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“She’s magnificent!” Kemal breathed.
“Or insane,” muttered Vai under his breath. “Are you sure she’s safe from him?”
Kemal grimaced. “We do not eat people. They smell bad and are not at all nourishing. Among the lore of my kind, it is said humans are poisonous. Cold mages most of all.”
“How have you cut the threads of my magic?” Vai asked.
“I know nothing of such secrets. Why would I?” Bitterness shaded his expression but then, remembering what he had just done, he smiled.
After a hesitation, Vai spoke. “My apologies for any discourtesy I showed you the first time we met, Maester Napata. I’m not just saying that because you saved our lives.”
Kemal staggered along between us, looking unaccountably cheerful for a man who had taken several gashes to the flesh. “My thanks, Magister. Be assured I am accustomed to such treatment from cold mages. Although to be honest, your arrogance had a particularly memorable flair that made it all the more striking.”
I glanced past Kemal to Vai, not sure how he would react to this gentle sarcasm.
“My thanks,” he said with a slight flutter of his eyelashes. I wasn’t sure if he was suppressing a sneer or a laugh. Then he smiled. “I often practiced for many hours in front of a mirror to be sure of bringing it off to its full effect.”
Both Kemal and I laughed.
We hobbled around the kitchen wing. In front of the pier, guarding the rowboat, we discovered Maestra Lian holding a burning lamp in one hand and in the other a poker with which she was threatening Rory. He had an oar in each hand as he tried to dodge past her.
“Maester Kemal!” she cried. “This person steals the boat!”
He let go of us and limped to her. “Maestra Lian, let him pass. His Excellency is about to depart.” He took the poker from her to use as a cane. “Some ruse must be devised to confuse the soldiers and send them away. I fear for the hatchlings.”
“Tell them I wove the illusion of a dragon with cold magic as we were escaping,” said Vai. “Their belief in my exceptional abilities will trouble them for months.”
“If not years,” Rory said, lowering the oars. “Can I get in the boat now, or is that dragon-stinking man going to poke me with the iron stick?”
I poked him. “Rory, don’t be impolite! Maester Napata, my apologies. What will you do now?”
Kemal gestured toward the building. “I inherit the position as headmaster. That was always His Excellency’s intention.”
A shape like the void of night thumped down to the shore. I felt as with the skin of the grass that crushing weight, the ancient fire of its soul, and the spark of a new being about to shed the husk of its old form.
Bee’s flow of words was the leash on which she led the beast to water. “I do not mean to sound inconsiderate or ungrateful, but I do think it most unfair that I should risk so much and yet be told so little. I realize human people are of little interest to your kind except insofar as we hinder your lives or aid you. But, for example, I would wish to know who that very old man was who kissed me and then died! Was he one of your kind, for I am sure he must have been. Why did he say he was waiting for me? He called me his death!”
Because of the cloudy light chasing along its black scales, she was able to see us standing by the pier. She waved cheerfully, looking not one bit frightened.
The dragon slid into the river. The touch of the water peeled away the skin of the beast. As his old skin sloughed off, a slender creature with pearlescent scales unfolded sleek wings. Its crest fluttered in a rainbow of shining color. It looked very like the leviathan that had carried us across the Great Smoke, only much smaller. The water boiled white as she swam in a wide arc out into the current and back to the shore.
Stars peeked through rents in the cloud cover. The head breached. Water poured off the long neck as she towered above us. Her scales reflected us as in a mirror:
The shadow of Rory’s cat spirit limned his body like a cloak.
The glittering threads of Vai’s cold magic flowed like sparkling ribbons that were being sucked into the void of the dragon’s massive weight.
Maestra Lian and Bee each bore the ghost of a third eye shutting and opening on her forehead.
As for me… two Cats melted together, one wreathed in the shadowy threads of magic that bind the worlds while the other was plain, solid flesh.
Bee turned to Kemal. Unfolding around him in the manner of a male peacock’s bright tail, he wore a fan of brilliant colors shaped into the translucent illusion of the dragon that was his true nature. I thought it unlikely he could have looked away from Bee’s smitten regard even if the world had ended and we had all been swallowed by fire and ice.
Her voice’s hoarse tremor was no doubt enrapturing to a man who had been hopelessly infatuated for so long. “I have never seen anything as magnificent in my life as you becoming a dragon.”
She tipped up her face.
I thought he would crush her to him and kiss her searchingly and deeply and with the release of all that frustrated longing, as Vai had kissed me so angrily and passionately on the stairs at Nance’s boardinghouse in Expedition.
