Far out in the sea the disturbance made a geyser. Dawncloud leaped up through foam; then a dragonling rose beside her. Another, another, until four dragonlings were swimming back toward the drowned city. Behind them floated the body of the hydrus, half submerged. The fifth dragonling did not appear. Beside Teb’s chimney, Dawncloud crashed up out of the water screaming her pain and her loss for the one dragonling, the one left behind in the jaws of the hydrus, where they floated, dying together. Teb felt Dawncloud’s grief as his own, felt Seastrider’s weeping as the pale dragonling came to the chimney and wrapped herself around it and laid her head up along his body.
With the sun high overhead they clung so to the ruined chimney, the young dragon and her bard. And then at last Seastrider stirred, put away her grief, and began to study Teb.
Chapter 19
Teb stared into Seastrider’s eyes and felt complete. He marveled at how intricately her scales were woven along her neck and back and along the slim reptilian legs she wrapped around the chimney, scales that could have been crafted of diamonds and of pearls. Her face was slim, her nostrils flared, her two horns white as sunstruck snow, and her cheek felt warm and cool all at once. His mind filled with her songs, and now, together, they made the team for which both had been born. They looked at each other for a long time. Above the sea in the deep afternoon light, Dawncloud circled, keening her agony of mourning, as only a dragon can, for her lost child. The sea rang with her misery, the sunken city absorbed her cry and held it as it held the memory of ages. Moonsong was dead, sleek and beautiful and dear, and not even grown to the full fierce power she should have known, would never know.
It was much later that Dawncloud dropped down out of the sky to dive again among the ruined walls, searching. Teb could see her forcing between stone buildings and down narrow, drowned alleyways, her wings folded close to her body, her white undulating shape curling among watery broken stone and through water shadow, touched by light from the dropping sun. What drew her, now that the hydrus was dead?
“She seeks something,” said Seastrider, watching her with a puzzled cock of her head. “Perhaps some old memory, a secret from the ancient city. Perhaps something else.” She kneaded her claws into the chimney like a great cat.
They watched Dawncloud slip along the top of a broken wall, to lie looking down into a high attic room, then saw her swerve down into it and disappear. “Come on my back,” said Seastrider.
“Can you carry me? You are only young yet.”
“Come on my back.”
Teb climbed astride as he would mount a pony, and she lifted so fast into the sky she nearly took his breath. He sat clinging between her wings, caught in wonder as the sea fled below, the outlines of the drowned city clear now—the upper and middle baileys and the barbican, the lower and greater halls, the keeping gate and the guard tower all laid out, and the streets surrounding it, the rooftops and the lines of the three old roads leading away. Then suddenly Seastrider dove. Down and down. She came to rest on the edge of a broken wall to look down into the ancient chamber where Dawncloud lay curled upon the stone floor, her head resting on the oak bed. The chamber, quite dry, was furnished. Teb stared down at it with shock: bed and two chairs and even a rug on the floor, its corner protruding underneath Dawncloud’s claws. How could a room remain furnished, as if someone had just left it, after hundreds of years of rain and wind and the dampness of the sea? Why hadn’t it decayed, like the rest of the city?
There were even blankets on the bed, a cookpot on the hearth, and the charred remains of a fire.
Teb walked along the top of the thick wall, looking down. Dawncloud lay quite still, as if caught in some inner dream, her shoulder against a small cupboard that stood beside the hearth, its door ajar, a touch of red showing inside. It was as he rounded the corner that he saw, down in the water outside the building, the nose of a boat. He moved along the wall until he could look down on its deck, the deck of a small sailing boat.
Her sails had been carefully reefed, but were dark with mold. Her sides were covered with barnacles, but still he could see the bright paint in streaks on her deck and knew she had not sat here for hundreds of years. A few years, maybe. He glanced across at Seastrider perched on the wall watching him, and knew she touched his thoughts. Then he climbed down into the chamber, beside Dawncloud.
He touched the blanket beneath her huge head and ran his hand along her muzzle. He looked around the room, and knew someone had lived here, come here in the little boat to this drowned place. But why? Then he approached the cupboard, caught by the flash of red.
He pulled the door open.
Two gowns hung there. One was red, flame red, with braid around the throat in three rows, and buttons in the shape of scallop shells. He could see his mother in it quite clearly. It had been his favorite dress.
She had been in this room. She had lived in this room.
But when?
She had never been away from them until she left them that last time. She had worn the dress just before she went away.
Was it here she came, then? But why?
And returned to the Bay of Dubla only to drown there? His mind seemed frozen, unable to think clearly.
If she came here in the boat, how did she go away without it?
He stood looking at the dress and at the little room with its blanketed bed and two chairs and the cupboard. In a shelf below the mantel was a blue crock, a small paring knife, and a green plate, all of them familiar, all of them from the palace. The knife handle made of wrapped cord soaked with resin, as old Pakkna always fashioned his knives.
Dawncloud was watching him now, and he knew that she, too, saw his thoughts. All five dragons were watching him, the four young draped along the tops of the walls. He looked at his mother’s dress and could see her wearing it before the red flowers of the flame tree.
“Where did she go?” he whispered. “What happened to my mother? She didn’t drown in the Bay of Dubla. Where is she?”
Then he sensed Dawncloud’s own eagerness and confusion. He sensed her desire, and then visions began to touch him, and he knew, all in a moment, how Dawncloud had lost her bard to murder, how she had slept away her misery in Tendreth Slew, then awakened to seek out a mate.
“But now another bard speaks to me, Tebriel. Somewhere she lives, she who lost her dragon even before my own agony. Somewhere Meriden lives.”
“She . . . is a bard?” Teb said hoarsely, hardly believing it. But knowing it was so, and wondering he hadn’t guessed before. Her songs, her strength, the way she seemed drawn away sometimes, searching. “She is alive,” he cried, caught in wonder. “But where? Where?”
“She is alive, she who turned from the skies in her own misery, and then was drawn back again.” Dawncloud reared tall above the broken walls and stared up at the sky and out to sea. Then she writhed her great body down again, into the chamber.
“There is a door in this city, Tebriel. I don’t know where, but I will find it. A door that enters, by spells, into the far Castle of Doors. And from that castle, one can enter anywhere, into any world. She is someplace there. Meriden has gone through one of those doors. And I will follow her.”
“My mother is alive,” he said. “Why did she go? Why would she leave us?”
“She went,” Dawncloud said, her voice ringing, “to a mission for all of Tirror. She went hoping to return. Do you not see her boat is still here? She would have sunk it otherwise. She went to give of herself in the saving of Tirror. She went to seek the dragon she thought did not exist anymore on Tirror. And to seek the source of the dark, too, and to learn, if she could learn, how to defeat the dark.”