The dragon made no effort to avoid Rus’s black shard, however. The toxic dart punched straight through his outermost scales, extinguishing the blue sparks that danced there. It disappeared under the dragon’s armor and into the meaty muscles surrounding his rib cage.
Yellow-white light crackled across the dragon’s face, then cascaded down his body like melting snow. A wave of glittering distortion and gemstone facets seemed to envelop the great beast.
In the midst of this patch of eldritch fog, Cayce saw the dragon clearly. He was not covered in exquisite fused glass or ceramic but in rough black metal still smoking from the forge. He did not have small jags of azure lightning dancing between his scales, but flexible ingots of pale, muted yellow dotted the length of his spine like glowing vertebrae. Smoke and sparks vented from his shoulder joints and from where his wings joined his back. He was not the graceful, awe-inspiring predator that attacked the bridge; he was a smoking, soot-encrusted nightmare that dropped flakes of rusty black with each clang of his jagged metallic teeth.
The horror stood rampant and roaring in his glittering cloud of amber light and crystalline sparks, his neck stretched high and his wings spread wide. The dragon was undiminished, proud and utterly defiant in the face of whatever effect Rus’s toxic crystal was supposed to produce.
Earlier, Cayce thought she had seen the dragon in all his fury, that she had seen his true face. Only now did she understand his true might, only now did she know what the stunning mystery the great beast’s outward appearance was designed to conceal.
Then the monster hitched and shuddered, sending a wave of muscular force rolling along his body from top to bottom. He blinked. The arm closest to the wound left by Rus’s attack stiffened and shot out straight, but the dragon calmly regained control of his limb. As he brought the forelimb back to his side, the beast clenched his fist. The glittering nimbus around the dragon faded, and he appeared as he had before: an awesome, beautiful beast clad in polished blue-white scales.
The dragon lowered his arm and flexed his neck muscles so that the scales around his face stood on end. He snorted contemptuously then coughed a tiny bulge through his long throat. Barely opening his jaws, the brute spat a melon-sized sphere of crackling energy that flew straight into the center of Rus’s broad torso.
Her master’s scream barely sounded over the explosion. Cayce turned her head away from the blinding flash and pressed herself flat against the rugged ground behind her rocky shelter. When the noise and the dust settled, Cayce opened her eyes and looked.
The dragon was overhead, circling the small smoking crater that marked the last stand of Potionmaster Donner Rus. He hissed disparagingly and spread his wings. The wind from each beat sent a fresh cloud of grit against Cayce’s face, but it also carried the monster farther away, off into the cloud-thick morning sky.
Cayce slumped back against the ground and exhaled. Her breath was returning. Her broken fingers throbbed, and her knee was swelling painfully, but she had made it. She was alive.
A shadow passed over her eyes, and Cayce opened them. She saw Vaan’s melancholy face and a small, blue-tinged hand offering to help her up.
“Come with me,” the pixie said.
Cayce took his hand. “What for?”
“You must tell the others what I cannot.”
Cayce got to her feet then cast Vaan’s hand aside. “I’m not staying on this dungheap any longer than I have to. I’m leaving.”
“You cannot just leave. You must tell them what you have seen.” He locked eyes with her, almost pleading. “I saved your life.”
Cayce scouted the rubble between her and the path to the ridge. “I’ll write you a note for them,” she said. “Look, I’m grateful you got me out of there in one piece. But I’m really scared, and I don’t want to be here. So I’m going.”
Vaan’s wings buzzed, and he stood directly in front of Cayce. He crossed his arms and said, “You can’t just go. You must come with me.”
It was somewhat comical, the miniature man trying to physically intimidate her, but Cayce remembered the power in those tiny arms and wings. She considered testing Rus’s ring on the pixie, but the fact that it was her ex-master’s made it suspect and unreliable.
Instead, Cayce smoothed an imaginary strand of her ghostly white hair under her headdress. Gingerly holding her broken fingers at her side, Cayce ran her good hand along the edge of her headdress, probing the inner seam of the long wrap where she concealed her needles. Each of the three short spikes was tipped with one of Master Rus’s more powerful sleeping agents, and Cayce expertly slid one of the needles between her index and middle finger.
Careful to keep her fingers pressed together around the thin metal spike, Cayce raised her palms to Vaan in an apparent effort to calm him down. As she’d hoped, his eyes were drawn to the broken fingers on her free hand and not to the ones pressed tight around the needle.
“There’s no need to get agitated,” she said. “I was panicking and forgot how important this is to you. Of course I’ll come with you. I’ll tell them everything I know.”
Vaan relaxed. The bluish tint of his skin seemed to shimmer, and his ice-white eyes glittered. “Thank you, Tania Cayce.” Vaan offered her both hands and said, “With your permission I will carry you down to the others.”
Cayce nodded. “The quicker, the better.” She stepped forward and, as Vaan took flight to circle around her for the best possible grip, Cayce curled her fingers into a fist and lightly punched the needle’s sharp tip into the pixies neck. Cayce smoothly withdrew the thin spike from Vaan’s flesh and hopped back to watch him fall.
Small, powerful fingers dug into her shoulder, and an iron hand clamped onto her fist. Vaan was still standing in front of Cayce, but he was also behind her somehow, forcing her fingers open so the needle dropped to the rocky ground. He took hold of her shoulder and spun her around, latching on to her headdress as he sprang into the air. The long, turbanlike garment unraveled as Vaan shot upward, giving Cayce’s spin an extra unwanted boost of torque.
The headdress ripped free just as Cayce’s legs twisted beneath her. Awkwardly, she fell, and her hair splayed out crazily across her face. Cayce was blinded and choked by an inescapable cascade of white. Worse, her scalp seared and stung in a hundred different places that until recently held the healthy and firmly rooted strands of hair now dangling from the headdress in Vaan’s tiny fist.
The pixie’s wings buzzed and he was behind Cayce once more, one strong arm around her throat and the other clenched around her waist. He held her motionless until her equilibrium returned and her view was unimpeded.
Before her the Vaan she had stuck, the false Vaan created by pixie glamour, faded from sight.
“Don’t try anything else,” the true pixie muttered from behind her. “And don’t struggle like you did in the cave or I’ll drop you. I swear I will. You can still talk if both your legs are broken.”
“Wait,” she started, but a powerful buzz rose from Vaan’s wings. Cayce’s stomach dropped as he carried her over the side of the ridge. The ground quickly fell away, and Cayce found herself flying too high and too fast to do anything but cradle her broken fingers, clench her teeth, and endure the ride.
At least she was moving away from the dragon’s lair. Once she told the others what she had seen, perhaps they would let her go.
They returned to find Kula and the soldiers waiting. Vaan explained what he had seen then turned away, unable even to tell Cayce to tell the others the dragon’s great secret. It really was a very good geas, she thought.