Page 112 of Fortune's Blade

And even weirder, none of them were transforming and following us.

“Why aren’t they changing?” Louis-Cesare yelled.

I was about to say I didn’t know, but suddenly, I did. “Claire! She’s a null witch!”

“Can she stop all of them?”

“Guess so!”

But for how long, I didn’t know. Claire had a gift from her mother, who had been a human witch, that allowed her to suck all of the magic out of an area. And despite Regin claiming that magic was rare among dragons, he meant Claire’s kind. Because they were all magical beings who used their own version every single day.

Unless a null witch was clamping down on it, that was, and clamping hard.

Thank you, Claire, I thought fervently, and only hoped that she could keep it up long enough for us to get away and then follow us. Although the latter might be a problem. Because Antem had just noticed that he had someone on his tail and panicked, tearing across the sky like a shooting star.

I felt my eyes widen, my thighs clench and my throat dry out, because I damned well knew what came next—

And oh, fuuuuuuckkkkkk!

But Louis-Cesare had one arm around my waist, and Regin’s mane in the opposite fist—or Lar’s, I supposed, since his dragon was most definitely in charge now. And was headed after his son with the sinuous grace that I’d noted last night, which did nothing to make me feel less like I was clinging to the wing of a 747.

God, I hated flying!

But Louis-Cesare did not, and once he realized that no one was coming after us, he actually laughed. And started to make a whooping noise, which so help me God! I elbowed him in the stomach, and the joyful expression cut off to allow us to hear Regin’s transformed voice, which was cutting through the wind as easily as his wings.

“We will secure my son,” he told us. “And his information. Then, together we will go after your sister. Do you find this acceptable?”

I looked at Louis-Cesare, who looked back at me. And then we slowly grinned, although our lips were flapping back against our faces so much that you couldn’t really tell. But I felt the arm around my waist tighten, and the sparkle return to a pair of blue eyes, even before he spoke.

“Now that sounds like a plan!”

“Good, then hold on,” Regin said. “I am going to fly fast now.”

“Fast?” I said. “W-what have you been doing?”

I didn’t get an answer that time. I got a demonstration. And Louis-Cesare, goddamn him, was whooping up a storm the entire way.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Dorina

I did not sleep, but Raymond did, hugging me tightly from behind, utterly exhausted from the day we’d had. I tried to get up after I was sure that he was out, but he mumbled something and tightened his grip, pulling me further back against him. And I knew he would wake if I forced the issue.

And I did not want him to wake.

Raymond was loyal and good and often kind, but he had a temper, and it had been tested enough today. I needed information not a fight, and I did not think that I would get it if he came along. Of course, I wasn’t sure that I would do any better myself, with my nerves every bit as frazzled as his.

Perhaps there was a better way.

I waited until he settled down again, then mentally snagged the ogre who was still helping the guards to hold the door shut. He did not run screaming like the first one I’d snared, perhaps because he was very drunk, and very focused on finding another flagon. I released the other two, who stood there, blinking in confusion, and peeled him away.

He would not be easy to control without a drink, so stop number one was the Great Hall, where the party was over except for a few unconscious types snoring under tables or slumped against walls. And the only ale to be had was dripping from spilled tankards and puddling on flagstones. But the ogre was crafty and he headed for the kitchens, where he grabbed a small barrel for the road when the pixies weren’t looking.

Only that road wasn’t headed to a pile of his brothers in a dark cubbyhole, where he had been planning to sleep. Instead, I steered him after the faint scent of Mircea’s cologne, which his nose picked up as well as mine could have. We followed the trail like a bloodhound along intersecting corridors, up long flights of too high stairs and then down even more for this place was a maze.

It also reminded me of a patchwork cloak, looking as if it had been built by many different species over the centuries, with different needs. We left the rough, rock and timber construction and oversized everything of the giants’ area and passed into a corridor with red brick walls and low archways lining a central hall, which gleamed with the light of many furnaces. My nose twitched from the familiar smells of a blacksmith’s shop: coal, hot metal, leather, sweat and finishing oil, and the nose twitching reek of past fires that had soaked into the very walls.

I remembered the smell, but had forgotten the heat, so intense in places that the air shimmered in front of us. It was cooler where the walls blunted it and gave us brief moments of relief, and blazingly hot when we passed open arches and got hit by new blasts. I glimpsed anvils inside as we scurried by, so large that they were being worked by five or six blacksmiths at a time, their hammer blows striking rhythmically even this late into the night. They were manned by the duergars that populated this area and who stared at us, their faces closed and secretive under their ever-present hoods, as we passed.