one

Waking alone; standing and stretching alone, unwatched; stepping out of his rough shelter and still being alone. Going naked to the stream to wash, and then running all down its tumbling length until he plunged into a sea-pool at the bottom, shrieking like an idiot as the surf broke over his head just because there was nobody to see him, nobody to hear. Sometimes he could feel like king of the world. King of his life, his little world, this island.

He’d never been alone before, in any way that mattered. His family, his master Doshun, Li Ton and the crew of the Shalla—always there had been someone to overlook, to claim his time and assign his space and keep him under their control. Now here he was, marooned. No one actually knew for sure that he was here; only a handful could guess at it.

One man in the world, perhaps, could come to the Forge to see. And that man was in Li Ton’s hands now, where Han had been before him. Under the pirate’s eye, sailing the only boat the pirate had. The fisherman had greater worries than Han to occupy his mind.

Besides, Han didn’t need worrying over. He had this whole island, all the Forge to himself; he was doing well. King of the world.

AT FIRST he’d thought he would never manage on his own. When the dragon left him, he thought it was a death sentence, slow and cruel. A boy alone with a crippled hand on a rock of ghosts, an island of slaughtered monks—how could he live?

Obviously, he thought, he wasn’t meant to. She couldn’t kill him directly, but she could strand him here and let him die.

No, he had stranded himself, hadn’t he? He’d sent everyone else away, to save Tien. The dragon had only let it happen. Then she’d flown away and left him, and he would starve to death if he didn’t fling himself off a high cliff first, or die of simple solitude for being all alone.

That first hour, when he realized the truth of it—that she was unbelievably gone, and the boat was gone, and they were neither of them coming back—he had run madly down to the old broken jetty in case there was a miracle, a boat somehow that he could somehow use; and then back up to the peak again in case of another miracle, some distant sight of the fisherman coming back to rescue him, with Tien at his side.

And then through the monks’ old ruined settlement, calling pointlessly, screaming almost, because the monks were all still dead and their burned bones lay where he had scattered them.

Perhaps Tien had slipped away from the others, on their way back to the boat; perhaps she was in hiding somewhere on the island, waiting for him to find her?

Or perhaps the old fisherman had sent his boy to swim quietly back to shore and hole up until the dragon left, to be Han’s boon-companion in his exile?

Or perhaps he would find the monksmith’s ghost here, where they had burned his body. That should be frightening too, but what did Han have to fear from an old man’s shade, when he had stood in the dragon’s mind? He wasn’t brave, and all summer he had gone directly from one terror to another, again and again. Nothing could be more frightening than the dragon, though. Now that she had left him, he thought perhaps that nothing would ever frighten him again, because nothing could come close to matching her.

Except that he was frightened of being on his own, apparently. He would have welcomed the old man’s ghost, if only he could find it.

No ghost in the ash and ruin of the monks’ compound, only a sudden eruption, half a dozen black chickens battering the air with shrieks and wings and lifting dust as he stumbled through them where they scratched at the grass together.

He ran on, through the wild gardens and the steep tangle of trees behind, and came to a clifftop and didn’t jump, no, though he did almost go over anyway before he knew it was there. Grabbed at a creeper and saved himself right on the brink, and stood for a little with his heart pounding and the sweat cold on his skin and the fall in his eyes, the long plunge to the water and then farther, all the way to the bottom where her chains lay, where she had lain herself until he cut them …

… CHICKENS?

THE MONKS must have kept chickens, and fed them too. Not for weeks, being dead and so forth, but that didn’t matter much. The birds foraged for themselves, in the open and among the trees, but still lingered around the compound.

They wouldn’t let Han close enough to catch one, though he made a private diving idiot of himself in trying, again and again. Meantime they laid eggs, sometimes, that sometimes he could find; and he laid traps, each more intricate and hopeful than the last, as thoughts of spitted chicken blazed brighter and brighter in his head with every day that passed meatless. He could smell it, taste it, he could feel the grease of it on his fingers and the shreds between his teeth. Only not the warmth of it in his belly, because he couldn’t—quite—get it there.

He had the fire ready. The moment he’d realized that he might yet live after all, which was the moment after he hadn’t quite gone over the cliff-edge, he raced back up to the firetop and salvaged still-smoking charcoal from the crush of the dragon’s footprint. He’d kept it alive in a firepot since, fed it twigs and moss and more charcoal, blown it into constant sullen life, dull and red and waiting. Sometimes he thought his stomach was the same, that dull red burning ache of ever-present hunger.

Not that he was ever truly hungry, or no more so than he always had been. The monks’ gardens were full of greens and onions and garlic, long beans and curious roots, between the rampant overgrowth of summer weeds. In a few short days he’d learned to be a farmer. And he’d found their low stone storehouse, full of grain and dried fish. He made congee daily over a slow fire, and was probably as healthy and as well fed as he’d ever been; only that his belly ached and grumbled, waiting for the promised meat that he could never quite lay hand on. It wasn’t only chickens. There were other birds in the woods, and creatures that scuttled and slithered through the leaf mold, and any of them, all of them might have been edible, if only he could catch them.

He slept dry or dry enough, first in that same storehouse, then in a roomier shelter that he made for himself close by. He didn’t like to go into the old compound, because there were still bones mixed with the ash where someone had built an inadequate pyre and tried to burn the monks. Some of the bones were bound together by scorched dried flesh and tendons; the skulls still had skin of a sort. They were dreadful. He thought they stared at him, with their hollow eyes. He thought they screamed at him with their silent gaping twisted jaws, their blackened teeth; he knew they had good reason. He had been one with the men who killed them, and one again with those who scattered their remnants, searching the dead pyre for wood that would still burn. He hated both those memories, the one cold and the other fresh; his life had turned and turned again around those nights and the days that followed.

And now his life—which meant Tien, Li Ton, the dragon above all—had left him here, solitary at the last; and he had learned that he could live this way, doing no harm to anyone, having no effect. For a little while he had mattered in the world, and it had all been terrible. Now he was nothing: neglected, abandoned, alone. That was something to rejoice in, except that he missed Tien. She was safer without him, though, and so he should be happy.

And so he was happy, with no one making demands and no one to be responsible for. No one to watch him, laugh at him, worry over him. No one to see if he threw himself into the surge of the sea and only barely made it back to the rocky shore, no one to be scared or scolding. No one to rub his hair dry and push their fingers through it after, threatening to take a scratchy comb to the tangles. No one to share his tension as he snuck up to his latest chicken-trap and his disappointment when he found it empty, no one to be disappointed in him.

He did better, with no one else around. He did best alone, and he’d had to be marooned like this to learn it—

—EXCEPT, OF course, that he never was alone. Not quite. Any more than he was quite entirely here, marooned on the Forge.

SHE HAD left him, unbelievably, when he was exhausted and numbed and close to surrender, overwhelmed within the great spaces of her mind. She had lifted into the sky and left, not tried to eat him after all. She was gone: and yet she was a silence somewhere in the back of his head, a stone-cold voice that never spoke, a weight that dragged at his thoughts like a pebble thrown into a sheet of silk, distant and potent and inescapable.

HE? HE was a thread caught in her claws, a tangle of weed around her neck, a tickle in her throat, an irritant. A negligible presence, something she carried because she could not shift it, something she struggled to ignore.

REMOTELY, THEN, he did still fly with her. Some little part of him was awed, perpetually full of wonder.

Remotely, then, she did still stay with him. Some little part of him felt the impact of her constant regard and was in perpetual terror, perpetually trying to stand against it, not to be eaten from within.