close, the shaft flared a bright crimson arc, and bit into him sharply. Shaella jumped from her daze, and raised the staff to strike Pael.
Pael yelped in surprise and pain from the staff’s magical defense, and his head grew pink with his growing rage.
When Shaella realized who it was before her, she relaxed the staff, and made a quick apology before her father could unleash something horrible at her. As a sorceress, she was fairly powerful. She had memorized a wealth of spells, and was learning more each day. She could cast them effortlessly, and with supreme confidence, but compared to her father, she was a kitten to his saber cat. She dared not cross him. She knew that the bond they shared as father and daughter was, at best, as thin as a strand of spider’s web. His anger alone, would burn it through, before it could be checked. Especially if she provoked him.
“Father,” she said meekly, as he was trying to calm himself.
“I see you have warded MY orb well.” The stress on the word “my” wasn’t lost on Shaella, but Pael’s voice betrayed little animosity, and most of his anger had dissipated by then.
He stared at her, but the look softened. He had no further use for the orb, he decided. Xwarda’s vaults held much more powerful things, if one knew how to use them. Luckily for Pael, Shokin had that knowledge right there for him to take.
“Why are you here?” Shaella asked kindly, and then stood. “Can I have something brought for you? Food? Wine? Anything?”
He took her hand, and helped her down the three steps that formed the dais for the Lion’s throne. Her mind raced through the possibilities. His strange, suddenly fatherly manner, suggested that he wanted something. But what could Pael want that he couldn’t just take?
“No my dear, I need no refreshment.” He put a hand on each of her shoulders, and looked her in the eyes. “You have made me proud, Shaella.” He seemed as earnest as one could be, but Shaella wasn’t fooled by the act; at least not completely. “I wish to have you by my side when I take Xwarda on the morrow. I wish to share the victory with you, and I hope to make you as proud of me as I am of you.”
She would have thought that he just wanted her along to gain the advantage of intimidation and might that her dragon would bring, but she didn’t even have the collar on at the moment. It interfered with her use of the orb, allowing the dragon’s thoughts into hers and Gerard’s moments, so she had stopped wearing it. As it was, Pael could have just summoned the collar to himself, put it on, and taken control of the dragon. There was no question in her mind that Pael knew exactly where the collar was, but he hadn’t tried to take it.
She dared not believe in this sudden burst of fatherly tenderness. Her mother’s voice rang through her head, spewing a myriad curses at his lack of such an emotion, warning her not to be taken in by his act.
Shaella returned the loving gaze into Pael’s cold dark eyes, and searched them. Try as she might, she didn’t see, or sense any sign of deception or mockery. He seemed as sincere as one could be. She found that this moved her, and without a moment’s more thought on the matter, she agreed to join him in his conquest of Xwarda.
Starkle, the blue-skinned pixie man, woke Queen Willa just after the sun broke the horizon. In a hurried zigzagging flutter, flown at a respectable distance from the waking Queen’s bed, he spoke to her in his deep, excited voice.
“It is as he said, Highness, the necromancer didn’t lie. You have to see it for yourself. Hurry now.”
He had to zip out of the way of a thrown pillow.
“I am only the messenger!” he said indignantly after he had recovered.
“General Spyra, and the High Wizard, Targon, sent me. They await you at the Coast Road Gate. Hurry now, Majesty.”
“Would you excuse yourself so that I may dress, sir?” Queen Willa snapped sharply. A little tiny pixie man was still a man, and she was still a lady, no matter how serious the emergency.
“Of, of course Highness, forgive me.” Starkle bowed in midair, then erratically zipped across the room, and out the slightly cracked door.
“Milly!” Willa yelled coolly. “I know your ear is glued to the door! Someone had to open it for that little blue gnat!”
A middle aged woman, blushing furiously, eased into the room. Willa was hurriedly swapping her night clothes for a heavy pullover gown.
“Why wasn’t it you who awakened me?” the Queen asked. “Find my hooded cloak while you answer. No, the darker one.”
Milly hid her face in one of Willa’s large closets.
“Who can say the ways of the fairy folk Highness. Surely not I.” she called from inside.
Willa found a black leather belt and buckled it around the velvety lavender gown she had chosen, and then took the cloak Milly offered.
“It’s not the ways of pixies that concern me, Milly,” Willa said, while bunching her hair into a ponytail. “Pixies can’t turn door knobs by themselves.”
Willa’s grin showed that she was just teasing her maid servant. Suddenly, her face turned serious, and she looked sternly into Milly’s eyes.
“I want you to gather a pillow sack full of your dearest things, and then report to Lady Andra. Do it just as soon as I leave, and tell her I said to take you to the tunnel herself.”
A half hour later, Queen Willa came up from the endless switchbacks of stairs, up to the wide roadway-like top of the outer wall. It took a few moments for her to catch her breath and gather her bearings, long enough for her to locate the General and Master Targon.
In her cloak, with the hood up, no one bothered to acknowledge her, much less direct her. This was fine with her. She didn’t want to distract the men. Looking around at them, she decided that she could have come up to the top completely naked, and not a one of them would have been able to peal their eyes away from what was holding their attention.
When she gained the side of her advisers, she was finally close enough to see for herself. Out and down from her vantage, standing boldly, within bow range, row upon row of soldiers stood in perfect formations. Thousands of men, among them huge ladder towers, and great battering rams, stood at the ready. Catapults, and wagon loads of head-size boulders for ammunition, were spread evenly just out of bow shot, in a row parallel to the wall.
“Look,” General Spyra pointed down, and then helped the Queen lean out past the arrow crenellations, to see what it was he was trying to show her.
Below them, and a bit to the right, directly in front of that particular set of gates, stood half a dozen soldiers at attention. They had so many arrows sticking out of them, that they resembled porcupines, yet none of them had fallen. In front of them, was a pyramid stack of three barrel kegs.
“What of the other gates?” Willa asked.
She felt as if she were sinking in sand, and had the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders.
“The same,” Spyra answered, with little or no emotion in his voice. “Around ten thousand men, who are unhindered by our arrows, and ready to set all of the outer gates on fire with those casks of oil.”
“Curse the gods of the heavens and earth,” Willa said to herself, fingering the horn that she had snatched from her bedside table as she left her room.
Just then, a small, mule drawn wagon, pulling a load of supplies up one of the long, slow sloping ramps that ran on the inside of the wall, broke free from its tethers. Men shouted, and screamed to make way, as the cart wobbled, and scraped against the wall on its unhindered way down the ramp. Men dove and leapt out of its way, as it gained careening speed, then smashed into the next mule cart, which was halfway up the slope. A man, and a mule were crushed to death, and a few men were injured from the tumbles they took, while trying to avoid a direct hit.
Queen Willa decided not to mock the gods anymore, and also decided that never in all of her life had she felt more helpless than she did just then.
“What is it that you and Hyden Hawk have come up with?” she asked Targon, with her last bit of hope hanging in the balance.
“There is a plan,” Targon answered, with a doubtful look on his face. “But it cannot even be started until he returns.”
