The dragon smiled, an expression that did not look as forbidding as one might suppose. Her life had become much more amusing since Rowena had moved in with her, following the receipt of a birthday gift from her Aunt Frideswide which had been chosen with more poetic license than common sense. Boredom was the bane of a near-immortal’s existence, which was probably why the dragon had agreed to foster Rowena when the princess had decided she did not wish to return home. So far the arrangement was working out quite well for both of them, although there were occasional drawbacks—such as the prince outside.
“I’m afraid not,” the dragon replied calmly, using two foreclaws to pick up a particularly fine emerald from the pile of gems in the girl’s lap and twist it so that it sparkled in the light from the fire in the back of the cave. “He’s been here only two weeks, and he strikes me as the persistent type. He could be here all summer—perhaps even until the snow falls.” Her voice was wise with centuries of experience. “Princes as a whole talk a lot, sing romantic ballad after romantic ballad—”
“—after romantic ballad. Maybe he’d like to perish gallantly for love,” Rowena suggested brightly, then sobered under the dragon’s glare. “All right, it’s not all that funny, but I’m getting very tired of being cooped up in here.”
She sighed, which added an opal to the pile of gold coins and jewels in her lap. “Unrequited love is hell. And if he finds out about this—” she gestured at the gems which fell from her lips with each word she spoke, “he’ll never leave.”
“Just don’t ask me to kill him,” the dragon said tartly. “Those stupid princes taste dreadful, and they’re difficult to digest.”
Rowena giggled. “Especially if you eat their armor.” Then she sobered. “You don’t think he knows about the spell, do you?”
The spell in question was the birthday gift which had resulted in Rowena’s sudden desire to leave home. Originally it had been the standard fairy tale version, where every word spoken produced a flower or a jewel. After Rowena left home and moved in with the dragon (that afternoon), the dragon, who had given Frideswide the original spell, had modified it somewhat, substituting gold coins for the flowers. Unlike roses, gold coins had no thorns, so Rowena was relieved by the change and more than happy to give the dragon the coins for her bed.
The young prince outside sang on. He could scarcely have found a less appreciative audience.
“It’s not that I want him dead,” Rowena sighed. “And I know that knights don’t cook evenly and they’re hard to digest. But still, it’s a pain to be stuck here inside for weeks on end, especially when the weather is so beautiful outside. And if he doesn’t go away soon, all the berries will be gone, and I wanted to pick a lot of them before the season ends. It’s not fair!”
“True,” the dragon agreed. “It’s not as if he is a real guest. We’re not obliged to entertain him or arrange our schedules to suit him.”
“And it’s all so pointless. Why did he come here to ‘rescue’ me?” Rowena frowned fiercely. “I don’t need to be rescued! I’m much happier here than I ever was at home.”
“You might wish to marry someday,” the dragon offered, sounding amused, “and you don’t get many opportunities to meet young men living alone here with me.”
“If I were ever to marry, which I don’t plan on,” Rowena said firmly, “I’m sure I would want a husband who had some sense of self-preservation. Camping out on a ledge just outside a dragon’s lair does not betoken any great degree of intelligence.”
That actually provoked a snicker from the dragon. “You might try explaining that to him.”
“Sure I could,” Rowena said sarcastically. “I tried that four—or was it five—princes ago. That particular idiot insisted that I was bewitched and begged me to come away with him so that I could be freed from the non-existent spell you have me under.”
She grinned up at the dragon, in a lightning change of mood. “Besides,” she pointed out, “It’s very difficult to talk to anyone face to face without having him find out about Aunt Frideswide’s birthday present.”
It had been quite a shock for Rowena to wake up in this condition on her fourteenth birthday. The gems were all right, but the rose-thorns hurt. And she had known immediately what her fate would be if anyone discovered that she was producing something more rewarding than flowers; she’d have been locked in the palace treasury and forced to talk herself into exhaustion. Ordinarily, Rowena was something of a chatterbox, but there were limits!
Fortunately the dragon had carried her off that afternoon, before anyone at the castle realized why Rowena had locked herself in her room and was refusing to talk.
“There’s a full moon tonight,” Rowena said, still trying to find a way out of her current trap. “And I think he goes somewhere else at night to sleep, because I never hear him on the ledge after dark.” She looked up at the dragon again with a touch of defiance. “I’m going to sneak out tonight and pick some berries; there’s enough light for that at full moon. And if I don’t get out of here for a little while, I am going to lose what’s left of my mind!”
“Very well,” the dragon agreed. “Just be sure that you’re back before dawn.”
“I shall,” Rowena said grimly, “I’ve no desire to be carried off by anyone or anything, let alone some stupid prince.”
~o0o~
Rowena left that night, and the dragon, listening carefully, heard no sounds of pursuit. But the girl was not back the next morning. This was enough to worry any foster-mother, of whatever species. The dragon left the cave two hours after dawn and flew a search pattern until midday. She couldn’t see Rowena anywhere, and she knew that her search had covered more area than a human on foot could have gone in the time since Rowena left. There was also no sign of the prince or his horse. This could only mean one thing.
It was time to panic.
~o0o~
Rowena sat in the corner of a small, damp, uncomfortable cave and glared at her captor. Her wrists and ankles were firmly tied, although he had at least had the consideration to tie her wrists in front of her. And even with her ankles tied together she could still kick well enough to make him keep his distance from her. In fact, his shins were bruising nicely, and Rowena felt a certain amount of satisfaction in that.
“I am sorry for the lack of comfort in our accommodations, your highness,” he said, “but if we leave this cave the dragon is certain to find us.”
Rowena bit her lips. She would have loved to tell this idiot what she thought of him, his ancestry, his morals, and his singing, but she didn’t dare open her mouth. He didn’t know about the spell, and she needed to keep it that way. It had been dark when he grabbed her, so he hadn’t seen the pearl that appeared when she screamed, and she’d kept quiet ever since. Of course, she had struggled and tried to run, which was why he had tied her up. So now she was wedged into this cave with him and his horse, until either the dragon found them or he felt safe enough to try to leave it.
“But you are safe with me,” he continued, “and as soon as possible I shall take you home and ask your father for your hand in honorable marriage. I am Prince Florian of Astrefiore, at thy service, Princess.” The prince stepped forward to make his bow, keeping a wary eye on Rowena’s bound feet. “My eldest brother was among the guests at your birthday party when you were carried off, and he came home and told us of your abduction—and of how your own father forbade all of the princes gathered there to attempt your rescue!” He looked thoroughly indignant. “As it is the clear duty of a prince to rescue such an innocent victim, and as King Mark’s unnatural command was not binding on me, I set out for the mountain where the dragon laired.” He smiled sheepishly. “I’m a better minstrel than a fighter, so I’m just as glad that you were able to creep away without my having to fight the dragon. Of course,” he added hastily, “I would fight the beast if it were necessary to insure your safety.”
Chivalry is dead, Rowena thought morosely. It’s been replaced by total idiocy.
~o0o~
Two women, one dark and one amber-haired, guided their horses on a barely-perceptible deer-track that threaded its way between decidedly unnatural trees. Fortunately, this set of trees whimpered and shrank away from the riders. They could, all too easily, have been reaching towards the women and their mares with avid hunger.
The last lot had, after all.
“I thought you knew your way around the Pelagirs,” the dark-haired one said, rather crossly. Her companion didn’t answer, but then, the remark had not been aimed at her.
:I did,: came a purely mental reply, in a tone of affronted dignity. :It is not my fault that the forest has changed. That is the nature of Pelagir territory that has no Hawkbrother Vale nearby. You never asked me if I thought I could still find my way around this area.:
The head of the speaker emerged from the underbrush, and the bushes there squeaked with alarm and pulled away. He was tall, dark, would have told you himself that he was a handsome fellow, and he was not human.
Nor was he a male in the strictest accounting. Warrl was a kyree neuter, a magically-made species with the coat and heads of wolves, the bodies of the great hunting-cats of the plains, the size of a young calf, and all of the intelligence of a human.
Of course, Warrl would have insisted that he was far more intelligent than any human.
Right now, his spirit-bonded friend, the Shin’a’in warrior Tarma shena Tale’sedrin, would have argued for the superior intelligence of the calf.
“Let it be, she’enedra,” her companion, the sorceress Kethry, advised. “We’re not in any danger.”
“Now,” Tarma replied darkly, though she did not elaborate. She didn’t have to; Kethry already knew what the Pelagirs were like. This was not the first time that they had penetrated the wild lands where magic wars of long ago had warped and twisted the plants, the animals, and even the land itself into something strange, unrecognizable, and often deadly.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if they had actually been in the forest on purpose—but they weren’t. They were supposed to be on the way to Kata’shin’a’in, but the familiar road had inexplicably dwindled to a track, then a path, and now had become nothing more than a game-trail. Trying to turn around hadn’t worked either; the trail vanished altogether when they tried that. Clearly, something wanted them to go in this direction, something magical. Tarma was hardly pleased. It was bad enough that much of their time was spent satisfying the demands of Kethry’s mage-sword, Need—but to have some unknown magician trying to herd them to a completely unknown destination was intolerable! She was beginning to feel like some poor character in a play, bullied towards a confrontation known to the audience, but not to her.
She did not particularly like the feeling.
Suddenly the track opened up into a clearing. She urged her battlemare into it, disliking the whimpering trees and eager to put some distance between herself and them—and then reined the mare in abruptly when she saw what stood in the center of the clearing.
It was a doorway without a building, a beautifully formed arch of white stone taller than three tall men, and wide enough for a cart to pass through with space on either side. There was only one problem.
It shouldn’t be here. There wasn’t a single sign of the hand of man for leagues and leagues around.
Warrl stood directly in front of the portal, staring at it as if caught in a spell of fascination. All around the clearing, the whimpering trees with their thick, palm-sized leaves pulled their branches towards their trunks and shivered.
Kethry brought her mare up beside her partner’s, surveyed the clearing, and wrinkled her brow in consternation. “The path ends here, doesn’t it,” she stated.
Tarma nodded gloomily. “And I’ll bet you that if we try to retrace our steps, there won’t be a path. We’ve been herded here like a couple of sheep—”
She would have said more, except that the space inside the doorway suddenly changed. Instead of the other side of the clearing, there was nothing there but darkness, a black void that Tarma shrank from without knowing why she did so. Whatever that thing was, she wanted no further part of it!
She started to turn her horse’s head, determined to ride through and even over whatever animate plants wanted to get in her way—
But suddenly Kethry gave an all-too-familiar cry of pain, and spurred her mare straight at the archway. Warrl was right on her horse’s heels, and in a heartbeat, the two of them were swallowed up in the blackness between the white stone pillars.
With a heartfelt curse, Tarma spurred her horse after, and followed.
~o0o~
“Warrl, I don’t think we’re in the Pelagirs anymore—” Tarma said weakly, looking around at the rocky and mountainous slope ahead of her. Sunlight blazed down from a sun near the zenith on the graveled path where their horses stood—it had been near sunset in the clearing.
Warrl did not dignify the observation with even a snort of derision.
It was possible to deduce some of what had just happened; Tarma had heard about magical doors into other places, often called Gates or Portals—obviously that doorway back in the clearing had been one such device. Something had made it active—and once active, whatever was on the other side had called to Kethry through the medium of the sword she wore, a blade called Need.
The sword responded to women in crisis, as the runes on her blade explained: Woman’s Need calls me/As woman’s Need made me./Her Need must I answer/As my maker bade me. Kethry had accepted a kind of soul-bonding with the sword as the price of the aid the blade gave her—Kethry, though completely untrained as a swordswoman, became an expert when the blade took over, and if she was wounded, the blade could and would heal just about anything. As a result, the greater the urgency of the woman in trouble, the worse the sympathetic pain Kethry would experience, unless and until she rode to that woman’s aid.
Very nice for the women they helped, but not too damned convenient for Tarma and her partner.
No point in trying to throw the sword away, either; the farther Kethry got from it, the more it would call to her, and much too strongly to be denied. Relief would only come when Kethry found a successor to pass the blade on to—and even then, the sword would have to accept the new candidate.
“Where?” Tarma asked her partner curtly. Kethry shook her head as if to clear it, closed her eyes for a moment, and pointed up the slope.
“There,” she said, her soft voice giving no hint to the firm will behind her pretty face and emerald eyes. “Whoever’s in trouble, she’s up there, and she is—must be—practically out of her mind with it. She’s also a mage, but not of a kind that I recognize; that must be how she brought us here.”
“Lovely,” Tarma muttered. She stood up in her stirrups, and surveyed the countryside again. It was singularly unprepossessing. The rocky slopes boasted nothing much in the way of vegetation except for thick patches of blackberry bushes. At least, Tarma assumed they were blackberry bushes. There were berries in various stages of ripeness, from yellow-green to darkest plum, showing clearly against the foliage. If they were like the blackberry bushes of home, they’d be as thick with thorns as with berries. Tarma’s long-dead love had called them “wait-a-moment bushes,” because that was what anyone who tried to force his way through them was reduced to calling out, over and over again.
There appeared to be a path of sorts ahead of them, leading up to a cave with a generous ledge outside it. That was the direction Kethry was pointing.
There were no armies camped outside that cave, no signs of horses or other beasts of burden, no fires; whoever was in that cave was probably alone, or if captive, guarded by one or two people at the most. There was nothing to be lost in riding straight up to the cave-mouth and taking a look. Very few people outside the Shin’a’in Clans knew just what it was that Tarma and her partner rode—battlesteeds were easily the equivalent of two ordinary human fighters apiece, and when you added in Warrl, you had a force of the equal of any seven fighters. So
if there was anyone nasty up there, he was going to get a major shock if he tried a direct confrontation. And just at the moment, Tarma rather hoped he would. She was truly in a mood to kill something.
“Let’s go,” she said, “I want to get this over with.” And as her partner blinked in surprise at her apparent impulsiveness, she sent her mare trotting up the path to the cave.
She had been supposing all this time that her adversaries would, of course, be human, so when the monster snaked its head and neck out of the cave-mouth, all she could do for a moment was to freeze in place.
The monster seemed just as surprised as she was; it stared at her with its mouth—a mouth well-appointed with dagger-like teeth—dropping wide open in shock. Unfortunately, that only gave Tarma a much better look at all those teeth.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t a creature like anything she had ever heard of before—except, perhaps, a cold-drake. This thing was the wrong color, but the size was right, and the long neck, and of course, all the teeth.
There was, presumably, a female being held captive somewhere in that cave. Maybe the monster was saving her for dinner, later; maybe it was just there to guard her. Whatever, the woman’s distress held Kethry here until she was freed—and that held Tarma and Warrl. Tarma did the only thing a Swordsworn warrior could, under the circumstances.
She drew her sword, and with a Shin’a’in battle-cry, spurred her horse into a charge while the monster was still caught off-guard. That is, she started to charge. Kethry’s shriek made her rein her mare in so quickly that the poor beast’s hooves skidded and she slid to a most undignified stop.
“Tarma! Stop!” Kethry cried in real pain. “Don’t! Need wants us to help the dragon!”
~o0o~
“Dragons,” Tarma muttered, staring at their hostess in disbelief over a nice hot cup of tea. “Tea-drinking dragons. I must be out of my mind.”
The Princess, the Dragon, and the Frog Prince Page 2