The Dragon Shield / Part of Chapter 2

Chapter 2

King Achilles threw a long, keen knife down on the map planning an attack on Lepordanda, the country Thevan had been warring with for the past six years.

“I told you not to fail, Sykin. Did I not make the message clear enough?” Achilles’ voice was low and dangerous. “Or do you have hearing problems? Tell me Sykin, please, why did you fail?” the Tyrant drew another knife from a sleek black belt, studded with crystals, and flicked it threateningly at his servant.

"I'm s-so s-sorry, master, but you see," stammered the servant uncontrollably.

"No excuses, Sykin," warned the King in a falsely kind voice "I cannot execept failure." Sykin cringed under the King's threatening words.

"B-but you see, S-scorpio w-wasn't-"

"I don't care whether or not Scorpio was there. You cannot fail me. It will be your demise, not mine, if you do."

Sykin nodded, trembling. "I'm glad you understand," King Achilles smiled his cold, dark, smile, and flicked the knife at Sykin. It landed with a thud in Sykin's stomach.

Sykin keeled over, blood gushing from the fresh wound. "Take him to the infirmary," commanded King Achilles to the guards at his right, "But make sure that he is not released."

Leigh let go of the bowstring and watched the arrow fly toward her target. She put the bow down gently to the ground, and examined her shot. It was fair. That shot would have earned her nine out of ten points in a formal competition. But now she was only competing against other children in her village, mostly boys, who where livid that a girl could beat them at something as trivial as archery.

Leigh stepped back and watched the other competitors finishing. She could see that she was about to win again. Her score was forty-nine out of fifty. The boy who had beaten her once, name Brian, had thirty-four, and another good archer, Hector, had forty-five.

When all of the archers had finished shooting, they approached the targets to retrieve the arrows and count up their score. Leigh, who found this simple, took less than a minute, while some of the boys, who had never really practiced math, took ten minutes or more.

They gethered together. Hector, the oldest, was in charge. "Okay, what was everyone's score?"

"Twenty-two," yelled out a young boy with a runny nose.

"Higher than twenty-two," said Hector.

"Thirty-nine," screamed an even younger boy, sure that he would finally win.

"Forty-nine," said Leigh softly. A hush came around the cloud of boys. None of them had ever heard of a score much higher than forty-three.

"She's lying," accused Brian. "how can you ever trust a girl? No one has ever gotten a score much higher than forty-five!"

"Yeah!" agreed the boy with thirty-nine points. A wave of noise came around the boys, who were all looking murderously at Leigh.

Leigh did the only thing sensible, and ran.