Page 5 of River Dragon’s Song

She needed it, he understood suddenly. She needed it to breathe.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and thin, and it echoed strangely off the stone. “Okay. I’m alive. That’s good. That’s a start.”

He didn’t understand the words. But the sound of them made him flinch. It had been so long since he had heard any voice besides his. He had forgotten how it felt to hear someone speak, to hear the rise and fall of it, the little catch in the middle where her breath ran short. He sank lower in the water, his heart pounding.

She looked around, turning her head slowly so that the light swept across the pool and the falls and the high, dark walls. Twice it passed over the slab where he was hiding. Both times he sank beneath the surface until it moved on.

“Ethan?” she called. Her voice cracked and she tried again, louder. “Ethan! Tanjiri! Can anyone hear me?”

The only answer was the roar of the falls.

She pressed her fingers to the side of the shell on her head and waited, and then she pressed them again, harder. “Come on. Come on, you overpriced piece of GenCon junk. Ethan, if you can hear me, I fell. I’m at the bottom of the side passage. I’m okay. I think I’m okay.” She paused and looked down at herself, running her hands over her arms and legs. When she touched her left side, she flinched and hissed through the mask. “Mostly okay.”

His claws dug helplessly into the stone of the slab. She was hurt. He could see it now in the careful way she held herself, the stiffness in her shoulders, and the arm she kept tucked against her side. There was a dark scrape along her cheek above the mask, and her hands were trembling.

He wanted to go to her. The urge was so strong that his tail lashed once beneath the water before he could stop it. He wanted to lift her out of the cold spray and carry her to the warm pool downstream, where the water rose from deep below and the vines grew thick and soft. He wanted to see what she looked like without the mask and hear her voice again, closer this time. But he stayed where he was.

She was small and hurt and frightened, and he was none of those things. He had seen his reflection in the still pools. He knew what he looked like, the scales and the claws and the long tail, the eyes that caught the light. He was built for the river and the dark. She was not. If he rose out of the water in front of her now, she would scream and then she would run. There was nowhere down here to run that wouldn’t hurt her more.

So he watched silently from the shadows.

She sat on the gravel for a long time, her arms wrapped around her knees. Once she rubbed her face with the back of her wrist, just above the mask, and her shoulders shook. He didn’t know what that meant. He only knew that it made his chest ache.

Then she took a long, shuddering breath and pushed herself to her feet.

“Right,” she said. “Enough of that.”

She limped slowly along the edge of the pool, keeping one hand on the rock wall. She stopped twice to look up at the dark space overhead where she had fallen. Her lips moved, although he couldn’t hear what she said over the roar of the falls. She knelt stiffly at the water’s edge and cupped her hand in the pool and stared at the water running through her fingers for a long time. When she stood again, her face was strange. She wasn’t frightened anymore, and her eyes were bright.

“It’s real,” she whispered, and this time he could hear the words. “It’s actually real.”

She turned and looked straight at the slab.

He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. The light from her shell swept across the rock, across the moss, across the dark water where he waited with only his eyes above the surface. For one long moment it rested there, and he was certain she had seen him. Then it moved on, and she turned away, and he let himself sink silently beneath the water.

He didn’t go far. He honestly couldn’t. He swam in a slow circle beneath the surface, watching her light through the water, a wavering bright spot moving along the gravel bar. He watched her pull a small pack from her back and set it on the stones. He watched her sit down beside it, and after a long time, he watched the light dim and then go out. In the darkness, only the moss still glowed.

He surfaced beside the slab and rested his arms on the cool stone. He could hear her breathing from here, slow and uneven through the mask. Every so often it caught and she shifted on the gravel, and he heard her murmuring to herself.

She was alone. She was hurt. She was a long way from wherever she had come from, and she didn’t know the river or the channels or the dangers that lay in the dark. But she was here.

For the first time since he had opened his eyes in this place, there was someone else in the cavern. Someone who breathed and spoke and wept and whispered to the dark. He didn’t know what she was or why she had come or how long she would stay. He didn’t know if she would ever understand a word he said.

But as he watched the faint outline of her curled against the rock, a word rose from deep inside him, as old and certain as the river itself. He didn’t know what it meant. He only knew that it belonged to her.

“Lirra,” he breathed, so softly that even the water didn’t carry it.

Across the pool, the small, warm creature slept on.

CHAPTER THREE

Frankie woke up cold, stiff, and absolutely certain that somebody had used her as a hammer. Or possibly a nail. For a long moment she didn’t move. She lay curled on her right side with her cheek pressed against something hard and gritty. Somewhere close by, water roared, and she tried to remember why that was wrong. Then her left side throbbed, a deep, sullen ache that ran from her hip all the way up under her arm, and everything came back at once. The rotten ledge. The anchor tearing loose. The long, slow fall and the shock of the water closing over her head.

She was at the bottom of a cavern that wasn’t on any map. And she was alone.

“Okay,” she whispered. Her voice came out rough and scratchy. “Okay. Still alive. That’s good.”

She sat up cautiously and bit back a groan as her side protested. The darkness around her was nearly complete, broken only by a faint blue glow on the rock wall beside her. She fumbled for the switch on her helmet and pressed it.