coiled around, I moved my hand into that final difficult arc around my own back, ending up in a twisted but still comfortable inscribing position under my left shoulder blade—right as the head of the Dragon slid precisely beneath what would have been the point of my tattooing gun.
I couldn’t quite see whether I’d got it quite right—I had no full length mirror with me this time—but I felt the Dragon rippling under the skin as he moved, and scratched him under the chin with my forefinger. His whole body rippled with pleasure, sending waves of light, movement and color cascading through all the other tattoos over my whole body.
“Challenging a skindancer about where she inked her tattoos is pointless, and the Marquis should have known that,” I said loudly. I turned to look at him through one half lidded eye, then straightened and walked back to my side of the ring without a backward glance.
“The Dragon is mine,” I said. “You cannot top it.”
But the Marquis was not deterred. “I concede your skill… at dancing, if not inking,” he said, to the delight of the crowd. “I cannot compete with it. But magic is more than performance. Real magic has function. Show us, Dakota, can your marks do this?”
I turned, and gasped. The golden cat eyes of the feral girl hovered not three feet from me, barely visible within a column of shimmering heatwaves, like a catstriped version of The Predator effect. She growled and lunged at me, and I leapt back: only then could I see her outline. I sure as hell didn’t know any flash that could do that, and had no idea how to top it.
Then the wolf-boy leapt forward, displacing the girl. He snarled at me, eyes glowing; then the eyes of his tattoo began glowing as well. Suddenly his human head shifted in a blink to a wolf’s head, snapping at me, howling at the ceiling; and all the wolves whistled and applauded. I could now see that what I had thought were far-seeing signs were actually the marks of a magical capacitor, and guessed that the applause of the crowd was that the tat had made him a quick-change artist. Impressive… but I was starting to get an idea.
Now the Marquis stretched his thin chest. Wolf tattoos began to move across his shoulders, and tribal designs on his chest began to shift and interplay. His marks gave off quite a bit of light, and were moving impressively fast—as long as you hadn’t noticed the trick. The Marquis was powerful, but he only inked surface magic. His tattoos were shimmering back and forth on his chest in a running display that I assumed was some kind of history of the pack, and the wolves were lapping it up; but all I saw was—
“A magical screensaver,;” I cried, clapping slowly and loudly. The Marquis’s jaw bulged. “Clearly you are an expert at the two dimensional form. I cannot equal you.”
“Well, then—” the Marquis said, confused and suspicious.
I clapped my hands together firmly and rubbed them against each other, Mister Miyagi style. When I pulled them apart, the mana I’d built up in my magical capacitors on my palms released slowly, into a glowing ball of light.
The crowd grew silent, then drew back as the ball grew larger and larger, from softball to soccer to basketball. The Marquis just stared, eyes wide, clenching his jaw. I was right. He was a backwoods artist; skilled, but without the training or the flash to do real skindancer marks that could affect anything beyond the wearer. If the crowd’s reaction was any gauge, none of them had seen this kind of magic either. Now it was clear why the Bear King feared it.
“There is more to magic than just show,” I said, letting the floating ball rise slowly over my upraised palm, then jabbing it so it exploded in a thousand fiery sparks that jetted out among the crowd and pushed them back a full yard from the edge of the pit. “And more than just function. True magic is beauty incarnate: let me show you.”
Then I swayed my whole body, drawing mana through the vines, concentrating it into my upraised left wrist so the gems gleamed, the flowers bloomed, and the butterfly flapped its wings and raised off my wrist into life.
There was silence around me as the glowing image of the butterfly flapped in the air, as I sheltered it with my hand like a dying flame,