Blood and Royalty

by M. R. Mathias

  They’d had to spell Golden to sleep to keep her depleted core from failing her. She wanted Pascal safe more than she wanted to survive, which was unnatural for a High Dracus. She’d expended herself while constructing the shields.

  Crystal hadn’t been nearly as bad, but she hadn’t been lending her magic, only her icy breath. The fact that, once a mudged was close enough to touch her scales, its wings would stiffen and fail from her chill, was amazing to March, but Blaze didn’t seem to like her.

  “You men hold tight.” Marcherion gave Pascal a firm nod, and then clasped Rikky’s shoulder. “Even if I don’t make it, Blaze will come; but you are right. With two dragons and me covering you, you’ll have a better chance.”

  “This ain’t no coffin chore,” Rikky said. “You’ve gotten too skinny to even make a morsel for one of them bastards. Just don’t take too long.” Rikky smiled, and March remembered just how much he’d missed his old friend.

  Once those ranks of wyrms come down, it’s done, Rikky voiced.

  The last was said in the ethereal, Marcherion knew, so as not to scare the boys.

  *

  “This is Orn Spike?” Clover shook her head in wonder as she and Zahrellion stood looking at the unsheathed sword, where Jenka had laid it on a table.

  Aikira was finally asleep, and Jenka was off doing something that he said had to be done, but hadn’t elaborated on what it was.

  Both Zahrellion and Clover were about to go join the search for Pascal, their dragons having absorbed enough energy from the pads above. Zahrellion had used a druidic spell to freshen her own senses, and the great power of Clover’s dragon tear kept her ready.

  Clover grabbed the sword by the hilt, sort of hoping for some reaction from the weapon, but there was none. She let out a sigh and then offered Zahrellion the chance. Zah laughed and declined, but here came Princess Amelia, levitating a few inches off the floor as she slid up behind them. Clover saw her in the reflection of the shiny steel.

  “It is for Jericho,” Amelia said matter-of-factly. “If you grab the hilt, mother, the sword will ignite. If I touch it, or Jericho, it will too.”

  “You’re serious?” Clover was suddenly feeling the sort of rush of excitement that she used to feel when she and Crimzon were about to go dominate a battle.

  “Watch.” Amelia glided forth and wrapped her little hand about halfway around the hilt. The blade started glowing a light shade of blue, but flared out, and the whole room suddenly lit up with white-hot magic. This only lasted a moment, then she was gliding back, a grin of triumph on her face.

  “Your father held the hilt earlier, while he was looking at the markings, and nothing happened.” Clover looked at Amelia, then Zahrellion in turn. “So it is you, Zah, who carries the blood of the demon-fighter in you.”

  “I never knew my parents. Linux told me they died in a troll attack before I was born. The druids of Dou found me crying in the woods.” Zahrellion’s brown eyes suddenly narrowed, and she kneeled before her daughter. “Does your father know?”

  Clover was confused, wondering why Zahrellion wasn’t taking up the blade to go fight Richard with it that very moment.

  “The sword is for Prince Jericho, for when he becomes king.” Amelia gave her mother a look that Clover perceived as some sort of warning.

  “I don’t know how to use a sword very well, anyway.” Zahrellion returned the girl’s look and then gave what could only have been a forced smile at Clover, but she stood and reached out, grasping Errion Spightre’s hilt anyway.

  “Jericho can have it, but we need it right now, Milly,” her mother said as her eyes widened and slowly rolled back into her head, as if she were feeling total bliss.

  Clover felt a rush of jealousy, but it was fleeting. The blade began to glow the lightest shade of blue she had ever seen.

  “Can you hear it?” Zahrellion asked in a whisper. “Such a sweet symphony.”

  “Mother!” Amelia yelled, causing Zahrellion to drop the hilt and look at her.

  While mother and daughter stood staring at each other, probably having a conversation she couldn’t hear, Clover grabbed the hilt again, but nothing happened. Then Rikky’s familiar ethereal voice cried out.

  I’ve got Pascal, but Marcherion and Blaze are swarmed over…

  There was a long pause, and Clover’s heart started hammering.

  They’re gone. The sorrow in Rikky’s voice was so heartwrenchingly absolute.

  “No!” Zahrellion yelled at her daughter. “You’re to stay here and watch over Aikira. Do not tell your brother about this. Not yet. But tell your father immediately. I’m going to end this nonsense, and end it now.”

  Zahrellion reached out for the sword, and Clover obliged. Then Clover teleported herself up to the dragon pads and was glad to see that Zahrellion wasn’t far behind her, brandishing a blade that looked as red as Crimzon’s scales.

  For what was to come, Clover was certain that Crimzon could tolerate Crystal. Poor Richard was about to feel the wrath of an angry mother, and an even angrier red dragon, for Crimzon shared Blaze’s line, and he would relish avenging his kindred.

  Clover began warding herself and her dragon against anything she could think of, while she gained the saddle and told Crimzon where they needed to be. Then the wind was in her hair, and the feeling she lived for, the feeling of pushing herself into the unknown, overtook even the power of her dragon tear.

  PART IV

  Fire and Ice

  Chapter Eighteen

  Zahrellion had never heard such sweet harmonies, and they were sung by the voices of the heavens. Each individual melody was attached to a particular strain of magic. It was so complex she didn’t think even Jenka could understand it. But she knew it was to be Jericho’s blade, for he wasn’t a dragon rider, and this sword held the power of all seven dragons who’d lent their flaming breath to forge the ore. This was the sword for a true king.

  The thought saddened her, for she hadn’t said goodbye to her husband before he went off to do whatever he was doing. Even with all his strange and exasperating ways, the one thing that could always be said about Jenka was that he was selfless, so wherever he was, it wasn’t for reasons he’d dictated. She knew this in her heart, and she knew there was a sky full of mudged on the other side of the portal Clover had just opened before them. Marcherion and Blaze were dead, and Rikky and Pascal couldn’t get to Silva, nor she to them.

  Suddenly, the flaring red glow of the sword in her hand went white, and then she was through, sending mudged to the ground with the slushy, static-filled ice blasting from both her dragon’s maw and Pavreal’s ancient blade.

  Jericho’s blade, she corrected herself, and started toward the Pirattiton, where Rikky was pinned in.

  Clover and her huge fire wyrm were right beside her, Crimzon scorching mudged, and Clover blasting them left and right with scarlet pulses of raw dour from her dragon tear.

  It was a heartwrenching scene, but Zahrellion swallowed back her desire to vomit, and allowed her disgust to drive her will.

  The sword was magnificent, and she ended a score of mudged with a concussive blast that caused even the wyrm formations just hovering in the clear, blue afternoon sky to break ranks.

  It was then she saw Richard, riding one of the larger, clearly lesser mudged blue dragons, not the Nightshade. It made her think of Royal and the way she’d once thought the world of Prince Richard and his mighty blue dragon. She’d always felt sorry for him because she couldn’t imagine the hole left inside him, the pain he must have felt, after his bondmate died. She couldn’t imagine being without Crystal. Just the thought of it sickened her. Then she thought of Pascal, her best friend’s son, pinned beneath a statue, and of Marcherion. Almost of its own accord, for she only thought to do the deed, the sword responded to her will before she could stop it. Another, even greater, blast shot comet-like right at her husband’s brother and exploded.

  The sound was deafening, even to her, and it left Crystal’s sensitive ears
ringing, but more than a hundred mudged were flung from the sky, some straight down into the city with a force, some in great arcing tumbles. Not even the mudged that were sent upward from the blast lived, for the concussion left them either pulped inside or stunned unconscious.

  By the hells, wench, warn me before you do something like that again, Clover barked angrily. Some poor mudged down there below us got the load of Crimzon’s shit you scared from him right in the maw.

  Coming from angry Clover, being called a wench didn’t bother Zahrellion, and the idea of scaring the shit out of a dragon Crimzon’s size and age gave her even more confidence, but now she couldn’t find Richard in the sky. Had she gotten him?

  Here. Over here, Rikky called out. Stop stirring them up and come get us.

  For just a moment, Zahrellion understood Jenka’s drifting then. Magic could carry you away into its flow, carry you wherever it willed you. She was back on task now, though, and it took only moments for her and Clover to clear a path for Rikky, Pascal and the other Outland boy to where Silva was waiting.

  *

  Jenka had felt so impervious, so all-powerful, for so long, that being blasted like a leaf in the wind not once, but twice, was enough to bring forth his basic human instinct to fight. He’d run once, from Jade, scared witless by the sight of the, then puny, young dragon. He wasn’t afraid now, though. He was rattled and hurting, but already the alien essence inside him, and the teardrop Jade’s mamra had cried for them, held him together, and kept them both from dying. It was a close thing, and only his ability to go into hyper-motion saved him from the next blow.

  He knew from reading his daughter’s thoughts that the Sarsaraxus could move hyper-fast, too. It didn’t surprise him when, just after he blasted it and the Nightshade with crackling yellow energy, they shot out from under his spell and started flying.

  It took Jenka a moment to realize they were flying away. In fact, they were heading toward his land now, following the Sarsaraxus’s instinct to pollinate the spore there. Apparently, it wasn’t afraid of seawater, after all. Jade had to remind Jenka that they had to be stopped before they reached the Mainland. Jenka urged his emerald-scaled dragon after them, for he was thinking of ways to kill such a thing.

  Jade pumped his leathery wings with all he had, and Jenka pushed his power to speed through time to its limits. The Nightshade was slightly faster, though, even in that elevated rate of time. Like a sailing ship pulling away from another that was using the very same wind, soon the doom of all humanity was but a speck in the distance out over the sea.

  Wees snever catches themmmsss, Jade hissed.

  It was only then that Jenka realized they could get ahead of them, and how. But what they would do when they got there, he didn’t have a clue.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Zahrellion didn’t see Richard’s mudged when it came up from underneath them and jolted her and her frost wyrm to the very marrow of their bones. She lost the sword, then. It fell from her hand, and the sudden lack of power, and the harsh heat of the half-mudged’s lightning breath, left her and Crystal dizzy.

  Luckily, Crystal’s wings didn’t fold as they glided into the hillside, just beyond the edge of the city.

  Zahrellion opened her eyes as the sensation of Crystal’s magic tingled over her, and then she could only think of one thing: getting Jericho’s sword back.

  Only as an afterthought did she bother to look back and see if Rikky and Pascal had made it clear.

  They had, but she was after the sword now. The relief she felt was only fleeting, as she used her druidic magic to ward herself from any similar surprise attack.

  She was lucky Crimzon and Clover engaged Richard, too. Had he had the time when she was unconscious to get to her, he could have most likely ended her and her dragon both.

  Crystal sensed the blade, and then Zah saw where it was lying. She urged Crystal to come down on the mudged feeding there and snatch it, but one of Richard’s cronies must have seen her drop it. He was an older-looking, dark-complected, bald man, and was going after the sword now, too.

  He came to a hover, and the mudged on the ground opened up a circle around the blade for him. He casually dismounted, glaring up at Zahrellion, and picked up the weapon. She laughed when she saw his disappointment. He’d hoped to gain the power he’d just seen her wielding, but it wasn’t there.

  The blast of icy spew Crystal sent at them spread around the spherical field surrounding him and his mudged, and that irked Zahrellion. There was little she could do but prepare for a battle in the sky with them, and the threescore mudged that were now coming down from the broken ranks above.

  Her heart fell, for the man was flying away with the greatest weapon a kingdom could have. She was about to give chase, but the riderless mudged engaged her and kept her from it.

  She was crestfallen and sickened, and all the fight was about to slip from her. Then the sky beyond the rider opened up, and Marcherion and Blaze, covered in claw and bite wounds and dripping blood, came through and, just out of sheer luck, crashed hard into Richard’s crony.

  It fells again, Crystal hissed.

  I saw, Zahrellion replied. Pretend to flee, then turn and fly ‘round to it.

  Yesss, her dragon responded, the wyrm’s hope clearly restored again, just as hers was.

  *

  Marcherion was as glad to see Crimzon as anyone ever had been, and he guided Blaze right through a devastating gout of the greater fire wyrm’s breath, letting it fill them with heat and heal them.

  By no means were their wounds fully restored, and they both felt weak and helpless, but they were alive.

  March had teleported out of the mudged swarming him, just as they went down into the city. It was the only thing he thought could save him.

  After bathing in Crimzon’s fire, his first thought was Rikky and Pascal, and he was relieved to see them all on Silva’s back as the pewter-colored wyrm went undulating away east toward Clover’s castle.

  He needed to go with them, but his will to fight overcame his exhaustion and he went to help Clover watch over Zahrellion, for that is all they seemed to be doing since Richard had suddenly disappeared.

  You can go rest, Lord Commander, Zahrellion voiced, as her dragon dipped down into the city and came pulling up sharply with something shiny in its claws.

  It took Marcherion a moment to realize she was talking to him, for he’d sort of thought Jenka’s giving him a title was a jest or some such. He was about to ask what they were doing, but then he saw Crystal stall so swiftly with her frosty wings that her hind end came under her, and she tossed a sword up into the air.

  As if she’d done the maneuver a hundred times, Zahrellion reached out and caught the blade by the hilt. It was amazing to see such graceful flight, but what happened next was even more amazing.

  Three speeding blasts of crackling blue energy shot from the end of the blade, each out toward the larger concentrations of mudged in the sky. Then he nearly shit his britches, for he and his dragon both felt the following trio of concussions in their guts. The sound was so loud, he could hear nothing, but he saw nearly half the wyrms in the sky go flinging away from each epicenter like straw dolls.

  He knew it was the sword he’d brought here, the sword he and Brendly had found when they’d killed that wyvern back home, but he’d never imagined it held such power, and he wondered if it wasn’t meant to be Zahrellion’s all along.

  Then he thought of Desira. He needed to go rest and heal up, then teleport there and ask her if she would come back here with him. It wouldn’t take much time, for finding her would be easy, and a yes or no was all he needed from her.

  He sighed, because another realization hit him then. There were still more mudged following Richard than they’d killed, and they hadn’t been able to end even one of the mudged-riders who were controlling them.

  Like a flock of birds being startled from a tree, the mudged feeding in the city all leapt into flight and fled south at the sound of Zahrellio
n’s blasts. Then March saw Richard and one of his mudged-riders in the distance, leading them away.

  He wondered if they were going straight to Three Forks, or if they would even bother with it. If he were trying to take over this land with Richard’s army, he would burn all the ships in the harbors and eliminate the need to even bother with the islands. For without goods and produce from the Mainland, those people wouldn’t have the option to resist.

  Chapter Twenty

  The teleportal opened up over a deep blue sea. Jenka and Jade were high above the surface, and hopefully a few minutes ahead of the Nightshade and its new rider. Jenka pondered the Nightshade for a while. Had it come here with the vessel, or was it a demon, like Mysterian and all the others had told them? Could it have come with the vessel?

  No, Jenka decided; it knew this world far too well, and thrived off of the suffering of humanity. It had probably been here all along, and Jenka regretted granting Richard the thing’s life when the Dragoneers banished him to the island. He wondered how the Nightshade had healed itself, for one of its wings had been almost torn off. It would have had to regenerate the limb, for he knew enough about healing to know it had been ruined beyond repair.

  Maybe it knew of the Leif Repline fountain, too? Maybe it really was some hellborn demon, with enough power to regrow a wing? His alien knowledge showed him a handful of possibilities, but he could be sure of none of them. He thought of Richard, the Prince Richard he’d seen before a joust in a stadium on King’s Isle. That Richard had been as good a man as ever there was, but Gravelbone, and then extending Royal’s life with the power of his teardrop, ruined his mind. His dragon, Royal, had been awesome to behold, for there was nothing like watching a pure-blooded blue wyrm in the sky. He then remembered Richard’s message to Rikky.