air and striking from above, lightning-quick. Her left sword pierced a man’s eye, the right slid into another man’s cheek.
Bellowing a Western Isles war-cry, Jarrik the Armourer came charging out of his shop, using his shield as a battering-ram to crush four men against the opposite wall.
“Fancied some exercise,” he grinned, abandoning his shield to twirl a two-handed war hammer about his head. “Just bop these thugs, one, two!”
Spill their brains was what he meant.
“Thanks!” Lia ducked a javelin and used the momentum to knock a man’s feet out from under him. Jarrik finished him off by the simple expedient of dropping his knee on the man’s chest, crushing his ribcage. Grandion would have approved of that move.
For a few moments they withstood a siege of cudgels and swords, before the youths saw the better value of cowardice and fled. Gathering her weapons with exasperated haste, Lia quickly armed herself and slipped her swords into their sheaths. No point in skulking about now.
“That way,” said the Western Isles warrior, pointing.
Halfway down the road at a dead sprint, Lia heard a tramping of booted feet ahead. A cohort of Rolodia’s grey-clad guardsmen marched into the narrow street between the shops, blocking it. She turned.
“Run!” yelled Jarrik.
The sound of more boots echoed up the street. The real trap was sprung. Lia spared a half-breath to wonder if Ra’aba might not somehow be behind this, before she realised what she must do. She bounded up onto a barrel and from there, sprang up to the eaves and swung herself smoothly onto the roof. Lia raced across the uneven surface as the monks had so often trained to run across the uneven boulders near the crater lake.
For a long drawn-out second, she thought she had made her escape.
Whap! A weighted net snarled her body. Hualiama had not seen a rooftop guard post, but they had seen her and fired a net in her direction. Deprived of the use of her arms and legs, Lia toppled helplessly, rolled down a shingled slope, and tumbled into the street below. A mound of red-dyed cloth broke her fall, but she had no time to struggle free of the net. Cruel hands seized her.
“Now you’ll pay, girl!”
An unseen cudgel slammed her head into the cobblestones. Blackness overwhelmed her instantly.
* * * *
A Princess locked in a tower. The same prekki fruit of old, Flicker chirped, slipping between the bars of Lia’s tower cell.
Flicker! Hualiama gasped. What … where did you come from?
The dragonet inquired archly, Good shopping trip? What’re you still doing in here?
Escaping, of course. Lia worked vigorously at the lock on her left ankle. Toss it in a Cloudlands volcano, this one’s so blasted stiff …
Shall I fetch the keys off that hook, straw-head? Her brilliant smile made him flip an aerial somersault–gingerly, to avoid further hurting his ankle. The dragonet chattered, Aye, thank you Flicker. You are my saviour, my best friend and indeed, the true dragonet-king of all Fra’anior. Here. Loosen those chains while I call Grandion.
As the jail tower was a little ways out of the city, down near a garbage heap which smelled emphatically appealing to Flicker, he and the blue blunderer had decided that with a touch of Grandion’s concealing magic, they could rescue the Human girl and earn themselves kisses. Well, kisses were his privilege. By his wings, there was no way he’d allow that prowling Lesser Dragon to muscle in on his girl, shiver the thought and turn his fires to ice!
Having signalled Grandion as agreed, Flicker returned to the cell to find Lia gone! The door yawned open. In a flash he whizzed down the spiral staircase. He narrowly avoided crashing into the back of Lia’s head and instead, violently assaulted the man facing her with a crossbow levelled at her chest. Meantime, Grandion landed on the roof, shaking the building. Twang! A quarrel quivered in the wooden ceiling of the room beneath Lia’s previous cell.
Hualiama chopped the man down with the hard edge of her hand. “Flicker, I had it under control!”
“That’s what you’re doing with a lump on your head, in jail?”
“I was in the middle of escaping, you brainless lizard,” she complained. “Look, the guard captain laid all my things out nicely on his desk so that he could choose what he wanted for himself. Let me just collect–”
“Grandion is so upset with you–I’m upset with you!”
The Tourmaline Dragon thundered, “WHERE IS THAT PEST?”
“Hmm, sounds like he’s planning to rip the roof off,” said Lia,