he dropped to the ground next to me.

The man with the sword turned to face us. “We have to raise—” When he saw his comrade on the floor by my feet, the sword came up to point at my throat. “Don't move!”

I raised my hands in a hopefully inoffensive manner. “I didn't—”

“What did you—” He was interrupted by something round and shiny suddenly appearing across the bridge of his nose with a solid wet thud. His head snapped back and he dropped like a bag of wet barley through the hands of a drunk brewer.

I spun around and saw Laya step out of the shadows behind us, a leather sling dangling from her hand.

“You're all right!” I said.

“So are you,” she said, smiling a bit as she bent down to retrieve a shiny yellow object from next to the first guard's head. Mary and Krys ran ahead and stationed themselves at the end of the corridor, past the body and the tapestry.

“You're all all right!” I said, feeling a relief completely aside from the fact I was suddenly free to think of some way to fight Snake, or at least free the hostages.

“We can take care of ourselves,” Mary said.

“The others?” Krys asked, looking over her shoulder at me.

“Grace, Rabbit, Thea—they're in the courtyard with a bunch of hostages and more of Snake's troops.”

Laya ran up and grabbed the other shiny blob from the remains of the swordsman's face. She shook some of his face from the object and I could see that it was a heavy gold nugget. She saw me looking and Laya sighed. “I only have three of these. It was a mess down in the treasury, I had to improvise some ammo.” She faced the tapestry. “So why'd you kill this guy and not the ones holding you?”

“Why'd I?” I ran up to the tapestry. “I thought
you
had.”

“We were coming from the other direction,” Mary said. “Hurry up. We're exposed out here.”

I pulled the tapestry away from the body.

The body on the floor sported a dagger in the throat, and it was a dagger I recognized.

Yep, it's gotten worse.

 • • • 

Snake was right. I had been using Weasel's thieving expedition as a distraction to take the attention off of myself as I tried to recover the Tear of Nâtlac. The girls had tried to use it as a distraction to cover their own escape.

It was such a good idea, why wouldn't someone else decide to appropriate it?

What if, just for the sake of argument here, the three turncoat assassins Weasel had used to open up the way to the treasury weren't really turncoats? What if, upon being recruited by Weasel and company, those assassins reported back to their employer exactly what he was planning? What if Prince Oliver wasn't as obtuse as both Weasel and I had been assuming? What if, knowing what Weasel had known about the movement of Snake's assets, Prince Oliver had come to the same conclusion Weasel had, that Snake had taken over Lendowyn in a secret coup? And what if, despite his protests to the contrary, Oliver had believed what I had told him about Snake vacating this body in favor of that of the Dragon Prince?

What if
all
of this was Dermonica's feint before the
real
attack?

All of which would be a somewhat weak chain of reasoning based on the presence of one misplaced assassin's dagger, if it wasn't accompanied by the sudden sounds of battle outside the keep.

 • • • 

We were still high enough in the keep proper for us to find an arrow slit to look down on the outside of the castle walls.

It was bad.

“Prince Oliver,” I said, “why'd you have to be smarter than Prince Bartholomew?”

“What's going on out there?” Mary asked.

I stepped aside and said, “Look for yourself.”

Mary peeked out and whistled.

“Those aren't just assassins and mercenary thugs,” I said. “That's the entire Dermonica army.” And what I had seen was a military force larger than anything I think Lendowyn could have managed, even with Snake's financing.

“How did they get here unopposed?” Mary said.

“Between massing on the Grünwald border and preparing for a fifty-thief invasion here, I think our friend Snake left the entire Dermonica border undefended.”

“Wait,” Krys said, “that doesn't make sense. Prince Oliver didn't believe you, and his father didn't even know . . . Oh.”

“He fed everyone a bucket of goblin crap,” Mary said.

“We were all played for fools,” Laya said.

“Well,” I told her, “I'm sure Snake feels worse.”

 • • • 

If I had any good sense—which I obviously didn't, given the situation I found myself in—I would have found a way to slip outside and run for my life.

Instead, while the mass of the Dermonica army worked to breach the outer wall, I led our way down to the courtyard. We met no other living guardsmen inside the keep. The trio of non-turncoat assassins had been keeping themselves busy eliminating most of the defenders inside the building. The only ones left to defend the wall were the men Snake had massed in the courtyard for my benefit.

In the interests of keeping myself calm in the face of adversity, I did not attempt to calculate the ratio of attackers to defenders. After five-to-one, did it really matter?

Down in the courtyard, the prisoners had been clustered into a group behind a single thin line of guards who faced outward at the new threat across a now nearly empty courtyard. Attackers poured over the wall, engaging the bulk of Snake's men who had rushed up to defend against the breaches that appeared to come from all sides simultaneously.

Lucky for everyone, I and a trio of girls sneaked out of the keep to their undefended rear instead of one of the assassins who must be still at large.

The four of us were able to slip into the rear of the crowd of prisoners and start cutting bonds. I worked my way to the edge of the group and slit the rope binding the wrists of Sir Forsythe.

Without warning, someone grabbed my collar and pulled me away from him. I landed on my ass at the feet of a huge Grünwald mercenary. He raised his sword, and I brandished my recovered assassin's dagger as if it could provide an adequate defense.

The man started a lethal swing, then halted himself, sword in mid-stroke, eyes widening. I saw him curse in frustration, right before Sir Forsythe tackled him.

Of course, Snake wants this body intact. Everyone would have orders not to kill me.

“What does he think he's doing?” I heard a familiar voice yelling. I turned away from Sir Forsythe's pounding of the unfortunate guardsman to see Princess Lucille stepping out from the mass of prisoners, rubbing her wrists. She stared up at Snake the Dragon doing lazy circles in the sky above us. The guardsmen turned, raising swords uncertainly at her. Snake had obviously given similar orders in regard to the princess as he had me.

“Look at him up there,” Lucille said. “Why doesn't he strafe the enemy?” She yelled up at him,
“Don't you know how to be a bloody dragon?”

“He can't hear you,” I said.

She turned around and saw me. “Frank?”

Just then, the guards around her lost their indecision. They whipped around and ran off toward a column of Dermonica troops that had broken the defensive line and were storming down one of the staircases to the courtyard.

I remembered my vision of Lendowyn Castle being overrun.

“I think we may be in trouble,” I said.

The girls finished freeing the prisoners and we stood in the center of a slowly contracting circle of calm. There were no guards left as such, as all had run to defend against the Dermonica troops pushing down from the walls. The dragon flew above us, doing nothing.

We moved toward the only defensible position left, the keep itself. But as we moved, a group of a half-dozen Dermonica troops broke from the surrounding melee to rush to meet us. Sir Forsythe raised his captured sword and yelled, “For Honor!” as he ran ahead to meet the attackers.

Snake finally acted. He swooped down, flew over Sir Forsythe, and immolated the attackers less than a dozen feet from him. The flame shot out in a cone, washing over the six Dermonica attackers to splash against the base of the wall near the keep, catching a few of his own mercenaries.

The fighting around us seemed to pause for a moment as everyone suddenly realized a dragon was part of this fight. For a few seconds all I heard was the crackle of flames and the screams of the poor bastards who hadn't been killed instantly.

Two things occurred to me then.

First, Snake did not have a particularly precise weapon.

Second, he didn't engage the enemy like Lucille wanted because he was preoccupied with keeping us alive. To hell with the keep, or the people defending it, he couldn't let me or Lucille die.

Some think courage is the absence of fear.

Some think courage is acting in spite of fear.

I think courage is just not having the time or inclination to fully contemplate how stupid or dangerous what you're doing actually is.

Sir Forsythe stumbled back from the dead Dermonica attackers missing a substantial amount of his once-grand facial hair. As he did, I stepped forward and grabbed his sword. He looked at me with wide eyes and said, “My Liege?” before breaking out in a fit of coughing.

I don't blame him. Burned hair smells awful.

Sword in hand, I ran toward the thickest part of the melee. I heard Lucille and several of the girls call out to me, and I supposed from their perspective I was engaged in a stupid suicidal gesture.

But that was beside the point.

As I placed myself shoulder-to-shoulder with the Grünwald defenders, swinging a too-heavy sword in a particularly ineffective manner, I wasn't expecting to add much to the sum of Lendowyn's defenses.

That was Snake's job.

I barely got three swings in before a shadow passed above us and a wall of fire fell down just behind the line of Dermonica troops we were fighting. In moments, my section of the defensive line—no thanks to my efforts—began pushing back the attackers.

I couldn't help grinning even as my blade hit helmets and shields with uselessly bone-jarring force. I might not be a factor in the defense of the castle, but I could damn well encourage Snake to participate to keep his own borrowed skin intact. The dragon laid waste to dozens of Dermonica attackers almost before we reached them, and we waded through charred carnage all the way to the top of the wall.

That's when the flaws in my plan became apparent.

Despite the endless supply of attackers, we had run out of them. The Dermonica command wasn't stupid. They had seen quite clearly that the dragon had focused its attacks on one section of the wall, so—quite logically—they had dropped the attack in front of me to concentrate on the unburned flanks.

There was also a second flaw in my plan.

Dermonica troops now filled the courtyard, and the prisoners and about a dozen Grünwald mercenaries were pinned down at the base of the keep, cut off from any way inside.

I watched Snake fly down to carve flaming swaths through the enemy in the courtyard, but while Dermonica seemed to have an endless supply of fresh reserves, we had only the one dragon. I saw the flame was weaker now, and as Snake flew low enough to do damage, a wall of arrows flew up toward him, fired from the walls to either side of me.

I saw one draconic eye turn in my direction, glaring. He coughed out a ball of flame to slam into the archers on top of one wall. As he pulled upward I heard a vile curse on the air, followed by one word.

“Enough!”

The dragon flew up and perched unsteadily on top of one of the highest towers in the keep. He was obviously near exhaustion, sides glistening with the blood from dozens of wounds and pulsing with his labored breathing. The dragon lifted one bloody clawed hand, and I saw something glitter in its grasp.

“Oh no, you're not—”

He was.

“Crap!”
I bellowed as my brain slammed into a point dizzyingly high above the courtyard. My vision blurred and the colors went all wrong. My mouth—my huge, huge mouth—filled with the taste of blood and sulfur. Every part of me was too big and too far away, and my head swayed in an impossible way above my body as my stomach began to rebel at my precarious location and my head throbbed with the multiple hammer blows of having my consciousness ripped from my body
again
.

I blinked with one eyelid too many and my vision cleared enough to see a tiny version of Snake lying on top of a soot-scarred castle wall, still far from any enemy troops. As I watched, he got unsteadily to his feet and started a wobbly run toward the outer parapets.

“No, you bastard!”
I yelled as he climbed over the outside wall. The pain from speech caused my vision to blur. Disoriented, I reached out with a long muscular forearm to swipe at him with a taloned hand. My arms might have been way too long, but they weren't
that
long. I leaned forward too far and I felt the huge mass of wings and tail fly out unconsciously to pull against my back to keep me from toppling forward with the swipe.

It surprised me and I made the mistake of looking behind me. My head whipped around on its impossible neck until I was staring straight down at my own scaled backside, massive tail, and a hundred feet of nothing between me and the top of the castle. The vertigo hit me full force, and everything around me began toppling. I grabbed the tiny bauble that hung around my neck and tried to grip my perch even tighter with my feet, tearing away chunks of the tower in my panic.

I spread my wings as the tower gave way with my balance, but the castle decided to wrap me in a cloud of rubble and the realization that a single dragon is not the be- or end-all of military supremacy.

I managed to cling to my consciousness and the tiny bauble in my hand as the castle came up and hit me. After a stunned moment, I began clawing my way out of the wreckage. I was strong, almost intoxicatingly so, but every stone I threw away ignited fiery pains all along my body. The pain didn't go away. It got worse. As the throbbing mess inside my skull faded from my awareness, it only made way so I could feel the physical injuries full force.

I pushed the last of the rubble aside with a trembling taloned hand and stared at the smears of blood I left across the surface. In the distance I heard voices calling out, “Dragon! Get the dragon!”

Something finally connected in the front part of my mind.

I'm the dragon now.

Flying must be an instinctual aspect of dragonkind, because as that particular thought struck me I was already rocketing upward, shedding blood, ashes, and small parts of castle. I clutched my fist tighter around the Tear of Nâtlac, my thoughts tumbling in a worse chaos than the clouds around me.

Dragon.

Snake's back in his body . . .

They think I'm still him . . .

Hurts.

My stomach suddenly realized where I was and rebelled. I looked down across my massive body and couldn't see ground. Through my pain-blurred vision I couldn't even tell up from down. I screwed my eyes shut to try and calm the welling sickness inside me.

That must have been when I passed out.

 • • • 

For a moment I woke enough to realize I had landed, painfully, somewhere in the woods. I had just enough energy to unclench my taloned hand to see I still clutched the tiny evil jewel. Then I groaned and passed out again.

 • • • 

I slowly became aware of myself and my surroundings some time later. I didn't even have the small blessing of a moment or two to forget what had happened to me. Unlike my first few weeks as the princess, the sensations from this body were too radically different to allow me that small comfort. As soon as I was aware enough to realize I was conscious, I knew something horrible had happened to my body.

Lucille had been okay with this?

I blinked a bloody haze from my lizard eyes and saw a small clearing scattered with the broken remnants of small trees. Actually, the clearing was ringed by small trees. The forest was
filled
with small trees.

Not small trees.

I sighed, and white brimstone-flavored steam curled from my nostrils. I stared at it, then down at my nose. I didn't have to move anything but my eyes, and I could see the black-scaled ridges that formed the upper half of the dragon's snout dominating the lower part of my field of vision.

I had to admit the central flaw in my original plan. I had no idea what to do after convincing Snake to abdicate his coup of Lendowyn by returning to his own body. I certainly hadn't planned for it to happen so . . . inconveniently.

Even when I win, I lose . . .

It was tempting to just use the jewel still clutched in my hand to run away from my problems again. It would serve Snake right to come back to a half-broken dragon. Fortunately, I wasn't drunk, so it only occurred in passing as I mentally itemized all the parts of me that hurt, a list that included parts of me where I'd never had parts before.

One pain proved hard to locate. Somehow I felt a burning sensation that seemed to float outside my body. As it came closer, and became more intense, I turned my head in the direction it seemed to come from.

“Oh you're kidding me,”
I groaned.

About a hundred yards away, jumping over downed trees, I saw Grace leading the rest of the girls. They had managed to arm themselves again and, most importantly, Mary carried the unmistakable glowing red-runed blade,
Dracheslayer
.

I held up a bloody taloned hand and said,
“Hold up there!”

They pulled up to a halt outside my reach, and the others formed a tight group behind Mary and the dragon-slaying sword. Except for Grace, who took a few steps in front. “You know what that blade is?”

“
What do you think you're doing?
”

“There's a price on your head, Snake,” Grace said. “So I see two options. We take that head, or you start telling us where the rest of your treasure is.”

I lowered my forearm. It hurt to hold it up for too long anyway. I sighed and dropped my head to the ground.

The universe really loves me.

“Two problems with that ultimatum, Grace.”

“I know you must have left something in reserve. You couldn't be sure this would have worked.”

“First, you're actually assuming that a complete rat like Snake Bartholomew would honestly tell you where he hid something? It's not like you can take several tons of lizard prisoner and have him lead you there.”

“Head then.”

“Second, you're assuming that Snake hasn't moved on with his plans.”

“What?”

“I'm Frank, Grace. How do you think I know your name?”

“No. He ran off. Left us . . .”

“Flew off.”
I pulled my other hand out from under my body and unclenched it. The Tear of Nâtlac glittered in my palm.
“He always planned to take his body back. That's why his soldiers wouldn't kill me, and why he flew down to defend me when I charged the wall.”

“You're trying to trick us,” Grace said.

“Look at me. I'm half-dead here. He abandoned this body after it took too much damage to be useful. Snake is probably headed right for his army on the Grünwald border, that's what he cares about. Not the dragon, not Dermonica, not the chaos he left at Lendowyn Castle.”

“Damn it!” Grace snapped.

Mary sighed and lowered
Dracheslayer
and stabbed it point-first into the ground. “Great, so we went back after this thing for nothing?”