The Dragon's Fury (Book 1) Read online

  THE

  DRAGON’S

  FURY

  Book one of the

  Relics of Power Trilogy

  D. C. Mickelson

  Revival Publishing House

  MEDFORD, OR

  Copyright © 2013 by D. C. Mickelson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Mickelson/Revival Publishing House

  Medford, OR

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout ©2013 BookDesignTemplates.com

  The Dragon’s Fury/ D.C. Mickelson. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9913349-1-9

  ISBN-10: 0-9913-3491-4

  Dedicated to Dan and Brenda Mickelson

  Your love and support has made the difference between

  life and death for me.

  Thank you.

  ONE

  HIGH HOPES

  Jealousy is a deadly sin, they say. Ha! If that were so, none would be left alive.

  Roland the Venerable, Aphorisms,

  Year 212 of the Dominion of Man

  “This has nothing to do with Kara. I just want to kill you.”

  The speaker batted a dangling lock of golden hair out of his eyes with an impatient jerk of the left hand. The right hand held a sword, which was pointed straight at his adversary’s heart.

  The rival stood at ease, leaning lightly on his drawn blade, the tip of which remained obstinately pressed into the earth. “Good enough then,” he said amicably. “You want to run me through just for the sporting challenge. Is that it?”

  “That’s right. Now prepare to die.”

  “Very well.” The other raised his weapon, its polished steel and silver hilt flashing white in the westering sun. “Just so long as it’s not about Kara because that would be completely pointless.”

  Triston Slendrake gave a disbelieving scoff. Behind him, far below their hilltop vantage, a rich vale unfolded in a tapestry of tended fields and orchards. Through a distant haze beyond, the jagged arches of the Catspine Mountains hunched above the lowlands like a stalking beast. “Not that I care what you think, but why would dueling for the hand of a fair maiden be pointless?”

  “Is that what this is?”

  “No!” A pause. “Maybe. I think I might hate you. You’re a bastard, you know.”

  Alden the Bastard had killed men for less. His olive skin and raven black hair were an ever-present accusation against his late mother’s honor, here amid the fair-faced, blond and befreckled villagers of Wyrmskull. Being different and, so they said, illegitimate, he had learned long ago that only by brass knuckles and the keen edge of a blade did the baseborn live in peace.

  Now, looking past the deadly weapon crossing tips with his, he carefully considered the wielder. Blond, gray-eyed and fresh-faced, the would-be dueler was a typical villager through and through, except perhaps for the intensity in his eyes. At eighteen, Triston was two years Alden’s junior, comically possessed by the scrawniness of youth, and for many years now, Alden’s closest friend. It was therefore with no little annoyance that Alden noted, for the first time in their lives, he no longer looked down on his fiery-eyed accoster.

  Despite this unwelcome realization, mirth flickered at corners of his mouth. “All right, Trist. If you really think you love her, I’ll make it easy for you.” Suddenly sheathing his blade, he took two deliberate steps forward, halting only when Triston’s sword point pressed into his magnificent black-leather jerkin. “Run me through and she’s yours. But first,” he added with an upraised hand, “answer me this: what did you say not a fortnight ago about my Kara—”

  “Your Kara?”

  “—when she asked Winchie that sweet question in the fire hall.”

  Triston narrowed his eyes. “You mean . . . about the pie.”

  “Winchie’s bean pie, yes.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “What did you say?”“Doesn’t matter, Ald. Not the point.”

  “Say it.”

  “But she asked what animal kidney beans come from.”

  “Yes, and you compared my sweetie’s wits to what dull object, commonly found in smithies and forges—”

  Triston abruptly sheathed his sword. “Damn! Just realized, I can’t kill you right now anyway.”

  “—and dwarf ruins. Why’s that?”

  A hesitation. “I need your help with something.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, leaning forward conspiratorially. “Armistand’s Riposte. Mine’s a bit iffy.”

  Alden’s grin vanished. Without glancing down, he deftly sheathed his blade, then stepped forward to grip Triston’s shoulder. “Does this mean you’re in after all? You’re going to battle the beast?”

  Triston inhaled deeply, casting his eyes down to the left, where the land fell away into a depression of singular description. The crown of Magog’s Rise, the hill upon which they stood, did not mount to an ever-tapering summit. Instead, it crested and then fell gently inward, like a vast saucer. And whether by some fluke of nature, or the toil of men long since fallen to the grave’s slumber, or an ancient power lost to the graying world, the great bowl’s shallow, grass-clad slope was smooth and even and symmetrical.

  At the lowest point, the dead center of the hilltop, stood a standing stone called Magog’s Tooth. Jagged and unworked in appearance, yet wrought of one piece, the monolith towered five or six times above the height of a man, and was so measured that its evening shadow lengthened to the eastern brim of the depression at the precise moment the sun vanished beneath the horizon.

  “Got to, don’t I?” he said with a wry smile. “Nothing to lose really.” An uncomfortable silence followed these words, in which neither of them gave voice to the thought, Except for his life. “Course, the whole thing’s completely hopeless.”

  Alden squeezed his shoulder, his eyes intent. “Trist, you’ve got the speed. It doesn’t matter how big he is if he can’t get at you. And think of the pay off.”

  Triston faced his friend. Alden’s black leather jerkin, buckled in front with silver fastenings, his silver-pommeled longsword and dagger, each housed handsomely in leather-bound sheaths, and his silver ring embossed in crimson with the garish skull of a bull dragon, marked him as a Wyrmskull Fighter. Beside the reflected glory of these trappings, Triston was keenly aware that his own woolen tunic, ever patched and threadbare, had developed a disagreeable tendency to tear at the slightest provocation.

  “Tell me again how much they pay you to sit on your ass in the gatehouse, sipping dragon rum with Belinda on your lap?”

  Alden smirked, jingling the coins in his pockets. “Belinda’s out of the question now, course. For the present. Kara and all that, even if she is—how did you put it?—sharp as a hammer.”

  Triston redrew his borrowed sword, looking thoughtfully at its dull and rusted blade. It even reflects the sun dully, he thought. Poor Kara. They always end up weeping. Out loud, he said, “Hot as a crucible.”

  Alden grunted his agreement. A pregnant pause followed this exchange in which neither met the other’s eye.

  “Well then,” said Triston determinedly. “Armistand and all that. Will you play the
enraged brute or shall I?”

  Alden stepped back, unleashing his weapon with a flash of silver. “No no,” he said, the glint of battle lighting in his eyes. “I’m the charging troll. You’re Armistand, heroically defending the poxied milkmaids or whatever he’s supposed to have done.”

  Triston backed up a few paces and readied a defensive stance. “You know, I think it was actually a traveling harem. We just water the tale down for the little ones. Besides, no one wants a whoremonger for a hero.”

  “Poxied either way,” mumbled Alden. Suddenly he was glaring over Triston’s shoulder, down the outer slope in the direction of the village. “Troll stains. Bloody meat sacks.”

  Triston didn’t bother wheeling around to puzzle out the source of this foul-mouthery. There was no need. “I was wondering when your little tracker would turn up.”

  “I’ll make tracks on him if he keeps shadowing me like—oh bloody hell. What’s this then?”

  Curiosity aroused, Triston turned to see a sandy-haired, freckle-faced youth charging up the path towards them. Though still a good way off, Triston made out that the hand the newcomer enthusiastically waved was marred with livid blood streaks. The other hand, equally striped, gripped a potato sack, the contents of which were writhing and churning with a far greater zeal than the cheerful swing of his arm seemed likely to produce.

  “I got Brigand!” the lad bellowed in a breaking voice, holding up the sack. “Can you believe it? Tricked him. Bits of catfish. Genius. What should we”—he gasped for breath—“do with him?”

  This last question, however, was immediately rendered irrelevant. Stumbling on a loose stone and careening face-first into a puddle, the youth sent his burden flying with a wild flail. Mid-air, the projectile expelled a giant, bronze-toned fur-ball which sprouted legs, landed at full gallop and vanished into the brush with a blood-curdling yowl.

  In a minute, the lad had gained the summit. His chest was heaving and his sopping hair oozed puddle water which ran down his face and reeked faintly. With a two-handed, smearing wipe on his forehead, he grinned happily at the other two. “Got away from me.”

  Alden raised one eyebrow. Triston’s face flushed.

  “Owain,” he said in a voice of forced calm. “You set Winchie’s cat loose in the wild.”

  Owain beamed. “The hunter becomes the hunted. He won’t last a week up here.”

  “Owain,” Triston growled, “don’t you think it’s possible she might notice her best friend in the whole world has vanished from the earth?”

  A shrug. Owain was now looking at Triston as if he was concerned for his sanity. “Old banshee has it coming after what she done to you, Trist. Enslaved you, that’s what she’s done. And your mom fresh in the grave and all.”

  With an alarmed glance at Triston, Alden stepped between them, gripping the startled youth by the front of his tunic. “You get that mangy couch pillow back to the inn within the hour or—”

  “But I was just trying to—”

  “Put him down, Ald.”

  “Boy, it’s not complicated,” cut in Alden, his voice laced with a menacing tone the young men of the village had learned to fear. “The cat is back at the Dragon’s Rest by suppertime or”—here he lowered his voice to a hint of a murmur—“or there’s another fresh grave in the sage-yard by sundown.”

  White-faced so that his freckles stood out like stars on a moonless night, Owain shot off the moment Alden released him, a spooked rabbit dashing for cover.

  Watching him vanish into the brush, Triston felt a sudden urge to laugh. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance he might actually catch the mangy—”

  “No chance.” Alden’s corner-of-the-lip smile was back.

  Triston turned away, facing down the bowl toward the standing stone. “She had me working late again last night. Wouldn’t send a scrap my way until after midnight. Just cold porridge anyway, so no loss. And that yellow-eyed fiend dines on chicken nightly. Do you know he actually watches me eat my slop with something like mockery in his eyes?”

  “Dined, you mean. He’ll be a thing of the past soon. But what was so urgent you had to push on into the haunted hours?”

  “Erm, nothing. Just stuff.”

  Alden came around to stand beside him. “What?”

  “Chamber pots needed scouring again,” Triston muttered. “Listen, the kid. Pretend to forget your threat when you see him next.”

  Alden pursed his lips for a moment, then said, “If the old bat blames you—”

  “She will.”

  “—and tosses you to the streets, you can always shack up with us at the Fighters’ Stronghold. The guys like you—”

  “Chief wouldn’t allow it.”

  Alden raised an eyebrow. “He doesn’t have to know.”

  “After tomorrow it likely won’t matter.” A pause. “Whichever way it turns out. You ready?”

  “Wait. I’m the troll right? I’d better strap on some armguards.”

  An hour’s swordplay under a sweltering midsummer sun meant a wicked thirst. “Winchie thinks I’m gathering firewood,” panted Triston from the east-reaching shadow of Magog’s Tooth. So determined were both of them that Triston should be at the top of his craft that their exertions had ranged over the entire bowl of the summit with almost no let-up. “I’d better be getting back.”

  Alden was bent double, holding his knees and breathing hard. “Nasty shock she’ll get when you’re inducted into the Wyrmskull Fighters tomorrow night.”

  Triston shrugged. He had dared no hope since old Door-shield announced his retirement from the Fighters three weeks earlier. It seemed too good to be true that he could win a coveted place on the elite guard. But hearing Alden say the words brought an ache to his empty belly.

  Alden straightened with a groan and leaned against the standing stone. “And nothing lights a maiden’s fire like a man in uniform.”

  Triston smiled winsomely. “So it seems.”

  Alden frowned. “Oh come on, Trist. Not that again. She’s wrong for you and you know it. Besides,” he added emphatically, folding his arms across his chest, “come on.”

  “What?”

  “Do I have to say it?”

  “Go on then.”

  “You know she had to end up with me. Look at her.” He glanced over Triston’s shoulder with a rapturous face as if beholding a waking vision. “She’s Octana reborn.”

  “So . . . you’re saying she’s a spider seductress who assumed an enchanting human form to ensnare besotted lovers into her web of death? Gotcha.”

  “Oh. No, I meant that temptress wood-nymph wench. What’s her name? Doesn’t matter. Trist, there’s something you should know—”

  “Forget it, Ald. I’ve heard it already. You’re a jackass, you know. And what’s worse, you seem proud of your jackassery. But never mind. Point is . . . .”

  His voice trailed off. There was no point. Nothing more to say, except, She’s yours and that’s that. But according to Alden, that went without saying.

  Alden was gazing over his shoulder, a dreamy look on his face. “Trist, you should know—”

  “But if you treat her like you did Belinda, I really will kill you.”

  “Don’t go bringing up the B word now, Trist,” Alden hissed emphatically.

  “I mean it. I won’t stand for you toying with her like your latest trophy, only to toss her aside and forget about her when the luster wears off.”

  “Lust what? Trist, listen! Not now. She’s—”

  “That reminds me. I never said Kara was sharp as a hammer. I said she was sharp as an anvil.” Alden was mouthing wordlessly, his eyes wide with horror, but Triston was getting too worked up to care. “So maybe she does have the wits of a cabbage? Who cares? She still deserves—”

  There was a sharp slap and suddenly the back of his neck felt on fire. His weary knees buckled and the ground leapt up. A grassy tussock swallowed his face whole. Momentarily stunned, Triston lay facedown, his mouth tasting of dirt and blood. Vo
ices murmured above him. He lifted his head painfully.

  Kara.

  Alden held her tightly in his arms while she sniffled into his shoulder. He was idly turning her majestic, waist-length locks of gold in his fingers.

  Triston rose, ashen-faced. “Kara, I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know what you didn’t mean,” she said savagely, facing him with bright red eyes. “I can’t believe I thought you kind once. And I’m not giving you daddy’s message now so don’t ask for it. He can tell you himself.”

  “So . . . so your daddy—Traven, I mean, the tanner—oh look, I . . . I’m so sorry. You’re not—”

  A muffled “Go away,” erupted from Alden’s shoulder. For his part, Alden gave Triston a you’ve-really-stepped-in-it-this-time grimace, shaking his head and shrugging. Without another word, Triston turned away and plodded up the slope.

  His meager offering of firewood thunked to a rest on the alarmingly dwindled woodpile. Triston groaned. That meant a large party of new guests, and another late night for him. If only Winchie let him sleep past dawn to make up for it. Why tonight of all nights?

  Parched, he stumped across the inn’s hen-yard to a crumbled-down well. Unhurriedly cranking the handle which would eventually haul up a leaky water-bucket, Triston tried not to think what a fool he’d made of himself on the hilltop.

  It was no use. As he discovered so often lately, the harder he struggled to free his thoughts, the more stuck they became. He was stuck. That was the problem.

  When his mother finally succumbed to the White Plague on the first day of New Leaf, Triston could no longer conceal the nature of her illness. The village elders at once condemned their cottage to the flames, with her body still inside, along with the adjacent supply shop they had run together. “This curse must die with her,” Elder Attric croaked solemnly as they set torches to the thatched roof.

  Chief Gorbald only released Triston from solitary confinement two weeks later, when it was clear he had eluded the dreaded scourge. He found himself standing in the village square, homeless, not a copper to his name. Some smiled, others quickly looked away, but all kept their distance. “Mark my words. This all comes of his father’s doings,” he overheard that night, crouching under a window to escape a downpour. “Messing about with black magic, they say, before it got the better of him. It’s a wonder Meria lasted as long as she did, poor thing. And I’ll be jiggered if the boy doesn’t meet the same sticky end.”