The Royal Dragoneers: 2016 Modernized Format Edition (Dragoneers Saga)

by M. R. Mathias

  “That wouldn’t be hard,” she retorted.

  “There are men on horseback making the retreat from here,” Linux told her. “We need another substantial group to retreat from Midwal as well, to divert attention from the folk that are trying to get inside the wall. We want the Goblin King and his horde to think that the bulk of our defenders are retreating in fear. Watch over both groups if you can. Defend them, but someone should first fly to Farwal and see if they are as bad off as we are. I’m having written orders prepared as we speak. In addition, sweep along the wall and make certain that everyone who can gets inside of it and starts this way. We might not have enough ships for them all, but we closed up the breach nearest here. With the help of your fellow druid, we’ve moved our big swivel guns to the wall-top. We can defend Port until more ships arrive from the islands.”

  “I’ll go to Midwal after I clear the sky over the men leaving here,” Zahrellion said, climbing purposefully back onto her dragon's neck. “They know of us at Midwal. Rikky, if you fly the wall all the way east you can pass the word to Midwal that I’m coming and deliver the orders to Farwal. Silva seems quick, where Crystal is slower and more savage. She can bring down the mudge with her breath, but she can’t cover nearly as much ground as you can.” Zah wasn’t certain if this was true or not, but Crystal assured her that Silva was fast. Zahrellion wanted to vent her rage on the enemy, not carry messages. It didn’t matter. Rikky was glad to take orders from someone he felt he could trust.

  “I’m waiting on scribes, then,” Rikky pointed out the obvious. “What if I come across Jenka? What do I tell him?”

  “Tell him to do what he wants to do.” Zahrellion’s tone was sarcastic. “That’s what he’s good at.” With that, Crystal poised to leap into the air. At the last second, Zah stopped her dragon and turned to Rikky. “I’ll see you in the sky over Mainsted soon, I hope?”

  Rikky gave a short salute of respect then nodded his head. “Soon,” he assured her.

  As he waited on the scribes to finish sealing the orders, he looked at Linux and the king and found it fascinating that they had switched bodies. It seemed obvious now, but it was impressive that Zahrellion had figured it out so easily. He wondered how long it had been so, and then he diverted his attention to Crystal’s shrinking form winging away. He felt sorry for the mudged and the goblinkin that crossed her and Zah’s path this day.

  A short while later, he was streaking through the sky high above the wall. There were corpses scattered here and there, marked by the fluttering of buzzard wings, or the feeding scavengers who jostled for position on their prize. There were plenty of dead trolls and goblins, too, and it seemed that the varmints had no preference between the human and troll flesh. For some reason though, the carrion left the bodies of the little gray-skinned goblins alone.

  It was nearly dark when Rikky and his dragon made Midwal. Silva had to dodge a few arrows and chase off a pair of smaller mudged that were feeding on the humans attempting to get inside the wall. Silva caught one with a claw and winged it to the ground. The other fled south towards Mainsted and would no doubt be returning with others. Rikky tossed down the bundle of written orders for Midwal, then called down that the white dragon and the druida would be there soon. Silva made one slow circle of the darkening sky to gain altitude and warn away the mudged. Rikky couldn’t believe the amount of carnage around the tunnel mouth and outside the huge, banded-wood gates. There were piles of dead in some places. He wiped a tear from his eye, bit back his anger, then had Silva work her way eastward toward Farwal. He hoped that the vermin had stayed away from the less populated eastern part of the peninsula, but he doubted that was the case. The Farwal gate was a good distance away, and Rikky wanted to get there, pass on the orders he carried, and then go help Zah.

  In the middle of the night, he was set upon by a large fire drake. Out of nowhere, a massive jet of dragon’s fire shot across Silva’s path. She avoided it, but narrowly. She pumped her wings in an undulating rhythm of quick, bursting strokes that gained them some distance, but it soon became clear that the big scarlet wyrm was on the hunt. No doubt Rikky and Silva were its intended prey.

  They flew eastward as swiftly as Silva could carry them, the red casually dogging them as they went. Soon the watch fires of Farwal were ahead of them. When Rikky looked back the sky was empty. The red had somehow swept out away from them into the darkness. Rikky couldn’t see it anywhere.

  As they neared the eastern end of the wall, he discovered that the flames he was seeing weren’t watch fires. Farwal was an empty, smoldering ruin. The massive gates stood open, one huge, banded-oak panel lying askew. Save for the structures that were still burning, it was mostly ash. The fire drake and the troop of trolls still rummaging around the destruction had picked the place clean.

  Suddenly, flames were jetting out at them again, this time from directly overhead. Silva turned away from the searing heat, but only partially made it clear. The next thing Rikky knew, they were making a clumsy landing on the frontier side of the wall, with the huge scarlet beast flapping down right on top of them.

  Zahrellion and Crystal had helped to see the pike men from Port on their way. Then she and Crystal came toward Midwal and made short work of a middling sized, black-scaled mudge that had decided to roost just south of the city. The men from the Walguard, and the few King’s Rangers that were left alive at the Midwal Stronghold had spent all of the night and most of the morning escorting people into the wall. Several different groups of refugees and civilians had been hunkered down in one building or another out in the city. Most of the trolls and goblins had gone south, leaving behind clouds of carrion to pick clean the bones of all the foul-smelling dead. Zah saw no sense in sending the men who were under orders marching off into the rear of the enemy. Instead, she scouted the flatlands for the trolls and the goblin hordes, and found a route that Midwal’s pike men might ride horses around the enemy. A pair of dragon-riding trolls found her in the sky on one such reconnaissance flight and decided that they wanted to try and take out the white-haired Dragoneer and gain Gravelbone’s favor.

  One of them hit the ground as a solid chunk of frozen flesh and cracked apart gruesomely. The other mudge lost its rider to Crystal’s snatching jaws, but managed to gouge the white’s long neck in the exchange. Blood streamed back in bright droplets and splashed Zah in the face. She ordered her icy dragon to land, and went about casting a healing on the wound. The act tired her, but not so much so that she couldn’t continue guarding the sky over Midwal. In the late afternoon she flew west to check on the men who were retreating from Port.

  What she found when she came upon the group sickened her and left a hollow place in her soul. These men’s lives had been her responsibility. Even Crystal felt the wave of nauseous guilt flood through Zah as they took it in from above.

  The hundred eighty men and their mounts were dead. They had been half eaten and mangled by a horde of vermin. Some of the vile little goblins were still feeding. In a rage, Crystal bathed the whole scene with her icy breath. Only a small mudge managed to lift out of her frigid spew. It attacked Zah’s face with raking claws and snapping teeth, but the druida let loose a spell that sent the feral dragon flailing backwards through the sky, only to hit the ground in a bone-snapping crunch.

  It was then that she noticed several other mudged dragons closing in from the south.

  “If you’re out chasing me, then you’re not killing the good folk of Mainsted,” she mumbled.

  “They aren’t chasing us, Zahrellion,” Crystal informed her. “We’re baiting them in so I can crush them.”

  “Good,” Zah chuckled despite the knot of revulsion she was feeling. “I hate running. But we don’t want this to happen to the men marching out of Midwal. They are depending on us like these men were.”

  Something changed inside Zah as those words came out of her mouth. Any bit of girlishness or dreamy adolescence remaining in her had just been scoured from her being. Her demeanor grew as cold as Cr
ystal's breath, and she bit down hard on the meat of her cheek just to feel the pain. “Lead them back toward the Midwal gate.” Her voice was decisive. “We will kill them as we can along the way.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jenka swallowed back his bile and fought to contain the nausea he was feeling. It wasn’t the sickly sort of nausea, it was the kind you get when you are overly excited, or after you’ve achieved something grand and are extremely nervous. Jenka was breathless and tingling all over. Everything around him looked crystal clear, as if the edges of his sight had been sharpened to perfection.

  He could smell the ogre hiding over the next ridge. He could sense the immense fear it was feeling. He could hear the scrape of a hawk’s claw as it gripped the bark of the tree where it perched. He could even hear the slithery sound that Jade’s scales made as they moved and shifted over each other.

  He stood and took in the deepest of breaths, relishing the feel of the chill mountain air expanding inside him. The turmoil in his belly began to quell and was replaced by a surging of energy that radiated into him from the dragon’s tear he still held clutched in his hand. Jade could feel it, too, and Jenka could feel Jade.

  Looking at the amber jewel sparkling in the afternoon sun, he realized he was in that other world Zahrellion had tried to describe to him. He was effortlessly there. Instead of being inside himself, he was everything outside himself. Everything. That is what it felt like.

  On a whim, he called fire to his fingertip. He wasn’t disappointed when a short jet of blue-green flame shot forth in a quick burst. He realized everything Zah had been trying to convey to him made perfect sense now. He had been a slave to his surroundings. Now he was the master. He needed to decide what to do next because Zahrellion and the survivors would need their help, and he still knew nothing about Crag or the keep.

  As always, his mind went back to his mother, and he decided that was what needed doing first. Hopefully she was holed up in the Keep with Lemmy and Grondy and the King’s Rangers. But before he could start away, there was the matter of the ogre huddled over the ridge.

  As he thought about asking Jade a question, the dragon spoke the answer into his mind. “Yesss.”

  “Crixun cruxun, vaghsil gherd?” Jade said quite loudly. There was a long silence, but finally the ogre responded to the greeting. It eased up to the ridge and peered over at them like some gigantic curious child. Its eyes were set deep into its overlarge skull, and its eyeballs were the size of duck eggs. A conversation ensued between the fur-bundled, olive-skinned thing and the young green dragon. Jenka couldn’t understand any of it. Jade mostly listened, and when the ogre stopped talking, Jade repeated to Jenka what the surprisingly intelligent-seeming creature had said.

  “Gravelbone isss going to ussse poison on the great mannisssh city beyond the barrier.” Jade stopped and looked at Jenka, with alarm firing to light in his melon-sized amber orbs. “The nightssshade is immune and will deliver the ssstuff. The ogre won’t go passst the wall for fear of it, but they will fight the trellkin with us on this ssside of the barrier. Thisss one’s kin wasss enslaved by Gravelbone’s orcsss. He says that the poissson is terrible and fassst.”

  “Tell them to go to the grottoes, the caverns by the lake,” Jenka commanded with confidence. The creature seemed to be looking for instruction, and was showing a strange sort of reverence with its humble posture. Jenka wasn’t certain how he knew this to be true, but he did. “With Gravelbone and his black wyrm worrying over Mainsted, the ogres might be able to clear out some of the trellkin that are concentrated in that area.” He paused as Jade translated his wishes. Then, in the silence that followed, he had an idea. “Ask if they can send a few of their number to Kingsmen’s Keep. The folk there, if there are any still alive, will need an escort east to the town called Seacut to meet the ship that Prince Richard sent there. Tell them we will go to Kingsmen’s Keep directly, and ensure that the trellkin are few in the area when they arrive.”

  After Jade repeated Jenka’s request in Ogrish, the ogre agreed to do these things. It loped off and could be heard calling out strangely to the others of his kind that were watching the ridge from below. Jade lowered his neck for Jenka to mount him. Jenka was surprised and a little alarmed that he had only sensed the one ogre. There were several moving about below their position now.

  “Are you rested?” Jenka asked his bond-mate, though he could plainly feel the power of the tear coursing through the link they shared.

  “Yesss,” Jade hissed, as he formed a step with his foreclaw.

  He knew that Jade was feeling as crisp and alive as he was. Even after he shoved the tear into the little drawstring coin pouch he wore around his neck they could feel its power inside them.

  As soon as Jenka was mounted between Jade’s small spinal plates, the yearling dragon took a single stride and leapt smoothly into the air. “Where is this Keep you continually worry about?” Jade asked. “You hope your mamra is there?”

  “Yesss,” Jenka responded in his mind. His slurred “S” reminded him so much of Mysterian that he had a chill. A disturbing thought occurred to him. He would have to give the tear to her when this was done. After feeling its raw power course through his body he wasn’t sure if he would be able to. He definitely didn’t want to, but he had given his oath and, according to his mother, that was the measure of a man.

  By mid-afternoon, Jade was soaring out of the Orich peaks and gliding down over the foothills. The area was still thick with trolls and goblins, but the mudged could feel Jade and were nowhere to be seen. The young green dragon radiated power like the sun radiates heat. It was the tear's power that lent the sensation its potency, but the mudged couldn’t tell the difference, which left the sky clear for Jenka and Jade.

  Jenka saw a golden flutter of what he thought was hair moving in the shadows a good mile from the keep. Lemmy was trying to creep along a tree line, probably trying to get a message out, or just scout the area. He was a good enough Forester to move undetected among the vermin. Oddly the mute hunter looked up into the sky at them and used his hand over his eyes to shield his gaze from the warm afternoon sun.

  “Who comes?” a soft male voice asked into Jenka and Jade’s minds. “Who, young dracos, do you carry?”

  “What?” Jenka blurted out loud. Then in his mind he replied to the question Lem had asked Jade. “Lemmy, you can talk?”

  “Jenka?” Lem didn’t sound as surprised as Jenka thought he should have, but then again Lemmy the mute wasn’t a simple young hunter. He was an old elvish druid, who apparently could speak to dragons with his mind.

  “Yes, it's Jenka, and Jade is my bond-mate,” Jenka told him. “What are you doing out here amongst the vermin. They are as thick as gnats.”

  “And twice as pesky,” Lem jested in response. “Someone has to find us a route out of here. There are forty-three people holed up in the keep, and three of them are Druids of Dou from the temple. There are too many people for my taste. I’d rather take my chances out here in the fresh air.”

  “There’s a ship coming into the cut. It’s probably already there. A handful of ogres are coming to help escort you to it. The men on the ship won't welcome the ogres, so be careful. How is my mother? Did Grondy and his family make it?”

  Even over the great distance between land and sky, the silence that followed Jenka’s question was palpable. Jenka’s heart fell into his stomach and turned into an icy cold knot. Tears were welling into his eyes, and even Jade drew in a long slow sympathetic breath of air. “Both?”

  “Your mother was wounded in the battle in Crag. Grondy died getting her here,” Lemmy’s voice was soft; a deep foreign sound. Jenka had never heard it before, and it didn’t go well with the young-looking man. Talking to him at all lent a surreal feeling to the miserable conversation.

  “I was carrying the two younger girls and only managed to save one of them,” Lemmy was speaking about Grondy’s two younger sisters. “Grondy’s father went down bashing trolls like a war
rior. Captain Brody braved the goblin hordes to aid us. Your mother passed a few days later in her sleep. The claw wound across her back had grown infected, and she refused to make a potion for herself.”

  “Go back to Kingsmen’s Keep, Lem,” Jenka’s voice was commanding. “Ready the others to make the trek to Seacut. You’ll not want to be around these woods tonight. And if you are, stay still, because everything that moves between here and that ship is dead.”

  As the sun left the sky, Jenka and jade hunted. Savagely.

  Like some terrible monster from the old tales, Jade and Jenka unleashed the wrath of their anger and sorrow. With the help of the tear, Jade found his fire. Both of them could see well in the dim starlight. Jenka found that he could send hot warbling blasts of amber substance streaking down into the hiding vermin. The blasts were not nearly as potent as Zahrellion’s magic, but they were deadly, and served his purpose well.

  Long after the sun left the sky, Jade circled above the area between Kingsmen’s Keep and Seacut. He dove swiftly and destroyed anything that they saw move. Troll and goblin alike met their end in droves. When morning came, the Dragoneer and his young wyrm ranged up and down the east coast until they found the ship that Prince Richard had sent.

  The men on the deck of the three-masted galleon cowered at first. They later cheered when they saw that the green dragon had a rider and was diligently eliminating the band of savage orcs that had been stalking the shore and the ruins that had once been the substantial fishing village called Seacut. When the shore was clear, Jenka and Jade hovered over the vessel. Jenka called down and told them to expect Commander Brody and the folk from the keep. He told them to sail directly to King’s Island, that there would be war and devastation in Mainsted. It was obvious that the people who had been holed up in the keep for the last few weeks would need attention, not more trouble.

  They left the foothills then. Jade carried them directly to Midwal, where Jenka was struck dumb by the amount of carnage he found around the gates and the huge hole the vermin had dug. He felt hot tears of regret streaming down his cheeks. Had he and Jade not dallied in the peaks or spent so long killing trolls around the keep they might have prevented much of this.