CHAPTER 21

“It never goes wrong in the way you expect,” Lucille and I spoke through our single mouth in perfect coordination. The sentiment came out whispered without a hint of a slur.

“Oh boy,” Krys said.

The arena was filled to capacity—beyond capacity. If anything, the arena seemed much bigger than it had the first time I had seen it. The tall forms of the elves were wrapped in engraved armor of silver and gold. They held aloft silken banners covered by embroidery too complex for mortal eyes. Ranks of them stood, filling the arena, down to the floor below where a stage stood centered on the floor. On the stage stood Timoras, the elf-king himself, bearing the same icy armor he’d worn when he had issued his ultimatum. He had his arms raised in a gesture of martial incitement.

Or maybe he was trying to swat a bug; with the pose nearly frozen it was hard to tell.

Next to him on the stage was Queen Theora, just as I had seen her with Dudley; as tall as Timoras, her skin as brown as his was pale white, her leather armor bearing patterns as elaborate as any engraved in the silver and gold immediately surrounding us. Her forest-green hair flowed behind her like a cape. In her hands she held aloft a familiar piece of curling parchment.

Past her I saw the half of the arena closer to the forest populated by elves of a different character than the ones nearer us. Her elves had the same leather armor, and the same dark skin.

Lysea’s vision—or Lothan’s, I suspected now—had shown me these two elven armies converging here. I had the strong suspicion that this convergence of Summer and Winter, Queen and King, was unique.

That did not make me feel better.

“This isn’t good,” Krys said. “We need to get out of here before—”

“Shh,” came sloppily out of Lucille’s side of our mouth. “Loosh.” She had meant “look,” but she had seen it before I had, and our speech wasn’t coordinated.

Despite that, when Lucille pointed Krys and Rabbit got her message. So did I.

On the stage, along with the elven sovereigns Timoras and Theora, was a golden cage surrounded by an honor guard of elves, half dark, half light. Inside the cage was an old man. He was tall, white-haired, and had skin the sickly white of an underground denizen. He wore the same robes I had last seen him in.

Elhared.

Krys shook her head. Rabbit looked back at us with wide, incredulous eyes.

The bailiff and judge from our prior captivity stood on the stage, flanking the wizard’s cage. As we watched through one open eye, I saw the bailiff’s massive staff slowly land on the surface of the stage at his feet. I saw the eruption of sparks as it struck, blue flashes that hung too long in the air. Moments after, the sound of the impact washed across us like a slow avalanche.

I realized that, aside from the king, queen, and bailiff, everyone on that stage faced Elhared. All of those, aside from the judge, bore crossbows that were loaded and cocked and already halfway up to point at the wizard.

“We can’t—” Krys started.

They mean to execute him! Lucille tried to use our mouth, but the words came out slurred and incomprehensible. Fortunately her mental shout seemed audible to everyone thanks to the shaman’s flower. Around us the impact of the bailiff’s staff still resonated like a passing stampede. On the stage his staff had already rebounded upward.

Everything seemed to be picking up speed.

Of course it would start wearing off now.

Lucille gave up on our voice. Get him out of there while we still have surprise on our side. Run!

I had seen the doubt on both Krys’s and Rabbit’s faces, but Lucille managed the voice of command, and neither of them hesitated, rushing down the aisle between the no-longer-quite-paralyzed elves toward the stage.

Give him some of the tea! Lucille thought.

Then we tried to run after them.

That had not been a good idea on either of our parts. With control of our body split evenly between us, navigating the stepped descent would have been a difficult process at a normal pace. At a run it was suicidal. We managed three consecutive steps before we fell, and then only if you counted my frantic attempt to prevent the tumble as an actual “step.”

We rolled down the steps, lucky that both of us had the same idea of tucking ourselves into a ball to minimize the damage. The bruising descent seemed to last forever.

The good news—we rolled out onto the arena floor much sooner than we could have managed under our own control.

We opened our unfocused eyes in time to see another flash of blue light from the bailiff’s staff. Blue sparks slowly arced across the sky like a shower of comets above us, cutting across the face of the too-large elvish moon.

The sound of the crashing staff came quicker this time.

Around us, the ranks of elves had visibly moved, turning in our direction. I could almost see them moving.

I remembered Crumley’s words, “If you can see something, it can see you.”

Not good!

Tell me about it.

You have a plan yet?

I thought this was your plan? “Get him out of there.”

I tried to push us upright, and Lucille’s arm belatedly scrambled to help me.

Not much time, we both thought at the same time.

At the same time we both thought that, with all the paths leading to this arena, from the city and the woods, it probably counted as a crossroads. If that wasn’t enough, we were still barely standing at the intersection of elfland and Fell Green. With our eyes unfocused, we could still just make out the wide cobbled road that separated the city from the woods—though that image faded almost as we watched.

We glanced up, at the elf sun and the elf moon.

Only one part of the instructions left.

We wouldn’t be able to tell you who thought that. We were no longer thinking simultaneously, because that implied two voices in our head. A single voice now spoke our thoughts. Panic gripped us, because, if it wasn’t too late already, we knew that point was only moments away. Not only with our merging personalities, but with the elves that turned toward us. Soon we would be a prisoner, and whoever was that prisoner, it would no longer be us.

We tore at our clothes.

Our clumsiness faded as our limbs began working in concert again. That was no comfort, just another sign of the acceleration of our merging. As we tore the armor off our body, kicked off boots, and shed the chemise underneath, sparks flew from the bailiff’s staff a third time, the sound quick upon it. Around us, the elves moved, visibly accelerating as they faced us, blocking our view of the arena. It was hard to tell, were they moving at a quarter speed now? A third?

We held Lothan’s flask in one hand, Timoras’s pendant dangling from its chain in the other. In the pendant sand had begun racing through the glass.

Naked, standing in the crossroads of that arena, under the moon, we broke the seal with our teeth and drank.

We tasted blood.

•   •   •

I should have known what was coming.

The flask was a boon from Lothan after all, god of deception, lies, masks, metamorphosis, and transformation. He was not a cruel deity, but he was known for a juvenile sense of humor, often at the expense of those he favored. That wasn’t an aspect you wanted to dwell on when you were relying on divine intervention, but that was probably why, even after millennia, Lothan’s jokes still caught people unawares.

People like the Dragon Lucille and the Princess Frank.

Which is not to say he didn’t grant us exactly what we asked for, or even what we needed; like I said, he was not cruel.

But it wasn’t quite what we were expecting.

Even though the Wizard Crumley had explicitly told us exactly what it would take to solve our two-minds-one-body problem.

Even though the instructions about being naked under the moon had been a really big clue.

•   •   •

We drank, gagging at the taste of blood in our mouth. The unpleasantness didn’t deter us, and not only because we had quaffed worse-tasting beverages in our lives—Brock’s fungus-laced medicinal tea came immediately to mind. We drank because we knew it was our only chance to stop the merging that had been accelerating along with the movements of the elves. We were certain that if we had hesitated until the elves’ movements and ours were in sync, it would be too late.

During the last swallow, as I felt something slightly clotted slide down my throat, I realized that I was feeling the nasty sensation of coagulated blood settle into my uneasy stomach.

Lucille?

That was nasty.

I blinked my eyes and realized that I could focus on the circle of elves closing around us. I raised my hands, and they both obeyed me.

Okay, we’re naked, unarmed, and an army of angry elves is surrounding us.

At least we’re still an us.

Slight improvement, but beside the point right now.

Plan?

We have any of that shaman’s flower?

Wouldn’t that just undo what Lothan’s flask did?

Wouldn’t it?

That didn’t feel right. He had promised us our own bodies, not just a return to the status quo.

That wasn’t the only thing that didn’t feel right.

I belched as my stomach roiled.

Ugh. Lucille’s dragon voice filled my skull as my gut spasmed with rebellion against Lothan’s boon. Everything lurched as I tried to vomit. That’s what it felt like anyway.

I retched to bring up the swallowed blood, but instead of coming up my throat, the blood filling my gut slammed outward in directions it shouldn’t have been able to go. I felt things twisting and pushing against my skin. I fell to my knees and, strangely, found my eye level did not drop. I threw my arms out to keep from falling forward and instead of my arms, I saw muscular forelimbs, covered by rippling red scales. I tensed the muscles in my jaw, and I felt the tension strain the length of much more neck than I should have. The elves fell back away from us, still at half the speed they should have been moving.

I felt our tail sweep out behind us as broad wings erupted from our back. We towered over the elves now, our head sweeping an arc a dozen feet above their heads.

Lucille glanced down and looked at herself. Her taloned hand lifted from the ground, the pendant dangling from its chain wrapped around a single long digit.

“Oh yes!” she hissed in a cloud of brimstone steam as she closed it in a massive fist.

I realized I’d been relegated to the back room of our skull again. I didn’t mind, Lucille was the one with all the dragon experience. Hoping she could still hear me, I thought at her, Get out before they speed up to normal. They could capture the other dragon, they’ll manage this one.

I don’t know if she heard me, or had just thought the same thing, but she launched toward the moon above us at a gut-wrenching speed that I don’t think the original dragon could have hoped to match. She glanced downward at the shrinking arena, and while my mental stomach churned with a queasy awareness of our velocity and distance from the ground, the golden cage on the stage below shot into focus. Elhared was gone.

“Yes!” Her triumphant scream came out in a ball of incendiary joy.

She turned and flew across the elf moon toward the shadow of Fell Green.