strike at him from behind.
“This Cormyr,” Azoun told her almost gently, “that you burn and tear apart and visit plagues and goblin infestations and insect swarms and the like on, Lorelei Alavara, is the fair land you care so much about.”
“How dare you?” The dragon almost sobbed, rearing up above him in a tall and terrible way. She threw herself down upon him, broken wings spread, snarling, “Have my life too, then, human! Strike me down. Or is it you that shall go down first, eh?”
They rolled, the human frantically, to avoid being crushed, and the dragon after him, seeking to grind him into bloody pulp with her great weight. She clawed at him as she went, gouging great furrows in the earth. Goblins fled down the slopes of the hill crying in terror.
After a dazed and drifting time, Ilberd Crownsilver remembered his name. He remembered his fall, and the terrible lunge of the dragon before it, and the battle before that. He was lying sprawled on his back with the same gray, tattered-smoke clouds above him that had hung over him then… and he was lying on cold, still, and unpleasantly sharp goblins. He was seized with the sudden desire to get up and stand again and know his fate-even if it was to die under the blades of scores of cruel earfangs.
The young nobleman struggled to his feet, the world heaving and rocking through his swimming eyes. Something red-his own sticky blood, he discovered, looking at his fingertips calmly-was streaming into his right eye, and he’d hurt something low on the left side of his belly that involved torn armor and more blood beneath.
“Well, you did want to taste glory,” he growled to himself. “Tastes a lot like blood to me, but there it is, hey?” He coughed weakly, spat out a lot of blood, and looked around. There were goblins in plenty, wandering the field dazedly or picking over bodies for blades and helms, but none near. Some of them even seemed to be fleeing from the hill he was standing on.
Ilberd looked back up the hill to where he’d stood with the king against the Devil Dragon-in time to see that great wyrm hurl herself down on Azoun and roll about trying to claw at him, for all Faerun as if king and dragon were two children brawling in the dirt.
“Glory,” he said in disgust and spat blood again. His helm and dagger were gone in his fall, somewhere, but his sword was still in its scabbard. He drew it, deliberately, admired its weight and heft in his hand one last time, and started up the hill.
Cormyr needed him-and if that was good enough for his king, dying in the dirt up there under a dragon’s jaws, well… it was good enough for him. Smiling, Ilberd Crownsilver went to find his doom.
“This is madness, Nalavara,” Azoun gasped, as they rolled apart and clambered upright, each in their own way. “We both fight for Cormyr-to guard and keep unstained the land we love!”
The red dragon’s eyes glittered. “Clever words,” she hissed. “Humans are always spewing more snake- tongued cleverness. Die, human king!”
Her flame this time was but a few wisps that barely challenged the failing defensive magics of his blade, but her bite was as swift and savage as ever. Armor plate shrieked under a tooth as she crushed Azoun’s left shoulder and sent him staggering back, despite his thrusts into her chin with both warsword and scepter.
“I strike in sorrow,” he gasped, as the golden light flooded around him once more, “and apologize to you for the sin of Andar Obarskyr and for the sins of my father and grandsire and forefathers back to Andar in keeping secret the murder Andar did-and for my own part in doing so, too. Will offering you my life for that of your beloved end all this?”
The red dragon drew back and stared at him in amazement, dragging her broken wing.
“What did you say, human?”
Azoun spread wide his arms, allowing her a clear path to his breast, clad only in sweat-soaked leather where the transformed and sacrificed breastplate had gone. He looked old, his hair white and his face weathered and careworn, but he also seemed almost contented.
“Will my own life atone for what you have lost?” he asked again. “If so, I yield it gladly. Take it, so long as you restore peace to Cormyr and, by your honor, Lorelei Alavara, all who dwell in it.”
For a moment the red dragon’s scales wavered, and he was seeing the sleek bare body of an elf maiden, her red hair cascading around her in a long and glorious cloak, her large, dark eyes almost pleading, her mouth trembling on the edge of a smile.
Then it was gone, and he faced the dragon once more-a smaller wyrm, it seemed, but bright-eyed in its renewed fury.
“No!” Nalavara snarled, “Your trickery comes too late. Too long has my hatred carried me, human, until it is all I have left. Nothing you can say or do will bring back my Thatoryl. As he crumbled, so shall you all. The peace you seek will fall upon ‘fair Cormyr’ only when the rotting corpse of every last human feeds the forest that has been so defiled!”
“Time changes Faerun, as the dragons gave way to the elves, and your kin to mine,” Azoun said gravely. “I can’t bring Thatoryl Elian back, but I can raise a stone-or plant a grove-in his memory. My huntmasters tend the land even now, and leave some stretches untouched. I can make Cormyr far more a forest again… but the paradise you hunted in is gone, I fear, forever. Can we not work together to plant its echo? Must this end in more blood?”
Nalavarauthatoryl the Red reared up again, beating her wings despite the pain her broken one caused her, and snarled, “Of course it must, human! How else, whatever our ‘civilized’ pretensions, do elves and humans and dragons settle their disputes? No better than the goblins are we-and I cannot be something I am not. Die!”
Her jaws swept squarely down on Azoun this time, heedless of his warsword cutting into them and the scepter striking home-even when its golden radiance burst inside her head and her eyes blew out in twin balls of flame.
Ribs broke and the organs within burst before those jaws parted, sagging open again in death. Torn, Azoun gasped aloud at the pain, barely noticing as the Scepter of Lords caught fire in his trembling hands.
Yet its fury revived him from sinking into oblivion. He stood his ground, holding it deep in the dragon’s jaws, and snarled, “For Cormyr!”
Let those ladies on the walls of Suzail change their wagers, damn them. He had a realm to save, whatever the cost, and this self-damned dragon was taking far too long to die.
Hot black blood boiled out of Nalavara’s gullet then, washing over his chest and arms, drenching his wounds and raging through him wherever it touched his own blood. Azoun growled in pain and staggered as his foe shivered once, from end to end, then slowly gurgled into eternal silence.
As the Devil Dragon fell away, smoke rising from her empty, staring eye sockets, Azoun went to his knees atop the familiar form of Vangerdahast. It was done, his strength was spent, and it was time. Time for even a king to leave his throne behind in favor of a calmer place.
44
The Steel Princess peered through fog that was streaming across heaped bodies like smoke in a hurry to be elsewhere. The dead were everywhere, piled and sprawled across the rolling fields like a grotesque crop. Vultures and crows were already circling and gliding, looming out of the mist like lazy black arrows as they descended. The goblins were like a gory, countless carpet, but among them too many a brave knight or dragoneer lay stiff and staring. Even if this was the realm’s last battle for a season or more, there’d be few Purple Dragons to watch the borders and patrol the roads. The Stonelands would just have to go unwatched for a year or three-and if Sembia or another eager reaver decided to reach out into the Forest Kingdom, little valor and fewer swords would be left to stand against them.
Alusair’s boots slipped on a tangle of interlocked blades, and she nearly fell onto the goblins frozen in desperate striving with the lancelord who lay beneath them, his face cut away into a ruin of blood and crawling flies. She recovered herself grimly and peered again at the battlefield. Somewhere ahead in all of this death lay her father. He’d have been fighting the dragon chin to tail, no doubt, and that would probably mean on a hilltop, given where dragons prefer to swoop.
That one on the right, Alusair decided, would be her first destination. She could see goblins clambering up its slopes, a handful of living among so many dead. Swallowing, she hefted her blade and glanced to her right, where a
