by Rachel Aaron
“Hypothetically speaking,” he said, looking up at the giant dragon, who’d sat patiently observing this whole time. “Can anyone pick up one of these chains, or do you have to be a seer?”
“Anyone can trade their future for certainty, yes,” the dragon said. “Though, since only seers can actually look inside the chains and see which future is which, you might not be happy with your purchase.”
Julius cursed under his breath. There went that plan. Not that he’d been particularly keen to trade his future away, but chains seemed to be all they had to work with around here. He was trying to think of some other, cleverer reason Bob had sent them to this place when Dragon Sees the Beginning added. “I might be able to help you, though.”
That was the last thing he’d expected the giant dragon to say, and his head popped up like a cork. “You?”
The dragon nodded, and Julius gasped. “Why?”
In hindsight, that was not the most politic response. Fortunately, the dragon looked more amused than offended. “I find you interesting,” it rumbled, leaning down to lay its massive head on the ground, putting its milky-white eyes level with Julius’s own. “You are by far the oddest dragon I’ve seen in a very, very, very long time. I’ve read through your past several times already over the course of our conversation, but even when I observe your decision making process step by step, I cannot comprehend why you make the choices you do. It’s a fascinating conundrum you’ve given me, and as you might imagine given my circumstances, I value new entertainment very highly. So, as a show of my gratitude, I’m going to offer you a deal. You tell me what future you want to purchase, and I’ll put it together for you and tell you how much it will cost.”
“You can do that?” Marci said, clearly skeptical. “I thought you only dealt in the past? And you said only seers can see into the chains! How will you even know what you’re doing?”
“Being a construct with dominion over all that has ever been isn’t entirely without its benefits,” the dragon said with a sniff. “I might not have my brother’s skill with the future, but I can see into the chains well enough, and I’ve watched seers do this uncountable times.” The white eyes went back to Julius. “I’ll certainly do a better job than he could.”
That was definitely true. “Sounds good to me,” Julius said. “What are my options?”
“Anything you like,” Dragon Sees the Beginning replied, lifting its head back into the sky to get a panoramic view of the mountain of chains around them. “You are quite young. You have an entire lifetime of possible futures ahead of you, and that’s not even counting the vast potential that your perceptive, presumptuous companion brings to the table.”
Marci crossed her arms with a glare. “I thought you said my future was merely ‘good for a mortal.’”
“But I didn’t say how good,” the dragon replied with a cryptic smile. “I’m not entirely sure why—again, this isn’t my area—but it seems your mortal’s connection to the…whatever it is she has on her shoulders has the potential to completely change the course of magic on her home plane.”
Marci’s whole face lit up. “You mean Ghost?” she asked excitedly. “How?”
“I don’t know,” the dragon said. “Nor do I particularly care. I’m just telling you what I see in the chains. Personally, I’m far more intrigued by the fact that young Julius here appears to be intricately linked to the future of the Heartstrikers as a whole.”
Julius blinked. “Me?”
“Yes, it’s quite fascinating,” the dragon said, leaning down toward the chains for a closer look. “Brohomir seems to be using you as a sort of linchpin, a fixed point around which the rest of your family’s futures, including his own, pivot. I’m not sure what he’s hoping to accomplish—again, I’m not a seer—but the configuration he’s created gives your future an absolutely enormous amount of potential, far more than any single dragon should ever have on his own. If you were to cash all of that in, why, you could be the new dragon king of your world.”
“Dragon king?” Julius repeated skeptically. “As in king of dragons?”
“As in king of everything,” Dragon Sees the Beginning said, turning back toward them with a smile that sent shivers down Julius’s spine. “Think about it, young Heartstriker. Between your mortal and Brohomir’s machinations, you have enough potential here to buy any future you desire, without sacrificing your own. With one chain, you could defeat everyone who’s ever looked down on you. All of your problems, the things that bother you, we could make them all go away and give you a lifetime of custom-made paradise in their place. Power, respect, fear, wealth, everything a dragon desires could be yours with the click of a claw, and all for the price of a future.” The dragon’s smile widened. “What do you say? Would that not be glorious?”
“Maybe,” Julius said. “But not at that price.” He looked at Marci, who’d gone very pale. “Marci’s future isn’t mine to trade. Same goes for the ones Bob wrapped around me and anything else you see in there. Even if I could trade my own future for everything you just mentioned, I wouldn’t, because it was thinking like that that messed everything up in the first place. Also, I’m not actually interested in all that stuff.”
The dragon blinked in surprise. “You’re not? But you would be a king! Don’t you want to see your enemies crushed before you?”
“Not particularly,” Julius said. Honestly, he was having a hard time imagining a future he wanted less than the one Dragon Sees the Beginning had just described. Sure, being all powerful sounded fun, but Julius had met a lot of dragons with a lot of power, and with the exception of his Mother, whom he never wanted to be like, not a one of them had seemed actually happy.
“Thank you for the offer,” he said. “But minus the current crisis, I’m actually pretty content with my life as it is. If you could just please find me a chain that will let me stop Estella’s, that would be great.”
He’d tried to word all of that as politely as possible. Refusing gifts was the fastest way to insult a dragon, and offending the only force who could possibly help him with this was the last thing Julius wanted to do. By the time he finished, though, Dragon Sees the Beginning was looking at him with a strange mix of horror and wonder.
“I knew you were odd from the beginning, but now I think I see why.” The dragon smiled its terrifying, toothy smile. “I’m beginning to understand why my brother sent you here, Julius the Nice Dragon.”
“I don’t believe I’ve met your brother,” Julius said nervously. He’d remember if he’d met another dragon like this.
“Perhaps not yet,” Dragon Sees the Beginning said. “But you will, and to the dragon of the future, that’s the same thing. Besides, no one makes it back to this place without Dragon Sees Eternity pulling the strings in some way. Most of the time the reasoning is obvious, but you were a real puzzle. Now, though, I see. If a dragon can come here and turn down unlimited power, there might be hope for us yet.”
The dragon said this like it was a revelation, but Julius had no idea what was going on. “I—”
“Right, right,” the dragon said, snaking its huge head back around to the wall of chains. “Now that we’ve established you don’t want to rule the world, what sort of future are you looking for? I’m not as good at this as an actual seer, but there’s plenty here for me to work with. Given the materials at hand, I’m reasonably certain I can fashion something that will force your plan through.” The dragon glanced back. “You do have a plan, right?”
Julius did, actually. It was a pretty long shot, but it was the only situation he could think of that defeated Estella’s objectives without actually having to go directly against the four chains she’d paid her entire future for. It took a while to explain exactly what he wanted to Dragons Sees the Beginning, but by the time he finished, the guardian was smiling wider than ever.
“It certainly is thinking outside the box,” the dragon said. “Not to mention you’ll be creating a paradox.”
“Is that a problem
?” Julius asked.
“Only if you don’t enjoy watching seers lose their composure,” Dragon Sees the Beginning said with an evil grin. “No, this is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for when you showed up. I’m only sad I won’t be able to see it myself until the next visitor brings it in as part of their past.”
Julius let out a relieved breath. “So you’ll do it?”
Rather than answer, the dragon lifted a long forearm from deep in its coils, running its massive claws over the piled chains like an astronomer searching a star chart for one particular dot in the night sky. After several minutes, the dragon plunged its claws into the wall to pull out—not a snaking rope like Estella’s—but a black nubbin of chain no longer than the top joint of Julius’s pinky.
“Um,” he said when Dragon Sees the Beginning held it up for them to admire. “Will that be enough?”
“Quite,” the dragon assured him. “The links are a measure of time, not power, and unlike Estella, you’re buying minutes, not days. That said, this is a very unlikely future, and there is still the matter of your payment.”
“If you’re sure it’ll work, I’m happy to pay,” Julius said. And then, because he could already see Marci opening her mouth, he added. “Alone.”
Marci shot him a glare, which Julius ignored. The dragon, however, seemed to be deep in thought. “The payment for this one will be steep,” it said. “As I said, it’s quite unlikely, and—as was also aforementioned—the exchange rate of the potential for the definite is quite steep. Further complicating the matter is the fact that neither of us is actually a seer. Put all this together, and I’m afraid I can’t actually choose what will be taken.”
“So what does that mean?” Julius asked.
The dragon’s face grew dour. “It means that neither of us has the control necessary to pick which future you will pay. The trade will be decided arbitrarily at the point of transfer.”
“You mean it’s just going to randomly take part of his future?” Marci asked, horrified. When the dragon nodded, she whirled to face Julius. “Don’t do it.”
“I have to,” he said. “If I don’t do this, and Estella wins, we’re probably all dead anyway. And it’s not like I’ll miss stuff that hasn’t even happened.”
“But what if it takes something you really want?” she asked. “What if it takes the one future where things are actually good?”
“Then I’ll make another,” Julius said, smiling at her. “Like Bob is forever saying, the future is made of our decisions, and it’s never set.”
That’s why Bob was always bending over backwards to make sure they understood how seers actually worked. All those seemingly random lectures on seer magic weren’t just him bragging, or even making conversation. He’d been teaching Julius how the system worked so that, when the time came, he would understand that Estella and Bob didn’t actually control his future at all. He did. He was the one whose decisions created the path of his future, and the more Julius thought about that, the more confident he became.
“It doesn’t matter if I lose some vague potential,” he said firmly, reaching out to take Marci’s hand. “So long as I’ve got even one timeline to work with, I can make the choices I need to make it good, because it’s my future. Not Bob’s and not Estella’s. Mine. I can do this. For once, I really believe that. Trust me.”
“I do trust you,” she grumbled, glaring up at the giant dragon. “I just don’t trust him. Or the random decisions of these.”
She stomped her foot on the wiggling chain floor, and Julius chuckled. “That makes two of us,” he said, leaning in to rest his forehead against hers. “But we don’t have to trust them. If Bob’s right, and our decisions make the future, then we just have to trust us.”
“You mean ‘be yourself’?” Marci replied in a terrifyingly accurate Bob impression.
Julius nodded. “Just don’t tell him he was right.”
“He’s a seer,” Marci reminded with a laugh. “He already knows.”
That was actually very comforting, and Julius turned back to Dragon Sees the Beginning. “I’ll pay it.”
“Excellent,” the dragon said, flicking its claws. “Catch.”
It took all of Julius’s discipline not to dodge the tiny black chain flying like a bullet at his chest. But though he saw it hit, he didn’t feel a thing. The black links simply vanished into his shirt. There was no pain or trauma like he’d seen Chelsie go through in the video. He didn’t even feel like something had been taken. “Um, did it work?”
“Only one way to find out,” Dragon Sees the Beginning replied. “It was a true pleasure to meet you, young Heartstriker. Give my regards to my brother when you see him.”
Julius had already opened his mouth to ask how soon that would be when the layer of chains cracked opened under his feet, dropping him and Marci into the void.
Chapter 19
The sun was low over Heartstriker Mountain when two dragons—one enormous with scales white as new snow, the other smaller and covered in rich, royal blue feathers—shot out of the balcony that opened into Bethesda the Heartstriker’s throne room. They circled each other in the cloudless desert sky, shining like jewels in the evening light, and then the white dragoness put on a sudden burst of speed, shooting toward the horizon. The smaller male matched her immediately, folding his wings like a fighter jet as he set off in hot pursuit.
He would never catch her.
Estella took a deep breath, watched the flash of her sister’s frosted wings until she vanished into the distance. Only when she was sure Svena was safely away from what was about to happen did the Northern Star finally turn to face her host.
As always, Bethesda the Heartstriker was dressed like a gaudy mess. Where Estella looked regal and elegant in a simple, sleeveless white dress, Bethesda looked like she’d spent the last hour rolling in her treasury. Her indecently low-cut, golden gown was little more than a backdrop for the giant, tacky clusters of jewelry she wore at her neck, ears, arms, wrists, fingers, ankles, and feet. But even though the Heartstriker was displaying her wealth so hard Estella was surprised she could still move, the clan head still fell short. The only piece of real value in the whole gaudy display was her headdress: a solid gold Aztec crown commissioned for her by her father back when she’d been the Quetzalcoatl’s spoiled princess. That was actually lovely, but the rest of it reeked of someone who’d spent her whole life trying too hard. But then, “trying too hard” was Bethesda in a nutshell, as the trashy snake proved yet again when she turned to address Estella as an equal.
“They’ll be out until midnight at least,” she said, her crimson lips curling into a smug smile. “Ian always does things properly.”
The blatant suggestion in her voice turned Estella’s stomach. It was not quite time yet, though, so she hid her disgust, though no force in the world could make her smile as she followed the Heartstriker back into her throne room to the banquet table that had been set up beneath the Quetzalcoatl’s suspended skull.
That sight was enough to turn her stomach again, and Estella’s jaw clenched. The God of Hurricanes deserved so much better than this, reduced to a mere decoration, his teeth stolen so his murderous daughter could have weapons for her spawn. He only had two fangs left at this point: the long one that usually belonged to Bethesda’s baby knight, and the one that none of the Heartstriker whelps had yet managed to yank from his head. Neither Fang would ever be used again after tonight, of course, but Estella was still sorely tempted to break them both, if only to see the Heartstriker’s face when her treasured weapons were reduced to splinters. She was still enjoying that mental image when Bethesda’s smarmy voice interrupted her.
“Champagne?” she asked, holding up a gold-foiled bottle. “I had a case flown in from my son Evan’s vineyard in France just for this occasion.”
“No.”
Bethesda’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you sure? It’s the best in the world, the private reserve of a winery that had been run by the same family sin
ce the seventeen hundreds before we forced them out of the business.”
“No,” Estella said again, not even bothering to hide her disgust at the blatant name dropping. As always, though, the censure rolled right off the Heartstriker’s back. She just shrugged and popped the cork to help herself.
“Now that we’re alone,” Bethesda said, filling a tall flute with golden, bubbly champagne. “I think it’s time we dropped the act and discussed the terms of your surrender.”
“I wouldn’t discuss that with anyone,” Estella said coldly. “Least of all you.”
“Come now,” the Heartstriker laughed. “Your arrogance is legendary, Northern Star, but surely you’ve comprehended your situation by now. This room, my mountain, and all the airspace for a mile in every direction is entirely under my control. I have wards set down by my best mages, mortal and dragon, specifically constructed to prevent that little teleportation trick you used to crash my party last time. Fifty of my most talented children are already waiting in the wings. All I have to do is think the order, and they’ll rush in to tear off your head so I can add it to my collection. You are completely surrounded in every meaning of the word. At this point, the only choice you have left is whether you enter my service as a slave or a trophy.”
By the time she finished, Bethesda’s voice was so smug it could have curdled milk. Normally, that would have made Estella furious, but not this time. This time, she savored it, letting the silence stretch until even the Heartstriker’s victorious grin faltered.
“Nothing to say to that?” she asked, taking a sip of champagne. “Have I rendered the Seer of the Three Sisters speechless at last?”
“Not at all,” Estella replied with a smile of her own. “I was simply enjoying the moment before your fall.”
