Chapter One
Dimension: Tarakona
Date: About a week ago
Barnabas Courtier knocked three times on the door near the end of the rubbishy alley between Valiant City’s sketchiest purveyor of enchanted marital aids and a tavern of some sort. Loud music and revelry from the tavern indicated that the Night of the Grape celebration was in full swing. After a pause, Barnabas knocked again, examining his gloves to see if the soot-covered door had left a mark. Clearly a fire had raged in this alley at some point, but not long enough to cleanse it.
Clunks and rattles behind the door indicated a response would soon ensue. The door cracked open, and a dirty, hairy face peered out at him. “Whozit?”
“I believe the password is the cow lows at midnight,” he said. “It is the Night of the Grape, and I’m here for Mistress Harcourt.”
“She’s not in,” the elderly man said. “Go away.”
How could she not be in? This was the night—the night toward which he and Mistress Harcourt had been planning for over a year.
“Check again.” He allowed a talisman to fall through the neck of his unbuttoned greatcoat, in hopes of intimidating the man with the sign of his wizard status.
“Don’t have to,” the man said. “Never heard of nobody by that name.”
Everyone in Valiant Province and beyond had heard of Mistress Harcourt. This poor human was addled. Or deceitful. Barnabas was leaning toward deceitful. “You just said she wasn’t in. Therefore it follows that you know someone by that name.”
The man squinted balefully. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but ain’t nobody here but me.”
When the man made as if to close the door, Barnabas placed his gloved hand on it and exerted some of his considerable strength. He might be a wizard and a scholar, but he kept himself in shape. He never knew when he might have to engage a bout of fisticuffs on a mission.
“She also goes by Spymaster,” Barnabas explained, preventing the man from slamming the door in his face, “and I would appreciate it if you could fetch her for me, my good man. We have an appointment.”
The man gave up shoving the door and spat through the crack. It landed next to Barnabas’s shoe. “Ain’t heard of no appointments.”
“Who’s at the door?” a heavily accented feminine voice from inside the building called. “The delivery boy from Mickmack’s?”
The man looked at Barnabas skeptically, starting at his top hat and ending at the leather shoes that would require a great deal of polishing to restore to their proper finish. “Some wizardy ponce asking for a Mistress Harcourt. Reckon he’s lost.”
“Well, shit.” The accent of the woman inside the building changed, from Lower Street to High Court. “Alfred, don’t just stand there. Show the man in.”
The recalcitrant butler, or whatever he was, grudgingly stepped aside, allowing Barnabas access to Mistress Harcourt’s establishment. It was not what Barnabas had been led to expect when he had enlisted her help in achieving a long-standing goal. However, when negotiating with humans, you had to be especially careful not to allow their weaknesses to distract you from their inventiveness.
Humans in a world ruled by wizards and dragons had to be plenty inventive to thrive, and Barnabas did not begrudge them their foibles. He, too, had been human once—as had they all.
He had to stoop to enter Mistress Harcourt’s parlor, the low ceiling liberally festooned with charms, chains, curse dolls, and other paraphernalia. He paused briefly to wonder about the poor soul who’d been stabbed through the head by a nail, but that wasn’t why he was here.
He was here to rescue the silver dragon—at last.
Barnabas removed his silk top hat and bowed deeply to the Spymaster of Valiant Province. “Mistress Harcourt, I am here to enact the final stage of the operation. Freedom be to you, and to all.”
The woman rose from her upholstered recliner and adjusted her headscarf. Large earrings dangled from her ears, and curls of grey hair escaped from the wrapped cloth. Her garments, a simple tunic and trousers, glistened with gold thread. Mistress Harcourt’s lodgings were in the dingiest part of the city, but she had spared no expense in her clothing.
“The Honorable Barnabas Courtier,” the woman said, inclining her head. Multiple doors indicated that this rat’s nest had many escape routes, many ways for Mistress Harcourt’s network to deliver their reports. “At last, we meet. Do you have the final payment?”
“Of course.” Barnabas removed a pouch of coins from a greatcoat pocket and handed it over. Excitement such as he rarely experienced buzzed through him now that the climax of his mission approached. He felt positively invigorated—almost as if he could do magic on his own. “Are the players in motion?”
When Barnabas had been a young wizard, newly come into his variant, his parents had been ecstatic. They had been human variants, and most parents hoped for their offspring to morph into wizards. All children, no matter their parentage, were human until puberty, at which point they became one of three variants. Wizards in Tarakona had the most power—socially, hierarchically, and literally. A wizard in the family meant an easier life for everyone.
A dragon in the family meant something else altogether. Something darker and less savory. Something that Barnabas, a wizard scholar by trade, and the Dragon Liberation Front—the DLF—were devoting themselves to upending.
He was also, personally, devoting himself to the rescue of the singular silver dragon, whose magic allotted her wizard too much supremacy. Silver dragons, the rarest of all dragons, conferred upon a wizard the power of prophecy. Her Grace Victoria the Valiant, the governor of Province Valiant, was not using that power to do good.
Mistress Harcourt opened the pouch and shook a few coins into her hand, checking them for authenticity. The coins danced over her knuckles before disappearing. “You’ll be wanting to know about the girl.”
“The dragon,” he corrected. “Nadia Silver. Victoria can no longer be allowed to abuse the power of the silver dragon to—”
“To make our province the richest and most influential in all of Tarakona? It’s a crime, I tell you,” Mistress Harcourt said. “But you have paid me well, Your Honor, and I owe you an explanation.”
Barnabas straightened to his full height. Without a dragon, a wizard had no more power than a human, unless he had talismans. And what wizard would walk into a literal den of thieves without at least a talisman? “Explanation? You owe me a dragon rescue. Where is the girl?”
For over a year, he and Mistress Harcourt had formulated an intricate plan to use her network of humans in Castle Valiant to rescue Nadia Silver from Governor Victoria. Some wizards engaged a single dragon, while others collected various types if they could afford it.
Nadia had been part of Victoria’s prodigious stable since she had morphed into a dragon. Several years ago, the governor had begun to abuse the girl’s power of prophecy to harry other provinces, jeopardizing Tarakona’s stability.
But tonight, the culmination of Harvest Week, was the night Barnabas had worked toward for so long. Security in the palace would be at its most lax, and drunkenness would be would be at its most flagrant.
“About that.” Mistress Harcourt fingered one of her large shiny earrings and wouldn’t meet his eyes. “It appears the girl has already flown the coop.”
Barnabas couldn’t help it. As a wizard, he was not used to being disobeyed. So he yelled, “What?”
It was not effective. Mistress Harcourt waved a hand in the air, as if flapping away his outrage. “I’m ashamed to admit it, Your Honor, as I pride myself on knowing everything about everyone. But it appears someone else had the notion to sneak into the palace on the Night of the Grape and snatch the dragon, and they did it before my people could.”
“You confirmed this how?” He clutched a talisman, not caring that she saw the gesture. The transportation talisman could be used to harm if he conveyed someone fifty feet into the air and let them drop.
Harcourt had the grace to look a little worried by his anger. “We did enact the plan, Your Honor. The palace was all asunder. The girl was missing, and no one had any idea where she’d gone. Her Grace Victoria is in a rage, and my people barely escaped the castle. Apparently the girl disappeared at some point this afternoon when she was supposed to be preparing for tonight’s festivities.”
“But how would she negate the thrall crystal?” Barnabas asked. Dragons, to the shame of all who dwelled in Tarakona, had tiny, enchanted crystals implanted in their bodies. Those crystals allowed the dragons to be controlled by wizards. Allowed the wizards to drain the dragons’ power as they desired, whether the dragon agreed or not. Otherwise the dragons could shift into their winged form and fly away. People in this dimension had only begun rudimentary explorations into aircrafts and would have little chance of chasing down a free dragon who was determined not to be caught.
“I suppose by whatever method you thought you could negate the thrall crystal,” Mistress Harcourt said, raising her eyebrows. “Which was…?”
“I cannot reveal all my secrets, human,” he said gruffly. Wizards linked to purple and green dragons implanted the crystals, and he’d obtained a talisman the DLF healers believed could be used to find and remove them. It would be hasty and uncomfortable for the lass, but he had required an immediate way to prevent the silver dragon from being tracked.
To keep Victoria the Valiant from taking over province after province until she made herself a Supreme Ruler of the land.
To give the silver dragon her freedom.
To possibly, hopefully, enlist the girl in the DLF, with him as her partner. Her protector. Together they could supplement the operations of the liberators to a level that would make dragons rejoice and arrogant wizards across the land tremble with fear.
“This is what we will do. Send your people to find where the dragon has gone,” he ordered Mistress Harcourt. “Immediately.”
The old lady cackled and sank back into her chair. “Do you think I’m daft, boy? That I haven’t already sent out runners?”
He clasped his hands behind his back so he wouldn’t be as tempted to use a talisman on her. He had paid the spymaster so much coin, and for what? “And what is the word?”
“The word is she’s disappeared. Nobody knows how she got out. In fact, she might be dead. In her chambers, my people found evidence of a struggle.”
Mistress Harcourt rang a bell beside her chair, and one of the doors opened. A dirty, pre-variant child ran into the room. “Yes, Mistress?”
“Get me the cloth,” she told him. “Don’t touch it with your bare hands.”
The child scampered out and returned almost immediately with a scarf of fluttering, diaphanous silk, like the gowns in which Victoria liked to dress her dragons in their human forms. It was splattered with red. The child offered it to Barnabas via a pair of tongs.
He took the tongs, inspecting the beautiful but deadly garment.
“This is the dragon’s blood?” Barnabas asked sharply. “Did they soak up all of it?”
The child shook his head. “No, it’s not all. Nearly caught us, they did. Lucky we were, to get most of it.”
Fresh blood could be used to track someone, though tracking and controlling were two different things. With this, the silver dragon’s blood, he could find her.
But so could others, if they had enough blood.
“I will require a refund of my final payment,” he informed Mistress Harcourt. “The original amount was to include the dragon herself, so that she could be taken to safety.”
“The original amount was to free the dragon,” Mistress Harcourt argued. “She’s free, isn’t she?”
Barnabas was tired of haggling and needed to make haste. “We do not know. She could have been kidnapped by a rival wizard. It’s been attempted before.”
“I’ll find out soon enough if that’s the case, and we’ll try again,” Mistress Harcourt coaxed. “I’ll only charge a portion of the original fee.”
He held out his hand. He would need the money to hire a blood wizard with an iron dragon. He knew just the pair, who played any side of the fence somebody would pay them to run along—and the dragon was the smarter of the two. He made it a point to patronize wizards who believed in equality with their dragons, after all. “The pouch, please.”
“Do you know how much my business is going to suffer now that the governor doesn’t have her silver anymore?” Mistress Harcourt protested. “Why, whenever my people overheard prophecies, it increased my profits by leaps.”
“Then you may keep the coin you hid in your sleeve as payment for the bloody scarf,” he said. “You are familiar with wizards, are you not? And the powers to which we have access? Do not make me lose my temper.”
He wouldn’t, of course, despite raising his voice once today. He did not lose his temper. He did not lose control. He did not lose—and he was putting that characteristic and his scholarly mind to good use with the DLF. Slowly but surely.
He had intended to put his legendary control to good use in rescuing the silver dragon, easing her through her transition into a free life, and instilling in her the urgency of the DLF mission. But first he had to find her—and he had to do it before Her Grace Victoria the Valiant did. He would die before he’d let the silver dragon become a tool for Tarakona’s oppressors again.