A Dragon and Her Girl

by Max Florschutz

  Rowena left that night, and the dragon, listening carefully, heard no sounds of pursuit. But the girl was not back the next morning. This was enough to worry any foster-mother, of whatever species. The dragon left the cave two hours after dawn and flew a search pattern until midday. She couldn’t see Rowena anywhere, and she knew that her search had covered more area than a human on foot could have gone in the time since Rowena left. There was also no sign of the prince or his horse. This could only mean one thing.

  It was time to panic.

  Rowena sat in the corner of a small, damp, uncomfortable cave and glared at her captor. Her wrists and ankles were firmly tied, although he had at least had the consideration to tie her wrists in front of her. And even with her ankles tied together she could still kick well enough to make him keep his distance from her. In fact, his shins were bruising nicely, and Rowena felt a certain amount of satisfaction in that.

  “I am sorry for the lack of comfort in our accommodations, your highness,” he said, “but if we leave this cave the dragon is certain to find us.”

  Rowena bit her lips. She would have loved to tell this idiot what she thought of him, his ancestry, his morals, and his singing, but she didn’t dare open her mouth. He didn’t know about the spell, and she needed to keep it that way. It had been dark when he grabbed her, so he hadn’t seen the pearl that appeared when she screamed, and she’d kept quiet ever since. Of course, she had struggled and tried to run, which was why he had tied her up. So now she was wedged into this cave with him and his horse, until either the dragon found them or he felt safe enough to try to leave it.

  “But you are safe with me,” he continued, “and as soon as possible I shall take you home and ask your father for your hand in honorable marriage. I am Prince Florian of Astrefiore, at thy service, Princess.” The prince stepped forward to make his bow, keeping a wary eye on Rowena’s bound feet. “My eldest brother was among the guests at your birthday party when you were carried off, and he came home and told us of your abduction—and of how your own father forbade all of the princes gathered there to attempt your rescue!” He looked thoroughly indignant. “As it is the clear duty of a prince to rescue such an innocent victim, and as King Mark’s unnatural command was not binding on me, I set out for the mountain where the dragon laired.” He smiled sheepishly. “I’m a better minstrel than a fighter, so I’m just as glad that you were able to creep away without my having to fight the dragon. Of course,” he added hastily, “I would fight the beast if it were necessary to insure your safety.”

  Chivalry is dead, Rowena thought morosely. It’s been replaced by total idiocy.

  Two women, one dark and one amber-haired, guided their horses on a barely-perceptible deer-track that threaded its way between decidedly unnatural trees. Fortunately, this set of trees whimpered and shrank away from the riders. They could, all too easily, have been reaching towards the women and their mares with avid hunger.

  The last lot had, after all.

  “I thought you knew your way around the Pelagirs,” the dark-haired one said, rather crossly. Her companion didn’t answer, but then, the remark had not been aimed at her.

  :I did,: came a purely mental reply, in a tone of affronted dignity. :It is not my fault that the forest has changed. That is the nature of Pelagir territory that has no Hawkbrother Vale nearby. You never asked me if I thought I could still find my way around this area.:

  The head of the speaker emerged from the underbrush, and the bushes there squeaked with alarm and pulled away. He was tall, dark, would have told you himself that he was a handsome fellow, and he was not human.

  Nor was he a male in the strictest accounting. Warrl was a kyree neuter, a magically-made species with the coat and heads of wolves, the bodies of the great hunting-cats of the plains, the size of a young calf, and all of the intelligence of a human.

  Of course, Warrl would have insisted that he was far more intelligent than any human.

  Right now, his spirit-bonded friend, the Shin’a’in warrior Tarma shena Tale’sedrin, would have argued for the superior intelligence of the calf.

  “Let it be, she’enedra,” her companion, the sorceress Kethry, advised. “We’re not in any danger.”

  “Now,” Tarma replied darkly, though she did not elaborate. She didn’t have to; Kethry already knew what the Pelagirs were like. This was not the first time that they had penetrated the wild lands where magic wars of long ago had warped and twisted the plants, the animals, and even the land itself into something strange, unrecognizable, and often deadly.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if they had actually been in the forest on purpose—but they weren’t. They were supposed to be on the way to Kata’shin’a’in, but the familiar road had inexplicably dwindled to a track, then a path, and now had become nothing more than a game-trail. Trying to turn around hadn’t worked either; the trail vanished altogether when they tried that. Clearly, something wanted them to go in this direction, something magical. Tarma was hardly pleased. It was bad enough that much of their time was spent satisfying the demands of Kethry’s mage-sword, Need—but to have some unknown magician trying to herd them to a completely unknown destination was intolerable! She was beginning to feel like some poor character in a play, bullied towards a confrontation known to the audience, but not to her.

  She did not particularly like the feeling.

  Suddenly the track opened up into a clearing. She urged her battlemare into it, disliking the whimpering trees and eager to put some distance between herself and them—and then reined the mare in abruptly when she saw what stood in the center of the clearing.

  It was a doorway without a building, a beautifully formed arch of white stone taller than three tall men, and wide enough for a cart to pass through with space on either side. There was only one problem.

  It shouldn’t be here. There wasn’t a single sign of the hand of man for leagues and leagues around.

  Warrl stood directly in front of the portal, staring at it as if caught in a spell of fascination. All around the clearing, the whimpering trees with their thick, palm-sized leaves pulled their branches towards their trunks and shivered.

  Kethry brought her mare up beside her partner’s, surveyed the clearing, and wrinkled her brow in consternation. “The path ends here, doesn’t it,” she stated.

  Tarma nodded gloomily. “And I’ll bet you that if we try to retrace our steps, there won’t be a path. We’ve been herded here like a couple of sheep—”

  She would have said more, except that the space inside the doorway suddenly changed. Instead of the other side of the clearing, there was nothing there but darkness, a black void that Tarma shrank from without knowing why she did so. Whatever that thing was, she wanted no further part of it!

  She started to turn her horse’s head, determined to ride through and even over whatever animate plants wanted to get in her way—

  But suddenly Kethry gave an all-too-familiar cry of pain, and spurred her mare straight at the archway. Warrl was right on her horse’s heels, and in a heartbeat, the two of them were swallowed up in the blackness between the white stone pillars.

  With a heartfelt curse, Tarma spurred her horse after, and followed.

  “Warrl, I don’t think we’re in the Pelagirs anymore—” Tarma said weakly, looking around at the rocky and mountainous slope ahead of her. Sunlight blazed down from a sun near the zenith on the graveled path where their horses stood—it had been near sunset in the clearing.

  Warrl did not dignify the observation with even a snort of derision.

  It was possible to deduce some of what had just happened; Tarma had heard about magical doors into other places, often called Gates or Portals—obviously that doorway back in the clearing had been one such device. Something had made it active—and once active, whatever was on the other side had called to Kethry through the medium of the sword she wore, a blade called Need.

  The sword responded to women in crisis, as the runes on her blade explained: Woman’s
Need calls me/As woman’s Need made me./Her Need must I answer/As my maker bade me. Kethry had accepted a kind of soul-bonding with the sword as the price of the aid the blade gave her—Kethry, though completely untrained as a swordswoman, became an expert when the blade took over, and if she was wounded, the blade could and would heal just about anything. As a result, the greater the urgency of the woman in trouble, the worse the sympathetic pain Kethry would experience, unless and until she rode to that woman’s aid.

  Very nice for the women they helped, but not too damned convenient for Tarma and her partner.

  No point in trying to throw the sword away, either; the farther Kethry got from it, the more it would call to her, and much too strongly to be denied. Relief would only come when Kethry found a successor to pass the blade on to—and even then, the sword would have to accept the new candidate.

  “Where?” Tarma asked her partner curtly. Kethry shook her head as if to clear it, closed her eyes for a moment, and pointed up the slope.

  “There,” she said, her soft voice giving no hint to the firm will behind her pretty face and emerald eyes. “Whoever’s in trouble, she’s up there, and she is—must be—practically out of her mind with it. She’s also a mage, but not of a kind that I recognize; that must be how she brought us here.”

  “Lovely,” Tarma muttered. She stood up in her stirrups, and surveyed the countryside again. It was singularly unprepossessing. The rocky slopes boasted nothing much in the way of vegetation except for thick patches of blackberry bushes. At least, Tarma assumed they were blackberry bushes. There were berries in various stages of ripeness, from yellow-green to darkest plum, showing clearly against the foliage. If they were like the blackberry bushes of home, they’d be as thick with thorns as with berries. Tarma’s long-dead love had called them “wait-a-moment bushes,” because that was what anyone who tried to force his way through them was reduced to calling out, over and over again.

  There appeared to be a path of sorts ahead of them, leading up to a cave with a generous ledge outside it. That was the direction Kethry was pointing.

  There were no armies camped outside that cave, no signs of horses or other beasts of burden, no fires; whoever was in that cave was probably alone, or if captive, guarded by one or two people at the most. There was nothing to be lost in riding straight up to the cave-mouth and taking a look. Very few people outside the Shin’a’in Clans knew just what it was that Tarma and her partner rode—battlesteeds were easily the equivalent of two ordinary human fighters apiece, and when you added in Warrl, you had a force of the equal of any seven fighters. So if there was anyone nasty up there, he was going to get a major shock if he tried a direct confrontation. And just at the moment, Tarma rather hoped he would. She was truly in a mood to kill something.

  “Let’s go,” she said, “I want to get this over with.” And as her partner blinked in surprise at her apparent impulsiveness, she sent her mare trotting up the path to the cave.

  She had been supposing all this time that her adversaries would, of course, be human, so when the monster snaked its head and neck out of the cave-mouth, all she could do for a moment was to freeze in place.

  The monster seemed just as surprised as she was; it stared at her with its mouth—a mouth well-appointed with dagger-like teeth—dropping wide open in shock. Unfortunately, that only gave Tarma a much better look at all those teeth.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t a creature like anything she had ever heard of before—except, perhaps, a cold-drake. This thing was the wrong color, but the size was right, and the long neck, and of course, all the teeth.

  There was, presumably, a female being held captive somewhere in that cave. Maybe the monster was saving her for dinner, later; maybe it was just there to guard her. Whatever, the woman’s distress held Kethry here until she was freed—and that held Tarma and Warrl. Tarma did the only thing a Swordsworn warrior could, under the circumstances.

  She drew her sword, and with a Shin’a’in battle-cry, spurred her horse into a charge while the monster was still caught off-guard. That is, she started to charge. Kethry’s shriek made her rein her mare in so quickly that the poor beast’s hooves skidded and she slid to a most undignified stop.

  “Tarma! Stop!” Kethry cried in real pain. “Don’t! Need wants us to help the dragon!”

  “Dragons,” Tarma muttered, staring at their hostess in disbelief over a nice hot cup of tea. “Tea-drinking dragons. I must be out of my mind.”

  The dragon ignored her, as she had ignored Tarma every other time she had muttered something similar. It—she—was a very polite dragon, although a deeply distressed dragon.

  She had every right to be distressed, though how that distress and the spell she had cast to bring her some help had interacted to open a portal between her world—which was obviously not the one that held Shin’a’in, since there were no such things as dragons in Tarma’s world—and their world was a mystery White Winds Adepts would probably be debating for the next century or more. That didn’t matter. What did was what she and Kethry were going to do about the situation that brought them here, since obviously the magic that had done so would not release them until they had.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry now that I built the spell that way,” the dragon was saying, apologetically, “But I thought I would probably be dragging in some reluctant knight or other, and well—historically my kind and theirs do not exactly get along. I built in coercions, and now I can’t get rid of them.”

  Kethry nodded wisely, as Tarma sighed. “At least the track isn’t even cold by Warrl’s standards,” Tarma put in. “I have to admit that you couldn’t have deliberately selected anyone more fit to get Rowena back to you in a reasonable amount of time if you’d tried.”

  Warrl nodded. :I really should get on the scent now,: he said, his tone as sympathetic as Tarma had ever heard. :Rowena is probably terribly frightened—:

  “Rowena is probably furious,” the dragon corrected. “And if she starts telling him what she thinks of him—”

  The dragon’s voice broke on a sob, and her talons tightened on her own oversized mug until it broke, period. Tarma did not finish the sentence, for the dragon had revealed Rowena’s “little talent” to explain why they were going to have to find the girl quickly. Princes are always hard up for cash, especially younger princes. Once he finds out he has the equivalent of a mint and a mine in his hands, he’ll lock her up so tight they’ll have to send daylight to her by messenger.

  :I’m on my way,: Warrl said hastily, not wanting to be subjected to another bout of draconic tears and hysteria. The last bout had been quite enough for him.

  I would never have guessed that dragons could cry.

  Warrl vanished with alacrity, and Tarma decided to change the subject before the dragon broke down again. “Look, this idiot can’t have gotten far with her. She isn’t going to cooperate, and he is going to be far too gallant and polite to knock her over the head and bundle her off unconscious.”

  “That—that’s true,” the dragon sniffled. “Rowena didn’t think much of him before, and by now, her estimate of his character has probably placed him somewhere below spotted newts. If he’s lucky, she hasn’t done anything to him that’s permanent.”

  “Well, given that, how do you want us to get her loose?” Tarma asked. “I don’t think you ought to appear; he might try something desperate.”

  The dragon winced, but nodded.

  “We need to be smart about this,” Kethry mused. “I—”

  Then she flushed, and grinned. “You did say that her father forbade anyone to go after her?”

  The dragon nodded again.

  “Well,” Kethry said slyly. “I have an idea that would provide the perfect explanation for why he did that, and possibly even prevent anything like this from happening in the future. Provided, of course, that your fosterling doesn’t mind her reputation being totally destroyed.”

  Tarma looked closely at her partner, and as often happened, realized precisely w
hat the sorceress meant; after all, it was an assumption—incorrect as it happened—that was often applied to her and Kethry. Oh my ears! If she’s thinking what I think she’s thinking—

  The dragon lifted her head high, and cocked it to one side. “I don’t think she would mind if it kept princes off the ledge, but what—”

  :I’ve found her,: Warrl trumpeted in their minds. :They aren’t far away at all. Hurry up, though, I think His Highness is getting impatient.:

  “Let’s go,” Tarma said, jumping to her feet. “I want to get this over with. We’ll explain on the way.”

  This prince, if not a complete idiot, was certainly the most incompetent person Tarma had ever seen. He hadn’t left any kind of a guard on the trail outside the cave he’d hidden in, he’d picked a hiding place barely an hour away from the dragon’s own cave, and he wasn’t paying any attention to anything going on outside. I guess this just proves that the gods watch out for fools and the mad, she thought in disgust, as Warrl drove his horse off. I can’t think of any other reason why he’s still alive.

  The sound of his horse galloping off—the fool hadn’t even hobbled it!—finally brought him out of the entrance of the cave. He stared in shock at the sight of two grim-faced, armed women—with swords drawn—waiting for him.

  Tarma was going to be the one challenging him, because Need had a tendency to over-react and they didn’t want to kill or even hurt him. And right now, caught between the distress of the female dragon hidden out of sight behind them and Rowena’s emotional state in the cave in front of them, Kethry would not be able to restrain the sword if she had to fight the boy.

  Of course, there was the chance that he was a much, much better fighter than they thought. He could even be better than Tarma. In that case, they were not going to play fair. Kethry would move in and deal with him. Hopefully, she would be able to keep Need from inflicting anything too permanent.

  “Stand forth, kidnapper!” Tarma growled menacingly. “I, Tarma shena Tale’sedrin, do challenge you as a cad and a miscreant. I challenge you for the welfare of the lady you have stolen. I challenge you to single combat for the hand of my lady and my love, the Princess Rowena!”