Shadowbridge (16 page)

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The Coral Man stood upright in the back of the cave. The glow seemed to have left him altogether. The cold had probably killed all the tiny creatures living within him. His dullness should have made him less imposing, but she found that she could not work with her back to him. Despite the fact that he had no eyes, the sensation of being watched overpowered her. She couldn’t help looking to be sure he hadn’t come to life and edged nearer. When she couldn’t trust that he hadn’t, she went over and scratched a line on the floor in front of him. Even that corroboration failed to satisfy her in the end, and so she moved around the stone table and worked on the other side. It was inconvenient, because the cavern wall jutted out there, forcing her to hunch over her work as she beheaded and sliced and gutted each corpse. It put the mats on the wrong side, beyond her reach, and instead of placing each cleaned fillet in the basket, she had to let them pile up and then walk all the way around the stone to lay them in there.

Being able to see him didn’t improve her situation, either. Her attention kept flicking to him, as if he were moving in her periphery; but it wasn’t movement. It was more, she thought, as if he were singing to her, whispering at a level she couldn’t hear but feel.

And all at once she stopped and set down the knife and stared. She knew well the sensation she had just described. It had been absent in the boathouse, but it was back now. Only the call no longer came from across the sea.

It came from across the room.

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By the time Gousier and his fool assistants arrived, she was ready to bolt. Her uncle took in the coral figure as if he’d seen it there every day of his life. Obviously someone had told him about it. He looked it up and down once—he towered over it—and then turned his attention directly to the business of the day.

She had cleaned perhaps two-thirds of the fish she should have prepared, and he saw that immediately. She anticipated a beating, and for a moment as he scowled she knew it was coming. But then he looked at her, and the scowl spread into a knowing smile and a narrow-eyed glance that said,
Go ahead, enjoy your final act of defiance.
The Coral Man loomed behind him in the shadows, and the two of them combined was more than she could stand. She put down the knives and turned, knocking one of the fools aside as she marched and then ran out of the cave. She heard her uncle’s savage laugh, heard him say, “She’s nervous before the event,” and heard the fools join in the laughter, but for all she reacted they might have been discussing someone else.

On any other day if she had walked out on him, Gousier would have dragged her back by the hair, cursed her, slapped her, whipped her. None of that was necessary now.

She washed and warmed her hands, then hurried away from the cavern before her uncle and his fools emerged. “Don’t provoke him,” Soter had said. For her that meant being elsewhere, and she went to her beach.

The tide was in, and the inlet lay open to the sea. She sat on the spit of sand, knees drawn up, the salty breeze ruffling her hair. Despite her impending escape, she felt as if a huge weight were tied to her. She could barely contemplate stripping off the bloody clothes and going for a swim for fear that the weight would pull her down and drown her.

It wasn’t Gousier. She wouldn’t miss him, nor the fish guts and the cold cavern to which he consigned her, any more than she would miss the marriage he’d arranged. She would miss Dymphana terribly, though. Her aunt would grieve when she’d gone, and weep for the girl who hadn’t even said good-bye. She didn’t dare, because Dymphana would stop her, even if such betrayal condemned her to marry an imbecile. However much her aunt loved her, she must follow Gousier’s way, having long ago succumbed to his governance.

This is what it was like for my mother before me,
she thought.
Who I hurt and whether I care—those are my choices.

The rest of her burden the Coral Man provided. She knew that effigy would call her back to Bouyan, plague her with its siren song, and in that moment she made a leap of intuition: It had come from the sea, the same as the dragons. Like her they’d heard its call. That was how a dragon had brought Tastion to it, and that was what the dragons had been staring at. Not her. She’d been standing in direct line between them and the cavern. Magic thrived in that figure to which they and she were attuned because…and here her surmise failed her outright. Dymphana had told her that not all mysteries were explained, but on the cusp of one, she resented that she couldn’t find its final panacea.

She almost got up then, to go off and prepare whatever needed preparing. Then, looking across the inlet, she thought,
This is the last time I’ll ever be here.
Her mother must have thought that once upon a time, too, looking out from this spot to this ocean. It seemed important to acknowledge.

She pulled off her small boots, drew off her bloody clothing, then ceremoniously walked into the water.

She swam across to the far side of the inlet, where she pulled herself up on a rock and perched like a sea otter. Like the evil mermaid of Omelune.

A cloud rolled across the sun, and the wind riding the water turned chilly. She shivered with gooseflesh and slid back into the inlet, splashing, diving down in the crystal-clear water to the bottom, where she grabbed a handful of weeds and sand, and offered a prayer of farewell to whatever could hear her thoughts. It was what Tastion said the fishermen did on their final outing.

When she kicked off from the bottom she found herself face-to-face with a sea dragon. She darted back in surprise. The dragon moved with her. Its protruding black eyes swiveled, studying her. She surfaced and drew a deep breath, ready to dive back down; but before she could, the dragon’s yellow head popped up beside her.

It wasn’t full-grown. An adult sea dragon could never have fitted through the narrow mouth of the inlet even at high tide. But it wasn’t a baby, either. Its body was mottled the way an adult’s was. Close up, she could see small soft spikes protruding from its ribs—features not visible from the beach. Features that only fishermen ever saw. A feathery ruff surrounded its neck, as thin as a dragonfly wing.

The plumes off the back of its head ended in purplish fans—one at the top of the head and one lower on the back of the neck—that seemed to rest on the water. Below the surface, its gills fluttered daintily. A puffy reddish mound, speckled like the torso, encompassed each eye. Tiny needle-like teeth encircled the crumpled mouth at the end of the reedy, tapered snout. The mouth flexed, wheezed, and blew spray at her. She thought of Muvros, the smaller dragon Tastion rode, and how it looked as if it were forever puckering for a kiss. This one was like that, too. She couldn’t help but smile.

“Hello,” she said to it.

The dragon glanced aside as if considering whether it should answer.

“What are you doing here?” she asked herself as much as the creature. It exhaled another small jet of water.

One of its paddle-shaped feet slapped against her side, and she flinched before realizing what had touched her.

The dragon turned its head to face her straight-on, its eyes swiveling to find her. With its snout it nudged her, and its whuffling breath sprayed her face.

Abruptly it turned as if to go, but remained, paddling in place. Its tail snaked across her belly. She dared to touch it now, expecting the creature to dive, to flee from her. Its skin was slightly rough. The mottling across its back was bumpy. Far down its back a third plume lay folded along its spine—another feature not visible from land. Now she understood how the riders could perch in place: They fitted against the base of the plume and held on to the lowest fan on its neck.

The dragon glanced around at her, clearly impatient. The third plume fluttered in invitation. She swam up beside the dragon and pulled herself onto its back. The rough and oily skin chafed her belly and then the insides of her thighs as she sat upright. She bent her legs and clutched its sides with her knees. They fell between the larger ribs quite naturally. Whoever had first climbed upon a sea dragon would have thought the creature had been designed for them—as she did now. The dragon seemed to think so, too.

She leaned against the rear plume and held to its neck. Neither her weight nor hold seemed to inconvenience the dragon. She was thinking,
Well, this is nice,
when it suddenly dove. The surface slapped her chin, closing her mouth. Water jetted up her nose, but she held on.

The dragon made a swift circuit of the inlet, lunging forward with each oar-like sweep of its paddle fins. She leaned close to its back, hoping it wouldn’t stay under too long. And as if aware of her need for air, it immediately surfaced. Leodora flexed forward like a branch that had been pulled back and then released. She clung to the dragon’s neck, spitting, coughing, gasping. And then laughing.

She laughed with a joy as naked as she. The dragon craned its neck and observed her with one solemnly inquisitive black eye. Then with a flick of its tail it scooted straight out of the inlet.

The rocks to either side scraped against her legs. Another month, she thought, and the little dragon would be too big to fit through that opening. Another hour and there wouldn’t have been enough water to clear it.

“How did you know about this?” she asked, as if the creature might suddenly explain itself. The transparent ruff fluttered, no communication she could understand. She had never seen any dragon in or near the inlet before, and she swam there nearly every day. When had it discovered the opening? Had it heard her farewell prayer? No, it would have had to be there already. Then she recalled that Dymphana had said a sea dragon had brought her mother home the night everyone thought she had drowned. This surely couldn’t be the same one—it was too young. But how did it know to find her? “How did one know to find my mother?” she wondered aloud. “Oh, I wish you could talk to me.”

Soon she had adjusted to the dragon’s thrusting motion through the water and sat with her knees bent, her heels clutching its sides, riding erect, the way the fishermen did as they left in the morning. Proud.

They journeyed well beyond the safe haven of her inlet, and farther out, around the point that divided Gousier’s land from the village. She watched her boathouse go by, stared through the open window as if she might glimpse herself watching herself. The dragon seemed to have an objective, a purpose. It carried her steadily within view of Tenikemac. “This is not a good idea, dragon,” she cautioned, but it didn’t heed her. She could have jumped off at any time, but the dragon’s purpose fixed her in place. The idea of the violation tempted and excited her. She was a girl out of their own stories. She was Reneleka and she was riding a sea dragon.

The first villager to see her was a woman on the beach, whose distant shout of alarm reached her ears even as others appeared in doorways and started down the beach. The woman flailed at the air and pointed. Shortly a dozen other women stood at the water’s edge.

Only then did she remember that she was naked. She was violating practically every taboo imaginable. Public nudity on a dragon. It almost made her laugh. She still might have dived into the water, hidden from view behind the creature. Maybe they wouldn’t have recognized her. But she stayed.

Then the dragon began circling away from the shore.

When it had turned to face out to sea, she saw coming straight at her another dragon. On its back sat Agmeon. He had the ropes of a net wrapped around his wrists as he held on to his dragon’s plume. Agmeon’s son on a second dragon held the other end of the net. They were returning early with their catch. The son’s gaze traveled down her body and then up again, meeting her eyes with a look both of arousal and embarrassment.

Agmeon’s furious, bloodshot glare held her rigid. She couldn’t shrink away now, and his anger passed to her, fueling her defiance; pride and self-esteem mixing with resentment of all the rules he embodied—how arbitrarily her position changed when he chose it. Let them banish her. They were too late. She had already banished herself.

Agmeon’s mount swam past hers. From his look as he went by, she knew if he’d had a weapon and could have dropped his net he would have killed her on the spot. His son passed more closely but could only look at her from the side of his eyes. No one spoke. Only the dragons moved. Hers swam on as if it had encountered nothing. Nor had the other two seemed to notice it.

The dragon took her around the point again and back to her inlet. She rode proud and straight the whole way, despite a trembling in her limbs she couldn’t control even though there was no one to see her now.

“You meant to do this to me, didn’t you, clever little dragon?” she asked as they arrived. “You tricked me.”

The creature didn’t acknowledge that it had heard her.

“I think I’ll call you Meersh, how would you like that?”

The sea dragon drew up beside the opening to the inlet and paddled in place. It looked back at her expectantly. The tide had begun to ebb, and the dragon could not swim into the inlet any longer. It seemed to know this.

Everything that had just happened, she thought, had to have happened exactly when and as it did.

She slid off and swam to the submerged shelf of rock. The dragon hesitated, watching her. “Go on, Meersh,” she said. “Go back to the story you came from. You’ve done your work. There can’t be any marriage with Koombrun after this. I’d have to leave the island now even if I didn’t want to.”

The dragon extended its neck. Its puckered mouth whuffled in her face as though in reply, spraying her with gentle tears. Then it swung away and dove from sight. The sea immediately erased even the ripples of its going. She looked out across the water for a long time. The dragon did not resurface.

Finally, Leodora swam back to her clothes. She wrung the blood out of them and put them on. Then, with one last look across the inlet to the unbroken sea, she started up the beach to her garret. The only proof that she hadn’t imagined her voyage was the red chafing inside her thighs from the dragon’s skin. She knew, however, that Agmeon would provide all the proof necessary for everyone else.