hand. “Wing of bat!” he shouted at nobody that I could
see. “Not the whole damn …” Muttering, he let the bat
loose, glared at me, and sighed. “Now I’ll have to start
over.”
“It doesn’t seem to me very fair,” I commented,
watching the bat fly into the cave. “If it’s Theros’s decision
to tell or not to tell and Owen’s decision – then it should be
my decision, too. I mean whether or not to say anything
about the lances. Working,” I added.
Fizban stopped his spell casting and stared at me.
Then his eyebrows smoothed out. “By gosh. I believe
you’ve caught on at last. You are absolutely right,
Tasslehoff Burr-foot. The decision will be yours. What do
you say?”
Well, I thought and I thought and I thought.
“Maybe the lances aren’t magical,” I said, after
thinking so hard that my hair hurt. “Maybe the magic’s
inside us. But, if that’s true, then some people might not
have found the magic inside themselves yet, so if they use
the lances and think that the magic is outside themselves
and inside the lances, then the magic that isn’t inside the
lances will really be inside them. And after a while they’ll
come to understand – just like Owen did, though he doesn’t
– and they’ll look for the magic inside and not for the
magic outside.”
Fizban had the sort of expression that you get on your
face when you’re sitting in a rope swing and someone
winds the rope up real tight, then lets it loose and you spin
round and round and throw up, if you’re lucky.
“I think I better sit down,” he said, and he sat down in
the snow.
I sat down in the snow and we talked some more and
eventually he knew what I was trying to say. Which was
that I would never, ever, ever say anything to anybody
about the dragonlances not working. And, just to make
certain that the words didn’t accidentally slip out, like a
hiccup, I swore the most solemn and reverent oath a
kender can take.
I swore on my topknot.
And I want to say right here and now, for Astinus and
history, that I kept my oath.
I just wouldn’t be me without a topknot.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I finished my story. They were all sitting in the Upper
Gallery, next to poor Owen Glendower, listening to me.
And they were about the best audience I’d ever had.
Tanis and Lady Crysania and Laurana and Caramon
and Owen’s son and Lord Gunthar all sat staring at me
like they’d been frozen into statues by the white dragon’s
frost breath. But I’m afraid the only thing I was thinking
about then was my topknot shriveling up and falling off. I
was hoping it didn’t, but that’s a risk I figured I had to
take. I just couldn’t let Owen Glendower die of a fit when
telling this story might help him, though I didn’t see how
it could.
“You mean to say,” said Lord Gunthar, his
moustaches starting to quiver, “that we fought that entire
war and risked our very lives on dragonlances that were
supposed to be magical and they were just ordinary
lances?”
“You said it,” I told him, hanging onto my topknot
and thinking how fond I was of it. “I didn’t.”
“Theros of the Silver Arm knew they were ordinary,”
Lord Gunthar went on, and I could see him getting
himself all worked up over it. “He knew the metal was
plain steel. Theros should have told someone – ”
“Theros Ironfeld knew, and Theros Ironfeld split the
Whitestone with the dragonlance,” Lady Crysania said
coolly. “The lance didn’t break when he threw it.”
“That’s true,” said Lord Gunthar, struck by the fact.
He thought this over, then he looked angry again. “But, as
the kender reminded us, Owen Glendower knew. And by
the Measure he should have told the Knight’s Council.”
“What did I know?” asked a voice, and we all jumped
up to our feet.
Owen Glendower was standing up in the middle of
the pile of cloaks and, though he looked almost as bad as
he had when he was righting the dragon, he had at least