The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(65)
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?
Jeryon checks the galley’s transom, sweeping white crabs out of his path with his spears: the dinghy is gone. The tracks end at the tide line. Could she have managed to drag something all the way from her cabin with her injuries? Did she get off the island? Was she taken against her will along with their supplies?
Jeryon can’t decide whom he’s more furious at: her for not leaving him any sign of where she’s gone or himself for letting the Hopper go.
He impales several crabs on a spear and runs as best he can to the Crown. He needs the dragon to search the island, but Gray is still unwilling to be approached. She grudgingly accepts the crabs.
Jeryon barely sleeps that night, pacing the expanse of rock and peering across the island for any sign of her or the Hopper’s crew. By morning he’s worked himself into a lather.
Gray is back to normal. Perhaps she’s already forgotten her eggs. She doesn’t glance at them and comes at Jeryon’s whistle. They search the island in a crisscross pattern. They see nothing except blue crabs that don’t realize they’re missing an unprecedented feast at the cabin and on the beach.
Jeryon and Gray circle the island in an ever-widening gyre and find the sea as empty. If she had gotten off the island after the Hopper arrived, she might already be in the League. Could she sail, though? Could she navigate? Would he have seen her on the way to the island, or did he overlook her in the lousy weather? Is she lost right now?
He can’t search the ocean, but he can go to the one place where he knows she would look for him eventually. He’ll find her and bring her back to take care of Gray’s eggs. In the meantime, he’ll deal with Livion and the owners. No more loose ends. No more counting on others to make things go his way. He brings his boats in on time.
Jeryon tends to Gray’s wounds then brings her to the beach so she can fill up on crab before the trip to Hanosh. Disturbingly, she prefers to feed on the corpses.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Junior
1
* * *
Atop the Quiet Tower in Hanosh, a guard named Isco hears a scuffing behind him, then a voice call out, “Who’s there?”
Isco can’t make out whom it is. The moons have withered to new, the wind off the bay has put out the torches again, and firelight from the city won’t bleed past the crenellations. He raises his crossbow and says, “Stand, and show yourself.”