Dragon Princess (5 page)

But not enough to keep me from slamming my knee into his crotch, sending his marbles back where they came from.

“Apology accepted,” I told him, slamming my fist into the side of his head. I don’t think he noticed the punch. I’d never been a brawler, and Lucille didn’t have any significant upper body strength. It did direct his collapse so he didn’t fall on top of me as he clutched his groin.

Bear had stopped laughing, and I suddenly had an angry, hairy wall descending toward me. One look at his face and I knew that this bastard would probably take a kick to the testicles as a form of foreplay. I pushed myself up and bolted for deeper in the woods.

What Princess Lucille’s body lacked in upper body strength, it made up for in speed and dexterity. I felt as if I practically flew to my feet, and I was racing for the cover of the woods before Bear had made it a couple of steps.

All of which meant I wasn’t aware of the abnormal pain pitching me forward into the forest mulch until my face planted into a pile of dead leaves.

When I rolled onto my back and looked down at my feet, I expected to see a pair of bloody stumps. Instead, I saw what must have been the most ornate implements of torture ever devised by man. I knew the princess was short, but compensating for that with the heels on the jeweled monstrosities imprisoning her feet was a cost far too high. They were more effective restraints than the ropes I’d slipped out of.

I spat leaves and mulch and managed to remove one offending shoe before Eyepatch caught up with me. The guy was not much bigger than I had been before I found myself filling in for the princess. Currently, however, he had close to a foot in height and probably sixty pounds on me. He hooked one hand under my armpit and yanked me to my feet without showing a bit of strain.

And I’d been worried about Bear.

He sneered at me and grabbed my throat with his free hand. “Now, don’t give me any more trouble, you little bitch. I have no problem cutting—”

His threat was cut short with a gasp as I brought the princess’s shoe up and slammed it heel-first into his good eye. Eyepatch screamed and let me go, clutching his face in a way that showed that the shoe was at least as painful for him as it had been for me. He lunged at me in a literal blind fury, and I scrambled backward, kicking off the remaining shoe of death.

Bear caught up with us, and he made the mistake of touching Eyepatch’s shoulder. Bear didn’t get out so much as a grunt before Eyepatch lunged for him. He probably should have realized that Bear’s throat was both higher and furrier than the one I wore at the moment. Then again, Eyepatch seemed
really
angry. Bear tried to peel the guy off of him, but that only made Eyepatch attack harder, and they both fell to the forest floor.

I took the opportunity to run out of there as fast as I could.

I ran for a long time before I realized that I wasn’t anywhere near the hillside where Elhared’s dragon had been stashing the princess. I wasn’t familiar with the landscape of Lendowyn, but the wizard had given me a pretty good briefing on the landscape near the lair, and what I ran through right now wasn’t it.

For all I knew, I wasn’t even
in
Lendowyn anymore.

I stopped once I was certain that I had made it clear of Eyepatch and his crew. I leaned up against a tree to catch my breath. I had just run a mile or two in bare feet. Now that I’d stopped, I realized how badly torn up the princess’s feet were. They hurt almost as bad as they had with the shoes of doom on.

I slid down the side of the tree to sit on a large root. I groaned with relief as I took the weight off the princess’s injured feet. I lifted one foot and looked at the sole. It was a mess. Despite wearing footwear that should have toughened them up, the skin of her feet was as delicate and soft as her own backside. At least as delicate and soft as I presumed her backside was. Since I was using it at the moment I didn’t feel an urge to test the hypothesis.

The effect of the forest floor on the princess’s unprotected feet resulted in a bloody mess that looked like her shoes had made them feel. I winced as I started pulling out splinters, pine needles, and pieces of pinecones.

“Whatever happened, Elhared, you twisted bastard,” I whispered to a passing squirrel, “I hope it
hurt.
” The squirrel sat up on its hind legs and chattered at me. I flicked a bloody piece of gravel at it and it ran away.

It was clear that I had disrupted Elhared’s spell a few incantations later than I should have. The soul-transference bit happened, but it looked like it had been me and the princess who had swapped rather than me and the wizard. That was probably for the best, since last I remembered, Elhared’s body had vanished in a pillar of magical fire. I didn’t know why the princess ended up in the middle of the forest an indeterminate distance from Elhared’s self-immolation, but I’m not a wizard. It probably had something to do with the dragon throwing me into the spell.

Now that I had a moment to think, I started coming up with a plan. The plan was simple enough, but the objective was pretty obvious. I needed three things. I needed to recover the lexicon of nastiness Elhared had been cribbing notes from. Books like that tended not to run into multiple editions, and if someone were to undo what Elhared had done, they would probably need a copy of the exact spell that Elhared had muffed. Of course, for that to be of any use, I needed to find the princess and, presumably, my body along with her. Lastly, I needed to find a slightly less corrupt wizard who could make sense of the whole mess and fix things.

Simple, really.

I shredded strips off the bottom of the princess’s dress, grumbling because the rest of her outfit seemed as inappropriate to the situation I found myself in as the shoes had. I fostered that resentment because it was the only thing keeping me from staring at my—her—legs and thinking about exactly how it felt when I bent over to wrap my feet. The pain also helped distract me from paying too much attention to where the princess’s clothing tugged at me—or the one important place it wasn’t tugging at me.

Three things, that’s all I needed. Of the three, looking for a sane wizard was pointless until I took care of the other two. Looking for the princess/myself was also going to be difficult if we were both randomly teleported to parts unknown.

Since I knew where the dragon’s lair was, that left me with finding Elhared’s evil tome of maleficence as my immediate logical first step.

Sometimes I hate logic.

But, besides fixing one third of my problem, if I had some luck, Princess Lucille would come to the same conclusions and go to recover the book herself and I’d take care of another third of the list at the same time. Then it would just be a matter of traveling back to the king, who would most likely help us find a wizard for step three. Even if the treasury was bare, there was a position for a court wizard that had just opened up.

My plan was a thing of beauty, simple, elegant, and flawless. Except for the state of my feet, and the issue that I had no idea where in the wide world I happened to be.

I pushed myself to stand on my bandaged feet and whispered, “One thing at a time, Frank.”

Step one-half, find a village, a farm, or a traveler a bit more civilized than the brigands I’d left behind that could tell me where I was and point me in the right direction.

 • • • 

The simplest plans always prove to be the most difficult to execute. Finding a road or a village shouldn’t have been this hard. I began to suspect that Eyepatch and company had not chosen their campsite for its accessibility.

The sky was edging toward dusk before I found a mud track that had seen use by more than the local wildlife. As the light faded, it began to sink in how bad my situation was. Hobbling through the woods in daylight, it was easy enough to avoid thinking of anything but my pained feet and finding signs of human civilization. Now that I had found those signs, and night was coming, it sank in that I’d be walking along an empty road in the body of a young, injured, unarmed woman.

The non-human predators that would soon be waking up in these woods would probably be a bit easier to reason with than the human predators that traveled this road at night. I had no desire to run into another group like Eyepatch’s crew, if for no other reason than that I’d like to return the princess’s body in a state close to how I’d found it.

I picked up a fallen branch that could double as a staff and a walking stick, and began looking for a safe hole where I could hide myself through the night.

But, before night fell, and before I could find a good hidey-hole, I heard the sound of approaching hoofbeats.

Oh, crap.

In one sense, it was exactly what I was looking for, a traveler who could tell me how best to get back to the areas of Lendowyn that I was somewhat familiar with. But I wasn’t in a position to defend myself against anyone whose interest in wayward princesses was less than savory. I had an urge to run into the woods and find cover, but between my initial indecision, the lack of good cover on this stretch of road, and my tired, bandaged feet, there wasn’t any way for me to get out of sight before the galloping horse was in view of me.

So I stood my ground and gripped my branch as if it might do some good. If I had been the princess, I might have been a little reassured by the appearance of the lone rider approaching me. The man rode a black charger, and wore mail that almost gleamed underneath a tabard bearing a device that marked this guy as a member of the nobility, a knight at least.

That might have reassured the princess, but it didn’t reassure
me
. In a long career on the outside of the law, I had gotten to know plenty of people in the shiny armor of noble birth. The differences between such men and the dregs hanging out with Eyepatch were more teeth, better weapons, and nicer clothes. Honestly, most nobles I’d met didn’t even edge out Eyepatch in the cleanliness department.

The knight drew his horse to a stop next to me on the road, and somehow he managed to keep his mount from kicking up a soup of mud and horse crap on me. He had long blond hair tied behind his head, and a long mustache whose ends curved down below a chin so broad and stonelike that it seemed as if he could sharpen his sword on the cleft. He called down to me as if he were performing an oration for the benefit of an unseen audience. “Ho! What evil has left a maiden alone to wander this dismal wood?”

I gripped my makeshift staff and, even though my present appearance had been the foremost worry in my mind for the past few hours, I still found myself glancing around for the maiden he was referring to. I sighed, returned my gaze to the knight, and said, “It’s a long story.”

The knight’s eyes widened and he exclaimed, “My lady! Are those the arms of Lendowyn upon that ill-treated frock?”

“I suppose they are—” I hadn’t really paid much attention to the princess’s clothes, aside from trying to tear them into something slightly more appropriate to hiking in the woods. Though, strictly speaking, complete nudity would have been more appropriate.

The knight vaulted off his horse and landed in the road in front of me. Again, he somehow managed to keep from splattering mud over either of us. His tabard rustled in a slight breeze, along with his hair, as if he had been granted special favor by the gods of high drama. He bowed down to one knee, effortlessly finding the single patch of road that was not a sloppy mess in which to genuflect. “It is an honor. I am Sir Forsythe the Good, slayer of monsters and savior of fair maidens. As fate would have it, I was on my way to Lendowyn to offer your father my service in rescuing you.”

Of course you were.

Somehow, my perfectly simple plan had overlooked the fact that there was an outstanding bounty on return of the princess. Just because the princess was no longer in the clutches of an evil dragon didn’t mean there weren’t still all manner of freelancers out to save her.

That complicated things.

“Well, uh, Sir Forsythe? I think I’ve managed to rescue myself, thank you.” I bit my lip because I wasn’t used to talking to people bowing at me. It was a little disconcerting. “You can get up.”

He stood, slowly enough that it gave me a really good sense of how much he towered over me, how much he would have towered over me even before I had been princessified. I was suddenly very grateful for the privileges of rank. I straightened up, looked Sir Forsythe in the eye, and tried to muster up all the royal arrogance I could manage. “I appreciate your effort, Sir Knight, but all I require right now is proper directions toward . . .” I hesitated. Despite steeling myself and trying for a tone of royal command, the sounds that came out of my mouth were more of the frightened teenager variety. But I couldn’t very well turn back from the attempt now. “T-the nearest inn where I can get my bearings.”

“Your Highness,” he said in a way that made clear exactly what was coming. “I cannot in good conscience leave you alone in these woods. You have no retainers present to protect you.” Of course he wouldn’t. I’m a thief with no respect for authority, chivalry, or noble blood, and
I
wouldn’t. “However,” he bowed his head to me, “I would be honored to personally escort you to such an inn, and at daybreak take you to the castle gates themselves.”

I opened my mouth to object, but the sane part of my brain kicked some sense into me. I was alone, unarmed. This guy was loaded for bear, and had transportation. Even if I didn’t want to confront Princess Lucille’s dad without the princess available, I couldn’t see any logical objection to Sir Forsythe’s offer.

Did I mention that sometimes I hated logic?

“That isn’t necessary.”

“Your Highness, to do otherwise would besmirch my honor, and I doubt the king would look kindly upon any knight that abandoned you in such a state.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out as I realized that I could be counted in that princess-abandoning group. It may have been due to no fault of my own, but kings, as a general rule, were not known to be the most reasonable class of people. The power to have people decapitated whenever you were irritated was not conducive to the growth of emotional restraint.

I really needed to find Lucille before I was presented to the king, unless I wanted to push this princess masquerade a lot further than I wanted—which would result in the betrothal to the blond pretty-boy knight who walked me up to the gate.

Despite the temptation to explain everything, I held back. The only leverage I had with this guy was the fact he thought I was royalty. “Sir Forsythe, you may escort me to an inn. But before I return to my father we must—
oof
.”

My royal pronouncement was cut short by Sir Forsythe scooping me up with one arm, and lifting me like a doll as he mounted his warhorse. We were galloping down the path before I had regained my breath.

It took a minute or two before I could regain my composure enough to speak. I was astride the horse in a terrifyingly unstable sidesaddle position in front of Sir Forsythe. The only thing preventing my slide under the beast’s galloping hooves was Sir Forsythe’s mailed arm clamped around my midsection.

“There are things I need to do before I meet the king,” I half-yelled and half-gasped. Sir Forsythe gave no sign of hearing me. I didn’t repeat myself, because screams of terror didn’t seem to fit with the persona I was attempting to project.

I’ll deal with it when we get to the inn.