“Spirit kill swamp dragon.”
The clearing went still around the words; hundreds of green faces turned up toward the girl with the morning in her hands, and I watched Yuki’s whole body understand that the bill had come due.
The light still poured off her, soft now, and below her the Torks knelt and waited for a goddess to answer. The goddess looked as if she very badly wanted to ask whether there was a quieter version of the question.
I knew that look. I’d worn it the first time someone called me Your Majesty and meant it.
She came down slow, boots finding the trodden earth, the Dawnfox Mirror dimming in her grip, and she gave me a look across the fire, ears flat, every tail spelling out the three words she’d hissed at me on the way in. I’m a historian.
I opened my mouth to take it for her; I had the entire speech ready.
Yuki got there first.
“I—” she stopped. Her shoulders came back, the tails went still, and when she spoke again, the stammer had folded itself away somewhere and left only her own quiet voice. “I can’t promise I’ll kill it.”
The clearing rustled. Mok’s old face began to fall.
“But I’ll go and look at it. I’ll see what it really is—all of it, the truth of it. That much I can do.” The smallest catch, and then she pushed straight through it. “I’m rather good at seeing what things really are.”
The Torks took two words out of all that—spirit go—and the clearing came apart for the second time that night. Mok struck his staff against the stone until I thought it would crack, and the sound that tore out of him landed somewhere between a war cry and a sob.
One moment Yuki was a terrified spirit who’d just promised a tribe she’d face the thing that ate them, and the next she’d folded down onto the stone in front of Mok with her hands already moving, the panic gone wherever Yuki’s panic always goes when there’s a good question in front of it.
“Old Mok. Tell me everything. When did it come? What does it do? Has anyone seen it, like actually seen it, the whole of it?”
Mok lowered himself down across from her, suddenly every one of his years, beads pooling around him in the dirt. “Older than Mok,” he said. “Older than Mok father. Grandfather say his grandfather run from it. Always there. Down where the water grow wide.”
Llama’s head came up. “How wide?”
Mok spread his arms, found them useless for the job, and gestured instead at the whole dark south. “River grow. Every year more. Eat the trees. Trees die standing in the water. Now—” a flat, sinking motion of one hand “—forest under the water, two days’ walk. More. All drowned.”
“No footing,” Llama said, mostly to himself, and you could watch him take personal offense at a swamp with no floor in it.
“And the dragon,” Yuki said. “What have your people seen?”
Mok’s brows furrowed. “See?” He laughed, but it was dry. “Nobody see and come back. Tork see lights. On the water, in the trees. Pretty lights.” He pointed up at the village lanterns swaying on their cords. “Like home. Tork follow, think Tork going home.” He stopped for a second. “Tork not going home.”
Gle glanced into the fire.
“And it call,” he went on, papery now. “In the dark. Call in a voice you know. Mother. Child. Friend gone long years. Call by name. Tork want go. Tork want go much.” He looked down at his own knotted hands. “Mok hear his daughter. Forty year. Still hear, some nights, when the wind come off the water. Still want to go to her.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Yuki said, “It puts out an illusion and then it just waits.” She blinked back to us. “I read about similar phenomena in one of the river’s kingdoms.” She caught Mok watching her, and the lecture tucked itself neatly away. “Sorry. I understand it now. That’s what matters.”
Mok, satisfied the spirit had taken in both the warning and the grief, hauled himself up off the stone, thumped his staff once, and barked something that turned the drum back on. The clearing exhaled.
The fire got loud again, and food began circulating with renewed religious intensity.
Phèdre arrived at Yuki’s side with a steaming leaf of something and folded down beside her, coat pooling, pressing the food into Yuki’s hands before she could think to decline it.
“You promised to look, mon cœur. The rest is for tomorrow,” Phèdre made a graceful tip of her shoulder, “and tomorrow is not invited to this party.” Her scarf drifted off her shoulder and settled across Yuki’s, light as nothing, and Yuki’s next worried sentence died unspoken.
Across the fire, Lady Luminaria finally lost her war.
The Tork toddler that had spent the better part of an hour swinging on her hem had graduated to climbing her like a tree, and somewhere around the third handhold the porcelain composure she wears into battle split clean down the middle.
She laughed.
Out loud, and clapped a hand over it half a second too late. The look she shot around the clearing to see who’d witnessed it was so thoroughly mortified that I had to study my fish.
Lucy witnessed it.
Lucy had relocated her wounded dignity onto the dragon. She’d commandeered a log and four enraptured Torklings, and was explaining precisely what Her Majesty’s Royal Navy did to overgrown swamp-lizards that put holes in things.
“Ye see, I been wantin’ a proper sea monster me whole career. Lake’s got nothin’. River’s got floaters.” She cracked her knuckles. “But a dragon that lives in the water and fancies itself clever? That there’s a monster.“ A Torkling asked something reverent and hopeful. “No, ye can’t have its teeth. I’m havin’ its teeth.”
And Yuki was having a good time.
It started small.
A Torkling crept up to inspect a tail, and instead of apologizing for the inconvenience of existing, Yuki let the tail drift over and curl once, gently, around the child, who promptly lost its entire mind.
Another came.
Then six.
Within minutes she had a small, reverent congregation arranged at her feet and was answering their questions like someone testing the thickness of ice; where dawn came from, whether she’d met the moon, why her ears did that.
She glowed a little brighter every time she laughed, and I don’t think she noticed she was doing it.
So I leaned back against my root and let the night happen.
By my standards, this was a flawless evening. Lola would have found three things wrong with it, but Lola wasn’t here, and the brunch I’d traded for her absence was looking better by the hour.
The party wound down slowly and then all at once. The fire sank to embers; the Torklings dropped where they stood and were carried off to bed, and Mok, after extracting one last promise from Yuki, this one heavy with staff-thumping and the words spirit come back repeated with real fear, let us go.
They walked us out through the trees with lanterns, a soft green procession, and Red Beads stood at the water’s edge while we crossed the ice bridge I’d never gotten around to melting. She watched the spirit go, and she didn’t look away until the dark took us.
The ship was silent after all that. Lucy posted a watch out of what I can only assume was pirate principle; the others peeled off to their bunks, and I found Yuki at the bow rail, looking south, where the river ran on into a dark that didn’t end.
I came and stood with her. We didn’t say much; the day had already said most of it, louder.
“They’ll be there in the morning,” she said at last. “Watching us go in. And if I don’t come back out, they’ll think their spirit left them.”
I turned over several useful, queenly things to say and discarded all of them. “We go at first light. You’ll look, that’s all you promised. We see what it is, and then we decide what we do, together. You are not walking into that water alone, Yuki.”
She was quiet. Then her ears lifted, just slightly, and a little dawn crept back into her tails. “Together,” she said. “Okay.” She breathed. “I want to see it anyway; I just want to know what it really is.”
I bumped her shoulder. “That’s not the spirit talking. That’s the historian. Hold onto her. She’s the one getting us through tomorrow.”
The next morning, the entire village had come down through the dark and lined the water in the half-light, hundreds of them.
Yuki stood at the rail and let them see her. Whatever she was feeling, she kept off her face and out of her tails, and she held still and lifted one hand, and the bank stirred, hundreds of voices wishing one person well. She held the hand until the trees swallowed the village behind us, and only then did her shoulders come down.
“That was well done,” I told her.
“I’m going to be sick,” she said pleasantly, eyes front.
Red Beads had come aboard at first light and refused, with great dignity, to explain herself. She’d planted herself at the bow with her bow across her knees, and every so often she lifted one hand and pointed, and Lucy, to her enormous credit, steered to it without argument.
We were going south upstream; there was no other way, but Lucy didn’t comment on it.
The forest had been dim since we’d entered it, and now, by degrees, it began to die. The first dead tree was almost pretty, a pale skeleton among the green, bare and bleached and leaning over its own reflection.
Then there were more. Then the green gave out entirely and there was only the gray, trunk after trunk stripped bare and standing in water that had risen to drink them, and the deeper we pushed the higher that waterline climbed, until whole stands of forest stood with only their crowns still clear of the black.
Then Red Beads pointed off the starboard side. “There.”
The river didn’t end. It kept running south, a clear dark channel threading between the trunks, narrow but navigable, but off to the right, toward the side the village sat on, the bank simply wasn’t there anymore. The river had climbed over it in the last however-many years and never climbed back, and now the forest on that side stood drowned for as far as the dim light reached. Kilometers of it. Dead trees in black water, a whole forest standing in its own grave with the water up to its throat.
And out in it, far off among the trunks, were the lights.
I’d half-talked myself into believing Mok had exaggerated. He hadn’t. They hung among the dead trees in little warm clusters, pale gold, swaying gently though there was no wind to sway them, and they looked like the lanterns strung between the homes of a Tork village.
“Lucy. Can you get us in there?”
She’d come up beside me, hat off for once. “No,” she mumbled. “I can take her up the river all day, Charlie. But in there?” She nodded at the drowned forest. “Half a meter of water over a hundred meters of roots and deadfall. She’d ground inside a ship-length and stick there. That’s not water for a ship.”
So that was that; we go in on foot.
We anchored at the lip of it, where the channel ran closest to the dead trees, and Lucy handed the ship over to her crew with a string of instructions and one long backward look she thought nobody caught. Then she shouldered her hammer and was first to the rail, because of course she was. “Crew holds the beast,” she said back in her accent. “I’m comin’ for the lizard. Nobody’s takin’ them teeth but me.”
Red Beads did not move from the bow.
I went to her. She was looking out at the lights, her broad face gone tight and gray, the bow across her knees gripped hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “You guided us well,” I said. “Thank you. You don’t have to come any further.”
“Tork not go in. Tork never go in. Go in, not come back.” She looked up at me, then past me, to where Yuki stood haloed faintly against the dead trees. “Spirit go in,” she said. “Spirit come back.” She said it like a prayer she’d long since stopped expecting answered, and saying it anyway took more courage than going in ever would have.
So we went in.