She can’t enjoy the view because there isn’t much of one, despite Med rising. So she memorizes how he controls the dragon, feeling when his legs tense, watching how he works the reins, and leaning herself when he uses his weight.
A few minutes later she spots the Gamo’s wake, milky in the moonlight, and dives. Mylla’s scream is clenched by her throat. She tries to grab the reins, but her brain no longer speaks to her arms. As they approach the stern deck, the rider yells, “Comber!” and the dragon scours the galley with flame from the steering oar to the foredeck. The rider brings the dragon around twice, setting the shutters on both sides of the rowers’ deck alight. The oars collapse like the legs of a man whose neck has been snapped. With the rowers shackled to their benches and the oarmaster and his team trapped below, there’s no one to put the fires out. The rider spirals the dragon up to watch the ship become fully engulfed, collapse in on itself, and sink, leaving only a tower of smoke quickly dissipating into the night.
Mylla can’t imagine a worse death, and she saw Sumpt die. As the rider returns west, Mylla says, “Why are you doing this?”
The rider says something she can’t make out, the wind is so loud.
Nearing the beach where the Pyg has burned nearly to the waterline, she says again, “Why are you doing this?”
He says in her ear, “You remind me of someone I know. Can you swim?”
“Of course. I’m Ynessi. Wait!”
The dragon dives again. They skim the water toward the beach. She tries to take control of the dragon. She clings to the dragon with her legs, leans over, and braves the spikes to hold its neck. The dragon slows. First he grabs her goggles, but they come off in his hand and slide over his wrist. Then he grabs her by the back of her pants and slides her half off.
“Don’t go to Hanosh,” he says.
Turning sharply finishes the job. She skips off the water, flips, half loses her pants, and splashes to a stop.
The officers and archers weren’t expecting the dragon to return and so they had gathered in a tight clump in the light to discuss what to do. The dragon blasts them, and they decide to run around burning and screaming.
I don’t care, Mylla thinks, I’d rather sink than call Barad for help. She doesn’t have to. He sees her, throws off his candlebox, and swims out. He’s huffing so hard by the time he reaches her, though, that she has to save him. They collapse in the shallows to avoid being seen. She pulls up her pants, rakes her soggy hair off her face, then rakes his off his face and says, “We have to find him. The dragon rider. We’ll go to Hanosh. Are you with me?”
He nods. She had him at “we.”
“First, though, we’ll go to Yness,” she says, “to get Solet’s brothers.”
Jos, wreathed in flames, runs by and flings himself into the surf. A cloud of steam stinking of burned hair wafts over them.
“And his sister Thea,” Mylla says.
6
* * *
Midafternoon the next day Jeryon spots the island. The weather’s lousy, dank and misty, the sun a mere suggestion. Jeryon’s new goggles keep fogging.
The previous night, after flying a mile toward Hanosh, Gray tugged for home, and he gave her his head and they flew down the coast. Hanosh could wait a few more days. After spending the night a few hours south of Solet’s beach, Jeryon longs for his lumpy bamboo bed a wall away from the poth.
A week hasn’t passed, but it feels much longer as the magnitude of what he’s done bleeds through his exhaustion. So many dead. That wasn’t the plan. What can he possibly tell her? He doesn’t lie. He could argue they worked for the Shield and his former mates, but they weren’t soldiers, nor is he. He can’t understand how he enjoyed watching Tuse suffer. He can’t fathom how he crushed Solet’s skull. He tries hard not to admit it thrilled him. Instead he feels released.
He doesn’t need Hanosh anymore. Why risk all by going there? What more could he do? He doesn’t have to finish the job. He’s already cost the company four ships. The reasons why will come out, and the other companies will make sure the Shield suffers further. Livion won’t escape. That he can count on.
He only needs a boat. He could buy one outside Yness and tow it to the island. He and the poth could then ride it into the sunrise. He could talk her out of going to Ayden by saying they’d take the dragon. In the Dawn Lands, she’d never find out for sure what’s happened.
Jeryon soars over the island to make a more dramatic descent to the cabin and notices a galley on the flats where the poth washed up. At first he thinks it’s a pirate ship, then he sees the burned mast and the scorched remnants of deck and knows it’s the Hopper. He doesn’t want to be spotted by the men lounging on the galley and the beach, so he pulls the dragon up until the mist obscures the galley and races for the Crown along the treetops.