"The axle's bent," Gary explained, crawling out from underneath the quadricycle and sitting up on the dry ground south of the Ruined Forest. He looked back to the east, to the thick tree root sticking like a speed bump from the ground, the jolt that had caused the problem.
Mickey nodded and said, "Hmmm," though the leprechaun had no idea what Gary was talking about. "Well, can ye fix it, then?" he asked.
Gary sighed deeply and looked to the angled front wheel, and his expression was not hopeful.
"Ye got to fix it, lad," Mickey implored. "Or to be sure that Robert's going to find us sitting here in the open."
Gary reached over to take the spear of Cedric Donigar-ten, then slid back under the front end of the gnomish contraption and angled the spearshaft above the bent axle. He found rocks and placed them around the front wheels to keep the axle from turning as he applied pressure, then slid a large, flat rock under the back end of the spear to make sure that it didn't simply slide downward when he pulled the other end up.
"Young sprout," came a not-too-happy call in his head.
Gary ignored the spear, kept at his work. "Young sprout." This time the call was accompanied by a tingling feeling in the metallic shaft, a clear warning that the spear might soon blast Gary's hands away.
We have to fix this, Gary telepathically replied.
"I am a weapon forged to battle dragons and fell unlawful kings," the spear answered. "I am the tool of the warrior, not the tradesman. I am the instrument with which ..."
All things in place, Gary put the top end of the spear over his shoulder and heaved upward with all his strength, pressing the spear between the bent axle and the front bumper of the gnomish vehicle. He felt the tooproud spear's anger, felt an energy charge beginning to build within the sentient weapon's shaft. But Gary growled in anger and pushed harder, pushed until a blue flash erupted from the spear.
And then he was sitting on the ground again, his hair dancing on its ends.
"Are ye all right?"
Gary nodded quickly to Mickey, then rolled to his hands and knees to inspect the axle. It still wasn't perfectly straight, but Gary's efforts had bent it back enough so that he believed the thing would drive. "I am not pleased, young sprout."
"Oh, shut up," Gary said aloud, and he grabbed up the spear. Again he felt the charge building, and he instinctively started to drop the weapon to the ground. He stopped, though, with a determined growl. "You do it, and I'll leave you here on the plain," he promised. "Let the dragon find you and put you in his lair as a trophy, and see how much fighting you'll find there!"
The spear did not respond, but the tingling in its metallic shaft ceased. Their progress was limited over the next few hours. The quadricycle bumped and bounced, and Gary kept it to as easy and level a course as he could find. The contraption wasn't built to handle this much weight, he realized, and with the axle already weakened, Gary feared that any hole or bump could buckle it once again.
They made it to Dreadwood, though, as twilight descended over the land, and even though the forest had seemed an evil place to Gary, he was horrified to view it now. Tangled boughs had been replaced by charred, skeletal limbs, and all the northern section of the forest glowed with residual heat. Orange embers appeared as mischievous eyes in logs lying prone, as though a hundred little goblins had climbed inside the fallen wood, daring Gary and Mickey to walk past.
"Now what?" Gary asked the leprechaun.
"Now we're going through," Mickey replied sternly, as though the answer should have been obvious.
Gary understood and accepted his companion's sudden anger. In looking at the devastation, Mickey could not help but worry about their friends, worry that Kelsey and Geno and Gerbil had not escaped the dragon fires. Blowing a deep breath, Gary set the quadricycle into motion, veering this way and that along the path to avoid fallen branches. Several time he had to get out of the seat altogether, to remove debris, and always, those orange ember eyes watched him, their glow intensifying as the night deepened.
"We'll camp on the other side of the forest," Gary decided after two hours of inching along. His hands were blackened from soot, his whole body was lathered in sweat under the armor from the residual heat, and he felt as though his lungs would simply explode. "No, lad," Mickey replied grimly, "we'll keep going right through the night."
Gary looked at the sprite curiously. It seemed as if Mickey's euphoria at finding his pot had fully worn away, to be replaced by a level of despair that surprised Gary.
"I've a feeling that there's worse trouble brewing," Mickey explained. "We've a hundred miles to go to get to Brae-mar, and I'm wanting to be there before tomorrow turns to the next day."
Gary nearly laughed aloud. "I can't even see the path ahead," he complained.
Mickey spoke a quick rhyme and snapped his fingers, and a ball of light appeared, hovering a few feet in front of the quadricycle. "It'll stay out in front of us," the leprechaun explained.
"I'm getting tired, Mickey," Gary said bluntly. "I'm not a pack horse, and we've gone a long way already."
"No, ye're not getting tired," the leprechaun replied. Gary scoffed at him.
"Ye're not getting tired," Mickey said again, his tone compelling. "Slip deeper into the seat, lad. Let yer body become a part of the gnomish contraption."
Gary eyed the leprechaun closely, but somehow, Mickey's words seemed to make sense to him. Without even thinking of the movement, he did indeed slip deeper into his seat.
"There's a good lad," Mickey said, and now his voice seemed incredibly soothing to Gary. "Ye can even close yer eyes." Mickey shifted so that he was sitting right on Gary's lap, and eased Gary's hands away from the quadri-cycle's steering bar.
"There's a good lad," Mickey said again, nodding approvingly at Gary's deep and steady breathing. "Just keep yer legs turning, turning easy." Gary was soon fast asleep, caught in the throes of the leprechaun's hypnotic magic. His legs continued to pedal, though, and would throughout the night, as Mickey subconsciously compelled him, every so often whispering magical, coaxing words into his ear.
Many times that night, Mickey looked back anxiously to Gary. There was a very real danger in doing this to the young man, Mickey knew, a danger that the exertion would explode Gary's heart, or tire him to the point where he would never recover. Mickey had to take the chance, though, for he, unlike Gary, had heard the dragon's call from the north, from above the Crahgs. Robert had sensed his missing sword, Mickey believed, and when the wyrm came back out of Giant's Thumb, probably the very next morning, his mood would not be bright.
"Smooth and easy," the leprechaun gently prodded. "Smooth and easy." Mickey looked to the slightly flip-flopping wheel of the quadricycle and could only hope that the thing wouldn't fall apart before they got to Braemar.
Wearing grim faces, Kelsey, walking, and Geno and Gerbil atop the pony, made their slow way around the last barrier of stone before the sheltered vale of Braemar on the morning of the next day. They saw the lines of black smoke rising out of the valley, and could guess easily enough where Robert had flown off to. Half expecting to find all of Braemar razed, Kelsey paused a long while before mustering the courage to step around the bend and get his first view of the village.
Many of the structures remained intact, but many others had been destroyed. Stone skeletons of farmhouses, their ends pyramiding to a point, but not a piece of thatch left atop them, dotted the landscape. The spoke-lock was a one-story building now, with the top level flattened to kindling, cracked boards protruding from the edges of the stillstanding first level, and the roads and even a huge tree had been ripped and torn by the angry dragon.
The normally stoic Geno let out an unexpected wail, spotting two cairns piled high on hills beside the town.
"Are those the normal burial mounds of your people?" Kelsey asked reverently, recognizing the source of his companion's distress. "Are dwarfs buried under those piled stones?"
"Look closer, elf," Geno replied gruffly.
"The dwarfs are not buried beneath the stones," Gerbil, who knew the ways of the Buldrefolk better than the elf, explained, emphasizing the word "beneath."
"Look closer," Geno said again.
Kelsey stared at the distant mounds and discovered, to his amazement, that bodies of dead dwarfs had been stacked together with the stones, holding up their places in the piles as solidly as the boulders.
"Two mounds," Gerbil added, his tone unintentionally impassive. "Which means, by all dwarfish records, that at least six dwarfs were killed." Geno grunted.
"The Buldrefolk will, of course, put no more than five of their fallen kin a single cairn," the gnome went on, speaking like a professor in some classroom far removed from so brutal a scene as Braemar after the dragon. "There is a belief among the dwarfs that ..."
Kelsey held up his hand to gently stop the gnome. He knew that Gerbil wasn't intentionally being callous, but Geno, sitting dangerously close to the rambling gnome, seemed on the verge of an explosion, gripping the pony's bridle so tightly that Kelsey wondered if the leather long would simply fall in half, squeezed apart by the dwarf's iron grasp. If Gerbil kept on going, Kelsey realized, the gnome might find that a dwarfish boot was nearly as strong a delivery system as his Mountain Messenger.
"Oh," Gerbil said simply, and apologetically, as he regarded the dwarf seated right before him, seeming to realize only then that his dissertation on dwarfish burial methods might have been somewhat out of place.
"Let's get down to the town," Geno offered, brushing off his moment of weakness. "It looks like it could have been worse. I see a few of the buildings still standing, and the Snoozing Sprite's up, if a bit blackened."
Kelsey nodded, and he held more than a little admiration for Geno at that moment. He had seen the dwarf's pain - perhaps the first time the elf had witnessed any emotion other than anger from one of the Buldrefolk - and had seen the dwarf sublimate that pain because Geno knew that they had no time for grief, not with Gary and Mickey wandering who-knew-where and with Robert still flying about, probably even then preparing to hit the village once again.
Braemar was bustling that morning, people rushing about, bringing supplies to various shelters, changing dressings on the nasty wounds, mostly burns, of the injured, and formulating defense plans should the dragon return. Braemar proper, like the actual town area of most of the outlying villages, was a small place, a cluster of just a few structures, with most of the people associated with the town living as far as several miles away. It seemed as if the majority of those farmers and miners had come in now, though, to help with the effort. These were admirable people, even to one of the Tylwyth Teg, who generally looked down their noses at humans.
Many sentries had been set, high on the slopes overlooking the town, and Kelsey's party was spotted and reported long before the three companions got anywhere near the village. No one rode out to meet them or to hinder them, though (Kelsey figured that no one would have the time), and few gave them more than a passing glance as they plodded along the street, muddy from the soaking rain and the firefighting efforts, into Braemar's central square.
Batteries of archers roamed the streets, pointing out angles of possible dragon descent and seeking out the best locations from which to strike back in the event of the wyrm's return.
One woman, three children in tow, cried out for her husband, trying futilely to get past the men blocking her entrance to her stillsmoldering home. All three of the companions, even Geno, sent their hearts out to the apparent widow, and all three were truly relieved to see, unexpectedly, the supposedly missing man running down the street from the other direction, crying out for his beloved wife and children. They were just turning their attention back to the road ahead when a familiar, plump face appeared from around a corner. Soot-covered, and lathered in sweat, Baron Pwyll seemed far less regal, seemed sobered, actually, as he walked solemnly out to greet his returning friends.
"You did not make the Giant's Thumb," the Baron reasoned.
"Have Mickey and Gary Leger returned?" Kelsey asked.
Baron Pwyll shook his head.
"Then they are still on their way," Kelsey said hopefully.
"They have the quadricycle," Gerbil interjected, smiling as widely as he could manage, given the grim scene all about him. "They have probably been there and are near to back again!"
Pwyll blew a deep breath, tried to turn up the edges of his mouth, but the smile would not come. "Perhaps that is why the dragon has not returned," he reasoned. "Robert flew in hard and fast, and was gone just as quickly. We spent a long night, expecting the darkness to be shattered by flaming dragon breath. But he did not come back."
"It is a hopeful sign," Kelsey agreed.
"How many dwarfs?" Geno said abruptly, and after a moment to digest the blunt question, Pwyll understood that Geno wanted to know how many of his people had perished.
"Seven," he answered.
"Kervin?"
Pwyll turned about and motioned to the Snoozing Sprite.
"Best place to be after a dragon attack," Geno agreed, and he handed the bridle to Gerbil behind him and slid down off the pony, cutting a beeline for the still-standing tavern.
"Even if the dragon does not return, there is much to do," Pwyll prompted the others, and Gerbil, too, slid down from the mount.
Kelsey removed his belongings from the pony's back and handed the reins over to Pwyll, bidding the Baron to find out where the pony would be of the most help to the people of Braemar. The simple gesture overwhelmed the Baron, for he knew how protective the Tylwyth Teg normally were of their precious steeds.
"Together we will not lose," Pwyll said firmly, right before he led the pony away. Kelsey nodded, his fair features stern and determined. He was glad to see the normally quivering Pwyll apparently rising to the occasion, but his hopes were tempered by the grim reality. Robert was flying free, and even if Mickey and Gary somehow managed to replace the dagger and put the wyrm back in his hole (which Kelsey had never actually believed to be the fact of the matter), and escape with their lives, there was still the matter of King Kinnemore's gathered army, a new puppet ruler coming to power in Dilnamarra, so near Kelsey's forest home, and a witch coming out of her banishment in three short months.
At that moment, the future of Faerie seemed as bleak to Kelsey as the blackened kindling that had once been Braemar's spoke-lock.
A cry from down the lane turned the elf about, to see the frantic woman and her children locked in a communal hug with the man they had thought dead.
"Then again," Kelsey said aloud, his suddenly hopeful tone drawing a curious glance from Gerbil, "one never knows what might happen."
The quadricycle limped into Braemar soon after sunset that same day.
Mickey steered it into the village square just outside the ruined spokelock, where it bogged down in the mud. A crowd of onlookers gathered about, keeping a respectful distance, but pointing Mickey's way and talking anxiously among themselves. Mickey had been far-sighted enough to enact an illusion before he and Gary ever got close to the village, one that made him appear as a normal human boy and not a leprechaun. Greedy human hands seeking the fabled pot of gold would surely have engulfed him, even after the dragon attack, if the leprechaun had gone in undisguised.
"Easy now, laddie," the leprechaun whispered to Gary, who was sitting back with his eyes closed, his body, except for his pumping legs, limp with exhaustion. The semiconscious man kept on pedaling, apparently oblivious to the leprechaun's calls, or to the fact that the quadricycle's back wheels were spinning uselessly in the mud. "Stop and rest," Mickey quietly implored Gary. Then came a great bump as the contraption's front axle snapped in half, dropping the whole front end of the thing into the mud.
"Oh," Mickey muttered, and he was certainly glad that the contraption had waited until now to fall apart.
Gary remained oblivious to it all, his legs turning the pedals, the rest of his body thoroughly drained to support the hypnotic effort, and his mind too shut down to even dream. He lay in blackness, unaware of anything at all, even the fact that he could very well, and very soon, work himself to death.
"Oh, my dear," came a wail, and Gerbil Hamsmacker bolted out of the crowd and rushed to his ruined contraption. "Oh, what have you done?" the gnome asked accusingly. He looked at Mickey curiously for a moment, at first not recognizing the sprite-turned-boy. "Oh, what have you done?" he said at length, finally figuring out the deception.
"I put three hundred miles on the damned thing in three days," Mickey replied. "Ye built it good, gnome, good enough to get ye on any plaque, by me own opinion."
The high praise calmed Gerbil down considerably. He fell flat to the mud before the contraption, trying to assess the damage, then nearly got run over as the continually turning back wheels caught some solid ground under the muddy trenches and lurched the contraption forward. "Do make him stop that," Gerbil calmly said to Mickey, and once more, the leprechaun whispered into Gary's ear for the man to stop pedaling.
And once more, Mickey was ignored.
"What is wrong with him?" Kelsey asked curtly, coming over with Geno to join his companions. Both elf and dwarf crinkled their expressions when they regarded Mickey, but understood the matter soon enough. "And where have you been?" Kelsey went on.
"Hello to yerself, too," Mickey replied dryly.
Kelsey nodded and dipped a quick bow, as much of an apology as he would ever give. "You have much to tell us, I would assume," he remarked.
"Aye," said Mickey. "But first ye two help me to get Gary Leger out o' the seat, afore the lad pedals himself to death."
Geno offered a callous remark that Gary seemed near that point already. The dwarf stepped over, grabbed Gary's metal shoulderplate in one hand, and heaved the man from his seat, allowing him to fall unceremoniously into the mud. Mickey held his breath, and was relieved that Geno never looked into the low seat, never seemed to notice the stolen sword.
Gary lay facedown - it seemed as though he could not even breathe - but made no attempts to turn about. And still, his legs kept pumping.
Kelsey, Geno, and Gerbil, and many of those gathered about, looked to Mickey suspiciously, awaiting an explanation.
"Had to get to the dragon's lair," Mickey explained with a dismissive shrug. "And back fast. I'll put a spell o' resting on the laddie and he'll be all right after the night."
"You have been to the lair, then?" Kelsey asked anxiously, hoping that this ordeal with Robert was at its end. "And you replaced the stolen dagger?"
"Aye," Mickey replied. "Aye, to both." It wasn't quite true; once the pot of gold had been recovered, Mickey had forgotten all about the dagger, and had it still, in a deep pocket of his gray jacket.
"Then Robert is banished once more," Kelsey reasoned, "and the folk of Braemar can begin to plan for troubles from another direction."
"That'd be dangerous thinking," Mickey put in. All three of the leprechaun's companions eyed him curiously. "I seen the dragon, fast flying to the east," Mickey went on. "Whether he's to stay put in his hole or not, I cannot be saying. But I wouldn't take it as fact, nor should ye all, until we're knowing for sure."
"You said that the replaced dagger would ..." Kelsey began.
"I said an obscure rule in an old book," Mickey pointedly argued, for of course, the leprechaun knew that the wyrm had not been put back in his hole, knew all along that replacing the dagger would have no effect at all on Robert.
Only then did Kelsey, leaning forward on the gnomish contraption as though he needed the support, notice Robert's huge sword, lying in the seat where Gary had been sitting. Mickey watched the elf's face contort weirdly, knew that Kelsey was now, as Gary had done in the dragon's lair, putting the pieces together and figuring out the entire deception. Even if the dagger had been put back, the presence of the sword, a weapon that Kelsey knew all too well, would have defeated the whole purpose for the trip to Robert's lair.
To the leprechaun's relief, Kelsey did not mention the logical problem then and there, just offered a knowing smirk Mickey's way. "We will get him into a warm cot," Kelsey said, looking to Gary. "Be ready for a long night," he said to Mickey. 'There is much to be done before the dawn." "And much to be done after the dawn," Mickey added under his breath. "Unless I'm missing me guess."