“Well,” she said, considering the problem since it appeared that it wasn’t going to go away. But as she sat there thinking, her steed quiet beneath her, she heard something else. A steady, quiet thudding.
“Someone’s coming,” Zeke said, stating the obvious. Why had she never before noticed how often he stated the obvious?
“Yes.”
She drew her sword, pulling it silently from its leather scabbard. Her two guards followed suit, arranging themselves to back her up.
The steady thud-thud drew closer, even as the forest seemed to grow misty, transforming slowly into another world.
Then horse and rider emerged from the mist, a tall white stallion mounted by a well-built, handsome man she recognized.
“Hi,” he said, looking rather startled at the sight of their swords. “I’m Miles, the Behemoth Tamer. Are you lost, too?”
2
They cleared away the pine needles and dug a pit, in which Zeke and Tertio built a warm fire to hold the chilly mist at bay. Then the two men took up guard, while Miles and Drusilla sat by the fire and made a pot of hazelnut coffee.
“I never would have thought of bringing hazelnut coffee,” Miles said.
“Why not?” she asked. “It’s my world.”
“That’s a good point.” He laughed then, an expression that surprised her with its warmth and also its array of even white teeth.
“I’m looking for the Behemoth,” she told him.
“Why?”
“I think he has the Key of Morgania.”
He frowned. “What’s that?”
“It’s…” She sought a way to describe it. “It’s a book, actually. A wizard’s book. Full of knowledge of how to protect Morgania.”
“Magical knowledge?”
She nodded.
“Sounds important.”
“So if you’re the Behemoth Tamer,” she said logically, “you must know where he is?”
His hazel eyes met and held hers. “You’re very pretty, Princess.”
In spite of herself, she flushed. “Stop it. We have important things to discuss.”
He shrugged and laughed. “I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“Lots of people have seen me before,” she said with mild irritation. “I’m the princess. I make a lot of public appearances. So where’s the Behemoth?”
“In a cave.”
“Ooookay,” she said, her tone indicating impatience. “Which cave?”
“I don’t know.”
She gaped, then frowned at him. “Then what good are you?”
He shrugged, a twinkle in his eyes. “None right now. But if I ever find him, I can tame him.”
She sighed and poked at the coals under the coffeepot. The delicious aroma rising in the steam from the spout told her the coffee was just about ready. “So that’s what you’re doing? Looking for him?”
“Isn’t that what life is all about? A quest?”
She glanced his way again and felt their eyes lock, felt something pass between them, something at once electrifying and terrifying.
Quickly she dragged her gaze away. “It’s not funny. My people will be overrun by the southern hordes if I don’t find the key. It’s the only way to save them.”
“Hmm.” He nodded. “Is that coffee ready?”
She considered beaning him with the pot, then reminded herself that a Behemoth Tamer could eventually be useful. Instead, she filled the two tin cups waiting beside the fire. “So there really is a Behemoth?”
“Yes, there really is a Behemoth.”
She could almost hear the word Virginia tagging along at the end of his sentence. “You’ve seen him?”
“Her. Yes. She’s huge, gray and scaly. With an unpredictable temperament.”
“So what happened?”
“She vanished one night.” He lifted his cup and sipped the coffee, sighing with satisfaction. “Delicious, Princess. Thank you.”
“You let her go?”
He eyed her. “Princess, I’m telling you, Behemoths are unpredictable. Sometimes, even with the best taming in the world, they still run away. I’ve been looking for her ever since.”
“I thought she was only a myth.”
“That’s because she doesn’t usually hurt anyone. She just goes off and does her own thing somewhere. But if she’s in a foul mood she might, um, cut my career short. Or someone else’s.”
Drusilla nodded, absorbing this information. “So she’s dangerous.”
“She can be, yes.”
She looked straight at him. “Can we join forces?”
He thought for a moment. “I don’t see why not. But our first problem is getting out of these woods.”
“Uh…yeah.” She sipped her own coffee and called to Zeke and Tertio, telling them to come get some. They emerged from the mist like wraiths, and moments later disappeared back to their posts.
“Your bodyguards?” Miles asked.
“You could say that. Or you could just say they’re my fellow soldiers.”
“Yeah, I saw how you pulled that sword. A feisty princess, huh?”
She scowled at him. “I’ll have you know I’m one of the best warriors in Morgania.”
“Good. Maybe you can protect me.” Then he laughed, and she wanted to smack him.
She gave him her best royal frown. “I’m not kidding.”
He stopped laughing, but his smile remained. “I didn’t think you were. I’ve always been attracted to Amazons.”
“Will you get serious?” She didn’t like the way her heart fluttered, especially since she knew nothing about this man.
“I’m perfectly serious. But if I’m disturbing you, I’ll stop. Anyway, before we can find any Behemoths or any keys, we’ve got to get out of these woods.”
“You said that already.”
“I know.” Again that hazel twinkle. “I’m just moving us to comparatively safer ground.”
Drusilla wasn’t used to men who made such bold references, not in her fantasies or in her real life. In fact, in both, she avoided men who were like that. Where had this one come from? He wasn’t the kind of character she usually dreamed up.
For an instant the fantasy shimmered and she could almost see her computer and the keyboard and the lists of numbers she was entering so industriously.
She had a choice. She could focus on her work. Or she could put up with this presumptuous, unpredictable character who had emerged from some strange corridor of her unconscious.
She would put up with the Behemoth Tamer, she decided. At least he was interesting, however irritating. Anything was better than endless streams of digits.
The shimmering stopped and the daydream fell firmly into place again.
But as it fell into place, she realized things had changed. Miles was standing, his back to the fire, a short sword in his ha
nd. Where had that come from? She didn’t remember him being armed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, immediately springing to her feet.
“Didn’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
He glanced at her. “Something’s out there.”
“Zeke and Tertio?”
“Shh.”
She didn’t like being hushed, never had, but this time she simply clamped her jaws together and listened. All she could hear, though, was the endless dripping of water from the trees, sounding magnified in the thick mist.
Then, as if from a distance, came a low moaning. It sounded like nothing Drusilla had ever heard before, a strange ululation almost beneath audible range.
“What is that?” she whispered, feeling her neck prickle atavistically.
“I don’t know.” Miles looked at her. “I’ve never heard the like.”
“Me neither.” Instinctively she moved closer to him and drew her own sword, though she suspected it would be useless against whatever was making that sound.
“Zeke?” she called. “Tertio?”
“Shh,” said Miles again. “Do you want it to know where we are?”
But there was no response from either of her guards, and Drusilla’s stomach sank. “I think it already knows.”
Their eyes locked. The moaning came again, this time from somewhere closer.
Drusilla drew a sharp breath.
“Want some Skittles?”
If murder hadn’t been a crime, Cal would have died right then. He was peering over the cubicle wall at her, holding out the colorful bag of candy.
Ordinarily she would struggle to be polite and say, “No, thank you.” But her hair was still standing on end, her heart was hammering, and the echo of that moan was still loud in her ears.
So she glared at Cal, her fingers frozen over her keyboard. “Cal, I’m concentrating.”
He smiled sheepishly. “You’re typing so hard and fast, you’re going to burn up the keyboard.”
“I told you, I have to leave early.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to make the rest of us look bad by getting so much done.”
The warrior princess would have climbed over that fragile wall and put Cal in his place: butt firmly planted in chair, face pointed toward his monitor. But Drusilla of the real world couldn’t do that. Here, she was an ordinary mortal, bound by the laws of the land and the rules of her company.
“Cal, please,” she said. “Please don’t interrupt me. I’ve got to get through this stack before I can leave.”
“Okay.” His face fell. “Sorry, Druse.”
“Sure. No problem.”
She turned back to her keyboard, settled her fingers over the data entry pad and fixed her eyes on the endless rows of numbers she needed to record for GalaxyCom’s many subsidiaries. Sometimes she thought it was a duplication of effort, but it had been explained to her, and the rest of the clerks here, that written reports were required from each subsidiary, so they could be matched up to the data entered automatically in the system. To catch problems. In short, to catch embezzlers and the careless.
Now where was she?
But she couldn’t remember. She’d been running on automatic and had no idea what she’d already entered and what she hadn’t.
Oh, God. Now she was going to kill Cal.
Reaching for her mouse, she scrolled upward, hoping to find her place. Yes, there it was.
Relieved, she began to type again and hoped she could recover her daydream. It had been so real. So amazingly real. And the anxiety she was feeling right now about the princess’s situation was not in the least imagined.
Where had she been?
The moan. From somewhere nearby…
Miles put a finger to his lips and gestured to her. She followed him out of the circle of light cast by the campfire and into the dark, misty woods. When they were deep within the shadows, the firelight dimmed by the perpetual fog, they hunkered down at the base of a huge, ancient tree.
“I need to look for Zeke and Tertio,” she whispered.
“Later. If they have any sense, they’re hiding, too.”
“But what if…?”
He laid a finger over her lips, silencing her. The touch was warm, gentle. “Don’t think about that. Right now we’ve got to figure out what we’re up against.”
Reluctantly she agreed. Both Zeke and Tertio were among the best of the guard, and they would know what to do. It disturbed her, though, that they hadn’t come to check on her. Warrior though she was, capable though she was, she was still the princess of the realm, and they were supposed to keep an eye on her. She feared something terrible had happened to them.
A chattering caught Drusilla’s attention, followed by a burst of recognition. The chattering came from the teeth of her two guards. And the distant, growing howl they’d been hearing was the north wind of Trayen.
“We have to cover up,” she said to Miles. “Now.”
3
“We can’t be that far north,” Miles said, even as he slipped his blanket roll off his shoulder and carefully opened it. “We’d be leagues off course.”
The wind soon proved them wrong, sweeping through the woods with a bone-numbing chill. Drusilla found herself sharing the blanket with Miles, and not entirely sure how she felt about that. On the one hand, she was at least warm, physically. On the other hand, there was another warmth building, a pleasant heaviness in her loins. On the third hand—she made a note to add a three-handed creature to the story—she had not come on this adventure to get laid. There were bigger fish to fry.
“Shh,” Drusilla said. “Did you hear that?”
There was a sound. In the distance. Faint but audible above the wind, a thump-squish-creak-plop-swish, repeating again and again.
Miles’s face darkened. “Oh, no.”
Zeke and Tertio materialized at the edge of the clearing, Zeke’s eyes wide despite his attempt at courage. “What was that?”
Drusilla glanced over at Miles, catching the briefest of nods. “Somehow, we’re way off course. We’re almost to the River Mopenwachs.”
Tertio shuddered. “That’s not good, is it?”
“No,” Miles said. “For one thing, it means we’re too far north.”
“And the other thing?” Zeke asked.
“Is Krusti Olfard,” Drusilla said. From the look on Zeke’s face, he wasn’t familiar with local mythology. “The keeper of the river. Legend has it that he can make the river itself move.”
“Mean as a snake,” Miles said. “And he has powerful magic. The Wand of El Pomposo. The merest wave of it, even at a distance, can make your stomach roll over. At closer ranges, it causes light-headedness and retching.”
Drusilla gathered up her coffeepot and bedroll. “We have to get away from the river. There aren’t enough of us to confront Olfard.”
But even as she said it, the sounds of the river were coming closer. And they hadn’t moved.
“He really can make the river change course,” Miles said. “I thought you said it was only a legend.”
Drusilla was already fitting her coffeepot into her saddlebag. “Legends have a way of proving to be true. So let’s think about this. The river runs through the woods. If we keep the sound of the river to our left, we should come out on the east side of the forest.”
“Right,” Miles said.
Drusilla arched a brow. “No. If we keep the river to our right, we’ll come out on the west side. We need to get to the east side.”
Miles held up a hand. “I meant, right as in correct. We need the river to the left.”
“Right,” she answered with the barest flicker of a wink. Zeke and Tertio exchanged confused glances. Drusilla mounted her horse. “Let’s get moving.”
They mounted their horses awkwardly, still wrapped in their blankets, and once again tried to negotiate the twisting paths of the forest. Even with the sound of the river as a guide, navigation was not easy. The trails all seemed to turn in the wrong direction at the wrong time. Worse, the sound of the river was beginning to overshadow that of the wind. Miles seemed to read her concern.
“I know,” he said. “It seems like the river keeps getting closer.”
“Rivers bend,” she said, trying to be brave.
“Sure they do. But this seems more…focused.”
“Like Olfard is working his way toward us?” she asked, trying to ignore the faint but growing scent.
“Exactly,” Miles said.
A little while later, Drusilla reined in her steed and sat listening for a few moments. “It’s definitely coming nearer, and I really don’t want to get dunked by the Mopenwachs. Does anyone have any idea what time it is?”
But of course she’d forgotten to provide watches in this world of hers. “Okay, okay. Maybe it’s not past darkfall. I’m going to climb a tree and see if I can get a sense of which way to go.”
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