Jani gave her a strange smile. ‘Keffria Vestrit. But the turning of a day ago, you were volunteering to leave your children in my care, and return to Bingtown, to spy on the New Traders for us. It seems to me that you then had a very good sense of who you were, independent of your role as mother or daughter.’

Keffria propped her elbows on the table and leaned her face into her hands. ‘And this now feels like a punishment for that. If Sa thought I undervalued my children, might he not take them from me?’

‘Perhaps. If Sa had but a male aspect. But recall the old, true worship of Sa. Male and female, bird, beast, and plant, earth, fire, air and water, all are honoured in Sa and Sa manifests in all of them. If the divine is also female, and the female also divine, then she understands that woman is more than mother, more than daughter, more than wife. Those are the facets of a full life, but no single facet defines the jewel.’

The old saying, once so comforting, now rang hollow in her ears. But Keffria’s thoughts did not linger on it long. A great commotion at the entrance to the hall turned both their heads. ‘Sit still and rest,’ Jani advised her. ‘I’ll see what it’s about.’

But Keffria could not obey her. How could she sit still and wonder if the disruption were caused by news of Reyn or Malta or Selden? She pushed back from the table and followed the Rain Wild Trader.

Weary and bedraggled diggers clustered around four youngsters who had just slung their buckets of fresh water to the floor.

‘A dragon! A great silver dragon, I tell you! It flew right over us.’ The tallest boy spoke the words as if challenging his listeners.

Some of the labourers looked bemused, others disgusted by this wild tale.

‘He’s not lying! It did! It was real, so bright I could hardly look at it! But it was blue, a sparkly blue,’ amended a younger boy.

‘Silver-blue!’ a third boy chimed in. ‘And bigger than a ship!’ The lone girl in the group was silent, but her eyes shone with excitement.

Keffria glanced at Jani, expecting to meet her annoyed glance.

How could these youngsters allow themselves to bring such a frivolous tale at a time when lives weighed in the balance?

Instead, the Rain Wild woman’s face had gone pale.

It made the fine scaling around her eyes and lips stand out against her face.

‘A dragon?’ she faltered. ‘You saw a dragon?’ Sensing a sympathetic ear, the tall boy pushed through the crowd towards Jani.

‘It was a dragon, such as some of the frescoes showed. I’m not making it up, Trader Khuprus.

Something made me look up, and there it was.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. It flew like a falcon!

No, no, like a shooting star! It was so beautiful! ’

‘A dragon,’ Jani repeated dazedly.

‘Mother!’ Bendir was so dirty that Keffria scarcely recognized him as he pushed through the crowd.

He glanced at the boy standing before Jani, and then to his mother’s shocked face.

‘So you’ve heard. A woman who was tending the babies up above sent a boy running to tell us what she had seen. A blue dragon.’

‘Could it be?’ Jani asked him brokenly. ‘Could Reyn have been right all along? What does it mean?’

‘Two things,’ Bendir replied tersely. ‘I’ve sent searchers overland, to where I think the creature must have broken out of the city.

From the description, it is too large to have moved through the tunnels.

It must have burst out from the Crowned Rooster Chamber.

We have an approximate idea of where that was.

There may be some sign of Reyn there. At the least, there may be another way we can enter the city and search for survivors.

’ A mutter of voices rose at his words. Some were expressing disbelief, others wonder.

He raised his voice to be heard above them.

‘And the other thing is that we must remember that this beast may be our enemy.’ As the boy near him began to protest, Bendir cautioned him, ‘No matter how beautiful it may seem, it may bear us ill will. We know next to nothing of the true nature of dragons. Do nothing to anger it, but do not assume it is the benign creature we see in the frescoes and mosaics. Do not call its attention to you.’

A roar of conversation rose in the chamber. Keffria caught at Jani’s sleeve desperately. She spoke through the noise. ‘If you find Reyn there…do you think Malta may be with him?’

Jani met her eyes squarely. ‘It is what he feared,’ she said. ‘That Malta had gone to the Crowned Rooster Chamber. And to the dragon that slept there.’

‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. Do you think she will come back?’ Weakness as well as awe made the boy whisper.

Reyn turned to regard him. Selden crouched on an island of rubble atop the mud. He stared up at the light above them, his face transfigured by what he had just witnessed. The newly released dragon was gone, already far beyond sight, but still the boy stared after her.

‘I don’t think we should count on her to return and save us. I think that is up to us,’ Reyn said pragmatically.

Selden shook his head. ‘Oh, I did not mean that. I would not expect her to notice us that much. I expect we’ll have to get ourselves out of here.

But I should like to see her, just once more.

Such a marvel she was. Such a joy.’ He lifted his eyes once more to the punctured ceiling.

Despite the dirt and muck that streaked his face and burdened his clothes, the boy’s expression was luminous.

Sun spilled into the ruined chamber, bringing weak light but little additional warmth. Reyn could no longer recall what it felt like to be dry, let alone warm. Hunger and thirst tormented him. It was hard to force himself to move. But he smiled. Selden was right. A marvel. A joy.

The dome of the buried Crowned Rooster Chamber was cracked like the top of a soft-boiled egg.

He stood atop some of the fallen debris and looked up at dangling tree roots and the small window of sky.

The dragon had escaped that way, but he doubted that he and Selden would.

The chamber was filling rapidly with muck as the swamp trickled in to claim the city that had defied it for so long.

The flow of chill mud and water would engulf them both long before they could find a way to reach the egress above them.

Yet bleak as his situation was, he still marvelled at the memory of the dragon that had emerged from her centuries of waiting.

The frescoes and mosaics that he had seen all his life had not prepared him for the reality of the dragon.

The word ‘blue’ had gained a new meaning in the brilliance of her scales.

He would never forget how her lax wings had taken on strength and colour as she pumped them.

The snake-stench of her transformation still hung heavy in the moist air.

He could see no remnants of the ‘wizardwood log’ that had encased her.

She appeared to have absorbed it all as she metamorphosed into a mature dragon.

But now she was gone. And the problem of survival remained for Reyn and the boy.

The earthquakes of the night before had finally breached the walls and ceilings of the sunken city.

The swamps outside were bleeding into this chamber.

The only means of escape was high overhead, a tantalizing window of blue sky.

Mud bubbled wetly at the edge of the piece of fallen dome Reyn stood on. Then it triumphed, swallowing the edges of the crystal and slipping towards his bare feet.

‘Reyn.’ Selden’s voice was hoarse with his thirst. Malta’s little brother perched atop a slowly-sinking island of debris.

In the dragon’s scrabbling effort to escape, she had dislodged rubble, earth, and even a tree.

It had fallen into the sunken chamber and some of it still floated on the rising tide of muck.

The boy knit his brows as his natural pragmatism reasserted itself.

‘Maybe we could lift up that tree and prop it up against the wall. Then, if we climbed up it, we could –’

‘I’m not strong enough,’ Reyn broke into the boy’s optimistic plan.

‘Even if I were strong enough to lift the tree, the muck is too soft to support me. But we might be able to break off some of the smaller branches and make a sort of raft. If we can spread out our weight enough, we can stay on top of this stuff.’

Selden looked hopefully up at the hole where light seeped in. ‘Do you think the mud and water will fill up this room and lift us up there?’

‘Maybe,’ Reyn lied heartily. He surmised that the muck would stop far short of filling the chamber.

They would probably suffocate when the rising tide swallowed them.

If not, they would eventually starve here.

The piece of dome under his feet was sinking rapidly.

Time to abandon it. He jumped from it to a heap of fallen earth and moss, only to have it plunge away under him.

The muck was softer than he had thought.

He lunged towards the tree trunk, caught one of its branches, and dragged himself out and onto it.

The rising mire was at least chest-deep now, and the consistency of porridge.

If he sank into it, he would die in its cold clutch.

His move had brought him much closer to Selden.

He extended a hand towards the boy, who leaped from his sinking island, fell short, and then scrabbled over the soft mud to reach him.

Reyn pulled him up onto the fallen evergreen’s trunk.

The boy huddled shivering against him. His clothing was plastered to his body with the same mud that streaked his face and hair.

‘I wish I hadn’t lost my tools and supplies. But they’re long buried now. We’ll have to break these branches off as best we can and pile them up in a thick mat.’

‘I’m so tired.’ The boy stated it as a fact, not a complaint.

He glanced up at Reyn, then stared at him.

‘You don’t look so bad, even up close. I always wondered what you looked like under that veil.

In the tunnels, with only the candle, I couldn’t really see your face.

Then, last night, when your eyes were glowing blue, it was scary at first. But after a while, it was like, well, it was good to see them and know you were still there. ’

Reyn laughed easily. ‘Do my eyes glow? Usually that doesn’t happen until a Rain Wild man is much older. We just accept it as a sign of a man reaching full maturity.’

‘Oh. But in this light, you look almost normal. You don’t have many of those wobbly things. Just some scales around your eyes and mouth.’ Selden stared at him frankly.

‘No, not any of those wobbly things yet. But they, too, may come as I get older.’ Reyn grinned.

‘Malta was afraid you were going to be all warty. Some of her friends teased her about it, and she would get angry. But…’ Selden suddenly seemed to realize that his words were not tactful.

‘At first, I mean, when you first started courting her, she worried about it a lot. Lately, she hasn’t talked about it much,’ he offered encouragingly.

He glanced at Reyn, then moved away from him along the tree trunk.

He seized a branch and tugged at it. ‘These are going to be tough to break.’

‘I imagine she’s had other things on her mind,’ Reyn muttered.

The boy’s words brought a sickness to his heart.

Did his appearance matter that much to Malta?

Would he win her with his deeds, only to have her turn away from him when she saw his face?

A bitter thought came to him. Perhaps she was already dead, and he would never know.

Perhaps he would die, and she would never even see his face.

‘Reyn?’ Selden’s voice was tentative. ‘I think we’d better get to work on these branches.’

Reyn abruptly realized how long he had hunkered there in silence.

Time to push useless thoughts aside and try to survive.

He seized a needled branch in his hands and broke a bough from it.

‘Don’t try to break the whole branch off at once.

Just take boughs from it. We’ll pile them up there.

We want to intermesh them, like thatching a roof –’

A fresh trembling of the earth broke his words.

He clung to the tree trunk helplessly as a shower of earth rained down from the ruptured ceiling.

Selden shrieked and threw his arms up to protect his head.

Reyn scrabbled along the branchy trunk to reach him and shelter him with his body.

The ancient door of the chamber groaned and suddenly sagged on its hinge.

A flow of mud and water surged into the room from behind it.

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