CHAPTER 35

For all I knew, there were dozens of secret passages out of Grünwald Castle. However, I had only seen one of them in a prophetic vision.

I had assumed that I had seen the Dragon Snake putting an end to me. It hadn’t quite registered that I was making some unwarranted assumptions about who was wearing the dragon’s body, and who was wearing Snake’s.

I swooped down onto the ruins of Lysea’s garden burning with rage and filled with an unnatural certainty. As my shadow flew across the nearly unbroken snow between the broken monuments, I saw a lone figure trudging away from the woods where Sir Forsythe had led us out of the catacombs. Snake was tiny, easily missed if not for the contrast between his sewage-encrusted clothes and the pristine snow.

He didn’t realize he was in trouble until my shadow caught up with him. He looked back up over his shoulder and I think he might have screamed. I screamed back; a draconic roar bearing enough fury that, had I not exhausted my fire during the battle, would have left the legendary Snake little more than a sooty stain between the mausoleums.

The great Snake blubbered and dashed in a frantic, stumbling run toward Lysea’s temple. I finally saw the family resemblance between him and Dudley.

As panicked as he was, no man on foot is going to outrun a dragon, even a clumsy, wounded one.

I fell on him just like the dragon in my vision. Almost. My vision had been slightly less clumsy. The real me stumbled a bit on landing and added a bit to the cemetery ruins after a couple of lumbering steps reaching for Snake.

Once in my taloned fist, he seemed remarkably tiny, even given my increase in size.

“P-Please! Mercy! Spare me.”

“Why?” I grumbled low in my throat. The sulfur-flavored word stung my throat as smoke curled from my nostrils.

I felt something warm and wet spreading in my hand and I grimaced in disgust. Is this creature really the almighty Snake Bartholomew? The man who almost stole two kingdoms? I’d never been any great thief, and I had still managed not to wet myself the first time a dragon had grabbed me.

“I can pay you, riches beyond your imagining.”

“I can imagine quite a lot,” I grumbled low. “And your loot is safely in the Lendowyn treasury now, remember?”

“I have more . . .”

I shook my head slowly.

“And I’m a prince. Help me regain the Grünwald crown and . . .”

“You think I care about that? You think you have anything to offer me? You think there is anything that can compensate for what you’ve done?” I raised him up to my face, hesitating only because I couldn’t decide what was more appropriate: belching what remained of my fire into his face, biting his head off his body, or just squeezing him like an overripe grape.

From somewhere below us, I heard a slow clapping.

I glanced down and suffered from a sense of vertigo. Not from height this time, but from looking down at a ground that wasn’t where the ground should be. The red-tinted mist floated around us, carrying the distant wails of a legion of agonized children.

Snake started blubbering again, “No. Not this. Anything but this.”

“Oh shut up.”

Below me, the Dark Lord Nâtlac walked into view, still clapping. “Impressive, Frank.”

Even in my new form, the Dark Lord’s presence still felt incredibly unnerving, like maggots burrowing under my scales, or a thousand tiny Dracheslayers poking into my brain.

“Why are you here?”

I felt Snake vainly trying to kick his way free of my grasp. He screeched, “Lord Nâtlac, save me!”

I briefly wondered why I was still a dragon in the Dark Lord’s realm. Then Lord Nâtlac spoke and his gimlet words bore into my ears.

“There is something Prince Bartholomew can grant you. Some compensation for the troubles he has caused you.”

“What?”

Snake just shook his head and wept.

“You gave me the queen. Give me the prince.”

“No,” sobbed Snake.

I shook him and said, “Shut up.”

“Sacrifice that wretch in my name, and all that is his can be yours.”

“He has nothing anymore.” Not even any self-respect.

“Nothing?” asked the Dark Lord. Watching him smile was akin to watching an open wound give birth to a million spiders. “He has one thing you do not. Something you desperately want.”

“What would that be?”

“You know what it is, Frank. It is quivering in your palm.”

“I just have . . .”

Oh.

“You see now, don’t you?”

“I had his body. With his history it is more trouble than it’s worth.”

For the first time ever, I saw the Dark Lord Nâtlac nonplussed. It lasted a fraction of a second before the spider smile returned full force. “I have many followers, Frank, many bodies. That confused oaf of a knight of yours is considered handsome, isn’t he?”

Sir Forsythe? I shuddered internally.

“Give me this wretch, on this ground, and you can name your price.”

Even under assault by the gangrenous itch of the Dark Lord’s presence, I instinctively realized something. The Dark Lord Nâtlac was not negotiating from a position of power.

What does he want?

“Why do you hesitate, Frank? You know that he would gladly give you to me.”

I looked at Snake, blubbering incoherently in my scaled fist. “I am sure it is something he would do.”

“You know he deserves it.”

“I am certain he does.”

“What do you want, Frank? Name it.”

“I’m wondering what you want.”

“Only his soul.”

I laughed. It hurt, as if the air stabbed barbed fishhooks into the base of my teeth, but I couldn’t help myself. Even Snake had stopped blubbering enough to stare at me as if I’d gone insane.

“What do you find amusing?” The slight displeasure in the Dark Lord’s voice was enough to melt iron, but the dragon’s bowels were made of sterner stuff.

“I’m sure you have his soul already. He’s part of the Grünwald royal family. That’s almost a given. No, you want his blood spilled here, in your name, by a nominal high priestess.”

“Meh, you’re speaking in technicalities.”

Did the Dark Lord Nâtlac just say “Meh?”

“You live by technicalities.”

“That is all beside the point. Give me what I want and I can give you what you want.”

“But ‘here,’ on ‘this ground’ you said. We haven’t left Lysea’s garden, have we? That’s why I’m still a dragon.”

“Again, beside the point.”

“This is still her garden, isn’t it? All it took was one offering and she took it back, and that galls you.”

“Enough of this!” The Dark Lord Nâtlac tore free of his nominal human guise and suddenly loomed over me, the way I loomed over Snake. Everything about the Dark Lord’s appearance was wrong in ways that it is impossible for me to articulate. It glared down at us with a face swirling with eyes, teeth, and waving insectile things. “What do you want?” the Dark Lord demanded.

I couldn’t look at it. I averted my gaze and said, “Your jewel thought me and Snake were alike.”

“Kindred spirits, meant to be thieves and kings,” the Dark Lord said, half spoken, and half carved inside my skull with a rusty nail.

“And he would sacrifice me to you.”

“You know he would.”

“So what do I want?”

“Yes.” The word was filled with loathsome desire, like the lust of a bloated corpse.

“I want to be different from him,” I said.

“What?” Even not looking at the Dark Lord, I could feel it deflate a bit.

“I don’t want to be him, and I don’t want to serve you.”

And just like that, the presence receded and the mists withdrew. I felt the air go cold again and I was back in Lysea’s garden, in front of her temple. A small vortex of red mist and wrongness remained at the base of the stairs to Lysea’s temple, and the more human-form Nâtlac stood within it.

“Well played, Frank Blackthorne.”

“Uh—” Now I was left somewhat nonplussed. I had expected more pushback from an angry deity.

His smile was still full of spiders. “The jewel was not wrong. You can take the same horse down many different paths. Unlike Prince Bartholomew, though, yours seems not to lead toward me.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Fair warning, Frank Blackthorne, we are not parting amicably. You have made an enemy.”

“I expect so.”

“You should consider if the blubbering idiot in your hand was worth it,” the Dark Lord said, vanishing in a swirl of red mist and unease.

I looked at Snake, who appeared to have completely withdrawn from the proceedings, shaking, weeping, burying his face into the scales of my fingers.

“No. He isn’t.”

But it was never about him anyway.