Dragon Thief (11 page)

“Now,” Grace said behind me, interrupting a half-formed thought.

I turned to face her as she spoke, and I realized that I was surrounded with my back to the altar. I glanced from her to Sir Forsythe, who was still across the room by the doorway.

“Now?” I repeated.

“Care to explain ‘Frank Blackthorne, Princess of Lendowyn, and the rightful Dark Queen of Nâtlac?'”

“Like I said, it's a long story.”

“We seem to have the time now.”

I guess we did.

I backed up and sat on the altar, facing everyone.

“Well . . . My name is Frank Blackthorne, and I'm going to tell you a story.”

 • • • 

Frank Blackthorne, Princess of Lendowyn, and the rightful Dark Queen of Nâtlac . . . also add, somewhat mediocre thief.

I found it an immense relief to finally admit to who I was. I felt no small gratification in taking Snake Bartholomew's identity and metaphorically crumpling it up and tossing it into one of the hotly burning braziers. I unloaded my whole sorry story starting with my accidental liberation of a virgin sacrifice to the Dark Lord Nâtlac, to the somewhat less than epic battle between Weasel and the assassins. No one interrupted me, not even Sir Forsythe who probably could have offered some alternate explanations of his behavior before Queen Fiona's demise.

When I finished, Grace muttered, “Of all the idiot—”

“You were royalty and you gave that up?” Mary snapped, echoing what Grace must have been thinking. “What kind of fool—”

“The kind of fool who gets drunk and wears evil enchanted jewelry,” Laya finished.

“And you just let us think you were the legendary Snake,” Grace said, “dragging us all the way down here. Nearly getting us all killed.”

Thea peered up at me. “You were really a girl?”

Mary turned to Sir Forsythe, who still hung by the doors. “So is this all true? This twit killed off your Dark Queen Fiona?”

I shook my head. The girls were arguing to themselves, venting. That didn't really require any response from me. I sighed and waited for things to subside. As I did, I noticed three things.

First, Krys didn't contribute anything to the conversation. She looked at me in a way that, unlike everyone else, wasn't tainted by anger or contempt—sad, more than anything else.

Second, Rabbit wasn't paying attention to any of the others. She was looking in my direction, but seemed to be staring through me with widening eyes. She grabbed the edge of Grace's befouled shirt and was yanking it, and her mouth opened to emit a sharp, almost barking sound for attention.

Third, Mary was still shouting at Sir Forsythe and Sir Forsythe quietly whispered, “My Lady,” and fell to one knee, looking not at Mary, but toward me.

Actually, like Rabbit,
past
me.

I turned around, sliding off the altar at the same time, to stand in front, facing the statue behind it. A statue that had changed from a marble nude to a flesh-and-blood woman, a woman with the same epic proportion as the statue, half again as tall as Sir Forsythe, clad only with a flowered garland in her hair. She smiled and rolled her head, and I could hear the vertebrae cracking as she yawned and stretched her arms, touching the ceiling above us.

“You're kidding me,” I whispered.

“Well no one's been here for a while,” she said when she was done stretching. She walked out from behind the altar, tracing the tops of the frescos with one hand. The girls fell silent as they all realized we had a visitor. She towered over all of them, offering a bemused smile. She stopped a few paces from where Sir Forsythe was genuflecting.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Are you afraid of
me?
” She reached down and lifted his chin with her hand. Her hand was delicate and beautiful, but large enough to wrap halfway around Sir Forsythe's face. “You aren't afraid of anything.”

“My Lady, I—I—”

This was a first. I had never seen Sir Forsythe at a loss for words before. She stopped his stammering by placing a finger against his lips and clucking a tongue at him.

“Don't embarrass yourself, Sir Forsythe. You have a reputation to uphold.” She brushed an errant hair from his forehead. “Why would I harm you? Just because you pledge yourself to a rival deity whose followers desecrated my temples and enslaved my priestesses?” She reached and grabbed hold of the hair on the top of his head and yanked his head back. “Just because your Dark Lord raped my church?”

“Stop it,” I called out. I think I've mentioned that I am more impulsive than is generally wise. So the words came out before I had time to realize that interrupting an annoyed deity was not the best course of action. Especially since, by some lights, I was higher in the Nâtlac hierarchy than Sir Forsythe—Dark Queen and all that.

She let go of Sir Forsythe's hair and turned to face me. She smiled and her expression was beautiful and terrifying. “Stop what, Frank?”

She strode toward me, and the girls parted between us.

“You think I might do some sort of damage to your loyal minion? Look at me. Excessive displays of violence are not my forte.” She strode toward me, and it was impossible for me to take my eyes from her. Every curve of her towering body carved itself into my consciousness, as if some tiny artist was sculpting my brain into a likeness of the statue that had spawned her. She stopped less than an arm's length from me and placed a hand on a cocked hip. “I have other weapons.”

“I see.”

She laughed at me. “No, Frank, you don't. You think somehow I've not already had my revenge on that babbling idiot? If you don't realize that, you're a bigger fool than he is.”

“What revenge?”

She laughed again, shaking her head. “You, now.” She reached out and placed a finger on my chest, and just her proximity set my body into overload and I had trouble keeping my knees from wobbling. “I should be furious at you, shouldn't I?”

“Uh,” I said with an eloquence I usually found only while drunk.

“After all, someone so close to the Dark Lord walks into a temple that was desecrated in his name . . . But . . .” She trailed off as she removed her finger and sighed. She shook her head and turned away. “Get up,” she told Sir Forsythe.

“But what?” I said, once I had caught my breath again.

She paused, her back still toward me, just as mesmerizing as the rest of her. “But you had to give me an offering, didn't you?”

“An offering?”

She sighed. “You do know that's what the altar and those braziers of incense and perfumed wood are for.”

Oh.
It was probably what summoned her too.

“Of course, if some man comes into one of my temples with six young women, I generally expect a slightly
different
sort of offering. My rival Dark Lord to the contrary, there is more than one way to offer a virgin sacrifice.”

She turned around to face me again. “But that gets
so
tedious. The same thing, over and over and over and over . . .
booooring
. And look—” She gestured down at herself and spread her arms. “This is what my worshipers want. As if sex was all there was to me. But I'm not just love, sex, and fertility. I'm also art, beauty, song, poetry . . . and storytelling.” She flashed a genuine smile at me that might have struck me unconscious if it wasn't for the fact that the display of her body had already overloaded every male response this body had, leaving me numb and a little shaken.

“You know how long it has been since someone has offered me an epic like that? Extemporaneously? The only way it might have been better is if you could have improvised in meter.”

“I-I'm glad you liked it.”

“Like it? I
loved
it.” She walked back up to me and touched the side of my face, then—before my legs gave out from the sensation of her skin touching my own—she bent down and placed a chaste kiss on my forehead. “Thank you,” she whispered.

I think I blacked out for a moment.

 • • • 

When I blinked my eyes open, I was flat on my back in the temple, the girls bending over me, and there was no sign of the Goddess Lysea.

I blinked again and realized that the girls were no longer wearing filthy sewer-encrusted rags, or the associated sewage for that matter. They wore long tunics embroidered with gold thread, held together with copper-studded leather belts. Their hair was all styled with braids woven with flowers reminiscent of the garland the Goddess had been wearing.

“What? How long was I out?”

“A few minutes,” Mary said.

“How? Your clothes—”

“She said if we're going to stay here,” Grace answered me, “we need to look the part.”

I sat up slowly, feeling the aftereffects of an erotic hangover. I wanted to be anywhere but lying prone, surrounded by a half-dozen teenage girls who'd been freshly cleaned, perfumed, and dressed like acolytes in a divine whorehouse.

“Are you all right?” Krys asked me.

I nodded. I wasn't, but I wasn't about to admit what was the matter, even if everyone could probably guess. I looked around and noticed who was missing. “Where's Sir Forsythe?”

“He stepped outside once the Goddess disappeared,” Grace said.

Great, the unstable bastard probably ran off.

I got to my feet, happy for the excuse to step outside myself. I headed toward the brass doors and Grace said, “Wait a minute.”

“What?”

“You just got kissed by a Goddess, and you have nothing to say?”

I shrugged. “These things happen?”

“Who are you, Frank Blackthorne?”

“I'll get back to you on that one.” I slipped out the door before any more awkward questions came my way.

Who was I? I didn't have an answer for that anymore. As for physical displays of affection from the Goddess Lysea . . . What was there to say about it? It certainly wasn't the weirdest thing that had happened to me by any measure.

Sir Forsythe sat on the broken steps to the temple, staring out at the first glimmers of dawn light touching the gray winter sky. “Are you unhurt, My Liege?” he asked without looking at me.

“I'm fine,” I said. “You're the one who doesn't look so great.”

“I was not expecting Her.”

“Neither was I,” I said. “But didn't you say it was Her garden?”

“It was abandoned long ago, when I was a child. I never expected to see Her again.”

I looked at the broken tombs. “Well I guess just looking at how torn up—” I stopped short and turned to look at Sir Forsythe.
“Again?”

He nodded.

“When did you see her before?”

He gestured at the old destruction before us. “Shortly after this happened. My father, the tenth Lord Forsythe, was one of the men who drove her acolytes from Grünwald. He led a small group of royals and nobles to the glory of the Dark Lord. He gave the first sacrament to the woman who would become our first Dark Queen.”

“What happened?”

“The Goddess came to all of us, every child of the first acolytes of Nâtlac.”

I was speechless for a moment as the pieces of what she had said began tumbling into a complete picture. I sat down next to him on the steps and said, “She said she already had her revenge.”

Sir Forsythe nodded.

“What did she do to you?”

He stared at the sky and shook his head. “She kissed us, showed us love and beauty and honor, and before we could pledge ourselves to Her for all time, She cursed us to serve the faith of our fathers.”

For the first time Sir Forsythe appeared broken, as if all the implications of what he had said weighed him down at once.

“We served the Dark Lord, fully and without reservation, because the curse allowed nothing else. And because of the Goddess's kiss, we understood what we did.”

For a goddess of love and beauty, I was starting to think she was kind of a bitch.

“My generation didn't last,” Sir Forsythe said. “Too easy for most to give up, lose themselves in battle, in drink, to the altar, even their own hand.” He turned to face me. “Do you remember, My Liege, when you asked me about the contradiction between being a hero and my service to Nâtlac?”

“‘I don't let that define me,' you said.”

He nodded. “And do you know who named me Sir Forsythe the Good?”

“No.”

“Prince—King—Dudley, as a mockery.”

“I'm sorry.”

“The irony is that buffoon Dudley owes his position to the Goddess. Both of his older brothers—older
legitimate
brothers—bore the same curse. Neither bore it well. He was born just too late to suffer from it.”

“Prince Bartholomew?”

“Saved by being a bastard. The king's bloodline did not participate in the worship of Nâtlac, and didn't raise a hand against Her temple.”

I found this new side of Sir Forsythe unnerving. Even if I now knew why he was so eager to pledge himself to me after Queen Fiona's death, and why he'd been slow to criticize the new Dark Queen for her lax observation of the rituals of the Dark Lord.

“Well, I need my knight back, Sir Forsythe.”

“My Liege, I am a fraud. All I am is because of a curse laid upon me by the Goddess. Without that, I would just be another blind acolyte of Nâtlac, serving King Dudley, looking to roast your flesh and that of those children for the glory of the Dark Lord.”

I stood and said, “You are not a fraud.”

“You heard—”

“Quiet!” It still surprised me when I managed to get a tone of command into my voice, even if I recently was able to argue a dragon to tears.

Sir Forsythe, invested in the hierarchy of nobility as he was, shut up. I didn't like abusing his misapprehensions of who I was, but I didn't want him continuing down the path he had begun down.

“You are no fraud, Sir Forsythe. Of all the people touched by the Goddess and given this ‘curse,' how many are left?”

“Only me.”

“Why do you think that is?”

He shook his head. To be fair, before this moment I would have answered the question for him; as I mentioned earlier, he was crazy as a rabid goblin. But, besides not being a helpful answer, it was also the lesser answer.

“I'll tell you why,” I continued. “Because I have no doubt that your peers decided to suppress the Goddess's gift. They buried it inside themselves to fit in, to earn favor, to be part of the new aristocracy of Grünwald. Am I wrong?”

“No.”

“That's what killed them. That was their contradiction. They denied who they were and it destroyed them. You took what the Goddess gave you, and you embraced it. You decided to become Sir Forsythe the Good despite mockery, despite derision.”

He shook his head. “It wasn't my decision.”

“It's
always
your decision!”

He drew himself back from my outburst, and I suddenly felt a sense of déjà vu as I spoke the words before I understood fully what I was saying. I was facing Lucille again, and I was about to say something irrevocable.

But it wasn't my relationship to Sir Forsythe that would change with my words.

“You had no choice in what the Goddess gave you,” I said, “just as you had no choice who gave you birth . . . but you decided how you'd react, you decided what person you'd make yourself into. You decided if what She gave you became a curse or a blessing. You did something no one else She touched was able to do, take what She gave you to make yourself a hero. And despite everything, you've become one.”

His eyes widened. Then he lowered himself to one knee before me, lowering his head. “Thank you, My Liege.”

As he repledged himself to my service, my own words echoed through my skull like a church bell ringing in a cathedral of my own stupidity.

You had no choice . . . just as you had no choice who gave you birth . . . but you decided how you'd react, you decided what person you'd make yourself into. You decided . . . curse or a blessing.

“Who are you, Frank Blackthorne?”

What person had I made myself into?