Blood and Royalty (5 page)

Chapter Nine

“DO NOT TOUCH THOSE CRYSTALS!” Marcherion yelled. He and Blaze had scorched a few of the mudged fluttering over Jenka’s crunching impact, but when Rikky dropped the rider, the rest of the tainted dragons started fleeing the sky.

“All of you, get on a ship and go help fortify Freeman’s Reach,” Rikky called down. “They are attacking in force elsewhere. This was but a diversion.” He looked at Jade, who was shaking off their bad landing and stretching his wings, and Jenka, who was moving normally, but glowing a light shade of green all over, as his own magic, or maybe his alien nature, healed him. Then he looked at March.

“One of you please stay,” a man called from the wall.

“Yes, we are defenseless against them without you,” another added.

Everyone seemed to look at King Jenka then.

Jade knelt and allowed his bondmate to get in his saddle. They rose up to the level of the wall, and Jenka spoke in that slow, drawn-out way that drove Marcherion mad, but here it seemed to emphasize what he was telling these soldiers.

“A few- hundred-years- ago, less- than- the- lot- of you here- kept us all alive against hundreds of those puny vermin.” Jenka pointed to one of the mudged lying dead against a corner of a stair leading up to the wall top. It had the shaft from one of the dragon guns stuck through it.

“One of us will return when we can,” Rikky said, trying to hurry it along.

March added, “You can kill them. They bleed just like you and me.” He put on a leather glove and picked up the dragon tear that had killed the poor soldier with its rush of power. He looked at the men looking at him and said, “Go fortify Freeman’s, and take the heads of these dead mudged to pike high on the towers when you get there.”

Come,
Jenka commanded in the ethereal,
we must go fight the real battle now.

As Marcherion remounted Blaze, he saw that Jenka was already opening a portal. Through the growing hole that would take them to the sky above the Outlands, he could see more mudged wyrms than he had ever imagined.

*

Zahrellion sensed her son’s worry over Amelia but couldn’t do anything about it at the moment. She and Aikira were in a sky full of thousands of mudged, trying to sustain a protective dome over an area they had packed in with people. They’d constructed the shield with Aikira’s wizardry and Zahrellion’s powerful druidic magic, and were now taking turns allowing other citizens to enter through small, street-level gaps they would open when they could.

Zahrellion also sensed Clover was doing what had to be done, for after all, Zah herself had some of the alien blood intermingled inside her. She’d had her skin tattooed with the stuff when she was but Amelia’s age and starting to show signs of great power. She had never known her mother or father, or their origin, save for what Linux had told her about them being Mainland settlers who died in a troll attack.

More than anything that she understood about her daughter was that she was as powerful as her father, if not more so, and could most likely defend herself from anything with her wit alone. Milly’s natural arcane ability was so much further advanced than anything Zahrellion or Linux had ever seen, that there seemed little to worry about.

Jericho was another story. He was still mostly a boy, but as dashing as any prince had ever been. He was extremely handy with a sword, but he didn’t have a lick of magical ability about him, nor did he seem to want to. He shared Zahrellion’s tainted blood, but he was conceived not long before Jenka was consumed by the alien, so the part of Jenka that made Milly so odd wasn’t in Jericho. He was, for all intents and purposes, just a normal teenage boy.

She decided that wasn’t quite true. He was being trained by the best huntsmen alive, and was the crown prince of the realm. She also decided that his normality, versus Jenka’s, or Milly’s, lack of it, seemed so much more appropriate to sit a throne.

She was using the rest of her concentration to allow a few more Outland citizens into the protective field, when Aikira sang out to her.

They are out there now.
Her voice was a melody of sung words coming from some distant part of her mind that wasn’t enraptured by the magic she was wielding.
We must set this field in place and join them.

Chapter Ten

Marcherion, Rikky, and Jenka were surrounded by hundreds of mudged wyrms. The entire sky over the Outlands was filled with them. To the people below, it must have been like a cloud, for the city was bathed in shadow, save the great circle where Aikira and Zahrellion were protecting those they could.

Marcherion had to admit he was a little scared, but Rikky stole the thought right from his mind when he spoke to them all in the ethereal.

At least they aren’t Sarax.
Rikky laughed. Then he turned Silva sharply into a tight, upward spiraling climb.
The Nightshade is mine, March.

Not if I get it first,
Marcherion replied. Then to the rest of the Dragoneers he explained,
We only have to kill the riders and the Nightshade. The rest will abandon the cause once they’ve no one left to give them orders.

This field is set,
Aikira sang out, her ethereal voice sounding a little exhausted.

I’m coming,
Zahrellion said.
Aikira will follow after she’s gotten her breath. Warn those still in the streets, and watch yourselves. Frozen mudged are about to be falling from the sky by the score.

Now it’s starting to feel like home,
March joked as he turned to see Jenka speed off into an emerald blur of motion.

March let one of the mudged get close enough to nearly claw him, but Blaze batted it from the sky with his long, sinuous tail. March let his anger rise and felt the heat rise from the medallion he wore around his neck. He felt his eyes grow hot, and then he vomited forth a pulse of scarlet energy that engulfed all the mudged it impacted. The heat of his eyes grew, and then suddenly rays were shooting, slicing meat from bone, and searing wing from wyrm anywhere and everywhere the fine streams of angry power touched.

In less than a minute, there were half as many mudged in the sky as there had just been.

We’ve a chance,
Aikira sang, as Golden carried her out of her protective field and into the battle-filled sky.

March’s eye rays extinguished their rageful burst, and he was just about to agree with her. Then the sky beyond the battle opened up. Coming through this portal was King Richard, sitting proudly on his Nightshade, with at least thrice the number of mudged that had just attacked. These were all flying in organized, ranked formation behind him.

March was still battling the mudged over the city and felt his heart sink when Richard didn’t send the newly arrived wyrms down into the fray. Instead, Richard positioned the huge, hovering swarm in such a way as to blot out the sun from the whole of the battle.

March swallowed hard and took in a deep breath. His rage was boiling over again, and this time, when fine crimson streaks burst from his eyes, he scanned row, after row, after row of Richard’s obedient wyrms, and in a matter of seconds ended a hundred or more of them. A whole series of bright lime green webbings crawled across the ordered ranks hovering above the other end, and a third of them flared bright yellow as they were incinerated into mist in an instant.

It was only then that March saw Richard snarl down at them and raise his left fist. His hand was full of cold, grey dragon tears, and in his right fist was a single dragon’s tear, larger even than Clover’s. A hum filled the air, as if all the power were being drawn out of everything around them, then a blast erupted from Richard that left a crater the size of ten ships in the city’s heart and sent everyone, even the Dragoneers, tumbling away from the ring of force that came flaring outward.

*

Clover was leery. Eventually, Crimzon admitted he had healed her before her arm came out of the box, but the two of them were baffled by Milly. Clover understood now that the Dragoneers, maybe even the wrecking of the
Dogma,
were a product of her will. After pondering what Princess Amelia had said, and confirming with Crimzon the truth of it, she was on Amelia’s side, no matter the outcome. If Crimzon had helped her pass before, he had a reason, or maybe a belief in her. In her eyes, Crimzon was not just an alpha dragon, he was
the
alpha dragon. His wisdom, and his mamra’s, which they’d garnered through the teardrop she’d shed for them, was the wisdom she would never question. Clover believed that with her very soul.

They used a teleportal and arrived not long after leaving the sky over Clover’s castle. As Crimzon carried them down through the protective field that covered the elven sanctuary, the air went from frigid to spring-like in an instant. All three of them, especially the huge fire dragon, had to shiver off the cold. Once they’d acclimated themselves with a few slow circles of the warmer sky, they landed before an alert escort of metallic-haired elves ranging from engrossingly beautiful to gnarled and crab-like. All of them shied away from the group, but Clover was certain they were shying away more from Amelia than from her, or her dragon, this time.

“Please, follow us,” asked one of the most beautiful women Clover had ever seen, as she nodded and started them on the forest trail that would lead them to the Heart Tree.

They rose on the platform, and all eyes were on the pallid girl with hair the color of blood standing beside Clover. They passed the bloom of a dangling ultraphlora on the way up, and one of its large, glassine petals reflected them in a slightly wavering fashion as they went. Had she not had the brown of the sun in her skin, she would have looked exactly like she was Amelia’s mother. Even the sun’s toning of her complexion couldn’t hide the resemblance. Both of them saw the similarity so striking that they could be mother and daughter, or siblings, but neither of them showed a hint of fear. Clover was concerned that this might get ugly, but her dragon was close, and Amelia, she sensed, was far more powerful than her, or her dragon tear.

When they entered the Oracle’s knothole, Clover saw that the elf was in her chair, covered with a blanket, and looked somewhat normal. Amelia stared at the very same disfigured elves that were staring back at her. She looked back up at Clover and raised her eyebrows twice, as if she were playing a game with her handmaidens.

Clover decided that Amelia probably didn’t have handmaidens, or even friends, and she understood that, too. “Go on,” she whispered. “Stand before the Oracle and let us get on with it.”

We may have to fight our way out of here,
Amelia’s voice whispered in a thin thread of the ethereal.

Yesssss,
came Crimzon’s hiss.

It didn’t surprise Clover when her dragon responded, but the tinge of eagerness in his voice made her heart race, and her hand slid casually to the dragon tear in her belt-pouch.

Chapter Eleven

KEEP THEM OFF OF US!
Zahrellion screamed through the ethereal.

It had taken the dragons several moments to get the wind back under their wings after Richard cratered the heart of the city and stunned most of the fighting men on the ground.

Marcherion saw that, since the first shielding had held true against Richard’s blast, Zahrellion and Aikira were trying to construct another dome just like it. This one was in another area of the city, where there were still people trying to flee the winged terror. There were so many mudged that, even though his sheer rage had killed more than a hundred of them, the sky was still full of them. They darted down at will to snatch a person, or blast a structure into flames. They were everywhere.

He couldn’t see Jenka or Jade, but here a mudged was crackled over with yellow glowing power and puffed into a green mist, and there the foggy grey cloud of Jade’s poisonous breath would appear among a clump of mudged and they would fall from the sky.

Before Zahrellion came back to help Aikira, she and Crystal had iced over a score of the damn things. They weren’t attacking the Dragoneers so much as preventing them from helping to stop the bloody Outlander feast they were having.

March let the memory of Richard’s snarl reignite his fury. He used his eye rays and the powerful balls of wizard fire he vomited forth to cover Aikira and Zahrellion.

He noticed that Jenka and Jade were helping him, too, but he still couldn’t see them, save for the rare glimpse of streaking green, when Blaze’s keener senses would feel them near.

He’d lost Rikky in the fray, but knew his old hunting partner was the most capable and determined of them all, so he wasn’t worried. Soon, March was lost in the heat of his anger. He and Blaze, with Jenka’s help, did well to allow a second shielding dome to be constructed, but by then they were all worn to the edges of exhaustion. There were hundreds of mudged still in the sky. Worse, Richard’s Nightshade and his remaining ranks were now hovering between the city and the moon, so the whole city was bathed in little more than shadow and blood.

*

“What is in there?” Amelia asked the Oracle, as two of the attendants presented a box that was about a pace long and half a pace wide and deep. It had carvings in three languages Amelia could recognize, and then there were the marks she’d been hoping to see, and some she didn’t understand. “Do you even know?”

“It is a wise and powerful thing inside the Basx, and it will tell us if you are a mystica, or just a strange, fiery-haired lass like Lady Clover here,” the Oracle answered.

Amelia chuckled at the Oracle. A Basx, she knew, was a demon trap, but there was no demon inside this spell-constructed prison. She could feel Clover’s tension behind her, but wasn’t the least bit afraid. “So, you don’t even know what is in there?”

The men holding the Basx suddenly had to struggle to keep the container up, as whatever was inside struggled to turn around or resituate itself.

Amelia laughed. “It knows now that I know what it is.” She felt her eyes glow lime like her father’s sometimes did, and she stepped forth and reached inside the box with all the determination she could muster.

The elves around them tried to stop her, but the Oracle’s staff thumped on the floor with a thunderclap, causing them to stay themselves. It was then that Amelia went into hyper-speed, as her father sometimes did.

She unlatched the right side of the box with her right hand while she reached and felt around inside so quickly that she had the thing in her left hand in no time. The alien slug in the box was stuck in real time and couldn’t put up a fight. Amelia reached over the Basx to undo the latch on the left side, but just as her hand found the brass release, the thing started moving in hyper-speed, too. As the latch came loose, the otherworldly leech-like thing shot out of her hand and exploded into a giant Sarax, right there in the Oracle’s knothole.

It immediately backhanded Amelia to the floor, and then the large, shark-mawed thing tore the Oracle’s body apart and threw the two halves at the other elves in the room.

Amelia saw Clover blast the spike-covered monster backward against the wall with the power of her dragon tear. It impacted so hard that the whole tree shook, causing a hundred more startled minds to reach into Amelia’s head and scramble her thoughts. One thought rang out over them all: she hadn’t wanted to let the thing loose, and now she had. She was supposed to kill it. She’d failed them all because she underestimated the ability of the creature in the Basx. She had failed. She faded, then, as real time overtook her, and just before she was out of it completely, she heard Clover’s pain-filled scream.