The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(40)

Sitting atop the cliff, they watch the whitecaps and suck on shega jewels. The big moon watches them from above the Dawn Lands while the little moon tries to catch up.

“It’s a double high spring,” he says, “a good sign. Best tide to come in on.”

Gray crawls to the edge and looks at the ocean too. Jeryon whistles to get her attention and waves her aside; she’s in his view. She hunkers down and hangs her face over the edge.

“What would the tides be like if there were only one moon?” she asks.

“Boring,” he says. “A high and low tide a day maybe. The world would feel slack.”

She spits a seed into a leaf and sets it aside. “My forest warden said there used to be only one moon,” she says. “Ages and ages ago.”

“How could she know then? And where does a moon just come from?”

“She was told by her warden and her warden was told by hers and so on. She said the moons were sisters who had lost their home and were forced to wander among the stars.”

“More make-believe?” he says.

“You told me about the tides.”

He lays back. “Tell me about the sisters.”

She crosses her legs and draws herself up. “One day they lost each other. The oldest, Ah, searched everywhere for Med. She asked this star and that. She asked the Abyss and the White Bridge that crosses it. She asked the Crab and the Dragon.”

Gray sees something. She bolts upright and flares her wings. She peers off the cliff, neck outstretched, tail slowly rising.

Jeryon says, “I could see asking a single star, but constellations—”

“Quiet,” the poth says. “When Ah reached the sun, the sun said it hadn’t seen Med either. So she asked the worlds. Ours said, ‘What if you stayed in one place? It might be easy to find each other if one of you isn’t moving. Besides, you look tired.’ Ah agreed and the world put out its arm and hugged her tight.”

“What if Med had—”

She pokes him with a skewer. “And the world was right. Med flew by, and the sisters didn’t think they could be any happier until the world said, ‘Please don’t leave me. All the other worlds have sisters except me. I can be your new home.’ And she put out her other arm. Med remembered the ages she’d spent wandering alone and fell into the world’s embrace. And the tides are the sisters hugging and releasing the world, who’s still so happy.”

“Huh,” he says, rolling onto an elbow. “That fits with something I heard from an old rower.”

“What?” She leans forward.

“I don’t know where he was from,” Jeryon says, “but he claimed that once he’d been a stargazer, and he could prove that dragons first came from Med. Maybe she picked them up during her wandering.”

The poth’s eyes get big then shrink to a squint. “You made that up.”

“Yep. Dragons are giant newts with arm flaps.”

She pokes him again, looks at the waves, then closer at hand. “Where’s Gray?” she says.

“I bet she went to the crabs,” Jeryon says.

“No.” The poth points north over the ocean. “There.”

The wyrmling is barely discernible, a gray nick in the blue. Jeryon stands beside her and whistles; Gray doesn’t respond. The poth puts two fingers in her mouth and whistles loud enough to make the bushes tremble. Either the wyrmling can’t hear her or she’s ignoring her.

“We weren’t paying enough attention to her,” Jeryon says.

“She’ll come back,” the poth says.

“Birds don’t,” Jeryon says.

The dragon shrinks to a point and vanishes.

They stand for a while then they sit. The wind shifts, and the birdcalls come more clearly, as does the smell of the crab rotting. The tide goes slack.

“How far could she go?” Jeryon says. “If she rested in the water, could she take off again?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “She was bound to do this, stretch her wings. She’s not a bird. We couldn’t put her in a cage.”

“I tried.”

The poth doesn’t rise to the bait. “She has to come back. This is her home. You have to trust her.”

“Having to trust isn’t trust,” he says.

Her face wrinkles around her eyes.

“And everyone runs off eventually,” Jeryon says. “I’m going to the hollow. I might as well start rendering.” He gets up and grabs his spears. He scatters the wood in the ring they made, but the fire’s long out. He doesn’t ask if she wants to help.

“What about us?” she calls to him. Her voice is thick. “What if she doesn’t return?”

“They win.”

Dinner is a somber affair: nuts, berries, greens, plus an herb tea the poth brews in an exceptionally concave blue crab carapace. The birds ate the rest of the crab, and what was left wouldn’t have been worth eating anyway. They sit on logs around the fire and pick at their food.

The poth waited in the meadow until Jeryon came down from the hollow. He carried a ragged, uneven strip of dragon skin and a few vertebrae whose spikes he planned to knap into cutting tools.

He would have walked right past their picnic site, but couldn’t, not the way she sat there with her arms around her knees just as she’d done when they were first put in the dinghy. He waited for her to catch up to him, and they left the meadow side by side.