Chapter 178: A Dragon Falls

The sea opened up like a mouth, and Wren saw its teeth.

They weren’t teeth. They were hands. A thousand pale, boneless arms rose out of the black water beneath her, each as thick as a ship’s mast, each as white as bread dough, and each one ended in a smooth, soft, wet little pit pressed into the tip. A thumbprint. Hundreds of them, opening and closing like hungry baby birds.

"Up!" Wren screamed. "*Nox, up!*"

*I cannot,* the dragon rumbled. *The air above is not empty. I told you.*

She understood what he meant a second later. The sky over the island had a *ceiling.* It was invisible, but she could feel it, like pressure on her eardrums, a heavy, listening weight pressing down on everything that tried to rise. Nox had flown straight into it three times already, and each time something had *clamped* on his wings and dragged him down.

*What rises is taken,* Nox said grimly. *What sinks is taken. There is a narrow road between. I am sorry I could not find it sooner.*

The arms struck.

Wren threw herself flat along the dragon’s neck as the first one whipped past her head with a sound like a tearing sail. Nox rolled, a huge, graceful, desperate twist that nearly threw her from his back. A second arm lashed up from below. He breathed out.

Fire.

It was the red-black dragonfire that had once burned a hundred men in the governor’s courtyard, and it roared out of his throat in a spear of flame forty feet long. The arm shrieked, a high, bubbling, inhuman wail, and recoiled, trailing smoke. The thumbprint at its tip curled up like paper.

"*Again!*"

He breathed again. A second arm withdrew. A third. For a few glorious heartbeats the whole sea seemed to flinch, and Wren felt a savage, shaky joy rising in her chest.

Then the water *boiled,* and the god came up.

---

It had no face.

That was what Wren would remember. It was a mountain of white flesh the size of a village, heaving up out of the black sea in a rolling, shuddering tide, and it had no eyes, no mouth, no head. Only arms. A forest of them, twisting and grasping and waving, and in the center of that hideous garden, where a face should have been, a single vast thumbprint, round and smooth as the moon.

*The Shore,* Nox whispered, and his voice shook for the first time in all the years she had known him. *The Hunger Shore. It is the same god. The sand and the sea. It is all one body.*

"Can you burn it?"

*Not all.*

"Can you burn *enough?*"

*I do not know.*

An arm caught his left wing.

It happened too fast to scream. One moment the wing was beating, huge and dark and strong, and the next it was wrapped in a coil of pale flesh, and Wren heard the sound of it, a wet, splintering *crack* that she felt in her own back. Nox bellowed. Blood fountained from the torn membrane in long red ribbons, spattering her face, hot as soup.

"*Nox!*"

*Cut it!*

She did the only thing she could think of. She flung herself down his shoulder with all four of her black wings spread, and she *cut.* Feathers flew from her back like thrown knives, dark and gleaming, every one edged in shadow, and they sliced through the white arm in a single spiraling blow. The severed end fell away, writhing. The wing came free.

It hung from his body at a terrible angle. He kept flapping it anyway.

*It is broken,* Nox said, very calmly. *I will not be able to hold the road. We are going to fall.*

"I’ll *carry* you!"

*You cannot.* A rumbling, rueful chuckle. *You are small, my girl. I have always been proud of how small you are.*

"Don’t you *dare* do this!"

*Wren.*

Something in his voice stopped her cold.

*Listen to me. When I fall, I will fall on the beach. I will be hurt. You must not stay with me.* A shuddering breath. *You must find the boy. It is why you came.*

"I’m not leaving you."

*You are not my rider.* The huge eye swung round and regarded her, slit-pupiled, ancient, black as a drowned well. *You never were. You are the little girl who dragged me out of a burning stable and told me not to be afraid. I have been afraid of nothing since.*

"Nox—"

*Hold on.*

The arms closed.

---

They fell.

A hundred feet of dark, screaming air. Wren clung to the great scaled neck with both fists and all four wings wrapped tight around her, and the wind tore the breath from her lungs. The island rushed up at them, a black wall of cliffs and a pale strip of sand, and below that, a vast and silent beach, grey as ash under the stars.

Nox spread his one good wing and *turned.* He took the full impact of the fall on his belly.

She felt the whole world explode.

Sand flew up in a rolling wave. The dragon slid, plowing a furrow a hundred yards long through the dunes, and Wren was thrown clear, tumbling head over heels until she hit the sand on her back and lay there staring at the stars, every inch of her body singing with pain.

*Wren.*

The voice was faint.

She rolled over. Nox lay thirty feet away in a long trench of churned sand, one wing crumpled beneath him, one eye open, a thin dark stream of blood running from his mouth. He was still breathing. He was *still breathing.* She crawled toward him on her hands and knees, sobbing.

"Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead. Don’t you dare—"

*I am not dead.* A wheeze of ancient amusement. *Merely impressed by my own landing.*

She laughed. It came out as a hiccup. She put her face against his enormous, warm, rough cheek, and he lay there, and the stars wheeled overhead, and for one tiny moment the world was safe.

For a moment, she felt it. Faint and far away and so familiar it hurt, a tiny, warm pulse in her chest where the link lived, like a hand squeezing hers through a wall. *Alive,* it whispered. *Alive. Alive.*

She pressed her palm against it and wept.

*Wren,* Nox murmured. *Do not stand.*

"What?"

*I hear the sand. It is listening.* His eye, very slowly, rolled toward the dunes. *Do not stand up. Do not stand, whatever you do.*

She didn’t understand.

She *would,* later. She would understand that a dragon who has lived a thousand years knows things a girl does not. That he had read the stories of the Hunger Shore in the minds of the sailors who feared it. That he had known, in the instant before they fell, what waited on the dry grey sand.

But Wren had never been taught that rule.

She had been taught that her dragon was hurt. She had been taught that her family was somewhere on this island, alone, in the dark, and she had flown through a sea of arms to reach him. She had been taught never to lie down in front of an enemy.

She pushed herself up onto her hands, and then her knees.

And then, slowly, with blood in her mouth and tears on her face, Wren *stood.*

The sand around her feet began to ripple.

---

I saw it from the ridge.

We’d been climbing for a quarter of an hour, a ragged line of survivors winding down the north slope in the dark, Kaelen carrying Tamsin and Dunstan carrying Emmet, when a bright, burning streak tore across the sky and plunged toward the shore. It fell like a star. It hit with a sound that rolled across the island like thunder.

*Valerian,* Aurelix whispered. *That was Nox.*

"I know."

*That was Nox, and the beach is the* Hunger Shore.

"I *know.*"

"Who’s Nox?" Kaelen panted, skidding down the slope beside me with Tamsin over her shoulder.

"A dragon. And the girl who rides him."

"Your friend?"

"The one who crosses oceans for me." My voice came out strange and raw. "Without being asked. Without a plan. Without ever once checking whether I wanted her to."

I don’t know what Kaelen saw on my face. She didn’t say another word. She only shifted Tamsin’s weight and ran faster.

I was down the slope in great sliding leaps, with the girl clinging to my neck, and I heard her small voice at my ear saying, "I’ll carry fire, Father, if you need it," and I didn’t have time to wonder what she meant. The only thought in my head was a single, black, horrified word that I couldn’t say out loud.

*Stand.*

*The beach hunts what stands.*

And somewhere out on that grey sand, in the starlight, a girl with four black wings had just gotten to her feet.