Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

“Only the mothers know. I do not.”

Kemal held open the door to allow a woman to carry in a tea tray. As she set down the tray on a worktable and poured, I recognized her. She had been the housekeeper for the dying man we had stumbled on while escaping from the Barry household, an old man who had exuded heat, sheltered loyal hounds, and asked Bee for a kiss. Now she was working for the headmaster.

“You may go, Maestra Lian. Kemal, you may also leave us. I will ring if I need you.” When the door had closed, the headmaster took a sip of tea. “For a very long time now our numbers have suffered, and we have become few. We have come to expect at best three hatchlings to survive from a mating swim. Two days ago, on the equinox, eleven hatchlings swam ashore from the nest you unearthed, Beatrice. They were all brought safely to the house. Quite astonishing, and a reason for us to hope our numbers may increase.”

I thought of how many had been eaten and crushed in their race through the spirit world. Truly, few if any would have survived if Bee had not been there to shepherd them into the river.

“Why would they only be coming ashore now when it was so long ago that Cat and I dug them up?” Bee asked.

“While they are swimming in the Great Smoke, hatchlings cannot sense the mortal world. However, here in the mortal world, a male announces his readiness to crown by marking a river’s shore with a scent. That mark attracts any rivals who wish to challenge him. The scent is so strong that it penetrates the Great Smoke as well. Hatchlings follow it into the mortal world.”

“What does it mean to crown?” I asked, for I could not help but wonder if the word was a euphemism for mating.

With a frown, he glanced out the window as if to suggest I had been rude for asking.

We sat in an uncomfortable silence. I did not know what to say, and Bee did not speak.

“Can it be?” He sat forward abruptly. An unexpected grin brightened his expression, and he rose. “What rich bounty showers on us! Yet more arrive!”

He limped into the garden and down the lawn. Bee and I ran to the window.

A spout of water swirled up from the river like an unraveling thread pulled off the fraying hem of a piece of cloth. The water poured into the headmaster. His human shape changed. I suddenly understood that his human form was nothing more than an elaborate illusion. The body absorbed the water and grew into a glistening dragon, one with a mouth large enough that it could eat me in one gulp. The slippery texture of its black scales swallowed light. Its head had a whiskered muzzle, and a shimmering crest ran down the length of its spine, waving like grass in the wind. Its body tapered into a flat tail more like a fish’s than a bird’s. Yet despite the creature’s perilous aspect and daunting size, it waddled in a remarkably ungainly way down the sloping ground.

A roil of movement stirred the river. Creatures surfaced.

“They’re mine!” Bee’s face had the shine of a mother’s smile. “Don’t you recognize them?”

She ran outside.

I halted in revulsion by the garden door. Eleven silvery-white eels the size of children humped up onto the shore, blowing and wiggling as they snuffled along the grassy bank. They were the ugliest things I had ever seen, except for their startling gem-like eyes. The dragon huffed a smoky breath that stopped them in their tracks and compelled their attention. Every pair of glowing eyes fixed on him.

A twelfth grub squirmed unremarked onto the shore farther down the bank, beyond a small wooden pier to which a rowboat was lashed. A hawk dove down to investigate its movement. The stray hatchling’s sapphire eyes tracked the hawk’s flight as the bird settled on the bare branch of a tree. The raptor and the grub studied each other. Then the hatchling lunged forward. In the time it took me to suck in a shocked breath, not sure who was going to devour whom, it changed.

As if the tide of a dragon’s dream swept its unformed body, it molted its ungainly larval form and rose as a large hawk, beating for the sky. The true hawk followed.

I dragged my gaze away from the birds to see the eleven hatchlings molting their ugly grub forms. They transformed into smaller versions of the scaled beast. The air around the headmaster shivered as if rippled by a blast of heat. The shining black body of the beast turned in on itself and became that of the man we knew, thankfully in his clothes. A brief circle of dense rain splashed around him, as if he were raining away the water he had earlier absorbed.

In a frenzy of imitation, the grubs also changed, although they did not change size.

Eleven youthful persons stood dripping wet and naked on the shoreline, with no thought for modesty. They had the size and features of innocent boys who are no longer children but not yet grown. They surged forward to crowd around Bee, touching her, patting her, sniffing her.

Maestra Lian came striding down the lawn. With brisk gestures and snapped words she herded them away from Bee and toward the house.

Bee ran to me, her face so opened by joy that she seemed ready to fly. “Did you see, Cat? They know I’m the one who hatched them!”

She glanced past me, and the brilliance of her gaze softened. I turned. Kemal stood in the garden door, watching the youths flock into the house. An expression of unimaginable grief seared his pale features.

“Maester Napata, I hope we have done nothing to disturb you,” said Bee in the same tone she might use to coax a wounded dog out of its hiding place.

He muttered, “What have you not done to disturb me?”

“Are you a dragon, too?” she asked, more lightly.

He flushed, glancing away, then took in a sharp breath and faced her. “This is the only body I have ever been able to wear. Since it is a man’s body, can I then call myself a dragon?”

Her frown usually presaged a scold, but she spoke in a mild voice. “If you hatched as these others did, out of a nest in the spirit world, then aren’t you a dragon regardless of what body you wear?”

“The others say I am too much of a weakling to change,” he muttered in a low, shamed voice.