Dragon's Run Read online

“I don’t know. It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Yaki said before pressing her lips together to prevent any questions from leaking out. Was this as far as it would go? What happened when she ran out of gold?

  “It’s bigger. Does it bargain with you? Promise you things for more space?” the doctor asked.

  “No, it’s not a spirit; it’s a heart. It beats harder when I’m scared or envious, and its gets hungry,” Yaki said.

  The doctor cocked her head quizzically. “Have you tried talking to it? You are a crystal singer, yes?”

  “Got it!” Rufus announced, carrying a small barrel beneath his human arm. The moment broke between Yaki and the doctor.

  “We will talk later,” the doctor said as she stepped away.

  Nodding in thanks, Yaki pushed herself back to her feet and made her way over to the barrel to offer what comfort she could to her dying friend.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It is Tree Mother’s blessing that created the first house tree. Each family shapes their own tree over generations. It is a place where each step is carefully planned and considered.

  Boots, Storywalker

  No dragons or Dragonsworn came roaring down the mountain in the middle of the night. The first rays of sunlight brought groans of relief to both Ishe and Drosa. With conversation, flirtation, and body heat, Drosa had kept Ishe’s thoughts from the Grief. Their bodies came apart with the sound of peeling tape, Ishe flopping forward to the ground. For a brief moment, she couldn’t feel anything, and then she felt her torso entirely too much as pins and needles crawled up from her hips. “Tithes of iron up the arsehole,” Ishe swore as she gritted her teeth and waited for her remaining uncorrupted body to reconnect fully. Drosa grumbled something in her own language. Ishe found her eyelids did not want to open. Instinctively, she reached up to rub her eyes and stopped herself only as the rubbery surface of her hands pressed against her face. Laboriously, with every curse she knew muttered under her breath, Ishe slowly forced herself to her feet, every joint protesting audibly, even the bones in her black limbs. Fatigue lay over her mind like a leaden blanket.

  Mussily, she pondered Drosa’s actions last night. Surely, that had been a one-time thing. A ploy to keep the Grief at bay. Ishe decided she wouldn’t mention it. Stretching, she showed the sun every inch of her chest; her copper skin had turned gray except for the band where Drosa’s arms had rested beneath her breasts. Ishe resolved to at least thank her for that. The shiny blackness of her arms had not advanced an inch. Taking in a breath, Ishe mentally loaded both a thank-you and an apology on her lips and turned.

  Drosa stood right behind her, hair radiant and tangled. Gleaming eyes bloodshot and staring out over sleep-deprived bags so purple, they looked like bruises. Yet the smirk on her thin lips made Ishe’s heart skip a little. Drosa took a step, more a skip, forward and wrapped her arms around Ishe’s neck, and as Ishe’s lips fell open in surprise, Drosa captured them with her own. She kissed Ishe with her entire body, pressing her naked chest against Ishe, standing on tiptoe to thrust with her hips. Ishe fought the urge to hug her, leaving her hands to uselessly clench and unclench at her sides. Instead, Ishe pressed herself back through the kiss. Lips parted; tongues met.

  Spinning away with a prancing step, Drosa grinned. “Tonight, we go front to front. Give us something to do when we run out of words, yes?”

  “Y-y-yeah,” Ishe managed to get out. A chill had nothing to do with that stutter. Whatever she had planned to say, it was forgotten. She dimly remembered Drosa telling her the outlines of how her tribe worked, but she had not explained at all about herself or family. Ishe stood mutely as Drosa dressed herself: she did not bother to bind her small breasts but pulled the leather vest on and secured the front with a series of metal hooks and loops. Ishe wondered if it chafed. Drosa caught her eyes and smiled, displaying her broad teeth.

  “Must be many people like me in Golden Hills?” Drosa asked.

  “How do you mean?” Ishe thought of a half dozen ways Drosa wasn’t like anyone she’d met before.

  Drosa grinned more broadly, displaying the fact that all her visible front teeth were flat incisors, no pointed canines anywhere. “You no flinch when I smile.”

  “You’d need much bigger teeth than that to scare me.” Ishe shrugged and thought of Murray, the monkey man who had fangs at least an inch long. He’d been the only crystal-touched on the crew that she’d known about. As far as she knew, Murray had still been aboard the ship when she blew.

  Ishe had expected to find the others slumbering with a corpse, but they all slept beneath a white sheet of silk that had appeared during the night along with a small pile of carefully wrapped bundles that were still wriggling.

  Hawk looked the same as she had before, eyes closed, face gray, chest heaving every ten seconds or so.

  “Sparrow, how is she?” Ishe asked as he pulled himself from under Hawk’s arm.

  “The same.” Sparrow’s voice was flat and dull. He had a haunted look to his spindly frame.

  “That is good. Maybe she last till we get back with litter and medicine,” Drosa said.

  “She will.” Sparrow did not look comforted. “The Death Panther is not here. She is refusing to come.”

  Ishe swallowed and looked at the misshapen form beneath the sheet. The stumps were no longer than they had been yesterday. No medical crystal could bring back a severed limb. Excellent ones could reattach them but never regrow them. The shape of Hawk’s future lay clear. “We’ll send help.”

  Sparrow nodded, but his grim expression said it was a little too late for that.

  High Tree proved to be fairly easy to find. After an hour of aimless hiking, Drosa had scuttled up a huge tree and spotted smoke in the distance. Direction set, it took them most of the day to reach it.

  The distinct click of a hand cannon woke Ishe from the fugue-like state that she had fallen into during the walk. Blinking sleepily, she saw nothing but more tree trunks. Then she looked up. A dozen men and women stood on wooden walkways suspended between the trees, pointing a smattering of crossbows and longbows at them. A large man who wore a helm sporting branch-like antlers pointed the likely origin of that click directly at Ishe’s head.

  “Ah, hello!” Ishe said, trying to give herself time to speak. The next thought was that she wished she were wearing a shirt. Everyone else had one. “Your trees are really sneaky.”

  “Hello yourself,” said the man with the hand cannon that did not waver. Ishe wondered what he loaded it with. An earth or wind round would be good nonlethal options, but if she’d seen a person half on her way to becoming a Grief, she’d load her cannon with fire crystals. However, if she lived in a tree, that might alter the calculus. In any case, Ishe rated her ability to throw herself out of the blast radius to be close to zero. “You can tell me who you are or you can die right there.”

  “Right, sorry, been two days without sleep now.” Ishe braced herself as she searched her mind, trying to remember if Fox Fire had ever hit a ship in the vicinity. Probably not; most tribes didn’t get along with Lyndon. “I’m Ishe of Madria. A dragon knocked us out of the sky on the other side of the mountains. We’ve got serious injuries.”

  “I can see that.” The hand cannon lowered a fraction, but most of the crossbows didn’t waver.

  “I’m not the worst of it.”

  “If they’re any worse than you, then they are lost,” he said.

  “We have one who is badly burned. Her husband claims that her cousin lives here, one called Starry Walker.”

  The man winced. “Fire and lightning,” he swore, “you’re from Fox Fire.” He sent someone to search for Starry Walker. A guardsman broke off and shimmied up one of the trees via a ladder that seemed to have grown out the side of it. He crawled up into a hole of a house-sized growth on the tree. Round in shape, it had several rings of holes circling it. The smaller ones had curtains, while the larger ones sported bridges that reached toward other trees. Nor was this the only gnarled house on the tree. She
counted three more higher up, and a webwork of bridges stretched as far as she could see. This was more than a mere village, a full-fledged town, maybe a small city. The man popped out a side window of the house with a red and a blue flag in each hand. After a few waves, an identical pair popped out of a house in the distance and then began to repeat the signal.

  It wasn’t ship code as far Ishe could tell, but it worked. Within minutes, a large form was racing toward them, hanging below the bridges. Bark-brown with eight mossy green legs, the giant spider had two people clinging to its back. Ishe swallowed: a riding spider. She suppressed a shiver as she upscaled the size of Blinky’s fangs for a spider the size of a draft horse and then some. It was a very rare animal among the tribes and flat-out banned in the Golden Hills. Riding spiders were a mark of wealth and power. This was certainly no mere trading post if they had even one.

  The spider reached the tree that the man had signaled from in no time at all and scurried down it, passing over several houses before stopping above the catwalks filled with armed guards. With its legs stretching across the girth of the house gnarl, Ishe revised her size estimate from large horse to large buffalo. The rider wore brown that matched the color of his mount, while his passenger wore a dress of brilliant green accented with the red of fall leaves that hugged her front in such a way that it advertised her small baby bump. It took three guards to untie her from the saddle and lower her to the catwalk. A solid woman; Ishe could see some resemblance to Hawk in her confident swagger as she strode up to the man with the wooden antlers. After a whispered conversation, she turned to Ishe.

  “I have many cousins, Ishe of Madria,” she said in a heavy Low Rivers accent, “and the one I know that served on your ship is an exile who is far too proud to ask for my help.”

  “But her husband is not too proud.” Ishe glanced over the weary faces of her companions. Drosa had her eyes glued to the spider, which had bunched up its legs, either to make itself look smaller or preparing to jump. “And neither am I. I need to get to the Golden Hills before my sister does something very unwise, and we’ve been on the run for days.”

  The lines of the grid of tattoos across Starry Walker’s forehead unfolded slightly. “Sparrow is still alive?” She shook her head. “And she’s the one who’s injured? How badly?”

  “She’s at death’s door. Badly burned. She’ll not survive another night without medical crystals, ma’am.”

  “You know what would happen to her and him in Low Rivers?”

  “No. But we’re not in Low Rivers.”

  Starry nodded sharply at that. “You’re lucky in that, at least. You can enter as my guests, but behave! Act like sailors at port and we’ll feed you to Fenria.” She pointed at the spider. Ishe swallowed, considering how much a spider of that size had to eat, the threat was probably less than idle.

  “Thank you,” Ishe said as the crossbows were finally lowered.

  “I am Chief Unyet,” the antlered man said. “And the forest must favor you that I stood on duty today. Your companions will go with Starry Walker and house with her. Do you know where you left Swooping Hawk?”

  “They’re camped near the falls,” Ishe said.

  “Grinning Face Falls. Not too far.” He walked over to the tree and easily slid down a rope ladder that one of his companions dropped. Ishe started with surprise to see that his dark brown skin had the rough appearance of bark. Another crystal-touched? His eyes were the amber color of tree sap. A team of guards started to jog in the direction Ishe and the others had come from. She made introductions for the rest of her party at a farther-than-polite distance.

  Drosa stepped behind Ishe. “We go together. We… I not know word… Not married but kiss?”

  Hot spiders were suddenly crawling up Ishe’s neck as Unyet’s head tilted slightly. Tribal laws regarding same-sex courtships varied widely. Squaring her shoulders, Ishe said, “We’re courting,” with as much confidence as she could muster.

  Unyet gave a half-shrug and gave Drosa a once-over, eyes pausing on the network of vivid red lines on her forearm. He grunted once. “It will be cramped with three. Follow me. Do not touch the trees with those hands.”

  He turned and to led them into the town, or perhaps city, of trees.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  To many, the gods are distant things, teachers of lessons and bringer of good luck. Yet to a few, they show their hands on the scales.

  Boots, Storywalker

  High Tree was laid out in a grid, gigantic trees growing at the four points of a square. Their straight branches mostly covered the sky but allowed a circle of sunlight through the very middle of each square of trees. Ishe and Drosa, followed Unyet’s example, stepping high as they slogged through a sea of red-brown pine needles mixed with occasional bits of fallen garbage. Gangs of children stared down, tracking their progress from the second-level walkways, the widest and sturdiest. Some of the shafts of sunlight beheld multistory vegetable gardens held aloft with wooden scaffolding and thick strands of spider’s silk. Ishe caught the whiff of something that might have been a pig farm on a breeze, but no more than that.

  Instead, as they walked, Ishe’s nose kept filling with a vague burning smell. Unyet slowed as the origin of the smoke came into view. A narrow chimney threaded up through the air from a domed structure in the middle of a square. Thick roots reached out from its sides like insect legs before plunging into the ground, while the rest of the plant resembled a beetle without a head. Stunted branches choked with dark green leaves reached up from the shell.

  “Welcome to the Clan Tree of Ashe,” Unyet announced. “As clan chief, I bid you to enter as honored guests.” He stepped off the pine-needle bedding and onto a path that had been cleared between the healthiest tree in the surrounding quartet and his home. The other trees in the quadrant were marred by scorch marks and one barely sported any green at all, the holes in its house gnarls boarded up and sagging. High Tree certainly had not given this chief a piece of prime real estate. Given that no one had come out to greet them, Ishe surmised that Unyet might serve as the head of a clan of one.

  They approached the dome and entered through an archway that had been cut into the side of it; the silver grain of the wood made Ishe stop short. Ironwood. The entire structure had been constructed of living ironwood.

  Unyet’s chest puffed out a little as he saw Ishe’s gaze. “Force-grew it about ten years ago; took five years of offerings before he finally let me move in. Now I can’t close my eyes without dreaming of small footsteps on flooring. Ironwood is slow-growing, but they make up for it with ambition.” He patted the arch affectionately and pulled open a door that had been carved to fit.

  The inside of the tree house glowed with the light of a noonday sun. Stepping inside, Ishe found a single room split into two purposes. On one side, a smithy, complete with a forge, anvil, a rack of countless tools, and wooden buckets filled with water. On the other side, a bit crowded by the smithy, lay a simple cot and a smattering of well-traveled belongings, a Lyndon cutlass, a painting of the Grand Torii as the sun rose behind it, and a Valhallan fur stole. Above it all, mounted on the ceiling, shone a sun crystal. With a groan, Unyet removed his helmet, revealing vine-like hair that rose from his head and turned tiny leaves in the light’s direction.

  He gestured toward the bed. “Take a rest. I’ll fetch you some food. Then you can tell me what’s happening across the mountains.”

  Hawk had been no stranger to the pain but had never been this intimate with it. Every movement, every breath brought fresh waves of agony. Yet she had not the energy to scream. The only thing that trickled from her lips was the smallest of whimpers. Even that was cut short by Sparrow forcing warm liquid into her mouth, firm fingers on her throat making her swallow it. Why hadn’t the Death Panther come for her? She called out to the All and felt it there, beyond the pool of pain. In it, the strand of her future held only the promise of more agony. She forced one eye open and saw him. Wet, bloodshot eyes stared back at her.<
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  The corners of his droopy whiskers bent upward as he smiled.

  Why haven’t you killed me? End this pain, she thought at him.

  “I know what you want, love. And—” He turned his head to cough into the back of his hand. It came away speckled with dark spots that he wiped off with his filthy sleeve. “And I had a dream last night. I heard you laughing again. It didn’t echo like the past.”

  “Hrrrrn.” Hawk managed to make an incoherent sound of rage, but even that unleashed new depths of hurt.

  His eyes fell. “I know you want to go. But if the Panther hasn’t taken you, she might not come even if I were to pierce your heart with a dagger. I’m sorry.”

  No. She’d done her part. Thrown herself in front of a boulder that would have smashed everyone, given time. Was this some sort of punishment for not killing the dragon? For failing to banish him from the world? He had to be wrong. She reached and found her fingers and swung her hand out toward him. Crimson red blossomed across her vision as burned flesh tore. She fell from her perch of consciousness and into merciful blackness.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Bah, do not put your faith in our kami to protect you in the Golden Hills. The priests will tell you they see all. They’re idiots. The brighter the day, the darker the shadows.

  Osada Kimi, customs official

  It did not take long for Yaki to miss the daylight. Without Grandmother’s Willow’s protection, one step into the sunlight could mean a dozen priests showing up within minutes. Only once the sun disappeared behind the mountains did she dare venture out from the boardinghouse. In the long moments while waiting for word from Gama or Mitsuo, she wondered if she was being overly cautious but resisted the urge to test these boundaries. Discovery at this point would mean death or fleeing the city. The fear of this all being for naught had invaded Yaki’s dreams; she often woke to find her sheets sopping wet and steaming, a haze of smoke gathered on the ceiling.