CHAPTER 32

It hadn’t been a bad plan as such things went. I had been out of it for most of the day. In the meantime, the Dermonica troops had spent a large amount of time and effort securing the castle and the surrounding town, enough time and effort to give Grace and company the time to slip into the keep and find the armory. They had known of Dracheslayer because they had overheard Lucille lamenting the fact that she hadn’t retrieved it and inserted it into a select part of the dragon’s anatomy back when she had the chance.

After slipping away from the castle, Grace’s plan had been something along the lines of, get information, slay dragon, be hero, and escape to retrieve gold and riches at leisure.

I almost felt guilty for screwing that up.

But we all had something else to worry about. In my unconscious flight, I had flown in the wrong direction. I had landed somewhere between the castle and the Fell River, putting the mass of the Dermonica army between us, Snake, and Grünwald.

And the mass of that army, once the castle was secure, would be moving in the direction of the nominal reason for their invasion . . .

Me.

Dragon or not, I was in no shape to face an army.

“You need to fly out of here,” Krys said. “They can’t be more than an hour or two behind us.”

I stretched, causing the girls to backpedal from a wall of black-scaled muscle. The movement fired off dozens of flares of pain across the whole of my body. When I tried to spread my wings, a spasm ran fifty feet down the length of my spine and back, slamming the back of my skull with white-hot pain that elicited a groan that set off a small bonfire in front of me.

The girls, remarkably tiny, had managed to put a hundred feet between me and them. They all stared at me and the fire.

“Sorry.” I shook my head. “I don’t know if I’m in condition to fly.”

“So what?” Grace said. “You give up? We leave you for them?”

Mary leaned against Dracheslayer. “I don’t think they’ll give you time to explain who you are.”

“We could go back,” Laya said.

“We’ll explain what happened,” Thea said, excitedly. “We could fix everything!”

“No one’s going to listen to us,” Grace said. “A bunch of girls playing dress-up? They’re going to take us seriously?”

“Grace?” Thea said.

“Grow up!” Grace snapped.

“This isn’t her fault,” Mary said.

“You don’t need to tell me whose fault it is,” Grace said. “I know!”

“She wasn’t saying—” Krys began to say.

“Shut up! I know what she was saying!”

“P-Please,” Thea said. “Don’t be angry.”

“Why not?” Grace shouted at her. “Why shouldn’t I be angry! Do you have any idea how bad things are? How they’re getting worse?”

Thea cowered from Grace’s outburst, shaking her head. “P-Please stop.”

“What? You think a whole army’s going to stop when they catch up with us? You think some tears are going to make anything bett—”

Grace’s tirade was cut short by a sharp slap. She turned to face Rabbit, who stood next to her now, glaring bloody murder. Grace rubbed the side of her face and said, “Rabbit?”

Rabbit hauled back and hit her with an open hand slap on the other side of her face. The sound echoed through woods that were suddenly silent. Grace took a shaky step back, staring at the mute girl in open-mouthed shock. “But . . .”

Rabbit turned away from her and started walking away.

Grace seemed to deflate, to look her age. “I’m sorry.”

Rabbit stopped walking away.

“I keep trying. But it just . . .” She shook her head.

“Don’t let that stop you.”

She looked up at me, startled, as if she had forgotten I was there.

“What?”

“Failure. It happens. It keeps happening. But if you let it stop you, it’s all you’re left with.”

“So do you have a suggestion on what to do now? You can’t move.”

“No. What I said was I couldn’t fly.”

 • • • 

Our best option was to continue to draw the Dermonica forces away from the castle. That meant a straight line toward the Dermonica border. And while I was too injured to fly, I could still move at a respectable pace overland.

However, there was only one way to do that without leaving the girls behind.

I think I was the one most hesitant about the girls climbing on my back. Given the size differential now, they all seemed too fragile to me. Feeling them climb up and perch themselves between my wings made me almost afraid to move, as if the lightest breeze might carry them away.

“What you waiting for?” I heard Mary’s voice and turned my neck in what felt like impossible ways to look down at my own back. All six of them had taken hold of part of a wing.

“Hang on,” I said.

They hung on.

I don’t know how fast I moved, but I think I may have outpaced a good horse for a few stretches. I was frightened when I heard someone screaming, but when I turned my head to check on them, Rabbit, of all people, had risen to her knees, hooking one hand under the base of my wing and waving the other above her head, making a guttural sound, looking like a war goddess riding into battle.

“Really?” I said.

She gave me a sheepish smile and crouched back down with the others. We came up to the Fell River as the last of daylight faded. I could hear the rushing water as we closed on it. Before we came in sight of it, I felt tugging at the base of my wing. I slowed to a stop and turned my head to see Rabbit on her knees again. This time, however, she wasn’t playing. She faced the evening sky, wrinkling her nose with an expression I’d seen too many times before.

I took a deep breath and I smelled it too. Wood fire.

“Get down.” I didn’t quite manage a whisper.

“What?” Grace said.

“Something’s ahead of us.”

They all scrambled off my back and I gestured for them to get back. I may have done it more aggressively than I intended, because they fell over each other backing away from me.

Once they were a safe distance away, I grabbed the trunk of the tallest, straightest tree in reach and pulled myself up on my hind legs. It ignited pains over the length of my body, but I managed to stand, breaking branches aside, shedding an avalanche of snow. I grabbed the tree with my other hand and pulled myself up. The tree groaned with my weight as my feet left the ground to dig their talons into the base of the trunk.

I only had to climb up a short distance—relative to my own size—before I could extend my head above the tree canopy to see the surrounding terrain. I craned my neck as the tree creaked and swayed with my weight. I tried to spread my wings to stabilize things, but they only caught the wind and made things worse. I heard something snap inside the trunk and immediately folded them back as tightly as I could manage.

The good news was there wasn’t another burned–out town awaiting us.

The bad news was I had made an error in assuming we had left the bulk of the Dermonica army behind us.

From my vantage above the trees, I saw across the Fell River to an encampment of troops maybe five times the force that had taken Lendowyn Castle. I saw tents, horses, and a large pavilion flying a recognizable royal banner.

Then the tree shuddered with another snap and I suddenly tilted away from the river as my head fell below the trees.

“Watch out!” I called down as the tree and I crashed back through the forest canopy. I fell on my back with a thud that shook the snow from every tree around me. I groaned as the remains of the splintered tree rolled off of me to crunch against another tree that echoed my groan.

The girls ran up to me, Krys yelling, “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” I stared up at the sky through the large hole my descent had torn in the canopy. “That was not stealthy.”

“What?” someone said. Probably Grace.

I groaned again as I struggled to right myself. “This dragon thing,” I said. “It doesn’t play to my strengths.”

“What did you see?”

“We have a problem. And we better move downstream before we have more of one.”

 • • • 

Amazingly, my draconic pratfall did not draw a battalion of Dermonica soldiers to finish us off. I suppose that being a mile upstream and having the river between us made it less obvious. That, and anyone looking for a dragon would probably be looking up.

“You sure that it’s the duke?” Grace asked once we’d stopped again.

“I know the banners. They wouldn’t be flying over another commander.”

“Don’t that make that pavilion a target?” Mary asked.

I snorted. “It is a wonderful thing to be able to suspend the rules of logic and strategy by decree and divine right. Staying on the Dermonica side is probably the only concession the duke’s made to his generals.”

“You should counterattack,” Grace said. “They’re obviously not expecting it.”

“What?”

“You have their ruler, they have yours,” Grace said. “You could work out some sort of deal with that, couldn’t you?”

“If I had that. But we’re on the wrong side of the river and an army.”

“We have to cross the river anyway,” Mary said, “or we’ll have to deal with the soldiers already on this side of the river.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Can you fly yet?” Thea asked.

I shook my head and looked up at the sky. “Even if I could, there’s no cloud cover and a nearly full moon. The archers would shred me before I got anywhere near the pavilion. They’ll be expecting an attack from the air.”

“We can’t stay here,” Grace said. “We’ll be pinned between them.”

“Think of something,” Krys said. “I heard your stories, I know you can come up with something.”

I sighed and lowered my head. “I’m not a miracle worker. You can’t defeat a whole army with six girls, a half-dead dragon, and a magic sword . . .” I raised my head and faced the sky again. No cloud cover at all. “A magic dragon-slaying sword.”

“You thought of something!” Krys said.

“We’ll probably regret it, but yes.”