The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Chapter 16: Diplomacy

Five frogs leaped at Floridiana. One went for her face, two for her seal, and the rest for her seal paste. With a hoarse cry, the mage hopped back, stumbling over a clump of eelgrass.

Nagi whirled to yell at Captain Carpio, "What are you doing? Call them off!"

"She needs a lesson!" he shouted back. "A good beating!"

"I specifically said that I wanted to negotiate first! I told you I didn't want to escalate the situation!"

If she'd wanted peaceable conversation, she should have assigned Captain Carpa to the welcome committee. Although, uncharacteristically for the political creature, I hadn't seen her in the audience chamber all day.

Where's Captain Carpa? I asked the dragon.

He'd sunk down in his throne, tucking his chin and his pearl into his mane as if that might shield him. "Away on patrol."

Was she going to be furious when she returned!

One of the frogs arced past Floridiana, shooting out his tongue. He was aiming for her seal but got her wrist instead, his tongue wrapping around and around it like a silk cord. She flapped her hand to fling him off, but he swung back and forth and started to haul himself up by his own tongue.

The frog attacking Floridiana's head fell short and plopped at her feet, and she pulled back her boot to kick him. With a nimble jump, he landed on her foot. She stamped it, trying to jolt him off, but he wrapped his legs around the top of her boot and clung on. She got a different frog square on her back.

There was a crunch. The frog shrieked.

In the audience chamber, the dragon and I both cringed as if our own spines had just cracked.

"Disengage!" Nagi ordered Captain Carpio, baring her fangs. "Disengage at once!"

"They'll all die if I pull them back now!"

I waited for the stomped-on frog to get up, but she lay flat on her belly with her four limbs twitching.

How – how did the mage do that? I gasped. All she did was step on her!

No spirit had ever died from getting stepped on by a human!

"Her boots are spelled," said the dragon grimly without taking his eyes off the scene.

Now that I looked more closely, there was a smudged, faded stamp on the heel of each boot. A strength-booster spell, I guessed, a wise precaution for a lone traveler.

The injured frog still wasn't getting up. Screaming, one of the others scrambled over and nudged her. She didn't respond.

She isn't dead, is she? I asked, still in shock.

I'd seen powerful mages before. Of course I had. But they were Imperial Mages, the elite of the elite, graduates of the Imperial Academy who'd survived decades of training and testing and purging before they won their appointments. This – this was just some poor, tattered, two-bit traveling mage who'd probably taught herself out of a handbook she'd dug up in a secondhand bookshop.

My voice went shrill. Did she really kill the guard? By stepping on her?

"No," answered the dragon flatly. "I'd have felt that."

Oh, of course. The bond between liege and vassal would have transmitted her injury and death to him at once.

The frog that had gone to her aid looped his tongue and one foreleg around her and tugged her through the gateway, where the shrimp rushed to help.