Inys moved gingerly as much to keep from crushing the boy as from fear of reopening his own wounds, drawing himself up. He felt a moment’s pleasure at the hunter’s fear.
“You have a name, little one?” Inys asked.
“Amin,” the hunter said. His voice was deeper than his body suggested. Older. Perhaps Inys had misjudged him. “Amin of Emissir Large.”
“Your people are nearby?”
Amin pointed to the west. “Two nights. I am… I am no longer with them. I was cast out. I did something bad, and so I live here now.”
“An exile?”
“Yes,” Amin said, defiance in his voice. “I am.”
“What were your crimes?”
Amin’s eyes closed and he swayed for a moment before he opened them. They were full of tears. “Am I dreaming this? Are you my vision?”
“No. But if you seek a judge, I am it.”
The answer appeared to satisfy the Nightswarm. He sat and bowed his head. When he spoke, his voice was softer, but clear.
“There was a beast killing my people. I tracked it to its den, laid in wait, and I killed it. Myself. But when I brought it back to my people, my friend said he’d helped. He’d done nothing, but he said he’d been my equal and more than that. I… was angry. I didn’t mean for him to die. I would take it back if I could.”
Inys felt a rush of sorrow. “You cannot. None of us can. Not even me.”
The Nightswarm was quiet for a long moment. “You’re hurt?”
Inys glanced at himself. He’d been cut and healed and been cut again. The edges of his wings looked like ribbons and made his control muddy and rough. No, he wanted to say. This is nothing. No slave can hurt a dragon.
But what point was there in lying? He’d debased himself once by caring what they thought. By acting as though their good opinion of him mattered. Better to learn from his errors. Better not to repeat them. “I am.”
“I was a healer once. For my people, and for others. Perhaps…”
Inys shrugged and spread his wings. Do what you can.
Amin came close. Inys smelled the fear in him and heard it in the hummingbird-fast beating of his heart, but it did not affect the boy’s movement. The slave slowly cataloged the insults to Inys’s flesh, new and old both. The rips in his wings, unhealed since the battle in the south. The new burns and pricks still raw under the bandage of char. The long swaths where his scales had once been smooth as water and were now rougher than unfinished stone. An odd peace filled Inys. He recalled long baths of water and oil, tended by a dozen slaves. The gentle vibration of the rasp as teams of slaves sharpened his talons. It had been years ago, before the war started, when he’d lived in his cousin’s house and dreamed of besting his brothers… No, not years. More than that. More than centuries. Even Marcus Stormcrow had only addressed Inys’s body as a thing of convenience and need. To feel cared for, even in so small a way, called forth an ache deep in Inys’s breast.
And then the chanting began. Amin’s hands brushed his scales, his wings. A warmth radiated out from the slave’s fingertips, and Inys felt an energy answering it. As if his own ability to heal had been sleeping and now roused, the dragon felt the rough scales shift and realign. The torn fabric of his wings knit together. The aches of his newest wounds and his oldest scars eased, even where they had been for so long he’d forgotten the ache was there. But that was not the greatest gift the chanting carried.
Against all hope, the melody was one Inys knew. He didn’t realize it at first, lost in the bliss of his remaking, but soon he realized he was anticipating the song, expecting the rising trill, the falling cadence, the near resolution that danced away again. It was one he had heard from Asteril when they’d been young and fresh as a first flight. The syllables were foreign and unfamiliar, but when he turned his attention to it, there were even fragments of the old languages. Bits of human words that echoed and carried all unknowing the power of humanity’s masters, even in the masters’ absence.
And that, Inys thought, his heart lifting in joy, was more than a lone healer’s cantrip. That was the whole of the world. He had thought the dragons gone, apart from himself, but it was true only in one sense. Yes, he was, unless another sleeper lay buried in the world, the last to lay claim to his own whole body, his own complete mind. But like the shards from a broken glass, the dragons were still everywhere. In the bodies of the races they’d made, in the poems and magics that their cunning men passed down through the generations, in the slave paths they had imposed on the changing face of the earth.
He remembered a little thing his first teacher, Myrix, had shown him. A sheet of crystal with a moment’s light captured within it, so that the paths of it shaped any new raw light into the form of it. As the surface of a pond alive with ripples and then suddenly frozen held the pattern of all the cooperating and annihilating waves, even a sliver of the crystal was formed of all that the full stone knew. With a sense of comprehension deeper than love, Inys saw that the world was the same way.
The shards of the dragons were in the laws that humans enforced upon each other. In the shapes of their bodies and the functions of their minds. The way their cities grew and the melodies of their songs. To bring the dragons forth again into the world wouldn’t be an act of creation, but of reassembly. He shuddered with pleasure. And with hope.
The chanting stopped. Amin stepped back. How long it had been, Inys couldn’t say, only the sun was in the sky now, pricking at the Nightswarm boy’s too-large eyes. Amin’s skin was covered in a sheen of sour-smelling sweat, and he trembled. His heart was calm, though. The fear was gone.
Inys took stock, and was pleased. Even with the char fallen away, his wounds no longer bled. The scars of his old battles had faded or vanished away. Even the tatters and holes of his wings had been repaired, the membrane thinner where it had ripped, but whole again. When he stood and stretched his wings out, his bones didn’t ache. He was astonished at how much of himself the slave had offered up.
Inys folded himself down to consider the boy. The Nightswarm blinked and made the curious gesture again. This time it seemed less the motion of a bird and more that of a dragon’s wings.
“I am on a desperate journey,” Inys said. “I will remake my kind and redeem my errors, but the path I seek is long and terrible. You have already done me great good. Greater even than you know. I name you Amin Stormcrow, first among my servants and destined to command all those who follow after, three upon three upon three.”
The boy fell to his knees. “I… I am yours,” he said.
“Swear to me now that you will never act against me. That you will never betray me.”
“I swear I will never betray you, higher-than-mothers. What you wish, I shall wish. Now and always.”
Inys shifted back a degree. He sensed no duplicity in the boy’s words, but neither had he in Marcus Stormcrow or the half-breed banker girl. Better to learn from his errors. Better not to repeat them.
“I don’t believe you,” Inys said, and killed him.
The Nightswarm’s blood had a strange, almost peppery taste, and his flesh was tough. Inys ate until his belly was full, then launched into the wide, open air, testing his newly-healed wings and leaving the rest of the body behind for the flies and jungle scavengers. Within the hour, he found the coast—huge waves breaking on a beach of perfect white sand. He landed in the high surf gently, delicately, and washed the last of the boy’s blood from his scales. Then, for a time, he lay on the sand-strewn beach, his neck stretched out. The sun warmed him and the sound of the water lulled him until, half dreaming, he felt he could hear a choir of dragons, their voices raised in song, in among the waves.