The Dragon's Dagger
Chapter 6 Sense of Strength

Two score of villagers, peat farmers mostly, gathered on the western road out of Drochit to watch the curious gnome's departure. Gerbil had brought grave news to the Duncan Drochit, Lord of the town, word that mighty Robert the dragon had taken wing again, that darkness would soon descend over all the land. In return, the gnome had been given some news of his own, information about the reforging of Cedric's spear and the subsequent theft of the artifacts.
It didn't take a clever gnome to suspect that the two unusual events might be related (especially since Robert had reportedly been the one to supply the breath for reforging the spear), and so, with Duncan Drochit's promise that Braemar would be alerted, Gerbil had struck out west instead of south, for Dilnamarra and the riddle that might shed some light on the appearance of the dreaded wyrm.
The quadricycle gained speed steadily, despite the mud left over from an early morning rain and the load of supplies Gerbil had strapped into a basket behind his seat. Less than a hundred yards out of town, he had to stop and wait, though, as a shepherd herded his flock across the road, an all-too-common scene that would be repeated four times over the next few hours, with poor anxious Gerbil making sporadic headway to the west. Then he cleared the immediate farming areas near to the village, came into the more wild region between Drochit and Dilnamarra, and made more steady progress.
"I must figure a way to smooth out this road," the easily distracted inventor said to himself, his little legs pumping tirelessly as he bumped and slid along the uneven cart path. And so Gerbil filled the hours with thoughts of extending the Mountain Messenger, or of developing a better road system through the land, or, perhaps, of possible improvements to the quadricycle, such as stronger bump absorbers and a gear ratio designed for mud.
The pursuit lagged behind, but was not given up, as the five companions continued their run down the south road. Soon they came to a crossroads, with four high poles stuck into the ground, one at each corner, and with torn corpses, barely recognizable as men, hanging by the neck from each of these.
This very spot had burned an indelible image into Gary Leger's memory, perhaps the worst memory he had of the land of Faerie. He remembered these very poles, and, he realized a moment later, remembered these very same men hanging by their necks!
They were more bloated now, pecked by the vultures, and one was so badly decomposed that it seemed as if he would soon break loose from the rope. But they were the same, Gary believed, to his horror and his confusion. He reared up his mount in the center of the intersection, staring unblinkingly at the garish sight.
"How long has it been?" he asked Mickey.
"They leave 'em until they fall of their own accord," the leprechaun answered grimly.
"No," Gary corrected. "I mean, how long has it been since I've been gone from Faerie?"
"Oh," Mickey answered. He began silently counting and looked to Kelsey.
"Near to a month."
"One moon cycle," Kelsey agreed.
"Why, lad, how much time has passed in yer own world?" Mickey asked. "Five years," Gary replied breathlessly.
"I thought that you looked older," Geno remarked dryly. "And older are we all getting, sitting here in the middle of this wonderful smell."
"With Prince Geldion coming fast behind!" the fearful Pwyll added, wiping the sweat from his blotchy face.
"Right ye are," said Mickey. "Off we go, then."
"The road to Connacht is surely blocked," Kelsey said. "So we go east, to Drochit and Braemar."
"Right ye are," Mickey said again, and he, too, now looked back to the north, growing fearful that Geldion would soon be upon them. "Off we go, then." Kelsey wheeled his mount to the left, to the east, and started off a stride, but stopped abruptly as Gary Leger said, in a determined voice, "No!"
"No?" Geno echoed incredulously.
"I came through here once before," Gary explained. "And we let these men hang, fearful that cutting them down would tell Geldion that Kelsey of the Tylwyth Teg had passed through this spot." Gary looked directly at the elf. "For who but the Tylwyth Teg would dare to cut down lawfully convicted criminals?"
"We have not the time," Mickey interjected, guessing where Gary's speech was headed. The leprechaun, too, looked to Kelsey for support, but realized that Gary had cunningly struck a solid appeal to the elf's sense of honor.
Mickey was not surprised to see the elf dismounting, a determined and grim sparkle in his golden eyes.
"We'll make the time," Gary Leger replied to Mickey, throwing his leg over the saddle and sliding down to the ground. "I'm not passing through here and leaving these poor men to hang, not when, by your own words, they did nothing wrong."
"You cannot cut them down!" Baron Pwyll verily shrieked. "That is a crime against Connacht punishable by . . ."
"Hanging?" Gary finished for him, in an unshaking voice. "Well, if I am caught and hung, then I hope someone will do for me what I am about to do for these men."
Noble Kelsey was nodding his complete agreement through it all.
"We have half an hour's lead, elf," the pragmatic Geno said. "No time for digging graves."
"Not even shallow ones?" Kelsey asked, pleaded, and Geno shrugged and hopped off the pony, motioning for Pwyll to come and help him. The Baron seemed hesitant and made no move to dismount, until the dwarf walked over and spoke to him privately - a line of deadly serious threats, no doubt. Kelsey shimmied up the poles and worked the ropes, while Gary used the butt end of the long spear to gently guide the rotting bodies down. By the time they had the four men cut down and planted in the shallow graves, the cloud of rising dust had reappeared just a few minutes behind them on the road to the north.
"Time for flying," Mickey, the first to spot the dust, remarked. The others were back in their saddles in a moment, Pwyll moaning and looking back in sheer terror, and Kelsey leading the charge to the east.
"Ye've grown a bit in yer five years, lad," Mickey remarked when Gary was back up behind him. The leprechaun gave a-squeeze on Gary's rock-hard forearm. "In body and in spirit, so it'd seem."   "Well done, young sprout, " Cedric's spear telepathically added.
Gary accepted both compliments in silent agreement. The fact that he had grown in strength was obvious, and increasingly obvious, too, was his newfound strength of character and confidence. The last time he was in Faerie, Gary hadn't been able to understand the motivations of Kelsey, so noble and so aloof. Kelsey's life was one dedicated slavishly to principles, to intangibles, something not quite foreign, but certainly not familiar, to the young man raised in a world of material possessions, a world that he himself had come to think of as spiritually bereft.
Gary could accept those faults in his own world, the real world, could play games on Route 2 with stressed-out drivers, could smile at the jokes about the latest enemy, the latest "created Robert," and had no choice but to accept the "progress" that was inevitably eating away at the woods out back and at the quality of life in general all about him.
But not in Faerie. The wrongs here were more black and white, more definitive, tainting an air that was too pure to be clouded with smoke. Bringing up the rear as the party charged down the eastern road, clutching tightly to that most mighty spear of legend with an evil prince and his soldiers only a few minutes behind, Gary Leger felt a sense of euphoria, a sense of righteousness.
A sense of strength.
"He will be trouble again!" the raven-haired witch snarled as she stared into her crystal ball, stared at the tiny images of Gary Leger and Kelsey and the others taking flight to the east, past the crossroads.
"Trouble for Lady?" Geek the spindly armed goblin asked, trying to sound incredulous. "Who could be trouble for most mightiest Lady?"
"Dear Geek," Ceridwen purred at him, turning slowly about on the satiny covers of the pillowy-soft bed, a disarming smile on her face. Her hand whipped across, catching Geek on the side of the head and launching him several feet before he crumpled against an ornately carved night table, to fall whimpering on the floor. The goblin quickly scrambled back to the foot of the bed when Alice, Ceridwen's pet lion, leaped up from her bed on the opposite wall, startled by the noise.
"You stupid goblin," the witch growled, looking from Geek to her alwayshungry pet. Geek whimpered, understanding what she was thinking, and crawled under the bed. "Trouble like he was trouble for me before!" Ceridwen continued, talking more to herself than to the hidden and cowering goblin. The witch's belly ached with remembered pain as she thought of that fateful day on the mountain outside Robert's castle. She had them, the whole group, at her mercy, until that wretched Gary Leger had thrown the cruel spear.
Ceridwen's wounds had not been mortal, of course. In Faerie, the witch could not truly be killed. But Gary's action had defeated Ceridwen, had banished her to Ynis Gwydrin, her island home, for a hundred years. The Lady Ceridwen was not a patient witch.
She looked back to her crystal ball, still focused on the crossroads. More horsemen charged into the scene, paused to study the tracks, then veered east, as Prince Geldion continued the pursuit.
Ceridwen's lips curled up in an evil smile. "Geldion," she purred, and then she waved her hand quickly across the ball, dispelling the image to smoky nothingness.
"Geek!" she called, snapping her fingers. A crackle sounded, along with a flash of sparking light under the bed, and Geek rolled out rubbing his smoldering posterior. "Go and fetch Akk Akk," Ceridwen instructed, referring to the leader of the giant monkey-bats that lived in the tunnels far below Ynis Gwydrin.
Geek cringed. He didn't like dealing with Akk Akk, or any of the unpredictable and stupid (even by goblin standards) monkey-bats. Twice before, when he was delivering similar messages from Ceridwen, Akk Akk had tried to nibble on flat-faced Geek's large and pointy ears.
Ceridwen dropped an angry glare on the goblin, then, and Geek realized that sitting in the middle of the witch's private chambers was not a good place to be when deliberating whether or not to obey one of her unbending commands. Ceridwen's icy-blue eyes flashed dangerously and she snapped her fingers again, and Geek cried out, hopped to his feet, and ran off, skipping about wildly and patting at the igniting sparks crackling across his butt.
As soon as he was gone, the witch ordered her bedroom door to swing closed. "Let us see who will win this time, dear Alice," she said to her pet, now in the form of an ordinary housecat, circling about and kneading at the pillows in its soft bed. "Let us see if Gary Leger and his pitiful friends can escape when I am guiding the pursuit."
Ceridwen's smile grew wider than it had for a month. There were ways to break banishments, the witch knew. Robert had found one, and was out and flying, and, with Gary Leger back in the land of Faerie, so, too, might she.
The witch's eyes flashed again. A second wave of her deceivingly delicate hand and a soft chant brought a new image into focus in the crystal ball, that of the throne room in Castle Connacht, where King Kinnemore, Ceridwen's perfect stooge, sat waiting.
Kelsey led the way down the wide road into the thick forest of Cowtangle. A short way in, the elf paused to get his bearings, then nodded and moved his mount to the side of the road, to a narrower path barely visible behind some thick brush. Kelsey dismounted and motioned for his friends to pass by, then took a wide branch and brushed the narrow trail and the main road clear of tracks.
"This should put Geldion back a while," the elf explained, coming past Gary and Mickey.
"Even if Geldion goes straight through," Gary said grimly, "he'll stay on the east road. Can we afford to have him riding directly ahead of us all the way to the mountains?"
"We will not stay on the road," Kelsey replied, nodding to show that he agreed with Gary's surprising show of reasoning. "We shall parallel it to the east, come to the mountains south of Braemar."
"Where I take my leave," Geno put in.
Gary started to reply to the dwarf, but Mickey tapped him on the wrist and whispered that it wasn't worth the argument.
"There, we will skirt the mountains south, and then east," Kelsey continued, "following our original course through the Crahgs and to the Giant's Thumb."
"If the wild hairy haggis doesn't get you all first," Geno put in with a wicked smile, a smile that turned into a belly laugh when the dwarf noticed how pale Baron Pwyll's face had become.
The dwarf was still roaring when Kelsey took up the lead and started off again down the narrow trail. A short while later, they heard Geldion's contingent gallop by on the main road, and they were relieved.
But it was short-lived, for a notion came into Prince Geldion's mind, an insight sent by a spying hawk serving a witch in an island castle more than a hundred miles away. Soon the companions on the narrow trail heard the unmistakable clip-clopping of horse hooves on the path behind them. "How'd he know?" Mickey asked incredulously.
"Good fortune," Kelsey replied grimly, before any of the others could utter any more ominous possibilities. The trail forked a short distance ahead and Kelsey veered from the main easterly course, turning southeast. "Where are we going?" Gary asked Mickey quietly, as the path continued to turn, and soon had them heading right back to the west.
"Kelsey knows the wood better than any," was all that Mickey would reply, though his grave tone sent alarms off in Gary's head. "Keep yer faith." Gary had to be satisfied with that, though he suspected that the leprechaun knew more about their course than he was letting on.   And indeed Mickey did. The leprechaun knew that the path they were riding would take them to the southwestern comer of the small wood, a place of steamy fens and bottomless bogs, and horrid monsters that appreciated having their dinners delivered.