by Lisa Daniels
Ever since Kazak whisked her away, she'd grown callouses over her hands, and a new hardness about her features. Kazak now left her tower door open, no longer bothering to lock her in, because he saw the light in her face as she appreciated the freedom. She went to his bed in the night, or he to hers. She still didn't know much about dragon society, but he'd promised to take her along with him when he next went to visit the witch of the swamp, and when he needed to check in at the goblin general store to procure new curses.
Marea understood partially why some princesses never returned to their kingdoms after being stolen. Not because they got eaten, but perhaps they learned to fall in love with the peculiar creatures, with their own brand of morality and their irritatingly attractive human forms.
Deeming herself of acceptable appearance, though her eyes seemed too dark for her liking, she ventured down the stairwell, and met Kazak in the main cavern room with the feasting tables, dressed up in a neat black and white suit, smiling radiantly at her appearance. He looked so powerful there, owning the room with his presence, his squared, strong body and rugged features. Though he kept his red beard neatly trimmed, he'd been growing it out a bit, leaving a growth that gave him a rough look to his handsome features.
He held out his arm to her. “Shall we go, milady?”
She looped her arm in his and grinned. “Anything for you, sir.”
All they did, really, was go for a stroll down the mountain path, exploring some of the vibrant scenery there, from the blushing pink flowers to the scraggly ferns that clung to the edges.
“I must say, princess, with that outfit, your beauty could kill.” He bent to kiss her hand, eyes flaming with desire and admiration. She flushed with pleasure from the flattery, feeling confident and beautiful. When they approached a tough cliff edge, Kazak pointed in the distance, to where the human kingdoms stuck out of the land beyond the Wilderness.
“Your home is over there,” he said, pointing to a small city, where the distant castle was the size of her fingernail.
She expected to feel sadness and longing for Glenderal. Instead, she felt nothing. No sadness. No heavy desire to return home. She had no taste for that life again of constant judgement, competing with other princes and princesses far more accomplished than she ever was.
Being a dragon's princess meant more to her than anything else.
How strange.
Kazak watched her expression for a long moment. “You might have a hard time being rescued, princess. I plan to cherish you for as long as possible, and to fight every Quester in your name.”
“I hope you will,” Marea replied, grinning. “But if you want me sticking around, I’d like you to decorate the place better. It’s awfully drab with the gray and the lack of seating areas.”
“That can be arranged,” he said. He bowed to her hand and kissed the back of it, his lips soft and hot against her skin. A pleasant shiver travelled up her body.
“Shall we go home then, princess?”
Home. I like the sound of that.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
She kissed him upon the lips, and he lifted her off her feet, twirling her around, before slinging her over his shoulder, and sprinting for the cave.
She laughed the whole while, her dress billowing in the wind, clutching her new love close.
The End
Captured by Durza
Dragons Take a Princess
(Book 5)
Chapter One
Jackie enjoyed her taste of freedom for precisely four days. Former captive of the dread dragon, Mokkan, with his defeat she clung to her knights in shining armor. At last, she could return to the Fera kingdom. Fera’s sole claim to fame existed in the fact that it was a walkway between the territories of Sondheim and Arul. Sondheim owned the most territory in the central kingdoms. Arul owned the largest military.
It created moments of high tension for Feralens, given that their land was mostly flat and easy to walk through – the perfect location for invasion. They received bribes from both sides, operated a system of spies and tentative third-party trading – and quietly prepared underground bunkers for when the inevitable war broke out.
Growing up, Jackie enjoyed the issues in their politics, and being well-informed. She also liked being a princess and all the perks that came with it. She didn’t enjoy, however, being kidnapped at a charity benefit by members of the Dark Clan, sold to a dragon, and then being kept as a prisoner for two years. Somehow, that blasted dragon managed to survive all attempts to slay him, and she had to live in a hierarchy of dumb princesses who couldn’t tell their left foot from their right.
Rescued at last, she happily tagged along with her Questers on their victorious return journey – only to find that they didn’t have a proper navigational device to get them through the Swamp of Illusions.
“You realize,” she said, her voice a growl, “that without a navigational device, we’ll probably all die.”
They scoffed at her assumption.
“It’s okay. We’re well-equipped. It takes far longer to go back through the Wayward Forest,” Reginald the White Knight stated, indicating his band of five travellers. A healer, a mage, a ranger, and a monk made up the team. One more princess travelled with them as well, a loud and brainless one called Andrea, whom Jackie wanted to gag at times.
“Better safe than sorry. You underestimate the magic of this place, and it will be your demise.”
“Oh, don’t be such a gloomypants,” Andrea chided Jackie. “We’re with Questers. They beat a dragon. We’ll be fine.”
Jackie ground her teeth but said nothing, knowing her words wouldn’t punch through all that fluff in Andrea’s idiotic brain.
Also, she wasn’t a gloomypants. What she stated was fact and common sense. The kind of common sense that ensured you didn’t take anything for granted. Their confidence will undo them. Fools. “Is this your final decision on the matter? You’ll go through the Swamp of Illusions without any means of being able to penetrate the illusions the swamp is named for?”
“I can do it,” Horace the mage said, twirling his blue robes and tilting his staff impressively. “I dabbled with some pathfinding spells back in the day.”
He waved his staff, then frowned. “Odd. I can’t seem to be able to cast it.”
Jackie folded her arms, tapping one foot on the squishy ground. The smell of the swamp permeated her muscles, sending an unpleasant, oozing sensation creeping through her lungs, tarring her throat.
“We’ll be fine,” Reginald insisted. “The shortcut will only take us two days, as opposed to three weeks through the Wayward Forest. Even if we’re a few days off, we’re still doing better time.”
These people. Are idiots. Jackie took a deep, irritated breath, trying not to explode in anger, her hands clenching into fists. Why the fuck did I have to end up with these incompetent fools? What are they teaching in Quester classes nowadays? Basics on how to fail? Advanced stupidity?
She quelled her anger with an unpleasant hiss of air. I can’t go alone. That’s the annoying thing about this. I have to stick with these fools.
“I’m putting it out there. You guys are far better off spending three weeks in a forest, than the rest of your lives dead.”
“Oh, don’t be such a downer,” Horace said. “I understand you’ve been grumpy from being locked up so long. How old are you, anyway? Twenty-six? Seven?”
“Does it matter?” She was twenty-seven, not that she intended to admit it to Horace Dumbface in a million years.
“Well. If you want someone to marry you when you get home, you should pull that frown off your face. You’re clearly getting past prime age.”
The insult jabbed at her and her eyes narrowed further. Getting past prime age? How dare they? She received enough rudeness from the princesses in their clusterfuck hierarchy. She felt much less inclined to help them now.
“Either I wear this frown, or I decorate your face with my fist. So you can fuck off.
This is suicidal, plain and simple. Do none of you read? Do any of you even comprehend how dangerous the Wilderness is, or are you treating it like some kind of camping trip? I didn’t get myself captured and locked up in a tower for two years without learning something about this place.”
Admittedly, her knowledge came from either conversations Mokkan had with his guests, or where the princesses happened to be in the Wilderness before they ended up in the same tower. She didn’t exactly overhear anything important, only snippets of conversation jumbled up in her mind over the years, and the reverence the monsters had for their homeland, which could easily swallow them up if they forgot just how dangerous the world was.
“Look, we didn’t come all this way to rescue a bitch, so you’ll stay with us, or you can go by yourself through the forest. If you’re so determined.”
That ended the conversation, but not Jackie’s undercurrent of irritation. Surrounded by deaf ears and the sinking knowledge of being unable to survive on her own, Jackie had no choice but to go along with them, and hope, somehow, that they pulled off a miracle. Only so many times could she talk to someone until realizing that every single word fell on unchanging minds and dangerously proud hearts.
Who would listen to a silly, airhead princess anyway, who didn’t know what she was talking about, who spent her entire life being served and living a life of luxury and dreams? Those were the thoughts that ticked in their minds.
None of them knew her fingers had flicked through many books and stained themselves with ink and knowledge, saturating her brain with new ideas and concepts that she knew on an instinctive level, but not how to express and convert into tangible thought. She knew, for example, that in a dragon’s cave, she was relatively safe, as they were bound by moral codes, obliged to treat their princess well and give them basic care – whereas other monsters did not operate by the same obligations, having different societies and functions.
She also knew, even before her subsequent capture, that around ninety percent of dragons shapeshifted into humans. The true traditionalists never learned, preferring to always stay in their “noble and elegant” forms.
The group wandered through the Swamp of Illusions, using the mountain peak as a guide, weary boots slapping into the grass and mud and spongy soil. Their progress came slowly, and gradually all conversation died out in place of the persistent need to push on. Horace sometimes hummed to himself, reminiscing about their defeat of Mokkan as a good, golden day, a day to be remembered by the grandchildren he planned to have. (Though he planned to omit the number of Questers involved in their victory.)
Over the hours, through rests and snacks and emptying their bladders, Jackie noticed the mountain never seemed to change perspective or size. It was always the same clouds, the same trees, and the same eagle circling in the distance. She didn’t say anything, but now started thinking through her options, and what she needed to do when everyone here died. Always best to be prepared for anything. Just like her mother and father used to say, and her survivalist older brother, who loved risking his life by camping in the wilder parts of their kingdom, either on mountain ledges or spying on military encampments and wealthy merchants in the kingdoms on either side of them.
“You may be a princess, living the life most people can only dream of,” brother Jacob had said, prodding her on the nose, his mouth wide in a Jacob smile, “but you also live in a dangerous kingdom. Tomorrow or in ten years, we might be invaded or poisoned in our homes. If you don’t learn anything, you may as well sit there and allow the world to kill you.”
Thanks, Jacob. His advice helped her keep her sanity when she was deprived of books in Mokkan’s residence, and encouraged her to write books of her own. Unfortunately, she never learned the same survivalist skills as him – something she now deeply regretted.
Two days later, no one wanted to admit that they were lost. The scenery remained exactly the same, and the path they kept walking upon somehow always made them pass the same flowers, chunks of grass, and fallen oak tree.
“Huh. Odd,” Horace said. “We’re not making any progress at all. Maybe we should try a different direction.”
Just keep knocking your head against that same wall. Jackie rolled her eyes, munching on an apple and chewing right into the core. They shifted direction, with Andrea whining in the background about how her feet were sore and she needed a bath. Oblivious to the fact that everyone else was in the same situation as her, likely feeling the same as her, her voice took on a nasal pitch as her distress increased. Tempers shortened and the band of five began sniping at one another, disgruntled, tired, thirsty, and frustrated at their lack of progress and the merciless environment that crushed them slowly with illusory fingers.
Jackie’s scrub dress became torn and her feet erupted in blisters every few hours. Despite the healer’s efforts in mending the discomfort, the poor mage couldn’t deal with physical exhaustion.
When the ranger equipped his Leaf Wings and took off to get a better vantage point of where they were, he never returned.
“Eh, he probably just wanted to take off with the loot,” Horace reasoned.
“Yes,” Jackie said, her voice tight with disbelief at his blatant refusal to admit the obvious, or his terrible decision. Even to the point of explaining away missing members of his team.
Next to go was Reginald. When they slept around a fire with Reginald on watch duty, they woke up a few hours later, and the knight had vanished.
“He’s probably chasing a swamp Quest. He’ll be back.”
Third was the healer, who spotted a frog, and, thinking it might be Reginald, picked it up and kissed it. A few moments later, the healer bloated up and lifted off the ground like a balloon, drifting into the sky, unable to move or squeak as Horace and Koras the monk tried to rescue him.
“Still think he floated off because he just wanted to see the sky?” Jackie said, giving her disapproving I told you fucking so face to the rather glum mage.
“Hmph,” the mage said, his tone distant, not wanting to engage or provoke debate on the matter.
“You can admit you made a terrible mistake,” Jackie offered, “though I don’t think we can backtrack anymore.”
“Just shut up. I’m tired of hearing you speak,” Horace said, redirecting his guilt into anger. Still unable to comprehend his own stupidity. Jackie sighed.
One hour later, they walked across a seemingly innocuous patch of ground, clear and green, with butterflies fluttering around flowers. However, the second they had all reached the middle, the ground began swallowing them up, letting out disgusting belching noises and the strong smell of manure. Jackie instantly grabbed onto an overhanging branch and Horace blasted the ground beneath him with flames, accidentally setting his monk friend on fire.
“We have to get out of this!” Horace yelled, as Andrea screamed, flailing uselessly until Jackie grabbed her hand, helping to haul her to the same branch. Koras sunk beneath the treacherous bog, and Horace continued screaming until the mud slurped over his mouth, nose, and eyes. He vanished into the ground with a plop.
Andrea continued screaming hysterically until Jackie snapped, “If you don’t shut up I’m going to shove you off this branch and you can drown with the rest of them.”
Andrea’s wailing turned into sniffles, the tears drenching her face, and she glared at Jackie. “I never liked you back at the tower. You never did anything with us.”
“Andrea, I don’t care.” Jackie was already looking around, trying to determine how far it was to the bank of relative safety, before conceding that there was nothing they could do except wait and slowly starve to death – and hope some monster came along with a kind bone in its body. Or competent Questers with actual navigational devices to punch through the Swamp of Illusions, and maybe a danger sense item, so they didn’t walk into snake pits or spike traps every five seconds.
A frog watched them balefully from the safe side of the bank, and ribbited ominously.
“Why are you such a
bitch?” Andrea asked, now swallowing her tears and gasping as she resisted the desire to cry and cry.
“Why are you?” Jackie countered, though she didn’t listen for the response. She had no time for this. They were stuck on a tree, mud coating their bottom halves, with solid ground too far on either side. They had no trinkets, no knowledge of spells, and they’d probably die of thirst in three days.
She closed her eyes, drowning out Andrea’s voice as she rested herself more comfortably on the fork of the branch, the leaves tickling either side, and reflected on her life. Her achievements. The prince she believed she was going to marry, maybe still waiting for her, or maybe shunted off to another princess when she vanished. She tried recalling her initial attraction, but nothing came. Just a sense of hollow, of the passing of time and the accumulation of experiences in the Wilderness and in the tower.
She didn’t need to save Andrea, honestly, but the princess was just woefully ignorant. Like a child. Unable to think for herself. She needed someone to bail her out, like a true princess.
Understandable, but still annoying. Jackie didn’t know how long they remained here in this impossible situation, but she must have drifted off to sleep at some point, because when she focused again, it was near evening, near the darkness, and the clouds above obscured the sky, meaning that they’d have little to no light to warm them up tonight. Plunging them into darkness, without the comfort of light to protect them from their imaginations.
Andrea let out whimpers, clearly distressed, but thankfully, she had the good sense otherwise to stay quiet, though Jackie needed to explicitly state to her why. You want to be eaten by any passing predator that might be able to reach us? Go ahead. Make a sound.
The bog beneath them, once it hit dusk, began glowing with an eerie blue light. Sparks seemed to wriggle along it, providing them a small measure of visibility, though Andrea shuddered because she thought the lights belonged to little bugs. Jackie couldn’t see from their height, but the blue glow never left the surface of the bog.