Dragon Princess (10 page)

I don’t have a real clear memory of the next few moments. It seemed to last an eternity with me paralyzed, naked, and gagged on the altar, black-robed acolytes holding down my arms and legs as if I could move, Dudley at my feet undoing his breeches. At some point I remember hearing someone say, “At least it’s not another wizard.”

But, as Prince Dudley started climbing up to take the princess’s virginity, a familiar shadow crossed above us. Dudley and the other acolytes looked up as a booming voice called down.

“I always thought you were overcompensating for something, Dudley.”

Above us, dropping out of the clouds, was a black dragon gliding on fifty-foot wings, snaking its long neck down in our direction, opening a set of toothy jaws that could comfortably envelop half the altar.

One of the men holding my arms screamed like a little girl.

Prince Dudley’s eyes went wide and the color drained from his face. He raised himself to his knees and slid backward off the altar, still staring at the sky. He reached down to the ground, where his breeches, belt, and scabbard had been left. He grabbed blindly for his sword, staring at the descending dragon.

It was a bad plan.

I didn’t see exactly what happened, but his sword only came half out of its scabbard as something tangled up in his feet and he fell backward, naked sword between his naked legs. He cursed in pain as he dropped out of my line of sight and I winced inside.

Then my field of vision was filled by a wall of muscle and dragon scales. The dragon had landed with its feet straddling the altar. I saw a scaled forearm make a sweep and I heard an acolyte scream.

Its head—
her
head—bent down to look at me.
“Move! I’m trying to rescue you!”
Her breath blasted my naked skin with the scent of sulfur and brimstone.

I’d never been happier to have a dragon yell at me.

“I can’t!” I called up at her. “Binding charm!”

The dragon uttered a word that I’m sure princesses weren’t supposed to know. Then she knocked back a line of acolytes with another sweep of her forearm, raised her head, and belched three cannonball-size balls of fire after them. I heard more screams from beyond my line of sight.

“I don’t believe this . . .”

She swung her tail and knocked aside another half-dozen black-robed figures as she reached down and grabbed me. She hugged me to her chest and flapped her wings, and suddenly we were airborne.

Below, I heard a familiar voice uttering an elaborate challenge up at her. We rocketed up out of the gray mists of the cursed black forest, and the Dragon Lucille asked me,
“Did someone participating in a sacrifice to the Dark Lord Nâtlac just call
me
an unclean abomination?”

I gulped air and yelled over wind whipping past us. “That’s Sir Forsythe the Good. I think he’s a bit confused.”

She grunted and clutched me tighter to her chest, a gesture that probably would not have been nearly as uncomfortable with any other princess. As it was, I felt as if I was clamped between the thighs of an elephant wearing particularly baroque plate mail. It didn’t help that I was naked and couldn’t move.

At least she was warm, in stark contrast to the freezing wind tearing across my backside.

As she swooped up into the spinning blue cauldron of sky above us she said,
“I can’t believe that heights used to make me sick to my stomach.”

I closed my eyes and said, “They still do.”

 • • • 

The flight away from the black forest was all sickening lurches and bone-chilling cold. It was a miracle of self-control that I didn’t empty my stomach during our escape—either that, or the ten-minute flight didn’t give my body enough time to realize what was happening to it.

She landed on a plateau overlooking more mundane-looking woods and scattered farms and gently set me down on my feet in front of her. Of course, I promptly fell over. She grabbed me and held me up in front of a giant lizard face that may have been showing the first signs of panic.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes!” I gasped, struggling to breathe against her tight grip on me. I managed to croak out, “Binding. Charm.”

She lifted me up and opened her hand so I was resting on her palm. It felt precarious because I was unable to move or shift my weight, but at least I could breathe again. I looked up at her face—her sharp, toothy, lizard face—and stared into eyes that should have been pitiless as any bird of prey’s. It was the first time I’d gotten a chance to see the dragon’s features in full daylight. It should have been horrifying.

It was, but not quite in the sense I expected.

Something of Lucille managed to leak out in the dragon’s expression; concern, compassion, worry . . . whatever it was, it was just enough to shift the focus from the gigantic killing machine staring down at me to the young woman who was trapped inside it.

Trapped inside, and staring at her own body frozen in the palm of her hand.

And I’d thought
I
had it bad.

“The necklace,” I told her. “Take it off of me.”

The massive head nodded and came closer, squinting. Her other hand lifted above me, extending a finger tipped with a talon almost as long as my forearm. When it lowered in my direction, it didn’t matter what I had seen in the dragon’s eyes; if I hadn’t been paralyzed I probably would have pissed myself.

The tip of her talon rested on my stomach and she slowly drew it up between my breasts until it hooked the charm and drew it back up over my head.

In response, my whole body shuddered and I clenched myself up in a ball on her palm.

“Oh, no! Is everything okay? Did I hurt you?”

“No. I’m just
freezing
.”

“Oh.”

She set me down again, and this time I was able to stand on my own, a little unsteadily. I rocked back and forth, hugging myself against the cold.

Lucille moved suddenly toward the edge of the plateau, and dropped out of sight.

“What? Princess?” I called out to her, the cold forgotten for the moment. I don’t know what distressed me more, the idea of being stranded alone and naked in the princess’s body, or the idea that the dragon might be suicidal.

I reached the edge of the plateau, and a steep drop by Lendowyn standards, just as Lucille flew back up the side. I stumbled back a few steps as she shot back over the edge, blasting me in a sudden downdraft. Clutched in her forearms was a large dead tree whose trunk had been weathered bone white.

“What’re you doing?” I asked as she landed.

“I’m sorry. I don’t seem to feel cold anymore.”
She dropped the tree down on a bare patch of ground, gulped, and exhaled a small holocaust onto the unsuspecting log. I didn’t even need to move to feel the heat from the sudden conflagration.

“Thanks,” I said, stepping forward and turning around to melt the frost off my chilled backside.

“I should have thought of that earlier,”
she said as quietly as a dragon could manage. After a pause, she added in a lighter tone,
“but I did think of something ahead of time.”

“What—” I began to ask, but she had slipped away again.

I guessed I’d find out soon enough. I paced alongside the fire, allowing each part of my body turns at being warm again. Naked, lost, and misplaced I might be, but I was incredibly grateful to be alive.

Lucille the Dragon had managed to truly outclass me in the princess-saving department, and she didn’t even need a shady wizard to put her up to it. Even if it was her own skin she was saving, I still had to give her an order of magnitude more credit than I would’ve any other royal. “We’ll get you your body back,” I said to the fire. “At this point it’s the least anyone can do.”

I jumped as a massive bundle of something landed next to me, and the ground thudded as Lucille landed about ten yards away. I looked over at her and she had her head cocked inquisitively at me.

I turned to the bundle she’d dropped. It was a sheet of torn gray canvas showing signs of teeth and claw marks, tied into a rough sphere by a massive knot on top. “Okay,” I said, and started struggling with the knot.

After a minute or so of struggling, she said,
“Here, let me.”

The ground shook at her approach, and then a large scaled forearm reached over me, and a pair of talons clamped onto a loose flap of canvas and tugged.

The bundle fell open, spilling its contents in front of me.

My eyes widened as a cascade of boots, underwear, cloaks, and all manner of clothing spilled out at my feet. The selection seemed random, and gathered in haste—I saw at least two boots that were obviously missing their mates—but it made me feel an uneasy mix of gratitude and inadequacy. Not only had she outclassed me today in the hero department, she was gaining ground in terms of thievery as well.

I turned to face her and asked, “How did you know they were going to strip me for a sacrifice?”

“I didn’t. I just saw you were dressing me like a whore.”

Oh, yeah, that
. I resisted the urge to say that it hadn’t been my fault. Instead, I rummaged in the dragon’s haul to put together a practical traveling outfit. And, to my relief, the selection did not consist solely of long lacy dresses and shoes of doom.

 • • • 

As I got dressed I asked her what happened, and about the rumors I’d heard about the destruction of Ravensgate. She sighed, flopped on the ground with an earth-shaking thud, and rested her head on her folded forearms. The old me could have looked her in the eye, but in the new princess version I had to tilt my head up to see she wasn’t meeting my gaze.

She’d turned her massive head away from me, to stare out over the rise. I’d never thought of a dragon as a terribly expressive creature. From what I had seen, their faces were largely capable of only three expressions: sleep, disinterest, and bowel-melting rage. But seeing the Princess Lucille staring out at the horizon, head tilted away from me, double-lidded reptilian eyes half-closed and unfocused, I couldn’t help but see the giant lizard as horribly sad.

And guilty?

“You didn’t really . . .”

“It wasn’t my fault.”
If anything, that booming voice sounded close to tears.
“I was frightened. I didn’t know what had happened to me. I woke up and the first thing I heard was so many people screaming. I opened my eyes and I was falling toward the ground, and everyone was running away from something terrible.”
Lucille shook her head slowly and closed her eyes. Next to me, her hand closed into a fist, causing her talons to dig into the earth, leaving a hole the size of a shallow grave.
“I didn’t realize they were running from
me
.”

“I’m sorry.” I looked up at her and both my pounding heart and churning stomach hadn’t quite realized that I wasn’t facing the monster they thought I was. I ignored my panicked body—it wasn’t mine anyway—and stepped forward to place my hand on the back of her fist. I don’t know if she could feel my touch through her armored skin, but it probably wasn’t appropriate for me to hug royalty anyway, even if it had been physically possible.

She had crashed into the town center at Ravensgate, still terrified and disoriented. She destroyed a blacksmith and a bakery just by standing up, turning around, and trying to see what everyone was screaming at. When she saw what had frightened them, she had screamed herself—and accidentally discovered the ability to breathe fire. By then, yelling at the fleeing populace that she wasn’t really the dragon didn’t do much to assuage their fears.

Then, as she was desperately trying to stamp out the fires she had started, things got worse.

“
Worse?
How?”

She groaned and nodded as if her neck strained against the weight of the small mountain below us.
“Ravensgate is a border town, a crossroads for mercenaries, adventurers, militias, and privateers. Of course they would mass to ‘defend’ the town against an invading monster.”

Like the dragon’s face, I’d never really thought of a dragon’s voice conveying much beyond contempt or stentorian anger, but I could hear her words—booming as they were—dripping with sarcasm.

“They attacked you?”

She laughed. Even though I never heard a dragon laugh before—and that is an unnerving experience to begin with—I could tell there was little humor in it.
“
They tried.
”

“You didn’t . . .” I had the brief mental image of the draconic princess finally snapping and slaughtering the town’s defenders in a demonic fury.

She whipped her head in my direction, making me flinch.
“
No! You don’t think—I wouldn’t . . .”

I was suddenly more terrified of making her cry. “Of course you wouldn’t. Tell me what happened.”

From what Lucille could tell in the ensuing chaos, there had been three main groups of defenders—organized parties of more than ten people. The smallest of the three groups, in numbers and stature, were the mercenary fighting dwarves of the Graybeard Mountains. The next most populous group bearing arms against the reptilian invasion were the dozen or so members of the Greencoat Raiders, a ratty group of oceangoing privateers. Lastly, and most numerous, were over twenty members of the Lendowyn Militia.