‘Brashen Trell,’ Per said. ‘Paragon’s captain.’ His face shone with hope.
Agonizing moments crawled by as they slowly drew closer. The waves pushed them toward us. Boy-O stood, his burned arm held close to his chest, his scorched face full of hope and misery. When they were close enough, Per climbed down to help first Brashen and then Spark to climb out of the water. The moment the man was on the dock, he sank down and Ant lowered Boy-O beside him. The father reached for his son, then drew back, not daring to touch his burned flesh. They both wept as the captain brokenly explained that he had seen Althea briefly when the ship fell apart, but not since. He had been swimming from raft to raft of wreckage, looking for some sign of her, but found nothing. When the wreckage began to drift out of the harbour, he knew he had to try to return to shore before he was carried out with it. Too weary to swim any longer, he had clung to a plank and stubbornly worked his way back to us.
Those who clustered around father and son smiled and wept. Spark, I noticed, isolated herself to sit and weep noisily yet privately. Lant was gone, as gone as Althea and probably others of the crew I had never met and knew nothing about.
When the captain saw the carefully composed body on the dock, he gave an exclamation of both pity and despair, and Boy-O began to weep afresh. ‘I failed, Da. Twice I tried to get through the flames to the figurehead, but the pain drove me back. In the end, it was Kennitsson who saved Paragon from dying. He claimed the Silver from me and ran right into the flames. I heard him screaming but he didn’t stop. He saved our ship.’
The man said nothing to try to comfort Boy-O but just let him weep. The two small dragons that had been his ship were like fluttering ribbons in the sky. Though so much smaller than the other dragons, they were just as intent on the destruction of the castle. He watched them. ‘So many losses,’ he said.
The red dragon rampaged on the ground. The ship’s dragons soon joined her. They were thorough in their destruction, moving methodically from structure to structure. They started at the houses and businesses closest to the causeway. There were no flames. The red dragon spat acid and then, when the structures weakened, turned them to rubble with a blast of her wings or a sweep of her tail. We heard the crashes and the shouts, and the stream of fleeing folk became thicker. Some fled up into the pastures and farmland behind the town; others pushed carts and followed the road that wound up into the hills. I sat on the dock and looked up, past the roofs of the warehouse and fine homes, to the hills beyond. People joined the sheep there and then pushed on, to vanish over the ridgeline.
Slowly, slowly the summer evening waned away. There were no flames to light the night. When IceFyre and Tintaglia had finished with the castle, they joined the smaller ones in a very organized destruction of the city. There was nothing random in what they did. The ruination was as coldly calculated as anything Dwalia or Capra had visited upon me. Mothers fled with their babes in their arms, fathers with small children in barrows or on their shoulders ran past. I watched. This was not justice at work, but vengeance.
Vengeance took no account of innocence or right. It was the chain that bound horrific events together, that decreed that one awful act must beget another worse one that would lead to yet a third. It came to me, slowly, that this chain would never end. Those who survived here would hate dragons and the folk of the Six Duchies and perhaps the Pirate Isles. They would tell tales of this day to their descendants and it would not be understood or forgiven. It would, some day, beget more vengeance. I wondered if that was a thread that was wrapped around every path. I wondered if ever a White Prophet would come who could snap it.
Boy-O suffered from his burns and many of the others from their lesser injuries, but we dared not leave our little spot of safety while dragons walked the streets and flew over the houses. I dozed in the night, when sleep eventually triumphed over fear and discomfort.
In the dawn, I wakened to a place I had never been. Every structure in the town was roofless, with walls cracked and crumbled. The harbour was studded with the masts of sunken wrecks. Of the piers and docks, only ours was left intact. The scene was eerie, lifeless: the streets were empty of people. I wakened because Spark shook my shoulder. I sat up to see the smaller blue and green dragons advancing down the dock. ‘What do they want?’ one of the guards demanded in a shaking voice. Beloved went to him and pushed aside his blade.
‘They come for their own. For one they claimed as kin. Step back. For they will pass whether you clear a way or not.’
Brashen stood over his huddled son, for Boy-O could no longer stand for the pain of his burns. Some of the other sailors retreated to the end of the dock, but Spark, Per and I remained where we were.
The planks of the dock complained under their weight as the dragons came toward us, turning their gleaming heads on their serpentine necks and snuffing the air near Beloved. Their eyes spun like twirling silver buttons. The blue opened his mouth, the better to test the air near him.
‘Tell me what they say,’ Per breathed beside me.
‘They have said nothing yet,’ I replied. He took my hand in his, and I wondered if he sought to give me courage or borrow mine. It did not matter: I welcomed it. Small dragons were still very large creatures, and they were very close to us but even in my fear and sorrow, their beauty made me smile.
‘We have come for him,’ the blue one said, and I repeated that softly to Per.
Beloved turned back toward us. ‘The dragons that were once Paragon the ship have come to claim the body of Kennitsson.’
I saw the uneasiness that went through all the others. The tattooed woman who had rowed the boat for us asked, ‘To do what?’
Beloved looked down at the body and then around at the gathered crew. ‘They will eat his body. To keep his memories among their own.’ At the looks of horror that his words awoke, he said, ‘The dragons consider doing that an honour.’
‘Is this a fitting end for the Prince of the Pirate Isles?’ Two men stepped forward to stand beside her. Tears tracked wet on one man’s face but he held a knife in his hand and faced a dragon.
There would be trouble.
Beloved spoke. ‘Is it so different to how Paragon took Kennit’s memories, when he died on the ship’s deck? Kennitsson goes where his father’s and great-grandfather’s ship has gone. And that is a fitting end for any pirate.’