The cabin goes up like a brushfire. Culms explode from the steam trapped inside, spraying the porch with shrapnel. The poth screams, falls inside through a wall of smoke, and disappears.
Jeryon rushes to the cabin, but the heat drives him back, air feeding the fire from all sides, turning the cabin into a chimney. His eyebrows singe and the ends of his hair evaporate. Air is sucked from his lungs. He shouts for the poth, but can’t hear himself, all sound blown from his ears.
Gray darts for the doorway, which is filled with flame. Jeryon grabs her tail to keep her from destroying herself. Gray can breathe fire. That doesn’t mean she can withstand it. Gray snaps her tail, flinging off Jeryon’s hand, and slithers inside.
Jeryon runs behind the cabin. The poth is at his window. It’s too thin and high for her to crawl out, so she’s chopping at the sill with his axe, the same idea he had. Her smock smokes where she’s beaten fire off it. Her skin is blistering. Her hair is full of wisps. Her eyes are crazed. Smoke pours out of the window, and she starts coughing too hard to swing the axe.
“Give it to me,” he yells. She tumbles it out the window. He hacks at the bottom of the wall. When he strikes horizontally, the bamboo splinters instead of slicing neatly. When he strikes vertically, the axe breaks through the supports, but leaves the slats in place. He has to stop when he sees her fingers pulling at the slats from the other side, her mouth wide open, wanting air, while wind drafts under the deck to pour up through the floor.
“Jeryon,” she cries, “I can’t get out!”
“I will get you out,” he says. He’s crying too, but doesn’t realize it.
He hears Gray inside. He hits the bottom of the wall with the axe and whistles three times. The wyrm attacks it savagely. An opening appears. Jeryon pulls the slats out, but they’re woven so tightly he can only remove one at a time. He gashes his hand on the bamboo splinters, and his blood soothes his own burns. The roof has caught. It’s about to collapse. The fire is in the columns too, and the whole cabin lists toward him.
The poth sticks her foot through the hole, but that’s all she can get out. He says, “Your arms! Maybe I can pull you out!” She sticks one hand through and her head. They’re face-to-face. He pulls. She pushes at the floor of the cabin with her feet. They wedge her shoulder through.
Gray chews at the slats trapping her other shoulder. That’s all they need, but they have so far to go. The bamboo frays. It will not break. Gray retreats. Jeryon whistles three times, but she doesn’t return. The cabin lists farther.
“Go,” the poth says, terribly calm. She folds her body tightly against the wall.
He keeps pulling. The cabin rocks toward him. A corner of the porch collapses sending a wave of fire around his legs.
“Go,” she says and releases her grip.
He grabs her hand again. Their blood seems to boil between them. She pulls his hand to her scorched cheek. He combs her hair away from her face with his other hand. Bristled clumps fall out and float away. A hunk of flaming roof thatch flops beside him and shatters. The underbrush around the cabin threatens to catch.
He rubs a tear into her cheek. “Everlyn,” he says.
“So you do know my name,” she says.
3
* * *
Jeryon has hiked to the Crown to watch the sunrise. The spikes look like cenotaphs. Their shadows stab the west. The eastern sky is clear and pale blue where the night before it had been cranberry. A good day to sail.
The wind topples a log on the remains of a large fire near the edge, and a wave of old ash blows over him. Maybe he should have set up a signal fire, he thinks, however difficult it would have been to maintain. Maybe a ship would have come.
The sun crowns the horizon. Jeryon heads for camp.
In the hollow, the dragon is a grove of rib bones too big for him to carry off. He could render them, but there’s a lucrative market for long bones provided they’re unspoiled. At some point he’ll sell them. The skull will be the greatest prize, despite his having removed the teeth to make tools. Mounted with its jaws open, it would make the perfect doorway for a shipowner’s home.
The frogs at the pond have recovered. They make for good eating, but tough gigging. They’re more shy than they once were.
At the shega meadow he gathers the last of the fruit from the tree and puts them in a dragonskin bag slung over his shoulder. He walks to the cliff’s edge. The dragonprint has vanished, worn away or swallowed by the meadow. The sea remains, endlessly wearing.