Royal Rescue

by A. Alex Logan

  Chapter Eight

  THEY WERE SURROUNDED by squirrels. Not the same fluffy, nonthreatening squirrels Gerald had so often seen in the forests in Andine, but fierce-looking squirrels wearing helmets and breastplates and assorted other bits of armor. Squirrels holding swords and daggers or bows with quivers of arrows slung over their shoulders. Squirrels that looked rather more intelligent—and quite a lot more dangerous—than usual. Gerald didn’t know what to do other than stare at them. Next to him, Omar looked equally confused; his knives were in his hands, but he seemed unsure if he should try to use them.

  It was the dragon who finally broke the silence. “Greetings,” it said in a friendly rumble.

  One of the squirrels, a pitch-black one wearing what appeared to be an eye patch, stepped forward with a torch in one hand and a sword in the other.

  “Greetings,” it returned, albeit in a decidedly less friendly tone. “I am Nadia, leader of the Swamp Squirrels. You are intruding in our domain.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the dragon said politely. “We’re simply passing through, you see. We were unaware this was occupied territory.”

  “Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it,” Nadia said severely.

  Gerald fought back the urge to giggle somewhat hysterically. One squirrel, even one with a sword, is not terribly threatening. A hundred of them, on the other hand…

  “How may we obtain permission to pass through?” the dragon asked, still politely. It did not seem to find their situation at all unusual or alarming. Gerald wondered how many talking squirrels it had run across in its lifetime that it took Nadia in stride. On the other hand, he figured it was probably quite difficult to intimidate a dragon.

  Gerald didn’t want to take his eyes off Nadia, but he examined Omar out of the corner of his eyes. Omar seemed to be more of a mind with Gerald than with the dragon. His eyes darted from squirrel to squirrel like he couldn’t decide which one was most likely to attack first. From the way he was still holding his knives, he seemed to think a fight was a foregone conclusion.

  Gerald wished, possibly for the first time in his life, that he had a weapon of his own.

  But negotiations had been ongoing while Gerald looked around and the dragon seemed to have gotten the upper hand. Several dozen squirrels were melting back into the swamp. The torches winked out one by one, either extinguished or simply carried out of sight.

  Gerald and Omar watched them go. The dragon kept its eyes focused on Nadia.

  “I know the place,” she was saying. “It has been a blight on our domain for generations. You’re telling me you can remove it?”

  “After a fashion,” the dragon clarified. “We will remove its guardian. If the resident doesn’t wish to leave, we will not force her.”

  Nadia bared her teeth in a smile. “If the guardian is gone, we can handle the rest.”

  “You’re not going to kill her, are you?” Gerald burst out. He gulped when Nadia turned her good eye toward him. “Sorry,” he said.

  “We’re not murderers, boy,” she snapped. “If the guardian leaves, the girl will follow. That is how it has always been.”

  “So we may pass?” the dragon interjected gently.

  “You may pass,” she sniffed. “Keep your passengers in hand, if you please.”

  “Of course.”

  The rest of the squirrels melted back into the swamp until Nadia was the only one left.

  “We’ll be watching you,” she said. Then, with a flick of her tail, she extinguished her torch and vanished into the gloom.

  None of them said anything for a long, long moment. Then Omar said conversationally, “You know, I think that was the smallest sword I’ve ever seen. By rights, it really should have been a knife. But it was definitely a sword. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “I bet it still would’ve hurt,” Gerald said.

  “Let’s not find out,” the dragon said. “Let’s get to the dratted tower before something else decides to threaten us.” It started wending its way through the trees as fast as the sticky mud would let it.

  Gerald noticed it was now doing its level best to go around the trees rather than through them. Doesn’t want to upset the squirrels, he thought. Every so often a torch would appear off to one side or another, always far enough away to not be an immediate threat, but close enough to clearly be a warning—a reminder they were allowed passage only conditionally, and they were being watched.

  It made the rest of the journey to the tower incredibly tense, even though Gerald had a feeling the squirrels were keeping everything else away. He couldn’t imagine the kind of creature that would want to mess with a hundred well-armed squirrels. Even the dragon hadn’t wanted to fight them.

  The trees eventually began to thin back out, and the smoky haze lessened enough to let some sunlight through. It had the welcome effect of lightening the gloom, and, from the dragon’s perspective, the even more welcome effect of drying the perpetual mud into something that squished a bit less under its feet.

  As they moved further into the lighter, drier part of the swamp, the trees thinned still more until they stopped altogether to reveal a clearing—and a tower.

  “Here we are,” the dragon announced cheerfully. “I believe it’s safe for you two to get down now.”

  Omar and Gerald exchanged looks, but there was no sign of squirrels, toothy lizards, or anything else threatening. Omar shrugged, sheathed his knives, and slid down the dragon’s side. Gerald followed him.

  They approached the tower cautiously.

  “What, uh, kind of guardian does Princess Elinore have?” Omar asked in a low voice.

  “I don’t know,” Gerald said. To Omar’s inarticulate noise of shock or dismay, he said, “That’s the one thing they don’t put in that stupid Who’s Who book. They don’t want the rescuers to know what to prepare for.”

  “It’s just that I don’t see one,” Omar said, still speaking barely above a whisper. “I can’t stab anything I can’t see.”

  “We don’t want to stab it, remember?”

  “Right, right.”

  They were within half a dozen yards of the tower and there were still no signs of the guardian. “I know it’s not supposed to attack us unless we attack it, or try to mount a rescue, but shouldn’t it be, you know, visible?” Omar asked. He was fiddling with his knife sheaths again.

  Gerald opened his mouth to reply but before he could a sharp voice interrupted from above.

  “Boys?” it said disdainfully.

  “Men?” Omar suggested.

  Princess Elinore leaned out the window to get a better look at them. “No beards yet. You’re boys. And boys or men, I’m not interested. Didn’t you bother to read my signpost before walking through the swamp? If you weren’t bright enough to check that first, I’m frankly astonished you haven’t been killed by now.”

  “We were with a dragon,” Gerald explained. “But we’re not interested in you. Or,” he added, with a sideways glance at Omar, “at least, we’re not here to marry you.”

  Elinore snorted. “Good thing, too.”

  “We’re here to free your guardian,” Gerald persisted. “Er… Where is it, please?”

  There was a moment of complete silence, and then the princess burst into laughter. She laughed for so long that Omar and Gerald exchanged nervous glances.

  “I said she was probably mad,” Omar said in an undertone. Gerald elbowed him sharply.

  “Um… Princess?” Gerald called.

  With a visible effort, Elinore pulled herself together. “Whew!” she said, wiping her eyes. “I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard. You’re telling me you two dragged yourselves—and a dragon—through this miserable mud maze full of natural, supernatural, and unnatural hazards to free my guardian, and you don’t even know what it is?”

  The princes exchanged looks again.

  “Um. Yes. That’s about the size of it,” Gerald admitted. He quickly explained the rest of it in broad strokes, wait
ing to see if he was going to get a sympathetic reaction or an uncaring one. Waiting to see if Elinore would be coming with them, staying behind unspelled, or staying behind magically muted.

  She waited for him to finish speaking, and then she started laughing again, although not nearly as hysterically as the first time. “Is that seriously the best story you could come up with?” she asked. “You really expect me to believe that nonsense? The guardians are barely sentient. They’re tools. You can mistreat a horse. You can’t mistreat its saddle.”

  Gerald sighed. “Dragon?” he called.

  “I heard,” it responded. There was a definite warning note of anger in its voice and Elinore’s eyes widened. But before she could respond, her mouth snapped shut with an audible clacking of teeth that made Omar wince in sympathy.

  “Not entirely mute!” Gerald hastily reminded the dragon.

  “I will adjust it before we leave,” it promised. “But for the moment…I’ve heard enough of her blather. And that laugh was getting on my last nerve.”

  “Mine too,” Omar muttered.

  “All right, all right,” Gerald said. “We still haven’t found the guardian, though.”

  Then the ground in front of them exploded.

  Omar and Gerald stumbled backward; Gerald lost his footing and fell over entirely. Omar crouched in front of him protectively, his knives back in his hands, and waited for the air to clear.

  When the dirt settled, Gerald wished it hadn’t. There was a giant, angry-looking snake swaying back and forth over them, its mouth open to reveal glistening fangs.

  A tarnished collar encircled its neck.

  Neck? Do snakes have necks? Gerald wondered hysterically. Or are they all neck?

  “Whoa!” Omar called, the same way one would halt a horse. He had seen the collar as well. “We’re not mounting a rescue and we’re not attacking you, so you can’t attack us! Right? The collar won’t let you!”

  The snake hissed, but it didn’t strike, and Gerald rather thought that answered that. He got shakily to his feet.

  “Dragon?” he said. “A little help?”

  “Let’s see…my Reptilian is a little rusty,” the dragon apologized. After a moment of thought, it hissed a reply at the snake. The two guardians carried out a long, sibilant conversation while Omar watched with interest, his knives sheathed once more, and Gerald wished for a convenient stump or bench or something to sit on. His knees didn’t feel entirely solid yet.

  After an indeterminate interval, the dragon, looking pleased, switched from Reptilian to Common to address the princes. “You can undo the spells now. Tska won’t bite.”

  “You’re quite sure?” Gerald asked and the dragon gave him a look. “Right. Okay then.”

  Tska had stopped swaying threateningly over them and now lowered the top half of its body back to the ground. Gerald stepped cautiously toward it and tried to ignore the way its tongue kept flicking out to taste the air.

  I’m good with animals, he reminded himself. I’m good with animals and the dragon says it’s safe, and I’m helping it, and it’s more than an animal, it’s like the dragon, it’s a guardian and it thinks and it knows I’m helping it, it’s not like a cat that’s going to bite when I try to bandage it because it hurts and it doesn’t understand that I’m trying to help it.

  Even so, Gerald was nervous. There was no good reason to be more afraid of a snake than a dragon, but he was. Omar walked up next to him and asked, “Can I help?” and Gerald was immeasurably relieved to have someone there with him, next to the head and fangs of the giant venomous snake.

  “You can help me mark where to carve,” Gerald said, handing Omar a stick of wax from his knapsack. He spread out the diagram Erick had drawn and said, “I’ll check it over before I start carving, so don’t worry too much about making a mistake, but if you help with the wax marks it will go faster.”

  “Sure,” Omar said. “I’ll start on this side.”

  He knelt on the damp ground next to the snake—serpent? “Snake” feels too ordinary for Tska, Gerald thought—and found his place on the diagram. Within moments, he was carefully marking in the new lines Gerald would need to make to render the spell diagram inert.

  Seeing Omar’s complete lack of fear and commitment to the task, Gerald felt guilty about his own hesitation. He knelt to start on the other side and soon he was too distracted by the task to worry about the serpent he was kneeling next to. He didn’t even flinch when he had to ask Tska to lift its head so he could get at the underside of the collar. He crouched calmly under the snake’s head and got to work, distracted more by its hypnotic swaying than the fact that its fangs were mere inches from his head.

  When all the marks were waxed and checked, Gerald got out his chisel. Erick had magically re-claimed most of his tools, but Gerald still had the one he needed most. He thought absently that he should pick one up from a blacksmith’s shop the next time they went through a town so he could return this one to Erick, and then he thought of nothing but carving over the guiding lines and freeing the serpent from the spells.

  By the time he finished, he was sweating and filthy from crawling all over the damp, muddy ground. The spells were disabled, the metal was tarnishing, and with a last sharp blow, the collar split and fell to the ground.

  Tska shook itself all over like a dog, hissed, “Thanksssssss,” in sibilant Common, and then dove back underground without another word.

  Gerald blinked at its sudden disappearance. Omar looked similarly nonplussed. The dragon showed them its toothy grin and said, “Snakes have never been good conversationalists. Climb back up, now. I want to get out of here before dark.”

  A shoe came hurtling out of the window at the dragon’s suggestion that they leave, and they all looked up to see a furious Princess Elinore leaning out the window with another shoe in her hand.

  “I forgot about her,” Gerald said ruefully. “Dragon, you had better modify that spell now, before we leave.”

  It let out a gusty, sulfur-scented sigh, but it gestured with its claws and muttered under its breath and the Princess got her voice back in midscreech.

  “—believe you did such a thing, I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, but my parents are going to hear about this and then you’ll be sorry!”

  “Come on, now,” the dragon said. “I want to get out of earshot.”

  The Princess continued to hurl insults and invective at them as Gerald and Omar scrambled back up the dragon’s slick sides and tied themselves in.

  “I think I can launch from here,” the dragon said, looking around the clearing. “I’d rather not have to fight my way back through the swamp to where we came in.”

  “Do it then!” Gerald said, his eyes already squeezed shut in sick anticipation of the climb. “It’s better to get it over with,” he added to himself in an undertone.

  Omar patted his shoulder reassuringly. “We haven’t fallen off yet!” he said cheerfully.

  Gerald made a seasick-sounding noise in return as the dragon reared up and launched itself skyward, the princess’s words growing ever fainter behind them.

  “It’s girls like that who make me glad I like boys,” Omar commented when she was finally out of earshot.

  “There are boys like that too,” Gerald pointed out.

  “Yeah, but at least their voices aren’t so shrill.”

  Gerald couldn’t come up with a good response to that, so he said nothing. They flew in companionable silence until the dragon spotted a good place to camp for the night. They left the marsh behind and were flying back over grassland now. It was a great deal cooler than the desert and Gerald had a feeling the night was going to get downright cold.

  The dragon landed gently next to a body of water—Gerald wasn’t sure if it should be called a small river or a large stream—and took care, this time, to not dip the net of supplies into the water. “There’s a bit of high ground over that way,” it said, waving a claw. “It’s far enough from the stream that the ground wi
ll stay dry, but close enough that I can have a bath.” It looked at its scales with a fastidious expression. “I can’t abide swamp muck.”

  “We’ll unharness you, then,” Gerald said. He and Omar unbuckled themselves and began to unburden the dragon. When they had undone the harness, detached the supplies, and taken down the canvas sunshade, the dragon gathered it all up and lifted it over to the hill it had mentioned.

  “After you set up the camp,” the dragon said, looking at them with the same fastidious expression, “I would suggest you bathe as well.”

  It didn’t wait to hear their responses, but immediately turned and dove into the river, displacing a significant wave of water. The princes ducked instinctively, but they were out of the splash zone. The dragon started frolicking in the water, rolling around and splashing like a small child instead of a huge reptile.

  It was quite a sight. Omar and Gerald exchanged looks and then broke into grins.

  “I think I’ll wait until it’s done before I jump in,” Gerald said. “It might drown us accidentally.”

  “Yeah,” Omar agreed. He looked down at himself. He wasn’t quite as filthy as Gerald was, but his shirt was a far cry from the color it had started out as that morning.

  They had the camp set up and a small fire pit prepared by the time the dragon heaved itself out of the river and walked over, water cascading down its sides. It was completely clean and looked very pleased with itself.

  “Your turn,” it caroled. “I’ll light the fire for you. I don’t think you humans dry as efficiently as dragons do.” The dragon’s sides were already steaming as its internal heat caused the water to evaporate.

  “Another one of our design flaws,” Gerald agreed with a smile.

  He and Omar left the dragon to it and headed to the river, carrying clean clothes and towels. Omar stripped and jumped in with no hesitation.

  “Brr!” he said when his head popped up. “That’s chilly. Not too bad once you get used to it, though.” He ducked his head back under and scrubbed mud out of his curls.

  Gerald was still standing on the bank when Omar emerged again. “Come on, it’s not that cold,” Omar said. “The sun’s going to set soon, though, and then it’s really going to get cold.”