Page 21 of Add To Hoard

I stand in the corridor and do not call after him, because there is nothing to call after him with, that would improve the situation.

I do not sleep.

I sit at the table with nothing in front of me, the west-facing window showing me the dark of the island below and the darker dark of the sea beyond it. The Spire is quiet at this hour. The night watch runs its rotations outside and the council hall is empty and the corridors have the specific silence of a large stone building in the small hours when the stone itself has had time to cool.

I have sat in this room through more nights than I can count with any accuracy. The first years after the wars I sat here because sleep was a place where the losses were waiting and I preferred the cold certainty of the room to whatever the dark brought when my guard was down. Then it became habit. Then it became simply what I do, the way certain things calcify over centuries into fact. I sit at that window at night and the island runs beneath me and the barriers hold and the clan sleeps and everything I built out of the wreckage of the wars continues.

I think about Aevyn and the no and the specific texture of standing opposite a position that will not yield regardless of what you bring to bear, and I think about a woman at the far end of my island, on a beach I have not visited in forty years, who has the same quality in her bones, the same absolute quality of a woman who has decided and is not revisiting it, and the cost of the last time I pushed against that quality instead of —

Instead of what.

I do not finish the thought.

I watch the window until the dark begins to thin at the eastern edge of the sky, which on this island happens slowly, the permanent cloud cover at the peak diffusing the dawn into something gradual rather than sudden. Then I stand and put on my coat and go down through the Spire toward the western forest.

I tell myself I am checking on progress.

I have made an arrangement and I am a dragon who maintains my arrangements and checking on progress at first light of the first day is entirely consistent with that.

The trees close around me as I descend toward the coast, black-barked and dense, and somewhere ahead the sea is working at the shore with its patient industry, and somewhere on the beach a small fire may or may not still be burning, and I walk toward it with the survey logs behind me and Aevyn’s name settling back into the place where I keep it, and the particular weight of a coat I have been wearing so long I have forgotten it is not my own skin.

I do not walk faster.

I do not need to walk faster. I simply arrive sooner than I intended.

11

NERINA

Up before the light.

Not because I slept well, the ground has not improved as a sleeping surface and the fire needed feeding twice in the night and something in the upper canopy of the treeline made a sound at the third hour that I have decided not to categorize, but because the list I made yesterday is long and three days is not, and I have never in my life solved a problem by waiting for it to become more convenient.

I start with the overhang.

The crack in the basalt face is worse in full daylight than it looked yesterday. Standard result of looking at structural problems in proper light. They are always worse. The fault line runs deeper than I thought, the separation at the top wider by a finger’s width on the eastern edge, and when I put my hand flat against the rock and push I feel a vibration in the stone that has no business being there. The overhang is not weeks from coming down. It is storms. Two, maybe three, depending on the angle.

I need wedging material. A piece of hardwood or compressed bark, something to drive into the base of the crack to arrest the separation and transfer the overhang’s weight back into the main face. Stone would work best — cut stone, fitted, but I have no tools for cutting and the beach offers nothing but rounded volcanic rubble smoothed by tide. I need to go into the treeline.

I pick up the knife and the length of rope from the supply chest and go.

The forest is different from inside it.

From the beach it reads as a wall — dense canopy, dark interior, the abrupt boundary between open shore and closed tree cover. Inside it the scale shifts. The trees are enormous, black-barked and ancient, their root systems rising from the ground in buttressed arcs that in some places form natural chambers large enough to stand in. The canopy overhead is so thick that the light arrives diffused and green-tinged, the kind of light that makes everything look like it exists slightly underwater. The ground is soft volcanic soil covered in growth I have no names for — broad-leafed and dark, nothing like the coastal scrub I know from Blackwake’s headlands.

The island smells different in here. Mineral and wet and a third thing underneath that I keep trying to identify and keep failing to, not unpleasant, just unfamiliar, the particular smell of a forest that has been doing its own thing for a very long time without reference to anything outside itself.

I move carefully. Not timidly. I have not got the energy for timid, but with attention, watching my footing on the uneven root-crossed ground, keeping my bearing by the sound of the sea behind me. Thirty yards in I find what I came for: a rock formation where a chunk of basalt has sheared off cleanly along a natural fault, leaving a flat-faced piece roughly the right size and shape to be driven into the crack in the overhang if I can get it back to the beach.

I work it free from the surrounding root growth with the knife and my hands, which takes twenty minutes and leaves me with dirt to the elbows and a fresh complaint from the hand I cut on the fish knife three days ago. I get the rope around it, test the weight, decide I can drag it, and start back toward the beach.

Thirty feet from the treeline when I smell the water.

Hot water. Not salt, not tide — fresh water with a mineral edge, the same volcanic smell I noticed in the forest but concentrated, sourceful. I stop with the rope over my shoulder and turn my head and follow it.

Twenty yards north, off the path I made coming in, the ground dips into a shallow depression ringed by the same black basalt as the beach formations but older here, more weathered, the edges of the rock smoothed into curves that the weather alone does not fully account for. Inside the depression the water sits dark and still and steaming faintly in the cool morning air, a natural pool, fed from somewhere below by the island’s thermal activity, draining over a low lip of stone on the far side into the forest floor.

I crouch at the edge and put my hand in.