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He pressed it into her hands.

She turned it over, tracing the carved lines with her fingertips. She held it up to the glowing walls, and the light caught the green threads inside it and made them shine.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “Korrak, it’s so beautiful. What is it?”

“Your song,” he said. “My people carve it when the song is finished. So it is never lost.” He closed his hands around hers, around the stone. “It is a promise. Your song. For as long as the water runs.”

She stared at the stone, and then at him. Her lips were trembling badly. She took a long, shaky breath.

“You say a word to me sometimes,” she said. “When you think I’m asleep. Lirra. What does lirra mean?”

He looked at her, the small, stubborn, brave female who had fallen out of the rock into his river. She had talked to her tools and scratched her thanks into a stone. And she had answered the song he sang into the dark every night for so long, when no one else ever had.

“The one who answers,” he said.

She made a small, broken sound. Then she was in his arms, the stone clutched between them, her face pressed against his chest.

“I love you,” she said fiercely, against his skin. “I love you. I’ve been trying to find the right time to tell you for days, and there wasn’t one, and I don’t care. I love you, Korrak.”

He had been keeping that word since the day at the rockfall. He had watched her working with her little hammer, and it had come to him out of nowhere. He had not known when to give it to her. He knew now.

“Love,” he said, and the word was right in his mouth. “Yes. Lirra. I love you.”

He laid her down on the smooth, warm stone at the edge of the pool, beneath the glowing rivers of the map, and he made her his.

He took his time, because there was no drill pounding in the rock above them now, and no wildness under his skin, and nowhere either of them needed to be. He undressed her slowly and kissed every inch of her as he uncovered it, and she did the same for him, laughing softly when he shivered under her mouth. They slid down into the warm water together, and he held her there against him, weightless, with her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms around his neck. He sank into her so slowly that they both trembled with it.

He moved in her with the water rocking gently around them. He watched her face intently and learned it all over again, every sigh and every gasp, as if it were the first time. And as he moved, he sang, low and deep, against her skin. He sang her song, the finished one, and he felt her answer, her body tightening around him, her voice catching and breaking on his name.

When she came, she came with her eyes open, looking at him, and something inside him settled and locked into place, like a stone sliding home into a channel wall. He could feel her heart against his chest, and he could feel it inside him too, the way he felt the pulse of the river in the stone. He would feel it now always, wherever she was.

He opened his mouth to say the word he always said, and she got there first.

“Mine,” she whispered fiercely. She took his face in her wet hands and held it, her eyes blazing. “You’re mine, Korrak. My river. My dragon. I’m keeping you.”

Nobody had ever claimed him before. He had not known how badly he wanted it until he heard it, and he felt it more deeply than any song.

“Yours,” he said, and his voice broke on the word. “Always, lirra.”

She smiled at him through her tears. Then she tipped her head to one side and offered him her throat. He bent his head and set his mouth very gently to the curve where her neck met her shoulder. She shuddered and held him tighter, and whispered yes. And then he let himself go, with his song still humming in his chest and her name on his lips. The pleasure took him so deeply that it felt like drowning and coming home at the same time.

Afterwards, he held her in the warm water while the lichen glowed softly overhead and the ripples died away across the pool. She lay with her head on his shoulder and her fingers wrapped around the blue stone. Every so often she hummed a few notes of the song under her breath.

He had been waiting for so long for someone to answer him, and now, finally, someone had.

That night, they slept for the first time in the new bed. He lay beside her in the dark and listened to her breathe. She slept on her side, curled against his chest, with the blue stone in her hand and her hair spread across his arm. The heater hummed quietly in the wall. Through the opening, he could see the gardens glowing faintly in the dimness, and hear the warm stream trickling down to the pools, and beyond that, the river.

The river was singing softly. It had been singing ever since the springs woke. He could feel it now, a deep, steady music in the stone that had not been there before. The new water ran down from the sealed chambers above, through the channels he and Frankie had opened. It flowed into the gardens and the pools and out into the dark. The river was fuller than it had been in all the time he had known it. The gardens were growing steadily, and the air was richer. Slowly, quietly, far beneath the dust and the thin cold air of the surface, the world his people had tended was beginning to wake.

He lay in the dark and listened to it, and he felt at peace in a way he never had before. And then, very faintly, he heard something else.

It came through the stone, so faintly that at first he thought he had imagined it, the way he had once thought he imagined Frankie’s humming in the water. A thin, distant thread of sound, beyond the gardens and the river and the falls. Beyond anywhere he had ever been.

It was a song—a dragon’s song. He knew it the moment he heard it, the way he had known the words and the channels and the carving of the stone. It was deep and slow and very old. But it was not a song like his, or like the ones in his memories. It did not reach out into the dark, the way his lonely song had, searching for an answer.

It was hiding. It was pitched low, almost below hearing. It went quiet and started again, and went quiet again, as if the singer was listening between the notes to make sure no one had heard. As if the singer did not want to be found.

He lay very quietly and listened.