Rise Of The Dragon King (Book 5) Read online

  RISE OF THE

  DRAGON KING

  (DRAGONEER SAGA BOOK FIVE)

  M.R. MATHIAS

  Copyright 2014 Michael Robb Mathias Jr.

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 1499193920

  ISBN 13: 9781499193923

  For Michelle Kinnamon who makes my life better every day she is with me.

  CONTENTS

  PART I: THE BANISHED KING

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PART II: ALONG CAME CLOVER

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART III: A COLOSSAL DEBACLE

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINTEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PART IV: “NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A WIZARD. ANY WIZARD. EVER.” - CLOVER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CRIMZON AND CLOVER I – ORPHANED DRAGON, LUCKY GIRL

  FOXWISE: THE LEGEND OF FOXWISE POSY – THORN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE ABOUT THE TIMELINE OF THIS STORY:

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PART I

  THE BANISHED KING

  CHAPTER ONE

  The banished king had been left on the small landmass known as Serpent’s Isle for eight years, so far. Richard, still King Richard in his own mind’s eye, or Prince Richard, depending on what era his memory was caught up in, had gone somewhat mad in that time, but the sound he was hearing now was no hopeful delusion. A bell was ringing as plainly as the calls of the gulls and pelicans it was irritating.

  Having spent a good deal of his time just lying there and listening, he knew the noise wasn’t coming from anywhere on the island. In fact, over the course of his first two years there, he had literally turned over every stone and investigated every crevice, crack and cavern at least a dozen times. There was nothing here that could make such an unnatural ding over and over again. Nothing.

  The bell, and the steady repetition of its ringing, had a purpose and a meaning, but he had long since forgotten the few rules of seamanship he’d known. His Nightshade had spent the first few months here with him, but then one day it had slid into the sea, and he hadn’t seen it since. After that happened, he stopped thinking like a man and began surviving.

  The realization that it was a ship’s bell he was hearing, and then the more specific recollection that it was the bell mounted at the front of a longboat, caused him to sit up. Each year, just before the cold set in, a sizeable bundle of stores and other necessities had been left on the beach. Maybe he was getting more? Maybe there was a message?

  Long before he’d arrived, Rikky and Zahrellion had fought and killed a terrible serpent here. Some of its bones, and the upper part of its skull, decorated his cave. The two Dragoneers had come to get an antidote to save his life. He was once a Dragoneer, too, and he’d helped save the whole realm. He and his dragon, Royal, had been the best of them.

  The sound of the bell brought him out of his jumbled thoughts.

  He was suddenly very excited. The previous bundles had been left by dragon, he was sure, for there were no marks on the beach around them at all. They had been dropped in the night. More, though, winter wasn’t about to set in. In fact, spring was just getting started, and he still had most of the storables from the previous package put away.

  It was possible they were coming to get him, but even as the thought, and the flood of hope it brought with it, assailed him, his subconscious mind began revealing other, less savory possibilities. After just a few seconds, he then realized there was nothing worse that could happen to him. No words could faze him, unless it was the news that he was leaving this place.

  He was disappointed when he came hurrying out of the cavern he now called home. The fog was so thick, he couldn’t see the hand at the end of his arm.

  The sailors were using the bell, and its echo, to gauge the shoreline.

  Knowing that when the air was saturated with moisture this way he would have to get above the mist to see anything, he started climbing up to the island’s peak. There, he had long since rigged the thickest tree with ladder steps made from wood he’d salvaged from the broken ship in the bay. He also had a mirrored lantern and a hand-carved whistle up there, for he had seen three ships in his time here and had gotten more prepared to hail one with each passing.

  He struggled up a rocky face that was slick with moisture from the mist, but once atop it, he stopped still, relaxed his posture, and started scratching his filthy head. This led to more scratching, and like a wild animal trying to rid itself of a flea, he ended up lying down and grinding his back and shoulders against the rocks until he rid himself of the irritation.

  “Why don’t I just hail them now?” he asked himself out loud as he stood. “We’ve got nothing to lose by revealing ourselves, have we, Royal?”

  As it often did, Richard’s broken mind took him away, back to a time in his youth when magic and wonder still had a place in his heart. A time before Gravelbone’s corruption had infected him. A time when he was Crown Prince of the only kingdom, and a dragon named Royal loved him dearly.

  “He mustn’t know, boy,” Mysterian the witch hissed, eyes wide. Even though she was deathly serious, Prince Richard’s excitement was so contagious, it was clear she was feeling it, too.

  He was seventeen years old and had just taken his first flight with the magnificent blue dragon called Royal. They were standing in the garden bailey, surrounded by lush greenery that was punctuated with stark, lime-colored, four-petal flowers the size of a man’s palm. The predominant smell of brine was overcome here, and Richard’s nostrils recalled well the sweet citrus scent of the blooms.

  He remembered it was a miracle they didn’t get spotted by his father’s Wallguard that night. Royal had glided right over them before dropping and landing like a sprawled cat in the garden. Richard also remembered how it felt after the huge wyrm had gone, when Mysterian twisted his ear until the giddiness was out of him.

  “If you get caught, that dragon won’t get scolded, boy.” She forced the urgency of the message through her teeth. “They’ll chain him to the earth and take his head off with axes. Do you want that?”

  “No.”

  Richard remembered being angry that she hadn’t believed he already understood. He knew his father could never know. Hadn’t he and the dragon kept their previous meetings secret? For nothing more than caution, Mysterian had taken the glory of his first dragon flight from him. It was only one of the reasons he hated her.

  Thinking of Royal allowed him to easily dismiss Mysterian, and he was in the woods on the far side of King’s Isle again, meeting his wyrm for the very first time.

  The feeling was all fear. There was exhilaration later, but when he first saw the deep-blue-scaled dragon’s head lying there on the forest floor, he nearly filled his britches.

  An eye the size of a dinner
plate blinked, and the wyrm’s sword-like, slitted pupil shrank to a sliver as it focused on him.

  You’ve come, thensss? it hissed into Richard’s young mind.

  “I have,” Richard managed. Standing in the presence of a beast that could swallow him whole left him fully in awe.

  We have a grimss future, youss and I. I am Royal, and youss are royalty. The dragon somehow filled his head with glorious thoughts. But until we meet our endsss, we shalls live.

  And they did. They were forced to take their flights over sea, for the most part, but after Richard became proficient on Royal’s back, the wizened wyrm took them all over the Mainland.

  These jaunts were only possible because of Mysterian, who used her witchy ways to make sure their absences didn’t seem suspicious. Richard wished his memories of her were fonder, for she thought she was looking out for him and the witches’ prophecy. Ultimately, she was only hiding the truth from them all.

  Those early years were tough on Richard. He was often forced to choose between the dragon’s beliefs and his father’s, and no matter what he did, he had to keep the dragon’s existence a secret. That was no easy task, and at that time, Richard had no idea that Royal’s hatchmate had been the wyrm that maimed his gran in the arena pit. He never got a sense of how much his father, and the people of the kingdom, hated dragons until later. Looking back, he understood Mysterian’s caution, but he hated her no less for all her deceit.

  The memory of learning that a very young Kingsman named Herald was the one who took the axe to Royal’s hatchmate, while the old king’s spellcaster held it still, almost turned the reverie into something else. Luckily, the image of his father finally allowing him to go to the woods, after a terribly long day at court, filled his head.

  Getting free to go be with Royal had been everything.

  He stayed lost in that time, thinking of all the thrills and discoveries he and his magical friend had made as he grew from a boy into a man and the two of them bonded. Then he remembered Jenka and Zahrellion arriving on King’s Island just before it all fell apart. In that moment, his guard slipped, and the visage of Gravelbone and a legion of Sarax froze his blood in his veins.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The sky over Kingsman’s Keep was speckled with small, puffy clouds and colored a bright shade of blue that made it look much warmer than it felt. Silva pumped her wings, sending her smaller, pewter-scaled body past Marcherion and his dragon, Blaze, as if they were standing still.

  Rikky, who was clinging to the saddle on Silva’s undulating back, hollered as they swept by, “See ya, tubby!”

  He looked back to see March pumping a meaty fist at him, but the older Dragoneer’s smile showed he wasn’t really angry. Blaze’s roar of disapproval, though, might have been tinged with more than a little frustration. The ever-growing red wyrm had eaten most of the elk cows they’d scared away from a large herd back in the peaks. The big drake was bloated and sluggish, and probably sleepy.

  Marcherion had gained some girth, too. They said they were eating like they were because they were about to leave for Marcherion’s homeland. Thanks to a single conversation with Clover before she disappeared, King Jenka’s admiral, with Aikira’s help, had mapped their routes, and a good portion of the globe. The Old World, as it was being called now, had reconnected with the survivors of the Dogma, and ships were coming and going regularly.

  Rikky fully understood Marcherion’s desire to make the journey by flight, though. Aikira could open a flash portal to almost anywhere in the world, but one out of every six or seven tries ended up with them in a whole other existence. These places were nothing like this world. Some were gassy masses of unformed flotsam; others were frigid tundras, nothing more than gargantuan bergs floating on dark seas. Still, Rikky probably would have used a portal. He knew March well enough to know that it was the solitude of the journey, and the time spent with his bond-mate and closest friend, that made the decision.

  Oddly, Rikky never pictured March having brothers and parents. He had always thought of him as the loner, the angry outsider from another part of the world, the Dragoneer who kept him sharp and ready.

  It wasn’t that way now. After two weeks of him blabbing about Brendly Tuck and all his sisters, the size of the krill they caught in the river, his brothers, and his girlfriends, Rikky felt as if he knew them, too. If he didn’t have duties to fulfill, he would have been preparing to go along with him. In fact, he was sort of sad that he wasn’t.

  The story March told them about killing a wyvern and seeing the white stag seemed a little far-fetched, until Blaze confirmed the truth of it. Even after witnessing what transpired with the strange elves when they ended the alien beast in the Great Confliction, Rikky always felt as if March and his dragon were pulling his leg or poking fun at him in some way. It was clear that they never told the whole tale, and equally plain that they delighted in recounting the event.

  You’d eat up, too, if you were about to have to fly a hundred twenty days straight, and then fly eighty-four more. Marcherion spoke to Rikky through the ethereal.

  I would if I had to fly that far. Rikky laughed out loud. But you don’t have to fly, tubby. You just have to sit there and hold your piss.

  Aye. March didn’t argue. Rikky figured it was probably because he knew he couldn’t win. Either way, Rikky still relished outdoing any of the other Dragoneers in anything, even wordplay.

  Having only one leg forced him to try harder.

  Not having March with whom to hunt and compete was going to test him. Jenka, Zah and Aikira were always too busy with their children and the kingdom. The Rangers were well trained now, and most all of the threats to the good folk had been eliminated.

  How long will you be gone, again? Rikky asked.

  At least two years.

  Rikky sighed. It’s going to be a long, boring time.

  Jenka might hunt with you. Or Aikira, even. The hopefulness in March’s voice was clearly forced. Jericho is ready to formally train, as well.

  Aikira is busy with Pascal the Rascal. Rikky tried to mask the loss of joy he was suddenly feeling, but it was hopeless. And King Jenka hasn’t the time for anyone, much less me.

  You’ll be all right, Rikky. Train Pascal, too. Just slow down a bit. We’re in no hurry today.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After the bell sounded again, King Richard heard voices. They were clear and carried to his ears well, but he didn’t understand anything they said. They were speaking gibberish. Fast and clipped, and somewhat hushed, too, as if the men in the longboat were afraid.

  Richard giggled and then cupped his hands to his mouth. He was at least fifty feet above the water on a trail he had carved into the rock over the years by running up and down to get better vantage points of the island. Having visitors made him excited and he couldn’t help what happened next.

  “Roooaaarrr!” Richard growled out into the fog in his best Gravelbone imitation. “Who dare be trespassin’ in my waters?”

  There was a bit of whispering, and the sound of oars banging in the locks as the rowers started moving the boat away. One of them was braver, for he calmed his fellows with soothingly spoken gibberish and then called back.

  “Orand ballin treealing mal shrignottle?”

  “WHAT?” Richard roared. “You’n be speakin’ the king’s tongue to me.” He stifled a giggle. He then hurried his way up to the base of his lookout tree. He was disappointed to find that he couldn’t see its top in the fog, and he decided that maybe he shouldn’t scare the men in the rower away.

  “With whom do I speak?” a stilted and shaky voice called up from below.

  Richard, hearing words he could understand, grew nervous. Who were these men? Outlanders? No, he knew the Outlander dialects well. They had been speaking a whole new language.

  He climbed back down some before answering, but when he did, he still didn’t use his own voice.

  “Who be you trespassing?” he called, putting as much depth into his tone as he coul
d.

  “Garrinvale yon cyclopsians,” one of the men in the boat said.

  “Yah, woggin agon rung,” said another.

  There was the sound of a scuffle, then a thud, as if someone were slugged.

  “Shush!” the first voice carried over them all, then the voice that spoke words he could understand replied.

  “We come from the Old World,” it said meekly. “We’ve come to liberate the banished king.”

  The banished king? Richard stopped again and scratched his head. A strange feeling was sliding over him.

  He was the banished king.

  Did he want to be liberated?

  Yes, he did.

  “Why should he go with you?” Richard called back, almost forgetting to accentuate his voice.

  “He will be treated like the king he is.”

  The voices whispered in their strange language for a moment.

  “Our king, King Chad, has guaranteed his safety and only wishes to breed one of his most beautiful daughters with New World royalty so that his kingdom will have a better stance in the upcoming trade negotiations.”

  Richard knew nothing about upcoming trade negotiations. The idea of just seeing, much less marrying, the beautiful daughter of a foreigner stirred places inside him that he’d nearly forgotten. The touch of a woman, after being alone for so many years, seemed as unreal as this situation was turning out to be.

  “Stay still, then,” Richard finally called down. “We’ve some thinking to do.”

  Richard thought long and hard for about three heartbeats and then began making his way back down to his cavern home.

  “Hello?” the man in the boat called out a while later. The fog hadn’t lifted, and a light drizzle was starting to fall. “Where haveth you gone? Are you there?”

  The fog was even more dense at sea level, and Richard knew it wasn’t going to clear until the wind picked up. It didn’t matter, though. His fractured mind had already turned over a hundred possibilities, and all of them were far better than staying on the island alone. Beside that, these people had no idea what he was capable of. He hadn’t been banished to the island as a punishment, but because surrounding him with sea water was the only way to dampen his unique arcane abilities. They had no idea that he had once possessed a dragon’s tear, and that he had willingly given up its delicious power to keep his dragon alive. They had no idea that he’d survived on the flesh of innocent humans and bathed in their blood. They had no idea that he’d been trained in wizardry by Vax Noffa, and in witchery by Mysterian of the Hazeltine. Not to mention his ability with blade and bow, for he’d trained with the best in the realm since he could walk. He had been groomed to rule the kingdom, and he understood both diplomacy and war, and deep in his subconscious mind, he still had a bit of his dragon-bond left. And here, as if proof that his destiny was not to die on an isolated island, was a way to another life.