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

by M. R. Mathias

  Behind the captain, Frunien peeked up out of the companionway.

  “I am,” she insisted. “Now, please. The dragon has been flying for hours, and I’m sure that she would like to get herself over land so that she can rest her wings. The longer this takes, the more likely she will be to try and take rest on your ship, and I assure you, sir, she will not ask for permission to board.”

  “Linux will have my head,” Frunien mumbled.

  “Then come along,” Zah snapped. “Crystal can carry three as easily as she can carry two.”

  “Crystal is her name?” Frunien was now watching the frosty white dragon ease in close to the ship. He could see Jenka sitting proudly on her back, and it astounded him. “No, Zahrellion,” he shook his head in the negative. “You have a destiny, it seems. I’ll not get in the way of it.” With that, he turned and went back down into the belly of the ship.

  The captain called out orders, and a series of ropes and pulleys were utilized to make a long wooden beam, able to swing out over the side of the ship, up high. Zah tied a short length of rope around the waist of her gray robes for a belt and fastened her cloak tightly. She then ascended the rigging as if she were born a sailor. In a matter of minutes, she was poised precariously out over the water, straddling the round beam of wood like some adventurous child on a tree limb. Crystal came swooping in, and as the two of them were really starting to feel each other’s presence through their bond, Zah slipped upside down on the jib and extended her arms down. Crystal had to pull her wings in so that the left one didn’t crash into the ship's rigging. She was coming in very fast because of this. At the last second, Jenka reached up and clasped Zah’s dangling arms at the wrist and as Crystal came streaking past the ship, Zah let her legs go. She spun acrobatically into a straddled position behind Jenka on the dragon’s back. It would have been a perfect feat had Jenka’s arms not been nearly ripped from their sockets when Zah’s weight, and the momentum of Crystal’s flight, yanked them backwards.

  As Crystal flew ahead of the ship and peeled away, winging north, the ship’s crew gave a hearty cheer, followed by a long, loud sigh of relief.

  Jade was sleepy. He had used all his energy trying to heal Royal so that they could fly away from the blood-soaked area where they had fought the hulking fire dragon. The spells he had cast, and the short swift flight had worn the young green dragon to exhaustion. They didn’t make it far, but they had gotten away from the red dragon's gruesome carcass before the sun left the sky. They felt safe enough to land and rest in a small, starlit glade, surrounded by forest.

  Royal fell into a fitful slumber as soon as he landed, leaving Jade to struggle to stay awake and keep watch for them. It didn’t take long for something to come around. A pair of roaming trolls, on their way to investigate the coppery smelling carnage blowing on the wind, stepped out of the tree line and saw them. After hurling a couple of small rocks, they went loping away, most likely to get others.

  Jade didn’t wake Royal. The big blue needed rest and more healing magic. Jade’s mother had instilled in him several spells of the restorative sort, but they were complex beyond Jade’s reasoning; the young dragon wasn’t capable of casting them yet. Beyond that, he had just cast the powerful spell that destroyed the huge red and then healed Royal well enough to get him in the air and flying. It was rare for a dragon of his age and type to be using such powerful High Magic, but desperation had filled him full of might, and he mustered the stuff from way down deep. It hadn’t hurt that he had Jenka’s strength with him to draw upon. His amber-tinted lower lids were now threatening to slide up. The exhaustion was getting the better of him.

  For Jade, everything had a deep, urgent undertone. He had been on his way to save his bond-mate from the stone fortress he was trapped within. Jade needed Jenka, and Jenka desperately needed him. Thinking about these things kept him awake and alert enough to sense the presence of another dragon, as it cautiously approached them from above. Surprisingly, Jade could sense the aura of a pure-blooded dracus circling overhead. It was a welcome sensation.

  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 caused 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 s
everal 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 Crystal's back and tried to walk off the soreness, he decided that he had probably 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 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 from 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.

  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.”