A girl straddles him, her eyes as thin and sharp as her blade. He grabs her wrist. She puts her other hand behind her knife and leans on it. He brings up his other hand to hold her off.
The box, a black shadow, hovers above her, but the boy holding it either can’t get a clear shot at his face or is ambivalent about smashing someone while he’s looking at him. If he rolls the girl and gets on top of her, he’ll get the box in the head again.
As the knife inches toward his eye, he realizes he’s seen it before. It’s a flat fingernail knife with a bone handle. He doesn’t want to do this, she’s just a girl, he’s just a boy, but he has to. He whistles.
Mylla’s weight slackens. She knows that tune. It gathers the crew. Why would he whistle it now? She hears a scraping on the sand, then through the underbrush.
Barad takes a step backward and adopts a defensive stance. The gray dragon’s head rises over him, and its mouth opens. He quavers, but doesn’t break.
Mylla jumps off the man and says, “Call it off! Call it off!”
The man stands and touches the boy on the shoulder without taking his eyes off the girl’s knife. The dragon sits and looks at him. The man whispers, “Move away slowly. There you go. Stand beside the girl.” He says to her, “I didn’t come for you.”
Mylla screams at him, “You killed Solet!”
He says, “He killed me a long time ago.”
She screams again, “You killed him!” He starts to protest again when her eyes flick toward the beach. He sees this and smiles. He knows what she is doing: letting the others know where he is.
“Clever girl,” he says and leaps at her. He grabs her knife hand, spins her around to pin her to his chest and drags her, kicking and screaming, to the gray. He climbs into the saddle and sits her before him.
“They’ll put an arrow through me to get to you,” she says.
He’s unconcerned. “Don’t move,” he says, “or you’ll slide off the saddle and tear open your crotch on her spines. Don’t you move either,” he says to Barad, “or I’ll slide her off the saddle myself.”
Barad stops advancing. Mylla stops struggling. As the rider takes her knife, Barad flashes her, “I’ll find you.”
She says, “I know.”
The rider takes the dragon’s reins, kicks her flanks, and turns her onto the beach.
Two archers are moving into a position to shoot, directed by some officers armed with discarded bows. He pressures the dragon with his knees and pulls the reins again, and the dragon lifts off. The rider jerks the reins so she veers this way and that. The girl pushes into him and grabs his arms so she doesn’t fall. Bits of gore unstick themselves from the dragon’s head and spit into their faces. Jeryon easily avoids the arrows shot at them and heads out to sea.
This is not how she imagined her first time riding a dragon. The strange man holds her like a crate waiting to be stacked. He stinks of fish and earth. His beard scratches her skin. His breath is too hot and quick. And she’s not in control. Every time the dragon’s wings are buffeted, he tightens his grip and she shrinks a bit.
Once she’s convinced he’s not planning to throw her off the dragon, she asks, “Where are you taking me?”
The rider says nothing.
“Who are you? You’re Hanoshi. I heard it in your voice.”
The rider starts to say something and stops.
She can’t enjoy the view because there isn’t much of one, despite Med rising. So she memorizes how he controls the dragon, feeling when his legs tense, watching how he works the reins, and leaning herself when he uses his weight.
A few minutes later she spots the Gamo’s wake, milky in the moonlight, and dives. Mylla’s scream is clenched by her throat. She tries to grab the reins, but her brain no longer speaks to her arms. As they approach the stern deck, the rider yells, “Comber!” and the dragon scours the galley with flame from the steering oar to the foredeck. The rider brings the dragon around twice, setting the shutters on both sides of the rowers’ deck alight. The oars collapse like the legs of a man whose neck has been snapped. With the rowers shackled to their benches and the oarmaster and his team trapped below, there’s no one to put the fires out. The rider spirals the dragon up to watch the ship become fully engulfed, collapse in on itself, and sink, leaving only a tower of smoke quickly dissipating into the night.
Mylla can’t imagine a worse death, and she saw Sumpt die. As the rider returns west, Mylla says, “Why are you doing this?”
The rider says something she can’t make out, the wind is so loud.
Nearing the beach where the Pyg has burned nearly to the waterline, she says again, “Why are you doing this?”
He says in her ear, “You remind me of someone I know. Can you swim?”
“Of course. I’m Ynessi. Wait!”
The dragon dives again. They skim the water toward the beach. She tries to take control of the dragon. She clings to the dragon with her legs, leans over, and braves the spikes to hold its neck. The dragon slows. First he grabs her goggles, but they come off in his hand and slide over his wrist. Then he grabs her by the back of her pants and slides her half off.
“Don’t go to Hanosh,” he says.
Turning sharply finishes the job. She skips off the water, flips, half loses her pants, and splashes to a stop.
The officers and archers weren’t expecting the dragon to return and so they had gathered in a tight clump in the light to discuss what to do. The dragon blasts them, and they decide to run around burning and screaming.
I don’t care, Mylla thinks, I’d rather sink than call Barad for help. She doesn’t have to. He sees her, throws off his candlebox, and swims out. He’s huffing so hard by the time he reaches her, though, that she has to save him. They collapse in the shallows to avoid being seen. She pulls up her pants, rakes her soggy hair off her face, then rakes his off his face and says, “We have to find him. The dragon rider. We’ll go to Hanosh. Are you with me?”
He nods. She had him at “we.”
“First, though, we’ll go to Yness,” she says, “to get Solet’s brothers.”
Jos, wreathed in flames, runs by and flings himself into the surf. A cloud of steam stinking of burned hair wafts over them.
“And his sister Thea,” Mylla says.
6
* * *
Midafternoon the next day Jeryon spots the island. The weather’s lousy, dank and misty, the sun a mere suggestion. Jeryon’s new goggles keep fogging.
The previous night, after flying a mile toward Hanosh, Gray tugged for home, and he gave her his head and they flew down the coast. Hanosh could wait a few more days. After spending the night a few hours south of Solet’s beach, Jeryon longs for his lumpy bamboo bed a wall away from the poth.
A week hasn’t passed, but it feels much longer as the magnitude of what he’s done bleeds through his exhaustion. So many dead. That wasn’t the plan. What can he possibly tell her? He doesn’t lie. He could argue they worked for the Shield and his former mates, but they weren’t soldiers, nor is he. He can’t understand how he enjoyed watching Tuse suffer. He can’t fathom how he crushed Solet’s skull. He tries hard not to admit it thrilled him. Instead he feels released.
He doesn’t need Hanosh anymore. Why risk all by going there? What more could he do? He doesn’t have to finish the job. He’s already cost the company four ships. The reasons why will come out, and the other companies will make sure the Shield suffers further. Livion won’t escape. That he can count on.
He only needs a boat. He could buy one outside Yness and tow it to the island. He and the poth could then ride it into the sunrise. He could talk her out of going to Ayden by saying they’d take the dragon. In the Dawn Lands, she’d never find out for sure what’s happened.
Jeryon soars over the island to make a more dramatic descent to the cabin and notices a galley on the flats where the po
th washed up. At first he thinks it’s a pirate ship, then he sees the burned mast and the scorched remnants of deck and knows it’s the Hopper. He doesn’t want to be spotted by the men lounging on the galley and the beach, so he pulls the dragon up until the mist obscures the galley and races for the Crown along the treetops.
If they’ve done anything to the poth, he doesn’t want them to know he’s there. His vengeance would be swift. His remorse disintegrates. Having killed before makes it surprisingly easy to consider afterward.
When Gray lands, she becomes very agitated, as if looking for something. He takes two spears and dismounts then stays behind her for cover as she rushes from spire to spire. Men from the Hopper may be waiting. He’d prefer that to another dragon.
At the spire where Jeryon and Everlyn found Gray’s egg, she curls around it, groaning. He wonders if she’s hurt, and she’s come here because instinctually it’s the place she feels most safe. She rolls on her belly then pushes herself up into a crouch, bent nearly double. Her stomach heaves. Having seen what the green dragon did in a similar posture, Jeryon flees around a spire behind her where he couldn’t be drenched with acid. She squeals and her tail whips up. She squeals again as if in pain. Jeryon peeks around the spire and sees the first egg slide onto the bare rock. Another follows and a third, a tiny cairn mortared with strands of gray mucus.
Her head snaps around. She gives him a ferocious look. He ducks behind the spire, presses his back to it, and tucks his spears against his chest. He doesn’t have a command, he realizes, that means Don’t eat me. When he peeks around the other side of the spire, she’s putting the eggs in the hole where hers was. Amazing, he thinks. He’ll keep them apart when they’re hatched. They could create an armada.
Gray curls around the spire again and falls asleep. He takes a step toward her to see if she’s all right. One eye opens, red-rimmed and slitted. She’s all right enough, he decides, and hurries down the steps to find the poth.
Insects swarm the first body a few hundred yards from the dragon corpse. It’s a rower from the looks of his shoulders and the number of scars and tattoos on his body beneath the devouring beetles. There’s a sword wound in the center of his back.
At the shega meadow, he finds his tree ravaged, the fruit torn off, and many branches broken.
At the stream overlook he finds another rower’s body, this one with several sword wounds, a few to the hands and one, the decisive one, to the throat. Jeryon looks at the beach. No one is moving. Can they be asleep? Then he notices the crabs on some of the bodies and more exiting the rowers’ deck.
Footprints clutter the trail to the cabin, so he forces himself to take a roundabout route. His leg is stiff and sore from tumbling with Gray, then riding, and a sharp pain cuts from his knees to his hip. He pushes through, using his spears as walking sticks, growing more worried with each agonizing step as he imagines what a boatload of fired-up prisoners would do to a helpless woman.
He comes across a body half-decapitated. Was she lying in wait for them? How did she get around so quickly? Or was this someone else’s work?
He can hear the cabin before he can smell it. It’s a chittering hive of beetles, insects, and blue crabs. The latter pour through the front door, carrying out pieces of flesh and cloth, which they devour on the porch and beneath the cabin. Jeryon can’t get close and he has no desire to clear it out, so he climbs a tree and looks through the window.
Corpses are sitting up, shoulder-to-shoulder, along the walls and back-to-back in the center of the common room. One holds his own head in his hands. Jeryon moves to other trees to look in other windows. There’s blood on the poth’s bed, which has been moved across the room. The door to her room has been knocked down as has his. His tools have been knocked from the walls and some are impaled in the bodies. He doesn’t see her.
He also doesn’t see the crates of food, the water barrels, or her sword. She must be alive, perhaps hiding until the danger has passed. He counts the bodies in the cabin and tries to remember how many were on the beach. There couldn’t be many left. Then again, how many could she have killed? She could fight one if she took him by surprise, but she couldn’t have slaughtered as many as are in the cabin, certainly not if they were together, nor could she have arrayed them the way they are. What purpose did that serve anyway?
He wants to scream, “Where are you? What happened?,” when he sees parallel tracks in front of the cabin. Something was dragged, he thinks, but the gouges are too thin and deep to have been heels. He follows the tracks downstream to the flats.
The smell reaches him long before he comes through the trees. They ignore him as he inspects their bounty of sailors and rowers. It’s difficult to tell, but all have some sort of wounds: gashes, broken bones, smashed faces. A few have bolts in them. Others were stabbed with what must have been harpoons. At least one was strangled. Did they turn on one another and destroy themselves? If not, where’s the faction that did this?
Jeryon checks the galley’s transom, sweeping white crabs out of his path with his spears: the dinghy is gone. The tracks end at the tide line. Could she have managed to drag something all the way from her cabin with her injuries? Did she get off the island? Was she taken against her will along with their supplies?
Jeryon can’t decide whom he’s more furious at: her for not leaving him any sign of where she’s gone or himself for letting the Hopper go.
He impales several crabs on a spear and runs as best he can to the Crown. He needs the dragon to search the island, but Gray is still unwilling to be approached. She grudgingly accepts the crabs.
Jeryon barely sleeps that night, pacing the expanse of rock and peering across the island for any sign of her or the Hopper’s crew. By morning he’s worked himself into a lather.
Gray is back to normal. Perhaps she’s already forgotten her eggs. She doesn’t glance at them and comes at Jeryon’s whistle. They search the island in a crisscross pattern. They see nothing except blue crabs that don’t realize they’re missing an unprecedented feast at the cabin and on the beach.
Jeryon and Gray circle the island in an ever-widening gyre and find the sea as empty. If she had gotten off the island after the Hopper arrived, she might already be in the League. Could she sail, though? Could she navigate? Would he have seen her on the way to the island, or did he overlook her in the lousy weather? Is she lost right now?
He can’t search the ocean, but he can go to the one place where he knows she would look for him eventually. He’ll find her and bring her back to take care of Gray’s eggs. In the meantime, he’ll deal with Livion and the owners. No more loose ends. No more counting on others to make things go his way. He brings his boats in on time.
Jeryon tends to Gray’s wounds then brings her to the beach so she can fill up on crab before the trip to Hanosh. Disturbingly, she prefers to feed on the corpses.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Junior
1
* * *
Atop the Quiet Tower in Hanosh, a guard named Isco hears a scuffing behind him, then a voice call out, “Who’s there?”
Isco can’t make out whom it is. The moons have withered to new, the wind off the bay has put out the torches again, and firelight from the city won’t bleed past the crenellations. He raises his crossbow and says, “Stand, and show yourself.”
The voice says, “Long live the Guard!” Someone not a guard giggles.
“Bern?” Isco says.
“Who else?” Another guard comes forward.
“Indeed,” Isco says, “who else?” He waves his crossbow toward the door. The faintest of shadows moves. “You come most carefully,” Isco says.
“Bern,” the shadow says with a girl’s voice. “You said there wouldn’t be—”
“Isco,” Bern says, “the clock’s struck twelve. Go to bed.”
Isco lowers his crossbow. “With pleasure. It’s bitter cold, and I
am sick at heart.”
“Aw,” the shadow says. “He’s a poet.”
Bern hushes her. “Have you had a quiet guard?” he says.
“Not a mouse stirring,” Isco says. “And if you wish the mice to stay quiet . . .”
“There’s a bottle of warm behind my bunk,” Bern says. “That should salve your heart.”
Isco salutes Bern, then the shadow, which giggles again. Relieved, he goes downstairs.
After the door clicks shut, the shadow pads to Bern and resolves into a maid still wearing her knee-length black chiton. Her bare arms shiver, and she slips beneath his.
“Where’s my bottle of warm?” she says.
“I thought I was,” Bern says. She hits his chest. He hands her a flask. “Now let me salve you,” Bern says. He puts his other arm around her.
She hugs him and pulls away. “You promised to show me something exciting first.”
He takes her hand and leads her to the southwest curve of the tower. The Quiet Tower squats at the end of the West Wall, which slopes downhill protecting the homes of deputies and juniors, functionaries and factotums, that is, the Greater and Lesser Silk, until naked cliffs make it unnecessary.
“There’s my dorm,” she says. The servants’ quarter lies below the tower, eventually bleeding into the warehouses, rope houses, closed houses, taverns, and casinos of the Harbor.
“Not down there,” Bern says and points west across the cliffs. “There. A shadow climbing, maybe flying.”
“I don’t see anything,” she says. “It’s too dark. Have you been putting me on?”
“There was more moon the other night. I heard a strange whooshing too when the shadow came close.”
The Dragon Round Page 20