The Dragon's Prize (21 page)

“Sure.  There’s nowhere to go.”  The dragon had an ugly laugh in either form.  He dropped Mira into a pile of silver coins.  She let out a small shriek and fell to her hands and knees, struggling to find purchase in the slippery medium.  “I wonder where your friend is?”

“What?”  Mira looked up from the coins at the dragon, then looked around the cave.  “She fell down that hole!  She can’t possibly be alive!  Oh, Sandra…”  That last part was little more than a choked whisper.

“Well, and I agree with you.  However!”  The dragon boomed out the last word for emphasis and swung his head in suspicious circles around the hoard.  “I didn’t see her body in the spikes.”

“Oh, I’m plenty alive!”  Sandra formulated a thousand plans in her head on how to deal with the dragon, but they all came back to this.  When she came out of the kitchen there was an open space with no cover and terrible footing between her and the dragon.  Running across it would be futile, he would get her before she even made it halfway.

“Ah ha!  There she is!”  Daro swung his head toward Sandra, and she could see that he was still showing signs of their earlier battle.  Blood dripped from a half dozen wounds on his neck and face, which made her smile.  “Ready to die, little morsel?”

“Actually, I’ve changed my mind.”  Sandra told herself she was lying to stretch out the conversation before the fight, giving her a chance to get into a better position.

“What?”  Daro looked taken aback.

“What!?”  Mira looked betrayed.

“What!”  The prince sounded shocked and hurt.  He had no right…!

“What?”  Sandra shrugged nonchalantly.  “I had a little heart-to-heart with the prince and I’ve decided I no longer want to rescue him.

“What?”

“What!?”

“What!”

“Okay, look.  Mira.”  Sandra directed her voice toward Mira, who looked about ready to cry.  “It was him.  He orchestrated our little fight, he goaded me into hitting him.  It’s his fault!”  Sandra was surprised by how much anger was left in her.

“No… no!  Say it’s not true!”

“It’s true.”  Sandra nodded.

“It’s not true!”  The prince shouted in desperation from his cage.

“Change your tune now that you know no one else is coming, eh prince?”  Sandra looked in disdain back at the cage.  He tried to smile at her from between the bars.  “You can’t take it back now…”

“I… come on, it was a mistake!  Just a mistake.  Kill the dragon, let me go, all will be forgiven.”

“No.”

“Kill him!  I command it!”  The prince yelled this time, shaking the bars of his cage as he did so.  “I’m your prince!”

“See, prince.  That’s the funny thing.  Loyalty is earned.  It can’t be taken.”

Everyone was silent for a moment, considering Sandra’s words.  Finally Daro broke it.

“Sorry.  I have a strict policy about not working with people who stab me through the heart.”

“And neck.”  Sandra pointed at the wounds on his neck.

“And face.”  Daro agreed.

“Don’t forget stomach.”

“Right.  Look!”  Daro roared, blowing fire into the air above him.  So that was why the coin pit cave was so tall…  “Point is: you tried to kill me.”

“I was under false assumptions.”  Sandra shrugged as if it were no big deal.  The entire time they were talking, she’d been working her way across the treacherous expanse of coins so that she was nearly at the dragon’s feet.  She was in danger of being stepped on, but one good jump and she could be in melee range with him.  “I thought the prince wasn’t a lying sack of crap.”

“Listen.  I don’t care.  You tried to kill me, and I’m going to return the favor.”

“You could use me.  Us.”  Sandra nodded to include Mira, who was still on all fours in the coins.  The maid’s face was screwed up in a rictus of confusion and betrayal.  That was pretty much how Sandra felt right now.  “You saw us fight.”

“I did.  It was impressive, I agree.  I’m still not letting you go.”

“Hiring me.”

“No!  Not that either!”

“Alright.  Okay.”  Sandra considered the dragon’s leg.  Could she get to it before he set her on fire?  “I guess there’s only one way to settle this.”

“By eating you?  I agree!”

*

Daro lashed at Sandra: a quick swipe that, had she tried to charge him, might have ended the fight before it started.  Instead she jumped backward, drawing the scimitar and slashing at his hand as she did so.

He roared in pain and a bright splash of dragon blood painted the hoard.  Sandra had no time to gloat: the other arm came around and grabbed her.  She was lifted bodily off the ground and hoisted high into the air.  He laughed and the hand squeezed, trying to crush the life out of her.  Sandra’s breastplate squealed and twisted with the force but maintained its shape, providing a dubious barrier between her and certain death.

“Bah!”  Daro cast her aside with a flick of his wrist.

Wind whipped past Sandra’s face and her hair briefly obscured her vision.  Then everything went golden.  Instead of breaking her bones by impacting with the coins, Sandra skipped lightly off of a pile of magical feathers and rolled to an ungraceful but painless stop on her back.

“Ah ha!”  Daro shouted in triumph.  She could hear him lumbering across the coins, making the room jingle and shake.  “Feather fall!  That’s how you lived!”

Sandra slithered to the side, narrowly avoiding a heavy reptilian foot which stamped down where she’d just been lying.  A second foot came down, but she held the sword straight up above her.  The blade pierced through scales and muscle with ease, and Daro’s cry of pain indicated the effectiveness of the weapon.  He reared up on his back legs as blood burst from the wound in his palm, painting coins crimson and staining the wall of his coin pit.  Sandra leapt to her feet and charged at one of his back legs.

His tail came lashing down and caught her feet, tripping her and sending her sprawling to the shifting ground beneath.  As she tried to get up, Daro slapped her with his wing and sent her rolling into one of the carts scattered around the hoard.

Dizzy and winded, but determined to succeed, Sandra leapt back to her feet and took stock of the situation.  Daro was standing on his back feet and bleeding all over the coins.  Both of his hands had wicked cuts and he looked like he didn’t want to put any weight on them.

Good.

The bad part was that, even though he looked awkward standing on his two back feet and using his wings for balance, he still moved damn fast!

“Sandra, watch out!”  Mira cried out as Daro snapped at Sandra with his steak-knife teeth.

Sandra rolled to the side and heard the cart crack and shatter under the pressure from the Daro’s jaws.

“Get to safety!”  Sandra shouted.  She instinctively kept moving and managed to narrowly avoid his tail slapping down hard into the coins.  “I couldn’t find any bows!”

“Where should I go?”  Mira was crouched at the edge of the coin pit, watching the action.  Sandra didn’t want Daro getting smart and trying to use Mira as a hostage.

“The side caves!”  Sandra pointed at the kitchen.  “I don’t think he’s small enough to fit inside!”  She was still running as Daro’s heavy limbs came crashing down around her.

As the coins shook from a particularly powerful impact from a bloody hand, she executed a spinning leap.  The torque of her body sent the sword slashing through the back of Daro’s wrist, cutting a deep wound and once again eliciting a cry of pain from him.  She was ready for it, this time.  He reared into the air and she charged his back leg, sword in front of her like a pike.

Success!

She stabbed the sword directly into his shin, sinking the blade to the hilt and getting covered in scalding-hot dragon blood.  Daro danced sideways and awkwardly launched into the air now that he only had one good limb.

Sandra didn’t want to lose her best weapon against him and stubbornly hung onto the blade.  He dragged her into the air with him, hanging by both her hands off of the sword.  He shouted in pain and shook his damaged leg until the sword worked itself free and Sandra went tumbling through the air.  She was twenty feet off the ground, but a cloud of sparkling feathers met her on the way down and deposited her gently on the ground.

“That’s my sword!”  Daro was spiraling up into the air above his hoard, leaking blood everywhere and trying to figure out how to land without being exposed to Sandra’s constant harassment.  “Thief!”

“You stole mine first!”  Sandra had a good idea what he was going to do next and ran across the piles of coins looking for something, anything that might save her from the blast of fire.

“What?”

“On the mountain!  You threw my sword off!”

“Oh, right!”  Daro finally came to the same conclusion Sandra had and landed on the side of the cave, some thirty feet up in the air so that she had no chance to get to him.  He gingerly used his feet and tail to get a good grip on the rock before twisting his head around and scanning the coin pit for Sandra.  “That still gives you no right to take my things!”

“You took the prince!”

“Two wrongs don’t make a…”

“ Yeah, yeah.  Tell it to the judge.”  Sandra found it!  A kite shield lay half buried in copper coins.  It was old and clunky: terrible for melee combat.

It was exactly what she needed.

The room filled with a rushing sound as Daro sucked in a huge lungful of air.  She could hear the crackle and smell the combustion going on inside his gullet.  Coupled with the rushing wind around her as he vacuumed in enough fuel for the fire, Sandra knew she didn’t have much time.  She levered the kite shield up so it was sticking out of the coins at a decent angle, then crouched behind it.  She pulled herself into as tight a ball as possible, but her mangled breastplate made that difficult.

It wasn’t enough.

It would have to be.  She sucked in a deep breath.

“Sandra!”

Mira’s yell was cut off by an ear-splitting whoosh and the world turned into fire.  Super-heated air swirled around Sandra, and she had to force her body not to breathe it in.  It felt like it was stealing the life out of her very lungs, and only the knowledge that breathing it would be more dangerous kept her from opening her mouth.

Flames coruscated all around her, licking at the sides of the shield and melting the coins around her into an amorphous slag.  The shield was screaming hot against her back and its protection was not good enough to keep her left foot from being engulfed in flame.

It was hard not to watch as her armor turned red-hot and the worst pain she’d ever felt radiated up from her toes.  She bit down hard against the scream.

Then it was over.

The heat remained, making the world shimmer and the air hostile, but the flames were gone.  The red-hot coins shifted and then cooled, and the heat surrounding Sandra’s leg was replaced by pain.

Pain!

Biting her lip, she tore off her boot and then fished around in her pockets until she found one of the potions.  She tried not to look at her foot, which was twisted and black from the heat.  Instead, she uncorked the potion and chugged it in a single gulp.

Warm, golden light replaced the pain.

“Sandra!  Are you okay?”  Mira shouted.  It sounded like she was in the kitchen now, which was good.

“Yes… yes, Sandra.  Are you okay?”  Daro’s laugh was ugly.  Sandra could also hear him taking deep breaths of air as if he were winded.  She wished she were able to take advantage of his weak moment to attack.

She examined her foot.  A moment ago the skin was black and crispy: useless.  Now it was fresh and pink.  It still felt tender, but it would hold her weight and she was no longer in danger of going into shock.  She tore off her other boot and leapt to her feet, brandishing the sword.

“I’m fine.”

Sandra twirled the sword in her hands, giving it a dramatic flourish to emphasize just how fine she was.  Daro looked at her and, she thought, scowled.  It was hard to tell expressions on his muzzle, especially with the gash she’d put in it earlier.

She hoped he was out of fire, and she turned out to be right.  He leapt from his perch on the wall and swooped towards her, roaring and reaching out with his claws.  Sandra somersaulted forward, narrowly avoiding being skewered by talons the size of knives, and finished with a jump.  He was moving fast!  She was intending to get a grip on his stomach or maybe one of his legs, instead she caught his tail.

Her body jerked as her momentum was reversed and shifted upward at a rapid rate.  Her shoulder protested the abuse and she grit her teeth against the pain, somehow managing to maintain her grip.  Daro howled in frustration and shook his tail angrily, nearly managing to knock her off.

She held on, keeping her grip despite his shaking, the swift changes in inertia as he soared around the room, and the wind howling past her.  Her bare feet endured the worst, becoming cold and stiff quickly through the flight.  She dreaded putting weight on them again when she finally finished the wild ride.

No.

Focus on Daro.