The Dragon Heir (36 page)

Jason felt like the fricking
princess in a video game.

“What's going on?”
he demanded.

“Wylie has some questions
for you. Now shut up.” As they neared the boundary of the camp, shouts
erupted behind them. The White Rose had discovered that their prisoner was
being stolen.

The Red Rose wizards let go of
Jason and turned to defend themselves. As the shields went up and charms began
to fly, Jason left his captors behind and charged toward the gate.

Fitch peered down through the
witch's brew of smoke and flame into no-man's-land, rubbed his eyes, and looked
again. Yes. There was furtive movement at the outer gate, the shapes of several
dozen figures crossing the open field.

He wiped his sweaty hands on
his jeans. Was this it? The assault they'd been waiting for? It wasn't exactly
an army. But a few wizards could do a lot of damage. He squinted through his
field glasses, picking out the White Rose emblem on several of the invaders.

He turned, looking for Will,
and saw that his friend had fallen asleep, leaning against the scaffolding at
the end of the curtain wall. Fitch couldn't remember the last time they'd
slept, other than accidentally.

“Hey, Will,” he
said. “Wake up.”

Will instantly came awake,
pulling hastily away from the wall. “What? I was just resting my
eyes.”

“Go tell Jack.
Something's going down.” Fitch pointed off the wall with his chin.

Will crept forward on his
hands and knees and peered over the battlement, then scrambled backward like an
oversize crab. Giving Fitch a thumbs-up, he picked his way along the
scaffolding and disappeared into the darkness. He could be amazingly quiet for
a jock.

Fitch resumed his
surveillance, feeling like a member of the INS border patrol. He fished the
remote out of his pocket and clutched it in one hand. He'd laid explosive
devices all along the outer wall, in a modern-day version of the method
medieval sappers used to undermine a fortification.

The first party was midway
across the field when another, larger group poured through the bad-guy gate,
following the first wave of White Rose wizards. From what he could see through
his binoculars, this second group seemed to be Red Rose wizards.

The White Rose advance party
didn't notice them at first. When they did, they didn't seem happy about the
reinforcements. After a moment's jostling confusion, half the group continued
on, increasing their pace, while half hung back, turning to confront the
oncoming army.

When the two groups came
together, wizard flame erupted all along the line. The Roses were fighting each
other!

Fitch fingered the remote
nervously. If this was the assault they'd been anticipating, it was show time.
But he didn't know what to make of the events on the ground.

Seph had found a quiet place
from which to monitor the boundary of the sanctuary in one of the many drum
towers Mercedes had built into her elaborate wall. It was good to be enclosed
in stone, since he tended to set things on fire otherwise.

There he hung silently like a
bat in a cave, his magical sonar lightly fingering the concentric walls of the
inner fortress and the outer wizard wall, scouring the disputed space in
between. He'd been on the wall for three straight days—putting out fires and creating conflagrations of his
own.

Con-fla-gra-tion. A perfect word for a perfect storm of death. His
enemies vaporized like mosquitoes who'd blundered into a high power line.

What time was it? He stood,
stretching his overused muscles, massaging the base of his spine. He rubbed his
grainy eyes and tried to spit out the awful taste in his mouth. Failing that,
he pulled the flask from his pocket and washed it away with a long swallow of
flame.

He had no idea whether he was
really addicted to the stuff or if pain and exhaustion had made it temporarily
necessary. At one time that distinction would have seemed important. If
Mercedes wouldn't make it for him, there were plenty of sorcerers who would.
They'd seen what he did on the wall. They knew he stood between them and
hundreds of wizards, and they knew what would happen if he failed.

The flame coursed through him,
and he was okay again. Totally. In fact, he felt almost giddy. Impervious.
There was another perfect word.

The world crowded in and he
welcomed it, each tiny blade of grass and leaf of tree and power-crazed wizard.
Once again, he felt embedded. Connected.

Somewhere behind him, the
Dragonheart throbbed like a toothache. His own heart seemed to keep time. He
was the energy that connected and destroyed.

He sensed the intruders before
he saw them, felt the raw power of hundreds of wizards exploding through the
wizard wall and streaming toward the sanctuary.

Leaving the drum tower, Seph
ghosted forward until he could look over the curtain wall. The sun had not yet
crested the horizon, and no glimmer of dawn had penetrated between the walls.

I know you're down there, Seph
thought, pushing back his sleeves. Did you think I wouldn't notice? He was
primed, bristling with power. They'd be history before they ever made the wall.

They came in two waves, the
one rapidly overtaking the other.

Flame erupted between the
walls as they came together, a ragged line spewing a fume of ruddy smoke like
lava hitting the cold sea. Wizards were fighting each other down below. But a
handful of invaders came on, heading for the Weirgate. Too close.

Seph lifted his hands, meaning
to send flame roaring into the group charging for the gate. And stopped,
sensing a familiar tear in the fabric of magic. A memory.

Instead, he launched a
rippling arc of light into the sky. It illuminated an apocalyptic scene.

Hundreds of wizards battled
each other between the walls. Most bore emblems of the Red or White Rose. Near
the gate, a small group of White Rose wizards had stalled, stymied by the
barricade. And, amid them, Seph saw someone that stopped his heart.

Madison.

She was at the center, carried
along by the flow of bodies like a chip of wood on a flood, buffeted and
jostled by the wizards around her. Her hair glittered in the wizard light, twisting in the
hot winds generated by the flames. Was she a prisoner? Hostage?

Seph vaulted over the
battlement, landing halfway down an interior staircase that led to the
courtyard at the bottom. Then raced down the steps, his feet touching every
third or fourth one.

“Commander! Sir! Wake
up!”

Jack surfaced from sleep,
wondering who the commander was and wishing he'd respond so he could go back to
sleep—until he remembered that he was
the commander. He sat up, banging his head on the bunk above. It was the first
time he'd actually lain down in a bed in a week, and now…

“Will's here.” It
was Mick. The tall Irish warrior had been assigned to be his bodyguard.

Will Childers pushed past
Mick. “Jack. They're coming. They're attacking. Or something. Hundreds of
them. Heading for the gate.”

Jack had yanked on his boots
and was on his feet before Will finished speaking.

“They're ready for you,
Commander,” Mick said.

“Where's
Stephenson?”

“She's out there in the
middle of it.”

“What's she doing?”
Jack snatched up his baldric and strapped it in place. He pushed his way out of
the tent and loped toward the gate, leaving Mick and Will to catch up as they
might.

The plan was, there'd
be no heroic sorties outside the wall, where their small numbers would put them
at a disadvantage. Instead, they'd line the top of the Weirwall and rain destruction
down on any among the enemy brave enough to approach it.

Ellen was the strategist. What
was she thinking?

They were waiting for him, his
ghost warriors. They'd trained for months for this moment. Somewhere out there
in the dark were Ellen and her hundred. Against hordes of wizards pouring into
the gap. Why would she leave the relative safety of the sanctuary and wade into
an unwinnable battle?

“They're already hard at
it, sir,” Brooks said, scraping his. hair into a ratty-looking queue and
tying it off with a strip of leather. “It's a melee.”

Outside the Weirwall, Jack
could hear the thud of bodies colliding and the cries of the wounded. It seemed
like a lot of noise. Even given the fact that Ellen was involved.

“Why'd she go out
there?” Jack demanded. “Why didn't you stop her?”

Brooks spat on the ground.
“Have you ever tried to stop Captain Stephenson from anythin'? She was
looking off the wall and she seen somethin' out there, and went out after it.
The others followed.” He paused. “We need to go after her, I reckon.
She wouldn't go out there 'athout good reason.”

It was what Jack wanted to
hear. He tried to close his mind to the possibility that he was putting his
warriors in danger in order to save Ellen's life.

“All right, I'm going out
after Captain Stephenson. If anyone wants to come with me, they're welcome, but
it looks like a bloodbath out there.”

His warriors crowded forward.
All of them.

“Well.” Jack tried
to  swallow down the lump in his throat. “Um, at least half of you need to stay
here and hold the walls.”

In the end, he had to force
them to count off. Brooks was selected to stay behind, but he called in a
gambling debt and joined Jack in the barbicon.

“Let's go.” Jack and
his fifty passed through the long tunnel of the gate, under Mercedes's murder
holes, and waded into chaos.

Visually, it was a sea of
bodies—some jammed so closely together it
was impossible to swing a blade, let alone tell friend from foe. Other twosomes
danced and dueled, as oblivious to the battle raging about them, as if they
were all alone on the practice field. Wizard on wizard, warrior on wizard—but
no warriors on warriors since none were fighting for the other side. Flames
spiraled into the sky and roared along the ground like a seriously
malfunctioning fireworks show. Some of the fighters were clearly marked with
emblems of the Red or White Rose, yet they seemed to be doing their best to
kill one another.

Which was a blessing, because
otherwise it would already be over.

All around, Jack heard the
meaty thwack of metal against flesh, the explosion of air as blows hit home,
the polyphonic roars of his fellow warriors. Then he was engulfed by the
fighting and gave himself up to it for a while, using Shadowslayer to create a
path ahead. He was still looking for Ellen.

He heard a distinctive
yodeling war cry and turned to see Brooks standing alone atop a small hill,
bleeding from a number of wounds, armed with shield and his trademark tomahawk,
under attack by four wizards. Bodies were scattered all around his
feet, and Jack wondered how many were theirs.

Brooks was losing strength. He
parried the wizards' assaults clumsily, staggering from stance to stance as the
wizards closed in, smelling blood. No doubt he would have been down already,
but they wanted to take him alive.

Jack was still a hundred yards
away when a bolt of wizard flame hit home, striking Brooks in the chest,
bringing him to his knees. The wizards charged, and Brooks raised his ax with
both hands, spewing eighteenth-century oaths and insults, probably hoping he
could goad them into killing him outright.

Jack fished in a pouch slung
across his chest and came up with a throwing star, something from Raven s
Ghyll. He had no idea what it might do. Desperately, he sidearmed it at the
wizards bearing down on Brooks.

It scissored into their midst,
and two of them went down, shrieking.

Jack parried several blasts of
flame and then he was into them, sweeping his blade from side to side, driving
the wizards back. Hot blood spattered his face and hands. Someone stepped,
hard, on his foot, and actually muttered, “Sorry.”

Brooks writhed on the ground,
still trying to stick the wizard leaning over him. Jack heard an immobilization
charm uncoiling, as if in slow motion, and he shouldered into the source,
slashing blindly with his belt knife. The wizard fell.

Jack knelt next to Brooks in
one of those tiny bubbles of time that probably last a half second, but seem to
go on forever. “Come on, Brooks. Up. Let's get you to Mercedes.”

Blood dribbled from the
warrior's mouth. “I'm done, Jack. But I took ten of the bloody bastards
wi' me, and that's something.” He gripped Jack's hand, as if looking
for confirmation. Jack could only nod. “All the tournaments I won, all the
poor warriors I put down…not half so … satisfying.”

Jack could scarcely speak.
“Up you go,” he whispered, brushing away tears with his gauntlet.
“Quit malingering.”

“Tell the girl, when you
find her…she has talent,” Brooks gasped. “She's a fine fighter.
Always was.” And the warrior closed his eyes.

Jack remembered a sunny
morning in Cumbria, Brooks charging at him across the grass, beaded hair
flying, his moccasins wet with the dew, a tomahawk in each hand. More alive
than any ghost had a right to be.

He stood, looked around. The
center of the battle had moved a hundred yards off. Ellen. He had to find her.
He cut a path through the mayhem, swinging his sword with deadly efficiency.

Eventually, he extracted
himself long enough to note a clutch of White Rose wizards hard by the gate,
seemingly in a furious pitched battle against some Red Rose wizards. And in the
midst of it all, he spotted Ellen and what was left of her patrol—maybe twenty bloodied warriors fighting for their
lives.

Ellen was her usual army of
one, laying about her with Waymaker, smashing blows aside with her shield,
rallying her depleted troops, making life miserable for anyone who came within
her reach.

Jack bulled his way toward
them, wondering why warriors would insert themselves into a battle among enemy
wizards. Then he saw someone familiar among the White Rose wizards against the
wall. Her studded denim jacket splattered   with  blood,  blue   eyes   wide  
with  fright,  she was secured behind a phalanx of wizards and warriors.

Madison?

So focused were the Red Rose
attackers on their intended that Jack cut down a half dozen before they noticed
he was there. Even when he could no longer be ignored, only a few wizards
turned to deal with him while the majority continued their relentless assault
against the White Rose. They cut down one of the wizard defenders and stepped
through the gap, only to be driven back by Ellen's fierce counterattack.