“Why would kit foxes be mixed in a battle with the dark raiders?” said Mikkian.
“I don’t know. But I know dragons were mixed in.”
“You only think you saw dragons. Why would—”
“I saw them, I tell you. If you hadn’t been stuffing your face with oysters, you’d have seen them, too. Two dragons, Mikk. I saw. . . .”
“Hah,” Mikk huffed as if he didn’t believe a word.
“Well, I did see them. And I heard the foxes cry just now, as well as you did, and I am going to find out what’s happening.” And off went Charkky, humping through the tall, waving grass.
Mikkian sighed and slid up out of the mud, to follow. “We’ll make better time by water,” he said, nipping at Charkky’s fat tail.
Charkky didn’t answer, but he swerved and doubled back and headed for the surf, so the grass thrashed above him.
They dove into the breakers and were quickly beyond them, to head west, following Baylentha’s shore, swimming mostly underwater, and so with no more arguing, for the moment. They reached the scene of battle and slid in under the waves, then stuck their noses out very close to shore, to hear the scream of a dying horse and smell the stench of blood. They didn’t see the foxes, only the teeming battle, and they heard a groan. Then Mikk caught the scent of the foxes, and they followed it into the marsh grass, near a dead white gelding.
“The foxes were here,” said Mikk. “Two of them, and—”
“I can smell them!” said Charkky. “There!” he cried, and leaped forward to part the thick grass.
Before them lay a still, bloodied human form.
“It’s no bigger than we are,” Mikk said, sniffing at Teb’s face. “It’s just a child—a boy child.”
“Is it alive?”
They put their noses to Teb’s nose and could feel his breath. Teb groaned again.
It took the two otters some time to decide what to do. Because the boy was small, he appealed to them more than an adult; they would likely have left an adult human to die. This boy was no older than they, and he was in need.
“They’ll trample him,” Mikk growled as a skirmish of fighting closed in on them. “Drag him farther into the marsh.”
They did. “What now?” Charkky said. “We can’t leave him. We’ll have to take him home. But how? He’s too sick ever to swim.”
“Human boys can’t swim much anyway. We—we’ll have to make a raft.”
“Like a fish raft for the winter catch,” said Charkky.
“Exactly.”
Soon Charkky was chewing off great hanks of cord grass and braiding them into twine, while Mikk searched for driftwood logs along the shore, where they had dragged Tebriel. The battle moved off to the north, away from them, so the otters worked with less frenzy. They dragged three good logs together and laced them tight, then pulled the raft into the surf, dragging Teb on board before it was quite floating, then pulling the whole heavy mass out into the waves. The journey that followed nearly killed Teb, for he almost drowned in the cold seas that lapped over him, choking him again and again. The otters had to stop pulling and pushing the raft each time and hold his head up until he could breathe. The salt water started his wounds bleeding harder, and stung fiercely.
“The blood will attract sharks and killer fish,” said Mikk. “Maybe we should have left him.”
“He’d have died,” said Charkky.
“If you have any ideas about how to explain bringing a human home to the island, I’d like to hear them.”
“It was your idea, too.”
“I’m having second thoughts, is all.”
“We’ll just have to tell Thakkur the truth,” Charkky said, shaking spray from his whiskers. “There’s nothing else one can do, with Thakkur.”
When Teb woke again, confused and frightened to find himself adrift in the sea, Charkky dove for sea urchins and opened them for him. Then, seeing the boy was too sick to eat properly, he shelled the urchins and chewed them, then spat them into Teb’s mouth. Teb was too weak to resist, and the rich protein seemed to give him strength.
By late afternoon they had worked their way around the coast past the Bay of Fear, and past Cape Bay, into the deep shelter of the Bay of Ottra, and to the wetlands that marked the Rushmarsh Colony. The two otters had cousins and all manner of relatives here. They were surrounded at once by a crowd of inquisitive otters chittering and staring and shouting questions, otters so thick in the water around the raft that Teb could have walked to shore on their heads.
“What is it?” shouted a curious young otter, splashing up to the raft.
“It’s a human,” Mikk said shortly, scowling at him.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“It’s not an it. It’s a he. He’s hurt; we’re taking him home to Nightpool.”
An old otter, heavily whiskered and portly, came to float on his back near the raft, ogling Teb. “They won’t let you keep him. The council won’t allow such a thing.”
“That’s silly,” said Mikk. “Why wouldn’t they? Mitta can doctor him, she—”
“It’s no good having a human at Nightpool. Having a human know its secrets. You should know better, young Mikk.”
“He’s only young, like us. He wouldn’t—”
“So much the more reason. Ekkthurian will never allow it.”
“Ekkthurian is only one of the council, and he is not the leader,” Mikkian said. “Thakkur won’t turn him away.” But he wondered if he was right. He wondered what Thakkur would say.
And he wondered if he dared to suggest they spend the night in Rushmarsh. They could not make it home before dark, and he didn’t much like the thought of traveling with the smell of blood from the boy’s leg all around them, in waters where sharks were known to swim. He saw the Rushmarsh leader swimming out toward them, his pale tan head clearly visible among the crowds of darker, teeming otters.
“Feskken will let him spend the night here,” Mikk said boldly.
“He never will,” said the portly otter. “Never.”
Chapter 8
The dragons’ mating dance grew frenzied; they raced between tall white clouds, banked and leaped through Tirror’s winds, while below them the seas spun away, scattered with strings of small island continents like emerald beads upon the indigo water. The winds twisted and changed direction, driven by the dragons themselves, caught in raging and time-honored passion.
At first, Dawncloud wanted to turn back to Tebriel, but her breeding cycle was very close. It was the only time the eggs could be made fertile, and this breeding was so important, for she and the male might be the last singing dragons in all of Tirror. She knew she had loosed Tebriel—she had seen him run. She began to sense at last, with the feel of rightness that sometimes came to her, that the boy was safe, that there was someone to keep him now, tenderly feed and warm him. Such a little while more, in the dragon’s time sense, that the child need be tended and watched over.
The male bellowed to shake the peaks and breathed lightning and flame into the sky, so the winds grew searing hot and beat around the twining two with gale force. The male was old; this would be his last breeding. He was heavier and much larger than she, and of rougher build, but he was as graceful as a male can be in the mating dance. When Dawncloud’s inner clock was sure, she rose directly into the sunset and he followed her, and they danced the final rituals, then bred high above Tirror in the orange-stained sky.
The old male died soon after breeding. The female mourned him briefly, then left him on the stony ridge. She moved high above clouds, south toward Lair Island, toward the peak on which she herself had been hatched, toward that jutting tangle of bare mountains that rises between Dubla and Fendreth-Teching. She sensed other creatures there, but they would soon be gone, for she would allow no threat to her eggs.