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For a moment, Reyn just stared at him through his veil. Then he observed wryly, ‘Obviously, you have forgotten whom you are speaking to.’

Grag gave a lop-sided shrug. ‘I’ve heard you could pass.

If you wanted to. As for me…sometimes, when I am away from my ship for a while, I find myself wondering.

What holds me here? Why do I stay in Bingtown, why must I be all a Trader’s son must be?

Some folk have kicked over the traces. Brashen Trell for instance. ’

‘I don’t believe I know him.’

‘No. You wouldn’t. And you never will. His family disowned him for his wild ways. When I heard about that, I halfway expected him to the from it. But he didn’t. He comes and goes as he pleases, lives where he wants, sails where the wind blows him. He’s free.’

‘Is he happy?’

‘He’s with Althea.’ Grag shook his head. ‘Somehow, the family picked him to captain the Paragon for them. And they entrusted him with Althea.’

‘From what I’ve heard of Althea, she needs no man’s protection.’

‘She would agree with that.’ Grag sighed.

‘I don’t. I think Trell has deceived her in the past, and may again…

It eats at me. But do I rush off to find her and bring her back?

Did I leap in and say, “I’ll go, I’ll captain your mad ship for you, so long as I can be with you?

” No. I didn’t and Trell did. And that’s another difference between us. ’

Reyn scratched at the back of his neck. Was something growing there? ‘I think you make a fault of what is actually a virtue, Grag. You know your duty and you are doing it. It isn’t your fault if Althea can’t appreciate that.’

‘That’s just the trouble.’ He tugged the small missive from his sleeve, then pushed it back again. ‘She does. She praised me for it and wished me well. She said she admires me. That’s a poor substitute for love.’

Reyn could think of nothing to say to that.

Grag sighed. ‘Well. No point in dwelling on any of that now. If it comes to war with the Satrap, it will come soon enough. Either Althea will come back to me, or she won’t.

It seems there is little I can do about my life; I’m like a leaf caught in a current.

’ He shook his head, and grinned in embarrassment at his own melancholy words.

‘I’m going forward to talk to Kendry for a while. You coming?’

‘No.’ Reyn realized how abrupt he sounded and sought to soften it. ‘I’ve got some thinking of my own to do.’

Reyn watched through a grey haze of veil as Grag walked forward to the figurehead. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. Even with gloves on, he would not take a chance on leaning on the railing. The whole ship shouted to him as it was, and it was not ‘Kendry’ that spoke to him.

He had travelled aboard liveships before and never had this problem.

The dragon had done something to him. He wasn’t sure what, or how, but it frightened him.

He had broken his bargain with his mother and elder brother to pay her a final visit.

It was wrong, but so was abandoning her without trying to make her see that he had done his best. He had begged her to let him go; she had seen how hard he had tried.

Instead, she had vowed that she would devour his soul.

‘As long as I am a prisoner here, Reyn Khuprus, so shall you be too,’ she had cursed him.

She had twined herself through his mind like a black vein in marble, mingling with him until he was no longer certain where she left off and he began.

It frightened him worse than anything else she had ever done. ‘You are mine!’ she had declared.

As if to underscore her words, the entire floor of the chamber had trembled.

It was only a tremor, a common occurrence on the Cursed Shores.

It was not even a large one as quakes went, but never before had he been in the Crowned Rooster Chamber when one struck.

His torch showed him the frescoed walls undulating as if they were draperies.

He ran, fleeing for his life, with her laughter echoing inside his mind.

He could not escape it. As he fled, he had heard the unmistakable sound of corridors giving way.

The deadening rush of damp earth followed the clattering of falling tile.

Even when he reached the outside and bent over, hands on his knees, trying to reclaim his breath, he could not stop shaking.

There would be work tomorrow, and for days to come.

Tunnels and corridors would have to be shored up.

If it was bad, sections of the buried city might have to he abandoned.

All would have to be inspected laboriously before there could he any new explorations.

It was precisely the sort of work that he hated.

‘Toil away,’ the dragon’s voice had bubbled merrily in his mind. ‘You might be able to shore up the walls of this dead city, Reyn Khuprus. But the walls of your mind will stand no more against me or my kind.’

It had seemed an idle threat. What worse could she do to him than she had already done?

But since then, his dreams had been plagued with dragons.

They roared and battled one another, they stretched out on rooftops to sun themselves, they mated upon the lofty towers of an exotic city. He was witness to it all.

It was not a nightmare. No. It was a dream of extraordinary brilliance and complexity.

They trafficked with beings that were almost human, yet were subtly different.

They were tall, with eyes of lavender or copper and the shades of their flesh were subtly different from any folk he had ever encountered in his real life.

His real life. That was the problem. The dreams were far more compelling than his waking hours.

He saw cities of the Elderkind and came tauntingly close to understanding their history.

He suddenly grasped the wideness of their streets and corridors, the broad yet shallow steps, the height of the doors and the generous windows.

The vastness of their constructions had been to accommodate the dragons that shared the city.

He longed to venture inside the buildings, to linger close to the people as they strolled in the markets or ventured out on the river in their gaily-painted boats. He could not.

In the dream, he was with the dragons and of the dragons.

They regarded their two-legged neighbours with tolerant affection.

They did not consider them peers. Their lives were too short, their concerns too shallow.

Reyn, while he dreamed, shared that attitude.

It was the dragon culture he was steeped in, and their thoughts began to colour his, not just sleeping but in waking times as well.

The emotions they felt were a hundred times as strong as anything Reyn had ever experienced was.

Human passion, intense as it might be, was but a snap of the fingers compared to the enduring devotion of a dragon to his mate.

They treasured one another, not just through years but through lives.

He saw the world with new eyes. Cultivated fields became a patchwork quilt flung across the land.

Rivers, hills and deserts were no longer barriers.

A dragon, on a whim, went where a man might not venture in his entire lifetime.

The world, he saw, was at once much greater and far smaller than he had known.

The curse of such dreams manifested itself slowly.

He awoke unrested, as if he had never slept at all.

The potency of his other life drew him. He spent his human days in a fog of discontent and restlessness.

He regarded his own existence with disdain.

A double curse of weariness dogged him. He longed to sleep, but sleep gave him no rest. Yet he desired sleep, not to rest, but to leave his dreary human life behind and immerse himself once more in a draconian world.

His life as a man had become a string of weary days.

The only thoughts that could still stir his heart at all were thoughts of Malta.

Even in those fancies, he could not shake the dragon’s curse, for in his mind’s eye Malta’s hair shone like the scales of a black dragon.

Behind all his thoughts and dreams, in words almost too soft to hear and yet never silent, came the mourning of the trapped dragon in the Crowned Rooster Chamber.

‘No more, no more, no more. They are all gone and dead, all the great bright ones. And it is your fault, Reyn Khuprus. You ended them, by cowardice and laziness. You had it in your power to create their world anew, and you walked away from it.’

That had been the sharpest of his torments. That he had it within his power, she believed, to free her and bring true dragons back into the world.

Then he had stepped aboard the Kendry, and his torment took an even more cruel turn.

The Kendry was a liveship; the bones of the ship’s body were wizardwood.

Generations ago, Reyn’s ancestors had pounded wedges into a great wizardwood log within the Crowned Rooster Chamber.

They had split the immense trunk open, and plank after plank of lumber had been sawn and peeled from it.

One immense chunk had been taken whole, to form the figurehead.

The soft, half-formed creature within had been unceremoniously spilled out onto the cold stone floor of the chamber.

Reyn twisted inside every time he thought of that.

He had to wonder: had it squirmed? Had it mouthed airless cries of pain and despair?

Or, as his brother and mother insisted, had it been a long dead thing, an inert mass of tissue and nothing more than that?