The clouds were covering the sky now, blotting the sun from view, and in the sudden gloom Ilberd saw Battlemaster Ilnbright striding up to the king. Wisps of white hair blew in the breeze on both their heads, and Ilberd suddenly realized how old these men were. They’d stood on fields like this one forty years ago, and more.
And they were still alive.
He was grinning at that, heart suddenly lighter, when his thoughts fell upon a new idea. Just how many other eager young men had stood with them then who weren’t alive to stand there now?
It was three grim, weary hours later when Battlemaster Ilnbright fell, roaring to his last breath, under a cloak of struggling, scrambling goblins. Ilberd himself hewed down the last of them, tears of rage and grief temporarily blinding him.
When he looked up, it was to see perhaps sixty men still standing around him or sitting wearily on the ground, some groaning from their wounds.
The field below the hill was knee deep in dead goblins. They were heaped head-high in some places. Still, a fresh wave, a thousand strong or more, was trotting out from behind the hill where the dragon lay sprawled at ease.
“That’s it,” someone said quietly. “We’re doomed.”
“What?” someone else growled. “And not have a chance to take some of these home to Malaeve so she can try her recipe for goblin stew?”
No one bothered to laugh, but there were a few silent smiles as men took up blades and worked aching arms in slow swings, waiting for death to come up the hill and snatch them down.
“For Cormyr,” someone whispered, almost as if it were a prayer.
“For Cormyr,” a dozen throats muttered in response. With something like wonder, Ilberd discovered that his own voice had been one of them.
Somehow they’d withstood that wave, the exhausted and blood-drenched few on the hilltop, though one lionar lay twisting and sobbing, his guts on the grass around him, pleading to someone-anyone-to cut his throat and end the pain.
King Azoun took a flask from his belt and put it to the man’s lips. The healing potion did not close the grisly wound, but the pain faded from the warrior’s face, and the king put one arm around his shoulders to help him stand. They were standing together grimly, knowing how little time they had left to live, when the thunder began.
Men looked up at the scudding gray clouds, racing across the sky as if in haste to be elsewhere but as endless as the swarming goblins. No lightning split that sky, and no rain fell. Could the dragon be working a spell? Or was this the work of the royal magician?
Ilberd glanced along the hill at Vangerdahast, who’d lain on his stomach murmuring spells and reading scrolls aloud for most of the day. He’d been wreaking great havoc among distant goblins but took no part in the hewing on the hilltop. If the strength of Cormyr on this hilltop shrank to any less, the young swordlord thought grimly, the wizard might not have any choice about fighting with blade and boots when the next wave came.
The thunder deepened, becoming a steady sound, and louder. The Devil Dragon was on her feet now, twisting around to look behind her. She sprang into the air with a ripple of powerful shoulders, great batlike wings beating once before she plunged down in a pounce on something out of sight, behind the hill.
Someone near Ilberd muttered, “The elves, come again? That can’t be…”
The thunder swept around the hill, driving a red foam of shrieking, spitted goblins before it before they were trampled and ridden down. Purple Dragon banners flapped above the riders. They raised their swords in a shouted salute to the king, then they crashed into the goblins between the hills.
“Gwennath,” Azoun said quietly. “Thank all the watching gods-Tymora most of all-that I’ve a marshal who knows when to disobey orders.”
“She’s emptied High Horn!” a war captain bellowed joyously. “See the banners-they’re all here!” He burst into unashamed tears, not caring if half the world saw his mustache dripping.
A figure in black armor rode at the head of that thundering mass of knights-a figure that raised one slender arm to Azoun as the riders swept past up the valley, driving the helpless goblins before them.
Azoun returned the salute, and laughed in delight.
He was still laughing when the gigantic red dragon swirled into view around the hill, clawing and biting as she roared past mere feet above the heads of the High Horn cavalry, and plunged down on the front ranks of the galloping Cormyreans, biting and clawing.
When she rose from the confusion of rolling, screaming horses and shouting men, jaws dripping with gore, the dark-armored figure could not be seen. When the wyrm turned in the air and breathed fire along that line of death, nothing but dark-armored figures could be seen, toppling amid the smoke.
“So passes Gwennath, Lady-Lord High Marshal of Cormyr,” a knight beside Ilberd murmured. “Who rode all the way from High Horn to win this battle for us-and lose her own life.”
“Win it?” someone else growled. “Forgive me if my eyes fail, but I seem to see a dragon…”
The Devil Dragon turned in the air with indolent grace and plunged down upon the cavalry, taking them in the rear just as they had done to the goblins. She skidded along, shaking the ground in fresh thunder with the force of her passage, and snapping her jaws like a dog ridding itself of stinging flies. A bloody cloud trailed from her as she swept her foes in a terrible tangle down the battlefield, leaving a long, bloody smear.
When their heaped, shattered corpses brought her to a halt at last, she bounded aloft again, scattering those who tried to hurl lances at her with a sweep of a mighty tail. She circled, looking down at those she was going to slay at her next pass. Or the next one.
Gwennath may have been dead, but she’d left one last trick for her slayer. The great red dragon had barely begun her dive down at the cavalry when there was a flash from within its close-packed ranks, then another.
“That’s magic!” someone on the hilltop shouted.
“Lord Wizard?” someone else barked. Vangerdahast peered, and kept peering, and said simply, “Aye. Magic.”
They stood and watched as the dragon came down, large and terrible in the sky-unmoving, claws outstretched and mouth agape as the ground rushed up, her eyes rolling wildly at the last.
“It’s spellbound!” someone cried excitedly, as horsemen scattered in the valley below.
The dragon crashed headfirst into the valley.
The ground shook, and many of the men on the hill fell as the ground quivered under them. Those who kept their footing saw men and their mounts cartwheeling helplessly through the air in the vale below, twisting in agony and despair, and vain attempts to catch hold of something in the roaring chaos that engulfed them.
The ground shook for a long, groaning time. The stiff-winged wyrm slid along like a giant plough, choking out a cry that sounded very like a human woman sobbing, as it helplessly hurled a great cloud of dust and dirt at the sky in its wake.
Clods of earth rained down on the hillside, and men swore in awe and threw up their hands-too late-to shield their eyes. The earth itself seemed to groan and echo its complaint back from the hills around, as at last the Devil Dragon came to a halt.
A horn sounded even before the great wyrm stopped moving, and lancers in the valley below spurred their mounts forward in a charge that ended at those curving scales as they milled around, thrusting and hurling for all their might.
The dragon surged as her assailants raged around her, heaving herself up once, twice, then twisting and rolling over on her side among screaming horses and sprinting men. She thrashed, flailed, then shook herself all over, hurling bodies like broken dolls in all directions, and righted herself.
Ilberd could have sworn the Devil Dragon was wearing a grim look as she flapped her wings, bowling over men and horses like so many toys and clearing a wide area around herself. She reared up and beat her wings in earnest, then, faltering only once. When she took to the air, she was not quite free of the magic, and her wavering flight was straight to her hilltop, to a crashing, heavy landing.