Chapter Twenty #2
Keva was appropriately massive, with the bulk of her dominating the mountainside, as vast as any boulder, but far more golden.
Or gold. She wasn’t merely golden-colored; she looked as if she were cast out of gold by a master craftsman.
Each scale gleamed with as pure a color as the sun, and her wings were as red as fresh-spilled blood.
She was, in a word, dramatic.
“Wow,” Ree said.
At the sound, the queen dragon swiveled her massive head to regard the humans and wax myrtle shrub who dared approach her, and Marin had never felt so small and insignificant, which was saying something since she spent most of her time with a massive sea serpent.
Objectively, Perri was longer from snout to tip of tail than Keva, but he spent most days submerged in the sea.
Keva was fully displayed on the mountainside, and she … she was a lot of dragon.
Marin very much hoped she liked music and not musicians, or this could be a very large mistake. She swallowed hard and clasped her hands behind her back to keep them from shaking.
Their guide, Marin noticed, had finally stopped talking.
The dragon was coiled around Marin’s sailboat. Glimpses of the hull and deck were visible around the bulk of the beast’s body. No holes that Marin could see, which was a relief, but the mast was snapped, and the sails were in tatters. I can fix it.
Hands still clasped hard, Marin stepped forward. Surot had told her the opening words to say. “Greetings, great and powerful one,” she said in the voice she’d trained for shouting across roaring wind. “We come to honor you—and to offer a trade.”
The key, Surot had said, was to be both respectful and direct. Dragons wanted to know what it was you wanted right from the start. Never waste a dragon’s time.
“That is my boat,” Marin said. She pointed to the dragon’s prized possession. “It was torn from us during a magic storm and flung up here. It belongs in the sea with me and my crew.”
The dragon coiled tighter. Smoke rose from her nostrils.
“I appreciate your taking care of Silver for me while she was here,” Marin said.
“You’re a noble dragon who … is good to boats.
” She hadn’t fully planned this out and regretted that now.
“Um, okay, I know you don’t have a hoard yet, but I think it’s because you haven’t found what you truly love.
So I … we … want to offer you something we think you might love: music. ”
The smoke hadn’t become flame. Marin took that to be a good sign.
She pushed on. “This is Dax. He is the finest composer in the Crescent Islands, and he is going to play you some music.”
The dragon tilted her head, and she reminded Marin of Perri: I’m listening, she seemed to say.
“To be clear: he’s only visiting Ilreka.
He’s not staying. You can’t hoard him. But you can keep his music.
Inside you. You can keep how it makes you feel and how it changes you.
” Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Dax was also staring at her with an expression that was very similar to the dragon’s. In a lower voice, she asked, “What?”
He smiled. “You understand.”
Yes, she did, but dragon? Sailboat? “Dax…”
“So you know, that kiss … I’m not pushing for more—I know you don’t think we have a future—but I need you to know that the reason I kissed you back wasn’t because it was a ‘high-emotion moment.’ It wasn’t even because you’re beautiful.
You are. But that’s not why…” He took a deep breath as if he’d find the words he wanted in the oxygen.
She felt Ree, the guide, and the dragon all staring at her.
Dax positioned himself on one of the rocks and swung the guitar in front of him.
“I kissed you—and I wanted to kiss you again—because you’re you.
I keep trying to tell you: you are extraordinary, exactly as you are. ”
She stared at him and felt as if a wave had slammed into her. She wasn’t certain she could breathe. Or think.
“Marin, you deserve the whole wild, beautiful sea. No man and no dragon should ever take that away from you. I am going to get your sailboat back.”
He didn’t wait for her to respond. Instead, he began to play.
At first it was a simple melody.
Inhaling shakily, Marin felt her cheeks heating up. She knew this song. She had a vague memory of it being one of the songs that the server had sung at the Kraken’s Nest, while Dax was playing for their supper. That felt like ages ago, but apparently Dax had memorized it.
It was a love song.
He added in a harmony, while still plucking the melody, and then he layered in a rhythm with his foot tapping on the rocks and the heel of his hand slapping into the body of the guitar. And then once he’d complicated the song, he closed his eyes and began to vary it.
Soon a sweet solo melody sang out above the swift notes—it was melancholy, and it made Marin think of just after sunset, when the last of the liquid gold had dissolved into the horizon. It was the gray before the stars, the deepening blue and the blurring of shadows.
He played the stars, the feel of them spreading across the sky. Under his fingers, the song transformed yet again, the notes singing of the silence of the night that isn’t a silence. It’s full of whispers and dreams and regrets and memories.
Somewhere in all of it, Marin realized she was crying. She didn’t know why. She touched her cheek and felt the dampness, and then she lowered her hand and just let herself cry.
The dragon had closed her eyes. Her head swayed with the still-beating rhythm of Dax’s music, and her tail swayed side to side.
Marin didn’t know how long he played, or how long they listened, captivated.
But when the music brightened like the dawn, Dax began to sing, softly, sweetly, the words of the love song:
“I see you, truly, deeply,
I see you, inside and out,
I see your fears, your doubts, your shame, your guilt,
I see your joy, your hope, your dreams,
And I love you.”
And then the chorus:
“You are my sunrise, my sunset,
I’m not the same since we met.
You are my future, all that I dream,
And I … I, I, I am the one who makes you seen.”
The guitar stopped.
It was only his voice.
And then silence.
The dragon opened her eyes. She stretched her bloodred wings, and she clenched her talons around the hull of Marin’s boat. With a mighty flap of her wings and push of her muscular hindquarters, she lifted into the air, carrying the sailboat upward.
Marin watched as the queen dragon flew with the boat away from the mountain, over the forest, and out above the sea. And then the dragon circled, spiraling lower, and she placed the damaged but still beautiful sailboat gently, very gently, onto the water.