The pirates were all over the decks. Padar roared his orders at them in Lacustrine. The stars shone bright in a clear sky, beckoning them toward the horizon.
“Not a genius,” Niclays admitted, weak-kneed. “Just mad. And lucky.” He patted her arm. “Thank you, Laya. For your help, and your belief. Perhaps we will both be supping on the fruit of immortality.”
Caution stole into her eyes.
“Perhaps.” Hitching up her smile, she placed a hand between his shoulders and guided him through the confusion of pirates. “Come. It is time you claimed your reward.”
In the deepest part of the Pursuit, a Lacustrine dragon was chained from its snout to the end of its tail. Niclays had thought it magnificent when he first saw it on the beach. Now it looked almost feeble.
Laya waited in the shadows with him. “I must go back,” she said. “Will you be all right?”
He leaned on his new staff. “Of course. The beast is bound.” His mouth was dry. “You go.”
She gave the dragon a last glance before reaching into her coat. From inside, she drew a knife, sheathed in leather.
“My gift.” She held it out by the blade. “Just in case.”
Niclays took it. He had owned a sword in Mentendon, but the only time he had used a weapon had been in his fencing lessons with Edvart, who had always disarmed him in seconds. Before he could thank her, Laya was making her way back up the steps.
The dragon seemed asleep. A tangled mane flowed around its horns. Its face was wider than the serpentine heads of wyrms, and gaudier, with decorative frills.
Nayimathun, Laya had called it. A name with no clear origin.
Niclays walked toward the beast, staying away from its head. Its lower jaw was loose in sleep, showing teeth the length of a forearm.
The dome on its head was dormant. Panaya had told him about it, the night he had first seen a dragon. When it illuminated, that dome was calling to the celestial plane, lifting the dragon toward the stars. Unlike wyrms, dragons needed no wings to fly.
He had tried to rationalize it for weeks. Months. Perhaps the dome was a kind of lodestone, attracted to particles in the air or the cores of far-off worlds. Perhaps dragons had hollow bones, letting them ride the wind. That was the alchemist in him, theorizing. Yet he had known in his gut that unless he could split a dragon open, to see it through the lens of an anatomist, it would remain inexplicable. Magic, for all intents and purposes.
Even as he studied the beast, its eye snapped open and, in spite of himself, Niclays backed away. In the eye of this creature was a cosmos of knowledge: ice and void and constellation—and nothing close to human. Its pupil was as big as a shield, ringed with a blue glow.
For a long while, they stared at each other. A man of the West and a dragon of the East. Niclays found himself overwhelmed by the urge to fall to his knees, but he only gripped his cane.
“You.”
The voice was cool and susurrating. The billow of a sail.
“You are the one who bartered for my scale and blood.” A dark blue tongue flickered behind its teeth. “You are Roos.”
It spoke in Seiikinese. Each word was drawn out like a shadow at sunrise.
“I am,” Niclays confirmed. “And you are the great Nayimathun. Or perhaps,” he added, “not so great.”
Nayimathun watched his mouth as he spoke. On land, Panaya had told him, dragons heard as humans heard underwater.
“The one who wears the chains is a thousand times greater than the one who wields them,” Nayimathun said. “Chains are cowardice.” A rumble filled the cavernous hull. “Where is Tané?”
“Seiiki, I assume. I hardly know the girl.”
“You knew her enough to threaten her. To try to manipulate her for your own gain.”
“This is a cutthroat world, beast. I merely negotiated,” Niclays said. “I needed your blood and scale to carry out my work, to unlock the secret of your immortality. I wanted humans to have a chance of surviving in a world ruled by giants.”
“We tried to defend you in the Great Sorrow.” The eye closed for a moment, darkening their surroundings. “Many of you perished. But we tried.”
“Perhaps your kind are not as violent as the Draconic Army,” Niclays said, “but you still see to it that humans worship your image and beg you for the rain that swells the crops. As if man is not also enough of a marvel to be adulated.”
The dragon huffed cloud through its nostrils.
Niclays decided then. That even if his alchemical tools were lost, and even if he was on his way to a font of eternal life, he would take what he had long been denied.
He laid down his staff and bared the knife Laya had given him. Its handle was lacquer, its blade was serrated down one side. He ran his gaze along the wealth of scale. When he had found an unmarred patch of scale, he placed a hand on it.
The dragon was smooth and cold as a fish. Niclays used the knife to pry the scale up, exposing the sheen of silvery flesh beneath.
“You are not meant to live for eternity.”
Niclays flung a withering glance at its head. “As an alchemist, I must disagree,” he said. “I believe in possibility, you see. Even if I cannot find the elixir of life in your body, the Golden Empress is on her way to the island of Komoridu. There we will find the mulberry tree, and the jewel that lies beneath it.”
The eye flared wide.
“Jewel.” A rattle stemmed from the dragon. “You speak of the celestial jewels.”
“Jewels,” Niclays echoed. “Yes. The rising jewel.” He softened his voice. “What do you know of it?”
Nayimathun remained silent. Niclays wrenched the blade upward, biting into scale, and the dragon twitched in its chains.
“I will say nothing to you,” it said. “Only that they must not fall into the hands of pirates, son of Mentendon.”
According to her journal, my aunt received it from a man who told her to carry it far from the East and never bring it back. Jannart’s words kept returning to him, circling in his head like a whipping top. Never bring it back.
“I do not expect you to stop your pursuit. It is too late for that,” the dragon said, “but do not let the jewel fall into the hands of those who would use it to destroy what little of the world is left. The water in you has grown stagnant, Roos, but it is not beyond cleansing.”
Niclays kept his grip on the knife, quaking.
Stagnant.
The dragon spoke true. Everything around him had stilled. His life had stopped, like a clock in water, when Sabran Berethnet had sent him to Orisima. He had failed to solve one mystery since. Not the mystery of eternal life. Not why Jannart had died.
He was an alchemist, the unmaker of mystery. And he would not be stagnant again.
“Enough of this,” he hissed, and carved.
43
South
The armorer furnished Ead with a monbone bow, an iron sword, an axe etched with Selinyi prayers, and a slim wood-handled dagger. Instead of the olive cloak of her childhood, she now wore the white of a postulant, a sign of her blossoming into a woman. Chassar, who had come with Sarsun to see her off, set his hands on her shoulders.
“Zāla would be so proud to see you,” he said. “Soon the red cloak will be yours.”
“If I come back alive.”
“You will. Kalyba is a dread creature, but not as strong as she was. She has not eaten of the orange tree, for twenty years, and so will have no siden left.”
“She has other magic.”
“I trust you to conquer it, beloved. Or to turn back if the risk becomes too great.” He patted the ichneumon beside her. “Be sure to return her to me in one piece, Aralaq.”
“I am no stupid bird,” Aralaq said. “Ichneumons do not lead little sisters into danger.”
Sarsun cawed in indignation.
When she had been banished, Kalyba had fled to a part of the forest she had named the Bower of Eternity. It was said that she had put an enchantment on it that tricked the eyes. Nobody knew how she created her illusions.
It was sundown when Ead set out with Aralaq from the Vale of Blood, back into the forest. Ichneumons could run faster than horses, faster even than the hunting leopards that had once lived in Lasia. Ead kept her head low as he crashed through lianas, slithered under roots, and sprang over the many creeks that branched off the Minara.
He tired just before dawn, and they made camp in a cavern behind a waterfall. Aralaq disappeared to hunt, while Ead refreshed herself in the pool below. As she climbed back to the cavern, she recalled the time when Kalyba had been at the Priory.
Ead remembered Kalyba as a redhead with bottomless dark eyes. She had arrived at the Priory when Ead was two years old, claiming to have visited several times before in her many centuries of existence—for she also maintained that she was immortal. Her siden had been granted to her not by the orange tree, but by a hawthorn tree that had once stood on the Inysh island of Nurtha.