Blood and Royalty

by M. R. Mathias

  “Sorry, Milly.” March gave her a pat on the shoulder. “It is tied to my dragon saddle. I will go get—” Then he was talking to air because she’d disappeared.

  “What does she want with that old sword?” he asked Jenka. He added a “Your Highness,” out of sheer orneriness, causing Rikky to chuckle, despite his battered body and Aikira’s loss.

  “Who cares about some blasted sword,” Aikira asked angrily. She hugged Zahrellion and sobbed again. “At least the prince is safe with Linux.”

  Clover was now a few rooms over, but her voice could still be heard through the open doors, though none of them could understand what she was saying.

  March thought she might be in her old office, rummaging.

  “The- sword- is- important,” Jenka said slowly, his eyelids closing and then opening a dozen times so quickly that it was unnerving.

  Marcherion had no problem easing away from the group to go see what Clover was after, but before he was out of the archway, Rikky said, “I nearly had that fargin’ turd-eater, March. I had him almost choked out before we were blasted, but the mudged are still destroying the Outlands, and they will move on to the kingdom soon, I’m sure of it.”

  “That they will.” Clover brushed past March as if he weren’t even there. “And I think our Sarsaraxus, like the Sarax, can’t travel over seawater.”

  “That is why it binded itself to that box,” Princess Amelia said as she appeared, laboriously dragging Marcherion’s sheathed sword across the floor. “Father didn’t sense it until it was released; nor did I. The Basx is what protected it from being sensed by the shapeshifter all that time, too.”

  “Bound, Milly, not binded.” Zahrellion pulled away from Aikira long enough to correct her daughter’s grammar.

  “Fine. That is why it bound itself to the Basx.” She paused to catch her breath, for the sword weighed as much as she did. “It wanted someone to bring it here, but only after you and the Elementals scattered its greatest foe across the sea.”

  “Where did you get that?” Clover asked Marcherion. She stuck the corner of the parchment she was carrying between her teeth and went to help the girl with the blade.

  When Clover picked up the sword and put her hand on the little girl’s shoulder, March saw that all of them, even Jenka and Zahrellion, saw it. Clover’s and Amelia’s hair were the exact same shade of red, and their eyes, quite nearly the same emerald color as Jenka’s.

  March turned to see that Aikira’s sobbing had stopped, because she was looking at them, too.

  “Did we grow horns?” Clover asked, as she unsheathed the ancient weapon.

  “You look just alike,” Rikky said, and shrugged it off. “What are those markings on the sword?” He moved closer to them, his peg leg thumping the floor heavily as he went to see it better. “And if there is a terrible Saraxsaurus--”

  “Sar-sarax-us, Uncle Rikky,” Amelia imitated her mother’s correcting voice, which caused Rikky to grin down at the girl as he took in the silvery blade.

  “It isn’t Wildermont steel,” was all March could think to say while waiting on an answer about the writing.

  Jenka was looking at it now, and March knew this could take a while. He was about to have Blaze drop him near the Outland destruction and see if he could locate Aikira’s family. He was sure that, after a little rest, Rikky would help. Aikira and the dragons needed to recoup badly, though, before they put them back in a sky full of mudged.

  “If there is a Sar-sarax-us running loose on King Richard’s side of the world, then that is to our advantage.” Rikky met Marcherion’s eyes, wanting to talk this through, like they sometimes used to reason out the course of a hunt by reacting to the prey.

  “Is there a chance Richard will go back there to fight it?” March asked his old hunting buddy. “Or is he just crazy, and lusting to cause sorrow and misery everywhere?”

  “That thing he rides feeds on pain,” Zahrellion said.

  “It is evil, that much is certain,” Clover answered them. “So, yes, it would feed on the suffering and woe those inbred wyrms and that Sar-sarax-us will cause, too.”

  Clover turned and started back to Jenka and the sword, but stopped and snapped her fingers as she apparently remembered something important. Looking right at Rikky, she said, “Your half-elven friend, Lemmy, I think you said his name was, well he was at the elven deep. But that was even before Milly set…” She stopped and gave the girl a look. “When the Sarsaraxus was let loose.”

  “Lemmy is alive?” Rikky asked.

  Both Zahrellion and Aikira stood and moved toward the conversation.

  “He was when I first went to see the Oracle.”

  “What is he doing on the other side of the world?” Aikira asked.

  “What was he doing there?” This from Rikky.

  “He was there when Clover brought me, too,” Amelia said. “He spoke to me. He was waiting to ask the Oracle a question.” She looked down at the scuffed-up boots sticking out from under her filthy dress. “He wasted all that time just waiting.”

  “What?” Rikky asked.

  “He’d been waiting a while,” Clover explained. “But the Oracle is dead now, and many of the elves, too. I doubt the Sarsaraxus was able to destroy their protective magics, but it probably did a lot of damage before they got it out of there.”

  Then Jenka stopped them all cold, for what he said was as unreal as anything they’d ever heard before:

  “This - blade -is -Errion -Spightre, once called Iron Spike. This is the Orn Spike from the ballads.” Jenka handed it back to Clover. “But only the blood of Pavreal can ignite its power.”

  “Impossible,” Clover said, feeling its weight in her hands, which coming from a three-hundred-year-old beauty only made Marcherion feel that much more disbelief. “This blade was forged from the purest ore the giants could find, by dwarven hammers, under dragon fire, while being enriched with the most powerful elven enchantments.”

  “But without one of Pavreal’s bloodline to wield it, it is useless.”

  “Against a sky full of mudged it is useless, anyway,” Rikky grumbled. “We should be resting. We’ve Pascal and his pa to find, and we still have a sky full of fargin’ wyrms to go kill.”

  ”Damn, he sounds just like Herald,” Marcherion whispered to the girls after Rikky had gone.

  Then Rikky was twisting March’s ear from behind, just like Herald had done to his trainees. “An’ don’t be forgettin’ it neither, boy.”

  For a moment, just a moment, everything seemed normal.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Richard couldn’t believe it when the Dragoneers fled. He couldn’t believe that Rikky Camille, a one-legged bastard he’d saved more than twice from certain death, would try to kill him from the sky; but more than anything, he couldn’t believe the Nightshade was telling him to ride Bruiser for a while, because it had something else to do.

  Richard tried telling it no, but the Nightshade overpowered his will. After it used its evil power to fortify Richard’s body and return him the one smaller teardrop it had found loose in the streets, it left him.

  Sitting on Bruiser’s back was almost demeaning, but Richard still had his huge dragon tear and the smaller one to add to its power. He told Kovin and Baru that he had the Nightshade retrieving something special. Then he searched the smoky sky over the Outlands and shrugged.

  “What happened to Dinaqu?” he asked.

  “He was charred to a husk when he destroyed that shield,” Kovin growled. “He was hasty and forgot to ward himself.”

  “So, if I order you to go destroy the other one,”—Richard smirked back at Kovin—“you could manage the task without dying?”

  Kovin swallowed hard, but nodded that he could.

  Richard laughed, and so did Baru, but the old bald man’s laugh was so obviously forced that it caused Richard to laugh that much harder. “Go, you two.” He waved them away. “Go use some of the dragons to herd the people into that protective field, and then burn the
city around them until it is gone. I want them to see what they’ve lost when we destroy their protection. I want to see the hope drain from their faces as it all sinks in.”

  *

  “It is impossible to act like a typical citizen with this!” Rikky yelled at March.

  They were creeping down an abandoned, but mostly whole, Outland street. Once Golden had taken a moment to gather her wits, she had told Aikira and the Dragoneers that she now knew Pascal was still alive, and knew exactly where he was. It was a battle to make Aikira stay behind and rest, but Zahrellion, Jenka and Clover were with her. Now, Rikky and March were after Pascal and his father.

  “Quit telling me to try and blend. Everyone knows who I am.”

  “They will stop following us, and clinging to us, if we can lose them or make them believe we are just scared people down here, too,” March argued, but Rikky was right. Both of them had on dragon-riding gear and battle armor, and neither of them seemed afraid, like the half-dozen people behind them looked.

  “We are here, anyway.” Rikky looked back at them all. “We are taking Prince Pascal to his mother. If you follow us out of the city, you can then return and lead others to a safer hiding place. I cannot say how long this will last,”—Rikky motioned up at the mudged and smoke over the city—“but I will die trying to send those things back where they came from.”

  “Just hide in the shadows there and wait.” March pointed, but just then a weak jet of dragon fire swept up the lane and caused the people to scatter.

  Only Rikky pulling Marcherion into the nearest stoop by the back of the belt seemingly saved him from the flames. He didn’t tell Rikky, but he’d wanted to feel that dragon fire. It wouldn’t have burned him like it would others. He was bonded with a fire wyrm, after all.

  “There,” Rikky said. “That is the base of the Pirattiton.”

  “What the hell is the Pirattiton?” March asked.

  “You were here when they unveiled it, dimbuss.” Rikky’s look was incredulous.

  “Oh.” March had sat through a whole lot of formal gatherings and unveilings before going back home. It was one of the reasons he’d left. And even though there were two landed mudged eating charred people right there on the cobbles between them and the monument, he decided he was as happy here as anywhere. Marcherion decided he would go retrieve Desira, or at least give her the chance to come to the safety of Clover’s castle, after this was done.

  An explosion of pain hammered his shoulder, and Rikky was in his face. “Are you drifting now, like Jenka? Get it straightened out up there.” He tapped March’s head hard. “We are about to have to kill these two turds the old fashioned way.”

  March rubbed his arm and then his head and laughed. “You’re Herald. You’ve turned into old Herald.”

  Princess Amelia had taken the sword March had been using. He didn’t mind; obviously Iron Spike hadn’t been meant for him. He pulled Rikky’s sword from its sheath. “Use your bow,” he said, and then charged out and rammed the steel to the hilt in the nearest mudged’s side.

  As soon as the inbred dragon slung him away and growled out in pain, Rikky loosed two arrows at the other one, who snatched up its meal and decided to eat elsewhere.

  The mudged March had stabbed was still there, though, and Rikky was drawing arrows and loosing them at it just as quickly as he could. It went darting across the cobbles, though, to where Marcherion had ended up.

  *

  The need to hunt the Sarsaraxus was so strong in Jenka that he couldn’t resist it. He left Clover’s castle knowing that he was about to go fight to the death against the thing the alien part of him despised. He understood the reasoning behind the hatred, for he understood almost everything, if he pondered it long enough. The beast he and the Dragoneers had destroyed used the Sarax for food. The Sarsaraxus was the pollinating male. It had escaped its power-suppressing cages on the vessel and caused the crash that brought them here in the first place. All of this Jenka knew from the alien’s memory.

  It must have used its supernatural power to change forms and cross the sea. Jenka was pretty sure it had fled fearing the alien that had held it imprisoned so long. How had it gotten itself trapped in that box they called the Basx, or had it been trapped at all? It had manipulated the elves and men into killing its only enemy. Then it escaped Amelia’s attempt to kill it, for she felt the same revulsion of the creature Jenka did, if not more so. Now it was on the loose.

  Jenka felt that killing the Sarsaraxus was no righteous deed, for it had been brought here imprisoned. Jenka’s motives were not the same as the desire driven by the alien part of him. There was a valid reason for not resisting this primal urge to hunt the Sarsaraxus down. If it came back to the Mainland, ever, the dusty pollen its skin produced would get in the air and quicken the spores left in the remains of all the Sarax they had killed. They would eventually emerge, feed and cocoon. Humanity would be overrun by horn-heads and flying death. It was sort of like the last laws of magic, the ones about ending anything that had the power of unrestrained creation. It was just something that had to be done.

  The problem with all of that was that only gods had the kind of power the elves feared, and the elves of Everling might have just been murdering the very weapons being sent from the heavens to save them. In Jenka’s case, he was just killing something that could end all of humanity if it ever made it back across the sea.

  For all he knew, his whole world, and everything around him, was just the whim of someone else’s creation.

  He could sense the Sarsaraxus as if he were smelling a savory dish. Once they’d teleported themselves across the sea, tracking it was even easier. When he finally saw it, and what it was doing, though, his thinking suddenly ended, and fear, true fear, filled his body.

  Had he been wrong about the nature of this thing? Or had the Nightshade taken it over as it had Gravelbone, and then Richard?

  For an instant, he wondered where his brother was, but the Sarsaraxus and the Nightshade it was riding were turning toward him. It was all he could do to urge Jade out of the way of the brunt of a devastating fist of energy.

  As Jenka felt the pain of the blow’s edge and then saw how the Sarsaraxus sat perfectly on the hellborn wyrm, how perfectly black they both were, he decided that maybe the Nightshade had caused the Sarsaraxus to crash the ship here, for the sight of those two foul things moving together as if they’d been created to do so, wouldn’t leave Jenka’s mind.

  It was only Jade who saved them from crashing, but even as they gathered themselves and started into hyper-movement, another fist of energy hammered them backward, then another.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “We can’t get past them,” Marcherion whispered. He, Rikky, teenage Pascal, and another boy, were all huddled in the crawl space underneath the statue of an old Outland pirate-turned-hero. A half-dozen mudged had found a sheep herd and were using the park-like area around the monument to land and feed. March couldn’t see any way to get the two boys through, but he had an idea.

  “I’ll go alone,” March said. “I’ll come back on Blaze and light this place up. If you guys stay under here, you’ll be safe, and with Silva’s help, maybe we can cover your way back out to the forest, where there is room to mount up.”

  “No use in me trying to sneak around.” Rikky tapped his peg leg on the ground angrily. This caused one of the larger mudged, one with prominent shades of blue and green to its scales, to look right at them.

  “Shhhh,” Pascal hissed.

  “It’s coming right at—” The other boy’s squeal was cut short when Marcherion’s hand wrapped around his face.

  The mudged was coming across the ground fast, but Rikky stood there in the opening and drew an arrow. His ability to disregard the charging dragon was amazing, but then March realized that its head was way too big to fit into the opening that led into the hollowed out area in which they hid.

  He watched his friend and saw the arrow fly. It went right into the mudged’s eye and d
isappeared completely, its full length passing through the wyrm’s ocular cavity into its brain.

  The fargin’ wyrm didn’t stop, even though it was dead. It hit the granite slab, shaking the whole structure, and they were lucky it rolled to the side enough for March to sneak through.

  They were far better protected now, though. March threw off his canteen and dug out a leather satchel full of jerked meat from his pocket.

  “You can stay here as long as you have food and water.”

  “You’re coming back, right?” Pascal asked, his ebon-skinned face looking almost exactly like his mother’s.

  March nodded that he was, but he took a deep breath and then asked the question that had to be asked.

  “Where is your father?”

  Pascal sniffled and almost started bawling, but he caught himself and, with a good bit of pride in his voice, he answered. “He died staving off a mudged so Zephan and I could break away from the hold’s back way.”

  He, too, took a deep breath, and ignoring the tear sliding down his cheek added a “Sir,” reminding March that he was as well-trained as any young man could be.

  The other ebon-skinned Outland boy was a sobbing mess now.

  “Once you’re gone, we will use one of those timbers.” Rikky pointed to a small pile of building and restorative materials that were stored in the crawl space. “We can get the opening wide enough that we don’t have to dally when we make our run.”

  We can come nowsss, Silva hissed into Marcherion’s and surely Rikky’s mind, for it was Rikky who answered her.

  There are too many mudged here. Pascal is Aikira’s son. I won’t risk it.

  March knew Pascal hadn’t heard them, but Pascal seemed to know they were talking to the dragons.

  The exasperated sound Silva sent out across the ethereal let them know she didn’t like it. But she would wait for Marcherion, with Blaze, who March knew wanted to be charring these sheep for himself right now. It struck Marcherion that, only after the Dragoneers started having children, did the female dragons become so overprotective of them.