Blood and Royalty

by M. R. Mathias

  “It is a wise and powerful thing inside the Basx, and it will tell us if you are a mystica, or just a strange, fiery-haired lass like Lady Clover here,” the Oracle answered.

  Amelia chuckled at the Oracle. A Basx, she knew, was a demon trap, but there was no demon inside this spell-constructed prison. She could feel Clover’s tension behind her, but wasn’t the least bit afraid. “So, you don’t even know what is in there?”

  The men holding the Basx suddenly had to struggle to keep the container up, as whatever was inside struggled to turn around or resituate itself.

  Amelia laughed. “It knows now that I know what it is.” She felt her eyes glow lime like her father’s sometimes did, and she stepped forth and reached inside the box with all the determination she could muster.

  The elves around them tried to stop her, but the Oracle’s staff thumped on the floor with a thunderclap, causing them to stay themselves. It was then that Amelia went into hyper-speed, as her father sometimes did.

  She unlatched the right side of the box with her right hand while she reached and felt around inside so quickly that she had the thing in her left hand in no time. The alien slug in the box was stuck in real time and couldn’t put up a fight. Amelia reached over the Basx to undo the latch on the left side, but just as her hand found the brass release, the thing started moving in hyper-speed, too. As the latch came loose, the otherworldly leech-like thing shot out of her hand and exploded into a giant Sarax, right there in the Oracle’s knothole.

  It immediately backhanded Amelia to the floor, and then the large, shark-mawed thing tore the Oracle’s body apart and threw the two halves at the other elves in the room.

  Amelia saw Clover blast the spike-covered monster backward against the wall with the power of her dragon tear. It impacted so hard that the whole tree shook, causing a hundred more startled minds to reach into Amelia’s head and scramble her thoughts. One thought rang out over them all: she hadn’t wanted to let the thing loose, and now she had. She was supposed to kill it. She’d failed them all because she underestimated the ability of the creature in the Basx. She had failed. She faded, then, as real time overtook her, and just before she was out of it completely, she heard Clover’s pain-filled scream.

  Chapter Twelve

  Richard was disappointed, for the Outlands were already conquered. The Dragoneers were so caught up in each of their battles that he could have picked them off one at a time with blasts from his dragon tear cluster.

  He didn’t see Silva in the sky and figured Rikky was in the first protective dome the girls constructed, wasting the power of his dragon and his teardrop to heal the scared and ravaged goodfolk. Or maybe he was still out on Gull’s Reach, helping the men recover.

  Clover was another matter. He didn’t see her, either, but he’d seen Jenka and Jade in fleet glimpses and was hoping they would spend themselves with all of their ultrafast movement.

  An unseen foe was impossible to defend against, so he’d shielded himself well, and he wasn’t worried about any of the pure-blooded dragons getting too near him.

  His brother was killing his mudged in droves, but he didn’t care. Their carcasses would lie in the city and rot for months, festering and stinking, and causing misery. They were too large for men to just haul away, and the scavengers, even the predators, would come down from the Orich Mountains once the smell reached them. He had hundreds, if not thousands, of acres of mountain range in the Old World from which to harvest tainted wyrms. All the Nightshade had to do was go there and summon them. They would follow his hellborn wyrm unquestioningly.

  Crystal and Zahrellion had been deadly in the sky, too. Crystal’s breath didn’t even have to freeze the mudged. It just had to slow them enough, stiffen them with its icy chill, causing them to lose their air. After that, the ground did the killing, or the men down there with the nards to fight finished them off.

  Zahrellion herself, with her strange, druidic magic, was a force to reckon with, but poor little Aikira didn’t have a dragon’s tear, and she needed to draw from Zahrellion’s power to conjure, shape and sustain the protective fields she knew how to cast, with the very same wizardry Vax Noffa had taught him.

  Richard could have penetrated the flimsy, mudged-resistant magic without his newfound power. Hell, he could land and walk right through the barrier, but he was enjoying all the bloodshed. The more people they saved now, the longer this invigorating surge of pain and death would last. The screams of human and dragon alike caused the part of him Gravelbone had tainted to take a stronger hold of his heart, and the impure power of the dragon tears in his hands only strengthened the satisfaction of the moment.

  After Dinaqu had returned to him from Gull’s Reach, with Rikky’s message and no dragon tear, Richard had grown angry. Baru might have come back with little Rikky’s head, or at least a tale of the parting destruction he’d left behind. Dinaqu had been so unnerved by the three Dragoneers; he needed to prove himself again. To Richard’s delight, he was eager for the chance, especially since Richard had given him another mudged tear to sustain his need for power.

  “Dinaqu, go land and move among them,” Richard called from the Nightshade’s back. His voice carried to all three of his henchmen, not through the ethereal, but through bracelets that kept their communication intentionally out of the ethereal. “Get inside the first protective dome, and tell me if the silver wyrm is there.” Richard found Dinaqu’s eyes and bore into them. “If it is, then destroy the field and find Baru as quickly as you can.”

  “And if it is not?” Dinaqu asked, bloodlust showing on his face.

  “Then destroy the field anyway, and let your mudged feed me all the misery they can.” The last was said by both Richard and the Nightshade, causing Richard a sudden bit of unease as the wyrm’s long, sleek neck turned to face Dinaqu and mouthed the words through their minds.

  Dinaqu broke away and dove his mudged mount down into the fray, while Richard wondered in the farthest reaches of his brain if it was he, or the Nightshade, who was in control. Had Gravelbone even been the enemy way back then, or had he been just like Richard was now, addicted to the power and the pain and the devastation the Nightshade allowed him?

  Richard was drawn from those deep thoughts by a thin scream, which was growing louder by the moment. He realized it was Rikky Camille’s scream, and that it was coming from just above him.

  He looked up just in time to move out of the way of Rikky’s sharpened peg leg.

  By the gods, Richard thought. The fool had leapt from his saddle high above them and passed right through Richard’s shield.

  Richard avoided being skewered, but Rikky’s nards slammed into his face with force. Then, Rikky’s thighs were clenching the air from Richard’s lungs as he tore him away from the Nightshade. He couldn’t even scream as they went tumbling toward the ground.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “What just happened, girl?” Clover slapped Amelia’s face lightly, then a little harder to bring her about. “Amelia, what did you just do?”

  They were in the open air, but on a wide branch of the Heart Tree. Clover guessed they were a hundred feet from the ground, far too high to jump from while holding an unconscious girl, but now that Amelia was coming around, maybe she could just hang on.

  “That is what it came after,” Amelia said, blinking. “The thing my father and the Dragoneers killed came here to kill the thing I just…” Amelia sniffled then, as if she’d just done something horrible. Then she sobbed, “... the thing I just let loose. Did it get away?”

  “It did, but it left a trail of elven blood Crimzon could follow in his sleep.”

  “The elves were doing its bidding,” the girl said simply.

  Behind them, Clover heard a few elves gasp. She also heard the slight hum of a bowstring tightening as it was drawn and trained.

  “Grab a hold of me, girl, and tightly,” Clover whispered.

  “If you want to get down, just say so,” Amelia said back, and rolled out from under Clo
ver on the grassy earth below the Heart Tree.

  Clover hadn’t felt a whoosh of magic, or seen the hand movement needed to cause a teleportation. One instant they were on the branch above, and the next they were on the ground.

  Clover didn’t analyze how she’d just basically moved from one place to another without even sensing it, but she would later. Elves were starting to hem them in, and she grabbed Amelia by the hand and took her running in the direction she’d told her dragon to go. Crimzon covered their departure with a few blasts of fiery breath toward the Heart Tree, and soon Clover and Princess Amelia were on his back, flying through the bright, sunny sky.

  If what the girl said was right, that the elves were following the thing in the box, then their desire to kill the alien creature that crashed its vessel in the New World was because of this new Sarax-like creature’s will all along. The only thing that irked Clover more than the fact that it made perfect sense, was that she had been played, right along with the elves. Not even the druids of Dou had gotten it right. Through the blood of the Sarax they tattooed into their skin, they’d only been controlled by the Sarax, who’d just wanted to escape the vessel.

  Out of respect for Jenka and Zahrellion, and maybe a little love for Amelia and her uncanny candidness, she decided to seek their thoughts on all of this. After all, Amelia’s mother had been inked with Sarax blood, and her father consumed by the shapeshifter that had come here to kill the thing that had been in the box.

  No, we don’t need the Basx, Amelia answered the question Clover was about to ask her. I remember exactly what was carved on it, and where. I even remember the markings I didn’t understand, but father will know them, once I write them for him. I should have killed it, but I underestimated it.

  “Aye,” Clover spoke out loud, even though she didn’t have to. The girl was right in front of her; Crimzon was trying to put some distance between them and the now angry and disheartened elves, but he wasn’t flying so swiftly that they couldn’t talk normally. “Never underestimate a—”

  “Wizard. Any wizard. Ever. I know,” Amelia finished Clover’s favorite saying.

  “You’re not as sharp as you think, lass.” Clover grinned at her. “That time I was going to say enemy. Never underestimate your enemies.”

  ”But it isn’t an enemy.”

  “Then why must we kill it?”

  “Because it will end us all, if we don’t,” Amelia answered.

  “Then it is an enemy.”

  “No, it’s just a perpetual threat, like you and I are to some. It’s not an enemy.”

  “Perpetual is a mighty big word for such a slip of a lass.” Clover showed Amelia where to hold on, and then indicated she should do so. “Since you’ve read so much, you might know about kites and the power of the wind. You should hold on extra tight, so you don’t flutter away when we go through.”

  “I can just take us there, Clover,” Amelia said, looking back with a smirk, and suddenly they were in the mudge-filled sky over the Outlands. Jenka and Jade slowed out of their hyper-movement into normal motion right before them, as if they’d been expected all along.

  Clover was shocked by the devastation she could see beyond the green-scaled wyrm. Then she saw the Nightshade and mighty King Richard’s ranks.

  Amelia looked at her father like the child she was. Her eyes went to the burning devastation below. Then she leaned over Clover’s thigh and retched.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rikky hit Richard like a falling stone and didn’t care if they died on the cobbled street together, but Silva snatched them in her claws and turned to fly them out of the city.

  As hard as Richard struggled, all he could do, besides snap his own neck, was to hold onto Rikky’s legs. Rikky squeezed as hard as he could, trying to crack Richard’s neck. He understood that by hanging on, Richard was allowing himself to be choked unconscious and he was taking advantage. He didn’t even care if Silva caught them or not.

  *

  Richard fought his instinct to hang on and concentrated. He was about to fade off. Worse, he’d dropped the handful of smaller teardrops so that he could hold on. Before blackness finally overtook him, though, he squeezed the huge dragon teardrop in his one hand and blasted an outward pulse that left him tumbling, but sent Rikky and Silva both flinging off at a canted arc just over the rooftops.

  *

  “Go to your father, lass,” Clover ordered more than asked.

  And just like that, Amelia was sitting behind Jenka, looking back toward Clover. Her eyes filled with tears of what Clover could only guess was regret. Then the little girl hugged onto her father and clenched her eyes shut as tightly as they could be.

  Jenka, who had almost been Clover’s lover once, and now seemed more like a stranger than anything, only gave her a lime-eyed look that may or may not have acknowledged her, or what was going on at the moment. He looked as alien as the giant Sarax-like thing Amelia had just let loose on the world.

  I’m sorry I let it get away, Amelia voiced, as Crimzon dove toward the battle below. I really am.

  Clover wasn’t sure if she was talking to her, or her father, or both of them.

  Sloooksss, Crimzon hissed, and diverted his rider’s eyes with his mind.

  Clover couldn’t believe what she saw when she found him in the sky. Here came Rikky Camille, falling from high above Jenka’s brother, his good leg tucked under him, so his peg leg would shaft Richard with all his weight behind it when he struck.

  Her heart fluttered. There was a reason why Rikky, of all her lovers since Denner Noffa, had actually gotten a piece of her heart. He was a warrior.

  Before Clover could stop him, Crimzon dove toward the area where Rikky and Richard would have hit, had they not been redirected by that powerful blast. So intent was her dragon on his purpose that she didn’t question him. If he was leaving Rikky to fend for himself for a moment, there was a good reason, and once she figured it out, she had to agree.

  There, in the cobbles, were two grey crystal dragon tears, and another shattered into an evenly spread circle of tiny shards, each about the size of a grain of sand.

  Clover started to slide out of her saddle and go after them, but Crimzon reared up, took a deep breath, and then melted the shards and all of their pieces into cherry-hot dust. Within moments, they’d disappeared completely.

  There are two more, Crimzon hissed.

  But Rikky and Silva need us, Clover reasoned.

  Yesss. Her dragon’s sigh was heavy, as if Rikky might not be as important to him as destroying the forced mudged teardrops.

  Clover was glad her wyrm chose to go help Rikky and Silva, for already they were being swarmed over with mudged.

  Crimzon’s angry roar alone scared half of the inbred wyrms away, but it took a few blasts of his fiery breath to get rid of the rest of them.

  Jenka was there over them, with his strange, mind-reading daughter clinging to his back, as he kept that part of the sky clear.

  Silva was easy to find, and she wasn’t broken or bent as badly as she could have been. Rikky, though, was unconscious and busted up.

  The Outlands are lost, King Jenka. Aikira’s beautiful voice was full of sorrow when she sang out across the ethereal. If Richard kills us all here, it’s over.

  Hearing Aikira call him King Jenka made Clover think. She’d never thought of Jenka as the king of this land. She’d always thought Zahrellion the queen and Jericho the crown prince, though. It didn’t matter; Crimzon was now itching to destroy the other four mudged tears, for he sensed the riders who carried the other ones, too.

  Jenka wasn’t listening. There was a steady stream of deep green fog shooting down from them and spreading across the ground around Rikky and Silva. After a few minutes, Rikky rolled over and stretched.

  One of the worst sounds Clover ever heard in her life was the one-legged hellion’s arm bending back into place, but a few seconds after, he fluttered his eyes open and started looking for Silva.

  When Clover saw J
ade, it didn’t surprise her that he was looking skyward, and that Amelia was the one doing the healing.

  Richaaaard -is -the -least -of -our wooooories-now, Jenka voiced.

  Let him have the Outlands. Amelia’s girlishness showed through, even in her ethereal voice. We have to go find it and kill it.

  Kill what? Zahrellion couldn’t contain her motherly concern.

  What are you talking about? Rikky asked.

  What do we have to kill, besides that crazy bastard up there? March added his query to the others.

  The Sarsaraxus, Amelia answered. The thing I just accidentally let loose.

  Did she say Saraxes? Rikky asked, his mental voice betraying real fear.

  Just one, Clover clarified. She understood the fear perfectly. In the sky, a swarm of Sarax was the most vicious foe a dragon could face. But it is a single one, as big as five of the Sarax you fought here before. Only, this one was wielding power and casting spells and such.

  Great, Marcherion said sarcastically. He was across the city, fighting with Aikira to help people get inside the last remaining shield dome, for the first one had just flickered away, leaving those underneath unprotected from the mudged. I left a honey-sweet beauty who wanted to have my sons for a giant Sarax and a war with the Nightshade’s puppet.

  PART III

  The Lesser of Two Evils

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Where- is- the- sword- you- returned- with?” Jenka asked the question his daughter had already asked Marcherion. They were all in the rotunda, under the dragon pads at Clover’s castle.

  Aikira was sobbing relentlessly to Zahrellion, because her husband, and maybe Pascal, had been under the first of her protective domes, the one Richard’s crony destroyed, and no one had seen them since. She would have been out looking still, but she and Golden were spell weary to the point of collapse.