Dragon Thief (9 page)

My first thought on seeing Sir Forsythe was that it was time for me to undergo my own trial by nightmare. That was only slightly unfair to him, since while he had pledged fealty to me, that was only
after
trying to kill me a few times. It was hard to completely trust anyone who had managed to somehow reconcile maiden-saving and monster-slaying with the worship of the Dark Lord Nâtlac. It was a bizarre bit of mental legerdemain that, frankly, made him look as crazy as a rabid goblin drunk on fermented mushrooms.

But he was also one of the few people around who knew me as I originally appeared, pre-princess.

“What are you doing here?”

“A final devotion before the usurper offers me to the Dark Lord.” He shook his head sadly. “I had always expected my end would be on the battlefield fighting the forces of darkness.”

You
are
the forces of darkness.

“No, why are you in Grünwald?”

“To find you, My Liege.”

“What? How?” I had a brief surge of optimism that they had figured out what had happened.

“When you disappeared, suspicion immediately fell to your main rival for the Dark One's favor.”

“When I . . . disappeared?” Something about the way Sir Forsythe spoke suggested something else was going on.

“The Dragon Prince was inconsolable when you were abducted from your chambers. Without a ransom demand there was no evidence of who took you and where.”

The coward just ran away, great.

“Of your retainers, I am the one who knows the most of the secret ways through Grünwald, and the passages to enter their keep unseen. It was my sacred duty to find proof that Grünwald was behind your disappearance.”

“That doesn't seem to have worked very well.”

“I was betrayed, My Liege,” he said. “I had barely slipped across the border and King Dudley's soldiers were waiting for me. I battled valiantly, but there were too many. I was overwhelmed.”

I didn't say anything, but I suspected that his capture had less to do with any betrayal than it did with the fact that it was implausible that Sir Forsythe could sneak anywhere. The man was normally as subtle as a brick to the face.

“But I see that the Dragon Prince's suspicions have been vindicated. You are here—”

“Not exactly. Dudley doesn't even know he has me prisoner.”

“My Liege?”

“You served Grünwald for a long time. I suppose you are familiar with the Bastard Prince Bartholomew?”

“Of course, a horrid man, exiled and driven to be a petty outlaw.” Sir Forsythe shook his head. “Forgive me, My Liege, but what does Prince Bartholomew have to do with what is happening?”

“Everything, unfortunately.”

 • • • 

It felt like hours later when I opened my eyes and found myself back on the cot in the dungeon cell that Dudley had left me in. However, from what I had experienced before in the Dark Lord's realm, I knew that it had only been a few minutes.

I took a few breaths to help the sense of disorientation pass. Being in Nâtlac's presence too long left a feeling like sharp gravel abrading the inside of my brain. I rubbed my temples, remembering that at some point I had heard the Dark Lord mentioning something suggesting that what his mother lacked in ambition, King Dudley made up for in stupidity.

I found it impossible to fault the sentiment.

King Dudley apparently hadn't known, thought of, or cared about the fact that the mass consecration in Nâtlac's presence would give the offerings a chance to communicate. Of course, most victims would be paralyzed by the inherent wrongness of the Dark Lord's presence and escape into their own nightmares like the girls had.

However, Sir Forsythe was an acolyte of Nâtlac, and the Dark Lord had actually crashed my wedding. We were both about as used to it as you could be. Even if I had been the Bastard Prince Bartholomew, Dudley expected his half brother to be familiar enough with the family religion to bring six girls into Grünwald specifically to sacrifice them.

Even if King Dudley the Dim thought it didn't matter because we were all locked up in the dungeons, it was a stupid risk.

Especially since it
did
matter.

Sir Forsythe was here specifically because he was aware of just about every secret passage in this keep. There were very few in the dungeons, which was why he was still chained in a hole. But, given the fratricidal history of the Grünwald royal family, it didn't take a genius to realize that if there was going to be a secret passage in the dungeons, it would be installed in the so-called “King's Suite,” and that the king who installed it might have been less than forthcoming about its existence to his immediate family.

It was just too bad for King Dudley's father that the queen had him assassinated rather than imprisoned. Then again, one man's ironic regicide is another's escape hatch.

 • • • 

It took me a bit of searching to find the false stone in the base of the wall and pry it free. Beyond was an unlit tunnel, dark as the Lord Nâtlac's soul. I grabbed the oil lamp from the table and shone it into the hole. Beyond the wall, the hole opened up into a narrow corridor that snaked between this cell and the next. The space was rough and unfinished and barely wide enough to accommodate me in my current incarnation. I crawled and wedged myself in.

Even with a bustline, I would have fit better as a princess.

There were handles on the inner side of the false stone, but I only made a token effort to pull it shut behind myself. Tight as the space was, I couldn't bend myself to get the leverage to grab it, and there were other things higher on my priority list.

I crept along, sandwiched between two stone walls, holding the lamp in front of me. It felt like hours. Then I came to the end.

I stared ahead of me. Several feet in front of the lamp, the void between the walls was filled top to bottom with loose stone and gravel. I suspected that was how the walls were naturally constructed, two stone surfaces with a void filled with debris. It certainly would make it harder to dig out, and it made the “secret” passage easy to hide, since the wall with the passage wouldn't be any thicker than any other wall.

That was a point in the designer's favor.

However, that was outweighed by the complete absence of any obvious exit. I stood there, dumbfounded, wondering if some sort of cave-in had blocked my escape. That seemed unlikely, since the debris blocking my escape was packed too flat and evenly to have happened by accident.

Did Dudley discover the passage and block it off?

Then why block it off here and not back at the cell itself? It seemed a lot of trouble to go to just to have a laugh at my expense.

The flame from the oil lamp flickered, and I realized that I felt a slight draft on my face.

“What?” I whispered.

I did my best, one-handed, to shutter the lamp. I fumbled with it and it slipped out of my hand. It clattered on the floor and guttered out, plunging me into almost complete darkness.

After several long moments freezing in place, my eyes began adjusting to a dim light that seemed to shine up from the floor in front of me. I lowered my arm, no longer holding the lamp, so I could lean over and look down at the light source.

It was a good thing I had stopped where I had. Barely a hand's-breadth from my right boot, the floor dropped away. From there to the wall of debris, there was no floor, just a drop into a corridor somewhere in the dungeons. The wall behind me continued to descend until it reached a stone floor about ten feet below, and the flickering light came from what I assumed was a torch hiding behind a pillar that hugged the wall and supported the end of the passage before me.

I heard footsteps below. I held my breath and quietly inched forward to lean in and get a better view of the hallway beneath me. That proved a mistake. My right foot slid on spilled lamp oil and shot out from under me. I fell forward, and almost completely through the hole. My descent was only stopped by instinctively grabbing the top of the pillar in front of me and pushing my left foot against the edge of the hole. I fought to remain silent as my naked hands slapped against the stone and pressed in.

Snake was just tall enough for the maneuver to work.

I held myself there, muscles vibrating, as one of the dungeon guards sauntered by below me. His pace was leisurely. So much so that it felt deliberate as my lungs screamed for air and my legs, arms, and hands stung from the effort of holding me suspended.

After a short eternity, he passed out of sight behind the pillar in front of me.

I slowly exhaled, and when no one came running, I shifted my grip on the top of the pillar and let go with my legs to swing down to between the pillar and the wall. I dangled for a moment, then dropped the last four feet or so. It would have been a graceful dismount if not for the fact my right boot was still slick from lamp oil and slid away from me again, dropping me on my ass.

I sat there, not daring to move. After it became clear I hadn't made enough of a commotion to warrant the attention of the guard ahead of me, I got slowly to my feet and peeked around the pillar.

I stood in the middle of a long corridor dominated by rough stone pillars supporting squat vaults every ten paces or so. Every other pair of pillars had a torch burning in a sconce between them. The torches were all on the same side of the corridor I was, meaning that the space where I stood, between a torchless pair of pillars, was the most shadowed spot available. Looking up, the gap in the ceiling I had fallen through was completely wrapped in the shadows from the pillars and the vaults they supported. Even standing directly beneath it, I couldn't distinguish between the gap and the shadows surrounding it.

“So far, so good,”
I whispered.

 • • • 

I had some basic information on the dungeons from Sir Forsythe, but he could impart only so much in the time we'd had. Also, he had no knowledge of the girls or where they might be locked away. There were five levels of cells where they could be hidden.

However, there were other sources for that information.

I followed my quarry past two twisting corridors while he made his rounds, and I made my move when he passed near a cell that was open and empty.

I'm normally not bloodthirsty, but people guarding more-or-less innocent sacrifices to the Dark Lord Nâtlac are fair game. Also, when you're armed only with a torch and the element of surprise, you can't really hold back and wait for the other guy to draw a sword. So one burning torch across a face later, I stood over the unlucky guard holding his own sword to his neck.

“My face!” he yelled at me through a still-smoldering beard.

“Shut up,” I said, “or the pain is going to come to a very abrupt stop.” I prodded his neck to emphasize the point.

The guard whimpered, but he sucked it up and stopped screaming.

“Now,” I said, “you're going to tell me where you're holding all the sacrifices.”

“I don't know what—”

He stopped when I pressed the sword point down. “Try again. Six teenage girls and a pretentious knight. I'd think that'd stick in your mind.”

“Oh, them.”

“Where?” I repeated.

I left my singed adversary in the unused dungeon cell after divesting him of his weapons and armor. Unfortunately, it was too ill-fitting to be a disguise. I had to leave half the fittings unbuckled, and I had to abandon the boots and helmet. But it did give me more protection than I started with.

I did have one lucky break—assuming he'd been telling me the truth. According to him, my girls were all chained in a single cell only a few hundred yards from Sir Forsythe.

I just had to sneak down one more level to the deepest part of the dungeon. Unfortunately, there was only one narrow stairway down, protected by a guardsman who rivaled my barbarian friend Brock for sheer size. I suspected that he was on guard duty here because he wouldn't fit in the stairwell.

Unlike Brock, I felt a sense of physical competence about the guy that suggested walking up to him and swinging a sword would just be adding to my personal list of bad ideas.

As I hid in the shadows, trying to come up with an effective way to get around this guy, the involuntary fire-eater I had locked up behind me decided to start screaming. While I had chained the semi-flammable guard to the wall with the available manacles, apparently balling up the end of his shirt and shoving it in his mouth did not make an effective gag.

But that oversight made an effective distraction.

The main obstacle to my descent ran off to investigate the screaming. He ran by the pillar I hid behind without even looking in my direction.

Once he passed, I bolted for the stairwell.

It was a good thing my immediate nemesis was distracted by my lightly toasted victim, because my oil-slick boot squeaked loudly on the stone as I ran. I stopped running when I hit the stairway.

The steps downward were narrow, steep, irregular, and corkscrewed down into complete darkness. If I tried to run down the stairs, my slick boot would probably try to kill me.

I sheathed the sword I'd been holding and grabbed the nearest burning torch from its sconce and began a slow, careful descent. I finished two complete circuits before I reached the bottom, where the stairway emptied into a closetlike antechamber dominated by a heavy oak door banded in iron.

The door would have been close to impenetrable, if it wasn't for the fact that the heavy iron bolts were all on this side. I slid the bolts aside with my free hand and stepped back as the door slowly creaked open toward me, pulled by its own weight.

I saw flickering light beyond, and I took a step to keep behind the opening door. I heard a horrible guttural sound and for a second believed that some demonic creature had been set to guard the lower depths of the dungeon.

Then the sound cut itself short with a sucking breath and I realized it was someone snoring. I heard a clatter and a groan, then a deep voice say, “Gryod?” Followed by a long yawn. “Can't be time yet, is it?”

The door now hung fully open, pressing me against the wall. I couldn't see the speaker, but I heard his footsteps, large and heavy, as imposing as the man above had been.

“Gryod? You there?”

The footsteps approached me. I heard jingling that might have been mail, or keys. I also heard a sound unmistakably like a blade being drawn from its scabbard. “Who's there?”

I said nothing and kept my gaze focused on the gap between the door and the floor. I saw a shadow pass on the other side as I heard the man, very close now, say, “Show yourself!”

I decided to oblige him by bracing against the wall behind me and shouldering the door closed with all the force I could muster.

I can say this about the body Snake bequeathed me, it made such a move a lot more plausible than it would have been if I still had Lucille's mass and upper body strength. The massive door had quite a bit of momentum as it slammed into the unseen guardsman. It came to a stop with a bone-jarring impact that stopped me cold and sent a dagger of pain shooting down the right side of my body. I heard cursing and a thud, and I ducked around the door to point my weapon at the prostrate guard.

I cursed myself as I realized that the weapon I pointed at his bloody face was the guttering torch.

“My nobe!”
The man below me bellowed, swinging his own sword up to knock the burning torch out of my hands.
“You buhded my nobe!”

I jumped back and drew my sword as the man unsteadily got to his feet.

“Imb goind to cud your fabe off!
”

The massive guard had about a foot's reach on me. He swung his sword back, and before he brought it to bear, I hooked my foot around the door and slammed it shut on him again. It hit with a solid crack, and I heard the sword clatter to the ground.

“Ag! I'll gill you.”

The door swung back toward me, and I saw the guy, on his knees, holding his bloodied face in his hand as he groped behind him for his sword.

You don't change a winning strategy. I slammed the door on him again. Since he was leaning forward slightly, it was brought to a solid halt by his forehead. The door swung inward again, forced by the full weight of the guy falling against it. He flopped, unconscious, facedown in front of me.

 • • • 

Armed with keys liberated from the man who lost his argument with a door, I started opening cells. The first few were people I didn't recognize, but I freed them anyway. The logic was simple and self-serving. There were at least two guards upstairs free to come after me or sound an alarm, and it would be a bit more difficult for them if a bunch of former prisoners were coming up out of the lower levels of the dungeons.

If you can't remove the opposition, distract them.

The girls had been stripped of their armor and placed in one large cell together. I opened the door and six pairs of eyes focused on me. I heard Grace's voice, raw as if she'd been screaming, “You bastard.”

“I . . .” They all sat on the straw-covered floor, chained, dressed only in the oversize male chemises they'd worn under their salvaged armor. Without the outward trappings of their independence—the armor, weapons, even their grotesque jewelry—they appeared much smaller than they had before. “I'm getting you out of here.”

“You got us in here!” Grace spat.

I started with Thea who stared at me with shiny eyes and shook. The chains came off her legs with a clatter, and she leaped up to run across the room to cower behind Grace and Mary. Rabbit didn't cower, but she didn't look me in the eye as she got up and walked over to Grace and Mary.

When I unlocked Laya, she whispered as she stood, “You were right. It can't be worth it.”

Of them all, only Krys looked at me as if I wasn't the guard come to haul them away to sacrifice them to Nâtlac.

I finished freeing them and said, “Now let's get you all out of here.”

My statement was met by a thundering silence.

“Come on, we don't have much time before the guards—”

Grace stepped forward. “Why should we go anywhere with you, Bartholomew?”

Crap.

“Can we talk about that when we're not in the middle of escaping?”

The band of girls crowded together, Mary and Grace at the front.

“Escape to what?” Grace said. “What do you want us for?”

“I'm trying to save you!”

“So you can use us before your brother does?”

I rubbed my forehead. I always knew that everything would unravel at some point. I had just naïvely hoped that it would happen at a more convenient moment. Behind me, I heard the sounds of commotion, running feet, things thudding into walls, people cursing and shouting.

The other escapees must have introduced themselves to the guards.

“You really should come with me.”

“Why should we trust you?” Mary said.

I had two swords and scabbards I had liberated from the guards I'd fought. I pulled both of them off and tossed them on the ground in front of the girls.

“Because I'm trusting you,” I said. “I'm sorry. Things got out of hand. I can't explain everything now. Too many angry guards coming after us. We still have to find the guy who knows how to get out of here.”

“I don't think—” Mary started to say.

I didn't hear the rest of her statement because someone tackled me from behind, screaming,
“Gill you!”

I hit the floor as I turned toward my assailant. A huge bloody moon face with a nose swollen like a lumpy black potato snarled and drooled down at me.
“Gill you!”
he shouted again, spraying me with blood, phlegm, and broken teeth. I couldn't respond since words were hard to come by while this guy squeezed my trachea shut.

“I'll teah you do slam a door in my fabe!”
He pounded the back of my head into the floor for emphasis. Fortunately the stone floor was covered by a layer of filthy straw and fecal matter, so I probably only got lice and some sort of disease rather than a concussion.

He yelled something inarticulate that trailed off into an incoherent sputtering. His hands loosened and he turned his head to look off toward the girls.

“Ah you gibbing me?”
he said as he fell off to the side.

Above us, Grace held my recently abandoned sword.

I sat up, rubbing my neck. “What about the rules?” I asked.

Grace looked down at me and said, “Don't press your luck. You said that there's someone who can get us out of here?”

 • • • 

I let Grace and Mary bear the swords. One less thing for me to worry about. Despite the change of heart that saved my life, I could still tell that I had exhausted the reservoir of trust I had with them. Better to let Fearless Leader take her natural role and not even pretend I was in charge. Once all of us were out of this place, we could part ways.

Just a bit deeper in the dungeon we found Sir Forsythe. I opened a heavy iron door, and it was unquestionably him. He was the only man I knew who could be stripped and thrown in a dungeon hole and still appear as if he'd stepped fresh off the parade grounds. Despite the black manacles holding him to the wall, the filthy bedding in the stall, he appeared unsullied, his long blond hair shining in the torchlight.

“Is it you, My Liege?”

“Yes.” I ran up and started unlocking the chains that bound him to the wall. “You're going to lead us out of this dungeon.”

He stepped free and looked me up and down. “You
are
wearing the body of Prince Bartholomew.”

“Yeah, he goes by ‘Snake' now.”

From outside the cell I heard Grace. “Who's the pretty boy, and what is he talking about?”

He drew himself up and walked out, intoning, “I am Sir Forsythe the Good, fair maiden. I am here in service to my liege, Frank Blackthorne, Princess of Lendowyn, and the rightful Dark Queen of Nâtlac. And I am going to save you.”

There was a chorus of “what?” as Sir Forsythe strode through their midst. Mary gaped at him, and he bent down to kiss her hand. “Thank you, My Lady,” he said. Somehow he had taken the sword Mary had been holding.

Sir Forsythe raised the sword above his head and said, “Now, follow me.” He charged back the way we had come.

Grace sputtered, “What the f—”

“We better follow him,” I said. “He knows the way out.”

Everyone started chasing the charging knight. As we ran, Grace asked, “Who is Frank Blackthorne?”

“That would be me.”

“What?”

“Princess of Lendowyn? Dark Queen?” Mary sounded the words as if she had lost track of what they actually meant.

“Long story,” I responded.

Behind us I heard Laya say, “Aren't we running back toward—”

She didn't manage to finish the thought, because she was interrupted by Sir Forsythe bellowing, “Servants of the Usurper! Cower before the might of he who serves the true Queen of the Dark One!”

The statement was punctuated by a high-pitched scream as a flailing body sailed through the corridor toward us. Everyone dodged to hug the wall as a guardsman crumpled limp between us. After a moment of shock, Rabbit, Krys, and Laya descended on the body, stripping it of weapons and armor quicker than I thought possible.

Sir Forsythe, for all his bluster, seemed to have a hint of tactical competence, if not subtlety. He stood before the doorway to the upper levels, but not so close that anyone could fight him with the door. But that meant that the guards—and I couldn't even see how many there were past the door—were forced to engage him one-on-one. That was not a winning proposition.

A guard took a step toward him and swung his weapon. Sir Forsythe effortlessly blocked it and grabbed the faceguard of the man's helmet with his free hand. Sir Forsythe pulled the man's head forward. As his opponent fell, Sir Forsythe bellowed, “Brilliant! Future generations will sing ballads of how bravely you stepped up and met your doom!”

The guard continued stumbling forward, and Sir Forsythe dropped his block and introduced his weapon to the back of the falling man's neck. The result was not pretty.