Page 13 of Add To Hoard

She had been down for perhaps an hour, the deep immediate unconsciousness of a body that has simply run out of the ability to stay awake, when the island’s other residents made their position on the new arrival known. The biting insects that live in the volcanic sand of the western beach are not large by the island’s standards but they are numerous and they are thorough, and they had found her with the efficient interest of creatures encountering something unfamiliar and deciding it was edible.

She came awake swearing.

Not panicking — swearing, which was a meaningful distinction. She had been on her feet in seconds, shaking out the bedroll, relocating herself closer to where the fire would be, which meant she had already been thinking about the fire before she slept and had simply been too exhausted to build it first. She killed three of the insects with her boot with the automatic economy of someone for whom this was a minor inconvenience rather than a crisis, relocated the bedroll to higher sand, and went back down.

The second waking was worse.

The island’s centipedes — black, long as a human forearm, with the unhurried confidence of creatures that have no natural predators on this particular landmass — are drawn to warmth. She had provided warmth. Two of them had found the edge of the bedroll by the time something woke her, and the sound she made when she registered them at close range in the dark was not a scream exactly but was in the same family of sounds.

She dealt with them with a piece of driftwood and language that I had not heard assembled in quite that configuration before and that I found, involuntarily, impressive in its creativity.

After that she built the fire. Properly, methodically, in the rock shelter. nd She sat beside it with her knife across her knees and her eyes on the treeline and she did not try to sleep again.

She is looking at the treeline now.

At me, or near enough to me that I go very still, the particular stillness of large things that would prefer not to be seen. The firelight does not reach the trees. I am in shadow and she is silhouetted against the flames and she cannot see me and yet her eyes have settled on the exact portion of the treeline where I am standing with an instinctive accuracy I cannot account for and am not going to examine.

She holds the look, then adds another piece of driftwood to the fire and goes back to staring at the flames.

I should remove her.

The thought is not new. It has been present since the first scout report, patient and reasonable, waiting for me to stop finding reasons to defer it. She is a trespasser. She is on protected land. She has survived the crossing through some combination of competence and luck and whatever it is that has been pulling at me since the stubborn vessel refuses to sink. The report landed on my table, and none of those things change what she is or what the protocol requires.

I watch the fire.

I think about the whispers and what they found in her. The name Bren said to the dark water two nights ago with everything stripped out of it except the need underneath. A woman who has crossed the most dangerous water in the known world alone in a damaged brig because the arithmetic of staying home produced an answer she could not accept, and who is currently sitting on a volcanic beach in the predawn cold having successfully negotiated a rain check with an island that has broken the minds of trained sailors.

Protocol says remove her.

Six centuries of instinct, the instinct that has kept me alive and kept this island invisible and kept my clan intact through wars and political upheaval and the slow erosion of everything that used to be certain — says that the things you dismiss without fully understanding have a way of becoming the things you wished you’d paid attention to.

That is what I am going to tell myself. It is a defensible position. It is, in fact, a reasonable strategic position for a dragon responsible for the security of a hidden island to take regarding an unprecedented incursion.

I am going to approach her.

Not like this, not in my own form, which would end the conversation before it began and raise questions I am not ready to answer in front of the clan. In the other form. The one I wore, in another life, when the world was different and I moved through it differently and there were reasons to walk among humans that no longer exist.

I have not held that form in one hundred and twelve years.

The decision sits in my chest with the weight of something that has been sealed shut for a very long time and has just been opened, and the air that comes out of it is not fresh but it is not entirely stale either, and I leave it at that because I am a dragon who has survived six centuries by knowing which things to examine directly and which things to simply act on before the examination talks me out of it.

I turn from the treeline and walk back through the forest toward the Spire.

Behind me, on the western beach, the fire burns small and steady against the dark, and the woman beside it watches the treeline where I was standing, and does not look away.

7

NERINA

Iwake to full daylight and the sound of the tide coming back in.

For three seconds I do not know where I am. A luxury I cannot afford. I end it by sitting up and looking at the shore and the volcanic rock and the brig sitting in its lines with its hull dark and its deck empty, and I remember. All of it, in the compressed and slightly unreal way that memory delivers things after insufficient sleep, the fog, the storm, the centipedes, the fire, the treeline watching me in the dark.

I am on Bloodstorm Peak. I have been here less than a full night. I have slept perhaps three hours across two attempts and been bitten by things I have no names for and the fire has burned down to gray ash and my back has opinions about volcanic grit as a sleeping surface that it is communicating with some force.

“Right,” I say to no one in particular. “Day two.”

I get up.