Dragon Wizard by S. Andrew Swann Read Free Book Online Page B

Your Highness. This is the third.”
    â€œFrom the same town?”
    The guard shook his head. “No. Three different towns. They all arrived in the past hour or so. From the north, east, and west.”
    â€œWhat about the other two? What happened?” I know Lucille had the same worry I did. Had troops already begun to move against Lendowyn? But if it was in response to the attack at the banquet, that reaction would have been impossibly swift. If the refugees were reaching Lendowyn Castle now, the attacks would need to have been within hours of the incident at the Northern Palace. Other kingdoms wouldn’t have had time to receive the news, much less rally an armed response.
    The guard’s explanation was only slightly more plausible. “Dragon attacks,” he said.
    â€œThree towns? He attacked three separate towns in one night?” Lucille’s voice came uncomfortably close to hysteria. “How is that even possible?”
    She had a point. Leveling a village takes some time. I had some trouble imagining how our dragon could pull off a trio of attacks at once.
    Before the guard had a chance to elaborate, someone screamed. Everyone turned in that direction, toward a commotion by the main gates. Next to us, the guard drew his sword.
    By the closed gate, the crowd backed away. One man was being half led, half dragged away. He still screamed, weakly now, cradling his right arm. That arm was blue-white below the elbow, and glittered slightly in the growing dawn light.
    Frozen? What the—
    Lucille turned from the injured man to look at the main gate. Wisps of unnatural fog seeped through, between and beneath the timbers of the gate. As she watched, fans of frost spread across the wood, wrapping it in the same glittery blue-white that had coated the screaming man’s arm. In moments, the gate seemed frozen solid behind a wall of icy fog. Fog that seemed oddly localized and refused to burn off in the dawn sunshine.
    In another few moments, the fog became dense enough to completely hide the gate itself from view. The swirling mists now seemed to be lit from within, the cold blue light source appearing from some place much farther away than the gates immediately behind the fog.
    There was something strangely familiar about it all.
    Lucille stepped forward.

CHAPTER 6

    Please, Lucille, this isn’t a good idea.
    She didn’t listen to me.
    Lucille walked toward the edge of the fog, quickly flanked by every armed guardsman stationed in the courtyard. I still yelled in her head not to step out into the open toward this—whatever it was. However, Lucille’s time as a dragon had made her more assertive—even when it might not have been appropriate.
    Fortunately, while something moved in the fog, we weren’t about to face the evil hordes of the Dark Lord Nâtlac. Not unless the Dark Lord had recently suffered from the same budget constraints that had plagued Lendowyn’s treasury since the kingdom’s inception.
    The fog swirled, wrapping a tunnel leading off to somewhere else. A single shadow slowly appeared through the mists, walking toward us from someplace beyond where the castle gates still stood. As the figure moved toward us, one of the guardsmen stepped in front of Lucille and called out, “Halt! Who approaches? What is your business?”
    The figure stepped out of the fog, and as if cued, the fog itself broke apart and blew away into wisps ofnothing. He stood tall, a stride or two in front of the still-closed gate to Lendowyn Castle. He wore spiked armor of the coldest blue. The dawn light shone off it and through its rippling surface, like ice from the purest lake. The wind blew past him, carrying a chill that fogged our breath and burned the skin.
    I knew him instantly. I don’t think Lucille, or anyone else here, had ever seen him to recognize his face—though the armor made of ice should have been a big clue that he had stepped straight out of