Page 134 of Silverbow
“Bought it off a body snatcher yesterday.” She glared, waiting for more. “It’s not so unusual as you might think. When the wealthy spot the signs in their children, they buy a set of papers in the Foreshore and pack them off to Durelli.”
“So Lara Fischer is rotting in some potter’s field and her parents have no idea?”
Oryn scrubbed a hand down his face. “I don’t have the slightest clue where she is or what happened to her, but the body snatcher would suggest there’s little risk she reports the copy missing.”
Her throat bobbed. “I don’t want it.”
“I thought you might want to avoid another Trout Run.”
“En,” Liam breathed.
“Do you know how hard it is to find a set of papers with green eyes?” Oryn asked.
Her lip curled in distaste. “Did you have to visit many body snatchers then?”
He clenched his jaw. He had, actually.
She huffed. “Appropriate company for a man who dallies with wi-”
“Ansel,” he growled. “For someone who claims not to care, you bring it up remarkably often.”
She glared at him with an arched brow, refusing to look away, but Liam had the wherewithal to study his oatmeal.
Liam
The unrelenting heat and press of bodies in the street had Liam sweating through his shirt before even the first puppeteers passed them by. Or at least, he told himself it was the heat, and not what Enya intended once dark fell. He did not try to talk her out of it. He would prove himself different from Adar, but some part of him had hoped she would come to her senses and call it off, or surely Andril would. He scrubbed a hand through his damp, sweaty hair.
A great train of people carried a long, slithering cloth dragon down the street. It occasionally belched real flame to the delight of the crowd. Liam studied the beast, wondering how different it was from the real thing. If the other marionettes were any indication, Drulougan the Dread would look nothing like it.
Andril had shepherded them to a spot far from the square before the keep, insisting on a view of the bay. Excited faces peered up at the sky, waiting.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
“He’s coming!” A boy exclaimed excitedly.
“Drulougan!”
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
Liam looked up, scanning for the source of the wingbeats. He grabbed Enya’s hand. A black, serpentine beast swept between the castle’s towers. Massive leathery wings pitched Drulougan the Dread high into the sky to theoohsandaahsof the gathered crowd. The man on his back, the king, was hardly a speck between the pointed spines that ran from the creature’s maw to the end of its tail.
“Drulougan rarely emerges from the keep other than to hunt, but once a year, Pallas likes to remind his people of his might,” Andril said quietly.
He was impossibly huge and terrifying to behold. Liam wanted to shrink back into the crowd, but Enya’s face was an unreadable, unperturbed mask as she watched the dragon sweep low over the bay. He circled, falling closer to the rolling waves with each pass. When he flew low enough for his barbed tail to skim the surface in a spray of white, the dragon let out a roar that shook the entire city, but it was nothing compared to the jet of blue flame that chased it. Great plumes of hot steam reached for the sky as the surface of the sea boiled.
The crowd roared at the demonstration and Drulougan unleashed another torrent of flame, this one coming close enough, the heat of it made Liam turn his face away. With a third plume, the dragon flapped mighty wings that sent torrents of steamy air buffeting the crowd and swept back toward the castle. Faces turned up to watch them go, shouting for the king and his dragon. The man leapt down onto a turret and the beast flew back toward Blackash Keep.
Liam turned his face to the bay where clouds of steam still billowed and the bloated, shiny bodies of dead fish rose to the surface, boiled to death in their own watery domain. It struck Liam as wasteful when so many were starving in the Foreshore. How many nets would those fish have filled? How many bellies might they have stopped from rumbling? And as he watched them wash upon the shore, it wasn’t fear, but disgust that knotted his insides. He turned to follow Enya and the demi-elf back into the crowd.
“You can’t seriously be going through with it after what we just saw,” he said as Enya turned toward the Flame Quarter.
“It’s time, Liam.”
“What?” He asked incredulously.
She darted a look back in the crowd. “We have a shadow you need to take.”
“I don’t want to be a distraction while you go risking your neck,” he hissed.
