The Sword and the Dragon (The Wardstone Trilogy Book One)

by M. R. Mathias

  Hyden wondered who this brave woman was, as she mounted Oof’s back with only a minimal pause. It was just moments, after she and Mikahl’s limp body were racing away on the wolf’s back, that he realized that she might be after Mikahl’s sword too. A flash of panic swept over him, and he looked to Vaegon. The elf was sheathing Ironspike, and securing it to his saddle. This came as a comfort, all be it a slight one. If Mikahl lived, Hyden wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to tell him that they had lost the sword.

  Hyden wished he wasn’t so slow and dazed at the moment. He felt as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, and his head felt as if it were full of mud. He had done something out of sheer desperation, and had repeated the word he had heard the lady say as she released one of her lighting blasts. The explosion of power that had resulted from the word he used had been the concussion that had sent the Choska twisting up, and away from them. He had used magic, and now he was paying the price for it. His mind was a jumble of sorrow and confusion, and he couldn’t hold a thought. He was sure that a moment ago, he had been alarmed, or excited by something, but now he had no idea of what it might have been.

  Drick urged them to get onto the horses. After riding on a wolf’s back for days and days, the saddles looked relatively comfortable.

  As he swung a leg over the horse’s rump and settled into his seat, Vaegon asked the ranger a question, reminding Hyden of what it was that had alarmed him.

  “Who is that woman?”

  The ranger looked at the elf, and unease spread across his face as he took in Vaegon’s wildness.

  “I’m not sure you really want to know,” said the man.

  There was no hint of jest in his voice, and the look Hyden shot Vaegon, sent chills of alarm up his weary spine.

  Chapter 47

  With the invasion of Westland complete, and the border now secure, Shaella found that she didn’t have much use for Claret. Through spells she found in her father’s library, she had learned to transport herself directly from her royal bedchamber to the tower library, so the dragon was no longer needed to fly her up to the gaping hole in the wall.

  The Breed giants that had sacked Portsmouth and Castleview had been rounded up and herded back northward, away from the Zard and human population centers. A big show was made about getting this done. Shaella came out looking like a savior, and her dragon, a fully trained pet.

  If the city folk had ever questioned her power, her ability to keep the massive red dragon restrained, then the ease with which she used it to get the marauding Breed out of the cities and towns, removed all of their doubt. Though she had no immediate purpose for the dragon to serve, she kept the collars in place. She wanted to be able to call Claret to her at a moment’s notice, but she released the dragon from duty until that time arrived. She also returned Claret’s remaining egg. The dragon had taken it, and flown back to her nest in the fang spire.

  Claret lay on the smooth surface of the Seal. She was curled protectively around the last of her eggs, deeply brooding. She could incubate the egg by bathing it in her fiery breath at any given time. She had refrained from doing so for centuries, because she didn’t want to have hatchlings to worry about while she was bound to guard the Seal.

  Now she felt guilty. Had she incubated the eggs sooner, they might have had a chance to survive. Now, she was bound to the collar. She couldn’t hatch this one, because Shaella could call her away at any time. She was used to these helpless and trapped feelings. She had been bound by the Pact for as long as she could remember. If it hadn’t been for that, she would have left this land full of pesky humans behind long ago.

  It took her a few days to make her lair feel homey again. She flew down, and picked choice bones from her feeding grounds. She put her remaining egg on a pile of Zard skulls. Then, she scattered geka bones, and freshly killed snapper carcasses around the smooth floor, until it once again began to look, and smell like what it was.

  At idle times, she tried to stretch, and rip the collar from her neck, but it wasn’t to be removed. Its ancient and powerful magical properties dictated that it could only be removed by the person wearing the collar’s mate. Claret knew that long ago. On another land mass, a place far away from this one, the collars were regularly used. When possible, dragons were taken when they were young and raised with the collars on. Those dragons grew up used to the idea of being servants. They never got the chance to know what it meant to be the highest predator alive, to be the ruler of the roost, to be the true master of all that inhabited its territory.

  Claret had known those things, once. Long before she had been bound by that tricky human wizard to guard this place. She was once the Queen of a land not so much different to this one. She had watched those silly humans fight over this and that, each faction trying to prove dominance over the other. Every so often, she would swoop down among them, remind them of their folly, and give them a common enemy. She would burn down a few buildings, ravage a few herds, and maybe even snatch up a stray human or two. Then, she would sit back and watch, as they forgot their personal quests for dominance, and banded together to rebuild. A few years later, they would forget, and the whole process would start anew.

  She didn’t long for that sort of freedom anymore, at least not for herself. She would die content, and destroy half the world before she went, if she could guarantee that her last un-hatched egg would hatch, and live its full life free and unbound.

  She pondered these things while munching the meat from a snapper she had just roasted. For now, pondering was all she could do, but she knew that sooner or later the situation would change. With humans, it always did.

  Shaella tried for the hundredth time to ignite the power of her father’s Spectral Orb. Claret had told her that she had seen Gerard crawl down into the Seal while her father had had it open. Shaella had no choice but to believe the dragon. With the collars on, there was no way that Claret could lie to her.

  Dead or alive, Gerard’s soul was beyond the Seal now, and according to her father’s books, the orb would allow her to communicate with him. First, she had to figure out the minute inflections of the chant that was supposed to activate the orb’s power. She wasn’t sure if it was her rhythm, or the pronunciation of the words that she was getting wrong. The only thing she was sure of was that she was getting it wrong.

  She glanced out of the crumbling hole in the tower wall at the darkness. It was late. The moon was already sinking down into the black expanse of the Western Sea. With a heavy sigh of frustration, she went back down the trapdoor ladder, through the nest, and down into the library. With a flick of her wrists, she set flame to the dozen candles that she had spread around the room. She went to a book that lay open among many on the desk. She read, and then reread, the passages about calling out the orb’s power. Another passage, pertaining to the orb, followed the inadequate instructions that were trying her patience. The crystal sphere didn’t have to remain so large and bulky, it stated. She could shrink it so that it might be moved.

  She had hoped to get it to work, at least once, before she attempted to move it, but she hadn’t been able to as of yet.

  The gaping hole in the side of the upper chamber was letting the weather in. Several times, it had rained hard enough for water to pool on the upper floor. The floorboards were going to rot, and already water had seeped through, and dripped into the nest, and the library below it. If she knew the commands to use Pael’s lift, she could bring up some masons, and have the damage repaired, but she didn’t.

  She had had to rearrange some of the ancient volumes, so that the weather wouldn’t damage them. She had a mind to move the orb, and the contents of the library out of Pael’s tower to somewhere more convenient. If Pael had anything to say about it, she would tell the truth, at least about the books. She was fairly certain that a little rain, or even a long fall through the rotted floor, would do little, to no damage to the powerful Spectral Orb.

  She sighed again. Moving the texts and the crystal could wait till morning. S
he transported herself back to her bedchamber, wondering if the staff she had commissioned to be made was finished yet. If it was, she would shrink the orb, and place it as the staff’s headpiece so she would be able to carry it around with her.

  Cole was overseeing the staff’s creation. He was laying spells of protection and binding into the materials as well. She was confident that he wouldn’t fail her. He never had before. He had known Gerard, and how she felt about him. He knew how important trying to contact him was to her.

  As she strolled through the castle, in her blood red silken robes, she wondered at how smoothly things were going. The people of Westland seemed to be carrying on as if nothing had changed. Sure they mourned their losses, but those losses were mostly due to Glendar, not her. They had all seen the amount of power she wielded, both as a sorceress, and as a dragon rider. It seemed to her that, as long as she didn’t start blatantly abusing her power, she would go on unchallenged as the new ruler of Westland. Crops were still being tended, and herds were still being sheared, or brought to market. Trade and commerce continued as it always had, save for the addition of Dakaneese slave ships in the Westland ports.

  The Zard weren’t accepted in the cities very well, but they had found their places to work, and to dwell, and they stayed to themselves as much as possible. There was a lot of animosity between the three races, but Shaella made it clear that open violence against each other wouldn’t be tolerated. The Breed giants were having a hard time trying to settle into the northern reaches of Westland. Farming and raising animals had never been a part of their heritage. They would eventually figure it out if they wanted to survive. There would be no more raiding and pillaging. Shaella, with Claret’s effectively persuasive abilities, had driven that message home. The message had been clear: learn to associate and work with each other, or die.

  Bzorch, her Lord of Locar, was the exception to her rule. He was given some leeway in his dealings with the humans in his little part of her kingdom. Shaella was pleased with the effort he was taking to strengthen the defenses along the riverfront. His idea to build towers along the banks, not only had created work, but would go far in keeping barge thieves and smugglers from sneaking in and out of her territory. Already, men were harvesting the lumber for the construction from the Reyhall Forest, and barges were being readied to float the wood into place.

  She refrained from telling Bzorch that the idea was far from original. The Westlanders had done the very same thing along the marshland border a few hundred years earlier. Settsted Stronghold and all of its outposts were further apart than Bzorch’s towers would be, and they were made of stone; but Shaella saw no point in bruising the Lord of Locar’s feral ego by telling him this.

  She wandered into her empty, yet torch-lit throne room, and touched the burn scar on the side of her head absently. The wound Claret had inflicted there was now healed over, but her hair still hadn’t grown back. From a line that ran across her left temple, up and over her ruined, but still functioning ear, then down to the middle of her neck, there was nothing but scar tissue. At times, she felt like a monster. Only those quick and fleeting glimpses in the reflecting glass, where she saw only her right profile, reminded her that she was still quite beautiful.

  The low feelings she was having as of late, had more to do with losing Gerard, than with her personal appearance. She was the woman who let her father send her dying lover into the blackness of the Nethers, and the guilt of not protecting him better was where her saddened state was rooted. Other than that, she just plain missed Gerard.

  She tried not to care what people thought about her, but it was hard. She was the Dragon Queen after all, the Conqueror of Westland. She couldn’t let her emotions show. She had to appear confident and in control. As much as she hated the idea, appearances did seem to matter. So, she spent a lot of her time in public trying to mask the turmoil that roiled inside her.

  She was startled by the sudden, sizzling pop of someone snapping magically into the room. She was even more startled to see that it was Pael. He looked angry, anxious, and spectacular in his glittering black robes. His pupils were dilated, his eyes open wide, and the deep purple bags of exhaustion under them, gave his head a skullish look. He moved skittishly, as if he was wound up as tight as a drum. Shaella realized she was more than a little bit frightened of him.

  “Where are my texts?” he asked sharply.

  The question threw her off, because she hadn’t yet moved any books out of the tower. After a moment’s thought though, she realized that he was most likely referring to the volumes she had moved to protect them from the rain.

  “The hole you left in the wall up there was letting in the weather.”

  She spoke the words slowly, and then paused, letting the idea that they might have been ruined, have a chance to sink into his slick white head. The way his angry eyes flared, and the way he nervously wrung his hands together, caused her to cut her pause short.

  “I moved them so that they might not take damage.”

  Pael slowly stopped his fidgeting, and let out a long sigh of relief.

  “Show me!” he ordered.

  “Come,” she snapped back, as she turned and strode away.

  She wondered if this was the way other fathers and daughters got along. She would have been surprised to learn, that her relationship with her father, wasn’t that much different than many others. Most young women were traded like chattel to other men, not for money, but for position and favor.

  “If you will show me how to use your lift, I will have repairs properly made to the tower walls, so that we don’t have this problem again.”

  She spoke over her shoulder, as she led him through the castle. The people, and Zard, that they passed, parted for them, as if they were contagious, but every last one of them gave a bow or curtsy of fealty.

  “You’ll have to kill the masons when they’re done,” Pael said conversationally.

  He suddenly stepped around Shaella, and led them from the semi-crowded corridor, down a narrow servant way. She followed him through a maze of stairways, corridors, and even through a hidden passage, which was cleverly disguised as a stray run of wall. It was all she could do to take in the route as they went.

  When they finally arrived, at what looked like a storage pantry set into the wall, not too far from the entrance to the upper dungeons, Pael spoke a word that released his wizard lock, and the false door vanished. He spoke the word to make the door reappear, and raised a querying eyebrow at Shaella. She repeated the release word for the magical door, and it went away again.

  Pael smiled at her approvingly, giving her a good look at his crooked, almond colored teeth. Then he called down the lift.

  As they rode it up, he went through a series of command words, and showed her what they all did. After she had repeated them all correctly, he had her take them the rest of the way up. She only cared about the commands for up, down, and stop. Since she had no need to sneak around the castle, because a King’s wandering eye was on her, or nosy servants might report her movements, she didn’t think the lock, or several of the other commands, would be necessary for her. She learned and repeated them anyway. When the lift was moving upward by the command of her voice alone, Pael gave her another nod. A look of fatherly satisfaction was in his eyes. Seeing this, gave her the courage to ask him about the Spectral Orb. Pael didn’t hesitate to tell her a lot more about it than she really wanted to know.

  “This human you’re so concerned with, this Gerard, has absorbed part of what is empowering me,” he told her. “Through some ethereal bond, I can feel him in my mind sometimes, like a pesky mosquito. He buzzes around in a daze of confusion, and occasionally stops to suck off bits of information from Shokin’s – no, from my mind, as if it were a drop of blood.”

  He met Shaella’s gaze then, his expression as dire as ever.

  “You must never even so much as attempt to release what he has become from the Seal. He is no longer human. He consumed the yolk of the dragon�
�s egg. At the moment, his power is infinitesimal. It’s doubtful that he will be able to survive amongst the evil he’s bound with, but if he does find a way to survive the Nethers he has the potential to become a power beyond imagining.”

  “I just want to communicate with him,” she lied.

  “If you’ll make a Binding of Blood with me, that you’ll not attempt to set him free as long as I live, then I’ll show you how to use the orb, but I want a future favor in return.”

  A Binding of Blood is a magical binding, which forfeits the life of one who breaks the oath the instant that the oath is broken. The ancient spell was specifically created to keep powerful wizards from cheating each other. Still, Shaella thought, Pael should know better than to try to make an oath that a woman couldn’t find a way around. Even the least clever woman could work her way around such a promise, be it binding or not, and Shaella was as clever, and deceitful, as they came. Without hesitation, she agreed to Pael’s terms.

  She wanted desperately to reach out to Gerard. She was confident that eventually she would find a way to set Gerard free from the Nethers. Especially since Pael seem so worried that it might happen. If it wasn’t a possibility, then the mighty Pael wouldn’t be concerned about it.

  She couldn’t conceive of Gerard being some ultra powerful force though. He wasn’t a greedy or lustful person. Even if he did have power, he would be content with it, and not yearn for more. Pael’s concern seemed rooted in fear for himself. If what Pael had said was true, that the same power that had manifested in him, had also manifested in Gerard, then it made sense that Pael would fear Gerard if he were released. After all, it had been Pael who had shoved the dagger into Gerard’s heart. He of all people would expect Gerard to come seeking vengeance.