I realized I might be in a bit of trouble.
• • •
I had to catch up on what had happened based only on snippets of conversation and glimpses of the aftermath as Lucille tried to take control of the situation.
Right after Prince Daemonlas had died, and I’d blacked out, whoever resided in the dragon’s body attempted to reprise the boar-roasting scene from earlier with Lucille as the main course; the Lucille resident in my—her—our body. Fortunately for us, Brock’s combat effectiveness was increased fivefold whenever protecting his princess was involved. Unfortunately for Brock, that still didn’t amount to much. He shielded us from a blast of dragon fire using an overturned table. He just didn’t manage to do so while on the same side of the table as we were.
He had survived only because he hadn’t been the focus of the dragon’s fury, and because Sir Forsythe intervened to grab the dragon’s attention.
Brock had been bandaged and left seated at the edge of the wreckage. Between the tears in our eyes and Lucille’s tendency to avoid looking directly at him, I didn’t get a good look at the extent of his injuries.
She took his unbandaged hand and I heard Brock groan. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me. It’s Lucille.”
He groaned again and I don’t know if he heard her. “Did Brock save the princess?”
Lucille sniffed and nodded. “Yes. Brock saved the princess.” She wiped our eyes and bent over to kiss Brock on the forehead. When I caught a glimpse of his face I wanted to cry myself. The side of his head was scorched and he was missing a good part of his left ear. He looked past us, staring out at nothing. Someone had stripped the armor from his upper body and had bound his left arm completely in bandages that were already becoming discolored.
“Brock is tired.”
“The battle’s over,” she whispered to him. “The princess is safe.”
“Brock saved the princess.”
“Yes, he did. Rest now.”
“Brock needs to rest now.”
His groans subsided and his breathing became more regular as he closed his eyes.
Lucille stood and yelled commands at the nearest servants. “You! You! And you! Get this man to a room with a bed. No one leaves him alone!”
A quartet of men responded with “Yes, Your Highness!” and carried Brock off the battlefield.
Oaths may be cheap for someone who had lost the ability to affect the physical world, but as I watched them carry Brock away, I vowed that whoever or whatever bore responsibility for this would suffer dearly for it.
• • •
As the nightmare progressed I couldn’t imagine feeling more powerless. And it was no consolation to realize Lucille didn’t feel any better.
I could only imagine what she was going through, being left solely in charge of this diplomatic disaster. In fact, “diplomatic disaster” understated exactly how badly things had gone. Prince Daemonlas may have triggered the catastrophe, but as far as the attendees knew, Lucille the Dragon had been the one to terrorize the ceremony.
Despite everything, Lucille took command of the situation better than I could have.
She ran around organizing our small staff of retainers to bring some semblance of order to the disaster our anniversary had become. In the space of an hour the wounded were all being tended to and the unhurt ushered into guest rooms far away from the great hall.
Unfortunately, by the time things seemed under control, there were already several delegations that had slipped away to spread the bad news to their home kingdoms. Given the number of dead still littering the hall where they had fallen, this was a very bad thing.
As the depth of the situation sank in, she pulled together my personal retainers. I guess they were her personal retainers now. I felt a great wave of relief when I saw that no one else had been injured as severely as Brock.
Although the verdict was still out on Sir Forsythe. No one had seen him after he’d leaped out the great windows after the dragon.
Lucille gathered them all around the splintered throne as the night air blew in through the shattered grand windows, a half-dozen handmaid-warriors; Grace, Mary, Laya, Thea, Krys, and Rabbit. Lucille looked out the window at the horizon, as if she was searching for the dragon.
For me.
The wind bit our face as she said, “You’re here because, after Brock and Sir Forsythe, you’re the people Frank trusts most.”
“Your Highness?” I heard Krys’s voice from behind us. “Why are you talking like Brock?”
Lucille sighed, and Mary said, “It isn’t Princess Frank anymore.”
“What?” said several voices at once.
Lucille turned around to face Mary. “You didn’t tell them?”
“Too much to explain,” Mary said. “And people could have overheard.”
Lucille nodded.
Grace, the nominal leader of the six, stepped forward hobbling as she leaned on a crutch that was made for someone about two inches taller. “What happened here?”
“Beyond what you saw?” Lucille gestured at the corpse of Prince Daemonlas, which still lay where it had fallen nearly two hours ago. “The spell he cast threw me out of my body and back into this one.”
Grace waved at the remains of the great hall and said, “So you didn’t do all this?”
“No.”
“Then who did?” Laya asked.
Lucille hesitated and Mary filled the silence by quietly saying, “You don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Grace asked.
“Frank,” Lucille whispered.
Most everyone else responded by saying, “What?” except Mary, who looked disappointed, and Rabbit who made up for being mute by providing a you-must-be-crazy expression.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. We swapped bodies. Again.”
Krys shook her head. “No, it doesn’t make sense. That would mean he tried to kill you, that he almost killed Brock.”
“That’s better than the alternative.”
“What alternative?” Grace said.
“That he’s gone.”
The only sound in the hall was the wind blowing from outside and the distant sound of chirping insects. I saw the girls’ faces through Lucille’s eyes and realized they all thought I was dead.
“No! I’m here! I haven’t gone anywhere!” I tried to shout through whatever barrier separated me and Lucille. We were in the same skull, she had to sense I was here on some level.
Or not.
For all my mental screaming, Lucille went on talking to the girls as if I wasn’t there. So much that it became hard for me to believe I was still there.
“I’m going to need your help,” Lucille said to them.
Grace nodded. “If we can help Frank—”
“Whatever happened to him,” Krys interjected.
“We’re at your service, Your Highness,” Grace finished.
“Good. Thank you.”
“What do you need from us?” Grace said.
“First I need all of you sworn to secrecy. No one outside this room is to know Frank is missing.”
I am not missing! I’m still here!
The response was three “What”s, two “Why”s, and a puzzled expression from Rabbit.
Lucille sighed, and she explained, “First off, we don’t know if the spell misfired when Sir Forsythe killed the elf. If this was an attack directed at me specifically, and the body-swapping is unintentional, we don’t want the attacker to know what happened. It could invite another attack.”
“With all due respect, Your Highness,” Grace said, “that seems kind of weak.”
“Uh,” Krys added, “and I think the attacker’s dead.” She waved at the unmoving elf-corpse.
“That spell the prince used,” Lucille said, “I don’t thin
k it came from the Winter Court. Until we know why Prince Daemonlas did this, and where the spell came from, we can’t just assume he was on his own here.” Lucille sighed and turned around to look back out at the night sky. “And there’s a more important reason.”
“Which is?”
“If my father thinks I’m still in the dragon’s body, he is much less likely to order something irrevocable.”
She turned away from the night and started explaining her plans in earnest, and gave me even more cause for objections. “I will need to go back to Lendowyn Castle with news of what has happened, and to retrieve Dracheslayer and the Tear of Nâtlac.”
A dragon-slaying sword made sense, but the Tear was another story. That’s crazy! Mix that with some unknown spell and even the Dark Lord himself can’t predict what will happen!
My pleas were still inaudible, and only one of the girls seemed to realize how insane bringing the Tear of Nâtlac into this mess actually was. The mute girl Rabbit tilted her head and looked at Lucille as if she had just suggested ritual suicide.
I wished she was able to voice her objections.
“Four of you will come with me,” Lucille said.
“Four of us?” Grace said.
“Someone has to stay here and help manage the chaos.”
Grace nodded and patted the side of her crutch. “I guess we know who’s staying, Mary?”
Mary sighed, looked down at her sling, and nodded.
“You stay, heal, keep an eye on Brock, and wait to see if Sir Forsythe comes back. The rest of us will return to my father, and hope this doesn’t spiral further out of control.”
CHAPTER 4
Lucille spent most of the night assigning jobs, and trying to convince delegates from various kingdoms that this wasn’t the prelude to a war of conquest directed at their nations. I actually would have found that amusing, the idea of Lendowyn—of all nations—launching a war of conquest, except I’d spent too long playing at the leadership role and I knew the implications. The fear of war was too easily self-fulfilling.
Lucille managed much better than I could have. She even managed to reassure a terrified Baron Weslyess who was on the verge of defecting from Delarin and pledging loyalty to the Lendowyn Crown in return for keeping his land holdings and servants. If I was in charge, I probably would have accepted his surrender just on general principles.
In the hours just before dawn, Lucille took her first actual break since I had awakened behind her eyes. She knelt next to Brock’s bedside, holding the large barbarian’s uninjured hand, watching his fitful sleep.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to him. “I wish you hadn’t been hurt because of me.”
Because of me, Lucille. Because of me. I knew our own history well enough that, knowingly or unknowingly, the probability was that any major disaster rested on my shoulders, not hers. That probability approached certainty once the Dark Lord Nâtlac became involved.
Beyond my own sense of responsibility, I wished he wasn’t the one on this sickbed if only because, had it been anyone else, we’d have Brock around to help treat the wounded.
“I promise you, we’ll find out what happened, and why.”
She looked at his wounded face, then looked away.
“Frank,” she whispered, “what happened to you?”
I didn’t do this. Lucille? Don’t you know that?
She closed her eyes and squeezed Brock’s hand. Brock groaned weakly and squeezed back.
“You better be alive somewhere,” Lucille whispered. “Or someone’s going to pay.”
She stood and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Who am I kidding?” She looked down at Brock, this time without averting her eyes. No longer whispering, I could hear the dragon in her voice. “Someone’s going to pay, regardless.”
I agreed with that sentiment. Not that it was worth much coming from a disembodied consciousness that couldn’t even communicate with the rest of the world, much less extract a fitting vengeance on the architect of the current catastrophe.
Though, for all of Lucille’s worry about conspiracies, the probability was that the conspiracy began and ended with the late elf-prince. Not that I’d say that to Lucille right now, even if I could. Sometimes self-deception is the only way we keep going.
She left Brock’s side and said to herself, “Be alive, Frank.”
I’m doing my best.
• • •
Lucille left Brock’s side to join the small caravan back to Lendowyn Castle. Four mounted guardsmen accompanied the royal carriage out into the pre-dawn light. Krys and Rabbit rode inside with Lucille while Thea and Laya drove the team pulling the carriage at a speed that stopped short of shaking everything apart.
I felt every inch of Lucille’s fatigue. Our fatigue. Both our minds, and the body we shared, had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours now, and I had enjoyed precious little sleep the night before the ill-fated festivities.
Once she removed us from the immediate crisis, unable to do anything but sit and watch the gradually lightening forest slide by the carriage, the weariness swelled around us, pulling us down like heavy mud sucking at our boots.
“What’s going to happen?” Krys asked.
“I don’t know.” Lucille shook her head, watching the forest, distorted through the wavy glass of the carriage’s small window. “It’s bad. We had representatives from just about every royal house for two hundred miles—except for Grünwald.” She laughed to herself.
“Your Highness?”
Lucille rested her temple against the thick glass of the small window. “In a fortnight Grünwald may be the only kingdom we aren’t at war with.”
“But it was the elf-prince, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Lucille said quietly. “But it was the tooth, claw, and fire of Lendowyn royalty that tore and burned their flesh. Where will they direct their swords?”
Krys was silent and Lucille closed her eyes.
After a time Krys asked, “Do you really want to let King Alfred believe you’re still Frank?”
“If there’s any chance it is Frank inside that dragon,” Lucille said without opening her eyes.
“But your father—”
“I won’t have him order Frank’s death out of convenience.”
Damn it, Lucille! That is not a good idea. Even if it was me, that’s not a good idea.
“But—”
“That’s enough!” Lucille snapped, the dragon taking her voice again.
Krys shut up.
All things considered, I should have been panicking, but the last twelve hours had drained the emotion from me, and I felt the full force of Lucille’s exhaustion. At this point I even found the occasional mental scream at Lucille too tiring. She kept her eyes closed and may have exchanged another few words with Krys, but I managed to fall into something that might have been sleep.
My awareness drifted away into vivid imaginings that were half memory and half dream.
Maybe half hallucination . . .
I wore Lucille’s body in my dream, and I stumbled across a familiar battlefield, the muddy ground strewn with Grünwald’s dead. The killing ground spread out, away from a stone circle that had been recently reconsecrated in Nâtlac’s name.
I knew that, because I’m the one who had done that consecration when I’d ritually sacrificed the high priestess of the Nâtlac cult, the last queen of Grünwald.
She hadn’t left me much choice in the matter.
Ravens picked at the bodies as I stumbled past the carnage, and I felt a sharp burst of anger. Not at the queen and Grünwald, but at the Elf-King Timoras. He had been the one to drop me here with Lucille. I had bargained with him—never a great idea with an elf—to free the Dragon Lucille in return for a ring I had stolen from the queen. Among a list of other promises, I had extorted free pass
age back to the mortal world for both of us.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t specified passage back to somewhere that wasn’t inhabited by the Dark Queen Fiona and her army.
That’s the thing about elves. They’ll keep their promises to the letter, but they can be very creative about interpreting those letters.
Something crunched under my feet. I looked down and saw a small hand mirror, its broken shards ground to silver powder under my feet. I remembered that, too; a “gift” from the elf-king that had never seen any use. My anger flared because that seemed another way Timoras had passively betrayed me. Who sends someone into a battle with a magic mirror? Someone who expected it to break and relieve them of the burden of holding to the last part of their agreement.
And Prince Daemonlas was Timoras’s son. How is the elf-king going to react now?
I looked up, and thoughts about the elf-king fled from me.
I stood at the base of a familiar hillside. The bodies at the base of the hill had been burned, and the source of the fire rested unmoving at the top of the hill.
I knew the dragon—Lucille—had survived this battle.
Still, I had fallen completely into this dream. I saw her giant body, peppered with arrow shafts blacker than her scales, and she appeared as inanimate as the burned corpses at my feet.
I screamed her name as I ran up the hillside. Carrion birds erupted into flight as I stumbled and slid up a slope slick with a dragon’s life’s blood. I reached the crest, hoarse from screaming, and everything fell suddenly quiet. Even the ravens’ calls had faded to nothing, leaving only my breathing . . .
. . . and, from behind the dragon’s body, the sound of metal scraping across stone.
I ran to see what made the sound.
Digging a hole in the earth on the other side of Lucille’s half-severed neck was the wizard Elhared the Unwise.
“What the . . .”
“The gang’s all here,” said the wizard.
“What are you doing?”
“Digging up a wedding present,” Elhared said.
Not Elhared, I thought with the sluggishness of dream-memory. The mind in Elhared’s body belonged to the dragon, displaced at the same time as Lucille and I had been. The mind of the wizard had—
Dragon Wizard Page 3
