by LeRoy Clary
He called out in their language. The shoulder-wounded man responded, and the first turned to Elizabeth. “He thinks one of them buried it.”
“Where?”
“He does not know. But he says he saw it. I didn’t.”
She allowed her eyes to scan the ground, and how us and them, had trampled everything. I suspected the one who hid it had smoothed the ground to keep it hidden from the others, so unless we decided to dig up the whole camp where a dozen men had lived, the gold was gone. Besides, it was now full dark and even searching would be difficult.
Kendra was applying a salve to the legs of the two men she had treated, and when I turned her way, she held her fingers in the signal we needed to speak. I gave her a small nod of assent. She said, “The one that talks didn’t bleed.”
Elizabeth lifted her head as if giving up on recovering her gold. She looked at Kendra. “The store where these men sold our belongings cheated them. We will go there and recover as much as we can, so we need to travel before they sell it. Tell me about the condition of our prisoners.”
“If we leave them here, they will die. Two of them can’t walk and probably won’t for weeks.”
“Tater?”
“He can sit a horse by morning. At least for a short trip.”
Elizabeth drew a breath and allowed it to escape between pursed lips, almost making a whistling sound. Her jaw was set, her eyes far-off.
Neither of us spoke. She was thinking. It was her position in life to make choices for people. We’d seen her in this mood often. It was as if she removed herself from her body and surroundings, then sorted through details until making her choices.
As a girl, she had sat with her father as he presided over disputes. If a cow broke through a fence and destroyed the garden of a neighbor while mating with a bull, who did the calf belong to? She’d told us many times that both sides of many disputes might be seen as correct. Either farmer could make his case for the calf. Her point was that ruling is often more difficult than farming.
She said, “Make our preparations. We leave in the morning.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
P rincess Elizabeth had spoken. Her word was law as much as if the king had told us the same. We would depart the campsite in the morning. Only the details remained. Who would go, and how? That was the critical question that neither Kendra nor I wished to ask. Neither did we want to suffer her ire, because we’d seen it before in similar situations.
However, Tater hadn’t.
He said, “How are we going to take those three and us when we don’t have enough horses? Who’s walking?”
“Walking will slow us too much. There is important work to be done in Mercia. We’ll take the one who speaks with us because he may be of temporary use. For the other two, we will leave them food, blankets, and their lives. That is more than they were going to allow us.”
A flash of relief flooded Stata’s face. He said nothing to the others.
“The wolves or bears might get them,” Kendra said.
“Better than them eating us, as they are doing just down the hill from us this moment. We have five horses, four riders. Begin sorting what we will take with us.”
Her tone offered no room for question. She was right. After getting over my initial shock and reluctance to leave wounded men on the mountain where they would probably die we got busy. If they had not attacked us, all would be alive. If they had things their way, all of us would be dead. Us or them. They had named the tune, and we were singing it.
I carried a burning stick to the edge of the meadow to inspect where they had dumped much of our belongings. I could sort through them and find anything we required. On the way, I had passed close to Kendra with my two fingers signaling her. She picked up a blanket and followed me, making it appear I needed it.
When we knelt and began our search, she said quietly, “The Blue Lady returned to speak with me last night.”
“What did she say?”
“That we were doing well. Better than she expected. She didn’t expect us to survive the ambush. She warned me against the forces of darkness again.”
That stilled me. “She knew about the ambush and didn’t warn us?”
“She asked if we were now traveling to Kondor.”
The burning stick fell to the dirt from my limp fingers. She knew too much. “What else?”
“Two things. First, a dragon approached, and the Blue Lady faded away like she was scared of it.”
“And?” I prompted.
“All of it happened right beside the fire. When she left, the firelight reflected in Tater’s eyes. He was wide awake. I don’t know how much, or what he saw and heard.”
“Of course, you couldn’t ask.”
She shook her head. “Maybe we can blame it on fever and bad dreams. Look busy, here comes Elizabeth.”
I stood and said, without turning to face the princess, as if I was only addressing Kendra, “There is nothing here we need to take. We should load the packhorse with blankets and food.”
Elizabeth snapped, “We can purchase all else we require with the silver we recovered—and the refund I intend to get from the storekeeper.” Her tone was angry, but not directed at us. She said to Kendra in a softer tone, “Are you sure Tater can ride?”
“He may need a rest break or two, but yes. I’ll keep watch on his dressings.”
Several snarls of large animals sounded from the darkness as a fight erupted. Either bears fighting over the same body or bears and wolves. Maybe other animals were involved. By morning a feast between the carnivores of the mountain would be in full swing.
Elizabeth said, “Let’s get to the fire and keep it stoked all night. We can take a final look around in the morning, but I’m fairly certain there won’t be much to find that we need. Anyone hungry?”
I was not. Despite only a handful of nuts and dried fruit while returning to camp, my appetite had fled with the grunts and growls. My mind told me human bones were getting crushed as animals ate their fill. Kendra reacted to another growl from the darkness and shook her head that she didn’t want to eat, either. Our minds were imagining the terrible scene a few hundred steps away.
Tater was sitting up beside the fire, chewing and spitting and seemingly happy. A sling held his broken arm. I’d anticipated using some small magic to relieve his pain but held off. Who knows how much essence the world possesses or how it’s replaced—if it is. I wouldn’t want to be accused of wasting it like my sister does with her dragons. I chuckled to myself, finding myself in a better mood than there was any right to.
The bruises on Taters face had taken on the hues of a rainbow, the swelling may have reduced slightly, but his eyes were still puffy. “How are you doing?”
He started to smile and winced in pain instead. “Can you talk to that princess of yours and tell her that the guide needs a raise?”
His joke didn’t strike me as funny. “Yes, I will.”
“No, that was a joke.”
“For your help, we will pay you more. Far more.”
He spat near me, and while I saw it coming, I didn’t bother to deflect it. It missed, and that’s all that counts. Elizabeth and Kendra came and sat near us.
Kendra said, “We need to set a guard tonight. Bears and whatever else is out there tearing those poor men apart.”
Stata was a few steps away, listening to every word uttered and trying not to let on. I went to him and sat. “We’ll have to tie you for the night. Same with your friends.”
He shrugged. “Barely know them.”
“You’re not from Kondor?”
“Father was. Never been there, myself.”
That was interesting. “How did you get mixed up with these?”
“They paid me. Should have kept my old job and walked away. Any chance of you letting me go, or maybe joining up with you?”
I shook my head. He was not going with us. The conversation seemed to lag. He was right if he told the truth. Kendra and Elizabeth had their he
ads together, so I decided to move on. “Why were they here? The other men?”
A sheepish expression he couldn’t conceal told me shame would come with the answer. He said, “They were hunting for the treasure of the Dragon Queen.”
“Treasure hunters? Up here?” The answer didn’t make sense. They had no digging or mining tools, were not the sort to search for gold and jewels, and why had they searched at the top of a mountain pass? Well, not the summit, but near enough. In late spring there was still snow on the ground, and water froze at night.
Stata said, “Not a treasure in the usual manner, no gold or jewels. They hunted the Dragon Queen and hoped for the reward in finding her.” He paused, then continued, in his clipped accent, “That’s what they told me. Maybe not the truth?”
“Who is she?”
“No one knows. Mages sense when she uses her powers and they grow scared. She is a new arrival, and they say she absorbs all the essence of the world, way too much. There were six mages in Mercia waiting for her to arrive and more coming. The Kondor have all routes into the city blocked, to kill her first and collect the reward. But they are not alone.”
The explanation chilled me more than the frozen air. A queen meant a woman. However, it was the remark about using all the essence that turned my thinking to my sister and the conversations with the Blue Lady. For the first time, I knew true fear. “How will they know her?”
“By her dragon, of course.”
“Her dragon? You’ve confused me.” My heart began beating again. Kendra might attract wyverns, but she had no dragon, so perhaps it was a different person. Since there were no dragons in the world, even if there ever had been, my twisted mind could almost relax because Kendra didn’t have a dragon.
Stata continued as if taking me into his confidence like we were friends, “The woman called the Dragon Queen will recall the last dragon to life. It will break free of its bonds and obey only her.”
“Where do you get this nonsense?”
“The mages know it, at least the older ones. There is a ceremony told in old books,” he defended himself.
Disbelieving he told anything but lies and half-truths, I’d about lost my patience. A guide and translator for a dozen invaders starving to death might tell any story in order to survive. I persisted, “But, how did you get the information. You’re not a mage.”
He smiled as if tired, but his eyes were locked on the women. His hand slowly lifted, and his fingertips slid across the bloody bandage on his thigh. A sprinkling of blue light surrounded his wound and quickly dissipated. The dried blood was no longer on the bandage. He gently peeled it off and tossed it aside. Not even a sign of where the arrow had penetrated remained. I scooted away from him, as scared as I’d ever been.
Stata’s image fell away. He stood on two uninjured legs, drawing the attention of all. His nose grew wider, his skin lighter, his hair turned the shade of Elizabeth’s—and most of those people from Dire. He took a single step closer to my sister and Elizabeth and said in a strong, clear, unaccented voice, “Which is her?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
W e watched Stata in fear, wonder, confusion, and a hundred other descriptions. He had accused either Elizabeth or Kendra of being something called the Dragon Queen. His conviction and hate were complete. He had morphed from the appearance of people from Kondor to Dire, his voice lost the weakness it had held, and he now seemed in charge of us in some manner instead of the other way around.
“Who are you?” Elizabeth asked in a hushed tone.
He raised both arms, hands high above his head, fingers extended, a foul expression threatening us. Hints of blue twinkled at the end of each finger. His face of rage told us he was about to do something, but not what. I was slightly behind him, and to one side, still squatted on the ground and couldn’t rise in time to prevent his actions. Both women were sitting. None of us could possibly move before he did whatever was coming.
However, it didn’t happen, at least not what Stata intended. Instead, there was a sound similar to that when I gave Alexis a good-natured slap on her rump. We saw the butt of a knife protrude from Stata’s chest, and his face morphed again, to one of shock and pain, and it resembled neither Kondor or Dire, but something else.
His hands grasped at the hilt of the knife as his knees crumpled. His mouth opened to scream but no sound emerged before he fell forward on his face. Dead.
Nobody moved.
Tater said, “Lucky it wasn’t my throwing arm that was broke.”
Elizabeth looked at me. “Why didn’t you do something?”
I understood her question. What she was asking was why hadn’t I used magic to stop Stata? The simple truth was that it was so ingrained in me to only use magic at rare times, and always in subtle ways, I hadn’t thought of it. It might not even have worked.
We all moved to examine the husk of a body that had been Stata. He no longer resembled those from Dire, nor from anywhere else. His skin had shrunk as if he had lain in the desert sun in the brown lands for days. Upon further inspection of him, all accomplished without any of us touching him, his bones seemed to have dissolved. What lay on the ground was wrinkled skin and clothing.
“Magic,” Tater hissed.
Kendra turned her face away and gagged.
Elizabeth scowled. “A mage did this.”
“Killed him?” I asked, wondering if Tater intended to retrieve his knife.
“No,” she snapped. “I’ve heard some mages can present themselves as people using a high-level spell called reincarnation. They enter the body of someone long dead and use it from afar to look and act human.”
“Never heard of that,” I told her through a whisper of fear.
She continued speaking as if she’d never stopped, “The mage must be present in the body at all times but cannot cheat death. Tater’s knife caused the mage to withdraw or die with the body. I’m sure only the body died. The mage is still out there. Somewhere.”
Her explanation chilled me even more. “Do you mean a mage has been wearing the body of Stata like some old clothes?”
“Yes,” her answer allowed for no other account.
Tater stepped forward and knelt but didn’t touch. “Looks old. She might be right. Anybody got a knife they can lend me?”
That answered the question of the knife, and I’d see he received a better one. “Then, where is the mage?”
Elizabeth shrugged.
I persisted, “Did the mage have to stay with the body all the time? If so, what about sleep? And why was he with those men from Kondor on the mountain?”
She said, “I think, but do not know for sure because I’ve only heard of this spell in hints, it can be maintained while sleeping. But when awake, the mage must accompany the dead, or it fades to what we see before us.”
“That’s so much work!” I said.
Tater shook his head and spat near my foot. “Would you rather be up here on this mountain freezing and starving, or in some warm room sipping soup and watching here through Stata’s eyes?”
“He’s right,” Elizabeth said, “and there is more to learn here. In the end, he looked different than Dire and has an accent. A corpse remembers no language.”
“He’s from far away,” Tater said. “For me, I might kill the next person who talks in the funny way he did, just to be sure.”
“I cannot believe he’s been up here for months,” I said.
“Who says he has been?” Tater asked, ending that line of thought. “For all we know, he might have just got here.”
Kendra turned, took one more quick look, and said, “If we leave now we can be at the store by daybreak. Please.”
We could hear the animals tearing apart the dead at the road, a sure thing to keep me awake. Besides, I’d never be able to sleep with the flat mass at our feet of what had once been a man. And I was not going to attempt moving it. “That sounds good to me.”
Tater said, “I can ride.”
We all faced Elizabeth. She sa
id, “Get the horses.”
Tater took the lead, again, to my surprise. However, I took the drag position in line, where it was easy to keep an eye on the women. A bow remained in my left hand, and arrow in my right for the entire night. Sleep could wait. My mind didn’t linger on the dead husk the mage had enchanted or reincarnated. No, it kept going back to his words before he attacked us.
He had been trying to gain admission or reaction from me that would convince him of who the Dragon Queen was, wishing it was Kendra. He used shock to draw her out. When that hadn’t worked, he had tried providing information to make her identify herself, or one of us to look her way. What the blue at his fingers was intended to do, I have no idea, but not kill. He didn’t seem to want to kill her, or he would have used his powers to drop a tree on all of us, cause a landslide, call the bears to attack, or freeze us in place and slit all our throats.
Stata also said there were six mages waiting for her at Mercia and more on the way. Three were from Dire so where had the others come from? How would they know their prey?
Those questions took me to others. Who offered the reward they hoped to claim? Why were they so concerned with a woman called the Dragon Queen? They seemed to know what she could do, and they feared her, so had there been another of her kind in times past?
Near daybreak, one set of facts were self-evident. Those waiting in Mercia knew her. They probably that she was my sister, and when she was arriving. They were waiting, the mages and others to do her harm. Some of the spirits might know when she arrived by the depletion of the essence. However, it was clear those enemies were massed and working together.
Therefore, she could not go there.
And I couldn’t yet explain to Elizabeth why.
The bow was still in my hand when the trail dipped onto level ground and turned into a dirt road. Ahead, and to either side, were farms, plowed fields, even at the early hour, lights glowed in the windows. A herd of goats crowded a fence to watch us ride past. Dogs barked. Farmers looked up from their dawn-work, and a few waved before continuing with their tasks. It all seemed so normal.
