Silver Dragon Codex (17 page)

“Trying!” the half-elf yelled, tossing about on the arcox’s plated back. “Tip’s too short, and my hand’s weak from the chimera’s poison. I can’t thrust hard enough! Curse it, these darts were designed for juggling or throwing at corkboard, not for killing a gigantic lobster! We need another weapon!”

Belen backed away from the bars and was stared at her hands. “Jace, am I a woman who turns into a dragon, or am I a dragon that turns into a woman?” she asked suddenly.

He blinked. “What?”

“Answer the question!” she screamed at him, eyes glinting with a strange intensity. Her skin had turned grayer, her body seemed larger than the slight form of the dancer he remembered. Was she losing herself again?

“Belen, calm down!” he yelled. “You’ve got to calm—”

Cerisse shrieked over him, breaking into his sentence, “Dragon, Belen! You’re a dragon! You’re only a person because you
want
to be! Now somebody help me with this thing—I only have one dart left!”

“Then if the spell breaks,” Belen spoke in measured tones, her breathing tight and controlled, “I turn into a
dragon.” She stared down at her hands, where small scales glistened like a silk sheath over her skin.

“Yes, right. Exactly!” Jace ducked under the arcox’s claws once more and heard them clang against the iron bars behind where he’d been standing, but found himself in the corner of the cage with nowhere to go. The monster lunged, Cerisse still clinging to its back. She lifted a fist and punched it atop its armored head, and it stumbled, missing him by only a few inches. In the space between sharp claw clacks, Jace managed to squeak between its chitinous body and the bars. The arcox must have felt him there, because it shuffled sideways to trap him.

The monster was heavy. Jace found himself edged between the thick plates of the arcox’s shell and the heavy iron bars of the cage. The monster rammed sideways, scuttling on thin legs, and the force of the blow knocked all the air out of Jace’s lungs. He choked, scratching and kicking at the arcox to try to knock one of the spindly legs out from beneath the monster, but nothing was working. The creature only pressed harder, refusing to budge even when Cerisse kicked and punched at it from above. It was going to crush him to death!

“So if something that is a part of me becomes no longer a part of me, then it’s dragon. Not human.” Belen wasn’t making any sense—or maybe it was the shooting
stars that Jace saw exploding in his vision that kept him from understanding her. She froze for a moment longer, and then jerked her hands apart. Jace glimpsed blood on her palm, and her face drained of color. “Cerisse!” she cried. “Catch!”

Something silvery and bright spun through the air, whisking between the bars. Instinctively, the juggler reached up to catch it, her certain hands grasping it tightly. She arched back on the arcox’s shoulders and then plunged it downward, shouting her anger and her fear with a wild cry. The purple bandage fluttered around her wrist, her eyes as wild as a deep-forest elf as she attacked the beast. The shining blade in her hand looked like some sort of a dagger twinkling between her fingers. Where had Belen found that? It sank between the gap of the arcox’s thick plating like water through a sieve.

The monster screamed, and it was the first real sound of pain they’d heard from it since being locked in this cage. It writhed, crushing Jace further. Cerisse scrambled on its back, drawing the blade out to stab again. The arcox broke away from the bars and charged across the cage, hurtling toward the far side of the cage at breakneck speed. Cerisse hung on tight, bringing the dagger down a third time even as the arcox threw itself against the wagon wall. It hit so hard that Cerisse was thrown free. She tumbled to the
ground in front of the monster, the shining silvery blade still clutched in her hand. The bars creaked, and the wood above them began to splinter. The wagon’s roof shuddered, and Belen let out a little cry.

“Cerisse!” Jace screamed, falling to his knees. It felt like his ribs were broken, and he could hardly draw a breath.

She didn’t stop fighting, twisting to her feet like a cat. One of the arcox’s claws caught her on a backswing, the thick curve of its closed pincer cracking against her injured arm. Cerisse let out a scream of pain but leaped in the air to avoid the sharp blade of its clacking claw. She landed between its writhing pincers and threw herself forward again, toward the monster’s eyes. It dodged to avoid her, backing into the bars

A quick slash, and she cut through one stalk, then another, and the arcox was blinded. Cerisse dodged the vicious pincers once more and plunged the dagger forward, cutting between the chest plates of the arcox with a vicious swipe.

The creature stumbled, tottered, and fell. Cerisse crumpled to her knees in front of it, gasping for breath. Jace made his way toward her, picking through the hay and crawling over the arcox’s fallen form. He reached out and touched her shoulder. “Cerisse, are you all right?”

Belen was already on the other side of the bars,
tugging where the arcox had caused the wood of the roof to splinter. While Jace helped Cerisse slowly to her feet, Belen managed to separate the bars enough to squeeze through. “I think the weight on the bars broke part of the roof,” she called out, standing on her tiptoes to pound a board loose. “We might be able to climb through and get outside.” Even at this distance. Jace could see that Belen’s left hand was bloodied, her fingertips leaving slick red traces on the wood.

He looked down at the dagger still clutched in Cerisse’s hand and untwisted her fingers from the base of the blade. It wasn’t a dagger. There was no hilt, no real blade, only a thickly curved shaft, pointed at one end with a razor-sharp edge and a stubby, bloody base. “This is a claw.” He stepped back, surprised.

“I did what I had to do.” Belen didn’t look down, climbing up the bars awkwardly to pound against another loose board. He saw her wince with each motion, one hand twisted in her shirt. Blood stained the fabric, seeping from a hidden wound. “I’m a dragon, changed by magic. So anything that’s part of me that is separated from me changes back. That’s how magic works.”

“What did you do?” He stared at her.

Slowly, Belen pulled her hand out of her shirt, letting the folds of fabric unwind. He could see the injury now.
The nail of her first finger had been ripped away, leaving a bloody wound. He stared aghast.

“You tore your fingernail out?”

She ignored him. “Help me get these boards down, and we can climb out of here.”

“Climb out?” Jace was near panic. “First we get attacked by a chimera, then the arcox. Cerisse is still sick from poison, and that arcox nearly cut my arm off, not to mention the fact that I think I have a couple of broken ribs. Now you want us to climb out of here … and do what? Fight Mysos? Stop Worver? We don’t even know where Ebano went. For all we know, he was working for the ringmaster!” The sight of her wound struck him more deeply than the pain in his side or the injury that Cerisse suffered fighting the chimera. The idea that she’d hurt herself, willingly … that wasn’t heroic at all.

“What?” Cerisse quirked an eyebrow.

“Oh, Jace.” Sighing sympathetically, Belen shook her head. “You’ve been looking at this whole adventure as if it were just another performance. If we did well enough, it’d all turn out right in the end. The audience would applaud, the curtain would go down, and there’d be an encore.”

He nodded. “In the end, we’d go home, take off the makeup, change out of our costumes, and everything would be great again, just like it was before. But we can’t do that, can
we? Things can’t go back to the way they were.” Jace didn’t want to look at Belen or see that strange pity in her eyes.

“No, Jace.” Now it was Cerisse’s turn to pull him to his feet. “We can’t. Not everything’s a stage show. The world isn’t like a magician with only one trick. Pull the rabbit out of the hat, and once it’s out—where are you? The curtain closes, and when it opens tomorrow, the rabbit will be back in the hat? It doesn’t work that way, things endlessly repeating over and over. Everything changes.”

“She’s right.” Belen’s lips curled into a slow smile. “That’s how magic—that’s how
life
—works.” She reached out to them, grasping both of their hands between hers. “What are you afraid of, Jace?”

Losing you. He wanted to say it, meant to say it, but the words wouldn’t come out. Everything up to now had been such a grand adventure, a chance to show Belen that he would fight for her, that he could be counted on, trusted. He hadn’t even thought about what it might cost until he’d seen what Belen had done to herself in order to save them. “I thought we were heroic. Fighting monsters, saving a ruined village, even finding your egg. Like a story, the kind where the hero just has to do his best, be honorable and good, and he wins. We’d all win.”

“Then take a bow and watch the curtain fall?” Cerisse asked. He nodded, and she laughed. The sound
was so unexpected that it brought a flush of blood to Jace’s cheeks.

“Don’t laugh at me!” he shouted, more angrily than he’d meant.

Cerisse fell silent. She shook her head, the auburn braid waggling behind her back. “Jace, I’m not laughing at you. I’m trying to explain.” She sighed, letting go of his hand to tug at her braid in irritation.

“Life isn’t a performance,” Belen said. “You don’t get to try again if you drop a ball you’re juggling, or if you forget a line or a step in the dance. You just have to keep going, even if someone gets hurt. You have to do the right thing because you can’t be certain what the outcome will be, so you have to at least be certain that you can look back on your own actions and know you didn’t give in to evil.”

Jace looked down at his mud-covered boots, remembering the feeling of flight between Belen’s giant silver wings. Had it been so different from falling? When he knew the ground was rushing up to meet him, with no way to save himself, wasn’t that flight too? Do what’s right, Belen said. No matter what the cost or whether you’ll win or lose.

Otherwise, how could he live with himself? “You’re right, Belen,” he said quietly.

“Psst, Jace,” Cerisse volunteered, a mischievous glint in her eye. “You can win, if you know how.”

Both Belen and Jace stared at her. “Uh … how?” Jace asked. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know the answer.

“You can win,” she repeated, “if you don’t care what the prize will be. You can’t say, ‘If I get such a thing, or if I see that, then I win.’ And you certainly can’t say, ‘If I make so-and-so love me, I win.’” Her smile faded. “That’s not winning, that’s asking life to bribe you.” Her eyes glanced from Jace to Belen and back again. “If what you want doesn’t happen, that has to be fine too. No matter who gets hurt or what you have to do, if you know you’ve done the right thing—even if what you want doesn’t happen—then you win. That’s the only way to live.”

“Is that right, Cerisse?” Belen asked, a strangeness in her voice.

Cerisse shrugged off the question. “Chin up, Jace. Listen to me. What we’re going to do is climb up those bars, go out onto the roof, and find Ebano. Then we’ll all talk to Mysos, and the wizard will have to listen to us. He’ll have to let Belen stay.”

“I thought you just said you couldn’t decide what the prize will be.” Jace tried to smile.

“I haven’t,” she answered with a wink. “I’ve set our strategy. It’s not the same thing. After all we’ve been through and sacrificed, Mysos will have no other choice.
He’s a white-robed wizard, after all, and they’re supposed to be good, kind people. If we trust that Belen’s a good person because she’s a silver dragon, then the same thing holds true for white-robed wizards, right?” She and Jace shared a smile.

Belen climbed back over to the bars and began to scale them, leaving faint red marks where her hands gripped the broken wooden boards. Jace stood beneath her, helping to balance the dancer’s light steps until she could pull herself out onto the roof. With a smile, she reached back and gripped Cerisse’s hand, helping the half-elf through with a tug. The girls paused on the roof while Jace jumped up to grab the wooden planking, exchanging quiet words. He jerked himself up as he would on the high wire, climbing with his the sheer strength of his arms. “Little help here?” he gasped, flopping chest first on the roof and kicking his legs weakly. The two girls turned quickly and reached for him. Cerisse laughed nervously and they pulled him all the way up.

It was nice to be out in the open again, breathing clean air that didn’t stink of hay and animals. Jace took a deep breath, letting his body grow accustomed to the feeling of sun on his skin. A sound reached him, tickling his ears until he turned to look off the edge of the wagon roof and follow it. “Hey,” he said. “What are all those people yelling about?”

“Oh my gosh, Jace.” Cerisse grabbed his arm, pointing. “There’s a fight over in the clearing behind the big top. Someone’s hurt!” Her face paled, and she jerked her arm back to cover her mouth. “That body on the ground … at the White Robe’s feet. That looks like … Ebano.”

hey pushed through the small crowd around the clearing, careful to hide themselves among the circus performers who were whispering and muttering. In the center of the clearing, the ground was cracked and blackened, stained with poisonous acid and broken open by magical force. Mysos, the White Robe, stood over the fallen mesmerist, his hands clenched in angry fists. “In Paladine’s name!” he roared. “What is going on? Who is this man? Why did he attack me?”