by Dante King
“No, Dragonmancer,” she said, “this is my fight, and mine alone.”
There was no arguing and no reasoning with that tone. I wouldn’t have tried anyway. Some things are just written in stone.
Queen Frami transformed into a Titan Bear herself; a huge house-sized beast with iron-gray fur and white claws. The fur across her back and shoulders was matted, just as her dreadlocks were when she occupied shape as a woman. Her one eye burned with a similar orange flame as her sister’s, but it was less manic and more controlled.
The two bears squared off, but there was very little posturing, which I admired. It seemed that talking shit and playing tough guy was not much of a thing in the Vetruscan Kingdom, and that was all to the good.
The two sisters bellowed challenges at one another and went at it.
The fighting from the township had pushed and spilled out and up to where we were now gathered watching the Queen and her sister duke it out for supremacy.
I caught sight of Elenari wielding her twin daggers, sending arterial spray in all directions. Penelope used her fairly innocuous-looking spell, which conjured vines and flowers out of nowhere, to pull down the side of a building on top of a band of rebels chasing after her.
As the fight between the two sisters in their Titan forms got underway, a hush fell across the fighting men and women, blanketing loyalists and rebels alike so that all hands were abruptly stilled. All fighting, from both sides, stopped as every eye turned to watch the two bears.
Queen Frami’s obviously unhinged sister, Dagna came charging in like a roided-out rhino and clobbered the Queen with a series of bone-shaking smacks with her enormous paws. The Queen lowered her head and took the blows on a skull that must have been thick enough to survive a 14.5mm incendiary tracer round.
Queen Frami fell slowly back under the blows, her head down, for all the world looking like she was the old dog who was being batted down by the younger, stronger pup.
Dagna, smelling victory, tried to grab the Queen by the back of her beefy neck, but Queen Frami shrugged her off, whirling on the spot so that Dagna was flung off and ended up crouched on one of the piers. The Queen herself was still on dry land.
Dagna bellowed her rage and rose up on her hind legs so that she could have quite happily peeked in through the third-floor window of an office block. Her right paw rose high, and her orange eyes flashed fire. The massive muscles in the Queen’s sister’s back shunted back and forth as she prepared to bring down a crushing blow on the rightful monarch’s head.
The pier beneath her gave way under her weight and collapsed.
Dagna found herself suddenly up to her waist in salt water, and at half the height as she had been before.
Queen Frami struck with a speed more suited to a snake than a bear. Her gigantic head lunged out and caught her sister under the jaw, her own jaw tightening around the usurper’s throat.
Dagna’s eyes bulged, and she let out a strangled roar.
Queen Frami heaved up and snapped her sister over her head, bringing her clean out of the water and slamming her hard onto her back on the fjordside.
The breath rushed out of Dagna, the golden bear going limp.
Queen Frami planted her massive paws on her sister’s chest, reset her grip around the golden bear’s neck, and just ripped the head clean off.
There was an awful squelching, wet, tearing sound as muscle and skin parted. Part of Dagna’s spine came with her detached head, and globs of spinal fluid splattered across the dockside. Steaming blood gushed out of the ragged wound.
Queen Frami spat her sister’s head out, and it landed with a very final thud in the middle of the space that had been cleared by the stationary fighters. It transformed from that of a bear into the visage of a woman that looked like a much younger version of Queen Frami.
There was silence.
Then, because there’s no moment to capitalize on your foe’s shock like when they’ve just seen their leader lose her head, Hana raised her arms and cried, “Dagna is dead! All those rebels who fought with her, capitulate or die!”
The Vetruscans were savage, wild and brave. They were excellent fighters and fearless warriors. But they also turned out to be very pragmatic too.
Weapons were thrown down. The clatter of shields, swords, axes, bows, and every other type of gear of war as they hit the floor filled the immediate area and expanded out into the town as the news spread.
Quickly, and with no commotion at all, Hana organized the rounding up of prisoners, gesturing at the captains to divide Hrímdale into sections and sweep them for any resistance.
Meanwhile, the Queen of Vetrusca had readopted her human form.
“Your Majesty,” I said, “are you all right?”
Men and women were yelling all around us, but there was nothing to suggest that there would be any more fighting. It seemed that a leader-on-leader fight was one of the oldest and most generally accepted ways for Vetruscan civil skirmishes to be resolved.
It was like we had all been hurtling along at two-hundred miles per hour in a bullet train and someone had thrown the emergency brake.
Queen Frami went to the fjordside and dragged out her sister’s headless corpse, which had now reverted to that of a woman. She reached down, flipped open her sister’s blood-soaked cloak, and rifled through the dead woman’s pockets. Secreted away in the depths of a pocket that had been cunningly hidden into the lining of her fallen sister’s tunic, the Queen found an Etherstone. It was a perfectly smooth orange-brown color; a tiger’s eye.
Queen Frami held it thoughtfully in her palm for a moment or two, running her bloody and callused fingers over the stone. She was looking at it, but her single eye appeared to be looking through the Etherstone, and I knew that he was lost in some distant memory. She stirred and shifted when I cleared my throat.
“Here, take this,” she said to me. “I knew that my sister would be carrying this family heirloom. She stole it from me a year or so ago, when she first defected. I always thought that she would come back and return it, although not in such a manner as this.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
The Queen grabbed my hand and pushed the Etherstone into it. “Of course I’m fucking sure, Mike,” she growled, her eye glinting. “I’m a damn queen, aren’t I? We’re always sure, just as we’re always right, didn’t you know that?”
She winked at me, although it might have just been a blink, of course.
I snorted and slipped the stone into my pocket.
“I have heard what you are capable of, Mike Noctis,” Queen Frami said, “and after the loyalty that you have shown here today in battle, what better way is there to seal the alliance between the Mystoceans and the Vetruscans than in a child born of us both?”
I laughed at that. It was a nice little bit of queenly wording, of political maneuvering. She was giving me the gift of the Etherstone, sure, but it wasn’t as if she was going to get nothing out of offering up her ward, Hana, too.
The Queen must have caught on to what was going through my mind because she put a heavy hand on my shoulder and held my gaze.
“Yes, that’s fucking politics, isn’t it?” she said in a low voice. “But this is not: I owe you my life, and my crown too, most likely.” She flicked the bone and wood crown that still sat upon her dreadlocked head. “My thanks to you, Mike. Believe me when I say that I am not sure that I can ever repay you, but I will try my hardest to find some way.”
Don’t let up in a fight. Press and press and press until your opponent is beat. It was a mantra of mine, and I perceived that it was an insight that might work in negotiation too.
I’d never used the tactic on a monarch, though.
“I can think of a way, if you’ll forgive me for throwing it out there so brazenly, Your Majesty,” I said. “The best bearmancers leading the expedition against the Bronze Citadel would go some way to leveling the score between our two nations.”
Queen Frami’s face was still for a long second
or two. Then it split into an honest smile. She clapped me on the shoulder.
“Damn me, but you’ve got some grit in you! If that is what it takes to make us even in your eyes, then I wholeheartedly pledge to send my best and boldest to Galipolas, to march side by side with you and the rest of the Mystoceans. In fact, I’m going to lead my bearmancers myself.”
Hana stepped forward then, and I thought that she might object to Queen Frami going off and risking her neck in foreign parts.
“You are a pioneer of the Vetruscans, Your Majesty,” she said. “You are pushing the boundaries of our Kingdom like none have done for years and years uncounted. I would very much like it if you would grant me leave to come too.”
The Queen looked from me to Hana.
“I am eager to fight alongside Mike Noctis once more,” the Odin-like figure said to her ward. She turned her one gray eye back to settle on me. It was shining with a knowing light.
“And it seems I’m not the only Vetruscan Bearmancer who has that opinion,” she said, motioning with her head at Hana.
Hana smiled shyly at me. Somehow, she still managed to appear shy even though she looking as tough and uncompromising as any female ever had, with her shaved head splattered in mud and blood and her armor showing through the holes and rips in her fur coat. She stepped toward me, her deep red eyes fixed on my face, her crooked lips parted ever so slightly. She lay one of her small, steady hands on my gore-covered chest.
“I think, Mike, that, if the Queen has finished with you now, I might repay you a little by leading you to a long soak in one of our mineral pools,” she said quietly.
I looked over at the Queen. The giant warrior raised a single bushy eyebrow.
“Politics,” she said. “Not always a total pain in the crotch, is it, Dragonmancer? I shall see to it that none disturb you for as long as you need.”
Hana led me away from the scene of the battle, through the mess of Vetruscan loyalists who were busy relieving the rebels of their weapons and the enemy bearmancers of their crystals. Before we could get very far, someone hailed the two of us.
“Mike! Hana!”
It was Renji, hurrying along behind us.
“Now that we have victory for Hrímdale,” the djinn said in her slow, sultry voice, “and seeing as diplomacy is in the air, shall we see whether you have the skill to take care of two birds with one—”
“Load?” I finished.
Hana and Renji exchanged looks. They spoke volumes.
“Good thing I now have two Etherstones, eh?” I said with a broad grin.
Battle and bloodshed.
I could have sworn they were better than champagne and oysters in that neck of the woods.
Chapter 18
Battle and blood, adrenaline and fury.
Champagne and oysters, lust and relief.
There was a comparison in there somewhere, but I couldn’t see it, not right at that moment. I had other things on my mind.
Hana led the way along the side of the fjord, skirting and stepping over corpses until we were clear of where most of the fighting had taken place. The closer we got to Berserker Hall and the Queen’s private lodgings, the less dead we encountered. Really, the rebels had not even come close to penetrating to the heart of Hrímdale. If the Queen had elected to stay sitting on her throne in Berserker Hall, not a one of her enemies would have caught sight of her.
But sitting back and letting others run the risks had, I guessed, never been Queen Frami’s style.
Renji and I padded along some way behind Hana, who was leading us toward the thermally heated rock pools that she had taken me to after the battle in the hall. She was some way ahead of me and the djinn, as we strolled in a slightly dazed, vaguely elated fashion around the final outcropping and made our way to the limestone pools and their naturally occurring screens of lingonberry bushes.
“Fighting for your life,” Renji said in my ear, “really does help to put things in perspective.”
“I’ve remarked on that myself before,” I agreed, pulling her tight against me and feeling the hardness of her body against mine. “Life can be all too fleeting in this crazy place.”
“Hmm,” Renji said in her deep, chocolatey voice, “but every warrior should travel to the brink of destruction and into the mouth of war; to test their appetite for violence, truth, and love of life. Then, when they return, they will no doubt be the better for it.”
“Reminds me of something someone very clever once said back in my world,” I said, giving the djinn’s hip a squeeze.
“And what did this very clever person say?” Renji asked, her own slipping down to my ass.
“I forget exactly,” I said, “but it was about how, in life, you weather storms. Most of the time you won’t even know how the hell you weathered them when you come out the other side. Sometimes you won’t be certain that the storm is even over. There’s only one thing that you can bank on.”
“What’s that?” Renji probed.
“When you walk out of that storm, whatever it is, you won’t be the same person you were walking into it.”
“Wise words,” Renji said, biting at my earlobe as we emerged from behind a large lingonberry and saw Hana up ahead. “Wait,” the djinn said. She reached into a pouch at her waist and drew out a pinch of something. “Open your mouth.”
I frowned at her. “What—” Before I could say anymore, Renji grabbed my head and shoved the pinch of whatever it was into my mouth. I had the instinct to spit it out, but instead, I tasted something familiar.
Dragondust.
“Just need to make sure you’re running at full capacity,” Renji said with a silver-toothed grin.
I laughed at her. “You really are clucky, aren’t you?”
Renji shrugged. “Come, Hana may have started without us.”
Hana was lounging on one side of a steaming pool, basking in the water up to her chin, her pale arms spread out on the stony lip of the natural bath. Her dark red eyes were turned up at the corners, as was her crooked mouth.
Momentarily, I worried that there might be some sort of female friction between Hana and Renji, seeing as we hadn’t really discussed what might go down next. But then I recalled that Hana had already shared me before, and Renji was a tranquil character who knew the score as far as I was concerned.
Saying I had fantasized a lot about this moment—about what it might be like taking Hana and Renji at the same time—would have been a lie. Honestly, I had never thought about this particular combination of women, but that was only because my reality had been blessed with so much good shit that I had never felt like I had to imagine anything better than what had been thrown into my path.
The coy and excited smile playing around Hana’s lips as she sat up and surfaced from the hot pool implied that she might have given this more thought than I had.
“Come,” she said, with water streaming down her slender neck and perky breasts, “here, Dragonmancer.”
Renji and I stepped down into the organic hot pool. The water lapping at my knees was delightfully warm, the perfect temperature for easing the kinks out of weary muscles. It had a wholesome mineral tang to it, a smell somewhere between earth and sea. It smelled like new life.
This pool was fairly shallow, made for relaxing not swimming. Renji instantly dropped down to her hands and knees, so that her perfect turquoise bubble butt was pointing in my direction, just visible over the top of the water. She crept slowly and seductively toward Hana. The shaven-headed Vetruscan reached out and pulled the silver-haired djinn toward her, and they kissed hungrily.
“I’m getting to like maintaining the political side of our two nation’s relationship happy, aren’t you?” Hana said, pulling away from Renji. “It’s a responsibility that I’m growing more enthusiastic about by the day.”
She wiped some crusted blood from Renji’s throat, being careful to trickle water down the other woman’s neck.
For a couple of minutes, I simply knelt, dumbfounded, in th
e hot pool and watched the erotic show play out in front of me. My cock twitched under the water, as the bearmancer and dragonmancer kissed gently at first, before getting a little more heated and sloppier, tongues licking and lapping at each other’s mouths.
The fantastically hot water was beginning to soothe away the aches and pains of the battle, but there was one muscle that was stubbornly refusing to relax.
Eventually, I managed to pry my eyeballs away from the sight and stir myself from the daze I had entered. It was time to get involved.
I slipped further into the water, though my eyes continued to move slowly over the glorious sight of the two naked females in front of me.
Hana dipped her hand back into the water and rubbed it over Renji’s chest, washing away some more grime that had accumulated under her armor. Renji’s big, dark blue nipples stood up like a couple of guard-dogs coming to attention at the scent of some steak.
The bearmancer rubbed at Renji’s shoulders and neck. She ran her hands over the djinn’s slick skin, causing goose flesh to rise for an instant before the water warmed it again.
Renji sat now, like a conquering hero, leaning against one end of the spacious pool, while Hana administered to her. Renji’s muscular legs were spread wide, and Hana was nestled up against the slightly bigger woman as she washed her down.
Renji groaned gently and slipped a hand beneath the surface of the water. She began to rub at Hana’s crotch while the Vetruscan continued to run her wet hands over her breasts, gently chafing Renji’s nipples with finger nails and, every now and again, leaning forward to bite the skin around the other woman’s nipples.
I reached out and ran my own hand over Hana’s wet back, making her shiver and moan with a barely mastered longing.
“I feel your eyes on me, Mike,” Hana said, the sound of laughter in her voice. “Do you like what you see?”
“I liked what I saw the moment I saw it,” I said. “From the moment I had to bring Bearne down with my Harpoon Stun.”
Hana threw back her head and laughed. Then she turned and looked at me, her face suddenly dead serious. “I still haven’t punished you for that yet, have I?”
