“Uh, sorry, sir. I mean, of course, if you think we should look into him—”
“I think the cellar’s empty and people are expecting results. Bring him in. You there, girl.” He suddenly glares at me from down the hall.
I gasp and look away, trying to pretend I wasn’t watching them. Or listening in. And why does he have to say “girl” like that? Like it’s a bad word?
He’s marching toward me, his footsteps heavy and intimidating. His voice is low, but unmistakably menacing when he says, “Who are you and what do you think you’re doing here?”
My mouth hangs open. I can’t think with him glaring at me like that.
“Yes? Spit it out!”
“I was just—”
“She’s with me.” Celeste’s voice is firm, not inviting any challenge. “She’s my sister.”
He looks me over, obviously not liking what he sees, then says, “See that your guests mind their own business from now on,” before storming off, the other paladin hurrying to keep up with him.
“Who was that?” I whisper, once he’s gone.
“Warwick St. George.”
That’s the guy she was so excited to work with? Him?
“Vee, you’re shaking. Are you okay? What did he say to you?”
“Nothing.” Other than that they’re going after Cedric. “It’s not— I have to go.”
“What? But you just got here. I thought you wanted to—”
“I have to go!”
“Wait, Vee! What are you—”
But I don’t stay to hear the end of that sentence. I turn and make a run for the door.
15
THAT OR HE HAS A HORSE HIDDEN SOMEWHERE
I forget about murderers hiding behind shadows as I hurry through the streets. When I get back to the inn, I look around frantically, hoping to see Cedric hunched over his book in the corner or sitting at the bar. But he wasn’t here when I left, and he’s not here now.
I look for Leif, but I don’t see him, either, even though I thought he’d still be working.
Snow scatters from my boots as I clomp up the stairs. I throw open the door to our room, then bend forward, too out of breath to speak.
Amelrik drops the book he was reading. “Virginia? Are you okay?”
“Cedric. He’s…” I gasp for air as I close the door.
Amelrik puts his hands on my shoulders, his eyes searching my face. “What happened?”
“Cedric’s in danger. I went to the manor, and I overheard someone talking. And we have to warn him, but I don’t know where he is, and Leif’s not here, so we can’t ask him. But we have to figure out where he went, because the paladins are going to come for him!”
“They said that?”
“They mentioned him by name. We have to do something!”
“Okay. Okay. Let me think.” He presses his palms to his forehead. He starts to say something, but then a loud knock on the door interrupts him and almost gives me a heart attack.
We exchange a look. Amelrik takes a cautious step toward the door.
There’s another knock, and then Cedric shouts, “Amelrik! It’s me!”
I exhale in relief as Amelrik lets him in.
Cedric’s face is red and he’s breathing hard, like he ran here. He looks me in the eyes and says, “You have to come quick. It’s Leif. He needs your help.”
Cedric’s house is full of junk. I mean, so much junk that there’s hardly any room to move. There are stacks of boxes and random drawers piled high against the walls, and tons of books overflowing from the shelves and a leaning tower of them threatening to fall over on the coffee table. I also see heaps of loose papers, random coins, a broken cart wheel, a scale with all the weights on one side, various tools, a mismatched pair of knitting needles, some animal figurines, and a bowl of seashells, just to name a few.
“What… happened?” Amelrik asks, gaping as he takes it all in.
I’m guessing that means Cedric’s not normally like this. Or at least that he wasn’t when they were growing up.
“Research,” Cedric says, as if it was a dumb question, or like maybe he thinks we have more important things to do than criticize his living space.
Leif joins us from what looks like a bedroom. His face is pale, his jaw clenched, and he’s got his arms wrapped around himself, like he can physically hold the transformation in. He reaches up and sweeps his hair out of his eyes as he looks over at me, his expression grim. Then he turns to Cedric. “I told you. I don’t need this. I… I can handle it.”
“No, you can’t,” Cedric says. “And it’s only going to get worse.”
“It’s better than being bound.” But he doesn’t sound super sure about that.
“If you transform,” Amelrik says, “someone will see.”
“And you’ll destroy all of Cedric’s junk,” I add. “Plus break the house.”
Cedric’s mouth falls open. He gives me a look like I just insulted him. “It’s not junk. I told you, it’s research.”
“How is a broken cart wheel research?”
Amelrik ignores us, still addressing Leif. “And the paladins will do far worse to you than what Virginia’s going to. They’ll put a dragon ring around your neck, and then they’ll torture you. They’ll break every bone in your body if they feel like it, and you won’t be able to heal yourself. And when they’re finally done with you, they’ll string you up in front of everyone in town. If you’re lucky, they’ll chop off your head and be done with it. But it’s more likely you’ll be stoned to death first.”
Leif swallows.
Cedric’s eyes are wide.
“I’ve seen it happen,” Amelrik says, his voice quiet.
He’s also been captured before. And tortured. And he would have been executed if I hadn’t let him out of our dungeon.
“I’ll go crazy,” Leif says, but I can tell from his tone that he’s giving in.
Not that he has much of a choice.
I hold up my hands to cast the spell. All three of them are staring at me. Cedric’s eyes follow my every movement, Amelrik grits his teeth as if he’s the one about to be bound, and Leif just looks terrified.
“Could you guys maybe back up a little? And, like, stop looking at me like that?”
They edge away a little bit, but there’s not really anywhere to go in here, what with all the junk piled everywhere. None of them looks away, though.
Fine. I guess I’ll just have to do this with them staring at me. No pressure. It’s just making my pulse race and my palms start to sweat. But it’s not like I haven’t cast this in worse situations. Well, in one, I should say. And it was the only time I’ve successfully done it, so…
I shut my eyes and focus on the task at hand, trying to ignore the tension and fear in the room. I imagine Leif being bound to human form. Being stuck that way. And I’m so afraid it won’t work, or that being afraid that it won’t work will make it not work. And maybe that time I did it before was just a fluke. I’m not Celeste. I can’t just cast this stuff whenever I—
There’s a tingling feeling in my hands, and the smell of sulfur fills the air. I open my eyes.
The dragons all start coughing. And of course now they find the space to back away from me.
Leif lets go of himself, though his face still looks pained. Actually, if anything, it looks worse than before. His eyes dart between me and Amelrik, and there’s a note of accusation in his voice when he says, “You didn’t tell me it would feel like this.”
Amelrik looks away guiltily.
“What’s it like?” Cedric asks.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Amelrik says.
Cedric takes in a slow breath, like he hadn’t thought about that.
“There’s something wrong.” Leif scratches at his arms and his neck. “It’s not… I still feel the transformation fighting me. It worked for a second, but now—” He grimaces and swears under his breath. He didn’t want me to cast the spell in the first place, but now the idea of it n
ot working is making him panic. “I know what I said before, but I was wrong! I can’t… I can’t do this!” He rakes his fingers through his hair. “If your magic’s not going to work—”
“It does work,” I tell him. “Just… not for very long.” Crap. I really probably should have been practicing all these months, though it’s not exactly a convenient thing to do back at Hawthorne clan.
Leif swears again. He sits down on the couch, which is miraculously not covered in crap, and then stands back up a second later, unable to hold still. “They’re going to kill me.”
“We need a dragon ring.” Two, really, because it’s only a matter of time before Cedric will be in the same boat. I gesture to all of his junk sprawled everywhere. “I don’t suppose you were researching them, too?”
He shakes his head. “I wish. The paladins don’t leave them lying around, though. Most of this stuff I found on the street.”
I could have guessed that last part.
“They’ll have them at Rosewood,” Amelrik says.
They will, but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to get them. If I get caught, there’s not really a good reason to be stealing them except, you know, to bind a dragon that you don’t want anyone to find out about. Maybe I could just ask for them. I could tell Celeste that I wanted them to practice on. And that I need two for some reason, and that it couldn’t wait until morning.
“I’ll do it,” Amelrik says. “I can—”
“No.” A chill runs up my spine at just the thought, and I know I do not want him going back there. He might run into Celeste. Or worse, Warwick St. George, the man whose voice alone made him freak out and transform. If Amelrik got caught like that, I’d never see him again. And thinking about all the horrible things they might do to him makes my chest ache. “If anyone’s going to go, it should be me. But maybe I won’t need to.”
Leif wraps his arms around himself again and sinks down on the couch. His face is scrunched up in pain. “It’s worn off completely now. And I don’t… I can’t fight it much longer.”
I don’t think he has time for one of us to go to Rosewood Manor and back, even if I did think it was a good idea, which I don’t. “We don’t need dragon rings—we just need iron.”
“Iron.” Cedric repeats the word, sounding numb. He keeps glancing back over at Leif, distracted by his boyfriend freaking out and maybe being about to transform.
“It has to be a circle. But it doesn’t have to go around the neck. Just, like, a ring, or a… a bracelet or something.” I glance around, like maybe there’s a pile of manacles I missed earlier. It doesn’t look like it.
Amelrik grabs Cedric’s arm. “Think. There’s got to be something in here.”
“I don’t have any rings. Not made of iron. Wait, I have an iron! I have three, actually. Or maybe it’s four now. They’re just in a pile somewhere…”
“It won’t work. It needs to be—”
“I know! But I don’t know what to do. I—” Cedric suddenly stops. He blinks, then snaps his fingers. “I have something! I just don’t know where I put them.” He practically shoves Amelrik out of the way as he starts pulling down boxes and rummaging through them. “Someone check the back corner! And… I might have put them in one of the drawers.”
“It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” Amelrik says, though he hurries over to the corner to start searching anyway.
I grab one of the drawers stacked against the wall, accidentally knocking down a bunch of books. They make a really loud thud, and a cloud of dust flies up into the air.
Cedric gives up on rummaging and just dumps out the contents of his box on the floor. “We’re looking for horseshoes!”
“Horseshoes?” Amelrik says. “Why do you…? Never mind.”
“I’m guessing it’s for research,” I tell him. “That or he has a horse hidden somewhere in here.” I grab another drawer and quickly sift through it.
“They were just all over in the street,” Cedric says. “Horses lose them.”
“That doesn’t explain why you took them.”
“Because I thought if I started asking questions it would be obvious I didn’t grow up in a place that had horses or carts or any of that stuff. And I was going to study them in more detail, like I was going to study all of this stuff, but then I didn’t get around to it. And I got carried away with my collections, and then everything piled up so much that I started spending most of my time at Leif’s house to get away from it, and now I’m hardly ever here, and I’m never going to get through any of it, and I don’t know why I even bothered!”
I take a step back, forgetting that Cedric just dumped a bunch of stuff on the floor. I nearly slip on a wooden flute and end up stumbling sideways into my stack of drawers. Odds and ends go flying everywhere. There’s a loud crash, followed by a metallic one as I fall onto a pile of books. A pile of books that was also hiding a box full of horseshoes. “Found them!”
The horseshoes are surprisingly clean, like Cedric washed them first before putting them away. There are about a dozen or so of them, and I wonder how many used horseshoes a person really needs, even for research purposes.
Cedric grabs one of the smaller ones. “Give me your arm.”
Leif does what he’s told, even though he looks like it’s the last thing he wants to do. Well, besides transforming and getting himself killed.
Cedric hikes up Leif’s sleeve and bends the horseshoe around his wrist, turning it into a makeshift bracelet. He makes it look easy, and I think again about how strong dragons are, even when in human form.
“This will work?” Leif asks me.
“The iron absorbs the spell and holds a charge,” I tell him. “It’ll work.” At least, I hope it will.
He holds out his wrist with the bracelet and looks away. “Just get it over with.”
Right. Just cast the binding spell again.
I raise my hands and concentrate. This time I keep my eyes open. There’s a flash of red light as I cast the spell, and then the sulfur smell gets stronger. My hands tingle—worse than before. And I don’t know if it’s because I just cast the spell basically twice in a row, or if it’s because the iron can absorb so much, but I feel a sudden wave of exhaustion as the magic leaves my body.
The horseshoe around Leif’s wrist glows a faint red. He stares at it in horror, looking like he’d rather chew his own arm off than leave it there for one more second.
Amelrik nods at Cedric. “Your turn.”
Cedric glances at Leif, a worried look on his face. “Maybe I should wait. I transformed more recently than Leif did. I might not need it.” But he doesn’t sound for a second like he believes any of that.
Amelrik tilts his head at him.
Cedric sighs. He picks out another horseshoe, then rolls up his sleeve.
Leif bends the shoe around Cedric’s wrist, just like Cedric did to him.
I feel kind of wobbly, like I just want to sink down onto the couch and never get up again. And we haven’t had dinner yet, and lunch was several long walks in the cold ago. My eyes want to fall closed, but I know if I let them—well, if I lie down first, at least—I’ll fall asleep. And despite what Cedric said about waiting, I don’t want to take any chances. Besides, the longer he has to psyche himself out of this, and the longer he sees Leif suffering under the effects of the spell, the harder it will be to convince him to go through with it.
So I suck it up and cast the binding spell for a third time tonight. Or at least I try to. There’s a spark of red, but it’s not the bright flash it should be, and the bracelet on Cedric’s wrist doesn’t look enchanted.
“Virginia,” Amelrik says, sounding worried. “Maybe you should—”
“No, I can do this.” I try to sound like I mean that, even though I’m not sure it’s true. I take a deep breath and attempt to channel all my energy, or at least what’s left of it. Even Celeste would have trouble casting this many times so close together, though her spells are a lot more powerful than mine an
d probably take more out of her.
And even though I feel so tired, and even though it would be so easy to give in and tell them I need to eat and sleep first and that I’ll do it in the morning, I can’t shake the feeling that I need to do this now. That doing it in the morning will be too late.
So I close my eyes and concentrate. I focus on drawing out more energy—as much as it takes—because if I screw this up, I don’t think I’ll have it in me to try again.
This time, there’s more than a spark. Much more. The flash of red is even brighter than it was earlier, and the room pretty much reeks of sulfur. And I suddenly feel hollow and empty, and I ache all over, like every part of my body just slammed into a brick wall.
My eyes really do want to fall closed now, and my legs don’t want to hold me up. I think Amelrik says something to me, but I’m not listening, too busy stumbling to the couch, where I sink down and fall into oblivion, more tired than I’ve ever been in my entire life.
16
NOT LIKE THE OTHERS
I wake up in the morning on the couch with Amelrik pressed against me. There’s not a lot of room, and I’d probably fall off the edge if it wasn’t for his arm around me. My neck is sore, and I realize I’m using his other arm as a pillow. I can feel his heart beating against my back and his chest moving in and out as he breathes, and even though I’m starving, I kind of just want to stay here like this. If I close my eyes, I might fall back asleep.
But then a loud, authoritative knock on the front door startles me. Amelrik jerks awake, and I get to my feet, my blood running cold.
Crap. I was supposed to warn Cedric. We were. I can’t remember much about last night after I basically passed out after casting the binding spell so many times, but I shouldn’t have let myself fall asleep. We should have gotten out of here first.
I hear footsteps, and then Cedric and Leif come in from the bedroom. Both of them look tired and sick. They’ve both got long sleeves on, hiding the makeshift dragon rings I made for them, but I imagine the skin around the horseshoes turning red and agitated, my magic slowly poisoning them.
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