CHAPTER 31

The girls finished freeing the prisoners and we stood in the center of a slowly contracting circle of calm. There were no guards left as such, as all had run to defend against the Dermonica troops pushing down from the walls. The dragon flew above us, doing nothing.

We moved toward the only defensible position left, the keep itself. But as we moved, a group of a half-dozen Dermonica troops broke from the surrounding melee to rush to meet us. Sir Forsythe raised his captured sword and yelled, “For Honor!” as he ran ahead to meet the attackers.

Snake finally acted. He swooped down, flew over Sir Forsythe, and immolated the attackers less than a dozen feet from him. The flame shot out in a cone, washing over the six Dermonica attackers to splash against the base of the wall near the keep, catching a few of his own mercenaries.

The fighting around us seemed to pause for a moment as everyone suddenly realized a dragon was part of this fight. For a few seconds all I heard was the crackle of flames and the screams of the poor bastards who hadn’t been killed instantly.

Two things occurred to me then.

First, Snake did not have a particularly precise weapon.

Second, he didn’t engage the enemy like Lucille wanted because he was preoccupied with keeping us alive. To hell with the keep, or the people defending it, he couldn’t let me or Lucille die.

Some think courage is the absence of fear.

Some think courage is acting in spite of fear.

I think courage is just not having the time or inclination to fully contemplate how stupid or dangerous what you’re doing actually is.

Sir Forsythe stumbled back from the dead Dermonica attackers missing a substantial amount of his once-grand facial hair. As he did, I stepped forward and grabbed his sword. He looked at me with wide eyes and said, “My Liege?” before breaking out in a fit of coughing.

I don’t blame him. Burned hair smells awful.

Sword in hand, I ran toward the thickest part of the melee. I heard Lucille and several of the girls call out to me, and I supposed from their perspective I was engaged in a stupid suicidal gesture.

But that was beside the point.

As I placed myself shoulder-to-shoulder with the Grünwald defenders, swinging a too-heavy sword in a particularly ineffective manner, I wasn’t expecting to add much to the sum of Lendowyn’s defenses.

That was Snake’s job.

I barely got three swings in before a shadow passed above us and a wall of fire fell down just behind the line of Dermonica troops we were fighting. In moments, my section of the defensive line—no thanks to my efforts—began pushing back the attackers.

I couldn’t help grinning even as my blade hit helmets and shields with uselessly bone-jarring force. I might not be a factor in the defense of the castle, but I could damn well encourage Snake to participate to keep his own borrowed skin intact. The dragon laid waste to dozens of Dermonica attackers almost before we reached them, and we waded through charred carnage all the way to the top of the wall.

That’s when the flaws in my plan became apparent.

Despite the endless supply of attackers, we had run out of them. The Dermonica command wasn’t stupid. They had seen quite clearly that the dragon had focused its attacks on one section of the wall, so—quite logically—they had dropped the attack in front of me to concentrate on the unburned flanks.

There was also a second flaw in my plan.

Dermonica troops now filled the courtyard, and the prisoners and about a dozen Grünwald mercenaries were pinned down at the base of the keep, cut off from any way inside.

I watched Snake fly down to carve flaming swaths through the enemy in the courtyard, but while Dermonica seemed to have an endless supply of fresh reserves, we had only the one dragon. I saw the flame was weaker now, and as Snake flew low enough to do damage, a wall of arrows flew up toward him, fired from the walls to either side of me.

I saw one draconic eye turn in my direction, glaring. He coughed out a ball of flame to slam into the archers on top of one wall. As he pulled upward I heard a vile curse on the air, followed by one word.

“Enough!”

The dragon flew up and perched unsteadily on top of one of the highest towers in the keep. He was obviously near exhaustion, sides glistening with the blood from dozens of wounds and pulsing with his labored breathing. The dragon lifted one bloody clawed hand, and I saw something glitter in its grasp.

“Oh no, you’re not—”

He was.

“Crap!” I bellowed as my brain slammed into a point dizzyingly high above the courtyard. My vision blurred and the colors went all wrong. My mouth—my huge, huge mouth—filled with the taste of blood and sulfur. Every part of me was too big and too far away, and my head swayed in an impossible way above my body as my stomach began to rebel at my precarious location and my head throbbed with the multiple hammer blows of having my consciousness ripped from my body again.

I blinked with one eyelid too many and my vision cleared enough to see a tiny version of Snake lying on top of a soot-scarred castle wall, still far from any enemy troops. As I watched, he got unsteadily to his feet and started a wobbly run toward the outer parapets.

“No, you bastard!” I yelled as he climbed over the outside wall. The pain from speech caused my vision to blur. Disoriented, I reached out with a long muscular forearm to swipe at him with a taloned hand. My arms might have been way too long, but they weren’t that long. I leaned forward too far and I felt the huge mass of wings and tail fly out unconsciously to pull against my back to keep me from toppling forward with the swipe.

It surprised me and I made the mistake of looking behind me. My head whipped around on its impossible neck until I was staring straight down at my own scaled backside, massive tail, and a hundred feet of nothing between me and the top of the castle. The vertigo hit me full force, and everything around me began toppling. I grabbed the tiny bauble that hung around my neck and tried to grip my perch even tighter with my feet, tearing away chunks of the tower in my panic.

I spread my wings as the tower gave way with my balance, but the castle decided to wrap me in a cloud of rubble and the realization that a single dragon is not the be- or end-all of military supremacy.

I managed to cling to my consciousness and the tiny bauble in my hand as the castle came up and hit me. After a stunned moment, I began clawing my way out of the wreckage. I was strong, almost intoxicatingly so, but every stone I threw away ignited fiery pains all along my body. The pain didn’t go away. It got worse. As the throbbing mess inside my skull faded from my awareness, it only made way so I could feel the physical injuries full force.

I pushed the last of the rubble aside with a trembling taloned hand and stared at the smears of blood I left across the surface. In the distance I heard voices calling out, “Dragon! Get the dragon!”

Something finally connected in the front part of my mind.

I’m the dragon now.

Flying must be an instinctual aspect of dragonkind, because as that particular thought struck me I was already rocketing upward, shedding blood, ashes, and small parts of castle. I clutched my fist tighter around the Tear of Nâtlac, my thoughts tumbling in a worse chaos than the clouds around me.

Dragon.

Snake’s back in his body . . .

They think I’m still him . . .

Hurts.

My stomach suddenly realized where I was and rebelled. I looked down across my massive body and couldn’t see ground. Through my pain-blurred vision I couldn’t even tell up from down. I screwed my eyes shut to try and calm the welling sickness inside me.

That must have been when I passed out.

 • • • 

For a moment I woke enough to realize I had landed, painfully, somewhere in the woods. I had just enough energy to unclench my taloned hand to see I still clutched the tiny evil jewel. Then I groaned and passed out again.

 • • • 

I slowly became aware of myself and my surroundings some time later. I didn’t even have the small blessing of a moment or two to forget what had happened to me. Unlike my first few weeks as the princess, the sensations from this body were too radically different to allow me that small comfort. As soon as I was aware enough to realize I was conscious, I knew something horrible had happened to my body.

Lucille had been okay with this?

I blinked a bloody haze from my lizard eyes and saw a small clearing scattered with the broken remnants of small trees. Actually, the clearing was ringed by small trees. The forest was filled with small trees.

Not small trees.

I sighed, and white brimstone-flavored steam curled from my nostrils. I stared at it, then down at my nose. I didn’t have to move anything but my eyes, and I could see the black-scaled ridges that formed the upper half of the dragon’s snout dominating the lower part of my field of vision.

I had to admit the central flaw in my original plan. I had no idea what to do after convincing Snake to abdicate his coup of Lendowyn by returning to his own body. I certainly hadn’t planned for it to happen so . . . inconveniently.

Even when I win, I lose . . .

It was tempting to just use the jewel still clutched in my hand to run away from my problems again. It would serve Snake right to come back to a half-broken dragon. Fortunately, I wasn’t drunk, so it only occurred in passing as I mentally itemized all the parts of me that hurt, a list that included parts of me where I’d never had parts before.

One pain proved hard to locate. Somehow I felt a burning sensation that seemed to float outside my body. As it came closer, and became more intense, I turned my head in the direction it seemed to come from.

“Oh you’re kidding me,” I groaned.

About a hundred yards away, jumping over downed trees, I saw Grace leading the rest of the girls. They had managed to arm themselves again and, most importantly, Mary carried the unmistakable glowing red-runed blade, Dracheslayer.

I held up a bloody taloned hand and said, “Hold up there!”

They pulled up to a halt outside my reach, and the others formed a tight group behind Mary and the dragon-slaying sword. Except for Grace, who took a few steps in front. “You know what that blade is?”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“There’s a price on your head, Snake,” Grace said. “So I see two options. We take that head, or you start telling us where the rest of your treasure is.”

I lowered my forearm. It hurt to hold it up for too long anyway. I sighed and dropped my head to the ground.

The universe really loves me.

“Two problems with that ultimatum, Grace.”

“I know you must have left something in reserve. You couldn’t be sure this would have worked.”

“First, you’re actually assuming that a complete rat like Snake Bartholomew would honestly tell you where he hid something? It’s not like you can take several tons of lizard prisoner and have him lead you there.”

“Head then.”

“Second, you’re assuming that Snake hasn’t moved on with his plans.”

“What?”

“I’m Frank, Grace. How do you think I know your name?”

“No. He ran off. Left us . . .”

“Flew off.” I pulled my other hand out from under my body and unclenched it. The Tear of Nâtlac glittered in my palm. “He always planned to take his body back. That’s why his soldiers wouldn’t kill me, and why he flew down to defend me when I charged the wall.”

“You’re trying to trick us,” Grace said.

“Look at me. I’m half-dead here. He abandoned this body after it took too much damage to be useful. Snake is probably headed right for his army on the Grünwald border, that’s what he cares about. Not the dragon, not Dermonica, not the chaos he left at Lendowyn Castle.”

“Damn it!” Grace snapped.

Mary sighed and lowered Dracheslayer and stabbed it point-first into the ground. “Great, so we went back after this thing for nothing?”