If they’ve done anything to the poth, he doesn’t want them to know he’s there. His vengeance would be swift. His remorse disintegrates. Having killed before makes it surprisingly easy to consider afterward.
When Gray lands, she becomes very agitated, as if looking for something. He takes two spears and dismounts then stays behind her for cover as she rushes from spire to spire. Men from the Hopper may be waiting. He’d prefer that to another dragon.
At the spire where Jeryon and Everlyn found Gray’s egg, she curls around it, groaning. He wonders if she’s hurt, and she’s come here because instinctually it’s the place she feels most safe. She rolls on her belly then pushes herself up into a crouch, bent nearly double. Her stomach heaves. Having seen what the green dragon did in a similar posture, Jeryon flees around a spire behind her where he couldn’t be drenched with acid. She squeals and her tail whips up. She squeals again as if in pain. Jeryon peeks around the spire and sees the first egg slide onto the bare rock. Another follows and a third, a tiny cairn mortared with strands of gray mucus.
Her head snaps around. She gives him a ferocious look. He ducks behind the spire, presses his back to it, and tucks his spears against his chest. He doesn’t have a command, he realizes, that means Don’t eat me. When he peeks around the other side of the spire, she’s putting the eggs in the hole where hers was. Amazing, he thinks. He’ll keep them apart when they’re hatched. They could create an armada.
Gray curls around the spire again and falls asleep. He takes a step toward her to see if she’s all right. One eye opens, red-rimmed and slitted. She’s all right enough, he decides, and hurries down the steps to find the poth.
Insects swarm the first body a few hundred yards from the dragon corpse. It’s a rower from the looks of his shoulders and the number of scars and tattoos on his body beneath the devouring beetles. There’s a sword wound in the center of his back.
At the shega meadow, he finds his tree ravaged, the fruit torn off, and many branches broken.
At the stream overlook he finds another rower’s body, this one with several sword wounds, a few to the hands and one, the decisive one, to the throat. Jeryon looks at the beach. No one is moving. Can they be asleep? Then he notices the crabs on some of the bodies and more exiting the rowers’ deck.
Footprints clutter the trail to the cabin, so he forces himself to take a roundabout route. His leg is stiff and sore from tumbling with Gray, then riding, and a sharp pain cuts from his knees to his hip. He pushes through, using his spears as walking sticks, growing more worried with each agonizing step as he imagines what a boatload of fired-up prisoners would do to a helpless woman.
He comes across a body half-decapitated. Was she lying in wait for them? How did she get around so quickly? Or was this someone else’s work?
He can hear the cabin before he can smell it. It’s a chittering hive of beetles, insects, and blue crabs. The latter pour through the front door, carrying out pieces of flesh and cloth, which they devour on the porch and beneath the cabin. Jeryon can’t get close and he has no desire to clear it out, so he climbs a tree and looks through the window.
Corpses are sitting up, shoulder-to-shoulder, along the walls and back-to-back in the center of the common room. One holds his own head in his hands. Jeryon moves to other trees to look in other windows. There’s blood on the poth’s bed, which has been moved across the room. The door to her room has been knocked down as has his. His tools have been knocked from the walls and some are impaled in the bodies. He doesn’t see her.
He also doesn’t see the crates of food, the water barrels, or her sword. She must be alive, perhaps hiding until the danger has passed. He counts the bodies in the cabin and tries to remember how many were on the beach. There couldn’t be many left. Then again, how many could she have killed? She could fight one if she took him by surprise, but she couldn’t have slaughtered as many as are in the cabin, certainly not if they were together, nor could she have arrayed them the way they are. What purpose did that serve anyway?
He wants to scream, “Where are you? What happened?,” when he sees parallel tracks in front of the cabin. Something was dragged, he thinks, but the gouges are too thin and deep to have been heels. He follows the tracks downstream to the flats.
The smell reaches him long before he comes through the trees. They ignore him as he inspects their bounty of sailors and rowers. It’s difficult to tell, but all have some sort of wounds: gashes, broken bones, smashed faces. A few have bolts in them. Others were stabbed with what must have been harpoons. At least one was strangled. Did they turn on one another and destroy themselves? If not, where’s the faction that did this?