by LeRoy Clary
The Last Dragon: Book Two
LeRoy Clary
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
The Last Dragon: Book Two
1st Edition
Copyright © 2018 LeRoy Clary
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Cover Design Contributors: Bigstock
Cover Illustrator: Karen Clary
Acknowledgments
Good books are written by several exceptional people, all of whom have my thanks.
My beta readers, Lucy Jones-Nelson, Dave Nelson, Laurie Barcome, Paul Eslinger, and Sherri Oliver, all found lots of things for me to correct, and much to improve. Thank you all. I want to publish the best books I can, and they are certainly better with your help. Any mistakes in the book are mine, and mine alone.
My wife puts up with the time it takes to write a book and deserves extra credit for her help with the covers and her ideas—and she gives me the time to write.
And my dog, Molly. She sits at my feet and watches me write every day.
Books by LeRoy Clary
The 6th Ransom
Blade of Lies: The Mica Silverthorne Story
Here, There Be Dragons
The Last Dragon Book One
The Light of Another Sun
The Mage’s Daughter Series
The Mage’s Daughter: Discovery
The Mage’s Daughter: Enlightenment
The Mage’s Daughter: Retribution
Dragon! Series
Dragon! Book One: Stealing the Egg
Dragon! Book Two: Gareth’s Revenge
Dragon Clan Series
Dragon Clan: In the Beginning (short introduction)
Dragon Clan #1: Camilla’s Story
Dragon Clan #2: Raymer’s Story
Dragon Clan #3: Fleet’s Story
Dragon Clan #4: Gray’s Story
Dragon Clan #5: Tanner’s Story
Dragon Clan #6: Anna’s Story
Dragon Clan #7: Shill’s Story
Dragon Clay #8: Creed’s Story
TABLE OF CONTENT
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Contact Information
Contact LeRoy Clary at his personal email address [email protected] or message him on Facebook at LeRoy Clary's Author Page if you have questions and/or suggestions. His blog is there, and readers are encouraged to make comments.
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CHAPTER ONE
I watched in awe as the last true-dragon in the Kingdom of Dire flew lazily above, high in the pale spring sky. One hadn’t been seen in Dire for generations, but even if they were a daily occurrence, their passing overhead would still draw the attention of everyone on the ground. As it swooped and dived, my breath caught.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” My sister crossed her arms over her chest and said in an accusatory manner as if daring me to disagree with her. Then, in a softer tone, Kendra attempted to console me, “You haven’t really lost any of your magic powers, you know. You just need a new source of dragon essence to draw from.”
Reluctantly and silently, I agreed. However, she didn’t fool me with her kind words, and wouldn’t distract me or quell my frustrations. My anger at remaining in Mercia instead of on the road home to Crestfallen wouldn’t ease. The limited use of what few magic talents I possessed had always been with me, although they were small in nature, which is the name we gave my abilities while we were orphaned children: small-magic. Unlike the gaudy magic of mages and sorceresses, I couldn’t light up the sky with bolts of lightning or create intense rainstorms to end droughts—however neither could they. Not anymore.
Like theirs, my magic abilities had dissipated with Kendra’s release of the dragon a few days earlier. All magic in the kingdom had ceased with that single, but kind action of hers.
“Right,” I replied sarcastically, without looking at her. “All I have to do is search the sky for the only remaining dragon, and if it flies close enough to me, maybe I can perform a quick parlor trick or two.”
Kendra puffed herself up, looking like a strange fish I’d once seen. When it got scared, it puffed up like her, full of spines and a nasty attitude. She said, “Don’t blame me.”
She was right, of course, but she was also my sister and whenever possible, I always blame her when things don’t go well—or my way. It’s more than a tradition for brothers to blame their sisters. It’s required by an ancient family code, I think. It also helps make up for those times when she is at fault and won’t admit it. And other times when I am not at fault but get blamed for her transgressions.
The dragon turned gracefully and flew inland, towards the road that would hopefully soon return the two of us to Crestfallen Castle in the northern corner of Dire, where the king resided. It had also been our home ever since we could remember. Well, that is not exactly true, but it had been our home since Princess Elizabeth took us in as small children and made us her personal servants over ten years ago.
Even the horse I sat upon, Alexis, was a gift from Elizabeth a few years earlier, and it also eyed the dragon nervously, as she always did when Wyverns or dragons flew near. No amount of coaxing or consoling made her relax when they were around, and probably with good reason. The dragon had almost died from starvation while in captivity, and since Kendra had set free, it often ate to regain weight and strength. That required daily meals of two or three sheep, deer, elk, cows, or anything else the supreme predator in history desired. Anything but my horse. The local farmers were going to learn to dislike its sudden appearances too, if we didn’t convince the crown to do something about repaying them for their lost stock. Teaching the dragon to only eat wild animals didn’t seem practical.
Kendra’s upturned face still watched the sky with utter fascination as I calmed Alexis and fought her sidestepping when the dragon returned and twisted its head and peered directly at us. Kendra asked, “Can you feel
your magic increase when she is flying near?”
“Can I feel when it is possible to tap into her essence?” I corrected with a sharper tone than necessary. “That’s what you’re really asking, and the answer is, no. If I attempt to use my magic, it either works or doesn’t. If she is near enough, it works, but there’s nothing that tells me so until I try.”
Kendra shrugged, her eyes still on the dragon. “Of course, that’s what I meant to say. My mind can sense her at a distance, even her direction, but I’m trying to figure out how far away you can, if at all.”
After considering her comment, my curiosity got the better of me. The only known dragon had been imprisoned in a cave in Mercia over four hundred years ago, but I had managed to draw miniscule amounts of her essence while we lived in a far-off corner of Dire. Kendra’s curiosity was normal. The royal mages and the two sorceresses who also lived in Crestfallen performed their magic by drawing on the same source, which had been located four days away by horseback if one rode fast.
Now, my magic didn’t work unless the dragon was within sight.
Since Kendra had freed the dragon, she had acquired a few magical powers of her own, when before she had none. Neither of us knew the extent of those new powers or the possibilities to come. Not yet. While the source of magic now quickly dissipated with distance, despite me being physically closer to the dragon, sometimes nothing happened when I tried to use essence. It was as if the dragon couldn’t help but share its powers while it had been held a prisoner, and now she withheld her essence in anger. Or, perhaps her mage captors had concentrated it in some manner that allowed mages and I to use it at a distance. Of course, I had been an accidental and unknown participant.
“Something important has changed,” I told my sister. “Feel it?”
We walked together around the rubble of the destroyed lower portion of what had been the city of Mercia. We avoided the deepest rubble, the remains of grand buildings. The four equidistant waterfalls still flowed. The city had been built between them. The cliffs had once held buildings that clung to the dark gray stone. The low rumbles from them were a constant reminder of their majesty and power. Above, somewhere high up the side of the cliff, was the cave where the dragon had been chained, and where Kendra wished us to climb. Up the same cliff where the dragon had been kept in a cave which was every bit as much destroyed as the lower city.
As we walked, I was reminded of an old children’s game and rhyme about everything falling down. That phrase came to mind and wouldn’t leave. It went round and round inside until I unconsciously hummed the tune and couldn’t make it go away. What was left of a city where a thousand servants worked for five or six powerful mages was now a broken and tumbled pile of rubble. It had fallen down. When my sister had freed the bonds of the dragon, its first task, no matter how weak the beast had become, was to destroy the cave. The second was to destroy the hated city where her captors lived in comfort and luxury.
The dragon was a female, Kendra assured me. We were learning to refer to it as a her, but the task was difficult when the word monster came to my mind quicker. Kendra’s head tilted back again, this time to examine the sheer cliff between the waterfalls, and the crude stone stairs cut along the rock face. “Part of the answers we seek might be right up there. Right in front of us. We have to climb up there, and you know it.”
I didn’t know it. As far as I was concerned, we’d already done far more than required from a pair of personal servants to a minor princess. “That’s a lot of stairs. Even if we climb all the way up, the dragon probably ruined the steps at the very top, making them impassible. We probably can’t even get to where the cave was. We may as well stay down here and wait for Elizabeth to return.” My reasoning was sound on both points. What I told her was true, and I didn’t want to attempt to climb up there. Both were logical. No, there was a third point, too. I didn’t want to find out what might lie up there if it was bad.
She relented, just a little. “Tomorrow, not today. We’ll start early so we won’t have to climb down them in the dark.”
“We can’t sleep here. This place is haunted—and you’re the cause. It is a dead city.”
Her eyes narrowed at my accusation and lowered from the side of the mountain until they found me—where they seized me as firmly as if she had wrapped her arms around my body and squeezed. “The Blue Woman, the local residents, the mages, and even the spirits have departed. Stata, the husk of a man who attacked us is also dead and turned to dust. The mages have all fled to other lands. There is nothing left here to fear unless we trip over a loose stone or brick.”
“The mage who used Stata’s body isn’t dead, only the husk is. He might come after us in another dead man’s body. Or woman. Or bear. And who knows what the Blue Woman’s spirit will do?”
She scowled but said nothing more. It became clear we were going to climb up there, no matter if I wished to or not. Her jaw was set, her lips were thin lines. I met her gaze. “We’d better find a place to spend the night, hopefully so far away you won’t wish to travel back here tomorrow.”
I turned Alexis with a jab of my knee and rode away at a fast gallop as if my words spurred her on instead of my heels digging into her belly. To our left, the dragon had knocked down the City Gate of Mercia that had stood at the edge of the raging white river. It had also knocked down the arched stone bridge beyond that had crossed the river. That left us no choice but to travel back along the old road following this side of the river, back to the Port of Mercia. The port city was located on the main branch of the river, inland a half-day’s sail from the salty ocean, like all great seaports. They were built on freshwater rivers because the ravenous salt-water worms ate the ship’s hulls. The worms didn’t survive in fresh water. Besides, fresh water also killed the weeds and barnacles that attached themselves to the hulls and slowed the ship’s speed.
Sleeping in the barren and rocky open, an area with no trees and few plants of any sort, that was exposed to the harsh, cold and wet winds that swept in off the sea didn’t appeal to me. Our choices were to travel all the way to the inland city of Andover, a large place filled with intrigue and enemies, or the nearer Port of Mercia. The port was a collection of small ramshackle collection of houses built with boards weathered as gray as the rocky land. It was occupied nightly by hundreds of rowdy sailors, loose women, crooked gambling houses, cheap taverns, dangerous bars, and other businesses that existed primarily to fleece the sailors of their wages and the ships of their profits. I liked it there.
While we had been in the Port of Mercia a day earlier, tracking down a couple of rogue mages who fled the city, there had been one little woman with untamed wild hair the color of a hot fire standing at the entrance of an inn. She had looked at me in a way that demanded my return. That was my wish, too.
However, my sister and Princess Elizabeth had recently taken to doing the opposite of anything and everything I suggested. But I knew Kendra had an aversion to sleeping on a single blanket in the damp and exposed landscape where the tallest bush rose only to my knees. It wouldn’t appeal to her. And even those nearby places that offered minimal shelter were few, so I slyly turned to her and said in a false resigned and defeated voice, “We might as well sleep out here on the bare rocks so we can get an early start up those stairs in the morning. It’s going to take us all day.”
She rode on in silence. But I knew she would soon contradict me and insist we sleep in the comfort of an inn at the port. Perhaps, without my obvious intervention, she could be convinced to stay at the one where that redheaded slip of a girl worked. The trick was to be patient and allow my sister to correct me and thus allow me to have my way.
Instead, she said, “Well, you know best, Damon. A bed and a hot meal at a warm, friendly inn sounded good to me, but if you insist, this is where we’ll stay.”
Damn. She had turned it back on me. My horse Alexis would have liked a bucket of grain to eat instead of the thorny plants we rode by, but my foolhardy attempt to outwit my
sister had utterly failed, and now we’d both go hungry. Alexis turned her head to look at me with one accusing eye as if the horse understood what had just happened.
The reasons to remain nearby Mercia and the stairs for the night made good sense and going all the way back to town didn’t. The return ride in the morning would give us a later start on the stairs.
She said, just as slyly as my remark and without a hint of humor, “Too bad that little girl with the big smile and all that hair won’t have another chance to grab your attention. Oh, I’m sure you didn’t notice her when we rode through town, but she sure noticed you.”
“The one with the red hair?” I couldn’t keep the eagerness out of my voice and knew the instant her laughter sounded that she’d outwitted me again.
“That would be her,” Kendra laughed again, a merry tinkling of triumph as she spoke in a too-sad voice that was as phony as the voices in a puppet show. “Listen, we’ve been sleeping outside for what seems like weeks. I can do with a bath, soft pallet, and a bowl of hot food. Would you mind terribly if we return to the port and stay at an inn for just tonight? I know it’s a lot to ask, but please?”
I kept Alexis moving and proudly refused to turn and look at the grin that was surely plastered on my sister’s face. The port town came into view after a ride of silence, the low gray wood buildings almost the same color as the fog, and the gray river beyond. In denser fog, it would be invisible. Only the masts of a few ships stood above the roofs of the few two-story buildings. Most of them were only one story, clustered along one main street.
One of them had no stories. It had been destroyed by Kendra’s angry dragon the day before. Inside had been four people, all working in concert against the King of Dire, our king. They had planned to supplant him with a double to impersonate him, to switch places and while ruling he would appoint their friends and cohorts to important positions. They had used the dragon’s essence for the magic they turned against the king. When released, the dragon had taken out centuries of pent-up anger and frustrations on them, and on the building where they hid. When last seen, the pile of rubble that had been a large two-story building stood no higher than my thigh.
