“Gracious Melqart, Bee! You have always had a way with dogs, although I cannot imagine why except that dogs have no discrimination whatsoever, for they will adore anyone who feeds them!”
At the sound of my voice, several growled.
“Down!” she cried. Their growls ceased. She glanced at me with a triumphant smile. “Didn’t Andevai win your heart by feeding you? Care to try your fortune with these? I swear on Melqart’s Axe I will only let them bite off one of your hands.”
“Bee, someone is coming.”
My warning came too late. The cypress branches parted to reveal a ghost-pale figure wearing a midnight-blue dash jacket under a plain wool coat. The headmaster’s assistant stared, mouth agape. Kemal Napata was an albino of Avarian ancestry, which meant he had extremely pale skin and straw-colored hair but also broad cheekbones and eyes with an epicanthic fold to mark him as a man whose ancestry resides in the distant East. His surprise was certainly greater than our own. After all I had done and said in the last year, I could easily recognize the look of frustrated longing and struggling restraint that tightened his expression.
“Beatrice Hassi Barahal!”
“Maester Kemal Napata,” she echoed with a graceful courtesy. “Please, if you will, call off your hounds. I do not fear them, for they are quite loving, but I confess to some anxiety that they have taken a dislike to my dear cousin Cat, mistaking her name for her character.”
At the academy we had jokingly called him the headmaster’s dog for his doglike loyalty, but I examined him with a fresh perspective now. He had a stocky frame and an appealing face once you became accustomed to his unusual coloring. More importantly, as the headmaster’s assistant, he must know things most people did not.
I said, “Begging your pardon, Maester Napata, but is the headmaster a dragon?”
His gaze skipped off Bee and landed on me. “Amun’s Horns! You both must leave at once.”
A gust of wind thundered through the cypresses. The white branches of alder lashed. A heavy weight thumped. Whimpering, the hounds huddled behind Bee.
A claw with talons as long as my arm raked between two cypress trees. Smoky mist spun through branches, which crisped to brown as if scorched by heat. The thin carpet of snow in the circle melted so fast that one moment we were standing on white and the next in seeps of water. A very large creature gave a very large huff that so scared me I dropped my cane.
Trees parted as a head thrust through. Its skin was scaled with obsidian flakes that both devoured and reflected light. Its eyes were as big as my head, so fulgent a green that they shone.
My enemy.
What instinctive force clawed up from my gut I did not know; I only knew that this was my enemy and I had to kill it or be killed.
Yet its gaze paralyzed me. In its eyes lay memories like shadows.
I saw a curly-haired man lift a little girl up to stand on the lower railing of a large, flat ferryboat. He braced himself to steady her. A crippled woman limped up next to them as they stared across a wide river. The little girl was babbling nonstop about her lovely new boots and whether there were any biscuits left to eat and if they would have to sleep in the coach once they got across the river and could she possibly hold on at the back of the next coach with the guard if she was very very good. Her parents smiled fondly at her and apologetically at the other passengers crowding on, some of whom winced away from the woman’s scarred face and empty sleeve. The ferry juddered as it cast off from the shore and began tacking across the powerful current. The woman pressed a hand protectively on her rounded belly. Wind whipped up the girl’s long black braid. The ferry bucked as if wrenched by an invisible hand, and some passengers cried out in fear. But with each tilt and dip of the boat, the girl shrieked with excited glee as she leaned trustingly into her father’s arms. She galloped her little carved horse through empty air, and with a bright smile at her mother, she said—
“Cat! Step back!”
Too late. The vast jaws of the predator opened as the ferry tipped, took on water, and sank as quickly as a stone, so fast that no one had a chance to scream. The railing scraped the girl’s hand as she clung to it, then lost hold. A rumble was all the voice the river had as it tore her father away from her. Her mother’s hand gripped hers with such desperate strength, but as her blood welled up from the scrape and dissolved into the water, she faded out of her mother’s grasp.
Delicately the beast closed its mouth over my body. Then I was drowning in a sea of smoke.
30
In the depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt. When it is woken, all tremble in fear.
In the depths of the black abyss, there drift in a watery stupor the Taninim, called also leviathans, and when they wake, their lashing tails smash ships into splinters and drive the sundered hulks under the waves.
In the depths of earth, wreathed in fire, lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All Dragons. Her smoky breath fills the ocean of dreams. She stirs, waking, and the world changes.
So we are told.
But of all the great powers in this world, one thing was certain.
No one could screech as loudly as Bee when she was truly outraged.
“LET. HER. GO!”
Thumps hammered its body, small fists pounding the leviathan’s massive flanks.
“How dare you? After I almost died unearthing a nest, is this how you repay me?”
Then she kicked him.
I wasn’t sure how I knew she had done that, only that I was spat out amid a rain of pebbles. After a moment the hail ceased. A dog crept up to me, ears down, and apologetically licked my face.
“Pah!” I shoved the animal away when it looked as if it meant to lick me again. Grabbing my cane, I staggered to my feet and spun to face the monster.
Bee sat on a bench beside the headmaster as Kemal Napata hovered anxiously behind. The headmaster had his hands on his knees, looking winded. His seamed black face and tall, slender frame looked exactly as I remembered them from Adurnam: those of an elderly man of Kushite ancestry with a scholarly demeanor and a calm heart. Sparks of green lit his eyes before fading into brown. The hounds swarmed over to press close to his feet.
Bee was in full spate, like the spring flood.
“I don’t care if her sire is the Master of the Wild Hunt and if the spirit courts are the most ancient enemies of your kind. I never asked to walk the dreams of dragons! Someone else decided on my behalf! Furthermore, when you tricked me into crossing into the spirit world, I almost died to save those hatchlings! And after all that, I am meant to watch while my dearest cousin is eaten?”
“Maestressa, you cannot speak to the noble prince in such a tone,” said Kemal, aghast, for Bee was leaning toward the headmaster as if her next move would be to punch him.
“What do you mean, I can’t speak to him in that tone? I am speaking to him in that tone, now that I know he is not a prince of Kemet at all but rather an impostor slithering about the world with some manner of secretive plot in hand that involves the death of perfectly gentle, mild, and blameless young women!”
By the angry flush mottling his cheeks, Kemal appeared as if he might be reconsidering his infatuation. Trying to gather up enough breath to speak, I wheezed my way into a coughing fit.
Bee ran to me. She patted my face. “Dearest! Are you going to live?”