Frost Moon (13 page)

“So, girl,” the Marquis said, “think you can ink magic? Where’s the proof?”

“My work speaks for itself,” I said, dropping my coat into Calaphase’ hands, better exposing the vines, butterflies and jewels adorning my arms, shoulders and upper back.

“But does it speak loudly enough?” the Marquis cried, doffing
his
coat to expose an elaborately tattooed chest and arms, throwing his arms wide to the wolf boy and tiger girl.

A man and a woman leapt down on either side of the ring. Both were dressed normally, him in jeans and a rough mountaineer’s shirt over a white tee, her in fleece and shorts that looked like they’d taken a hell of amount of outdoor running. They prowled up around me, him catlike, her wolflike, inspecting the lines of my tats, eyeballing the colors, lingering over the more prominent designs. He began sniffing my arm, and I scowled; laughing, he backed off.

After a moment inspecting the Marquis and his pets, the referees or judges or whatever they were returned to the center of the ring and conferred. “Her marks are equal,” the woman cried.

“You lie,” the Marquis cried. “Her flowers are no match for my beasts!”

“Her work is of exceptional quality,” the man said.

The Marquis’ nostrils flared. “And how could you tell from such little work? It is easy to ink one line. Only a true artist can do so consistently. Is she consistent?”

“Her lines are strong, her shading subtle—” the woman began.

“The Marquis is right,” the man interrupted, turning his attention to me, his eyes roaming over my body. “Have you no other samples of your work?”

“I didn’t bring pictures,” I snapped.

“We would not accept them,” he replied. “Have you no other living ink to show?”

“She has no friends here, how would she—” the woman began; then stopped. Now
her
nostrils flared, and she glared at the man in disgust. “You lecherous
bastard,
,” she said softly.

“If she has no other ink to show, the Marquis’ challenge must stand,” he said, smiling.

The woman judge turned to me stiffly. “Have you no other—”

“I get the drift,” I said, glaring at the Marquis.
Thank God I was wearing a bra.
I gave the woman a nod of understanding. “I assume you will rip out his throat for me later? If I rip it out I think that might be construed as an insult.”

“Gladly,” she said, and the man laughed.

“Of course I have more ink to show,” I cried, throwing up my hands, glaring at the Marquis. I was going to kill him, him and his horny little judge, too. But maybe not the little feral girl, smirking at me; I blew her another kiss, and again she hid, this time behind the Marquis, to the delight of the catcalling crowd. Then slowly, sensually, I pulled off my top.

The wolves whistled and the stags snorted and brayed as I lifted the rim of the black cloth up and over my head, revealing my sports bra. I’d thought about this carefully and made the movements slinky without turning it into a complete striptease: I had no desire to further taunt an entire crowd full of werewolves and end up raped or eaten. But my movements had another effect: they shifted and stretched my skin, making the tattoos shimmer like fire.

Tattoos are just pigment inserted into the second layer of the skin, just below the layer of cells you slough off every time you take a shower. So, for starters, you can do with a tattoo anything you can do with regular ink—tint the skin a shade, draw a pretty picture—or draw a design. Some of the simplest ‘magical’ tattoos are just benevolent symbols inked with, essentially, an alchemists’ version of glow-in-the-dark ink.

But real magical tattoos are filled with the compounds that dispense, control and discharge mana; and with the life force of a living being beating just beneath their surface, magical tattoos are some of the most powerful marks around.

When I dropped the shirt into Calaphase’ waiting hand, the vines rippling down my arms were glowing bright and the gems actually starting to glitter. Tattoo magic worked best when exposed to the air, and I was already feeling the burn on my legs where excess mana was bleeding back into my body; so I reached down, lithely, and unzipped first one boot, then the other, making the snakes curling through the vines move and the butterflies shimmer.

There was an art to this, an actual magical skill: the magical tattoo artist I’d apprenticed to called it
skindancing,
and while I didn’t know the details of that art, over the years I’d grown quite good at storing and dispensing mana simply by flexing and stretching my skin. Until now, I’d only done it by myself, in front of a mirror; or very occasionally, in front of Savannah.

As for now, I was glad that the ruddy glare of the torches was hiding my flush of embarrassment. Stripping before strangers, even partially, was terrifying.

“Do not let the fear go to your head,” Calaphase warned, quietly but urgently. “There are werewolves in the audience; they can smell your adrenaline, hear your heart race.”

“Thank you, Calaphase,” I said, letting my breath out slowly. Then I turned, and slowly began unbuttoning my pants.

“Whoo!” cried a young wolf, leaning into the pit, surprisingly close. The female werewolf batted at him, but he leaned back and yelled anyway. “Take it all off!”

“I would not want to embarrass the Marquis,” I replied, twisting so that the pants slid softly to the floor and the rest of the vines and flowers flickered to life. “Nor would I want to be accused of influencing the judges with too many samples of my canvas!”

The crowd laughed, as I stood there half-naked in front of them in my black bra and panties, turning slowly with a bravado I didn’t feel. The male tiger prowled around me and nodded. “It is a
fine
canvas,” he said, ignoring the wolf-woman as she struck him. “And an exceptional
body
of work—”

“Those
cannot
be all
her
artistry,” the Marquis said, eyes boring into me, nostrils flaring.

“They indeed are,” I replied, turning oh so slowly, eyes thanking Calaphase as he dusted off my pants. “I did all but these on my hand and these on my thigh—”

“You lie!” the Marquis hissed, and the crowd grew silent. “Be careful with your accusations,” the male referee said quietly. “She is a guest. She does not know our rules—”

“She lies!” the Marquis said again. “Can you not see it! All of you who have been under my needle know it. She cannot have done her own knees—”

“A shaking leg can be held down,” I said. By Kring/L, in fact, and it had taken both of his big, beefy hands to hold just one of my legs still—tattooing your knee
hurts.
“It need not disrupt the hand—”

“She cannot have done the dragon,” the Marquis yelled. “It covers her whole body!”

Now my nostrils flared. I prowled across the ring until I stood just in front of the Marquis, then held up my right hand, clamped as if holding the electric needle. Then I slowly bent down, and began to trace the tattoo.

The Dragon’s tail starts curling around my left big toe, a black and gold design with blue and green gems that make it sparkle with life. I lifted my foot off the ground, curling my hand around the toe, the ankle, once, twice, three times, the limit of my balance. I then stretched out my leg and touched the ground, drawing my hand up my leg and over the outer curve of my thigh, tickling the Dragon as it marked its circle around the muscles of my belly.

By now it was clear to anyone who could see that I’d drawn that one single design where my own right hand would reach. But the Marquis’ eyes tightened skeptically, and truth be told, I had done this bit in a sequence of short strokes, alternately twisting over my shoulder and behind my back in a sequence that had taken five sessions over three days. But the crowd and judges were not likely to listen to any kind of explanation; I needed to make a show.

So I began twisting around slowly, showing off the reach and flexibility of my long arms and supple neck. The movement agitated the Dragon, making his tail flicker and withdraw from my foot. You’ll rarely see a skindancer fully covered in tattoos, and not just because we know how to use negative space; it’s for the magic. Our tattoos need room to move.

The Dragon moved as I moved, coiling and shifting about my body as I stretched and flexed my skin, drawing his glittering form underneath my hand as easily as I had when he was just an outline. The Marquis was half right: I couldn’t have done the Dragon if he was a normal tattoo; but since he was magic, once the major components of the design, the logic of the magic, was in place, I could move him almost anywhere I wanted to fill in the details.

But some points were better for the magic than others, and in case the Marquis was savvy enough to know that, I made one final show. As the Dragon coiled around, I moved my hand into that final difficult arc around my own back, ending up in a twisted but still comfortable inscribing position under my left shoulder blade—right as the head of the Dragon slid precisely beneath what would have been the point of my tattooing gun.

I couldn’t quite see whether I’d got it quite right—I had no full length mirror with me this time—but I felt the Dragon rippling under the skin as he moved, and scratched him under the chin with my forefinger. His whole body rippled with pleasure, sending waves of light, movement and color cascading through all the other tattoos over my whole body.

“Challenging a skindancer about where she inked her tattoos is
pointless,
and the Marquis should have known that,” I said loudly. I turned to look at him through one half lidded eye, then straightened and walked back to my side of the ring without a backward glance.

“The Dragon is mine,” I said. “You cannot top it.”

But the Marquis was not deterred. “I concede your skill… at dancing, if not inking,” he said, to the delight of the crowd. “I cannot compete with it. But magic is more than performance. Real magic has
function.
Show us, Dakota, can your marks do this?”

I turned, and gasped. The golden cat eyes of the feral girl hovered not three feet from me, barely visible within a column of shimmering heatwaves, like a catstriped version of
The Predator
effect. She growled and lunged at me, and I leapt back: only then could I see her outline. I sure as hell didn’t know any flash that could do that, and had no idea how to top it.

Then the wolf-boy leapt forward, displacing the girl. He snarled at me, eyes glowing; then the eyes of his tattoo began glowing as well. Suddenly his human head shifted in a blink to a wolf’s head, snapping at me, howling at the ceiling; and all the wolves whistled and applauded. I could now see that what I had thought were far-seeing signs were actually the marks of a magical capacitor, and guessed that the applause of the crowd was that the tat had made him a quick-change artist. Impressive… but I was starting to get an idea.

Now the Marquis stretched his thin chest. Wolf tattoos began to move across his shoulders, and tribal designs on his chest began to shift and interplay. His marks gave off quite a bit of light, and were moving impressively fast—as long as you hadn’t noticed the trick. The Marquis was powerful, but he only inked
surface
magic. His tattoos were shimmering back and forth on his chest in a running display that I assumed was some kind of history of the pack, and the wolves were lapping it up; but all I saw was—

“A magical
screensaver,
;” I cried, clapping slowly and loudly. The Marquis’s jaw bulged. “Clearly you are an expert at the two dimensional form. I cannot equal you.”

“Well, then—” the Marquis said, confused and suspicious.

I clapped my hands together firmly and rubbed them against each other, Mister Miyagi style. When I pulled them apart, the
mana
I’d built up in
my
magical capacitors on my palms released slowly, into a glowing ball of light.

The crowd grew silent, then drew back as the ball grew larger and larger, from softball to soccer to basketball. The Marquis just stared, eyes wide, clenching his jaw. I was right. He was a backwoods artist; skilled, but without the training or the flash to do real skindancer marks that could affect anything beyond the wearer. If the crowd’s reaction was any gauge, none of them had seen this kind of magic either. Now it was clear why the Bear King feared it.

“There is more to magic than just show,” I said, letting the floating ball rise slowly over my upraised palm, then jabbing it so it exploded in a thousand fiery sparks that jetted out among the crowd and pushed them back a full yard from the edge of the pit. “And more than just function. True magic is beauty incarnate: let me show you.”

Then I swayed my whole body, drawing mana through the vines, concentrating it into my upraised left wrist so the gems gleamed, the flowers bloomed, and the butterfly flapped its wings and raised off my wrist into life.

There was silence around me as the glowing image of the butterfly flapped in the air, as I sheltered it with my hand like a dying flame, feeding all the mana left in my body into it to bring it back to life. Then I raised my hand, whispered,
“Fly,”
and blew one more kiss to the feral girl—and the butterfly flew with it, on a wind of sparkles and sunshine.

The girl squealed and held up her hand, and the trailers of magic bounced off her harmlessly. But the butterfly settled on her hand, fluttering, and she stared at it with open, wide eyes, and something closer to delight than fear. It flickered, once more, then lay its wings down and merged with her hand.

“You get one for free,” I said. “More will cost you.”

She cried out with joy, and the Marquis reached over and grabbed her hand, running his thumb over the design, peering at it with wide and inquisitive eyes. Then he looked sharply over at me, and took a sharp bow.

“How could I not concede to such skill?” he said. “Dakota may ink any of us.”

And then I was swarmed with a hundred werewolves, tigers, and stags, pressing around me, all asking what I could do for them—or just trying to get close enough to rub up against my bare skin. The referees and vampires pushed them all back and made a space for me at the edge of the ring, where, exhausted, I quickly began putting back on my clothes.