Dragon Princess (9 page)

Instead, through the night, I tried to get Sir Forsythe to have a moral epiphany. I told him my story, how I got onto Grünwald’s wanted list by saving a young innocent maiden myself, something he should empathize with. I explained Elhared’s spell, and how we needed to save the princess’s body intact so that the soul-transference could be reversed.

I don’t know at what point in my tale the snoring started, but I kept going out of narrative inertia until I fell asleep myself.

I didn’t sleep well. My body grew increasingly uncomfortable being unable to move, and I woke periodically to the sensation of pins and needles across my left side. I spent my wakeful hours discovering that, despite my ability to move my head and neck, it just wasn’t enough to grab hold of the evil necklace holding me in place.

Dawn came too soon.

Sir Forsythe the Allegedly Good threw me across his saddlebags, securing my body with some rope in addition to the binding charm. As he did, I felt twinges of nostalgia for the annoying chivalry he had shown me when he thought I was a princess.

“Is this any way to treat an innocent maiden?” I asked him as he climbed on his mount.

“You are Francis Blackthorne, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are neither innocent, nor a maiden.”

“And don’t call me Francis,” I muttered as my captor galloped off into the woods.

Slung over the horse’s rear as I was, I couldn’t see where we were going without craning my neck. Even so, even though dawn was breaking, I could feel the forest growing darker around us. I lifted my head up periodically, and managed to see a bad sign.

Literally.

Next to the path Sir Forsythe followed was a large wooden sign nailed to a tree. For the benefit of the illiterate, the upper half of the sign showed a grossly obese ogre whose body was half mouth chewing off the head of some unfortunate traveler. Next to the ogre was an arrow pointing helpfully down the path in the direction we were going.

Below the disturbing image was text that I only glimpsed as we galloped by. I saw enough to get the gist. More or less it said, “Entering the Black Woods. Bad things ahead. The Kingdom of Lendowyn takes no responsibility for anything that might happen to anyone stupid enough to enter.”

I suspect we passed more signs, but I only looked up in time to see one other, featuring an overly endowed demon abusing another unfortunate traveler. I decided that, if this was multiple choice, I would opt for the ogre.

Every glimpse I got of the woods when I lifted my head was becoming worse. It had to be full morning now, but where we rode the world was trapped in a gray misty twilight. Eventually the woods actually did turn black, the trees leafless and twisted, darkened as if they had recently burned. The road below us became a mix of ash, gravel, and bone.

“Let me guess, there’s an altar to Nâtlac around here. Looks like his sort of place.”

Beneath us, the proportion of bone in the composition of the road became higher and higher until we were traveling on a highway paved with half-buried skulls. Sir Forsythe brought our advance to a halt and I looked up.

I immediately wished I hadn’t.

We had stopped in front of a twelve-foot-tall, bat-winged demon. The thing was a slavering potbellied horror, shaggy goat legs, rotting flesh crawling with worms, with the skeletal head of a stag whose massive spread of horns were decorated by a garland of someone’s intestines.

I think the only reason I didn’t start screaming was because I was simultaneously trying to gag and the mixed signals paralyzed my diaphragm.

The thing looked down at us with empty eye sockets and belched.

“Whatcha got there, Forsythe?” the horror asked in a tone of lower-class familiarity that would not have sounded out of place at The Headless Earl
.

Sir Forsythe responded, showing no sign of being disturbed either at the demon’s appearance or its overly chummy tone. “I have uncovered the thief Francis Blackthorne.”

“Don’t call me Francis,” I said. Not that anyone paid attention.

Sir Forsythe’s voice took on an air of annoyance, but it did not seem directed at either me or the demon. “What are you doing here? Is there actually a ritual going on? Now?”

“Sure enough. Prince Dudley is honoring the feast of St. Haggard of the Maggots, or some-such silliness.”

The demon took a step toward us, and the breath left my lungs as one fetid clawed hand lifted my chin to face it. It stared at me with those empty eye sockets, and now I was close enough that I could just barely sense something unpleasant moving within them. “This don’t look like the guy.”

If you took a dead muskrat and threw it in a bucket of piss, left it a week until the body turned black and swelled to twice its size, then boiled the fluid until the stomach burst, the resulting odor would be preferable to the abattoir stench of the demon’s breath.

“There was a soul-transference spell involved,” Sir Forsythe told it.

The demon mercifully let my head go and stepped back, leaving my head and stomach in slow uneasy tumbles.

“Well, that explains the last one, doesn’t it?” it said as it waved us onward.

It took several moments before I managed to gather myself to ask, “What ‘last one?’”

Neither the knight nor the demon chose to enlighten me.

I redoubled my effort to strain my neck to see where we were going. Past Sir Forsythe’s leg, I saw a rise in the middle of a clearing formed of cracked black earth. Dominating everything was a large obsidian obelisk covered in carved runes that would have probably made Elhared uncomfortable. About twenty black-robed figures surrounded the obelisk, their backs to us.

As Sir Forsythe rode to a stop and dismounted, I got a better view as one of the shorter figures broke from the circle and walked toward us.

“Well,” the figure addressed him. “The legendary Sir Forsythe. Are you finally taking time out of your busy schedule for us?” The figure lowered his hood revealing a pudgy face that looked somewhat childlike, despite the graying at the temples in his disheveled mud-brown hair. The weak attempt at a mustache and goatee didn’t help.

Worst of all, I recognized him. Even if he hadn’t been in the front row at my one successful attempt at maiden rescue, right next to his mother the queen, it still wouldn’t have been hard to place him. Crown Prince Dudley was a rather infamous bastard back in Grünwald, even for royalty. Being part of a dark circle devoted to the Dark Lord Nâtlac probably wouldn’t even break the top ten in his personal list of iniquities.

I heard Sir Forsythe sigh before he addressed Prince Dudley in appropriately decorous tones, “Greetings, My Prince. It is an unexpected honor to find you here in Lendowyn.”

Prince Dudley brought his hands up and brushed them together as if he was trying to remove something distasteful. “I’m on an extended diplomatic mission for the queen. Grand plans of the crown and such.” He leaned over and arched an eyebrow as he looked in my direction. “Still rescuing princesses, I see. Though isn’t it a little out of character for you to truss them up and sling them on the back of your horse?”

“I am afraid that this girl is not what she seems, My Prince.”

“Good,” said the prince as he straightened up. His tone became darker. “Because what she
appears
to be is Princess Lucille of Lendowyn. And while I do not begrudge my servants the odd hobby, at this juncture the kidnapping of a member of the Lendowyn Royal Court by a servant of Grünwald would be . . . disruptive. The queen has plans.” He took a step forward until he was barely a hand’s breadth away from Sir Forsythe. His posture would have been intimidating if not for him being a head shorter than the knight. “You don’t want to disrupt the queen’s plans.”

“No, My Prince.”

“Then perhaps you could explain why you aren’t taking this remarkable simulacrum of the Lendowyn princess back to the court of King Alfred the Oblivious?”

“That is a long story, My Prince.” Sir Forsythe launched into a summary of the whole soul-transference business that, while largely accurate, made me out to be both more of a villain, and more of an idiot, than I remembered being. I tried voicing an objection once or twice, but Sir Forsythe’s reach was long enough to introduce me to the back of his gauntlet without pausing in his storytelling.

I’d had enough.

“All lies!” I yelled. “I am the Princess Lucille of Lendowyn and I demand to be returned to my father.”

Sir Forsythe raised his hand again but Prince Dudley shook his head. The knight froze, staring at me with a look of murder in his eyes.

“So,” Prince Dudley said as he walked around the knight to face me directly. “You claim this is a fabrication, and you are actually the princess?”

“Of course I am. This man is a delusional lunatic.” It seemed a plausible claim to me. “He saved me from a dragon, and then he clubbed me on the back of the head! Unless you want a diplomatic incident between our kingdoms, I suggest you release me now.”

“Now isn’t this an interesting development?” Prince Dudley smiled, giving his boyish face a disturbingly cherubic look. “The woman claims you are a liar?”

“Such audacity,” muttered Sir Forsythe.

Prince Dudley bent so that our noses almost touched, and he brought a hand up to caress my cheek. I suddenly had a bad feeling about my improvisation.

“You said yourself how this would disrupt Queen Fiona’s plans,” I said, trying to inject as much royal steel into my voice as I could.

“Yes, Mother can be such a spoilsport at times.” He shook his head. “But you really aren’t the princess, are you?”

“Of course I am.”

“No. I don’t think so. Sir Forsythe doesn’t have the wit to compose a credible falsehood. Also, I have wide-ranging experience in the world and its women. I have enjoyed princesses and prostitutes, and I would classify your attire as much more the latter than the former. Also, having met the princess on several occasions, I would have expected a few more tears.” He let go of my face, and I felt my skin shudder in involuntary relief. He stepped back to address Sir Forsythe, “This explains the last one.”

“What last one?” I asked, already getting uncomfortable pictures of the answer. My body was running around without me, and I couldn’t come up with any scenario wherein it ran into Grünwald nobility and ended with a good result.

“I suppose you intended to sacrifice this soul cursed by the Great One all on your own?” Dudley continued, ignoring me. “You’d like to have the favor of his dark embrace all for yourself, you greedy bastard.”

“Not at all,” Sir Forsythe responded, “that honor should be granted to the third legitimate son of my liege, since he happens to be here.”

Dudley waved over a couple of men from the circle of robed figures and gestured toward me. The pair untied me and roughly lifted me off the back end of the horse. They didn’t do me the courtesy of flipping me over as they carried me, forcing me to stare at the cracked earth as I dangled between them.

Prince Dudley still talked to Sir Forsythe as his minions carried me up the hill. “The virginal flesh is a bonus. Though, the body
should
ripen a little for a feast day. I suppose we’ll make do.”

Suddenly I was being swung back and forth, and I barely had time to suck in a breath before I was arcing up through the air. My side slammed into something cold, hard, and unyielding. I groaned as someone pulled my shoulder, rolling me onto my back. I stared upward, the obelisk jutting up from somewhere past my head to loom over me, pointing up at a blank slate-gray sky.

Then a dozen robed figures surrounded me like wolves around a freshly slaughtered sheep carcass. Sir Forsythe’s charm kept me from moving a muscle below the chain in the necklace, so all I could do was scream insults and obscenities as I felt their hands paw at the princess—at
me
—tearing off my leather. For some reason it pissed me off that they showed so little respect for it. The leatherworker in Doylen had been so proud of his workmanship.

Why was I thinking of that?

Even my own screams seemed far away from my thoughts, like I wasn’t even here. Somehow, though, it made sense. It wasn’t even my own body. Really, despite feeling the acolytes’ hands yanking off my boots and leggings, in some sense I was just an observer watching the violence done to someone else. The paralysis only served to enhance the dreamlike dislocation. The part of my mind that continued to think along these terms wondered if this was really the case, why was I still screaming?

Apparently, one of the acolytes wondered the same thing, and, after cutting part of my undergarments off, shoved some of the shreds into my mouth. Unable to scream anymore, I could hear Prince Dudley idly talking to some of the other Nâtlac worshipers by my feet.

Someone was asking whether they should deflower the sacrifice before or after they cut out the heart. Prince Dudley responded that there was no reason why the deflowering couldn’t happen before
and
after, something about the best of both worlds.

That was the point where the dislocated observer part of my mind decided to start screaming as well.