By the time they reached the promised lake Gerald was dusty and sweaty and irritated. I was fine in the caves. He could’ve let me stay there. He scowled at Omar’s back as the oblivious prince shed his boots and shirt and waded into the lake in a pair of short pants the piedlings had provided. Gerald had to persuade himself to do the same. No one else is here. He’s seen the scars before. I like swimming, and no one’s naked this time… Even though Omar hadn’t said anything about it, the memory of his panic at the river still made him flush with embarrassment.
Eventually he stripped down to his swim shorts, set his canes aside, and limped heavily into the water. Omar watched him, and if there had been any trace of disgust on his face, Gerald would have turned around and left. But his gaze was steady and calm. He didn’t avoid looking at the scars, but he didn’t stare either.
Gerald’s self-consciousness melted away when he got into the water. It was instantly easier to move, with the water supporting him and holding him up, taking the weight off his bad leg. He swam, he moved freely and easily and without the pain of cramping muscles for the first time in weeks, and he couldn’t help but smile at it. Omar gave him a smug grin in response.
“Oh, shut up,” Gerald grumbled. “You’re a desert prince, what do you know about swimming…”
Omar smirked and splashed him.
IT TURNED INTO a routine, that trek to the lake. Gerald relaxed in the water in a way he couldn’t relax anywhere else in the dragonlands, and he even started to get used to having so much of his scars on display. He could forget about them for long stretches, because Omar never stared, and he also never deliberately didn’t stare in that way that felt worse than staring did. Omar acted like they were there, but they didn’t matter, and so Gerald was able to start to feel like maybe they didn’t matter after all, although he still didn’t like them. But it was better to be at the lake than anywhere else. The amphitheater floor was always a flurry of activity, with the royals and piedlings and the occasional dragon working hard to get ready for the showcase, and Gerald avoided it. Omar was more social, but he still spent most of his time with Gerald. It was easy to stay by the lake or in their living space and forget about everything happening outside of it, let alone outside of the dragonlands, until the two-way parchment chimed with an urgent message from Erick.
Are you and Omar ready to go yet? The Council is starting to get frantic—too many royals have disappeared off their maps. There are wards popping up around the towers and tracker spells everywhere. We have to step up our speed and get everyone back here as quickly as possible. I’m on my way back now. Nedi, too. We’ll talk tonight. See if your dragon can recruit any more, too; we might need to recruit some of our rescuees.
P.S. I picked up Lila this trip. Just so you know.
Gerald read the message twice, flinching at the postscript, and then handed the paper wordlessly to Omar. He read it and looked back at Gerald. “Are you ready?”
Gerald rubbed at his knee. “I’m going to be useless. It’s hard enough getting to the lake. I can’t … I can’t just go back to this like nothing’s happened.”
“No one’s asking you to act like nothing happened. But you’ll be sitting on the dragon’s back most of the time. And when we need to walk somewhere, I’ll be there to help you. You know how the collar spells work, you’ve had practice taking them off, you won’t be useless. And I won’t go unless you go, and neither will the dragon, and they need us to go. What if the Council realizes it’s not only the royals disappearing and they change the spells on the guardians? We have to get all the collars off before that happens.”
“I know. And if Lila’s coming here, that’s all the more reason for me to leave.”
AGAINST HIS BETTER instincts, Gerald let Omar persuade him to go down to the amphitheater floor to meet Erick—and Lila. “You’re going to have to face her at some point,” Omar pointed out.
“But does it have to be now?”
“Don’t you want to get it out of the way?”
“I want to know why Erick had to pick her up,” he grumbled. But he went. The dragon was out hunting, so Omar helped Gerald limp down the stairs. He leaned on his canes and waited for Erick’s dragon to land. His cousin waved when he caught sight of them; Lila didn’t. Her eyes widened when she caught sight of Gerald’s canes; then her mouth twisted in a grimace of disgust and he wanted to drop the canes and belatedly hide the evidence of his injury.
“What happened to you?” she asked as she dismounted. There was no concern in her voice. “How hard is it to sit in a tower? Do you deliberately mess up everything you try to do or are you really that incompetent?”
“Nice to see you again, too,” Gerald said tiredly. “I got burned. I’m fine, not that you care. Erick cast some spells on it.”
“So he can do something practical. Who knew.”
Erick rolled his eyes behind her. “She’s been like this the whole time,” he stage-whispered.
“You abducted me and are forcing me to participate in this ridiculous scheme. I don’t think you have the right to expect me to be happy about it.”
“That’s no reason to be nasty to Gerald, though,” Omar broke in.
She turned to face him, raising her eyebrows. “And who are you, then, that my family reunion is any of your concern?”
“I’m Gerald’s friend.”
“Friend.” Lila smirked in Gerald’s direction. “Did he rescue you, then? I didn’t think you were going to give in about that. Did you finally give up your anti-marriage crusade?”
“I rescued myself,” Gerald snapped. “And I’m not anti-marriage. I simply don’t want to get married myself.”
“You may be in luck now, then,” she said. “I can’t imagine anyone will want a gimpy prince.”
Omar snarled at her and took a step forward with his knives suddenly in his hands. Lila put a hand on her sword hilt and smiled. “Don’t bring a knife to a sword fight,” she advised.
“Stop it!” Gerald said, thrusting out a cane to keep them apart. “Both of you. No one’s going to fight anyone. Omar, ignore her. I’m used to it.”
“You better get used to the idea of getting married, too,” Lila said. “Do you really think Mother—or even Mum—will let you come home without a spouse?”
“Maybe I won’t go home, then,” Gerald said quietly.
Lila rolled her eyes. “Do you really think they’ll let you do that, either? Grow up, Gerald.”
She turned and walked away before he could respond. He let her go. Omar and Erick were both watching him carefully. Erick looked apologetic. Omar looked angry. He was still fingering his knives and Gerald nudged him. “Put those away. That’s…that’s just Lila. I wasn’t expecting anything better.” And it could have been a lot worse.
“Where’s Nedi?” he asked Erick in an attempt to change the subject. “I thought you two were getting in about the same time.”
“They had some bad weather this morning,” he replied. “They’ll still get here today, but they’ve been delayed.”
It turned out to be quite a delay; Nedi got in with her latest batch of royals as the sun was starting to set. There were four of them, and they were all drenched and miserable. Even Nedi was disheveled—the first time Gerald had ever seen her looking less than completely put together and in control. “I know,” she said with a grimace while the piedlings hurried the newcomers off to bathe and get settled. “The storm came out of nowhere. There were no clouds, there was nothing building in the air. If that storm was natural, I’ll eat my crown… I might go ahead and eat it now, I’m that hungry. Our supplies got wrecked; I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
That at least was easily remedied and they were shortly sitting around Gerald and Omar’s table discussing Nedi’s misadventures over dinner and hot tea.
“But how did the Council find you?” Gerald asked. “If the dragons have been taking off all the tracking spells…”
“I don’t think they did, not exactly,” Nedi said
around a mouthful of stew. “It was a…a broad storm. It took us a long time to fly through, and that was at dragon speeds. It wasn’t targeted. I bet it was centered on Shira’s tower and then spread in all directions for as far as they could power it. Less of a direct attack and more of a trap.”
“We may want to rethink splitting up, then,” Erick said. “If the Council is starting to react by targeting us… You three shouldn’t be traveling without someone who can use magic.”
“The dragons use magic,” Nedi replied. “And splitting up is exactly what we need to do. There are what, fifty occupied towers? And we’ve gotten to how many between us? Less than half, and that’s counting Gerald’s and mine. We don’t have time for the four of us to make that many separate trips. Especially if those two still won’t split up,” she added, gesturing at Omar and Gerald.
“Even if we put every royal here on a dragon,” Erick said, “we can’t be everywhere at once. And we’ve only gotten ten more dragons to agree to carry us.”
“Thirteen is a lot better than three,” Nedi pointed out.
Gerald stopped listening and let them argue. He knew Nedi would win in the end, because she was right. They had to move quickly. Before long, Erick gave in, and the debate changed from if they would send the others out to which of them would go.
“Not Lila,” Gerald said, mostly to himself. Erick and Nedi were throwing names back and forth and he had nothing else to contribute. “Not anyone who seems unsure about being here.”
“Not anyone who can’t protect themselves,” Erick added. “And not anyone who doesn’t want to go.”
They came up with close to twenty candidates and wasted no time in running off to gauge their willingness and narrow the list to the ten they needed. Gerald watched them go and said, “Do we even have that many harnesses?”
“If we don’t, I’m sure the piedlings will remedy that,” Omar said.
A few minutes later, a golden orb materialized in the air between them and popped like a soap bubble. “Meet on the amphitheater floor in half an hour,” Nedi’s voice said.
There was no way to reply. Like Calin, she assumed her commands would be followed.
THE DRAGON BROUGHT Gerald and Omar down at the appointed time and then settled in to observe the planning session. Nedi and Erick were bracketed by ten royals, including a few Gerald recognized vaguely from events of state over the years.
Spread on the ground and weighed down with stones was a large-scale map of the Thousand Kingdoms, with the remaining occupied towers marked in gold. Gerald drew in a breath to see how many there still were, and how widespread they were. Erick and Nedi had visited most of the furthest-flung already, but there were still nearly a dozen that were a week’s flight away.
“As you can see,” Nedi said to the group, “we have a lot of ground to cover. On the bright side, the towers in the most inaccessible locations tend to be clustered together, to entice more rescuers to go out of their way.” She gestured, indicating a few places on the maps where there were three or four or even, in one case, five towers within a day or so of each other—and a day on horseback was merely hours for a dragon.
“On the other hand, that means the towers that aren’t quite so hard to get to, or quite so far out of the way, are often the only ones in the area.” Another gesture, at the scattered singletons.
“The plan is simple. Erick, Omar, Gerald, and myself will take the farthest clusters. We’re most experienced on dragonback and we have all used the guardian-release spells before. We’re best prepared to travel that distance and visit several towers each. When we started this, we started with the farthest towers, planning to work our way back toward the dragonlands. That means all the closest towers are still occupied. We’ll take volunteers or draw lots for doing these circuits—” She gestured on the map, drawing invisible flight lines in a rough loop around the dragonlands, each circuit taking in the closest three towers. “The rest of the singletons will be divided up between the rest of you. Those fliers will be responsible for only two towers each, but there will be a longer flight between them.”
She looked up from the map and met the eyes of everyone around it. “Any questions?”
There were none. Gerald privately thought everyone was too intimidated by Nedi’s calm preparedness to admit they were anything less than as ready as she clearly expected them to be.
“Good. These are the assignments…”
In a remarkably short amount of time, Nedi had sketched out all the flight plans and paired a royal with each one. “The dragons all picked the flights they wanted,” she added as she handed out copies of the maps and the instructions to disable the guardians’ collars. “Remember your flight number. Your dragon will have the same one. Pack any personal supplies you need. The piedlings are taking care of food and water, medical supplies, and the like.”
A few people swallowed nervously at the mention of medical supplies. Every eye flicked toward Gerald and his canes and he reddened under the scrutiny. He wanted to tell them his injury had nothing to do with the Council, but he didn’t think telling them it had involved a dragon would be much better.
“Purely precautionary,” Nedi said crisply. “We’re not aiming to fight the Council. If anything goes wrong, you retreat. We can always go back to a tower. The dragons can all cast spells, and an adult dragon is more than a match for any human magician. Now… We’ll be leaving at dawn. Eat, if you haven’t yet, and then get some sleep.”
She turned her attention back to the map and Gerald thought it was a pity her country had decided the heir had to be male. She will make an imposing queen.
The royals all knew a dismissal when they heard one, and they quickly dispersed. It was only once they were nearly out of earshot that they began to chatter at each other with varying degrees of excitement and nervousness.
Omar pulled Gerald to his feet. “You heard the general,” he said, his voice solemn but his eyes dancing with amusement. “Let’s go.”
The dragon had watched the whole meeting in thoughtful silence, and it was still pensive as Omar and Gerald climbed onto its back for a lift back up to their chambers. “Penny for your thoughts?” Omar asked, but it shook its head.
Gerald glanced back at Erick and Nedi, who still had their heads together over the map, and Erick looked up and winked.
Before Gerald could wonder what that was for, the dragon pushed off the amphitheater floor. Gerald shook his head. He had enough to worry about without trying to understand Erick.
“I’m going hunting,” the dragon said when it deposited the princes in the reception chamber. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
It took off without waiting for a response, and Gerald found himself smothering a sudden yawn as he watched it go. “It’s not that late, is it?” he asked.
“Late enough,” Omar said. “And I’m going to spend as much time in bed as I can. We’ll be in a tent tomorrow.”
IT WAS STILL dark when Gerald woke up the next morning. That was no surprise, given the lack of windows in the bedchamber, but Gerald had a feeling dawn was still a ways away. Omar was sound asleep across the room and Gerald didn’t hear anyone else moving around in the halls.
So why am I awake? He hadn’t been sleeping badly; he didn’t remember any dreams at all, let alone unsettling ones, and his bedding wasn’t rumpled like he had been tossing or turning. He wasn’t even particularly worried about this next stage of their mission. If anything, he was looking forward to being alone with Omar and the dragon again, far away from all of the staring royals and even the too-solicitous piedlings.
He rubbed his eyes and tried to decide if he should get up or if it was early enough that it was worth getting a bit more sleep. But across the room, Omar began to stir, and Gerald gave up on the idea of going back to sleep.
“You’re up early,” Omar said with a yawn.
“So are you.”
“True… I don’t want to give Nedi a reason to snap at me. It’s too early for a lecture ab
out disrupting her schedules.”
Gerald hid a smile. “Let’s get moving, then.”
THEY HAD DEBATED staggering departure times, so those covering the most and least distances would each reach their first targets around the same time. But Nedi had set aside her prior arguments about the need to coordinate their rescues to confound the Council, noting that this time there would be a dozen rescuers and not only one.
“With so many of us in the air, it’s almost guaranteed there will be several rescues happening within hours of each other. That will split the Council’s focus. Besides, with the increased scrutiny, it’s more important to get to the towers as quickly as we can. As soon as someone finishes their tower assignment, they can move on to picking up the wandering royals. The dragons have assured us not even the full Council can get through the wards around their land, so it’s imperative to get as many of us behind those wards as quickly as we can.”
That meant the amphitheater floor was crowded with dragons, piedlings, and royals as everyone attempted to get ready and leave at once, not to mention the other royals there to see off friends or siblings, or those who simply wanted to keep working on the staging for the showcase—and the supplies and projects in progress for that were taking up no small amount of space as well.
Gerald surveyed the chaos from above, thankful they could take off right from their balcony rather than having to fight through the mob on the ground. “You chose a good chamber to put us in,” he told the dragon as Omar packed away the last bundle of supplies.
The dragon preened and then bared its teeth at Calin when the piedling pointed out it hadn’t had much of a choice at the time.
Calin had insisted on checking Gerald’s leg once more before they left despite his protests, and she lectured him sternly about not overdoing.
Royal Rescue Page 21
