The Dragon Round (27 page)

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 maid shivers again. “I can't hear anything either,” she says. “The wind is too loud.” She takes a pull on the bottle and wraps her arms around her chest. “Do you really stand here all night long? By yourself?”

“Yes,” he says. “When war comes, I may be the first to know. This is probably where I'll fight too.” He pulls on her arms to unwrap her. “We shouldn't waste our last doomed hours.”

She twists aside. She wanted to see something wondrous, not think about war. She lifts the bottle then changes her mind. “Can we go inside? Maybe I should go.”

Bern says, “Wait. Did you hear that?”

“Now you're just trying to make me stay.”

“No,” Bern says. “Look, here it comes again.” He gets behind her to guide her gaze. A shadow rushes at them.

“I hear it now,” she says, “the whooshing.” She laughs and presses against him. “You said it was bigger.”

The shadow closes. The stars atop the bay are blotted out. Then maid and guard are whooshing upward, claws digging beneath their collarbones. She screams and Bern blows his horn, but they're too far above the city already for anyone to hear.

2

On a small bench beside his front door, Livion sits in his stocking feet while his partner, Tristaban, dresses down their servant girl for leaving a spot of mud on the toe of his dragonskin boots. He can't see it, but he trusts it's there. Nonetheless, he wishes he could save the girl. He knows what it's like to be dressed down in front of another, that's the life of a sailor, and it only got worse as a mate. He didn't grow up in a world of glossy boots and girls who shined them, though, so he leaves the issue to Tristaban and considers the hall tiles.

When did it stop feeling strange to spend his days on unmoving stone?

Tristaban looks like she's conducting musicians, the way she's moving her finger around. It's not like the boots aren't going to get filthy once he gets to the Harbor. He'd rather wear sandals, which are less conspicuous and comfortable. And boots, like the Aydeni who favor them, have gone out of fashion. But “Trist insists.” If he wants to solidify his new position in the Shield, he has to remind people constantly how he became a Hero of Hanosh and why her father let them be partnered.

She wasn't so conscientious when they were seeing each other behind her father's back: meeting in artisan taverns where no one would recognize them, finding quiet places alone beyond the walls, even taking a room for a week in Hanoshi Town and playing at living together as if they were common laborers or farmers come to sell their crop. She was coy, adventurous, and lively. Now she is . . . pretty. When she smiles. Thanks to her father, Chelson, he lives far more comfortably than he would have in the stern cabin he pictured for himself as a boy. He does love her. And he can't shake from his memory the looks she used to give him right under her father's nose, even as she orders their girl to wipe his boots again and dismisses her.

Tristaban takes a deep breath and settles back into herself. She brushes the shoulders of his white silk shirt, the latest trend among shipowners. She says, “I hate to trouble you with household affairs. Say hello to my father at Council.” She pecks his forehead. Her neck smells like vanilla. It's his favorite scent. And if her neck smells like strawberries tomorrow, that will be his favorite scent.

She goes around the corner toward her chamber. A moment later the girl appears. She silently pushes his boots on. She reminds him of a doll, her cheeks as hard as ceramic, her eyes as cold. She can't be more than twelve.

Livion stands up and turns each boot in the dawnlight coming
through the small window beside the door. “Good,” he says. “Here, between you and me.” He holds up a penny then sets it on the bench.

“I cannot,” she says and hurries away. Did she rebuff his guilt? Or, how stupid is he, a perceived advance? Livion shakes his head. He pockets the penny—today's penny is tomorrow's coin, his father-in-law says—and steps outside.

His small whitewashed stucco home is on a skinny lane, Brimurray, just above the servants' district, and halfway up the Hill. It's a respectable height for one of his position, and the sundeck abutting its blue tile roof adds a rare distinction. Nonetheless, Trist has her eye on a house a few lanes higher, one big enough for children. Or live-in servants.

Brimurray leads to a larger, guarded boulevard that connects to one of the switchbacking streets between the weathered Harbor and the blinding white mansions of the Crest at the top of the Hill. The streets are already streaming with barrows and carts bringing goods from the early galleys to the Upper City beyond the Crest, and with people flowing down to offices and jobs in the Harbor. Most are dressed in drab cotton and leather, and he remains surprised when someone darts out of his way. Trist says they dart out of respect—he's a Hero of Hanosh—but he can't believe he's recognized even when people do point him out to their children.

At a switchback he stops at a grill cart to buy an okono, a pancake rolled around pork, cabbage, and a brown sauce. The vendor is Aydeni, a rarity in the city nowadays, and he wouldn't say it out loud, but Livion prefers that city's version of okono to the Hanoshi, which has crab instead of pork. He hates crab. The vendor keeps his secret with a rough finger pressed to his nose, and for that Livion puts an extra penny in his tray.