“Dearest princess,” the aging sorcerer began, clasping his hands before his beard. “Favored pupil. With all the respect due your rank, and all the fondness of your mentor: Gadzooks, girl! What were you thinking?!”
Aria had the faintest trace of a smirk still fluttering around the edges of her mouth as she attempted to wipe the soot from her hands. She left long, black streaks on her lavender dress, but she hardly seemed to notice.
“Oh, don’t be angry, Uncle Ulfric! It’s all part of the plan, remember?”
Ulfric seemed to Ser Blackwing to be on the verge of either fainting or becoming hysterical.
“The plan? No! This was not the plan! The plan was to send the prince on a safe Quest and move to safeguard the kingdom afterwards!” He tugged sharply at his beard and made several anxious glances towards the closed door. “How, exactly, does turning young Theodore into a dragon factor into this?!”
Aria turned and reached for the door handle again. “You said we couldn’t send him out to the coast until he could protect himself, what with Captain Cinder on her annual rampage down there. And we needed a way to stop the tournament once and for all. I just...decided to kill two birds with one stone, that’s all.”
With that, the princess swung the door open and looked back over her shoulder. “You can come in, if you like. Theo won’t set you on fire or anything like that.”
The chamber beyond the door looked a little too wooden and flammable to be housing a dragon. Along one curve of its circular walls lay two oddly-shaped tables that were covered with books and scrolls. Several maps hung on the stone walls above them. Along another curve of wall were four overstuffed bookcases, an unreasonably large pile of cushions, and a fireplace.
Something like a smaller drawbridge took up the only flat wall. It was closed at the moment, held up with heavy chains. Aria noticed Sparrow’s curious stare and grinned.
“Isn’t it convenient?” she asked. “It’s been here for generations, but nobody ever found a use for it after my great-grandmother died. She used to keep injured Leptoptilini storks up here and release them out the trap door when they were rehabilitated. Now it’s my dragon door!”
“Excuse me,” said the dragon, dryly, “I believe that, given the circumstances, it is my dragon door.”
As dragons went, the former Prince Theodore was admittedly not the most graceful specimen Sparrow had ever seen. If taken in proportion to the rest of his body, his neck was probably no longer than a horse’s, and he had vast, ungainly wings folded haphazardly across his back. Presumably, being a transformed human and thus without an elemental pearl embedded in his heart, he couldn’t fly without the aid of wings. He was all bronzed scales and claws and spines, nothing like the rippling, coiling creatures Sparrow’s father used to point out to her, weaving around the waterfalls looming over their hall.
Of course, Sparrow had never traveled beyond the borders of the Neverspring Territories before, and only knew of two dragon phenotypes: the Benign Fall-Singer Dragon, and the False Fall-Singer Dragon. The shape the prince now wore was that of a species suited for harsh terrains. They were hunters, rather than fishers, and used their wings for communication between individuals as much as they did for flying. Of course, Theodore had no idea how to use his wings to communicate with an actual Brontes’ Dragon. And learning to fly had been just a little disastrous at first.
“Hello there,” said Sparrow, inclining her head politely to the dragon-prince. “Am I to understand that you are the dragon I am meant to be rescuing?”
“Unless you’ve any talent in magic,” Theodore grumbled, showing his very sharp teeth, “I suspect you won’t have much luck.”
His long tail twitched ominously, as though he would have liked the thrash it across the room. Lord Ulfric looked him over with a worried frown, then leaned up to pat one of the fan-like rows of spines on Theodore’s foreleg.
“I do hope, your highness, that your sister at least asked you before attempting advanced-level magic?” he asked. He didn’t sound especially hopeful. It had been that sort of a day.
Theodore narrowed one golden eye at his sister and bared the rest of his teeth. “It was supposed to be temporary.”
Aria cringed, but laughed. “I know, I know. And I will reverse it Theo, I swear. But in the meantime, you’re so much better suited to a Quest!”
“A Quest?” the prince howled, shaking the scrolls from the table, “I’m a plagueish dragon, Ari! And what’s more, I’m a Brontes’ Dragon! The sort that gets killed for Quests when they’ve snatched one villager too many!”
Sensing a rather explosive argument brewing between the teenagers, Ulfric intervened. “Well I think a Quest is unavoidable at this point, your highness,” he said, as sympathetically as he could manage. “But spell-breaking Quests are perfectly common once you get out of the capital of Tangle. So long as you travel with Ser Blackwing to help you find some healing magics, nobody will come after you with bows and pitchforks.” Hopefully, he refrained from adding.
Sparrow’s assignment to save a dragon from a princess had just become considerably more complicated.
