Witches’ Brew by Terry Brooks

Her fingers dug into his arm as she nodded in fierce, voiceless agreement.

Dragon Sight

It was afterward that Ben discovered he was still wearing the medallion. He looked down and there it was, hanging by its chain from his neck. For a moment he couldn’t believe it. He held it up and stared at it. The familiar graven image of the Paladin riding out of Sterling Silver at sunrise glimmered back. He had been so certain he had lost it. He had looked for it, and it wasn’t there.

“Ben, what’s wrong?” Willow asked quickly, seeing the look on his face.

He shook his head, letting the medallion fall back into place. “Nothing. I was just…”

He trailed off, confused. The blow on the head when he had stumbled must have stunned him worse than he thought. But he had been so sure! He had reached for the medallion, and it hadn’t been there!

Willow let the matter drop, moved to the clothes chest, and brought out clean robes. Seconds later a contingent of palace guards came charging up the stairs, weapons at the ready, responding finally to the attack. Ben and Willow were working on Bunion by then and ignored them. The kobold was banged up considerably but otherwise appeared to be all right. Kobolds are tough little fellows, Ben thought admiringly, relieved that his friend had not been seriously injured, thinking that almost anyone else would have been killed.

The palace guards poked around the room, stared out through the gap in the wall into the rain-streaked night, and mostly looked uncomfortable with the fact that they were forced to be there at all. It was a reflection on them that the attack had almost succeeded, and they were wary of both the High Lord’s and Kallendbor’s reactions to their failure to prevent it.

Ben, for his part, was too preoccupied to concern himself with casting blame; he was still mulling over the suddenness of the assault and the circumstances that had surrounded it. But Kallendbor, bare-chested and broadsword in hand when he burst into the room, was less charitable. After hearing a shortened version of the attack from Ben, he berated everyone within shouting distance. Then he dispatched one search party to the riverbanks below to discover if any trace of the Ardsheal or Rydall’s monster could be found. Others he sent throughout the castle to make certain nothing else threatened. Ben, Willow, and Bunion were moved to other rooms, and guards were ordered to keep close watch over them for the remainder of the night. Obviously ill at ease with what had happened and anxious to avoid staying longer in their company, Kallendbor bid them a gruff good night and went off to sleep.

An exhausted Willow and Bunion were quick to follow.

Ben, however, stayed awake for a long time thinking about this latest monster. Two things bothered him, and he could reconcile neither.

The first was how the creature had gotten into the castle in the first place. How had it managed to slip past Kallendbor’s guards and the Ardsheal as well? Something that big and cumbersome should never have been able to do so. It should not even have gotten past the front gates. Unless, of course, it hadn’t come through them in the first place but had gotten into the palace by use of magic, which was the only conclusion that made any sense. And that made him wonder—although admittedly this was more of a stretch—if magic had also been used during the attack to make him think the medallion was lost. Otherwise, why hadn’t he been able to find it—even stunned by the blow to his head, even in the frenzy of the moment—when it was hanging right there around his neck?

The second thing bothering him was that something was vaguely familiar about that robot, and he didn’t see how that could be. There weren’t any robots in Landover or even, so far as he knew, any idea of what robots were. So he must have seen it in his old world in a movie or a comic or some such, since even there robots were still mostly conceptual. He raked through his memories in an effort to recall where, but nothing came to mind.