“Be careful,” Zahrellion told them, as she gave them each a hug in turn. Rikky closed his eyes and savored her embrace. He wasn’t disappointed when she held him a little longer than usual, and she seemed pleased that he gave her an extra long squeeze in return. The moment made Aikira give them both a look, though, and Rikky found himself blushing as they levitated from the rotunda to the landing area.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jade can sense that wizard’s particular imprint in the essence, Jenka said. But only when he is using his magic.
So, you don’t know where he is, only where he was when he last cast a spell? Clover asked.
Yessss, Jade hissed the answer, for his rider’s mind had already drifted from the conversation.
Why didn’t you tell me about Vax? The demanding tone of Clover’s voice pulled Jenka’s attention back to the moment.
You were aging once we were free of that place. Jenka surprised her with the clarity of his response. I didn’t want you to spend the last few days of your life wallowing in regret. Had I known you’d be restored by the crazed dwarf’s fountain, I might have.
I’m thankful for you not telling me, Jenka, Clover clarified. I was just curious why.
Yessss, Jade hissed.
He just cast a spell, said Jenka, letting Jade carry them toward the sensation.
They started southwest, and soon the long, oval sheen of Demon’s Lake could be seen in the distance. Jenka was having to concentrate to keep focused, but he was managing it. There was only one place around the lake that he knew could conceal all of the beasts, and if they were hiding in the grottoes, then Jenka would have a huge advantage over them, for he had scoured King Richard’s mind once, and knew that his brother and Royal had escaped Gravelbone through a hidden tunnel in the depths of those haunted caves.
It turned out not to be such an easy set up. There was a creature hiding in the shallower part of the grottoes, and a handful of wizardly spell casters attending it, but it was most likely the creature Silva and Rikky had scorched. The more powerful wizard Jade had sensed must have been there and gone.
Jenka would have never thought to use heat as a focal point, but that was how Crimzon located the one creature they found. After trying it a few times and adjusting his mindset, Jenka managed to get the hang of the trick and could make out the individual men moving about the cavern that the creature was mostly filling.
I say we end this thing and have one less problem to worry about, Clover suggested.
No. Jenka shook his head, even though she probably couldn’t see him. We let them feel safe here. We creep in through the cavern Richard once escaped from, set a few spell traps, and then wait until they are all here before popping the spring.
I see your mind isn’t as mushy as we feared, Clover jested.
My mind mushy? Jenka searched the evening sky for her and found she had a determined expression that wasn’t betraying her thoughts. Just because I am unresponsive does not mean I am not paying attention.
Can’t you see your wife slipping away from you, knuckle head?
Who could blame her? was Jenka’s only response, and Jade churned his wings hard so he could stay ahead of Crimzon. For the smaller dragon, this was no easy task, but Jenka was determined not to let Clover see the moss-colored tears sliding down his ashen face.
Rikky was torn. He wanted to hunt the colossal beasts and be done with them, but he also wanted to guard over Zahrellion and the rascals. He wanted them safe, but even more, he wanted Zahrellion to feel safe and to know that it was he who cared to come protect them.
It was all silly, he knew, for Aikira was laughing about the situation. This made him feel foolish for loving Zah, but only slightly so.
I tell you, Marcherion left just in time. Even in the ethereal, Aikira’s voice had the hard-clipped Outlander accent. March and Aikira had made a bet about Jenka and Zahrellion at the wedding. Everyone knew about it because it was an absurd bet, and Aikira sort of tricked March.
If Zah and Jenka ever separated, Aikira would win the bet. If they stayed together, March would win. This created a problem for March getting payment, for declaring him the winner might take all of their lifetimes.
What was the wager again? Rikky asked, even though he knew.
A thousand push-ups, done on demand, and a sword made from true Wildermont steel.
A sword from Wildermont was worth enough gold to buy a small stronghold and an acreage, but having to do push-ups on demand for Aikira was a far worse price to pay. March and Rikky both lost to her once before, on a hunt. She had them do three push-ups each, every time she thought about it, no matter where they were, or what was going on around them. Rikky remembered having to mope near the entry to the ladies’ bathhouse when the Three Forks Hold was being constructed. Every time a woman came or went, he had to drop and do three push-ups. He could still hear them giggling as they pointed, whispered, and hurried past.
March’s debt payment that day was a little worse. He had complained about Aikira only letting them do three push-ups at a time.
“The prize is watching you squirm, March.” Rikky remembered the smugness of her voice as she spoke. She had out-hunted them all, and scored a buck with the biggest rack anyone had ever seen. It was an impressive win, and she had a right to gloat the way she did. The three of them had boasted and taunted each other relentlessly before the contest when they were wagering. “I didn’t win push-ups,” she told him. “I won push-ups when I want them. Now, go do three push-ups every time a man comes or goes from the baths, until the remaining six hundred you owe me are done.”
I can’t believe they stayed together this long, Aikira said. To be honest, I never thought Jenka would come back after the Confliction.
Yeah. Rikky was thinking about Zahrellion and only absently acknowledged Aikira now. After a moment, though, he grew curious about something. What did you and Clover talk of?
She is sort of my grandmother, which is strange, because she looks so young and vibrant these days. Aikira’s ethereal voice grew conspiratorial and gossipy. Remember when she was old and getting older every second? I thought she would shrivel up right there. I’m going to seek out that fountain she and Crimzon drank from and see what it does for my wrinkled eyes.
I miss March, Rikky blurted out of nowhere.
Why? Aikira must have decided to try to cheer him up. He would just out-hunt a stump-legged turd like you. Whoever spots one of those fargin things first gets a thousand push-ups from the other.
A hundred push-ups, Aikira, Rikky chuckled. And not on demand.
It’s a wager, then, she replied, and the two of them began seeking out the colossals in earnest.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Concealing Crimzon and Jade was turning out to be a challenging task, until Clover suggested they stop trying to hide. The two wyrms ended up flying into the clouds and circling high, while Jenka and Clover snuck into the grottoes on foot through a hidden tunnel.
Had Jenka not been trained by Master Kember and old Herald, he wouldn’t have seen the signs of his brother’s passing. But Jenka had been trained, and he saw plainly the decade-old evidence as if it were fresh.
Following the marks of Richard’s route wasn’t all that necessary, for the cavern only branched twice, and each time, the route taken was the only way a man could go walking upright, but then they came to an area where they both had to hunch over and even duck-walk for a time to get through. After that, a bit of wavering light reached them, and the echoing sound of distant voices speaking in a vast open space could be made out from the distance.
“They are speaking about the healing spells they have already cast,” Clover said. “It is an old Primalkar dialect they speak.”
“You— understand— them—?” Jenka asked slowly.
He was using some of the alien senses he had acquired, and finding them extraordinarily acute. In his mind’s eye, he was moving farther down the passage, even visualizing what was around the bend. He was thinking
that it was some sort of sound-based effect, but the depths of his mind told him that it was just the alien’s —and now his— mental ability to construct an image based on what the particles of the air reflected around them.
“If we load the narrow chute behind us with smaller rocks and debris, we can set a directional blast that sends the stuff careening through the passage,” Clover suggested.
“Have— you— done— this— before?” Jenka was genuinely curious, for it sounded like a great idea.
“Stop— speaking— so— slow.”
“I— can speak faster.” Jenka’s voice, and his body began to move so fast she probably couldn’t even see him anymore.
While Clover shook her head and looked for him with an exasperated expression on her beautiful face, Jenka built up a pile of broken rocks and scree with which to clog the chute.
“Stop!” Clover eventually hissed. “They’ll sense you using magic, man.”
Jenka appeared right behind her then, slowing to a normal rate of motion. He was so close to her that his manhood was pressed against her buttocks and he saw his breath cause the skin on her neck to prickle when he spoke in his distant alien voice.
It isn’t magic. It is so much more.
She pushed away from him, but she did so with her arse. Jenka couldn’t stop the heat that fluttered through his groin and belly, nor did he want to. Since Zahrellion had their second child, he was not that concerned with their relationship anymore. Mainly because she was too busy with the children and the Kingdom to pay him any attention. Amelia was part alien, too, and deep in Jenka’s heart, he knew he would someday have to take her away from here and teach her about her ability, lest it grow in a negative way. He had been steeling himself toward that end since her birth, and the fact that Rikky plainly loved Zahrellion came as a comfort, not the outrage that everyone, even he, expected him to feel about it. Clover, though, had stirred something inside him before, but that was right before she tore his soul free of his body.
As he started going through the motions that would articulate a powerful blast, one he could later release with a spoken word, he considered that even all of that hadn’t shaken the mental image of Clover pleasuring herself before the pain overtook him, and even the memory of the pain was laced with visions of her.
There. Rikky pointed at a deep cut in the hills. They were just west of where the town Weston had once been. You owe me a hundred push-ups, Aikira.
Not until I see it, too, she joked, but her expression was mirthful for only a heartbeat. Rikky saw her face twist into a fearful look as her dragon immediately banked them away from Silva and him.
The searing orange explosion of heat that shot past him caused Silva to rise a few dozen feet in a matter of seconds, leaving Rikky pressed against her scales and helpless. Then he and his wyrm were enveloped in a glassine orb and falling slowly as Silva’s wings found no purchase inside the magical field.
For a few moments, Rikky panicked, but Silva soothed him. They were in a bubble, it seemed. Beyond the sheen of their gently falling prison, Rikky saw Aikira send a blast of wizard’s fire into a knot of robed men standing on the ground. They scattered, some in a hurried dive, others thrown hard from the concussion. Then, Golden spewed her liquid molten breath across them.
Rikky half-expected the shell around him to disappear then, but there was no such luck. When the orb touched down, it was held aloft by the flimsy tops of the pine trees now cradling it. Standing on the bottom of the field on her hind legs, Silva began to probe the magic containing them. While she did so, Rikky watched Aikira and tried to reach out to Jenka through the ethereal.
There were at least two more men on the ground, for they both sent up red-hot streaks of energy that narrowly missed Aikira’s ancient wyrm as she slithered through the air. Aikira launched an arcing fireball that exploded across the forest in a quick, outwardly-expanding ring. The force only shook the trees over which Rikky was suspended, but the wizard who took the brunt of the blow was little more than an ashy husk now.
The other wizard on the ground got one of his scarlet streaks to hit its mark, and Golden roared out as she twisted and turned to find the location of her attacker. When she did, she drenched that whole area with her molten breath.
The ebon-skinned Outlander had been trained in wizardry, and it showed, for several of the spells the robed men cast were countered by her swift defense and understanding of what they were doing.
Then came the colossal. The wild-looking wizard riding this one was clad in a more ornate robe, and by the casual way he battered old Golden across the sky, Rikky was suddenly afraid.
The golden-scaled wyrm crashed and rolled. Rikky doubted Aikira could have survived in the saddle. He was well aware of how canny she was, though, so he didn’t discount the possibility she made it intact, but it didn’t matter anymore, for the world outside the orb grew so bright, he couldn’t see anything but white.
Silva roared out, and then suddenly everything was dim, and they appeared inside a cave near another handful of robed men. The field around them was still intact, and they both knew there was little they could do about it. Worse, the colossal they had scorched in their first battle was right there across the cavern from them, and it looked as if it had been somewhat healed; healed enough to want revenge.
At that point, Rikky couldn’t tell what was worse: the idea of being eaten, or the horrific feeling of being so contained.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jenka heard Rikky’s ethereal call. The way it cut off in such a quick, unnatural fashion worried him. He was finished setting his spell trap, though, and ready to respond.
“I’m going to go help them,” Jenka said, as he created a mental image of a map for Clover and illuminated from where Rikky’s hail had come. “I can be on my dragon in moments, where it will take you the better part of the day to make your way back through.”
“Go, then.” Clover put a hand on the wall and sucked in air. They had been trotting hurriedly through the passage since Jenka had heard Rikky. “Take Crimzon with you. I’ll be able to sense what is happening through him.”
Jenka stopped and met her eyes. He isn’t fast enough.
Clover gave him a confident smile, but the way she looked away betrayed more than anything that he was inside her head, too. Then he was moving down the cavern at a normal clip, while the world beyond him became a blur.
In a matter of moments, he was watching Jade back-flap his half-grown body to the ground, and then he was running across a field to climb into his wyrm’s saddle. Crimzon was following somewhere behind them as they sped north and west across the sky. After they crossed half the continent and slowed enough that he was able to see where Rikky should have been, Jenka saw instead Golden, battling the colossal that carried the strange wizard who had threatened him before.
Jenka’s blood was boiling, and he let the fact that he didn’t see Silva or Rikky anywhere, much less Aikira, drive his rage.
He and his dragon were suddenly moving with hyper-speed again, but when the wizard on the colossal saw Crimzon approaching in the distant sky, he started gesticulating a spell. He and his beast flashed away, just before Jenka could strike.
Theress, Crimson hissed into the ethereal.
When Jenka found what he was looking for, his heart fell. Aikira was thrown like a potato sack over a wizard’s shoulder, and now the wizard and another of his ilk were scrambling away through the woods.
Jade arced around to cut them off, and Crimzon dove in to block any retreat, but by the time the dragons were in position, the wizards found a small clearing, and after a rapid bit of arm and hand movement, they shimmered and disappeared, taking Aikira’s broken form with them.
The only thing more terrible than the way Aikira’s limbs looked as she was roughly toted along, was the sound of her wounded dragon’s roar when she was no longer there with them.
The expedition was planned and ready, but the whole of harmless little Vikaria was still abuzz abou
t the wedding and the way King Richard so gallantly handled his bride, her father, and the crowds.
He spoke to them with the newfound confidence he was feeling throughout his whole body and soul. The crowds loved it, and the ladies all swooned. At one point, he decided that this is what his life would have been like at home, had Clover’s Confliction not fallen on them to fight. She possessed the largest dragon tear known to man, after all. She and her fargin dragon were rumored to have mountains of gold hidden away. She should have ended the alien thing long before their time. She and his blasted brother Jenka, and that ungrateful shit Rikky, were the reason he was having to pretend like he was Prince Goodheart all the time. Once he had a dragon collared, and a small army of loyal riders with collared dragons of their own, he would go take back what was his. Until then, though, he had plenty to occupy his mind. Things like how he could kill King Chad, or, even better, how he could force a dragon to shed him a teardrop?
Richard and his wife had been consummating the union since the door to their newly constructed apartment had closed behind them. Richard relished the way she felt, and knew she was worthy of him, for she had led her most competitive sister right up to a beehive in the orchard, knowing a bite would swell her like a melon.
In fact, even before that act, he had decided it would be her. He still couldn’t remember her name. Then it came to him: Xawyn Azar; but her eyes were the one thing he could single out about any of them. Those dark, almost malicious, orbs gave her away every time.
“Again?” she asked half-heartedly, as if any answer would do.
“Again.” Richard rolled over and met her eyes, remembering to play like Prince Goodheart. “I could never refuse a chance to lay with you, lady. Only a fool would do so, especially on the eve of such a dangerous expedition.”
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