Isabel was facing off against another lizard now, this one much larger and more heavily armored than the first. Its frill flared wider than Cassandrella's outstretched arms, and its every move crackled with the snaps and sparks of barely contained lightning. Long rows of fangs seemed to glow from within the inner recesses of its mouth.
The breath caught in Cassie's throat as her cousin rushed at the beast, hacking at it with her broadsword. With loud clangs the blade bounced off, and with each loud failure Izzy redoubled her efforts to score a palpable hit on the thing, paying no heed to the popping sparks which filled the air. Not far off, Selvi was dealing with the miniature lightning in her own inimitable fashion. Roaring and raging, the barbarian princess simply ignored the sparks through sheer force of will. Cassie could almost see her eyes glow red to match the runes on her heirloom talisman, and spectral figures added their blades to her assault.
Seriously, how was a bunny supposed to compete with that? She settled back against a boulder and waited for someone else to need her healing services.
There was a sudden rumbling overhead, and Cassandrella looked up to see billowing purple clouds once more roll into position. But... how was that possible? Gwen and Bianca had done for the smallest of the thunder lizards, even before Izzy finished it off, and her cousin had said...
The boulder shifted against her back, rolling forward slightly before moving away. The moon princess fell backwards in surprise, and her ears were filled with a loud, heavy hiss. The next few minutes after that were harder to account for. They hurt, though.
"Look out!" Flora yelled the words, but Cassie never had a chance to hear. A thick, scaly tail smacked the moon princess as she tried to stand, and she crashed into the nearby rocks with a sharp crack. The lizard, so large that they'd first mistaken it for just another boulder, rose up on its pillared legs, flared its leathery frill, and brayed loudly with a voice that was part bird, part donkey, and all sorts of unpleasant.
Try as she might, the druid princess could not find a place in her heart for this particular member of the animal kingdom. With another shout, she commanded her lute to take its other form, that of a massive, spiked club, and leapt to the moon princess's rescue. She could only trust that wood was not a good conductor of electricity, so that when she knocked a thunder beast upside the head -- as she was doing now -- she wasn't risking a massive electric shock in retaliation.
Sparks crackled and popped as the spikes bit into the beast's leathery hide, but her hands felt nothing but the shock of the sudden stop. Flora hopped back, jumping over the whipping tail like it was a game of skip-the-rope, then laid into the beast with all the strength her two arms could muster. -whack- went the club, then -smack- on the return swing. A lucky strike landed right on its eye, and oh! how the beast roared at that! It reared up on its hind legs, opening its maw wide to cry to the heavens and call the thunder once more --
And that's when Bianca swooped in on her broom. A picayune bomb flew from a tiny hand, and it landed perfectly inside the thunder lizard's mouth, like the witch was herself playing some odd game with balls and baskets. However tough the beast's skin might be, in no way was it ever a good idea to swallow a live explosive. Unlike its mistress and itself, the bomb's boom was not small at all. The beast's remaining eye bulged, and smoke blew from its mouth and nostrils in the bare second it had before its entire head exploded.
A single, final bolt of lightning erupted from its body as it collapsed, rising upward towards the roiling clouds, and the clap of thunder almost rolled over the sound of a fifty-stone lizard falling to the earth. By the time Flora had recovered from the sound and the fury, Princess Isabel had reached her cousin's side. The paladin's glare was more baleful than any thunder lizard's.
"What were you thinking!?" Isabel shouted later that day, once they were safely bivouacked and had a few legs of lizard roasting over an open fire. The paladin, Bianca, and Flora had all taken turns patching up the battered moon princess, who despite it all still had to deal with a broken right arm and a couple of cracked ribs. There were limits even to magical healing, at least for the rest of the day. It wasn't as bad as it could have been -- Cassie was left-handed, so she could at least handle herself -- but it would still take several days' worth of healing magic before she could be said to be in adventuring shape.
Princess Isabel Cœur de Lion Solaire had doubts that her cousin would ever be adventure-ready, and was loud in expressing them. "Seriously!" she continued. "What were you thinking, rushing in like that?"
"Um... Selvi needed some help, and..."
"She's an orc! You can throw pretty much anything at them, and they'll be too stubborn to realize that they're hit! But you should know better, cousin."
"Hey, now!" Gwen interrupted. "There's no call for --"
"Oh, isn't there?" Isabel countered, swinging an accusatory finger at the ranger princess. "My temple received word that the heir to the Lunar Sepulcher had not only wandered away from a place of safety -- a place that you cannot even show me on a map, I might add..."
"We showed you where it was," Flora noted. "Right there by the mark that said 'Here Be Dragons'."
"Whatever! Not only that, but she'd taken up dangerous activities with people unknown to the Temple, and presumably suspicious. Now, I was willing to give you all the benefit of the doubt, but..." She cast a skeptical eye around the camp. "But now she's injured, not a week out of the city gates, and it's all because of you!"
"I didn't see you defending her," Selvi countered. "As I recall, you were hacking lizards apart pretty enthusiastically a dozen yards away."
Isabel sniffed. "I was dealing with the most obvious threat," she said. "I trusted that the rest of you could pick up the slack, but apparently that was asking too much. Never fear, cousin dear!" she belled, holding Cassandrella close and ignoring the girl's winces of pain. "I shan't be so remiss in the future. Your safety is my first priority and mission, after all."
"You don't have to..." Cassie tried to say.
"But I must! You all should be thankful that I'm here to help you defend the next Light of Selunika. Such an honor is a weighty thing, even for the most righteous of paladins."
"And what are we, chopped liver?" Bianca muttered.
Isabel sniffed again, and her lip curled slightly. "No, I do believe that you are a witch, though your friends have been careful not to say. I shall not judge, or even call into question your claim of being a princess, for that is not my place, but please do not try to tempt us into strange midnight rituals without clothes on, or anything else of that sort."
"Actually," Bianca said with a grin. "That's more of Cassie's thing. Isn't that right?" She winked at the moon princess, whose face was now burning red beneath the heat of Isabel's solar glare.
"Um! It was only the one time!" spluttered Cassandrella. "My first full moon at the Academy, and I wanted to do something special, but it was so drafty without my small-clothes on and there were mosquitoes and sand burrs and I never tried it again so please don't tell anyone back at home please Izzy!"
"Well..." Even the paladin was taken aback at that verbal avalanche.
Gwen decided it was time to speak up. "Why don't we have dinner and get some sleep," she suggested. "In the morning we can finish tending Cassandrella's injuries and be on our way to Namilda."
"Yes..." Isabel's mouth had gone as straight and shut as a closed portcullis in front of the castle gates, but she was still nodding. "Yes, it has been a stressful day. I... need time to think. Do you mind if I take first watch?"
"Sure," said Gwen. Selvi just grunted while the others shrugged.
"I can keep you company for a while," Cassie said.
Her cousin smiled. "Yes, I'd like that."
Uncle breathed a sigh of relief and let the heady aroma of fresh-baked pizza fill his lungs. As usual, Max's timing was impeccable, as the pies could not have come at a better moment. That first encounter had taken far longer to complete than it should have, and only because the gir
ls couldn't stop arguing. He sighed as he put the little figurines -- mostly of Japanese cartoon monsters, repainted for variety -- back in their box. The gaming session wasn't a total washout yet, but it was getting there. He'd played with groups that'd given a similar vibe as today, often right before they broke up for good.
Hope sprung eternal, though. The first two sessions had been excellent, far beyond anything he could've expected from a bunch of rookie players, and it was all due to their table dynamic. Surely one new kid couldn't ruin all that...
"Hey," Natalie whispered to him, passing a note. It was an unexpected piece of game etiquette, probably gotten from her brother. Break times were an excellent moment to send the game master a message and conspire without the others knowing exactly what was up. And who knew? Maybe she had a good idea that would help move the game's story along.
He read the note. He read it a second time, and then a third. Inside, he could feel his little wellspring of hope begin to dry up.
"She did what!?" Shelby shouted. Both her palms slammed down on the tabletop hard enough to make the pepperoni jump off her pizza. Any moment now, she'd be making angry duck noises out the sides of her mouth.
"You heard me," Uncle said with a sigh. In the past five minutes, he'd pulled Natalie and Claire aside for a quick chat and some dice rolls, and now the consequences were playing out. "Apparently Isabel and Claire had a long heart-to-heart during their watch, and when Selvi woke up to take over, the two of them were gone. Vanished. Vamoosed. Nowhere to be seen."
"Kidnapped." Now Shelby was drilling holes in Natalie's skull with her eyes, but only for want of power tools.
"You don't know that," said Uncle, "and in fact you can't and won't know anything for sure until you find them, because Natalie and Claire will be joining me at a table on the far side of the restaurant to play through their part of this debacle while the rest of you ladies chow down. Then, we switch. Got it?"
"Save some pie for me!" chirped Natalie.
"No promises," Shelby muttered.
The woods were dark at night. That really should've been a no-brainer, but Cassandrella hadn't considered it too much before. Most of the time, she had her moon-vision spell handy for situations like this, but that required planning and foresight and the wisdom not to go running off into the forest when one hadn't prepared the right spells that day. She caught small glimpses of the bright yellow moon through the branches overhead, but she couldn't find the serenity of mind she needed for prayer. Her arm and her ribs protested painfully with every bump, and no matter how carefully Isabel directed her horse, there were a lot of bumps.
There was a light in the paladin's eyes, a literal bit of sunshine from her blessed heritage that kept her sight clear and true, even in the darkest of hours. Cassie could trust in Isabel's eyes. It was everything else that made her unsure at the moment.
"Is this really such a good idea?" she asked, for perhaps the sixth or seventh time. "We could have waited till morning..."
"Sorry, Cassie," her cousin said, also for the sixth or seventh time. "The others would never have agreed to it. We need to get you somewhere safe, somewhere we can get you fixed up properly and away from any dangerous monsters, and they're all still fixated on getting to Namilda. Namilda!" She spat into the wind as it rushed past. "It's all pirates and doxies down that way. No place for a proper lady at all, so I'm sure they'll be all right. There's no temple down that way, either."
"So it's up to Nordiv?" she asked. Their flight had been so spontaneous that she'd not been able to pin Isabel down to any firm details while at camp. Everything had sounded so reasonable when the paladin had said it, or hadn't said it as the case may be.
"Maybe in time, but right now the closest temple is in Bargoczy, on the other side of the moorlands. We cut across just south of the old battlefields and get there by tomorrow evening, probably."
"Um, have you been this way before?" she asked.
"I've committed all the maps in my home temple to memory. Leave it to me."
Natalie's dice weren't really metal, though they had a steely finish lacquered over the cores of mundane plastic. They rolled as well as any, as the girl showed just now. Her twenty-sided die clicked and clacked on the blue-checked cloth of their borrowed table, stopping at 5.
Yes, the dice rolled well, but Natalie hadn't. Uncle tried to keep his best poker face on, but he knew from long experience that poker was not his game. That was why he had a game master's screen to hide behind, so the girls wouldn't see his reactions so well. His list of potential encounters was still clipped at the top of the screen, and the number 5 item on that list was something he'd hoped to spring on the girls anyway, given the chance. After all the stuff that had gone on the previous weekend, plus all the emails that had flown around since, this particular encounter had gotten some fun tweaking. Having only two of them be there for it was going to make things tricky, but if ever there were a pair who could manage a diplomatic solution...
He nodded slightly. This would be a good test of character, seeing how the girls reacted here.
"Okay," he began in a serious voice. "As you ride across the moor, the gloom begins to gather around you like a shadowy fog, blocking out the light of the moon. Your horse comes to a sudden stop, rearing and stamping as a dark figure rises from the ground before you..."
There was a loud shriek from the horse as it flailed its front legs and shook the ground with its stamping. Cassandrella held on tight to her cousin with her good arm, and tried to make out just what was in the way. One moment, the flat span of heather and turf was clear and empty, a perfect route for the paladin's horse to follow, and then suddenly someone was there, standing like they were rooted in place.
That someone stood as high as the horse's shoulder, and was clad head to toe in ornate armor. Battered and dented, rusted and bloodied, the only part of it that could be described as in good condition was the blazon of a rose over the breastplate. A warrior's mask hid the face from view, and perhaps that was for the better. Its voice was a booming whisper, cold and lifeless except for the barest hint of anger.
"Who crosses my path on this dark night!" challenged the figure. "State your name!"
"I am Isabel Cœur de Lion Solaire!" Izzy replied. "Paladin of the Temple of Solastria, serving in the city of Nordiv. I ride in aid to my friend and cousin, who requires medical attention. Now let us pass."
"No..." A cold wind whipped across the heather, blowing leaves and sticks across the ground. "Those who would pass must stand and face me with honor, for lost honor binds me to this place."
Isabel had her horse mostly calmed at this point, though the mare still pawed at the ground nervously. From the saddle, she looked warily at the armored figure. "Is this going to take long?" she demanded. "Only, I'm on a mission and I cannot spare much time."
"It shall take however long it is meant to take," replied that sepulchral whisper.
"I see..." said Isabel. "No, I don't think I shall, then." She slapped her hand against the sunburst blazon of her armor, rattling off a quick prayer as she did. "O Powerful Sun! who brings strength and glory, lend me your arrow in this dark time!" There was a flash, almost blinding in the depths of night, and when her hand pulled away, there was a long bolt of searing yellow light grasped within it. With a final cry of "Sun's Burning Ray!" she threw it at the figure.
The beam of light smashed into the armored chest, and the figure crumpled to the ground. Isabel kicked her horse into action, and the beast was only too willing to oblige with a fierce gallop away.
"Trickery! Dishonorable treachery!" screamed the armored figure, its voice becoming high and shrill. All around the field, ghostly hands reached up to claw and clutch, but at best grabbed only air. At worst, they were pulped by the heavy hooves of the paladin's battle-trained mare. And then the angry shrieks faded away, lost in the gloom behind them.
"Okay..." said Uncle after the last dice rolls were made. "That wasn't how I expected things to turn out."
; "It was even awesomer, right?" Natalie beamed. "Nothing's gonna stop Isabel in her mission."
"Maybe, maybe not," Uncle replied. "The others will be following, after all, and they're better over wild terrain than you are. But let's get some pizza while it's still there to be had."
Claire perked up, more than any time so far that afternoon. "Yay!" she cried. "Pizza!"
Pizza Time!
"So what are we in for?" Shelby grumbled, fixing her frizzy black curls back behind her hairband. A massive infusion of mozzarella and pepperoni had improved her mood a bit, though she still gave occasional side-eyed glares towards Natalie, who was now enjoying her pizza and a captive audience at the other table. Claire was putting up a brave front, but even her smile slipped when the other girl had returned from the drink bar with three huge glasses of assorted beverage. Uncle shared the sentiment. The last thing anyone wanted was a hyper-caffeinated Natalie on their hands.
"A long ride through dark winds," said Uncle after a moment's imagining. "And whatever Isabel managed to stir up along the way."
"Oh, goody." Arms were crossed and a pout was fully loaded now.
Helen flashed her brightest smile and fluttered her eyelashes. "Oh, Uncle..." she chirped. "Can't you tell us more, pretty please? With sugar on top?"
"Not till you run into it, I can't," he said firmly. "Gotta play fair here, so no knowing beforehand. And if you overheard anything, ignore it." Now he chuckled at the four matching grimaces around the table. "Time to practice a useful life skill, ladies. Imagine a wall running right through your brain, with everything you know on the one side, and everything your princess knows on the other. Nothing can pass over that wall to where she is."
Princesses Don't Play Nice Page 3
