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Six: Scorched Earth

Rialla hated being lost.

Once again, her horse shied to one side when the Veporligh's bright violet light shifted through azure to a vivid green, the cliffs rising to either side of the overgrown trail appearing to sprout emeralds. Poor Ness's lather and labored breathing were from nerves as much as from weariness, Rialla thought. The young mare was lively at the best of times, and had become almost too skittish to ride ever since the Veporligh began.

That had been around an hour after she'd left the road east of Boendal, guiding Ness in the direction she'd last seen the dark shape in the sky descending toward. She'd been close enough to the flyer then that she had been able to see the shape of its black wings against the horizon, more like a bat's than a bird's. At that time it had appeared to be heading behind the curve of a small plateau, and Rialla had expected to discover it as soon as she rounded the bend at the base of the plateau's short cliff. Instead, she had found a valley riddled with boulders, tall, thin trees, and dense undergrowth between herself and a wide ridge that the creature must have landed behind.

It was the base of this ridge that she and Ness were now navigating around, having spent the better part of the morning weaving their way across the gulley. Noon was still a ways off--she hadn't been wandering that long--so she knew by the angle of the trees' and boulders' shortening shadows that she was heading southwest along the ridge's northern face. She knew she had spent too much time in the tangled wilderness to have any hope of finding the black winged creature, but if it was what she feared it was, Jiam would be looking for it, too. It was a long shot, she knew, with her surroundings limiting her view to fewer than a hundred feet in any direction at most times, but there was a chance she'd find her husband somewhere in this labyrinth of seaside cliffs.

She was so intent on peering between the trees' tall, gray trunks that she wouldn't have noticed the tracks had her mare not stumbled in a patch of loose scree. There, in the deepest part of the gravel, ran a pair of straight trenches, each as wide as three of Rialla's fingers, running parallel along the path until they vanished on sturdier ground. The two rows of displaced pebbles and stones lay just far enough apart that a stout cart could have fit between them. Rialla waited until Ness steadied underneath her, the witch's breath catching in her throat, then urged the tired horse into a brisk walk. She may have been grasping at straws, but those tracks made her feel a sudden certainty that Jiam had passed this way.

A few minutes later, Ness balked, tossing her head in sudden distress even though the Veporligh was still casting the same steady blue light as it had while crossing the loose gravel patch, and it took all of Rialla's heel nudging and reign flicking skills to get the mare to move forward again. A few hesitant hoof-falls later, Rialla smelled it, too: Smoke. Several steps farther yet, she thought she could hear a distant rumble undercutting the constant sound of the surf far ahead of her, and as the scent of smoke grew stronger, as that underlying roar rose above the waves crashing against distant cliffs, Rialla realized that their source had to be much larger than a simple bonfire. It wasn't long before she felt its heat on her face, though she still couldn't see anything out of place among the curtain of tree trunks and moss covered boulders in front of her.

Then she rounded a bend in the ridge on her left, and was greeted by an inferno.

She had finally reached the western edge of the ridge behind which the black creature had descended, but found nothing except ashes and ruin. Her view was uninterrupted to the south, every nuance of the landscape visible between her and the miles-distant drop-off of Eyralia's coastal cliffs, and everything she could see that could catch fire was burning, the fire's bright orange and red light fighting the Veporligh's cerulean glow for supremacy. She felt as though she'd stumbled onto the aftermath of one of the legendary battles in the wars before the Tsuravi Empire, where huge swathes of land had been reduced to ruin by the wizards of the opposing armies. She took in the chaotic scene, eyes wide with her fear, and suddenly fervently hoped that she wouldn't find her husband among this destruction.

There, though, less than a mile to the southeast where the inferno burned the brightest, she could see two shadowy forms in brief moments when the thick curtain of flame parted, the larger shade slowly circling the smaller.

Without thinking, Rialla kicked her horse into a gallop toward the barely seen figures, desperately clenching the reigns when the panicky mare dashed between trees lit like giant torches, hooves kicking a cloud of ash into the air in her wake. Rialla could barely believe how little time it took to reach the two combatants. She pulled Ness to a stop behind a boulder an instant before a searing stream of fire billowed through the air in front of her, and after she dismounted, was amazed when the horse stayed where she was rather than bolting.

Once the gout of flame receded, Rialla dared to peek around her sheltering boulder, and for too long a while, forgot to breathe. At first, all she saw was the dragon--for dragon it was, in defiance of all reason--bellowing a never ending river of fire from its open jaws onto the ground a few yards in front of it as if it were trying to melt a cave into the unyielding stone. Black as death, with scales so tiny its body seemed molded from liquid obsidian, the creature was half again the size of a large draft horse, which was big, certainly, but not as tremendous as stories had led her to expect. That didn't diminish the creature's deadliness in the least, though. Its body was shaped like a huge cat, both the inferno's light and the Veporligh's shifting rays reflecting off the contours of powerful muscles underneath its metallic hide. The dragon flapped the wings sprouting from its back as though to fan the flames pouring from its mouth, and Rialla expected that those wings could have stretched the length of her house back near Vosenfal with room to spare. Their leathery lower edges extended down the length of its body and sinuous tail like a manta ray's fins.

Finally, long after Rialla released her held breath, the dragon's flow of flame came to an end as it inhaled, and though the very stone still burned in a wide ring around the spot of earth at which it had been aiming, an island of long green grass stood untouched in the middle of the circle of glowing stone.

On that grassy island, standing calmly between the fuming dragon and a small covered cart, stood Jiam, his hand resting reassuringly on the back of his mule's neck.

Though the bestial roar that rose from the dragon and made Rialla's sheltering boulder tremble couldn't be compared to speech by any stretch of the imagination, she almost thought she could hear the frustration in it. The creature lunged toward her husband, then, striking with the incomprehensible speed of a cobra, only to crash into some invisible barrier. The impact made no noise save for the beast's surprised grunt, but three feet in front of Jiam, at the edge of the grassy circle, it rebounded off of invisible air and stumbled onto its side as though it had charged into a granite wall. Back on its feet in an instant, it began swiping at the barrier with its front talons. Sparks rose from its razor sharp claws each time it lashed out, and were the only evidence of anything standing between the dragon and the target of its fury.

Apparently unimpressed, Jiam stepped toward the raging dragon and stood inches away from the sparking claws. He calmly looked up at the creature looming over him until it stopped its futile attacks and lowered its head to glare at the man eye to eye, seething. "I understand your anger," Jiam said, "but the situation is what it is. You've proven to yourself time and time again that violence cannot change it." He sounded for all the world like he was _lecturing_the dragon.

The beast made a noise like an angry, whistling bark, almost as if it was answering Rialla's husband, and maybe it actually was some crude form of speech, because Jiam went on as though continuing a conversation. Of course, the man may have simply lost his mind.

"I'm not the only one running out of time," he said, a grim urgency rising in his voice. "All I need is a single drop."

The dragon growled, then, a deep noise that Rialla felt in the ground beneath her feet and the boulder under her hands more than heard. After gathering itself low to the heated stone on which it stood, the dragon leapt forward, a great flap of its wings carrying it up over Jiam's head, where it settled on top of the invisible shield of air above his cart. With its talons planted firmly against the magic dome's surface, it appeared to be levitating some ten feet above the ground.

It lashed its tail down against the barrier once, then grew still save for a slight trembling in its shoulders and long neck. Jiam walked stoically back to the side of the cart, resting his hand on its arched canvas cover and shaking his head up at the dragon. "You know it's a waste of time. You could be carrying him home right now, if you'd only--"

His words were abruptly cut off when the dragon opened its jaws wide and exhaled a fiery torrent straight down between its front talons. For a brief instant, Rialla could see Jiam's dome barrier outlined in bright flame, but then even the dragon vanished as the inferno billowed upward and outward, and she had to duck back behind her boulder to save herself from being cooked in the next heartbeat. She pulled her horse close to the huge stone's base as flames erupted over its top and around its sides. Terrified, Ness screamed, but Rialla couldn't hear the whinny above the roar of the dragon's breath. Then the flames began curling in around her shelter, and she had to focus all of her will to use the energy around her and keep the fire pushed to a safe distance. Rialla had never had much skill at manipulating fire, so she counted herself very fortunate when the flames died out almost as soon as she began pushing against them.

She coughed, hot air searing her lungs as her ears rang. Her face felt like she had spent too much time under the midsummer sun, sweat evaporating as soon as it formed. Her heart racing, she staggered back to the burnt edge of the boulder to see if her husband had survived the inferno, careful not to touch the scorched stone.

When she peeked around the boulder's corner again, the dragon was glaring at her from less than a pace away, its breath still hot enough that heat waves rising from its mouth and nostrils made its obsidian head seem to shimmer.

Rialla was paralyzed by terror until the creature moved, but even then, it struck so quickly that the thought to dodge didn't even form before it was upon her, its long neck twisting as it tried to bite her in half. Just as when it had attacked Jiam, though, the dragon's muzzle met an invisible barrier mere inches in front of her. It wasn't until its head rebounded back from the silent collision that Rialla managed to stumble backward, tripping over her own feet and landing heavily on her backside, heart trying to climb up her throat. For the briefest of instants, she'd had a perfect view of the inside of the dragon's open mouth.

The dragon half turned and hissed back over its shoulder. From her position on the ground, Rialla could see her husband striding toward it from between its front and hind legs. Somehow, the man was able to walk on nearly molten stone without flinching.

"She's none of your concern," Jiam said, and Rialla used the dragon's distraction to scramble away from it, getting back to her feet before the scorched earth burned a hole in her riding skirt. "She has nothing to do with the abduction, and shouldn't even be here," he went on, the last clearly meant as much for her benefit as for the dragon. Despite her terror, Rialla felt a brief bristle of indignation at being reprimanded like a child. But what did he mean about an abduction?

She didn't have time to dwell on it, though. The dragon hunkered down against the ground, wings arching skyward, and with a single flap that sent hot air gusting around it with nearly enough force to knock Rialla back off her feet, it leapt over Jiam back to his cart and mule. Even without Jiam beside him to keep him calm, the mule placidly watched the dragon dive toward him, merely flicking his wiry mane when the creature was brought up short again by a smaller barrier protecting both mule and cart within the grass circle. Ignoring the mule entirely, the dragon slammed its tail against the dome of solid air around the cart over and over again, seeming to have forgotten the presence of the two humans it had just tried and failed to kill.

"What is it doing?" Rialla rasped, then broke into a fit of coughing. So much hot, dry air had made her throat raw.

Instead of answering, her husband just repeated, "You should not be here," before walking back toward the raging dragon. Rialla tried to follow him, but the leather soles of her riding boots began to smolder against the heated stone beneath them after only a few steps. Feeling helpless, she hopped back beside her horse, able to do nothing but watch while Jiam drew a dagger that strongly resembled the one which he'd left buried in Ves's body. He would have looked comical had the situation been less dire, a wiry old man striding calm-as-you-please toward a ferocious dragon, intending to fight it off with a knife barely longer than some of the beast's teeth.

So obsessed with the shielded cart, the dragon didn't appear to even notice the man approaching until he was within striking distance of its tail. Once Jiam was close enough, though, it whipped its tail at his head with enough force to decapitate him, but, predictably, the tail bounced away from the man inches before the killing blow. Jiam's steps never faltered, and incredibly, the dragon began backing away from him, its eyes locked on his dagger.

After retreating a few steps, keeping its dark body at an angle profile to the man advancing toward it, the dragon's far wing began reaching upward, unfolding at a peculiar angle, and it wasn't until the beast looked over its shoulder in surprise and batted at the air behind it with its tail that Rialla realized it had backed into another invisible, magical wall. Its head swung back toward Jiam again, and it gave a whistling bark as it had before, like an eagle and a wolf crying out in unison. When it tried to jump upward and take flight, its head hit a ceiling of air. Rialla was close enough to see its amber eyes wince at the impact, and it shook its head vigorously as it staggered back against the wall of air behind it, clearly dazed.

Jiam waited patiently with the dagger held passively at his side, having stopped his advance once the dragon met the barrier behind it. "I don't want to take it without your consent," he said, "but I will if I have to."

Behind Rialla, Ness let out a startled neigh, and she almost jumped out of her skin when, with a loud, grating lurch, the boulder beside her lifted out of the ground and hovered through the air toward the trapped dragon, spinning slowly. Watching in astonishment as sand and fine gravel began pouring down out of the center of what used to be solid stone, leaving a man-sized cavity in the bottom of the boulder, Rialla tried to imagine what her husband could possibly be doing. Then, after pausing briefly in the air above Jiam's head while he waited for a response from the dragon, the boulder remembered gravity and fell with a thunderous crash around him, the freshly made hole encasing him in an upright rock coffin. Jiam wasn't the one who had lifted the boulder.

The dragon could use magic, too, and did so without leaving a single ripple of energy behind for Rialla to sense, just like her husband.

As soon as the boulder landed, the dragon climbed over it and loped with frightening speed across the smoldering field, but stopped after a few ground eating strides to look back at the covered cart that had so captured its attention. A second later, a crack appeared in the boulder covering Jiam with a sound like a giant's bone snapping. Then, with a flash of white that mimicked the blinding glare of Parol covering the sun, it exploded, throwing rocks ranging in size from Rialla's fist to her horse in every direction. She barely had time to deflect a stone bigger than a watermelon with a burst of focused energy before it could pass through her abdomen.

"I didn't know you had a sense of humor," Jiam said wryly, but the dragon wasn't looking at him. The moment Rialla had diverted the flying rock's course, its black head had swiveled to stare at her, and she realized it must be able to sense the wake of the energy she manipulated.

Before she could calm her nerves, a buzzing in the back of Rialla's head grew so loud that her vision blurred, and she fell to her knees, hands pressing against her temples. A pair of vivid images washed simultaneously through her consciousness, one of her standing over her husband's dead body with his bloodied dagger in her hands, the other of her sitting on a high-backed, velvet padded throne, with piles of gold chaquils strewn at her feet and a mirror in her hand showing the unlined face of her youth. No sooner had the visions struck than they merged with the buzzing in her mind and somehow transformed into simple words that she could understand: "Help me kill him, and you will be rewarded."

"I told you, she is none of your concern." Jiam's voice broke whatever hold the dragon had over her, and Rialla gasped, finding that she had gone too long without taking a breath. "I didn't want it to come to this," her husband went on, "but you've made your decision clear."

Without warning, the dragon's head crashed down to the ground, and it fell onto its side as though pushed by some unseen force, its lower wing sprawling over the earth behind it. One by one, its legs tucked against its body and were held there, though Rialla could see the muscles in its thighs and shoulders straining beneath its scales. Its tail thrashed once against the ground, a cloud of ash gusting up around it, then it, too, curled around its body, and its upper wing clapped down against its side, forcefully folded. It made its whistling bark again, followed by a growl that shook the ground beneath Rialla's boots, but Jiam's magic had bound it so remorselessly that its struggles were barely visible.

Once again, Rialla's husband cautiously approached the dragon, dagger held in front of him and eyes never leaving the bound creature's amber glare. "This will only take a moment," he said, crouching down beside one of the dragon's lethal front claws, but instead of striking it with his dagger, he just snorted an exasperated breath and muttered, "Persistent."

Rialla couldn't guess what had frustrated Jiam until she noticed how much shinier the dragon's hide looked all of a sudden. Its black scales, already so reflective that they made its body appear cast of some dark metal, now shone as though they were covered in water. Indeed, as she watched, a pale tint joined the liquid glimmer over its skin, and she realized that the dragon was somehow coating its body in a protective layer of ice to keep Jiam's dagger at bay, in defiance of the overwhelming heat still rising from the field around it.

"If you keep delaying, you might not get him back in time," Jiam admonished. Though Rialla wondered who he was referring to, she had only been half listening to her husband's short, one-sided conversations with the dragon. None of what he said made any sense.

Lowering the dagger back to his side, Jiam held his free hand over the back of the dragon's ice-armored claw, and she could see steam rising from beneath his palm. The dragon closed its eyes in evident concentration, its amber irises vanishing behind the thickening white veil covering them. Rialla could hardly imagine how much it must be focusing in order to maintain the ice coating its body under the combined assaults of the ambient heat and whatever magic Jiam was using against it.

In the end, though, she discovered that the ice was insignificant next to the power that truly burned within the beast.

A noise rose from the ground all around her, similar to the sound made by the boulder just before Jiam had destroyed it, but on a far vaster scale. A series of rapid, fluttering snaps bombarded her ears, each so loud that she could feel them rattling her ribcage, but they came so quickly, one after the other, that they blurred into a single, rumbling roar. Beside her, Ness tossed her head in terror, but incredibly, still didn't bolt.

As she pressed her hands over her ears, a deeper shockwave of sound struck her just as the ground lurched under her feet, and she fell to one knee, bracing her hands on the hot stone in front of her. She saw it, then: a fracture zigzagging across the earth directly beneath the dragon's frozen body south toward the ocean. For a brief instant the deafening roar faded to a loud growl vibrating the stone on which she knelt, and she was just able to hear Jiam exclaim, "No!" He sounded distressed for the first time since Rialla had stumbled into the battle.

Looking up, Rialla saw that her husband was staring past the dragon's form at his cart, where that narrow fracture extended directly between its wheels. "He won't survive!" the old man shouted, only to be drowned out by another resonating crack as more fractures spread in every direction from underneath the dragon, like a spider web's strands. Jiam had to scramble back away from it to keep his footing.

Then the very earth parted, the two halves on either side of the long, seaward extending fracture quaking in opposite directions. The ground beneath Rialla dropped sharply, leaving her weightless for an instant before she followed it, bruising her knees, while the land on the other side of that fracture separated and lifted. The stone underneath the motionless dragon crumbled, everything caught within the lacework of cracks around the creature plummeting into the growing chasm, and with no ground beneath it for Jiam's magic to pin it to, the dragon fell as well, breaking free of its icy encasement in a shower of pale, crystalline shards.

As he ran back toward Rialla and safer ground, Jiam made a frantic gesture toward his cart, which lurched onto their half of the still-growing chasm just before it could fall into it. His mule was already waiting beside Ness. The smaller animal's eyes were wide and alert, but it showed no signs of alarm, otherwise.

Then an entirely different roar arose from the southern sea. The dragon's chasm stretched as far south as the ocean, and the sea itself was now rampaging toward them, filling the gap left by the parting earthen cliffs. A plume of white spray traced the flood's progress, the Veporligh's deep green light casting a hundred strangely colored rainbows through the air around the raging tower of water, arcs of blue, yellow, and barely visible emerald stretching across the sky. Rialla began backing away from the chasm, but hadn't taken two steps before the tide was upon them, making the ground tremble anew with its force. The torrent of spray hit her like a charging bull, knocking her onto her back and pushing her across the ground several paces until the vanguard wave met the chasm's end and erupted in a huge geyser that rained down over their heads.

When she managed to get to her feet, she saw that Jiam, his mule, and Ness all stood dry and unharmed, the water raining down over them even now parting around unseen canopies in the air above them while Rialla got drenched.

For the first time since the night he'd tried to murder her, her husband looked her in the eyes. "I told you not to follow me," he said pointedly, then walked stolidly back toward the chasm's edge, leaving Rialla to splutter indignantly while holding her hand over her pounding heart. He could at least have the manners to appear out of breath!

"Jiam!" she shouted, feeling like a half drowned rat, but he ignored her, stepping cautiously to the lip of the crevice and peering down into it. He stood like that for some time, his head lowered, searching the aquatic turmoil that had filled the land's wound while steam rose from the earth behind him and shrouded him in a curtain of mist.

Once she had dripped next to her horse long enough to catch her breath, Rialla stalked after her husband, skirt and blouse clinging to her wetly, boots squelching with each step. She pulled a strand of soaked, gray hair away from her face so she could glare at Jiam's back, outraged even through her fear that he had let her take the brunt of the charging wave's force just to teach her a lesson. She had half a mind to push the skinny old man into the newborn gorge, but after all she'd seen him do in the past few minutes, she expected he'd simply sprout fins and swim out to sea. At least she wasn't quite so hot any more.

"He's stronger than I realized," Jiam said when she stepped beside him and peeked briefly into the frothing water below. He sounded slightly irritated, but not at all as though the day had brought him anything out of the ordinary.

"Jiam, will you _please_tell me what is going on?" she asked after backing a safe distance away from the chasm. Despite the heralding plume that had nearly drowned her, the water's choppy surface was at least thirty paces below the ledge on which they stood, surging up and down against the cliffs' newly sundered stone.

It was no surprise when her husband ignored her again, instead whipping his head southward and sighting along the chasm. Not far inland from where the crevice opened into the sea, the black form of the dragon leapt from the chasm, the water spraying from its flapping wings visible even from this distance as it flew out over the ocean.

Jiam made a frustrated noise, perhaps a stifled curse, and turned away from the rent earth. "There's no time," he said, breaking into a sprint back toward the horse and mule. Rialla chased after him as swiftly as she was able, but her waterlogged clothing was weighing her down, and she had been exhausted even before she'd set out after the dragon earlier that morning. By the time she had a foot in Ness's stirrup, her husband and his mule were galloping west across the devastated countryside, back toward Boendal. Without a thought for her mare's strained nerves, she almost fell out of the saddle when the horse sprang after Jiam at the first touch of Rialla's heels.

She followed Jiam at breakneck speed for more than ten minutes before crossing an unsinged, healthy tree, and she realized she must have only witnessed the final clash of a sorcerous duel that had lasted most of the morning, likely beginning when she'd first lost sight of the dragon before the Veporligh started. Unshed tears dampened a face only recently dried by the wind of her chase. She had known when she'd left Vosenfal two weeks ago that Jiam was a stronger mage than she, but she'd had no idea just how strong he actually was. Today she had watched him fight a creature more powerful than any she'd ever known existed without so much as breaking a sweat, even after standing in the heart of the dragon's fiery breath. The dragon had needed to rip the land asunder just to escape from her husband.

If the dragon terrified Rialla, the creature Jiam had become frightened her beyond words. Yet still she followed him. She had to find out what it was he was after, what was important enough for him to betray her as he had.

The pursuit back to Boendal was an echo of her long journey to the city during the past two weeks. She pushed Ness to the very limits of the horse's endurance, then fed ambient energy into the mare to push her yet harder, but Jiam on his old mule stayed as far ahead of her as she could see. One moment the old man would vanish behind a stand of trees, or a small hill, the next he would reappear, slightly farther than when she'd lost sight of him.

Jiam led her from scorched earth, over grassy hills, into sparse woodland, then back out through open fields again. Then they were at the coastline, angry waves crashing against jagged, fang-like rocks to their left until they came to the flattened stonework of Boendal's pier. Rialla was out of breath from clutching Ness's reigns so tightly through the long chase, and was so thirsty, the saltwater bay beside her started to seem appetizing. She couldn't imagine how fatigued her tormented horse must have been, but she couldn't let the straining mare slow down. Jiam and his mule were only a distant, gray blur under the Veporligh's spectrum.

When she finally lost sight of him, she began to give up any hope of ever catching him, but then a streak of movement caught her eye along a stone and earthen peninsula extending into the bay. Her husband was racing toward a small ship anchored at the peninsula's far end. At an inexplicable, rising sense of urgency, she tried to somehow coax more speed out of her horse, but was still several hundred yards from the junction of peninsula and mainland by the time Jiam reached the stone finger's tip. When, a few moments later, she saw the mule galloping back across the peninsula, she thought briefly that her husband was coming back for her, until she realized that the mule ran now without a rider on his back. Jiam remained at the end of the long stone structure, his back to the mainland while he spoke with three others in front of the ship.

The mule slowed to a trot and turned once he reached the shore, waiting placidly as Rialla crossed in front of him and steered Ness onto the base of the peninsula. Jiam turned, then, and lifted his hand as though to wave farewell.

This time, no loud crack of splitting stone warned her before the peninsula in front of her erupted. At Jiam's gesture, the ground between them turned into a long fountain of stone and earth, rocks and dirt flying into the sky along an expanse of more than a hundred feet with a roar that mimicked the birth of the dragon's chasm. Rialla grasped her horse's pommel desperately, but still fell from her saddle when Ness reared onto her hind hooves. She spun mid-fall and landed on all fours next to the horse, miraculously unharmed save for skinned knees and palms, and was so stunned, she didn't move from that spot even when large, fragmented rocks began showering down against the short point of land left standing in front of her, bouncing and rolling over the peninsula's jagged, torn edge scant hand spans beyond her face.

By the time she looked up from between her hands, all that was left of the peninsula past the newly gouged drop-off before her was the small island on which Jiam and the three others stood and a few scattered stone teeth jutting up out of the white-capped waves between them, ragged survivors of Jiam's blast. Her husband was crossing the wide plank joining his little island to the rocking ship while a woman Rialla didn't recognize stared at his back and the two others, a pair of Oncans, gaped at the disaster he had so effortlessly wrought.

Rialla pushed herself onto her feet, all of her joints protesting, though none as vehemently as her knees. She shouted Jiam's name, but doubted anyone could hear her over the wind, surf, and the splashes made by the stones thrown the highest by her husband's farewell wave. Scanning the hostile tide between herself and the ship, she could see no way to pursue Jiam any farther. Though a few dumbstruck sailors stood staring at the destruction from the safety of the mainland, the fishing vessels docked nearby all floated abandoned. Already the woman and Oncans had joined Jiam on board their ship, and the ship's crew was pulling the boarding plank onto its deck while it moved away from the stone finger's remains and slowly began to turn into the wind. Once it was facing south, the ship's two large sails billowed out to its sides like wings, despite the strong ocean breeze blowing in the opposite direction, and it shot forward as though pulled by a giant, invisible hand.

Suddenly, Rialla felt too heavy for her legs to support, and she sank back to her raw knees, barely feeling the jolt as they hit the wet stone beneath her. The wind against her face was no longer strong enough to dry the tears flowing freely down her cheeks. Against all odds, she had finally caught up with her husband, only to lose him again as suddenly as she'd found him, left with a hundred more questions and not a single answer to those she'd already had. This time, Jiam had given her no clues about where he intended to head next. For all she knew, he could be planning to sail that small ship across the Infuli Ocean to the old Tsuravi Empire. Too much time had passed for him to hope to catch the black dragon that had escaped from him.

She watched her husband sail away from her until the ship vanished behind a huge wave over the distant reefs, then stared out over the ocean for a long while more, her tears blurring the brilliant colors of the Veporligh reflected off the bay. Never in her long life had she felt so helpless.

The mule brayed impatiently behind her, and after wiping her face with the backs of hands sticky from soot and saltwater, she looked over her shoulder at the animal. He stood beside Ness, whose long neck was lowered until her nose almost touched the ground in front of her hooves, gasping deep breaths. When the mule blinked at Rialla calmly, she remembered the cart that the old beast of burden used to be so reluctant to pull, the one thing left whole and unharmed in the dragon's and her husband's scorched battleground.

Maybe Jiam had left her a clue after all.

With a weary groan, the hedge witch climbed back to her feet and walked to her mare at the edge of the pier. Twining her fingers within Ness's long mane, she leaned against the horse's shoulder and filtered another drought of energy into the both of them, just enough to keep them going. Ness lifted her big head to look at Rialla eye to eye, and the witch of Vosenfal took a deep breath before clambering into the saddle, turning her horse eastward along the harbor and leaving the mule to follow or stay behind as he pleased.

"Come on, girl," she said, patting the horse's neck. "We're not done yet."