Meghan's Dragon (13 page)

Chapter 36

“It’s a dragon, Mommy!” screamed the little boy, bringing the fairgoers within earshot to a sudden halt.

Meghan couldn’t help smiling at the child’s excitement. She temporarily forgot her own embarrassment at being dressed as a boy in a doublet and short breeches with high boots, though she was thankful that the peaked cap allowed her to hide her hair rather than cutting it off. Laitz nudged her and winked, leading Meghan to expel a thread of red dust from the dragon’s mouth.

The crowd’s reaction was stunned silence, followed by a roar, and they pushed forward to get as close as possible to the three-sided booth that Laitz had erected from slender poles and blankets. The opening faced away from the sun, but a strategically placed slit in the back allowed a beam of sunshine through to backlight the illusions.

“Tonight, during intermission, the great illusionist Laitz and his assistants will present the first-ever performance of a dragon duel to be seen in New Land,” Jomar shouted over the crowd. Meghan had always thought that Phinneas must be the loudest man on Earth when he used magic to enhance his voice and issue commands, but the small man with the throwing knives had the war master beat by a factor of two.

“What’s the play?” somebody called from the crowd.

“We open after sunset with
The Stolen Twin
,” Jomar thundered, and his voice must have carried for a hundred paces in either direction. “Tomorrow the early show will be
Elstan
, followed by a reenactment of the
The Duke’s Uprising,
for which we will be joined by Brom’s players, and then a second presentation of
The Stolen Twin
. All week, exclusively with Rowan’s players. Laitz, The King of Illusions.”

At a nod from her mentor, Meghan swept her dragon out of existence, and Laitz stepped forward, theatrically waving his arms about. A confused mass of half-formed shapes began to materialize in the beam of light filtering through the back of the booth. All of a sudden, the illusion snapped into focus for the audience as if a veil had been drawn from over their eyes, and they saw an impossibly detailed scene of a crowd of people.

“Look, it’s us,” a woman cried, gripping her husband’s arm in excitement and pointing at a couple of figures in the illusion. Other members of the audience gasped and stared, while Meghan looked on in awe of Laitz’s control. Then the scene wavered a few times before dissolving, and the illusionist let his hands fall and took a bow.

“Rowan’s players. See us tonight at the West Amphitheatre,” Jomar thundered. “Now move along and let somebody else get a look.”

“How were you able to reproduce the crowd so quickly and in such detail?” Meghan whispered to Laitz. The people reluctantly began to disperse, helped along by scowls and shoves from Jomar.

“I didn’t,” the illusionist replied with a grin. “It’s just a scene I’ve practiced over and over again so I can build it quickly from memory, like a song you know by heart. The figures are small enough that nobody can make out the faces. I just use dark dots for the eyes and mouths and match a color here and there. Somebody in the audience always believes they see themselves, and then everybody else goes along.”

Chapter 37

“Stop staring at Juliana,” Meghan hissed at her supposed husband, who along with all of the males and not a few females in the crowd, was staring at Rowan’s daughter in her scanty elf costume.

“I’m not staring at Juliana,” Bryan retorted indignantly. “She’s not even on the stage.”

“Then stop ogling Nesta,” Meghan insisted. She added a punch in the shoulder to prove she was serious, but their difference in height made it awkward and she ended up hitting his bicep. Then curiosity got the better of her, and she asked, “How can you tell them apart?”

“Juliana has a little mole on her left thigh and Nesta has one on her right thigh,” Bryan explained. “Nesta’s left ear is a little lower than her right ear, and Juliana’s cheekbones are more prominent. I heard she was sick last week, so she lost a pound or two,” he added in concern.

“What color are my eyes?” Meghan whispered sharply.

“Blue,” he answered absently, before the edge in her voice sank in. “No, wait. Um, black?”

“Lucky guess. Are my ears pierced?”

“Sure, you wear earrings all of the time,” Bryan bluffed.

The ferocity with which she dragged him away from their vantage point by the side of the stage informed him that he had guessed wrong. He hated to miss the final scene of the first half in which he heard the kidnapped twin was forced to perform her seductive elf dance for the evil sorcerer. But it was one of the troupe’s most popular plays, so he was sure he would have plenty of opportunities to see it in the future.

Twenty paces away from the stage, Meghan pushed her potential dragon behind the props wagon. “How can I wear earrings all the time when I’m supposed to be a boy?” she demanded. “And don’t tell me that men on Dark Earth wear earrings, I’m not having any of your lame excuses anymore. I know you look at me when we’re talking, but you don’t see me, do you? Not the way you see Rowan’s daughters.”

“Is this about the whole Elstan thing?” Bryan asked. “I thought you agreed that it was a great way to hide out.”

“It is not about Elstan!” Meghan had to restrain herself from kicking him in the shins to make her point. “It’s about us being in this together and everybody else believing that we’re married. I do my part, but you wander around staring at pretty women like some sort of…”

“Guy?” Bryan interrupted. “Everybody in the audience was staring at them, and half of the troupe too. Didn’t you see those outfits? It’s like they weren’t wearing anything at all.”

“That’s not the point. You’re supposed to be loyal to me. I saved your life and in return you ruined mine,” Meghan added, stifling a sudden sob. She really didn’t know why she was getting so upset, since everything Bryan said was absolutely true.

The restrained emotion in the girl’s voice accomplished what her arguments couldn’t, and Bryan suddenly gathered her in his long arms.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was hurting you. I’ll, uh, stop looking.”

Meghan was so surprised by Bryan’s reaction that for a moment she let herself relax against his body, turning her head up to see if she could read anything from his face. She felt somebody’s heart pounding and saw green fire dancing in his eyes as his neck bent and his mouth approached hers.

“None of that,” she stuttered, shoving against his chest to put distance between them. He refused to release her and moved one of his hands to the back of her head to hold it in place. The heat from his body felt unnatural, and she wondered for a moment if she had discovered the secret to releasing his inner dragon.

“Hey, save it for after the show,” Laitz said, tapping Bryan on the shoulder. “It’s almost intermission and we’ve got to get ready. I was beginning to worry that the two of you came down with a sudden case of stage fright and ran off.”

Bryan growled rather than replying, but the distraction was enough for Meghan to gain breathing room and get her mind working again. “Chill,” she muttered, gambling on the fever-reduction technique Hadrixia had taught her. The older woman had once joked that it could also be useful in cooling unwanted amorous advances.

“Did you just put the whammy on me?” the young man asked incredulously. He felt like he’d been doused with a bucket of cold water, or maybe dropped in an icy lake.

“It’s time for our show,” Meghan said, trying to sound like nothing important had happened between them. She turned and followed Laitz back towards the stage.

“You just wait and see what happens next time you’re feeling friendly,” Bryan called after her. Then he remembered he was doing the lighting for the dragon duel and broke into an evil smile.

Chapter 38

The audience oohed as a blue dragon, created by Meghan, materialized from the swirling dust. The illusion grew increasingly solid as Bryan amped up the intensity of the focused fireball he was maintaining in the hooded section behind the slit at the back of the three-sided enclosure.

“It’s flying,” a child in the crowd cried out as the blue dragon began to beat its wings, moving in a small circle within the space sheltered from the breeze. Then a larger, yellow dragon entered from the side as the blue flew past. The younger and more excitable members of the audience screamed warnings to the smaller dragon.

The head of Meghan’s dust dragon turned on its long neck and looked back at the yellow, just as Laitz’s creation opened its maw and let out a stream of red dust. Bryan further increased the intensity of his light orb, causing all of the colors to glow brighter. The stream of illusory fire missed the blue dragon as it folded its wings and dove. The yellow dragon stayed on its tail, and for several laps around the open booth, the dragons exchanged jets of flame, always with the large yellow in pursuit of the blue.

Then Laitz caused his dragon to shift its strategy and occupy the center of the airspace, where it hovered with strong wing beats while waiting for a chance to corner Meghan’s tiring blue. Audience members who weren’t queued up at the kegs for beer during the intermission offered expert combat advice to their blue favorite, which was especially useful as none of them had ever seen a dragon duel before. The red flames spouting from Meghan’s dragon were growing weaker as she ran out of dust to release, and Laitz’s yellow opened its mouth wide and darted forward.

At that instant, a giant green dragon, twice as large again as Meghan’s blue, dove into the scene. It obliterated Laitz’s yellow with a gout of real fire that incinerated the very dust of which it was formed. Then the newcomer flew directly at the blue and hovered above it, wings beating in unison as it tried to entwine its neck with that of the smaller dragon.

“It’s a mating flight,” somebody called out from the audience, and parents covered the eyes of their smaller children. Then the light source went out, dousing the illusion. The children begged their parents for coins to throw onto the stage.

As the men assigned as stagehands for the night quickly pulled down the sides of the booth to prepare the stage for the second half of
The Stolen Twin
, Laitz helped a somewhat dazed Meghan find her bearings.

“Pretty exciting for a first performance,” he told her. “I’m not crazy about your husband going off script like that, but it worked. I couldn’t have maintained the lighting, a dragon, and thrown real fire like that myself. He’s got a lot of talent.”

“Where’d he go?” Meghan asked, coming back to her senses and realizing that Bryan was nowhere to be seen.

“He’s probably out in the audience trying to get a good spot to watch the second act,” Laitz told her. “There’s a scene at the end that always brings down the house when the free twin offers herself as a prize to the warrior who rescues her sister.”

Meghan thought for a moment about finding and berating Bryan over his quickly broken promise. Then she remembered his hot breath on her neck as she turned her head to avoid his kiss, and the strange feeling she had when his green dragon had enveloped hers on the stage. Instead, she remained in the wings to watch the second act.

Chapter 39

“A toast,” Rowan shouted, pounding the table with his giant fist.

A dozen conversations came to a sudden halt, and members of the troupe rapidly refilled their tankards with whatever they were drinking. Bryan noticed that five of the men, including Hardol and Jomar, were standing at carefully spaced intervals around the area of tables that had been set out under the night sky. A sort of light yellow haze extended between the sentries to form a perimeter wall.

“To Juliana and Nesta,” cried one of the few bachelors with the troupe, and a laugh went up as the revelers took a quick drink. Rowan glowered at the player, but the twins took the compliment in stride, inclining their identical blonde heads towards the young gallant.

“I was going to say, to the return of the prodigal son and the romantic young couple he brought with him,” Rowan finally made the toast, and then drained his tankard dry.

“Speech, speech,” several of the troupe shouted out jokingly, but Laitz wasn’t one to let an opportunity for attention go to waste.

“Since you insist,” he declared, hopping up on his chair and striking a pose. His harlequin suit would have made him the center of attention in any other crowd, but the players were used to both his costume and his manner. Laitz raised his voice and continued as if they were all eagerly awaiting his words.

“First, I’d like to thank Rowan for being smart enough to take me back,” he declared, drawing a series of hoots and catcalls. “Second, I’d like to thank Meghan and Bryan for making tonight’s illusion a great success. They’ve only been at it for two weeks now, and I’ll be surprised if they don’t surpass me by the end of the season.”

Meghan blushed as people turned to look at her and Bryan. She knew that when Laitz said “they,” he was really referring to the stranger she had brought from Dark Earth, who once again had become a mystery to her. Was he serious about his feelings, or was he just inflamed by watching the twins and willing to turn to the most convenient woman, the one with whom he shared a tent.

“On the subject of our new members, I’m sure you’ve all heard the rumors,” Rowan announced suddenly. His voice cut through the laughs and renewed conversations of the players who were ignoring the rest of Laitz’s ad-libbed speech. “I don’t have to tell any of you that troupe business is none of the king’s business, but I want to remind you that a denial is as good as an admission in the ears of a Seeker. If anybody suspicious asks you about new members in the troupe, don’t deny it or they’ll know we’re hiding something. Something else, I mean,” Rowan corrected himself, drawing a big laugh from the troupe. “Either answer without lying or don’t say anything at all. The Seekers know that they have no friends among traveling players.”