Silver Dragon Codex

by R. D. Henham

  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.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  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?”

  Worver pushed through the bystanders, shooing them away with sweeping gestures. “Stand back, good people. I’m sure there’s been some sort of misunderstanding.” He shoved aside Bobbo and one of the other clowns to come to a clucking halt beside the White Robe of Palanthas. “That’s Ebano! He’s our master mesmerist—a hypnotist beyond compare.”

  Jace could see Worver twisting his mustache around one finger while his strange monkey jumped from shoulder to shoulder. “Attacked you, you say?”

  Ebano lay face down, spread out on the ground between them. His dark robes were scorched by the acid. The air had the pungent stench of singed fabric and burned flesh. Jace wanted to get a better look at Ebano’s wounds, but there was no way to find out if the mesmerist was still alive without risking Worver seeing them among the crowd. They’d have to wait and see.

  “He came to my wagon, wouldn’t stop pounding on it, and when I answered, he used magic on me. Illegal magic, I’d imagine.” Mysos scowled. “He’s certainly never been to any Tower of High Sorcery that I’ve ever known.”

  “Well, that is something! Used real magic, hmm? I’d never have believed it. I thought his whole hocus-pocus thing was just sleight of hand.” Worver’s pet, Tsusu, leaped down to the ground and started poking at Ebano, leaning in close to see if the dark-skinned mesmerist was still breathing. The scaly little monkey jerked back and started chittering. “Still breathing?” Worver asked his pet. “I see.”

  Cerisse gripped Jace’s arm. “Ebano’s alive!”

  Jace hushed her quietly, shooting her a smile.

  “Perhaps he was under some sort of spell when he attacked you.” Worver smoothed his mustache.

  “A spell?” Mysos barked. “Are there more illegal wizards among your performers?”

  “What? No!” Waving his hands in distress, Worver protested, “That’s not what I meant! I meant, you see … that perhaps one of the mesmerist’s spells backfired. He might have been cruelly manipulated by his own magical mental control, some dark hypnotism. Or perhaps one of his recent subjects took the joke poorly, you see, and came back to cause him trouble. It wasn’t any of us! Yes, I’m sure that’s what happened. Poor Ebano. How tragic.”

  “Wasn’t this one of the men who went with the dragon?” Mysos’s sharp eyes took in everything, flicking from the dancing monkey to Worver’s uncomfortable shifting. “How is it that he has returned and she has not?”

  Stumped, Worver glanced back and forth among the performers, trying to look anywhere but at Mysos’s face. “Well, ah, perhaps he was sent ahead … to tell us how they’re doing?”

  “We have to get Ebano out of there,” Jace whispered to Cerisse. “If you cause a distraction, he’ll have to notice. Maybe open the horses’ pen so he has to stop them from getting out? That might give me a chance to grab Ebano, get him out of here, and tend to his wounds. It’s not a very good plan, but I don’t have any other ideas.”

  “Do you think binding his wounds will help?” Belen asked softly.

  “Maybe. I can’t tell how bad he’s hurt.” Jace cursed under his breath, glad that they had stopped by the big top to pick up their things. The short sword at his belt felt very reassuring right now. “Do we have another option?”

  “If you want a distraction,” Cerisse brightened, “I can do that.”

  “All right.” He shared a smile with Cerisse. Impulsively, she reached out and grabbed his hand, squeezing it gently. It made him feel better, being close to her, like he wasn’t so alone in all this trouble. He wrapped his fingers around Cerisse’s for a moment. “While you get the horses, Belen and I will … wait, hang on. Where’s Belen?” Panicked, he dropped Cerisse’s hand and lunged upward, looking around at the crowd in horrified realization.

  Belen had moved away from them to the center of the crowd. Before he could yell out her name or get her attention, Belen stepped into the clearing. She faced Worver and Mysos with almost regal calm. “I have returned,” she said simply. All eyes locked on her. Jace could see the open confusion of the clowns, Mysos’s relieved half smile, and Worver’s grin of hysteria.

  “This man is a companion of mine.” She gestured to Ebano. “Can his wounds be healed?”

  Worver strode to Belen’s side and took her elbow, pulling her close. “Belen, my dear! There you are! It’s so good to see that you’re all right!” From where he stood, Jace could see that Worver’s grip was far too tight for comfort. To answer the lady’s question, Mysos took a moment to kneel next to Ebano and inspect the fallen man’s burned robes and pained skin. While he was looking at Ebano, Worver was trying to drag Belen away. When the ringmaster spoke, his voice was low and quiet so Mysos wouldn’t hear him. “I assume our little friends are roaming about?”

  “No,” Belen said clearly. “They’re dead.”

  “What is she doing?” Cerisse gasped, holding tightly to Jace’s arm.

  “She’s protecting us. If Worver thinks we’re alive, he’ll have to keep trying to kill us. Now get down, he’ll see us.” Jace grabbed Cerisse’s shoulder and pushed her back, ducking quickly behind a pile of feed bags.

  Worver tugged on Belen again, trying to maneuver her toward his red wagon. Unwilling to be moved even an inch, Belen jerked her arm out of the ringmaster’s grip and glared at him. Worver started to speak, but Belen cut him off, demanding, “Can you heal Ebano, Worver?”

  “What?” Worver blinked. “I don’t know what you mean, my dear—”

  She cut him off again, her eyes flashing. “You healed Hautos when he was hurt by the werewolves. You healed Francis the Firebreather. Others. Can you heal Ebano?”

  “Minor incidents! Petty injuries!” Worver said loudly, waving his hand in dismissal. He pitched his voice low again and hissed, “I don’t see any reason to help Ebano since he has attacked our guest.” Worver’s eyebrows flew up and down like butterflies. “I would be better served if I let him die, poor fellow. Unless, of course, you’d be willing to make it worth my while?” His eyes flicked over the crowd and his voice dropped so low that Jace could barely make it out. “I’d so much rather have you part of the circus willingly, dear girl, but I’ll take the best I can get.”

  Belen bit her lip, looking down at Ebano. Mysos was shaking his head somberly as he looked at the dark-skinned mesmerist’s wounds. Ebano’s body lay broken and crumpled on the sandy ground. Jace knew immediately what Belen was thinking. She wouldn’t give her word unless she meant it.

  “I’ll do it.” Belen’s voice was heavy, weighed down by defeat.

  Worver relaxed visibly and broke into a smile. “There, there, my dear Belen. A tragedy, I know, but I shall make every endeavor to see that you are well cared for. But you’ve gotten out of all that trouble, and you’re here! Wonderful. I see that the experience has educated you. Very good, my dear. Then there’s nothing else between us. Now, tell me, do you promise not to make trouble? To let bygones be bygones?” The ringmaster’s tone sharpened slightly.

  “I will—if you heal Ebano.”

  “A trade, my dear? Very well. If I heal Ebano of these wounds, you will stay. You’ll sign the legal contracts with the White Robe that will make me officially your caretaker? You won’t cause trouble?” No one else seemed to be paying much attention to the ringmaster. Their attention was focused on Mysos and the fallen Ebano.

  Belen faced Worver squarely. “You have an agreement, you beast. Now make good on your part of the deal.”

  Worver smiled and stepped away. “Mysos, is he alive?”

  The White Robe looked deeply concerned. “Yes. I’m no healer, but these wounds are significant. I don’t know if he will recover, and if he does, I’m afraid he will be crippled by the injuries.” Mysos’s hand lingered on Ebano’s unmoving shoulder. “I am sorry, my friend, for whatever insult I did you that brought you to this end.”

  Worver bowed, fluffing out his short cloak and doffing his top hat. “This is a circus, my lord
Mysos. You’d be amazed at the recovery time of even the most serious wounds. Our healers are well trained to deal with injury garnered while performing our amazing feats.” The ringmaster spun on his heel, never letting go of Belen’s elbow. “Hautos, my horned companion! Come here and gather this poor fellow. The rest of you, go back to your duties—the crowd hasn’t left the big top, and we’ve little time to spare gawking about. Go on now, go on.”

  The minotaur stepped out from the crowd. He flexed his tremendous muscles and made soft gruff sounds in response to the ringmaster’s commands. When he walked past Mysos, the wizard stiffened. “You’re quite sure everything will be fine?” asked the White Robe.

  “Yes, yes, trust me on that.” Worver tried to take Mysos’s arm as he’d taken Belen’s, but the White Robe pulled away and brushed off his sleeve where the ringmaster had touched it. “Now, then, why don’t you and I and the lady Belen step into my wagon? I’m sure you must be very interested in her trip.”

  “Yes, I am. And I have those contracts you’d mentioned, the magical ones that will enforce our agreement. Assuming the lady is agreed, that is, and that she has no further information that will change the situation.” He looked at Belen sternly.

  “No, none,” she answered, her silver hair flowing over her shoulders as she walked toward the wagon. “I went to Angvale, but there was no one there. I … I did attack the village. I deserve to be punished, and I surrender myself to it without argument.”

  Mysos looked impressed, even if his brows were still knitted. He nodded once for emphasis, and then turned toward the wagon.