Free Blood and Royalty by M. R. Mathias

pointed, but just then a weak jet of dragon fire swept up the lane and caused the people to scatter.
    Only Rikky pulling Marcherion into the nearest stoop by the back of the belt seemingly saved him from the flames. He didn’t tell Rikky, but he’d wanted to feel that dragon fire. It wouldn’t have burned him like it would others. He was bonded with a fire wyrm, after all.
    “There,” Rikky said. “That is the base of the Pirattiton.”
    “What the hell is the Pirattiton?” March asked.
    “You were here when they unveiled it, dimbuss.” Rikky’s look was incredulous.
    “Oh.” March had sat through a whole lot of formal gatherings and unveilings before going back home. It was one of the reasons he’d left. And even though there were two landed mudged eating charred people right there on the cobbles between them and the monument, he decided he was as happy here as anywhere. Marcherion decided he would go retrieve Desira, or at least give her the chance to come to the safety of Clover’s castle, after this was done.
    An explosion of pain hammered his shoulder, and Rikky was in his face. “Are you drifting now, like Jenka? Get it straightened out up there.” He tapped March’s head hard. “We are about to have to kill these two turds the old fashioned way.”
    March rubbed his arm and then his head and laughed. “You’re Herald. You’ve turned into old Herald.”
    Princess Amelia had taken the sword March had been using. He didn’t mind; obviously Iron Spike hadn’t been meant for him. He pulled Rikky’s sword from its sheath. “Use your bow,” he said, and then charged out and rammed the steel to the hilt in the nearest mudged’s side.
    As soon as the inbred dragon slung him away and growled out in pain, Rikky loosed two arrows at the other one, who snatched up its meal and decided to eat elsewhere.
    The mudged March had stabbed was still there, though, and Rikky was drawing arrows and loosing them at it just as quickly as he could. It went darting across the cobbles, though, to where Marcherion had ended up.
     
    *
     
    The need to hunt the Sarsaraxus was so strong in Jenka that he couldn’t resist it. He left Clover’s castle knowing that he was about to go fight to the death against the thing the alien part of him despised. He understood the reasoning behind the hatred, for he understood almost everything, if he pondered it long enough. The beast he and the Dragoneers had destroyed used the Sarax for food. The Sarsaraxus was the pollinating male. It had escaped its power-suppressing cages on the vessel and caused the crash that brought them here in the first place. All of this Jenka knew from the alien’s memory.
    It must have used its supernatural power to change forms and cross the sea. Jenka was pretty sure it had fled fearing the alien that had held it imprisoned so long. How had it gotten itself trapped in that box they called the Basx, or had it been trapped at all? It had manipulated the elves and men into killing its only enemy. Then it escaped Amelia’s attempt to kill it, for she felt the same revulsion of the creature Jenka did, if not more so. Now it was on the loose.
    Jenka felt that killing the Sarsaraxus was no righteous deed, for it had been brought here imprisoned. Jenka’s motives were not the same as the desire driven by the alien part of him. There was a valid reason for not resisting this primal urge to hunt the Sarsaraxus down. If it came back to the Mainland, ever, the dusty pollen its skin produced would get in the air and quicken the spores left in the remains of all the Sarax they had killed. They would eventually emerge, feed and cocoon. Humanity would be overrun by horn-heads and flying death. It was sort of like the last laws of magic, the ones about ending anything that had the power of unrestrained creation. It was just something that had to be done.
    The problem with all of that was that only gods had the kind of power the elves feared, and the elves of Everling