It always started out promising, with some version of the “dragon taking princess hostage” story. Then I’d get colorful anecdotes of Elhared’s checkered past that I really wish I had known before the old bastard had hired me. Even Frank Blackthorne had gained some measure of infamy for his exploits in embarrassing the royal court of Grünwald.
And, each time, that’s where the well went dry. No one seemed to have heard anything more about dragon, thief, or wizard. As I bought rounds for some of my more talkative contacts with my diminishing supply of funds, I began to develop an ugly suspicion that the ersatz Frank Blackthorne might have been captured by the Nâtlac groupies of Grünwald.
I started hoping that my body would end up on the far side of Lendowyn, away from Grünwald. I admit that, in the abstract, there was some appeal to having the Grünwald court take out their frustrations on my body while I wasn’t resident. However, I doubted it would leave my body in a usable condition, and I wanted it back.
Besides, Princess Lucille didn’t deserve that sort of treatment, even if she was royalty.
I had been through the stories enough by now to know when I’d reached a dead end, so I was ready to leave one particular dark hole of a tavern, when one of the newer arrivals interjected a comment into a pause in the conversation.
“Any you all hear of Ravensgate?”
A chorus of “no,” rippled through the crowd around me. I certainly hadn’t heard about it. I made the mistake of holding out some hope that this newcomer’s story might be helpful to my mission in finding the displaced owner of my current body.
No such luck.
Not to say that his tale wasn’t dramatic. According to the story he’d heard, yesterday morning at around the time a trio of thugs were debating what to do with a tied-up princess they’d found in the woods, a giant black dragon had appeared in the middle of the border town of Ravensgate. Our storyteller gave a loving description of the carnage, paying such special attention to the immolation of the city watch that I was left with the impression that he had some particular issue with official law enforcement.
Even if the story had been embellished, and Ravensgate hadn’t been left a smoldering crater, I still asked for clear directions as to where Ravensgate was on the Lendowyn border—specifically in order to help me avoid it. Elhared’s dragon seemed rightly pissed, and after the debacle with Dracheslayer I didn’t want to come within four leagues of it.
Fortunately for me, the alleged massacre at Ravensgate was miles out of my way anyway, in the opposite direction from the capital from Doylen. More importantly, it was miles from the dragon’s lair—which meant I would be able to find it sans dragon, and that made me feel immeasurably better. I would be free to search for signs of what had happened to Elhared’s evil tome without fear of immolation.
After that, I could work on hunting down the princess and my body.
CHAPTER 9
The next day I found the dragon’s lair right where I had left it. From the outside there was no sign of the wizardly apocalypse that had happened within. I loosely tied the skinny nag that the last of Diego’s gold had bought me so she could graze the clearing while I was occupied, then I pulled myself back up to the scene of the crime.
Boobs aside, I practically flew up the side of the hillside in the princess’s body. She might not be blessed with great upper body strength, but in comparison to my old body, she was tiny and lightweight, so I found myself pulling her body upward with almost disturbing ease.
That marked the high point of my expedition.
I lit a makeshift torch and examined every inch of the cavern, and I came up with nothing. There was little sign of any hoard aside from a few items glittering forgotten, fallen into inaccessible crevasses, and an occasional goblet or necklace on the ground that looked shiny until closer examination showed base metal and glass rather than gold and jewels. Elhared had found a dragon more broke than the Lendowyn government.
More prevalent than the remains of an ex-hoard were piles of bones from sheep, cattle, and a few wayward knights less lucky than I had been. Without the dragon’s presence it all seemed sort of sad, and much less intimidating than the last time I’d been here.
Most importantly though, I found no malevolent book of wizardly nastiness. To all appearances it had been consumed in the misfire along with the unmourned wizard Elhared.
I stood over the splotch of wizard soot on the cavern floor, staring at a sharp rectangular outline within it—right about the place where Elhared must have dropped his compendium of darkness.
I uttered a very unprincesslike word.
Then I squinted and lowered the torch to examine the Elhared smudge a little closer.
Footprints.
“Well, what do you know?”
A set of footprints had scuffed the black soot on the floor of the cavern and had tracked carbonized Elhared out toward the cavern entrance. The tracks were feet larger than the ones I wore now, but about the right size for my lost body.
I let out a little victory whoop. Apparently the princess and I had had the same thoughts. And if the dislocated Princess Lucille had come back here in my skin to retrieve Elhared’s evil volume of evilness, then the most sensible thing she could do would be to return to the Lendowyn court. She was probably there already, waiting for me—or at least her body—to show up. With me, the princess, and the book all in the same place, someone should be able to find a more reputable wizard to put everything right.
“Yes!” This was the first really positive sign I had seen since Dracheslayer had crumbled in my hands.
So, in retrospect, there was no possible way it could have lasted.
I scrambled down the hillside, impatient to get back to the castle and Princess Lucille. I had more than enough daylight left to get there even on my cheap broken-down mount. I was halfway across the clearing when the horse looked up and decided to prove there was still some life left in her. She reared at me and I took a step back.
“Calm down, girl. It’s just—”
I had to scramble back to avoid being trampled. Swaybacked and half-lame she might have been, but she bucked like an unbroken colt.
“What’s the matter?”
Her answer was to snap her lead from where I’d tied her and gallop into the forest. “Great,” I muttered as the sky darkened to match the sudden change in my mood. It took me half a second—still way too long—for me to connect my horse’s sudden spooking, my proximity to an abandoned dragon’s lair, and a sudden darkening of the sky above into a coherent picture of what was happening.
I’ve said before, a sudden surge in optimism on my part is invariably a sign things are about to get worse. My head shot up, and I watched as my day obliged that particular rule of thumb.
Plummeting out of the sky above the clearing was a very angry-looking lizard with a fifty-foot wingspan. My horse seemed to have had the right idea. I bolted for the woods, and some cover, as the monstrous black dragon swooped dangerously low over the treetops. Branches and pine needles showered me from a near miss and the air suddenly carried a taint of brimstone.
The dragon’s voice reverberated through the woods around me. “You evil bastard! Give it back!”
I had to stop short as a black shadow fell across the game trail in front of me, knocking smaller trees aside. A massive head dropped down, snaking in front of me on a serpentine neck.
Not quite enough cover, apparently.
“Bastard!” It screamed again, the force of its breath enough to knock me over. Good thing too, since the dragon’s claws swept past where I had just been to splinter an unfortunate tree. It kept screaming at me, and all I could do was keep dodging as it grabbed for me. Each of its swings gouged craters into the forest floor and took out more lumber. It took a few moments of pure panic for me to realize a couple of things.
First, it wasn’t trying to kill me; otherwise I’d be Princess Flambé right now. Second, it wasn’t just screaming inarticulate curses at me.
&nb
sp; It was sobbing.
My bad feeling about this got worse as I started listening to what it was saying between the sobs. “It’s mine . . . Give it back . . . You nasty old man . . . You’re dressing me like a slut!”
That will teach me to make unwarranted assumptions. Just because I ended up in her body didn’t mean that she ended up in mine. Undoing Elhared’s failed spell had just gotten a lot more complicated.
I tried to get to my feet to run out of her reach, but I had to duck again as the dragon’s forearm took out another tree next to me. She might not be trying to kill me, or hurt her own body, but she obviously didn’t know her own strength, and her hysterics were making things worse. Her mad grabs to catch me could probably snap a few bones without her even realizing it.
“Princess Lucille! I’m not Elhared!”
“Liar!” I rolled as a clawed hand came down, digging into the soil where I’d crouched, sending up showers of dirt to rain down on me.
“No, really! I’m Frank Blackthorne, the guy who tried to save you.”
I winced as her claws came down in my direction, but she stopped with her hand about two feet over my head. “Frank?”
“Remember? I was the one who attacked the dragon—”
“Badly.”
“I tried to stop Elhared—”
Her draconic hand curled into a fist above my head, and I realized that my attempt to prevent the wizard’s invocations had arguably gone less optimally than my attack on the dragon.
“You screwed up his spell! It’s your fault I’m like this!”
Oh, crap!
It wasn’t as if I had a decent counterargument. She was right. If I hadn’t interfered, there was a good chance that she would still be in the same skin—married to the old coot Elhared, but still a princess and arguably better off.
“W-We can get you out of this,” I said, trying to salvage the situation. “We have your body, if we just find Elhared’s book we can get someone—”
“Don’t patronize me! Why do you think I’m here?”
Score one for the princess.
“Do you have the book?”
“Uh—”
“Where is it?” There was a rising note of hysteria in her voice that would have been deeply disturbing in a human speaker. From a dragon it was bowel-voidingly terrifying. “You have it. You have to have it!”
“It wasn’t there.”
The dragon raised her head to the sky and let out a scream of frustration that erupted into a shower of smoke and fire. I got to my feet and started running, because it looked as if Lucille was about to forget whose body I wore. I felt heat on the back of my neck, and heard splintering lumber behind me. “No! You can’t leave!”
Then, as I crossed another game trail, I heard an all-too-familiar voice. “Fear not, fair maiden! Your salvation has arrived!”
I looked to my left and saw a white charger bearing down upon me, Sir Forsythe the Good astride it, sun glinting off his armor. Before I could react, his arm came down and scooped me up and across the saddle in front of him.
As we rode deeper into the forest, I heard the dragon shrieking and sobbing behind us. I didn’t want to leave her in that state, but I didn’t have many options at the moment.
The sounds diminished as we escaped. The last thing I heard was a quiet, heart-wrenching plea, “Come back. Please. It’s not fair.”
She was right about that much. As we galloped away, I shouted for Sir Forsythe’s attention, “Hold on, stop!”
“Apologies, My Lady, but there is a dragon back there.”
“I know,” I shouted to make myself heard over galloping hooves. “You don’t have the whole story!”
“No?”
“No! That dragon is the real Princess Lucille. There was an evil wizard—”
“If the dragon is the princess, who are you?”
“My name’s Frank Blackthorne.”
“Is it now?”
“Yes and—” I never finished that statement, because the gauntlet of Sir Forsythe the Good came down on the back of my skull and the world went black.
• • •
The sky was dark when I awoke next to a small campfire. I groaned, and Sir Forsythe responded. “Good, you are awake. I didn’t get to tell you how gratified I was you survived that den of thieves, even if you were not who you purported to be.”
“You hit me!”
“Well, that couldn’t be helped.”
I tried to place a hand to the still-aching side of my head, and my arms wouldn’t listen to me. “You arrogant twit. I’m paralyzed.”
Sir Forsythe clicked his tongue at me and said, “Don’t be so dramatic. I simply placed a binding charm on you. Can’t have you running away again.”
I looked down at myself and saw that I now wore a necklace. A heavy chain suspended a glowing black stone set in a gold mounting inscribed with magical glyphs that wouldn’t have been out of place in Elhared’s book. Staring at that thing resting on the leather armor between the princess’s breasts made my skin crawl.
That did not look like something a “Good” knight would be carrying around.
“Is that really necessary? You got to do your rescue bit. I’m sorry I’m not the princess—”
“Actually, it is a fine thing you aren’t the princess. My liege will be quite happy that I’ve found Francis Blackthorne.”
I opened my mouth. Then I closed it again. My luck couldn’t possibly be that bad, could it? It took several moments for me to work up the nerve to ask who his liege might actually be.
I can’t say I was surprised at his answer.
“Queen Fiona the Unyielding, monarch of the Kingdom of Grünwald.”
“Of course she is.” I sighed. “Doesn’t this seem a little contradictory to you?”
“What do you mean?” He tossed another log on the campfire. Annoyingly, he still looked like a hero out of some popular ballad, all golden hair and shiny mail. His tabard still appeared spotless, and he had the nerve to still be smiling.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re supposed to be Sir Forsythe the Good, slayer of monsters and savior of helpless maidens—and you serve the Royal Court of Grünwald?”
“That’s correct.”
He doesn’t know. That had to be it. It was easy to believe that this guy could be that naïve. “Sir Forsythe, the Grünwald court is in service to the Dark Lord Nâtlac.”
“I’m a seventh-level acolyte myself. What is your point?”
“M-my point? My point? My point is that Nâtlac is one of the Seven Dark Lords of the Underworld, and generally agreed to be one of the top three nastiest. Nâtlac worship is just a little at odds with a heroic persona, don’t you think?”
“I don’t let that define me.”
“W-what?”
“In fact, the powers granted by the Dark Lord are quite helpful in monster slaying. Strength, endurance, immunity to demon fire, the ability to inspire bowel-watering fear in one’s enemies—”
“What about the ritual cannibalism?”
“Of course I find it personally distasteful, but what kind of knight would I be if I let such things stand in the way of my duties?”
“The Dark Lord Nâtlac is the personification of evil!”
Sir Forsythe shrugged. “Sometimes you need to take the bad with the good.”
I opened my mouth, but my brain had had enough and refused to form any more words. After the way the past few days had gone, it really wasn’t that surprising. I wish I could have honestly said I didn’t believe what he was saying, but I had long experience in the human ability to rationalize. It was a skill that those of noble birth were particularly adept at.
Silence settled around the campfire for a long time before I found my voice again, “Now what?”
I found it somewhat embarrassing that I sounded like a frightened little girl.
“We wait until dawn, and then we ride to the site of the offering.”
I didn’t ask what he meant. I had the stron
g suspicion that I did not want to know.
Instead, through the night, I tried to get Sir Forsythe to have a moral epiphany. I told him my story, how I got onto Grünwald’s wanted list by saving a young innocent maiden myself, something he should empathize with. I explained Elhared’s spell, and how we needed to save the princess’s body intact so that the soul-transference could be reversed.
I don’t know at what point in my tale the snoring started, but I kept going out of narrative inertia until I fell asleep myself.
CHAPTER 10
I didn’t sleep well. My body grew increasingly uncomfortable being unable to move, and I woke periodically to the sensation of pins and needles across my left side. I spent my wakeful hours discovering that, despite my ability to move my head and neck, it just wasn’t enough to grab hold of the evil necklace holding me in place.
Dawn came too soon.
Sir Forsythe the Allegedly Good threw me across his saddlebags, securing my body with some rope in addition to the binding charm. As he did, I felt twinges of nostalgia for the annoying chivalry he had shown me when he thought I was a princess.
“Is this any way to treat an innocent maiden?” I asked him as he climbed on his mount.
“You are Francis Blackthorne, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are neither innocent, nor a maiden.”
“And don’t call me Francis,” I muttered as my captor galloped off into the woods.
Slung over the horse’s rear as I was, I couldn’t see where we were going without craning my neck. Even so, even though dawn was breaking, I could feel the forest growing darker around us. I lifted my head up periodically, and managed to see a bad sign.
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