Chapter 22
- Crat'ax -
I wake up at sunrise, my dreams dark and full of dangers.
Callie is gone. At first I just rub my eyes and sigh, annoyed by the stench of splix that still permeates the air.
But she doesn’t return, and there are only night sounds outside.
Sitting up, I notice her dress that Carter’ez made, nicely folded on her side of the sleeping platform. The shell necklace is placed neatly on top of it.
Strange.
I get to my feet, unease tugging at my thoughts. Outside, there’s no sign of her in the pale strip of light where the sun will soon rise.
I walk quickly to Gren’ix’s farm. Nobody there. She’s not at the Circle. Drux’et is there, supposed to be on night watch, but he hasn’t seen her. Nor is she inside my old hut, but the scare up the three boys that have now made it theirs. “Look for Callie! Now!”
They run off.
I march quickly to the last place I can imagine her being, but the boat she built with the boys is gone.
Looking desperately around, my gaze catches on something that makes my blood run cold: The dragon’s cage looks like it was broken open. The top lid is lying askew, halfway in the water.
“Bradek tribe!” I yell as loudly as I can. “Wake up! Callie is gone! The dragon is gone!”
I run to my boat while sleepy heads poke out of huts. “What?”
“The dragon!” I yell. “Everyone out! Go! Go! Go!”
I jump into my boat and paddle over to the cage as fast as I can. And the dragon is gone. But there’s no sign of Callie.
For a long moment I freeze up, holding the oar in a limp hand. Did he take her?
Or… did they go together?
My whole body feels numb as I paddle to the edge of the bay and look desperately for the boat.
But it’s nowhere to be seen, so I paddle up the stream until the current becomes too hard to work against. Then I drag the boat ashore and follow the river until it becomes unpassable by any boat, even a small canoe.
There’s no sign of Callie or the dragon or the boat.
That doesn’t really help. They may have dragged the boat with them, or the dragon smashed it and threw the pieces into the jungle. He was very strong.
I make my way back to the bay and paddle to the village. On the way I meet many canoes with angry men in them.
“We’ll find that dragon!” they call to me. “He won’t get far!”
“Don’t look for him!” I urge them. “Look for Callie!”
“They’ll be together,” they reply. “Both are Darkness! The dragon and the woman brought by the Plood!”
Back in the village, that’s what they all say.
“There was always a chance she was bad news,” Chief Brun'ax tells me in a soothing tone. “She was too good to be real. When she saw that our tribe didn’t descend into madness with her among us, she freed her friend and went on to some other tribe. Don’t fret, tribesman!
Any man would be taken in by her.” He puts a hand on my shoulder.
I shake it off. “She was not Plood! She wasn’t sent by them!”
“This is for the better,” the chief says calmly. “She was sowing discord among us. The splix run was her last attempt. But when we were not envious of her net, she gave up.”
More men are setting off towards the shore. “We’ll catch the dragon, and then we’ll make sure he can’t escape again!”
“When did you see her last?” I ask, trying to stay calm.
“Oh, it was last night. She wanted fabric for her little boat, though the Deep knows what she wanted to do with it. I gave it to her, as well as some of the food items that the Dry tribes gave us.”
Two men pass me. “Now, no man is better than any other,” one of them says.
“It was a strange thing to not share,” says the other, as they continue on their way, making sure I hear it.
I get back into my boat and paddle underneath the village, checking every beam, support, and rafter.
But there’s no sign of her, except a pack of plaited leaves sitting on a beam right next to where she helped build the boat.
It’s from one of the tribes, a piece of food that they traded for splix. It’s fresh, too.
She may have planned to go far in that boat. And I think I know where she went.
I climb back up onto the platform and gaze out on the ocean. The sun’s still not fully up, but I see enough of the Deep to not want to get out on it. There’s a nasty pull in the air, and clouds are gathering over the horizon. A storm is coming.
Gren’ix comes and puts his hand on my shoulder.
“She left with the dragon, then. She asked me about him, and I told her about it all. Well, not all, perhaps. But enough to make her… not angry, exactly. But there was a sadness to her. She said she hoped my crops would be good. I understand now that it was because she would never see them herself.”
I sigh. “Was she a friend of the dragon, Gren’ix? Was she really sent by the Plood? Wasn’t she given by the Deep?”
“Men have examined the dragon’s cage. Most of the ropes were snapped in half with great strength, leaving telltale frayed ends. But the most important one looked like it was neatly cut. With a sharp blade. She had one, didn’t she?”
“I forged and sharpened it myself,” I say, my mind numb.
“Let’s forget the woman,” the old man says, trying to console me. “While she taught me many good things, she also made some of our men lose their minds. This is better, Crat'ax. The tribe is the way it always was.” He walks off, his stick tapping on the planks with each step.
Callie freed the dragon, then. The dragon I was desperate for her not to know about because I only knew he was bad, and I could feel his deadly danger with every fiber of my being.
The Deep forgive me for ever giving in to the men when they wanted to make a cage!
I could have protested more strongly, argued better against bringing that Darkness so close to our village.
I wanted to protect her from ever knowing about that thing.
And I didn’t want her to know that he was being kept here.
But now it seems she knew about him the whole time.
Perhaps they were friends. Perhaps she came here specifically to save him.
Perhaps she showed herself to me on that beach specifically to get me to take her.
Waves splash against the foundations of the platform, spraying my feet with cold seawater from below.
Perhaps it wasn’t the Deep that gave her, which I suspected the whole time because she wasn’t actually on the beach, but just inside a strip of jungle. That Plood ship — was it really the Plood, sending a woman to free the dragon?
I look over at the first sliver of the sun as it rises. It will soon be swallowed by the clouds.
“No,” I mutter to myself. “That’s not what it was. She did love me. She must have. Nobody could pretend like that.”
The wind picks up, gusts grabbing hold of the huts and making them creak.
I gaze out to the open ocean, where she must have gone. “Seek the shore, Callie. No boat can bear what’s coming.”
Chief Brun'ax comes walking, the wind tugging at his thin, white hair. “Still here, Crat'ax? You should join the dragon hunt. With your wonderful spear, you will be his biggest threat.”
“Why hunt him?” I ask, feeling empty. “What do we want with him? Just keep him, and enjoy it? Kill him, or let him go, Chief. We should not keep prisoners. Not of any kind.”
He takes a step back and hurries away, noticing my strange mood.
I look out to the ocean again. The waves are going white.
“Sorry,” I whisper into the wind. “I should have listened to you more about your friend. I should have said more that was true about the dragon. And not been so afraid of losing you.”