three

Li Ton sometimes liked to sit and count his losses. It helped to keep his purpose sharp; it gave a focus to his abiding anger, which might have whittled him down into a sour madness else. It might have let him die as he had lately lived, as a freeboot pirate, scum. Which would have been the last and almost the worst of his losses, if he had let that happen. He had lost so much already; he could not, he dared not lose his immaculate revenge.

HE HAD BEEN a boy, and hopeful, and lost that. Well, but so did most men. Hope was not a likely survivor in the world.

HE HAD BEEN a good soldier, an officer, and respected by his men. He had lost that. On his ship he ruled by fear largely and bribery a little, as any pirate captain must. He called it discipline, of course. Soldiers too lived under discipline, which was not easy—but a soldier can always run away. For the most part, his had not. Even as a young man he had valued that respect, and lost it.

HE HAD BEEN a man of rank, high rank, known and trusted at the court. He had lost that. Any general’s reputation shines only as brightly as his last battle, of course; any general can lose a battle for any number of reasons that are not his fault. Li Ton had lost an impossible battle and depended, perhaps gambled, on the emperor’s justice when he returned to the Hidden City.

He had lost.

HE HAD BEEN a man, a married man, a father; he had been a strong man, a whole man in his pride, marked only by the due scars of his service to the empire.

He had lost it all.

He had seen his wife and women executed, his children too.

His own skin he had seen emblazoned, treachery and cowardice writ large upon him, great black block characters tattooed with heavy needles while he struggled in his chains.

He had seen his manhood cut away, not by the skilled blades of the imperial castrators but the brute hack of an executioner. He might have died; he might have wished to die.

HE HAD lost that chance, and lost his country too: sent into exile, which meant a low and sordid death on some remote coast, broken and despairing and forgotten.

HE HAD LOST his name.

HE HAD found … no, he had been found by Jorgan and raised up into something again, some semblance of a man who mattered. He had worked, and fought, and won himself a ship and a crew, a way to live, eventually a path to vengeance.

And now, apparently, he had lost all that. Jorgan was dead, Li Ton’s ship was in the charge of the emperor’s forces, his last unexpected chance to influence the way of the world seemed to be gone. Sunk, with the rebels’ fleet.

ALSO, HE was an aging man and he had seen a great many terrible and wonderful things; many of them he simply didn’t remember anymore. It was his own life, and he was losing the record of it.

THIS, THOUGH. This he was determined not to lose: the day the dragon came.

She might have been the death of his last hope, but she was a great and an appalling mystery, and he had stood in the stench of her and looked into her eye, and he would not lose that. No.

THE BOY Han had cut his own chains, willfully, just when Li Ton was hopeful that he could control the dragon. Because Li Ton was hopeful, therefore the boy had cut the chains.

He should have died for that. Li Ton had lost count of the number of times that boy should have died and had not. At Li Ton’s own hands, most often. He was not a man who spared the weak or the guilty or the treacherous, and yet, for this boy he held his hand again and again.

Apparently, he was not alone.

They were on the Forge, Han had cut his chains, the dragon was free. There was nothing they could do but watch. She was like an emperor herself and all this petty world her court, the air her throne because it held her up; the sea her proper queendom because she soared above it. Until she dived, when all things were inverted: the sea her throne and the air her queendom, because she soared beneath it. Mortal man clung to that transitory skin between and was eaten, from above or beneath; or was broken, hurled from air to water; or was coldly left to perish in the desert vastness of the sea.

Oh, she was captivating: rapture in her liberty, beauty in her skin, deadly in her focus. Ferocity in her intent. She destroyed that fleet as Li Ton might have done himself, if he had chosen to, if he had been a dragon; and then—he thought—she came to destroy Han.

Li Ton took his first steps back down the path as soon as he realized that she was coming here. He thought they’d all be following him, tumbling down the slope in a desperate unavailing flight; but Han croaked at them—not in his usual voice, barely in a voice at all—“Tien, all of you, stay close.”

“I’m not leaving you.” That was the girl, Tien. “You come too. Come now …”

“No. Why run, where would you go? Stay close.”

The dragon swooped low over the islet and Han was utterly motionless then, utterly straining. They were wrestling together, the dragon and the boy, on some ground that Li Ton could neither see nor reach.

Li Ton struggled only to stay upright. She was a dragon; it seemed as impossible to stand as it was impossible to run. What could any mortal doings matter, in the face of this? Her face?

He felt the gaze of her, impersonal and exacting. She looked at him, assessed him, dismissed him. Her frenzy seemed to be over, but he thought she would eat him regardless. Sooner or later. She was here for Han; the rest of them were incidental.

His doom, their collective doom came spiraling slowly down from her sky-throne to settle on the peak. Massive and dreadful, too dreadfully close. One great foot landed squarely on the furnace, where wood and charcoal still glowed furiously hot; she didn’t seem to notice.

She was of a size to blot out the sun, a temple on a mountaintop. She drew awe from them, as a temple might, and demanded terror as a god might, visiting a temple. If those two together were not worship, Li Ton thought they came sufficiently close.

Worship, of course, was not sufficient for her. Not today.

She overhung them, menacing and beautiful. Unnameable colors shifted on her scales in sunlight, in the deep green dark of her eyes. Those eyes were captivating, in the worst way; a man could lose himself in that gaze. Briefly.

Her tail broke trees on the forest slope. He could hear their snapping, and the sudden flurried protest of the birds. That made him realize how quiet the world was, else. The fire had been a raucous thing, hissing and crackling; with that stamped out, he could hear his own tense breathing, the girl’s too and her uncle’s. The dragon that was so much larger, that could contain them all within the hollow of her armpit, he couldn’t hear her breath at all. Perhaps she didn’t breathe. What would an immortal need with air?

No matter. Her mouth held a more immediate interest now. What she would need with food was a question too, but that didn’t stop her swallowing men.

She reached her long neck down and the reek of her overswept them all, sea sludge and salt decay. He might have gagged if he hadn’t been so in thrall to the moment, and to her.

Her mouth opened. Her gape was vivid and immense. She had colors in her throat if you could see that far, if you could look past the teeth and tongue. Courage is often pretense; it was still possible to pretend—if only to himself—that he was a courageous man, when in truth he was only at the limits of what he could feel.

It wasn’t him she reached for, yet. Perhaps that made it easier.

He was impressed with Han, a little, because the boy still didn’t move. He was still fighting her, apparently. Or else he had lost all control, all contact with his body. Perhaps he only wanted her to get on with it, one quick lunge, one snap and gone …

SHE DID lunge, she did snap.

SHE MISSED him.

Her head slammed forward like a snake in its certainty, and slid aside like a drunk man’s fist that cannot find its aim.

She reared back, hissing, very like a snake; and the boy stood before her, very small, and said, “Don’t. Not that. I think you’ve eaten me already, as much as matters.”

The dragon must have disagreed. She tried again and missed again, and was seemingly as baffled as Li Ton. The boy apparently had some control over her, some access to her mind, even with the chains cut. That was strange—but he did still wear the iron cuffs and collar, even if the links hung loose that used to bind them all together. All that iron was etched with characters of control. They must still hold some measure of potency. And the boy was his, and—

No. The boy was not his. If anything, they were all the dragon’s.

He thought they were talking, the dragon and the boy; he could hear it in the silence between them, in the stillness.

He thought perhaps he could hear a promise of safety, for this little time at least, in the slow iron creaking of the dragon’s skin as she settled more heavily onto the rock, like a creature intending not after all to slay and go. He had attended enough parleys in the field, he could tell when the immediate threat went away and the serious talking began.

How do you talk to, how do you parley with a dragon? Li Ton couldn’t imagine what was happening in the boy’s head, or in hers.

Slowly, boldly, Li Ton took one step back up the path, and then another. He was ashamed now to be the one farthest from the dragon. It had been the wise move, even the strong move in its moment; now it was wrong.

They were all exhausted. The boy was in the worst case, but there was nothing he could do for the boy just now. The girl and the doctor were both of them unused to hard labor, and to the fear and shock of war. He had been made for it, once. Then he was unmade, unmanned, in the emperor’s punishment rooms; then he had been made again. He had laid muscle over damage, mind over muscle. He could work himself until he fell, and he very seldom fell.

The doctor was squatting on his haunches like a man at his uttermost limit, very close to falling. The girl was torn between caring for her uncle and running to the boy. While Li Ton would have claimed command anyway, he did think that he had earned it, if only by being stronger. Or more experienced, or right. He wouldn’t say wiser, even now, but he did think he was right.

He went to them, to the doctor largely, and said, “Can you stand?”

To nobody’s surprise, it was the girl who answered. “Of course he can stand, if he needs to,” meaning I will help him if you give me reason, meaning I would rather stay here, meaning I would rather be closer to Han. All too obviously she expected him to order them away, back to the boat if they could get there, if the dragon would let them go.

Even here, in a dragon’s dreadful shadow, he found a hint of pleasure in surprising her. “I think we should go closer to Han. Stay close, as he said. I thought it was boy’s talk, bravado; but look at her,” as though either of them, any of them was doing anything else. “She came to kill, to kill him, and she couldn’t do it. Now they’re … negotiating. I think. I think he’s inside her head. We need to stay inside his head, in his sight,” where he would—perhaps—hold them in the compass of his will. So long as he chose to. The boy had no reason to love Li Ton; which meant that Li Ton had a fine reason to stay as close as possible, within a dragon’s swallow of Tien.

The doctor seemed beyond words, beyond understanding. The night’s labors or the morning’s dragon or both together had drained him entirely. He offered no resistance, no effort either as they raised him to his feet and took him forward, step by slow shuffling step.

Old or young, vigorous or exhausted, it would be hard to do anything but shuffle into that shadow, under that glare. It was Han she watched, but she was aware of them all; each of them stood separately under her claw, however close they clung. He could see her claws, iron-gray blades carving great gouges in the rock of the Forge. He thought he could feel the stone groaning under the weight of her. He was astonished that his own bones could hold up under the weight of her awareness. How Han could survive her full attention, let alone resist it, struggle with her, deflect her purposes …

Well. It defeated him, but he could accept that. He could accept this, the need to squat in the boy’s lee. If any of them survived this it would be her choice, inhuman and immeasurable—unless it was the boy’s.

Han turned his head to find them, so suddenly it drew a gasp from Tien, a wary frown from Li Ton. Perhaps it was the dragon entirely in his head now, and working him? That was how it looked, entirely.

But he sounded more like Han the boy now, even giving orders: “Tien, all of you—go back to the boat. Tell the fisherman to take you away from here.”

“Where shall we go?” That was the doctor asking. Tien was bereft, and Li Ton had not asked any man for directions since he was the emperor’s general, since he was betrayed.

“It doesn’t matter. Taishu, or the mainland. Inland would be better.” Because the dragon is a creature of the sea, he meant, and I don’t know how much or how long I can control her. “Or there are other lands, beyond the empire. Li Ton will see you safe.” That was not a prediction, it was an instruction. The boy’s eyes were not the dragon’s, no, but they had something of that hammer-hard implacability. He had been weak before or frightened, hurt or overwhelmed. Now he was compelling.

“What about you?” Tien had found her voice, though it was thin and tremulous, as she was.

“I stay here.”

“I want to stay with you.”

“No,” he said, and there was no arguing with him. That was the deal, evidently: himself and the dragon to stay here on their own, until something was resolved. One way or another.

Li Ton could picture one way, which was the boy swallowed whole. He found it impossibly hard to picture any other. What, did Han imagine he could fly out of here on the dragon’s neck, ride her like a plaything, like a horse?

It almost seemed a shame to lose him now, but there was no challenging this. Even Tien realized; she only said, “How, how will you find us?” Meaning, of course, how will you find me?

“I’ll find you,” which was no answer at all, and yet it seemed to satisfy. Perhaps it meant the dragon will know, which was not a reassuring thought at all.

The dragon’s eyes moved to follow them, but he thought they were pushing now, wanting them gone. She might want them gone from the boy’s thoughts too, but he didn’t think she could have that. Tien was like a splinter in the boy’s eye, forever sharp; and every time he looked at his hands, Han must remember Li Ton. Even now, the boy’s fingers were rubbing at the raw scar where his thumb had been.

Jorgan had tossed it into the forge-fire, Li Ton remembered. Any last lingering ash of it, any nub of bone would stand under the dragon’s foot now. That seemed … appropriate.