by LeRoy Clary
Kendra turned at the corner, and as expected, a wide alley took us behind where each house had some sort of barn, stable, carriage house, or all. They were fenced, but we sat high enough that we saw over them. Her eyes were on one house, so my attention went there, too.
“Can you slip up to the house and see how many are inside?”
In answer, I got my feet under me and stood on the saddle and stepped over the fence. I landed on soft ground and rolled, then darted to the outbuilding. Getting found by enemies from behind was not going to happen because of the fence. The outbuilding held five horses, not a good sign. Three of the stalls had boards with names burned into them. Two were for visitors.
Perhaps that was better, but no way to tell, yet. At the rear door, I listened to a pair of men talking, but the words couldn’t be made out. A window revealed them sitting on large stuffed chairs, intently facing each other.
They were mages. Not because they glowed or by any deed of mine, but because I recognized them from the palace. I’d seen them my entire life.
A ladder stood against the outbuilding and a window on the second story was open. It was perfect. I found a few rags in the barn and wrapped them around the top rails of the ladder. It went against the side of the stone house without a sound. At the top of the ladder, I peeked inside to an empty bedroom.
Once inside, my boots came off, and I slipped barefoot from room to room, all empty. The same two voices echoed up to me, never another. There might be someone else, but I’d done all I could to be sure. If a bodyguard or soldier leaped out when I got down, we’d fight.
I moved down several steps and waited. The staircase ended in the room where the mages sat. My sword was in my right hand, my boots in my left. I threw the boots to the far side of the room, causing both men to look that way as I silently raced up behind them.
My sword-tip touched the bare neck of the closest. To the other, I said, “There is nothing preventing me from killing you both, here and now.”
“Damon?” The one able to turn his head asked.
The other started to turn to look at me. I jabbed him hard enough to draw blood.
The first said, “Have you lost your mind, boy?”
Despite my sword, it was two-to-one, and they had looked down on me my entire life. For them, facing a stranger would be more difficult. I sensed both tensing as if they were going to fight.
In a flash, my sword blade rose, and I hammered the butt of the sword handle down on the top of the head of the nearest, stepped aside, and slashed across the chest of the other. His shirt sliced open, as did his skin. The cut looked deeper than I’d intended.
As the first man slumped to the floor, I reached out my hand and tore the rest of the shirt open from the other as he stood in shock examining his wound.
A few slices of my blade cut the shirt into strips. He was still examining his wound when I pulled his wrists behind his back and tied them. The one I’d hit over the head hadn’t moved. I went to the rear door and waved for Kendra to come inside.
“Anybody else here?” I asked.
He shook his head. His eyes were still on his chest as if he couldn’t believe what had happened. Then he raised them to me and growled. “I will kill you for that. I am a mage, stupid boy.”
“If you had a dragon in chains to draw your magic from you might do it, but you don’t.”
“There’s more than one mug to drink from.”
“Not today, there’s not. Maybe not even tomorrow,” I said while using more strips off his shirt to add to the ones already on his wrists. However, the comment stuck with me. Kendra and I would find out what it meant to drink from more than one mug. It didn’t sound good for me. I knelt beside the one on the floor to begin tying him—and saw his eyes were open and already turning foggy. I’d killed him. I’d murdered a royal mage.
Kendra entered in a wary stance, her knife in hand.
The blood ran in rivers down the stomach of the mage I’d cut. The entire lower half of his body was red. He snarled at her, “You.”
I expected Kendra to berate me for killing one and cutting the other, but instead, she glanced at the dead one and back to the other as calmly as if we did this sort of thing daily. She said, “Yes, me. And you are bleeding to death. Damon, I’ll bet you a silver crown that he is dead before dark.”
“You always take the winning side of our bets. No thanks.”
Her face still had shown no emotion, and that probably scared the mage more than anything. She said to him, “I am going to ask you a few questions.”
“I won’t talk. There are others of us who are coming.”
She sat in the chair where he had. “Well, there were three of you here in Andover. Now there is you.”
That statement got his attention. For the first time, I saw fear.
She crossed one knee over the other as she sat at apparent ease. “Without my help, you will die soon. When that happens, I will call down that great beast of a dragon I control, and just like I did at Mercia, I will have it flatten this house, and you along with it. Did you watch my dragon do that to Mercia? I stood beside the river as it did it.”
“Your dragon?”
“The lady in blue light called me the Dragon Queen.”
“No . . .”
“Listen, I don’t have all day. No, let me rephrase that. You do not have all day. Where are the other mages and what are their plans?”
Her casual attitude and cold tone even scared me. Blood still flowed freely from his chest as he slumped to his knees and then to the floor where he lay in a pool of his own blood. His face was sweating and pale. His hand tried to stem the blood as he looked from Kendra to me, then back again, disbelieving what he saw and heard.
She abruptly stood. “Have it your way. Damon, it’s time for us to go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
W e walked outside, leaving the wounded mage lying on the floor bleeding to death. At any instant, I expected her to relent and tell me to question him again. Instead, we mounted and rode to the bazaar where she dismounted long enough to buy a loaf of bread and slab of cheese. Then she led the way out of the city, back to where we had left the first mage.
“Are we going to let him die?”
She turned to look at me. “I’m certain you didn’t mean to cut him as deeply as you did, and the other was an accident. I saw his chirp in my mind disappear when you hit him. The other is so dim I can barely detect it. There was nothing we could do to save him.”
“You called yourself the Dragon Queen.”
“To scare him. To know if he recognized the name. He was terrified of it, and that tells us he knows of the dragon and me.”
A shout drew my attention. The soldier or bodyguard from the inn was threatening a man on the street, demanding information about the mage who had disappeared. “Turn your head away and keep riding, Kendra.”
We left the city without incident if you can call killing two mages no incident. When we arrived where we’d left the first one we had kidnapped, he was still sleeping. We staked the horses and made a cold camp. While sitting on my blanket, I asked, “Did the second one die?”
She turned to me, and for an instant, I think she considered lying to spare my feelings. Then she said, “Yes. It was not your fault.”
“Are there any more of them in Andover?”
“No, but where I expected to find ten, there are four missing. Their blips have faded, and I have no idea why. I don’t think they died because I can still see them. That only leaves three strong blips, and four almost gone from mind.”
“Maybe they were injured by the buildings falling in Mercia and are dying.”
“Could be, but I don’t think so.”
“What about the Blue Woman and others of her kind? Can you detect her?”
“Nothing. It could be due to distance. We’ll talk to this one when he wakes, then move on to the mages at the port, and the others if we can find them.”
That told us how little we kne
w. We didn’t even have names for the blue creatures or spirits, besides calling them “others.” There was still daylight left, and the mage hadn’t woken, so I decided to take a nap. One thing about being my age was that naps came easily, at any time of the day.
I pulled the top blanket up to my chin and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, it was full dark, and Kendra was talking.
“Listen, the short story is your protector has no idea of where you are. I know you are a mage—or perhaps I should say, you were a mage. There is no more captive dragon to steal your essence from. So, you are mine.”
“There are others who will come for me.”
She snorted, “The other two mages in Andover who were from Crestfallen Palace? No, they won’t be coming to rescue you, I’m afraid. Damon killed both of them this afternoon.”
“Damon?”
“Yes, that young man sleeping over there. To tell you the truth, I was not too happy about it. He should have let me have at least one of them.”
It seemed more menacing to lie there and wordlessly stare at him. It certainly didn’t seem like Kendra needed any help. Besides, she knew the topics she wanted to question him about, and I didn’t.
“Both are dead?”
“Well, yes. Sorry. Now, we need to move on to you. I want to know about people, or things, that draw in essence for their use. There is one Blue Woman in particular, who intrigues me. And feel free to share anything about mages that you know.”
“Will I live?”
“That is a point you and me will have to discuss.” When it seemed he might object, or make demands, she held up her index finger to quiet him, then continued, “I should have put it this way. If you do not please me, you will die tonight. That is a certainty. Beyond that, well, who knows?”
He looked at me as if silently begging for help. My face remained impassive.
Kendra said, “Tell me about the mages who went to the Port of Mercia.”
“Some of us did,” he admitted.
“Why? I’m not going to spend all night trying to pull the information from you. It would be easier to leave you here for the crows to peck your eyes out while we go there and find out for ourselves. Talk, or we leave.”
He grew more even scared of her bland tone. Kendra can have that effect on people. He said, “The wyverns cannot produce all the essence we need.”
“Meaning?” she demanded.
“We must get more.”
“Are you intending to recapture the dragon?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s too old. It’ll die in a hundred years or less. We need a new one. A strong one full of vigor.”
“Where will you find this dragon?” her voice was deceptively soft.
“From the eggs. I do not know where that is. My job was to keep the dragon secure and shield her from the Dragon Queen’s release.”
“Ah, yes. The Dragon Queen. Enlighten me about her.”
His eyes darted from one side to the other before speaking as if making sure nobody else overheard him, “She will free the dragon from bondage and destroy the city. . .”
The mage’s voice had faded off at the end as if he listened to his own words and learned something he didn’t know. Kendra said, “Yes, that was me.”
He shuddered in fear.
She said in that calm voice that brought chills to backs and necks, “The Blue Woman and her ilk?”
“The undying?”
“Explain.”
“There are those who abuse the essence of life and draw it to them in such quantities that their bodies die, while they become evil spirits of energy existing only from the nourishment of the dragon. Not real physical beings. Touching them causes a discharge of essence strong enough to kill. Never touch one.”
Kendra slowly turned her head to peer through the darkness to me as if to say, I told you so. No misunderstanding existed between us on that point. I’d touched my last Blue Woman.
She said, “They occur unnaturally, the Blue Woman and others like her who demand essence. Correct me if I’m wrong, but with the dragon free, she and her kind cannot survive.”
“Wyverns. They profess to hate them, but that’s a ruse, so they alone control them. Wyverns are always kept nearby for times when there is no dragon essence to draw from. It is a pale substitute but keeps them alive. . . or what they call alive. They are hateful and evil.”
“The wyverns are like having a water-well beside a stream. If the stream goes dry, there is the well with stale water, but better than none until the stream flows again.”
He nodded quickly. “Yes. Like that.”
“I get the feeling you do not like them, the spirits,” she said.
Kendra had relaxed in her tone and posture, and as a result, so had the mage and I. However, it was he who was falling into her trap, as I’d done so many times before. He hesitated before answering. “No, we mages who still live do not like them. We will not allow ourselves to follow them.”
She seized on his statement, “I knew it. The spirits are nothing but mages who went too far consumed too much essence and changed into something else.”
He hung his head in shame. “You’re partially right. They are mages who grew old in their flesh and transformed into something eternal before their natural deaths. As long as they are fed the energy they require, they remain with us but do nothing of value. They only care about maintaining their sordid existence. If it was up to me, I’d have released the dragon long ago and told it to fly as far and as fast as possible, then a little more.”
Neither of us had expected that response, and there was no doubt about the anger, hurt, and disgust in his words. That brought another thought to mind. The man tied on the ground in front of us was not a terrible person—and that presented a problem. Those I’d killed earlier, and those before, deserved to die.
He said, “Do us all a favor and drive the dragon to the ends of the earth before you return to your home in Kondor. Do not let the dragon go there with you. It is expected, and there are mad mages and more spirits waiting for your return.”
“Return?”
“The dragon of yours came from your home in Kondor all those years ago, didn’t you know?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
T he mage didn’t know us and had assumed we had traveled from Kondor. He seemed to believe a connection existed. Our appearances made him believe that was our home and we’d traveled to Dire. It also meant he knew others from Kondor. A few days spent with him might answer a few of our unanswered questions about our origins.
Kendra didn’t speak as she absorbed the last few statements. When she did, her words were gentle, “Sir, you have provided what I asked for, and you will not die at our hands unless you force it. However, you also present us with a problem. What shall we do with you?”
He either refused to answer or didn’t have an answer.
For me, his candor had purchased his life, but I didn’t wish to face him as an enemy again, especially if he regained part of his powers. But he almost seemed reluctant in his mage duties. That resolved one problem that had been in the back of my mind all the while. Neither Kendra nor myself were capable of killing him—despite our recent rash of doing exactly that.
I looked at Kendra for an answer. She looked back.
We were not going to take him with us. Leaving him here to face a slow and painful death was worse than using my sword, and it would be kinder. “She asked you a question. What do you recommend?”
Hanging his head, he said, “If the situation was reversed, I’d kill you and go on about my business.”
Again, that streak of honesty.
Kendra said, “We are trying to find another way to resolve this. Help us, please.”
“You have no reason to trust me.”
“Still, I’m offering you a chance to live, and you’re not taking it,” she said. “We did kill your two friends today, and tomorrow we are going after more, so don’t think us children who are not capable of doing what w
e say.”
He squirmed into a better sitting position and leaned as close as possible. “I know my chances of living are slim. There is little to offer you but one thing. If you free me, I will depart for the hills of Brennen and never return to this cursed land.”
“That’s your home?” she asked.
“It is. The ship that brought me here sailed for nearly a month on an angry sea. I have the coin saved to buy passage home. What more can I promise but that you will never see me again?”
Kendra gave me a small nod. It gave us a way out, and if we saw him again, we could kill him then. I noticed how easily thinking of killing now came to me. Yet, I believed myself able to do it without concern. The mage gave us his word in trade for him disappearing, and if that failed to happen, his death was on him, not me.
“Deal,” Kendra said.
She made no threats, no promises, and leaving it that way was more frightening. I said, “Time for me to sleep. We’ll free you in the morning, and you can walk back to Andover, but stay there in the city at least ten days. We are going to the port of Mercia, and if we see you there, we have no choice.”
“If you see me on the road in ten days?”
A fair question. “If you are making haste to a ship I may shake your hand and wish you well. If you are walking in any other direction—well, it is time for me to go to sleep, like I said. Good night.”
However, I didn’t sleep. I lay awake and listened to the breathing of the other two, trying to decide if the mage was asleep or pretending, then the events of the trip overwhelmed me. Kendra now had a dragon for a friend, and I killed men while having no magic powers at all.
I mentally followed our route from the palace and realized Elizabeth, and Tater would arrive back at Crestfallen late tomorrow. I wondered if she would find her father had taken a turn for the better. Without mages to keep him ill, he might be hunting and dancing again. No, once he spoke with Elizabeth, he would probably roust his entire army and march this way if he was half the man he was.
