Master at Arms (Dragon Knights #2.5)

  Dedication

  To my family and fans, in equal measure. Both are my main source of inspiration, support and happiness.

  Prologue

  Faedric! Get out of there! Rath shouted into his new partner’s mind. Faedric was fighting with too little skill against an enemy that vastly outnumbered the knight, even with his dragon backing him up.

  “The king!” Faedric shouted, too caught up in the heat of battle to project his thoughts to his dragon partner, but Rath heard him anyway. Rath’s heart plummeted. The king was down there in the melee that had suddenly erupted on a narrow city street.

  Rath folded his wings against his sides and charged downward like an arrow—an arrow with big, sharp teeth and the ability to breathe fire. He aimed his trajectory for his knight who—to his credit—was fighting his way to the king’s side.

  Old King Jon was a good and just king who had done much for his land, but he had enemies. Draconia was rich in natural resources and its neighbors were not nearly as peaceful as the inhabitants of this fertile land. The king and his large family had come under fire many times, but this time…this time was different.

  He’d been ambushed in the heart of Castleton—the city beneath his towering castle. Caught unprepared on the ground by a superior force, with only three knights and no dragons at his side.

  Worse, the king would not shapeshift into the dragon that shared his soul because his mate was there, on the street, with him. Rath knew King Jon would never leave his wife unprotected, and the attackers were too numerous, and too close, to allow him to defend her in dragon form.

  But Rath could help. If he could just get down there in one piece.

  Of all the dragons beginning to swarm above, only Rath dared the narrow city street and the hazards between the tightly packed buildings. He was an excellent flyer and more agile than the others who were racing to answer the king’s call. He hit the ground with his sharp claws, slipping a little on the cobblestones, but he would not let the hard conditions deter him.

  He’d had to land down the street from the knot of fighters. The enemy had chosen their spot well. Only a few places in the old city of Castleton remained where a dragon could not easily land or maneuver.

  The king and queen had gone to a merchant’s shop on one of the older streets. The king had commissioned a surprise for his wife on the occasion of their wedding anniversary and had decided to take her into the city as part of the special celebration. It had been a spur-of-the-moment trip and he’d taken minimal protection with him—only the knights who had been stationed outside the royal chambers as honor guard.

  The dragons who partnered with those three knights had been relegated to flying above or perching on rooftops as the small, royal party made their way over ground. As a result, Rath had been too far away to help when the trap had been sprung around the king and queen.

  Swords clashed and clanged as Rath used his foreclaws to tear attackers out of his path. He couldn’t flame down here among the buildings unless he wanted to start an inferno that would kill hundreds of innocent citizens. That left his teeth and claws. And the swords of the knights who had been with the royal couple.

  Faedric was young. Ill trained. He was not a swordsman. Not yet. Rath worried as he tossed assailants—too many of them—out of his path.

  Other dragons were arriving, following his perilous path downward toward the street with mixed results. A few of the smaller ones had made it down safely and were following his example, following right behind Rath or approaching from the other side of the bottleneck.

  Several other dragons screamed in pain as they failed to find a safe path down to the street and fell hard, breaking bones and crushing parts of buildings and street lamps. Rath worried anew as he worked his way closer to the king.

  There were two older knights who were acquitting themselves well with their swords as they fought back to back to back with the king and poor Faedric, keeping the queen at the center of their small group. The king fought valiantly alongside his knights and they all had to know—as Rath did—that Faedric was the weakest point in their defense.

  Even as Rath watched in horror from too far away, Faedric fell.

  Everything happened in slow motion as Rath watched, feeling Faedric’s pain as if it was his own. Then the queen screamed as blood pulsed red around the knife sticking out of her chest. She had been stuck through the heart.

  The king, seeing his beloved wife fall, turned and was run through the neck by one of the assassins. The two knights tried to help, killing those who had struck the king and queen, but they could not last long against such overwhelming odds. They too were struck down.

  As Rath made his way to the pile of the fallen, he slashed out, killing all in his path. His talons were stained with the blood of the enemy, but it was not enough. It would never be enough to bring back Faedric. Or the king and queen.

  Dear Mother of All. The king and queen!

  Rath howled his pain to the heavens as he realized they were both dead.

  All dead. The royal couple. The two older knights. Faedric.

  Rath’s pain knew no bounds. He crouched protectively over the pile of bodies as the other dragons took out their anger, sorrow and pain on the remaining assassins. The street ran red with blood. Blood of the enemy. Blood of friends.

  Not one of the attackers lived to tell the tale and the air was filled with the roars and cries of dragons. The sound of despair. The feel of anger and mourning.

  Rath felt the pain of loss and the guilt he would bear for the rest of his long life for choosing a man who had not been ready to defend the king and queen…or even himself.

  Chapter One

  Golgorath was an old dragon. Not past his prime, but old enough to have taken more than one knight as his partner. The last had died before his time, in a battle he had been ill-prepared to fight. Rath blamed himself for picking Faedric for the goodness of his heart alone, thinking that the young man would have time to learn the warrior’s skills he’d need. The guilt Rath had felt over his misjudgment sent him into seclusion for decades.

  When he came out of self-imposed exile, Rath had decided to wait for the right man to be his next knight. That man, he decided, had to have both the pure and true heart worthy of being a knight and the skills of an expert warrior. Rath didn’t want to go through the kind of loss he’d experienced with Faedric again.

  Nor did he want to put his mate, Sharlis, through it. She was an excellent female and together they had raised five wonderful dragon children and been second-parents to over twenty human offspring. Theirs had been a long and fruitful union and he looked forward to the day that he found the right man to partner him, so he could reclaim his mate.

  Sharlis had already chosen a knight. Thorn was a newly appointed Weaponsmaster of the Border Lair. He was good enough to teach the other knights about archery and spear. No one in the new Border Lair could match his skill with long-range weapons, which were a knight’s first line of defense when on dragon back. In fact, few in the kingdom could best him with either longbow or crossbow.

  Sharlis and Thorn had been fighting partners now for almost ten years. Golgorath was impatient to find his own knight so those two men could begin the search for their mate. Only after the men had found a woman to share their lives and passions would the dragons be free to consummate their lifelong bond once again. For if a dragon bonded with a knight, the bond was so close that the dragon’s passion spilled over into his or her knight.

  Only the deep abiding love and acceptance of a mate could sate the passion the dragons inspired in their knights. No other woman would do. A casual sex partner would not satisfy the need and could drive the knights ins
ane from the emotional overload.

  Long ago, it had been decreed that fighting dragons who bonded with knights must abstain to protect their human fighting partners until the knights had a mate of their own. Only then could the whole family—dragon and human—all be happy and safe.

  To be near his mate and some of their offspring, Rath had come to the Border Lair and agreed to teach the younger dragons flying techniques he had perfected over his centuries. Rath had a certain aerodynamic shape to his wings and superior tail control that made him one of the best flyers in the kingdom. He shared those skills that could be learned, freely with the other dragons, and always had. He was not one of those to lord it over anyone because he’d been born with a better wingspan than most.

  But he did admit to a certain amount of parental pride in the fact that all of his offspring took after him. They were fierce flyers who had mastered the art of keeping their knights safely on their backs through almost any maneuver. He had schooled them himself and imparted his knowledge on the subject to many fighting pairs over the years.

  Sharlis was just as gifted, and between them, they had been named Flightmasters of the Border Lair. It was an honor he wore with suitable humility. Any time he started to feel full of himself, he remembered that one horrible mistake he’d made in choosing Faedric as his knight. Faedric had been good in the air but abysmal on the ground. He couldn’t heft a sword to save his life—and that’s what it had come down to. His life.

  Caught on the ground, Rath could not protect him completely. If they’d been in the air, Faedric would have lived to fight—or at least lived to learn to fight—another day. But caught on the ground, Faedric had been the next best thing to helpless. And for that, Rath would always bear guilt.

  He should have chosen better. Faedric had a knight’s heart, but not the skill.

  Rath swore this time he would choose a knight fully trained and worthy of the name from day one.

  Rath was one of the first in the air when the call to arms went out. By chance, he had been leading an entire battle wing in an exercise designed to teach the young pairs of dragons and knights to fight together more closely as a cohesive group. They were positioned closest to the area of attack, and though these were all young pairings, they were good fighters who had seen some action in the recent skirmishes.

  The Skithdronian army had been mounting surprise attacks along the border for the past several months. The escalation in border violence was the main reason the king had decided to create a new Lair in this region. It didn’t hurt that there seemed to be a larger than usual number of young dragons choosing knights lately. The surplus of young fighting pairs along with the increase in hostility in this area didn’t bode well for the future. The king and his council had decided to take the rather drastic action of creating a new Lair from scratch, which was quite an undertaking. In fact, it was something that hadn’t been done in generations.

  Unlike the paired dragons, Rath didn’t have to wait for a knight to remount, so he was one of the first on the scene of the latest border crossing. The entire young fighting wing was behind him and would soon be along to help him defeat this latest incursion. For now though, he and two other unpartnered dragons were the first to arrive.

  It was a familiar battleground. The keep was old, and dearly held by one noble family who had already lost their patriarch to the constant incursions onto their land. The Fadoral family was unlucky enough to live on the border with Skithdron. Though many noble families held lands along the border, the Fadoral lands offered one of the easiest border crossings and were therefore, constantly tested.

  Elsewhere along the border, steep cliffs and a wide river caused the invaders much more difficulty. House Fadoral’s holding had many farms with acres of cleared, relatively flat land that offered little natural resistance to the invaders and the Goddess-cursed skiths they drove before them.

  Skiths were evil creatures of magical origin. Much as dragonkind had been nurtured by ancient wizards to protect and guard, the skiths had been created by one rogue wizard—the thrice-cursed Wizard Skir. He and his allies had been defeated in the last great war among wizardkind, but his pets lived on and thrived in the land that was named for them.

  They were massive, snake-like creatures with sharp teeth and voracious appetites. They would eat anything that moved and could cleave a human in two with one fast chomp. They had one other weapon that was good at some distance too—a venomous spray they could spit from their fangs for several yards. The liquid was so acidic, it could even burn through dragon scale.

  For dragons were the skith’s only real opponent. Dragon fire could burn a skith to cinders, but it took time and cunning.

  Rath had polished his skith-hunting skills all too often over the months since they’d been tasked with setting up the new Border Lair. He’d fried dozens of skiths since moving to the border and had no doubt he’d kill many more before this conflict was ended once and for all.

  The only good skith was a dead skith as far as he was concerned, for they had no conscience. No real intelligence either. Not like dragons, who had as complicated a society as their human partners and felt the same emotions. Love, pride, joy and yes, hatred, disgust and anger were all part of the common ground between dragonkind and humanity.

  Skiths, by contrast, had little emotion other than mindless hunger. The all-consuming appetite drove them to hunt and kill at all times. There was no compassion in a skith. No heart. No love. And not much intelligence.

  Rath took stock of the battlefield. It had once been a thriving farm with both an orchard and a shady copse of trees where goats and sheep would graze. That wooded area provided cover for the enemy now, to the disadvantage of the defenders. Some were on horseback, but many of the men at arms were on foot, wearing dusty and damaged armor that had been patched together more than once.

  This small group of defenders had been attacked repeatedly and only recently had the dragons and knights been close enough to come to their aid in any numbers. The battle was already engaged, with more than a dozen skiths sent out before the enemy fighters as a first wave, driven ahead of the men to attack all in their path.

  They were making inroads in the tattered defense, but Rath and his fellow dragons would put an end to that shortly. Flaming carefully as he went, Rath made a first pass to distract the skiths from their human prey. He wanted the creatures to focus on the new threat from above, allowing the men on the ground time to retreat to safety before the dragons could engage the skiths directly.

  In a maneuver he had personally taught to many of the younger dragons, he flamed downward at an angle as he flew past with dangerous accuracy, toasting skiths but not the human fighters who were fleeing to safety. Rath made the first few passes with two other unpartnered dragons but was soon joined in the sky by many bearing knights. The rest of the fighting wing had arrived in good time.

  “Naru and Venri,” he called mentally to the two unpartnered dragons. “Will you come to ground with me and engage directly while the dragons with knights flame from above?”

  “Lead on Flightmaster, I’m with you.” Naru answered readily while Venri positioned himself for another pass.

  Venri was one of Rath’s older sons. Venri had recently come out of mourning for the loss of his first knight partner—a pairing that had lasted more than a century. The first loss was so very hard, Rath remembered from his own experience. Not that losing a fighting partner—a family member—was ever easy, but the first was a deeper learning experience that somehow hurt more because you were unprepared for the intense pain of the loss. At least that was how Rath felt.

  He’d talked long with his son on the subject in the past weeks since Venri had come out of his solitude in the mountains and rejoined the ranks of working dragons. It had been Venri who had volunteered to join his sire at the Border Lair and that had been a proud moment. That his son would want to work alongside him meant a great deal to Rath.

  “I am with you too, Father,” Venri
answered as he finished the pass over the top of the spitting skiths. Flame mostly protected him from the acid, which vaporized when it came in contact with fire.

  “Good. Ven, take the north flank. Naru, take the south. I’ll come down the middle and we three will hold the line while our brothers in the air flame from above.” Quickly communicating his plan to the leaders of the fighting wing now forming ranks in the sky above, Rath led the attack, landing in the center of the cleared space between the human defenders and the vicious, spitting skiths.

  Fighting on the ground was not his favorite thing to do, but in this case, it was the most effective use of resources. Rath knew the young pairs that made up the newly formed fighting wing were unused to fighting together as a unit. Normally an unpartnered dragon like Rath would not dare to lead a mixed group of knights and dragons, but of those present, as Flightmaster, Rath was the highest ranked and most experienced.

  It was his decision to allow the knights to remain aloft, where they would be safest. By having only unpartnered dragons on the ground facing the skiths, those above could freely flame. Their fire would not harm other dragons, but it would fry the skiths. Flame from above as well as below would take the creatures down fastest and with the least amount of danger to human and dragon alike.

  As they put Rath’s plan into motion, a few of the skiths made a break for it. They tried to go backward toward the copse of trees, but whatever the enemy used to herd them was enough of a deterrent to keep them from going back. The line of creatures became ragged as some tried to bolt forward.

  They only had three unpartnered dragons. Rath’s strategy relied on the dragons on the ground being free to bathe in their brethren’s flame without endangering a knight. Three dragons against more than a dozen skiths wasn’t very good odds, but it was all they had to work with.

  Venri and Naru were being pushed farther outward as the line bowed. Rath had one rough moment when a skith got past him, but he was too preoccupied with the remaining creatures to worry about that single rogue at the moment. He flamed constantly, pushing the creatures back with his fire, but he felt the telltale burn of acid on the sensitive spot where wing met body and realized that one rogue skith had gotten behind him.