The Royal Dragoneers (Dragoneers Saga)

by Mathias, M. R.

  The very same aura that terrified the mudged and worried the trolls and goblins filled other High Dracus with a sense of ease and comfort, save for the mating seasons, when it could cause terrible rage and jealousy among the drakes. This one was a mam, a female dragon, Jade was certain. And when it landed silently and came upon them, it made Jade nervous, but he wasn’t afraid.

  “Where are you taking me?” A human voice asked. A human boy’s voice.

  “Jenka?” Jade asked excitedly.

  “Who was that?” Rikky asked back. “This is Rikky Camile. How do you know Jenka?”

  With a loud, HISSSSSSSSSSSS , Royal sounded loudly, causing the mid-sized silver dragon that Rikky was riding to leap back and nearly toss him to the ground. Royal had felt Gravelbone’s palm on his bond-mate’s head, and had taken the wicked, tormenting abuse with him. Royal had a rage now, a rage that was boiling to life inside his slightly-healed body. Only because he knew the silver could help heal him more, did he restrain from lashing out at her.

  After the quick display of dominance, Royal eased his reflexive temper back a notch and half-welcomed the silver to join them. It had come for the Confliction, from beyond the peaks, and had bonded with Rikky. Rikky was still in shock over the sudden happening. He had only half-believed the things he had heard Jenka and Zahrellion talking about. Now he had no doubt about them. He had sworn to kill the Goblin King, and Silva had agreed that it needed doing. Not because Rikky had sworn to it, but because Silva knew that it must be done before the Time of Confliction could begin. Rikky had no idea, nor did he care, what the Time of Confliction was all about. He wanted revenge on the thing that had caused Master Kember and Solmon’s death, the thing that had destroyed Crag and the other foothill settlements, and the thing that killed all those countless, innocent people in Three Forks and Outwal for no good reason.

  Royal was pleased to hear of their intention. His bond-mate was Gravelbone’s prisoner, and was on the verge of death, or insanity, or both. Silva’s help might be the tide that turned the tables on the Goblin King. Jade, speaking over Rikky’s confused questions, told the other dragons that he still needed to go to King's Island to save Jenka from the stone fortress. Royal dismissed him as if he were a hatchling. As if Jade hadn’t just saved him from the huge fire drake, and certain death at the hands of the scavenging vermin.

  Jade didn’t take the rejection very well, but he didn’t let it distract him from what he intended to do. Since Silva was there to help Royal now, he had no reason to stay around. He didn’t even say goodbye before he took wing and started flying south toward the sea. He would go to King's Island and get Jenka without the help of the others. If they didn’t think they needed him, then he didn’t need them. He needed Jenka, though, and Jenka needed him. That’s all that mattered to the young green as he flew south with all he had left in him.

  The sun was breaking the horizon, and Jade was well out over the ocean when he realized that he hadn’t rested and was still weak from all of the spell casting. He had no idea how much further he had to fly, but he was already faltering from exhaustion. Panic overtook him, and he turned around to go back to the mainland so that he could rest and eat before again attempting to make the long flight over the ocean.

  He soon found that he had no idea where he was, or which way he was going. The panic was starting to debilitate him considerably. He wasn’t able to make full wing strokes and the ones he was capable of making were weak and shaky at best. The sun was high overhead, so he couldn’t tell which direction was what. Worse, there was no land in sight. He was losing altitude and would soon crash into the sea.

  It happened then, and terror overwhelmed him. His left wing failed. It pulled reflexively in against his body. The other wing wouldn’t close because it had cramped hard, and the muscle was knotted and pulling awkwardly. Like some tumbling leaf, Jade went fluttering into a spin and splashed into the slow-rolling, cobalt sea.

  *** * ***

  Silva cast several complex healing spells on Royal, and the two of them slept while Rikky sat high on Silva’s bulk, watching through the daylight hours. It was after the sun had left the sky, and Rikky had gone to sleep, that a band of trolls, led by two larger orc commanders, attacked them.

  Rikky had been so close to Silva’s healing magic that it had affected him too. His wounded stump no longer pained him, and he slid off of Silva’s back with ease. He hunkered down in the woods while the two dragons had their way with the attackers. Silva’s breath was a fountain of fiery liquid that lit up the night and consumed any creature that got in the path. Royal was still weary and wounded, but his fierceness was a terrible thing to behold. He darted forth and used a swiping claw to rip open two trolls and snatched another into his mouth with a sickening crunch.

  The orcs ordered the trolls to charge forth, but some of them blanched and Silva roasted them in their tracks. It looked as if the battle was over, that the two High Dracus had prevailed, when a mudge and the hellborn nightshade came streaking past. They sent gouts of their own wicked breath spraying down on Royal and Silva. The Goblin King, with his crown of ivory antlers, laughed manically and threw something down at Royal. It was Prince Richard's falcon-winged helmet, and seeing it sent Royal into an uncontrollable rage.

  When Silva blasted the mudge from the sky with a hot, lavender pulse of magical energy, the nightshade came to a hover just out of their reach. Seething, Royal forgot his half-healed wounds and leapt into the air after it, but Silva held fast.

  “Come, Rikky,” she hissed. “We must pursue.”

  “I think it’s a trap,” Rikky shouted as he limped over to the lowered dragon. The few remaining trolls and the two orcs were staying well clear now. “It wanted Royal to follow! It’s a trap.”

  “Royal knowsss thiss, but he doesssn’t care. He will die trying to sssave his bond-mate as I would die to sssave you. That isss why we won’t rush in,” Silva hissed, after Rikky wedged himself in between two of her spinal plates. “Rushing in is for the drakes. Hopefully that fool wyrm doesn’t get himself killed before we get there, but either way, the trap should already be sprung by the time we arrive.”

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Jenka was as tired as he had ever been in his life. Riding on the white dragon's sleek, undulating, and ever-chilly back had taken its toll on his body. If he could have felt Zahrellion’s warmth behind him it might have been better, but she couldn’t get close because there was a triangular spinal plate between them. When they made landfall on the mainland peninsula’s rocky bluffs, somewhere between Port and Mainsted, Jenka had never felt so relieved. When he slid stiffly off of Crystal's back and tried to walk off the soreness, he decided that he probably had never felt that much pain, either.

  Zah wasn’t much better. She only had to ride halfway across the ocean, and she had ridden on Crystal's back before, but her muscles hadn’t gotten used to the awkward, wide-straddled positioning yet. Jenka absently hoped that Jade's scaly body wouldn’t be so cold when he grew big enough to be ridden. The chill of Crystal’s body was unpleasant after a while.

  Zah started a fire with her druidic magic, while Crystal left them to go hunt. The white dragon had been flying now for nearly a week with only the shortest of stops to rest and feed. Jenka hoped that she found an easy meal, for she needed and deserved all the rest she could get. Jenka had stuffed his pockets with meat pies, purchased on King’s Island before he had gone up on the ridge. What he hadn’t eaten had fallen apart in his pockets. He offered Zah some of the crumbled stuff as he shook it out onto a flat stone.

  She laughed girlishly, and for a moment Jenka forgot that she was elvish and probably three times his age. Her smile warmed him and he let it, but deep inside the idea of her age bothered him. She took a bit of the crust from the stone and nibbled at it. It irked him that nothing in his life was as it seemed; he wasn’t Jericho De Swasso’s son, Zahrellion wasn’t a beautiful young girl, and the kingdom’s fate was supposedly decided by a trio of representatives f
rom different High Magic-wielding factions, not King Blanchard, as he had always believed.

  Linux from the Order of Dou; Mysterian, the Hazeltine witch, who had brewed his seed in a kettle pot; and Vax whatever-his-name-was, the wizard from the Outlands, were the ones who decided it all. He chuckled out loud but kept his thoughts to himself. If they are so powerful, then why do they need me to be their champion? He asked himself. Why me?

  When Crystal returned, she loomed her head down from high and laid a strip of fresh, raw meat across the stone Jenka had been using for a table. Then she curled into a tail-to-nose ball. Jenka put the meat on a makeshift spit and let it roast over the hissing blue flames while Zah got reacquainted with her dragon. By the time the meat was finished cooking, Zahrellion was fast asleep. Jenka ate half of it and left the rest close enough to the fire to keep the insects off of it.

  He went to sleep and dreamed of frantic wing-strokes and cramping limbs. He splashed down into the sea and felt a terror so deep and primal that it threatened to drive him mad. He was floating in the ocean, rising and falling on the surface, as titanic swells lifted and dropped him at will. The persistent feeling that some huge predator was circling in the water underneath him prevailed. It was dark, and there was lightning in the distant sky. A terrible storm was rolling in, and he knew that if he didn’t get out of the water and fly before the storm reached him he would surely drown.

  As hard as Jenka tried to wake from the dream, he could not. He was stuck there inside his dragon’s mind, trying desperately to swim up out of the water and get airborne. It just wouldn’t work, and Jade was only succeeding in exhausting himself.

  In Jenka’s dream, daylight came around again, and at least he could tell the direction the current was taking him. He was being pushed eastward, away from either of the nearest land masses. His hope for survival was fading as fatigue took over.

  When he reached the peak of the swells that were lifting him, he could see the storm he had seen the night before, still inching closer and closer to him. It was a black wall of roiling clouds, thick with flashes of wicked-looking lightning. Halfheartedly, he tried swimming away from it. He wasn’t certain why he bothered, for there was no way he could outmaneuver the approaching weather. Nightfall was approaching again in his dreamland, and the terror was taking a firmer grip on his soul, when Zahrellion woke him with her soft, sweet voice.

  “What is it, Jenka?” she asked. “What has you tossing and turning so?”

  “It’s Jade.” He sat up as he spoke, the cobwebs falling from his mind like shaken droplets of water. “He’s crashed into the sea and we have to find him before the storm swallows him up.”

  “Oh no,” Zahrellion gasped, as she looked out across the ocean they had just crossed. The sky that had just been blue and sunlit was growing dark and nasty. To punctuate the situation, lightning crackled nearby, and the following thunder was ear shattering.

  “Where’s Crystal?” Jenka yelled in a panic over the rumbling. “Wasn’t she just here?”

  Zahrellion turned to see that her dragon was gone from where it had just been lying only moments ago. Turning, she scanned the edge of the storm and was just fast enough to see Crystal’s stark white tail disappearing off into the roiling blackness. Then the rain started coming down in sheets, and the wind whipped into a torrent.

  *** * ***

  The only thing Herald hated more than traveling on the little ship was traveling on the little ship with the witchy old crone. Mysterian had gone into a tranced state and was sitting in the bow. She was using her witchcraft to call forth the near-perfect gust of wind that was pushing the creaking craft across the sea at uncanny speed. Like Herald, the small crew of fishermen was terrified, but they did their jobs and kept the boat sliding gracefully over the deep, rolling waves, if at an unnatural pace. It was clear that the boat wasn’t made for the open sea, but nevertheless they were away from King’s Island, beyond the point of no return now, and they were successfully outrunning the dark wall of clouds that had formed behind them.

  When Herald told Her Majesty, Queen Alvazina, that Prince Richard was now a prisoner of the Goblin King, she had gone wild with rage. Not at Herald, but at her husband for being so hard-headed about the dragons and trolls. She was on a ship sailing toward Port before Herald even knew what happened. When he rushed back to Mysterian’s residence to tell them about it, Jenka had gone. Herald remembered Jenka saying that he had to meet a friend north of town on Solstice Day. He had been lower on the ridge that afternoon. He had seen Jenka climb onto the back of the icy white dragon with his own eyes, and after he regained his composure, he went and told Mysterian what he had seen.

  “Good for him, then,” she’d replied. “We best get to chartering our own passage, Ranger. We’ll be needed on the mainland before it’s all over with.”

  Just like that, Herald was whisked aboard the net-hauling, single-sailed boat and they were off. After a few hours of less-than-smooth sailing, Mysterian heaved a heavy sigh and knelt at the front of the craft. She began chanting and humming, and slowly but surely, a wind found the tall triangular sail and had been pushing them northward ever since.

  The second day passed and they were closing in on the third night when she suddenly gasped out in horror, or maybe pain. The wind went still, and she slumped over. She moaned out loudly for Herald, and like some terrified child about to be scolded, he went forth, feeling the more pronounced roll of the boat on the huge swells. Without the strong, steady wind to keep the craft pressed into the water, it seemed to be on the verge of floundering.

  “Northeast on the compass, Herald,” Mysterian said weakly. “Row us yourself if you have to, but take us northeast, and have a man up in the nest searching the water. He’s not far, and he needs us.”

  “What? Who?” Herald waited only a heartbeat before he decided that the answer didn’t really matter. “Bah,” he growled, as he turned and stumbled over to the man who seemed to be in charge of the disorderly craft. “Row us northeast, and put a man up high. There’s something out there.”

  “What is it?” a man asked from behind the unsure Captain. “There’s a storm about to run right up our arses.”

  “Ask the witch,” Herald said flatly. “I’m a King’s Ranger, and you’re being ordered to row this tub northeast until the witch says otherwise. If you don’t like it, then swim!”

  Herald couldn’t believe that one of the men actually looked at the sea as if he were about to jump over the rail. The sea rose up under them, the boat lifted unnaturally high as it floated over the huge swell. Then they went sliding back into the gulf between the waves. Rowing the boat seemed a futile effort to the crew, but they did it. Behind them, the storm wall slowly gained on them. They could only hope to please the witch so that she would call back her wind and save them from the tempest.

  After the oars were locked in, and two men at each side were rowing, Mysterian called Herald to the bow again. She had turned so that she was sitting on her backside instead of kneeling. Her head was lolling over to one side with fatigue, but her eyes were open.

  “It’s Jenka’s dragon. It’s out there floating in the sea. Don’t let these fools harm it. I can feel its terror. It’s not dead, but it’s frightened for its life.”

  Herald gulped hard. “His dragon? The yearling green he calls Jade?”

  “Yesss,” she answered. “Now let me rest while you find him.”

  It struck Herald odd that he actually felt a deep concern for the creature he had only heard about. In fact, he felt in his heart that it was his duty to his young friend Jenka to do everything he could to save the wyrm. He was a little unsettled about the idea, but he started speaking to the fishermen as if they were a group of young Foresters in training.

  “Were searching for green, men. Scaly green dragon’s hide,” he waited for the murmurs to die down before continuing. “It’ll get darker ‘n dark soon, so light them lanterns. It’s not a big evil beast, son,” he reassured one of the men. “It be a
youngin’, and were going to save it or the witch will call forth a wind that’ll blow this tub straight to the bottom of the sea.”

  Herald had added the last because the hesitant men had stopped rowing themselves toward a dragon. He couldn’t blame them. What sane man would row himself towards a dragon? The times had turned anything but sane, though, and Herald had learned from nature itself that if you didn’t adapt to the circumstances then you didn’t survive. When Mysterian started cackling out crazily from the bow, the oars started to move again. Herald had to bite back a nervous chuckle that she would do such a thing to intentionally scare them.

  The last bit of velvety orange was leaving the horizon when the man up high yelled out, “Dragon ahead!”

  Jade was floating easily, but was afraid to his core because he was lost and alone, and didn’t know what to do. The impact with the water had been quite severe, but his cramps had long since left him. He had eaten a few curious fish that had come too close, and he felt that he could probably fly again if he could get out of the water to get airborne. But he couldn’t, and he was afraid.

  His young wings needed two steps of momentum to take flight from solid ground. He had long since given up hope of trying to get into the air from the sea. Several times he had tried to dive and then swim up towards the surface. He just wasn’t strong enough to get clear of the water. When he heard the man’s voice echoing across the waves, he thrashed around, trying to see where the sound had come from. The noise of the splash he made was substantial, and several of the fishermen started praying out loud.

  Mysterian crawled to the rail and pulled herself to her feet. She could feel the ozonic wrath of the sea-god Nepton in the form of the violent storm chasing them. She waited until a swell passed, and she could see the dragon clearly in the lantern light. In a voice as shaky as Jade felt, but with an unmistakable draconian accent, she spoke: “Terazal ephallenx. Friendsss of Jenka De Swassso we are. I felt your fear, Jahderialxellin. We have come to help you.”