The Royal Dragoneers: 2016 Modernized Format Edition (Dragoneers Saga)

by M. R. Mathias

  Jenka had to bite back a chuckle. He didn’t want anyone to know that he could hear just yet. He needed to think long and hard about everything he was learning about the dragons, the trolls, and the ways of men. It was hard to imagine that, not so long ago, his life’s entire focus had been narrowed down solely to his quest to become a Forester and then a King’s Ranger. Now he wasn’t sure what he wanted, or needed, to do.

  Jenka looked up and smiled, as Zah eased up beside him. Her pale face shone blue in the magical fire's steady light, and the triangle on her forehead glittered faintly with the reflection. When she whispered, “How are you feeling?” he acted like he hadn’t heard her.

  Tenderly, she inspected his ears. Her fingers were soft and tickly on his neck, and he had to wiggle his shoulder when the sensation became too intense. He truly liked her touch. When she softly whispered to him, her warm breath found his skin and stirred his feelings on a whole other level.

  “Thank you, Jenka De Swasso, for that chivalrous attempt to rescue me today. If you could hear me, I doubt I would be so bold with my heart, but the spark you have tendered in me is potent.” Her lips were so close to his temple that she might as well have been kissing him. “I have a feeling that the emotion might someday grow into an inferno and consume me. I know beyond a doubter’s shadow that I’m not the one for you. That is why I have to ignore my feelings. I must keep them to myself. There is too much at stake.” With that, she kissed his forehead softly, like a loving sister might, then went and curled up in her blankets near where Linux was quietly meditating.

  After a short, confusing while, Jenka rose and joined Rikky and Stick, where they were posted at the edge of the weird blue-green fire’s light. “What happened to Solman and Mort?” he asked them quietly. “Where are they?”

  “So you can hear again, then?” Rikky grinned with relief. “You’re a dimbuss, Jenk. You almost got charred up. You’re lucky Zah did that…that…that yellow thing.”

  Jenka feigned a sharp whack at the younger hunter. Rikky ducked playfully. “I asked where Solman and Mort were, not for your thoughts on my foolishness, boy.” Jenka’s imitation of Master Kember was spot-on, but he was paling as he hunkered down between the other two.

  “They rode off into the Strom,” Stick said, with a look at Jenka that, somehow, combined reverence with doubt and concern. “Are you all right? You don’t know how close you came today.” The odd light caused Stick’s eyes to contrast drastically with his dark skin.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Jenka sighed. He knew that Solman was an expert woodsman and would be able to take care of himself if he hadn’t drowned. Mortin he wasn’t so sure about. Either way, he was fading quickly. He felt as if he had to rest now, and his body was demanding that he do just that. He lay back and closed his eyes, and immediately fell asleep on the turf. Rikky covered him with a blanket, and Jenka didn’t wake until nearly dawn when Master Kember started booting him in the side.

  “If you’re drilling with the others, then get your arse a moving, Jenk,” the old man said with another nudge of his boot tip. “If not, then get your arse up and start saddling the horses!” Jenka didn’t move. “Rikky done told me you could hear again, so quit testing me.”

  Jenka groaned and grabbed at his back. In actuality, he felt great. Whatever Jade had done to him back up in the foothills was having a lingering effect. All of his wounds, especially his ears, were healing unnaturally fast. He wasn’t a slacker, and he had never tried to get out of doing his duty before, but he didn’t feel like drilling with the others today. He wasn’t sure if he still wanted to be a King’s Ranger, so he gave Master Kember an apologetic grin and went about readying the horses.

  They made it to Demon's Lake that afternoon. It was a massive natural reservoir surrounded by ancient, dangling willow trees, wild tangle-limbed oaks, and shrub and undergrowth hearty enough to survive beneath them. Like a wavering natural fortress wall, a thick band of chest-high grass hugged the shoreline elsewhere. Beyond that was nothing but chill, cobalt water reflecting the sinking, copper sun in its wavering ripples. The lake was so vast that it extended all the way into the western horizon.

  While looking for signs of Solman and Mortin, they came across fresh troll tracks. Individual and paired troll tracks were not an uncommon sight around the lake, but these tracks had been left by a gang of trolls numbering almost half a score. They had Herald scratching his head and glancing at Zahrellion. He wasn’t ready to admit it, but he was starting to think that she wasn’t so foolish after all.

  “Must have been a dozen or more of them goblinkin come through here yesterday,” he concluded. “One of them is carrying a staff or a pike.”

  “It could be a spear butt, or just a stick, or something else,” Master Kember put in.

  “My instincts tell me it’s a walking stick or a staff. Look how deep,” he inserted his finger halfway into a perfectly round hole in the soft ground. “They’re all that deep and evenly spaced, like someone is leaning on a walking stick heavily.”

  “A troll using a walking stick?” Master Kember raised a brow at the King’s Ranger.

  “Don’t make sense, do it?” Herald replied, with another glance at Zah. He gave Jenka and Master Kember a strange look; the look a man has just before he starts into something he doesn’t really want to do, then led his horse over to Zah.

  “These trolls that are supposed to attack us, how do they communicate? Do they actually speak, or are they like critters and get along with posture and noises and such?”

  “I’m certain that they have a language all their own,” Zah answered, with a look to Linux for help with the response. She didn’t feel that she could trust these men to tell them the truth: that a dragon had told her some dark force had awakened to lead the goblinkin against the expanding kingdom of men.

  “One of our peers has been trying to imitate the grunts and growls of trolls for over a decade now,” Linux explained. “Trollkin, goblinkin, whatever you want to call them, are built differently than we are. He has had little success with it, because the troll’s throat is so complex that we can’t make most of the sounds they use, but he has learned by his long experience with them that they are communicating with sound. Why do you ask?”

  “Well I’m pondering if a man might learn to get along with them, to help them plan and such?”

  “That is a good question, isn’t it?” Linux asked them both. “And if this person could communicate and organize the trolls, could he not do the same with the mudge?”

  “If it was a druid or a mage, couldn’t they spell the trolls into doing their bidding? My ma once spelled a man to build a garden for his wife and it worked,” Jenka said.

  All eyes turned to Jenka then. Zah let the corner of her mouth turn up a fraction, and Linux made weird shapes with his mouth as he thought the possibility over. Master Kember remembered when young Orvin Longgras had built that garden. He frowned and shook his head at the fact that Witch Magic had been involved.

  “I don’t know `bout all that,” Herald said, matter-of-factly. “But I know we got to get to King’s Island and let King Blanchard know there be dragons in the skies, and gangs of trolls wandering around the lake attacking berry pickers and herbalists. That’s my duty.”

  “Well, we need to find them boys first,” Master Kember reminded.

  “Agreed,” Herald nodded. “But after that, we need to make some haste, `cause my old Kingsman’s skull en't as empty as the lass might think. She might be seeing things better than the rest of us have been, but I en't blind!”

  Just then, from a great distance into the chest high swamp grass, Rikky let out a keening wail. Master Kember was off at a gallop and Jenka was right behind him. Before they had even gone twenty feet, Stick’s frantic voice came calling from the same area, “Over here! Over here! One of `em’s dead! Over here!”

  Chapter Six

  Jenka had to fight the urge to vomit when he slogged into the high grass and saw what the two boys were hovering
over. It was Solman who had met his end there, and young Rikky had found him. Solman’s pale, mud-splattered body was wide open across the middle, and the cavity that should have held his innards had been picked clean by the early scavengers. His head was lying at an odd angle, and one of his arms was horribly twisted. A more substantial creature had worried away most of his face, but his pants and boots were completely recognizable. There was no mistake as to who it was. Master Kember was trying to urge them all away so that he and Herald could look at the sign before it was completely trampled, but it was no use. Rikky was fiercely clinging to Salmon’s body and sobbing pitifully.

  “It’s all right, Kember!” Herald said, loud enough to stop him from pulling Ricky off of the corpse. Behind Herald, Zah looked down from her mount and gasped. She spurred her horse quickly away, and Linux, who had already dismounted, sloshed off to tend to her.

  “`Tweren't no troll did that,” the King’s Ranger said harshly. “That be a sword slash, or I’m a pixie's pecker-head.”

  “Probably those bandits that got your nephew,” Jenka said the first thing that came to his mind.

  “I reckon it is,” Herald let out a long, low sigh. “The other one is probably close. If not, he got away.”

  Master Kember was looking at Jenka, and would have commented on his quick reasoning, had he not been nearly overcome with his anger over the loss of one of the boys in his charge. He was fuming, and seriously considered stopping the journey to King’s Island in order to hunt down the bandits that did this.

  Finally, Stick got Rikky to move. Herald stepped in and looked the area over, shaking his head in sheer disgust the whole time. When he stepped away and moved over to Master Kember’s side, Jenka eased closer to listen.

  “It’s them fargin bandits. I’m sure of it.” He twisted his neck and cringed in his chin. “I’m thinking our boys walked up out of this swamp grass and startled `em.”

  “What makes you say that?” Linux asked curiously, startling them all. None of the experienced woodsmen had even sensed the druid coming up behind them.

  “That’s a sword slash, the kind you make when you’re facing a foe and defending ground.” Herald snorted deeply, then spat a wad of phlegm off to the side. He rolled his shoulders, trying to picture the scene in his mind. “If you were going to kill someone deliberate with a sword, you would just run `em through.”

  “Or open their neck,” Jenka added out loud before he realized he had spoken.

  “Just so,” Herald gave a nod of grim respect to Jenka, and continued. “There’s a problem here, though. That carrot-headed boy is probably a captive. If he came up out of the brush behind Solman, he’d have been able to yell out and keep from gettin’ killed.”

  “I don’t understand.” Linux looked at them all with his slick, bald head cocked sideways.

  Jenka answered, and felt comfortable doing so, which caught Zah’s attention. He really wasn’t as stupid as she had first thought. “Those bandits have to be weary of the frontier, just like we do. When Solman came out of the grass, the bandits probably thought he was a troll,” explained Jenka. “Solman and Mortin, if they were still together, most likely thought that the fire hole over there was from our camp. I doubt they had any idea of how far ahead of us the current carried them.”

  “Mortin has been around here some,” Stick chimed in. “He labored down at Midwal for a stretch. He told me that he rode a few times with the Walguard when they came through Three Forks to watch over the clay pit caravans. That’s where he did his feat of notability, fighting bandits in them tangle woods over there.”

  “What’s the clay pit?” Jenka asked. The Walguard he knew, they were the men who not only manned the Great Wall stretching all the way across the neck of the mainland continent, but they also rode guard for supply caravans that came out into the frontier to gather materials, such as lumber and stone, for the kingdom’s continuous construction needs. Jenka knew that there was a sizable outpost in Three Forks, called simply Three Forks Stronghold. It housed and sustained members of the Walguard, the King’s Rangers, and several of the more civic divisions of King Blanchard’s established command. Jenka, having never been very far out of Crag, had never heard of the clay pits.

  “It’s not far from here to the east,” Stick explained. “It’s a cliff face that’s been dug out and down so that it looks like a pit now. They dig up this thick mud called clay. It's reddish brown, and can be molded into shapes and baked into…”

  “I know what clay is,” Jenka smirked a little more harshly than he intended to. “I’ve just never heard of the pits.”

  “If Mortin’s been ‘round here, and he got away, then that’s where he’d go,” Herald reasoned. “He’s a Forester now, and the Kingsmen at the pit will take him in and hear his tale, but if he got caught by them fargin road thieves, then he might be in a heap.”

  “So we track `em down?” Master Kember asked, with more than a hint of vengeful eagerness in his voice.

  “No. I track `em down, and there really ain’t no tracking to it. They still got some of Swinerd’s pigs with `em. I can find a pig in a corn field.” Herald’s tone made clear to the crippled hunter that he was speaking as a King’s Ranger and a superior now. “Make camp, Master Kember, and post a double watch. And you,” he paused to point at Stick. “You get them crossbows unpacked and loaded, Forester. Show Jenka and Rikky how to use ’em proper, but don’t be a wastin’ no bolts. Then all three a ’ya go up to higher ground and start diggin’ Solman a hole. I want that done before dark fall.” He turned back to Master Kember and gave him a sharp nod. “If I’m not back, leave in the morning as if naught was amiss. I’ll try and get in close on them bastards tonight when the moon first starts up, and if I see our boy I’ll come back and we’ll go from there. If I don’t see him, I’ll come back and send Stick to the pit to look for him.” He put his hand on Master Kember’s shoulder. “I have a sworn duty to see them two druids to King’s Island, Marwick, or we’d all go a-bandit hunting, I promise ya.”

  Master Kember looked as if he were biting the end of his tongue off. His face grew beet-red, and after he gave a short nod, he turned and stalked away.

  Later, when the crossbows had been assembled, loaded and distributed, Jenka took a break from digging and handed Rikky the little field shovel they had been sharing. Stick was off gathering rocks to help cover the nearly-completed grave, and Linux and Zah were meditating, or praying, or whatever it was that druids did, over Solman’s stiffening corpse.

  Jenka wanted to swim out into the lake and just float away from it all so that he could have some time to gather his roiling thoughts, but he knew he couldn’t do that. He had grown up with Solman, and though they were never really all that close, he wanted his friend to be buried well. Beyond that, he felt the indescribable urge to be out there with Herald, hunting the men who did this. He knew that Master Kember shared the sentiment, but Herald was a King’s Ranger, and he had laid down the law. They had to follow it.

  It was almost full dark when Master Kember placed the last stone. His face was streaked with tears, and so were Jenka and Zah’s. Linux and Stick kept themselves a bit distant. They never had the chance to get close to Solman and neither felt that they had the right to intrude. Young Rikky just squatted near Solman’s buried head and stared at the long pile of stones as if he were in a trance.

  While searching for rocks, Stick had found enough washed-up wood and deadfall to start a normal blaze. Master Kember was thankful for it. The last thing he wanted was to spend another night beside that overly hot, hissing blue druid’s fire.

  Master Kember, Rikky, and Linux took the first watch, which was fine with Jenka. He quickly found his bed roll, buried his face in his cloak, and cried out a good bit of sorrowful emotion before he fell asleep. Zah kept an eye on him for a while, but her sadness got the best of her, and she too sobbed herself into slumber. Stick just stared blankly at the sky. He considered that it could have easily been him lying there dead in the mu
d until Master Kember gave him a shake and told him that it was time for the second watch. He woke up Zah, and then Jenka, and the three of them sat around the warm, cherry-red fire coals watching the night over each other’s shoulders.

  Morning came with no sign of Herald, and Master Kember didn’t confuse his orders. He had the group moving quickly down the rutted road before the whole of the sun was even in the sky. They rode like that for nearly an hour when they came upon what was left of Mortin’s horse lying just off the road. Mortin had a standard-issue Forester’s saddle that Stick recognized immediately. The animal had been torn apart and half eaten, which master Kember informed them only trolls would do. Almost all other large carnivores, he told them, tried to finish their kill, or at least protect it so that they could finish it later. His assumption in this case was backed up when Jenka and the boys marked troll tracks coming and going all around the horse’s putrid carcass.

  “Let’s get it moving again,” Master Kember urged them. “Herald and Mort are probably waiting for us up the road…”

  “Herald is right here a comin’ out of the woods at ya! And if I’d have been a troll, I’d have you!”

  “Not so fast,” Jenka said, shaking the tip of the crossbow bolt he had nearly fired at the King’s Ranger by mistake.

  “You’re lucky Jenka has a little more restraint than that bandit did,” Linux observed.

  “Aye…s'pose I am,” he shivered. “But see here! We called it true,” Herald walked over and patted Jenka’s horse on the chest. “I heard them theivin’ bastards last night talking `bout it. I got real close. Said the boy came stumbling into the dying pit-fire light and startled the one who was supposed to be on watch. They was razzing him about it pretty bad.”

  The idea of those men joking about Solman’s death irked Jenka deeply, but not nearly as much as it angered Rikky and Master Kember.