Once outside, she ran, but she didn’t know the fastest way through the city to the docks. She’d always taken meandering paths, dashing across walls and roofs. Shine tried to keep her course west, but the city was not laid out with straight lines and she kept curving north and north, having to switch back or find the sharpest left. The smell of fish and dank wood grew, and she followed it through a neighborhood of leaning taverns and past a market of fresh fish and mollusks and perishable goods from up and down river. She heard the river birds crying and the rough chant of sailors and burst out of an alley onto a narrow dock, nearly spilling off into the water.
Shine pressed her back to the wall. Her toes ached from the gravel roads and were caked with mud. She was a mess, a ragged doll. Below her several barges bobbed where they were tied to private piers, and south where the river deepened again were the ocean ships with their red sails tied down like cocoons. Shine peered over the edge of the dock. The tide was low, the water brackish here, between freshwater river and salty marsh. She didn’t know if the Selegan was strong enough to hear her.
But she had to try.
Scooping off the edge, she dug her toes into the rough, wet wooden pillar supporting the dock. She climbed slowly down, until she could see the muddy bottom of the river, several feet below the brownish water.
She pushed off, slamming into the river.
Shine turned and swam north, kicking hard. In the center of the river, she treaded water and tasted it. Not too salty. Muddy, churned. Unpleasant. Not like the clear, silver upriver water she’d flown through last month with the dragon.
“Selegan,” she said. She ducked underwater and called its name again, a muffled, bubbly sound. Selegan.
Then she dove forward, swimming as hard as she could. North, toward brighter water.
She rose for breath, careful to note where boats floated, careful to avoid them. But she didn’t care if she was seen and ignored a few startled cries. Let them think she was a spirit or a demon.
Her fingers numbed with the cold, but she clawed at the water. She could hear her heart loud in her ears, pulsing out and out from her body as if it could ring through the river.
Selegan, she cried.
When she emerged to breathe, she yelled with her voice, “Selegan River, please! I need you.”
She treaded water in a thread of silvery current, where dark-gilled fish stared at her from just beneath the surface and there were no barges or fishing boats. Shine took a few deep breaths. Then she pulled on the life of the river.
It sucked into her in a gasp of power, and Shine trembled, losing her rhythm for a moment. She sank down and hung there, suspended between life and dark depth. She opened her eyes, though they stung, and gently kicked, spreading her arms to hold herself in the deep. Selegan, I need you, she called. I can save your friend. I can save her. Let me save her!
She closed her eyes, feeling like the whole river was her tears.
If the dragon did not answer, she could still die here, mouth full of the river. Die and let her demon heart fly up the water road directly to the Fifth Mountain.
Shine’s body ached, and her chest burned. She had to breathe. She parted her lips and let the water slip inside. She thrashed and coughed, gulping, and human instinct shoved her up to the surface.
Scales touched her toes, pushing up, and Shine burst out of the river into the air.
She breathed, she choked, and tears poured down her cheeks along with snot and thin bile from her heaving stomach.
She collapsed onto coiling hard dragon flesh.
“Night Shine!” the Selegan River spirit hissed, shocked.
Shine wrapped her arms around its neck, white bone ridges shoving into her shoulder and chest. She hurt everywhere, but she held on. Her fingers dug into the feather beard. “Take me… Selegan, take me home. I will save her. As fast—as fast as you can.”
“Hold on, Night Shine,” the dragon said, and with a shudder of power it unfurled its wings and shot into the sky.
FORTY-SIX
THE DRAGON FLEW HARD and fast as wind. Shine clung to it with body and will, gritting her teeth and imagining herself smoke and fire. They tore through the sky, leaving tatters of themselves behind, little smoke butterflies and falling leaves and feathers of flame.
Her heart pulsed hard and she focused on it because she couldn’t see through the shredding wind or hear the dragon. There was only blood and air and desperation.
Shine did not let herself think the sorceress had already died, had failed, that she hadn’t stood up with Shine’s gift of power to secure the mountain against the army.
On and on they flew, into colder, wetter air, into lacerating clouds.
Tears turned to ice on her lashes, then ripped away, rimming her eyes with red.
The dragon slowed and Shine clenched around it, panicked that it was too soon; they couldn’t be there yet.
She pushed up and looked: ahead was the dark outline of the Fifth Mountain miles and miles away, below the rain-forest canopy so vivid green it was black in the late sunlight, shimmering in wind, an ocean of emerald, jade, obsidian leaves. The Selegan slipped like a vein of opal through it all.
“I smell them,” the dragon called to her, its voice rumbling through its scales.
They sank lower, pushing north on a gust of wind.
The rain forest broke open to expose the lava field and the vast meadow. Covered in soldiers.
Clusters of men and women lined up in lacquered red and brown armor, painted with gleaming teeth, their helmets crested with feathers and horns. Warhorses and wardogs stomped, snorted, and howled, lifting their long faces and baring teeth at the dragon as it drifted high overhead. Shine stared down at hundreds of soldiers. Too many—so many! They were putting together catapults and archer platforms near the front, where the mountain started. Forward scouts already climbed, hunting for doorways or passes.
Shine’s gaze was drawn to one sorcerer just before he thrust a staff into the ground and released a wailing ball of fire directly at them.
She thumped the dragon’s neck and it curved away and higher, pumping its wings to take her to the peaks, to the mirror lake.
“I hear her calling me,” the dragon said, tilting sharply so Shine yelped and fisted her hands in its feathers.
It wiggled like a snake, up and down, keeping close to the peaks, then it dove down toward a jut of mountain. The balcony outside the sorceress’s rooms.
Shine tumbled off as the dragon transformed beneath her, so they both landed on their human feet.
“Sorceress!” Shine cried.
The cave mouth leading inside shifted wider and Shine saw lights glowing inside, a diagram cut into the stone floor and the sorceress crouched, cutting with her wand. Flares of black feathers arced off her back almost like wings, and her hair was a black-brown-red mass of hair and feathers and tangling claws. Her legs were bent wrong, too many joints and talons dug from her toes into the ground. She had so many teeth, and when her head snapped toward them, the bone-white eye burned like a star.
She was perfect.
Shine stopped at the edge of the diagram. “Sorceress, what can we do?”
“I am holding it,” she answered roughly, tongue and lips working hard around the sharp teeth, blurring the words. “Not enough power.”
“Is my heart enough?” Shine asked. She knelt and stared intently at the sorceress. She wanted to dig her hands into the other woman.