45. Why birds flock
45
WHY BIRDS FLOCK
The storm wall surrounding the city had mostly retreated to its normal gyre once it was no longer under Tiendremos’s influence, which meant that at least it had stopped raining by the time they came up from the underground near the docks.
Unfortunately, it also gave them all a distressingly clear view of the sky.
Every dragon in Yagra’hai must’ve been circling, calling out to each other. She heard them the same way she might’ve heard a waterfall or an avalanche or a riot—a dull roar in the distance. She understood why Ris hadn’t insisted that Peralon could rescue them: it was impossible. The best he could do was keep his head down until he could make a break for it. She didn’t see any flyers leaving either, but that was a mountain she hadn’t reached yet.
“These pieces of junk look like they can barely fly,” Claw complained. “And don’t try to tell me that they’ll look better by daylight, because you know that they’ll look worse.”
Sadly, Anahrod had to agree. That was the problem with looking at the repair yard: most of the flyers needed repairs .
At least none of the flyers seemed to have suffered a great deal of storm damage. That made sense though: if there was one city where she’d expect everyone to have excellent protections against inclement weather, it was Yagra’hai.
“Pity that whaling cutter’s too large,” Kimat said. “That one’s in great shape.”
Anahrod nodded absently as she continued looking, then blinked. “Where?” She located Kimat and followed the girl’s stare to the cutter.
“Good job, Kimat,” Anahrod said as she stared at the smooth, flowing form of the Crimson Skies . “I think you’ve just found our way out.”
Anahrod found Captain Bederigha at the third drinking house she tried. Under normal circumstances, everyone would be in bed, but nothing about the night had been normal. Once the rampant alert had been called off, Bederigha had taken his crew to a tavern, where they’d taken over one of the back rooms.
They were pretty clearly intending to drink until the sun rose.
Anahrod sympathized, but if she had anything to say about it, their evening was going to go a different way.
She waited by the door while Ris swayed forward with those hips and that waist and a smile that was utterly wasted on Bederigha but still made a healthy chunk of the crew pause from whatever they were doing.
The captain smiled at Ris in a bemused way when she reached his table. He looked tired, but probably everyone in Yagra’hai was tired just then. “I am so sorry to disappoint you, miss, but—”
Ris set a bag on the table, open at the top so scales spilled out when it tipped over. “Might we speak with you in private?”
The captain snagged the drawstring with his hook and pulled the bag in his direction. “This buys you a few minutes of my time, yes.” He leaned around her and yelled out, “All right, crew! Go get yourselves some drinks at the bar! Thrasion, Valagh, you two stand watch at the door. Grexam, you stay with me.” He eyed Anahrod’s group with an assessing gaze. He raised an eyebrow at Kimat’s age, passed over Claw and Naeron, and then stopped dead at Anahrod. He frowned at Anahrod’s waist.
More specifically, he frowned at Anahrod’s sword. It was a thoughtful frown, like he was trying to place why the sword seemed familiar.
Naeron shut the door and plastered one of Kaibren’s silencing inscriptions on the inside panel. Anahrod’s throat clenched. That was likely one of the last ones the man had ever made…
No, she refused to think about it.
Claw cruised around the tables, inspecting everyone’s cards. After a tiny hesitation, Kimat joined her.
Anahrod removed her veil. “Captain—”
Bederigha pushed back from his chair and stood. “No!” he told her like he was scolding a pet. “No, no, no. Absolutely not. Do you have any idea how many people are looking for you right now?”
“All of them, I think,” Anahrod answered. “That’s why I need your help.”
The captain hadn’t called for Grexam to do anything, hadn’t called for his men to return. The smallest ember of hope flared in her chest.
“You got my cutter half-destroyed last time,” Bederigha argued.
“I also made sure they fixed it,” she pointed out.
“Made sure they fixed it? Ha!” Bederigha spat. “Have you ever tried to part a dragon with so much as a single scale? I’m arguing with them over every bolt, every weld! You’d think I was stealing from their hoards. I’m going to leave here owing those bastards money!”
Ris smiled, smooth as cream, as she leaned her hip against the table. It was not the hip where she wore her sword. “Would you like to fix that?”
The cutter captain started to retort, then stopped, blinked, and took a good, hard look at her. “You’re a dragonrider.”
“Yes, I am,” she admitted.
He pointed at Anahrod and raised an eyebrow, as if to say: How do you explain that then?
Ris shrugged. “She’s really good in bed.”
Grexam coughed over a laugh while Anahrod smiled ruefully.
Bederigha squinted and took a moment to study the ceiling. He scratched the side of his cheek with his hook. Then he said to Ris: “Why aren’t you riding your dragon? You’re not running, are you?” He frowned. “Is that even possible?”
“No,” Ris replied. “It isn’t. Let’s say the only dragon more unpopular than mine right now is Zavad himself.”
The captain scoffed. “I don’t know about that. I think that dragon that just went rampant is pretty unpopular.”
“And pretty dead,” Anahrod agreed.
Bederigha grunted in acknowledgment. He squinted at Ris. “Your dragon. He’s not a fire dragon, is he?”
“No.” Ris looked thoughtful. “Why?”
“A dock fire would be just what we need,” Bederigha said. “What you want is for every captain in this city to get it into their head that it’s not safe to stay here and they need to leave, now. The only reason it didn’t happen earlier was because the storm made it too dangerous.” He snorted. “Two dragons rampant in a week, one of them an elder. It wouldn’t take much.”
“Do you need the docks on fire or is it enough if they start collapsing?” Ris asked.
Anahrod gave her an odd look. Acid, then? Was Peralon’s breath weapon acid?
“Collapsing is better, honestly, if you can do it slow enough that people have plenty of time to get out. Fires have a bad habit of escaping their leash.” Bederigha nodded to himself, patted his coat as though making sure something valuable was still where he’d left it. “And what exactly are you offering for me jeopardizing my crew and my cutter and having us potentially cross paths with angry dragons?” He moved the scales on the table about with his hook. “This ain’t going to cut it.”
Fortunately, Anahrod had thought this part through. “No tariffs on sky amber for the next full cycle in Crystalspire.”
The captain squinted at her, then scowled. “You can’t promise me that.”
“I can,” Anahrod said. “The current mayor of Crystalspire is my father.” Anahrod shrugged. “And my mother is his wife, Belsaor, and you know what they say about her .”
“The dragon lady of Crystalspire,” he mused. “She does have a reputation. There’s a drinking song about her making the rounds.”
Anahrod didn’t want to know. “My point is, I can make good on the offer.” Her mother wouldn’t be happy about the agreement, but Anahrod would make damn certain she honored it.
He scratched his cheek with the edge of the hook, looking thoughtful. “Funny, though, I thought that woman only had one daughter—” Captain Bederigha gave Anahrod a knowing glance.
She felt her gut twist. “You’ve figured it out.” He knew who she was, knew that she was “Anahrod the Wicked.” Damn it all.
“Yeah, I figured it out,” he agreed.
The room fell silent, and Anahrod felt a horrible sense of dread. She didn’t want—
If this was ruined because of those stupid stories…
Captain Bederigha sucked on his teeth. “You throw in your casserole recipe, and we have a deal.” When Grexam made a surprised sound, the smaller, rounder man said, “Oh, you didn’t try it, darling. I’m doing humanity a favor by ensuring it’s recorded for posterity.” When Anahrod stared at him in surprise, he grinned. “I’ve seen you at your worst, girl. And at your best. And in neither one of those cases were you sacrificing any babies. I’ll take my chances.”
He took a long drink and said, “All right, Red. You have your dragon do whatever shenanigans it needs to do to start the docks crumbling. Probably want to wait until dawn, though. Best if people can see where they’re running. When the other flyers start stampeding, we’ll sneak out in the other direction.”
Anahrod cocked her head. “The other direction” made little sense. There was no “other direction.” The only clear path out of Yagra’hai was up.
“Captain—” Grexam’s voice was full of warning.
Bederigha grinned into his cider. “Always wanted to try a hurricane slingshot.”
“Captain, no!”
“Hurricane…” Ris stared at him with wide eyes. “You’re going to take us through the storm wall ?”
He shrugged. “You gotta admit, no one will look that way.”
“That’s because it’s insanity.” Ris laughed. “You’re a madman!” She clearly meant it as the highest of all possible compliments.
Anahrod said, “You have a deal, Captain.”
Grexam released a tired sigh.
“Great.” Captain Bederigha set down his drink on the table with a happy thump. “Now put your damn mask on, woman. Do you have any idea how much money they’re offering for you? My crew’s only human. Let’s not give them an excuse to make bad decisions.”
That was a fair point. Ris was giving Grexam a suspicious look, but Anahrod would allay her concerns later. Grexam was no fool. No tariffs for five years was a lot more money than what Yagra’hai was offering for her capture or death.
The deal done, the captain made his own arrangements, and Anahrod and her four companions headed for the whaling cutter to wait for the dawn.
Escaping from the city was so anticlimactic as to be dull. Anahrod never saw what Peralon did; for all his bright, reflective coloration, he still sabotaged the docks without being noticed.
Anahrod felt an odd ringing in her ears, but it quickly vanished.
The repair yard sat next to the docks, close enough to give the whole crew a ringside seat to the show. The first symptoms were easily overlooked, but eventually a creaking groan grew too loud to be ignored. People began running and shouting, in the manner of all emergencies. Most tried to save their cargo, to hold tight to profits and livelihoods.
Anahrod felt bad, but she reminded herself the city would have to pay for repairs and compensate for the loss of goods. These people wouldn’t be beggared by this.
Probably.
Then some captain let greed override sense and spent too long reloading cargo. They were still doing so when the entire section of the pier gave way and collapsed with a creaking, splintering crash.
It reminded Anahrod of the sound falling trees made in a flood.
The sky-amber-inscribed hull wouldn’t allow the cloud cutter to fall, but the wind grabbed at its wings. The cutter spun lazily in the air before flipping upside down like a wheelbarrow. Luckily, transports weren’t open at the top, but she hated to imagine the crew slamming against the walls, then the ceiling, then the walls again.
It did the trick, though.
At first, it seemed like the various flyers just meant to pull anchor and relocate closer to wharfside. As the pier’s giant pylons crumbled, however, the fly ers all seemed to reach the same conclusion: the smart thing to do was leave Yagra’hai. With or without permission.
It was chaos and mayhem. Some dragons were happy to see the whiny, always-complaining humans stop distracting them from more important problems. Others were the opposite, understanding how easy it might be for at least one of their problems to escape in the panic. Still other dragons urged calm, considering future relationships with Seven Crests.
During all this, the Crimson Skies cut ties and surged straight at the churning gray-green wall of storm cloud surrounding the city.
Anahrod found a tie-off point and hooked herself in. Everyone else, seeing this, followed in kind.
“This is going to be bad, isn’t it?” Kimat’s voice was small.
“Oh yeah,” Claw told her. “But it’s okay. We’ll get through this.” The scarred woman hadn’t been more than five feet away from Kimat since she’d tossed the girl over her shoulder back in the tunnels. At some point, Claw had exchanged the role of jailer for that of a big sister. Maybe Claw had latched on to the girl—as a fellow resident of Grayshroud, as a distraction from her grief, as both.
If Kimat didn’t watch herself, she’d find herself apprenticed to a stone-cold killer. Anahrod quietly laughed: Kimat would almost certainly see that as an encouragement rather than caution.
Anahrod’s mind was wandering, and she came back to herself as she felt delicate fingers interlock with hers, looked over to see Ris’s green eyes staring into hers.
“Are you going to be all right?” Ris whispered. She had hooked herself close enough to Anahrod to make reaching out no effort at all. Anahrod pulled Ris closer, setting her hand against the back of the other woman’s neck.
“I have survived worse,” Anahrod admitted, which wasn’t even a lie. The cutter wouldn’t fall, couldn’t fall. It might be flung about at ridiculous speeds or even smashed against the mountainside in a downdraft—
No. Best not to think of that.
“What about you?”
Confusion flickered over Ris’s expression. “You mean Kaibren? I’m upset—”
“I mean Tiendremos,” Anahrod corrected. “You never saw him die.”
Her eyes widened. Anahrod cursed herself, because Ris looked like she’d just been stabbed. Utterly gutted, and perhaps more than a little mortified that someone had noticed. “Oh. Yes, well…”
She fell into silence.
Anahrod thought that was it, that the dragonrider had nothing more to say on the matter, but she was wrong.
“I was just a child,” Ris whispered. “I couldn’t have been more than five years old. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why the dragons who were our friends were attacking us. I’ll never forget Tiendremos breathing lightning out over the house while a storm raged around him. My mother told me to run, so I did. I ran and then I stole aboard a cutter to get out of the city.” She made a breathy sound that only technically qualified as laughter. “The cutter had already left the city when they found me.”
“Oh, Ris.” Anahrod squeezed her hand. She wanted to think that they’d found an adorable moppet of a stowaway and had done the right thing, but she already knew that wasn’t how this story ended.
Ris sniffed and swallowed thickly. “I thought they’d be mad. I didn’t think—” She made a face. “The bastards sold me.”
“To the Valekings?” Anahrod said.
Ris’s gaze flicked to Anahrod’s, eyes narrowed and searching.
“I was eavesdropping when you talked to Sicaryon about it,” Anahrod confessed.
Ris huffed. “I see. I guess I don’t have to explain that, then.” Her gaze focused on something sharp and unpleasant, very far away. “Eventually I tried to run away and ended up—” She refocused her green eyes on Anahrod. “I stumbled onto Peralon’s lair and woke him. Not a thing I recommend doing, but if you absolutely must, make sure you’re the reincarnation of their previous rider. Much happier outcome that way.”
Anahrod frowned. “Wait, you—” She blinked. “Peralon thinks you’re the reincarnation of Senros?”
Ris just stared, her lips flat.
Anahrod cleared her throat. “Peralon mentioned Senros to Ivarion in that dragonstone memory he gave me.”
“Ah. Yes. He thinks I’m Senros.” She shrugged. “I can’t say whether he’s right or wrong. I don’t remember any past lives. All I know is that he’s wonderful in this one.”
“Did he share any sunny stories about Cynakris?” Anahrod asked the dragonrider. The cutter lurched unexpectedly, and a noise intruded on their quiet conversation—howling wind, muffled by the hull. Anahrod felt a weight pressing her back against the wall.
“Cynakris?” Ris narrowed her eyes, but the fact she was taking the question as an accusation was a kind of confession. “King Cynakris never existed, you know, just like Zavad never existed. They’re just stories.”
Anahrod picked up Ris’s other hand, kissed her fingers. “I know the power of stories, and I know how stories shift and morph. The Anahrod they talk about in plays and books is nothing like me, and I’m betting that’s true, too, for whoever inspired the stories about Zavad. Maybe the original dragon didn’t hoard gold at all. Maybe they meant to say he was gold.”
Ris stared at her for a moment in shock, then leaned her head against Anahrod’s. “You silly, wonderful woman,” she said. “No one will ever believe you.”
“Good,” Anahrod whispered back. “I should start my own hoard of secrets.”
“The other dragons never forgave him for saving humanity,” Ris whispered, although it seemed less like whispering against the rising volume of background noise. “They never forgave him for refusing to allow us to be exterminated or enslaved. So they made him the villain, because they could. And now no dragons are left alive who remember otherwise.”
Anahrod blinked away the stinging in her eyes. “We’re still in chains,” she told the woman. “They just call it something else. There’s always going to be another Neveranimas, another Tiendremos, because there’s nobody to stop them. They’ve taught us to accept our own enslavement as an act of faith, force us to send them our children. They always, always are ultimately the ones in charge. It can’t keep going on like this, Ris. It can’t.”
Ris put her hands on either side of Anahrod’s, cradling her face. “You have no idea how pure and beautiful and good you are, do you?”
“Ris—”
“That’s why I became a dragonrider, you know.” Ris laughed. “Okay, part of why. I mean, you’ve met Peralon. He’s amazing. But I also want to change things, because there are only a few paths forward from here. What Sicaryon wants is—” Ris shook her head. “Sure, it’ll free humanity eventually, but he’ll have to burn the sky and flood the mountains with blood to do it. He’ll end up killing, maybe not all dragons, but so many of them they will never trust us again. We will push and push and drive them to the harsher, wilder corners of the world until finally it will be like they were never here. They will be… stories. Nothing but stories. All the wrong parts of them mangled and warped and repeated forever.”
Anahrod knew tears were rolling down her face and didn’t care. “Not just dragon blood.”
“No,” Ris agreed. “It would mean war with the Skylands, too, and maybe that’s not a war he’ll win—”
“Oh, he would,” Anahrod said.
“But even if he doesn’t,” Ris insisted, “the damage will be done there, too. The trolls of the Deep will stop being stories and become threats, and if the Deep doesn’t conquer the Skylands, the reverse will happen. We both know it.” She curled her fingers around Anahrod’s. “The only way this ends differently is from the inside. Dragons and dragonriders who refuse to treat each other as anything but equals, refuse to let the rest of humanity be treated as nothing but thralls.”
“And how in all the heavens do you plan to pull that off?”
Ris stared into Anahrod’s eyes sadly. “I have no idea. Revenge was easier, even if I didn’t get to see Tiendremos gutted like a rabid vel hound the way he deserved.”
“Who knows,” Anahrod said as she tipped the other woman’s face toward hers, “maybe we can still swing something with Neveranimas.”
Ris smiled. “You sure know how to sweet-talk a girl.”
Anahrod kissed her as the Crimson Skies shook in earnest. From the other side of the hold, either Kimat or Claw or both made “Ew!” sounds in their general direction.
She ignored them.