Blood and Royalty Read Free

head.
    Rikky loosed an arrow at the other mudged and was pleased to see his shaft sink deeply into the thing’s wing joint. He then turned and shook his head as the mudged Silva had just blasted went spinning down out of the sky, its head now cased in hardening metal goo too heavy to keep aloft.
    The wyrm Rikky had shafted, which had been fluttering and struggling to stay in the air with the pain, now burst into emerald flames and disappeared in an instant. Right into the green mist that remained came Jenka and Jade, slowing from a blur into themselves.
    “Waass- thaat- all- of them?” Jenka asked slowly, his voice growing from a deep warble into its normal tone as he spoke.
    “There was one more, Jenk.” Rikky was already urging Silva to catch up with Zahrellion.
    Jenka and Jade flew right alongside them, and Rikky decided that once this last mudged was killed, he would spend more time with his wyrm. They needed practice. None of the others had ever been able to keep up with them in normal flight, yet here were Jenka and Jade keeping pace as if it were easy.
    They had to hurry, though, for with three riders, Crystal couldn’t just turn and battle a mudged.
    Rikky glanced at Jenka again, and their eyes met. Nothing was said, but Jenka nodded and went streaking away in a lime-colored blur, leaving Rikky and Silva to catch up on their own.

Chapter Three
     
     
    Using the Nightshade’s ability to manipulate the mudged, King Richard was able to single out the least inbred of the many draci his hellborn mount was summoning for him. These less tainted dragons were more rebellious than the others. They were able to defy the Nightshade, which made them a risk, but it also made them more valuable.
    Richard, with his black, sleek-skinned Nightshade’s influence, a few brutal torture devices, and his evil spell-casting, found cruel ways to force the defiant half-bred wyrms to sometimes shed a teardrop. The tears hardened on their way to the ground and held within them powerful magic.
    These crystallized drops were not nearly as powerful as the one Royal had once cried for Richard, but he had seven of the lesser ones now, and all combined their power was easily threefold the power of Jenka’s or Rikky’s dragon tears. He wasn’t sure about Clover’s teardrop, because the lines between legend and reality had been stretched in tales of her over the centuries, but he was certain he would have to face her, and he had a few other tricks, too.
    The people of all the Karian kingdoms thought of Clover as some sort of semi-evil goddess who sometimes sided with the people, and sometimes against them. They all feared her, and tales of the deeds she’d performed for King Amothy and his sons, and even in the following wars that split that once massive kingdom into a score of smaller ones, were recorded by monasteries, druidic cults, and all sorts of bards, poets, and story masters.
    Richard sought out the official chronicles of Old Kar, as the people called the previously whole kingdom, and with the help of his wife, Queen Xawyn Azar, purchased them from the distant relative of King Amothy, who was presently sitting on that completely inconsequential seat.
    After reading of the deeds of Clover and her violent dragon from firsthand accounts, Richard found he was a bit intimidated by her ability. He also learned of her association with the dwarves, and that she might have abandoned them in their greatest time of need. There was a chance he could ally with them in the slow, bloody war he was so looking forward to, but at the moment he was waiting on the newest extracted teardrop.
    He had not only given his three men, Baru, Dinaqu, and Kovin, each a collared mudged, but a single teardrop as well, so that they might maintain control of other mudged wyrms, in other places, in his stead. They were loyal, perhaps out of fear, but mostly because they were revered by all of Vikaria as King Richard’s wizard warriors, for they were going to