Standing alone on the clifftop, Jeryon has never felt so exposed. He ducks behind a fragrant shrub and scans the surrounding forest. A landscape that had been almost welcoming a moment ago is now full of waving blades of underbrush and the shaking limbs of trees. Every boulder resolves into a head, and the shadows of clouds become those of wings. He listens. He hears nothing. He takes a longer look at the track.
The print is worn around the edges. The lowest points are puddled. It was made before the storm, but what made it may still be on the island. He has to know. Jeryon follows the creature’s trail to the stream then upstream into the forest again, where it fades away.
The stream widens into a pond full of fat black frogs. He’ll gig some when he gets the chance and hope they’re edible. He eats more shega. The sweetness is intoxicating. As he chews he considers the trees: a variety of oaks, a few ulmus and chinkapins with their spiky nuts, amid the ubiquitous bamboo and many stands of palm. He could make a good raft from this forest. He strips some threads from a fallen palm leaf. How long would it take him to weave a sail?
Beyond the frog pond the forest opens into another meadow. The land is rising more noticeably, and he’s high enough to see more of the island. It could be eight or ten miles around. He doesn’t see any other approaches besides his beach, and it’s guarded for hundreds of yards by sandbars, coral, and jagged rocks. It’s remarkable that the dinghy made it as close to the island as it did.
He sees no smoke, no fire, no movement, no sign of the poth. I should blaze my trails, he thinks, to lead her to me. He’ll light a fire too. He needs to find her, and no longer just to testify. However rich the island is, he’s just one infection or injury away from death, and she can heal. The endless leaves and weeds, roots and blooms that surround him: He can’t understand their language.
On the high side of the meadow end he finds more tracks, older, barely visible in the underbrush, the toes lost in the stream. Whatever made them must drink here often. He fills his own cup and washes down the last of the jewels.
Again in the woods, he makes a blaze every thirty paces. After twenty blazes, the stream turns south between two steep rises. On one the trees are blackened from fire and the underbrush has barely returned. In the ashen dirt Jeryon sees another footprint, heading over the crest. The earthy smell of dragon wafts toward him, deeper and uglier than the one he smelled on the Comber. He crouches behind a tree.
He sets the cup down and pulls himself up the rise. He lays on the edge of the crest. Beyond is a clearing not made by nature.
In a broad hollow scoured by fire, trees have been shattered and others toppled so their root mouths yawn at the world like wooden octopi reaching for prey. Sunlight fingers great furrows in the earth. Blood stains exposed wood and tattered leaves. Jeryon sees in the midst of the destruction a line of short jagged spines atop an enormous black back.
This isn’t the maturing black of the Comber dragon, but the abysmal black of a very old one. Its wings are folded neatly, soft and floppy. Jeryon feels the urge to touch them until he thinks that each is probably bigger than the Comber. The dragon is withered with age. Its ribs and spine show through its skin, which rises in strange bursts like the chest of a person struggling for breath.
Jeryon inches over the crest. He’s moving as silently as possible, but sounds, he thinks, like a sword on a grindstone. Before he peeks over the edge he pictures himself staring straight down the creature’s throat. He hopes it’s sleeping. Its head must be the size of the dinghy. Its back alone looks nearly as long as the Comber dragon.
What he finds is carnage. The dragon’s neck is ripped in half. Its empty eye sockets bloom with nerve tendrils. Half its rotting tongue is clamped between its teeth; the other half has been chewed away. Its sides are rent, its tail, thicker than a man, is broken like a carpenter’s square, and the neck left on the body, wide enough to push a barrow down, has been cored of meat and bone. The remaining skin partially drapes it.