The army he could raise would roll over neighboring kingdoms if they fought against him. Or, he could simply use the same tactics that he had so far. Either way, he’d soon rule a vast empire.
With all that in mind, I reverted to the core of his problem. He had stalled his conquests while projecting the image of a little girl for more than a month as she walked, slept, talked, and was one of us. One of four. Flier, Avery, and Elizabeth came later. He had joined with Anna, Kendra, and me.
Logic ruled out Anna. She was a convenient child to use as a shield to hide behind. Anna was outspoken while the image of Emma was quiet, always watching and listening. That left Kendra and me.
I glanced at Emma, who wore a faint smile directed at me as if she or he knew my thoughts. I reached out with my mind and raised some sand into the air and used a breath of wind to push it at her. The grains clearly entered and exited her projected body. Then they flew off in random directions and disappeared. I hadn’t made the sand do that. The smile on the image increased.
The Young Mage knew of my small-magic. He had shunted it aside as a lesson and warning.
It was not me he was scared of.
So, it had to be Kendra.
The Young Mage had to be scared of Kendra. That is what he was hiding. I reached out to Anna. *He is scared of Kendra.*
*No.*
Her answer dumbfounded me. I’d followed a completely logical chain of thought, and a ten-year-old challenged it? I believed I’d managed to figure out something important and shot back at her, *No? Why not?*
*It’s the dragon.*
My fury evaporated like morning fog on a summer day. Anna was right again. It was not Kendra, but the dragon he feared. To complicate matters, he needed the Essence of the dragon for his magic to work—or so we believed.
If he did not, it was like a new hand being dealt with a game of blocks. We wouldn’t know the outcome until the hand was played.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Princess Elizabeth
We sat at the campfire in a circle facing each other, but all eyes were on me, their princess as if I could solve the problem of the Young Mage. Damon looked both scared and angry. Anna watched him too, but so did the fake Emma, so all eyes were not on me after all, but they all waited patiently to hear my next words. What were we going to do, they wanted to know? How could I tell them anything of value with the apparition sitting directly in front of me, listening?
Anna edged closer to Damon, her eyes nearly glazed with fear.
Flier said, “What’s happening?”
His attention had also turned to Damon, and the Slave-Master did too. Instead of waiting for my decision, they all looked at him. I shifted to look his way.
Damon looked at none of us. He looked at the thing we called Emma with unwavering concentration. Hate filled his face. He pointed at it and said, “You need to explain.”
The image of Emma spat, her eyes focused as hard on Damon as his were on her.
Damon said, “It does not have to be this way.”
“You don’t know anything,” the false-Emma shouted.
“I know a few things. One is that you’re scared, maybe for the first time in your existence. You want to stop us from reaching Kaon. That is your goal.”
“I just want to kill you.”
Damon didn’t flinch at the venom in the words. Instead, he moved a step closer and said, “Before you can do that, Kendra will call on her dragon and send it your way. It will find you. It has been searching for you this whole time.”
There was a long pause. Then the voice of Emma said, “How did you figure that out?”
“I didn’t, but you’re not scared of anyone here, yet you traveled with us and tried to prevent us from reaching here. You tried to stop us from leaving Trager, and then at Vin, you had the army trying to stop us, but you were a little too late. So, they attacked us after we left Vin and then again when we were closer to Dagger.”
“Why?” Kendra asked in a whisper.
Damon continued, “You tried to stop us and then when that didn’t work, you tried to get us to go anywhere but to Kaon. You even had us captured to be sold in Kaon, but we would never have lived that long to reach the auctions. You had Princess Elizabeth taken to Dagger, so we would follow her there and try to rescue her.”
The thing that was Emma shimmered as if losing power and it said, “We can make a deal. I’ll let all of you go free. Go back to Dire where you belong.”
“No deals,” Damon snapped.
How he managed to speak for all of us without consulting us was a mystery to me. For me, at that time, going home seemed a deal worth considering. He had taken charge and acted as I would have wanted—or wanted myself to act. He never asked permission, he simply did what was right and we allowed him to continue. He moved another step closer and waited.
Damon said, “You’re made of smoke and imagination. You can’t hurt us.”
Emma threw back her head and laughed so long and hard it changed from laughter to a continuous screech. I wanted to cover my ears. Then it ceased as quickly as it began. “You’re right and wrong.”
“Don’t play with words,” Damon said.
“There are other ways to hurt you. Flier, it was so convenient of you to tell me where your family is on that farm beside the sea. Yesterday I sent a small Vin army to gather them and bring them to Kaon. And Princess, the servant for the Heir Apparent is being held near here, a knife at his throat by one of my trusted associates.”
Damon said, “Kendra direct your dragon to Kaon. Do it now.”
The image of Emma smiled. “I watched two small boys playing this game one time. Each threw a knife near the other’s feet, daring him to flinch.”
“And?” Damon asked when Emma quit talking.
“One boy got a nasty knife wound in his toe.”
I hated to admit it to myself, but Emma was right. Both of us had made their threats, and one would flinch, or be hurt. There seemed no way out.
However, the entire conversation had the “feel” of two boys roughhousing. Perhaps the story the Young Mage had told about the boys with the knife shifted my thinking in that direction. No matter the reason, my impression was that the Young Mage was properly named. The thought of a mage under the age of twenty with special magical powers filled me with fear.
Boys that age are often filled with hormones that rage through their bodies. They will listen to no one, do as they think, and fear nothing. They rail against any who disagree.
My father has set an age limit on recruits for the Royal Army of Dire, as had almost all armies, he said as he leaned closer as if to reveal one of the great secrets of the world. “Those under twenty-three or four will accept orders to charge right into the face of a superior force, believing they will survive because they are immortal. They cannot be hurt. However, those over twenty-five will stop and think. They’ll tell their captains and lieutenants, ‘Hey, let’s think about this.’”
My father was right. All wars are fought by young men and boys, never by those old enough to fear death. Those older had achieved enough rank to be trainers or to order others to attack while they observed.