READ THE GREEN ECHO.

That morning, the wind had smelled of rain. Now it drove fine dust across the battlefield, dust that clung to Dessic’s lips and ground between his teeth. He wanted to spit it out, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Avar was waiting somewhere on the plain. Dessic forbade himself to count the hours. When he wiped his face with the back of his hand, a dark streak remained on his skin.

Across the plain stood the remains of three city walls. No two had belonged to the same city. Dessic knew the oldest only as a pale line among the thistles; the second had fallen before he was born, the third the previous winter. Stones were being taken from all three to repair the road along which the wounded were carried back. Even the war had learned to make use of the ruins left by its earlier years. No one who had marched long enough spoke any more of the war ending.

Avar still lay where Dessic had been forced to leave him, half beneath an overturned wagon. Its upper wheel turned in the wind. A scrap of cloth hung from the axle, brushing Avar’s forehead with every revolution. He no longer had the strength to push it away.

“You took your time,” he said.

Dessic knelt beside him. “I had to find a wagon.”

“There’s one here.”

“A better one.”

Avar tried to smile. The sound that came from his chest made Dessic reach for the fastening on his armour. The left side had been crushed inward; blood seeped into the cloth beneath its edge. A splinter had struck him when the earth had split open beyond the wagons. Dessic had seen the impact and counted on Avar getting to his feet again. Until that morning, he had always risen after a fall.

The buckle would not give. Dessic pulled harder, caught it between thumb and forefinger, and realised why his other fingers could find no purchase. Two were missing. Pale tips of bone protruded from the black grime of his left hand.

For a breath he stared at them. Then he tucked the hand beneath his armpit, as though the wound could be stored there until there was time for it. With his right hand he felt for his knife. It was still at his belt. He cut through the strap and raised the metal just far enough for Avar to breathe.

“Leave it on,” Avar whispered.

“You can’t breathe like this.”

“Without it you can see how bad things are.”

Dessic lowered the edge again. Behind the low hills they were gathering the wounded, beside a stand of wind-bent trees that had been visible from anywhere on the field that morning. Smoke now concealed the rise. He knew where it was all the same: to the left of the white towers above the coast, slightly higher than the old road. If he could pull Avar out from under the wagon and lay him on a shield, he could drag him there.

At dawn a green banner had still flown from the white towers, as it had for years. Dessic had once found refuge there with blue riders when a Red set fire to the coastal granaries and the water in the wells began to boil. The towers had stood then; the soot had been scraped from their stone. Today half the coast road was already black, and smoke hung above the roofs that no wind carried away.

He slipped his arms beneath Avar’s shoulders. Avar screamed, and Dessic stopped until the scream dwindled to shallow gasps. Then he pulled again. The toe of a boot caught in the spokes. Dessic had to crawl back, twist the foot and free it, while something enormous parted the clouds above them.

The light on the wagon turned green.

For a moment Dessic could see every nail in the wood, every drop of blood on Avar’s neck. In the churned earth beside the wheel, tiny blades of grass rose where none had been before. A familiar smell penetrated the smoke: wet leaves, dark bark after long rain. Dessic raised his head, though he needed to keep pulling.

Thae’oun flew so low that his shadow filled the entire hollow. Through the thin places in his wings, the burning sky shone. One membrane was torn, and with every beat a tremor passed through the long limb, as though the dragon could no longer carry his weight evenly. A wound gaped beneath his belly. Far away, where his blood struck the ground, steam rose, and branches grew out of the steam.

During the night, the wounded in the camp had spoken of him, though not as they would speak of a commander. They listed the places where he had been seen, as if a path through the battle could be read from his flight. Dessic had fought beneath Blues and stood watch beside Greens, and he had seen dragons of all four broods fall. Some crashed in flames; others drove themselves into rock and blocked the roads for years. With Thae’oun, he had refused even to imagine a fall. Now he could see how much effort the next wingbeat cost.

Years before this battle, he had seen Thae’oun once before, above a forest. He and Avar had stopped on the old road until the Green vanished behind the hills. Beneath him, trees had straightened whose crowns had been consumed by a red fire the summer before. Avar later claimed that Dessic had stood with his mouth hanging open. What Dessic remembered most were the villagers who abandoned their work and ran after the dragon, with no idea whether he would land anywhere. Even then, a Green in the sky had ceased to be an ordinary sight. Since that time, the messengers had spoken the other names more and more softly, until only one remained.

“Is he still there?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Avar kept his eyes closed. “Move.”

Dessic found a shield whose owner he did not know. The leather loops on its back were intact. He pushed it beneath Avar, threaded a loose strap through it and slung the strap over his right shoulder. When he straightened, the weight immediately dragged him down again. He shortened the strap, bent forward and set the shield moving.

Its rim ploughed through the sodden ground. Avar pushed with one foot until Dessic ordered him to save his strength. Between the tracks of fleeing wagons lay burst sacks of grain, a broken jug, a blanket with its mended hem trailing in the mud. Dessic stepped around an outstretched hand. Only afterwards did he see the person it belonged to. He pulled the strap higher and went on.

Beside the road lay a man in a dark cloak, his fingers clenched around a broken staff. Scales ran down his neck from beneath one ear; through the open eyelid Dessic could see a narrow, vertical pupil. One of the Preserved. In conquered cities men like him had distributed grain, appointed judges and guarded gates while the Blacks circled above the rooftops. Their gifts had not been lies. Dessic knew men who had begged for the touch of a black claw after a battle, and others who had died from the alterations. A waterskin hung from the dead man’s belt. To reach it, Dessic would have had to release the strap, and the shield was already sliding sideways.

The people on the road stopped. Another sound swelled above the noise of the wagons. Some turned around. Others threw themselves flat or crawled behind the embankment. A woman with a bandage round her head ran towards the hollow, shouting and pointing upward. Dessic saw her lips move but heard nothing. Not until she was a few paces away did the thunder reach him, swallowing every other sound.

A Black had caught up with Thae’oun. They hung one above the other in the torn sky, so tightly entwined that Dessic could not tell which wing belonged to which body. A black claw drove between green scales and tore them away in strips. Thae’oun arched his neck back and bit into the other dragon’s shoulder, but the Black dragged him lower all the same. With every movement, the clouds behind them shifted. Kaldruun, Dessic thought. He knew the name from orders, from conversations around the fire, and from the prayers of men who insisted they knew no prayers.

Farther off, above the towers, a red wing opened in the smoke. The dragon was smaller than the two above the hollow, yet its heat reached Dessic even here: pitch dripped from a wagon axle though the wood had not caught fire. On the coast a gate was flung open. People fled across the wall, while others bearing the same emblems blocked their way. On a roof, a man with dragon eyes shoved another over the edge. There was no telling whom either served. Dessic had lived through too many battles in which the victor had long since been decided and people went on killing one another anyway.

The woman seized the strap. Together they dragged the shield behind the embankment. They threw themselves down as a gust swept across the road and hurled the wagon beneath which Avar had lain to the other side. Its wheel broke free and rolled away. Avar’s eyes flew open.

Thae’oun fell.

Dessic saw a wing plunge into the smoke, then the long back, upon which earth and light seemed to be reflected. The impact came first without sound. The plain beyond the embankment rose, threw people down and subsided. A stranger’s elbow struck Dessic in the teeth. Only then did the crash reach him. It travelled through the ground and into his chest until he thought he himself had been struck.

When he could breathe again, the woman lay beside him, pressing both hands to her ears. Blood ran down her wrists. Avar was moving his lips. Dessic bent over him and understood nothing.

The Green’s head rose above the embankment. One eye stood open; smoke drifted across it, and the lid did not close. Kaldruun landed beside him, and only when Dessic saw the size of the boulders beneath his claws did he grasp how far away the two still were. Armies could have stood between them and him. Yet the green head seemed to lie directly before him.

The eye moved. Dessic straightened, the strap still over his shoulder. A cough came from the shield, but he did not bend down. As long as that eye remained open, he could not make himself look away.

Then the head sank, and Dessic felt something change before he saw it. The young blades of grass beside his knees lay flat. He drew his injured hand from beneath his armpit; a green glimmer shone between the finger stumps and went out. When he looked up, Kaldruun was lowering his neck towards the fallen dragon. Dessic could not see what he did there. The smoke thickened, and the woman tugged at the strap.

The horses on the road shied and reared. A bird fell out of the smoke, landed on the axle of the overturned wagon and did not fly again. No one gave an order, yet the people along the embankment clung to stones and wagon wheels as though they could keep the very ground from slipping away. All Dessic knew was that Thae’oun was dead. He did not understand what had begun beneath their feet, and he would never be able to put it into words.

“Keep going,” Dessic thought he read on the woman’s lips.

They reached the road, but the rise was gone. Where the trees had stood was a wall of dust. Dessic searched for a treetop, a branch, anything that might stand out against the shifting grey. People were coming down from there. One ran past with his shoulders hunched, holding both hands in front of him as though he were still carrying something that had long since slipped from his grasp.

The woman stepped into his path. He shook his head before she could ask and ran around her. Behind him, Dessic saw the road split.

The crack began narrow, scarcely wider than a wheel track. It raced towards them, darkened and tore the embankment apart with a dry snap. Dessic jerked Avar’s shield towards him. The woman grabbed Avar’s feet, and together they dragged him off the road. Behind them, a section of paving fell away. The man who had just run past sank to his waist, clutched at a stone and screamed.

Dessic dropped the strap and took a step towards him. Then the stone tipped as well. He heard rubble cascading down, caught one last glimpse of a hand at the edge, and then there was only dust billowing out of the fissure.

He stood there until the woman caught his sleeve.

The sea was retreating.

From where they stood, Dessic could see the bays below the white towers. The water sank against the walls, uncovering the lower steps of the landing places and draining out between the ships. Mooring lines pulled taut between the rings in the quay and decks that lay lower by the moment. One mast tilted, struck the next and tore open a sail whose white cloth cracked in the wind.

Dark furrows covered the exposed seabed. Carved stones projected from one of them, too regular to be natural rock and too far offshore to belong to a landing stage. Dessic stared at the straight line until Avar coughed beneath him. When he looked again, the haze had swallowed it.

It should have smelled of seaweed. Instead a cold odour drifted in from offshore, like air from a pit that had been sealed for a very long time. It mingled with the heat without driving it away. One side of Dessic’s face was freezing while sweat ran across a burn on the other.

Beyond the empty bay, a Blue was flying. His wings skimmed the haze, and beneath them white lines flashed and broke apart. Dessic recognised Vhiruln by his shape; they had seen him over the sea that morning. The dragon turned his head away from the land. For an instant he seemed to struggle against a wind that no one here could feel.

Dessic had once stood watch while Vhiruln rested on a coastal rock and the sea beneath him remained restless far into the night. The Blue had still spoken with envoys from the other broods long after the war had turned every meeting into an insult. Dessic had never understood his words, only their effects: water in empty cisterns, a cloud over a harbour from which the Reds had withheld rain for weeks. Now the dragon beat his wings against the haze before the empty bay and could not disperse it.

The woman knelt beside Avar and held a waterskin to his lips. Most of the water ran down his chin. Dessic took the skin from her and supported Avar’s head. The skin beneath his hand was frighteningly cool.

“The trees are gone,” Avar said.

Dessic did not know when his hearing had returned. “We’ll go to the coast.”

“There’s no water there any more.”

“There are people.”

Avar looked at him. Then he reached for Dessic’s left hand, found the stumps and held on anyway, just as he had on the nights before a battle when neither of them could sleep. At last he nodded. They dragged the shield downhill. Dessic now walked backwards with the strap wound around his forearm, while the woman kept the lower edge clear of the stones.

The shadow of a post lay across the ground before his feet. As he stepped over it, the shadow turned, though the post stood still. Dessic stopped. His own shadow slid sideways too, and the woman’s fell in a different direction. The light above them had changed. It was bright enough to show every stone, but the sun lay behind smoke, and the brightness came from a place upon which he could not fix his gaze.

Someone began to pray. Farther up, a man fell to his knees and pressed his forehead into the dirt. Dessic heard Oru’s name again and again, until he no longer knew whether he was merely hearing it or saying it himself.

Oru belonged to the old stories that dragons had told humankind. One Green had told Dessic that Oru was a father, one Blue that he was a keeper, and in a ruined temple Dessic had read of a judge who never came. Perhaps the priests knew what was written beyond that. No one had ever explained to him which of those names would heed the earth when Thae’oun no longer breathed. The kneeling man continued his prayers until the ground forced him to spread both hands.

Something happened in the sky that eluded Dessic’s eyes. The clouds raced against one another, passed through their own shadows, and a red body reared out of the glow behind them. Dessic saw a gaping maw, so close that he thought he could feel its breath against his skin. Then rain fell between its teeth. He tried to follow the long neck, but his eyes found nothing to hold on to. Behind his closed eyelids the image remained for a while: a wing without a body, suspended in a brightness that made him sick. He bent over Avar and rested his forehead against his friend’s shoulder.

The slope moved beneath his knees.

It began with pebbles rolling against his boots. Then the land before them sank so evenly that Dessic at first thought he was being lifted. The white towers stood askew. One broke in the middle, its upper half tilting over the bay before shattering on the rooftops below. Dust rose. The second tower sank below the edge of the coast, taking with it the rock on which it stood.

The woman stumbled backwards. A slab of ground broke away beneath her foot and dragged the shield with it. Dessic threw himself onto his stomach; the strap burned through his right hand until Avar’s weight pulled it taut. Stones poured over the edge beneath him. The woman crawled back and seized his belt. Together they hauled the shield high enough for Avar’s shoulder to rest on solid ground again.

The woman sat panting among the rubble. Her bandage had come loose and hung down to her chin. She felt for something at her throat, found it beneath her shirt and closed her fist around it so tightly that Dessic could not see what it was.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

Her lips moved. A deep sound from the sea swallowed the answer. By the time Dessic was ready to ask again, she was already standing. People had gathered on the narrow ridge behind them; some waved, and the woman pointed towards them. Dessic nodded. He would follow as soon as he had secured Avar on the shield again.

The Blue had drawn closer, although a stretch of land was now missing between Dessic and the sea. The edge of a wing appeared in the drifting smoke, then the long neck behind it. The image blurred as though layers of water lay between them. Only one eye remained distinct, huge and bright. Dessic thought he saw the jaw move. Then a word reached him.

He did not understand it. Even so, he tried to repeat it, feeling his tongue shape an unfamiliar beginning. The rest disintegrated in the chattering of his teeth. Vhiruln’s wing curved upwards; rain fell through the place where it had been a moment before.

Dessic looked back towards the battlefield. The black body above Thae’oun could no longer be found in the smoke, and the red wing was no longer above the towers. At first he thought his eyes had forgotten how to see. Later he clung to that mistake, for it spared him, for a few breaths, the thought of a sky without them.

Dessic kept searching until the eye, too, had vanished.

“Avar.” He knelt beside the shield. “Just a little farther.”

Avar’s head had fallen to one side. Dessic turned it back, placed two fingers against his neck and waited for something he could not distinguish from his own trembling. He brushed the dust from Avar’s mouth. Avar had always breathed through his mouth in his sleep and cursed about it in the morning because his throat hurt.

Avar had still seen Thae’oun. Perhaps that was why he had asked after the Green, as others might ask for a healer. Dessic had not been able to tell him that there was no second one. He placed his right hand on his friend’s back, felt the crushed ribs beneath the wet cloth, and withdrew it as though his touch could still make something worse.

From the bay came a rumbling that quickly swelled. Dessic looked up, and the ships were gone. A white line was racing across the exposed seabed, pushing masts and dark debris ahead of it and growing as he watched. Beyond it lay no sea he recognised, only water piling higher and surging over land already submerged.

People were running along the narrow ridge. The woman was among them. She stopped, turned back and threw both arms into the air. Dessic flung the strap over his shoulder, stood and pulled. The shield did not move. A stone had wedged itself beneath the rim. He kicked at it, pulled again and moved Avar a hand’s breadth.

The first wave struck him from the side. It came through the crack in the slope, brown with earth, and swept his legs from under him. Dessic went under, struck the shield with his shoulder and broke the surface long enough for one breath. A burning beam revolved above him. Water washed over Avar’s face, and Dessic grabbed the strap of his armour to haul him up.

He was holding him when the second wave came.

It took the ground from beneath them. Dessic was thrown about, mud filled his mouth, and he felt Avar’s weight tugging at his arm. He tried to bring his left hand to help. The mutilated fingers slid across the wet leather. For a moment he still managed to pinch the strap between thumb and forefinger; then the water hurled him against something hard, and he lost his grip.

When Dessic surfaced, he shouted for Avar. He swallowed water, coughed and searched the wreckage for the shield. Dark rounded shapes drifted everywhere: wood, bodies. He swam towards one and found an overturned tub with no bottom. The next current drove him against it. He hooked an arm over the rim and held on.

The coast had vanished. Through the rain he saw a hill rising alone from the water; whether it had been there before, he could not say. Ash clung to the tub. A little way off, a piece of cloth floated, and Dessic could not tell whether it was a sail or a bandage.

He searched until he could no longer raise his head. When a breaker spun the tub around, he tightened his grip until he could speak again.

“Avar,” he said.

A wave drove seawater into his mouth. He coughed and said the name once more.

The naerling thrashed its tail when Edran slid the knife in behind its gills. It was a strong fish, almost as long as his forearm. If he had not already spent half the morning gutting his neighbour’s catch, he might have noticed how cold its scales were. He pressed the fish harder against the board until it stopped moving. The cold remained on his fingers. Below, between the jetty’s posts, a broken basket drifted in circles. Each time it struck the wood, it sounded as though someone were knocking from beneath.

The sun had reached the roofs of Baisu, but not yet the river. Thin mist lay across the Naeril; the moored boats looked like drawings someone had tried to rub out. Behind Edran, shutters swung open; someone poured washing-up water into the lane, and two men argued over a torn rope. The smell of warm dough drifted from his mother’s house. If he finished the fish in time, he would get the heel of the first loaf before she put it on the scales. At the landing, the ferryman ran two fingers over a blue scale someone had carved into the post long ago, and only then checked the knot in his mooring rope. Edran had never seen him perform those two gestures in the opposite order.

He scraped his knife along the edge of the board and laid the naerling with the others. Four still to go. Bodil would come as soon as her delivery of timber had been unloaded. As always, she would inspect the small fish first to make him think she did not care about the larger ones.

“You should throw that one away,” Tovan said behind him.

Edran did not need to turn. He had heard the third plank creak, the one the boy always stepped on even though there was plenty of room beside it. “If you want it, you can ask.”

Tovan came up beside the board and examined the catch with the gravity of a man being offered suspicious goods. His sleeves were wet to the elbows, and a duck feather clung to his collar. “My mother says you give Bodil the good ones because she lets you owe her for the wood.”

“Your mother lets us owe her for salt. She gets the good ones next week.” Edran pushed the smallest naerling towards him. “Take a leaf from the basket. And tell her to cook it today.”

The boy wrapped the fish without taking his eyes off the others. He had grown so fast in recent months that his hands seemed too large for his thin wrists. Edran used to have to chase him off the jetty; by now he helped the boats come in when the current was strong and demanded a wage that he renegotiated every time.

“Have you been out today?”

“The boat’s taking on water. I have to replace the stern plank first.”

“I could come along when it’s done.”

“You could help mend it.”

Tovan pulled the leaf tight until the fish was hidden completely. “I promised my mother I’d go straight home.”

Edran laughed and reached for the next naerling. At that moment, the knocking beneath the jetty stopped.

He did not look down at once. Only when the rope of the neighbouring boat also stopped rubbing against its ring did he lift his head. Mist stood between the posts, and the basket hung motionless in the current. Edran could distinguish every individual willow twig. A drop of water clung to a broken end and did not fall.

Tovan held something out to him. The boy’s mouth moved, but Edran could not understand a word. Pressure built behind his ears, like the time he had dived beneath a grounded barge as a boy, too deep and for too long. He swallowed against it. Under his left hand, the fish grew hard with cold.

Then the sound came.

It rose from beneath the planks, and at the same time it was inside Edran’s teeth and in the bone of the wrist he had broken years before. For one breath he was certain someone was speaking close behind him. He turned, ready to answer a question whose beginning he had missed, and saw only the open door of the house and his mother standing in the doorway with flour-covered hands.

What he heard went deeper than sound. The wood beneath his feet gave way without moving. Something pale lay in the water beneath the jetty, long and curved, and he had to bend down to see what it was. He had already shifted his weight forward when Tovan seized his sleeve.

The basket struck a post. Water splashed up, the neighbouring boat jerked against its moorings, and barking dogs and shouting voices burst over them from the lanes. Somewhere, a jug shattered on stone. Edran stood on the edge of the jetty, knife in hand. He had no idea how he had got there.

“You didn’t hear me at all.” Tovan let go of his sleeve. The impudence had vanished from his face. “What was that?”

Edran looked down at the river. The pale outline was gone; scales and a thin thread of blood drifted between the posts. “I don’t know.”

His hand hurt. Where his spread fingers had lain, a white imprint stretched across the board, so fine that he first took it for fish slime. When he bent his fingers, the ice broke with a soft crackle.

He pushed the naerling over it and wiped his hand on his trousers. Tovan was still staring upstream, where people stood among their bundles on a Saolim raft. One flung both arms into the air and shouted something towards the bank, but the distance and the barking devoured his words.

“Edran.” His mother had reached the steps to the jetty. She looked first at him, then at the board. “Put the knife down.”

He obeyed before it occurred to him that she had not spoken to him in that tone for years. A streak of flour clung to her cheek. At any other time he would have wiped it away with his thumb. Now she took his left hand and held it to the light. Her fingers were warm, her grip firmer than it needed to be.

“Have you cut yourself?”

“No. It’s nothing.” He pulled his hand back, and she let him. Behind her, Bodil came running across the yard, her apron gathered in both fists to keep it out of the dirty water.

“Mera! All the jars fell off my shelf,” she called. “All the preserves. Did you feel that too?”

Mera turned towards her. “The whole house shook.”

“Nothing shook where I was,” Tovan said. Nobody answered. More voices came from the lane, and soon six people stood on the narrow strip of riverbank between the house and Bodil’s timber yard. A boatman claimed something had swum beneath his keel; his wife said he had still been asleep. Someone spoke of an earthquake farther north, another of a star that had fallen during the night. The ferryman stroked the blue scale on his post again. “My grandfather would have said one of the Blues was calling.”

“Your grandfather praised the Blues for every good catch,” Bodil said. “And if the basket stayed empty, he blamed the river.”

Edran had often heard them talk like that. Usually they kept arguing until one of them had to laugh. Today the ferryman lowered his hand and Bodil looked out across the Naeril. While they were silent, Edran ran his thumb across his palm. The skin was unbroken, but the cold still lay beneath it.

There was a saying at the landing that Bodil repeated every spring, when ice came down from the upper tributaries: No one gets sent across the river because of a noise that two others have not also heard. She had not invented it. The saying was so old that even the children mocked it; Tovan had imitated her only a few weeks earlier after a storm carried away his fishing rod. Now he said nothing, though he stood just one step from Edran.

Edran could have told them that he thought he had heard a voice in the sound. Instead he watched the boatmen draw their ropes tighter. Mera did the same with her hands in her apron. Edran knew that look. He wanted to know what the sound meant; Mera was already thinking of whom it might take.

She gathered the fish into a basket. She did it too hastily, without separating the large from the small, and when Bodil asked the price she named an amount Edran would have scolded her for on any other day.

“I haven’t gutted them all,” he said.

“Bodil can do that herself. Come inside.”

He bent for his knife, rinsed it in the river and pushed it into the sheath on his belt. The water felt as it did every morning, and he found it hard to take his hand out again.

“Here comes the mask woman,” Tovan said.

She was walking along the bank, slowly enough that people moved out of her way before she reached them. Edran had seen her three days earlier on one of the Saolim rafts, among sacks of salt and cages of shrieking birds. Back then she had held a wrapped bundle to her chest like a sleeping child. Today she carried it uncovered in the crook of her arm: a bronze mask, dark with age, with a flat, broad mouth and eyes whose lids were almost closed.

Two smaller faces hung from her belt. One was wrapped in cloth; the other bore the sunken cheeks of an old man. As a child, Edran had loved stories about the Koru, until his cousin told him that some masks still remembered what dying felt like. After that he had spent nights unable to look up at the wooden faces above Bodil’s gate, though they had nothing at all to do with the Koru.

“Stay here,” his mother said. She went to meet the woman and spoke to her before she reached the jetty. Edran did not catch the first words, but Mera shook her head.

The Koru answered quietly. “I didn’t come downriver because of him. It happened that way on the journey.”

“You don’t need to speak to him either.”

Tovan moved closer to Edran. “Her name’s Ama. From Obarem. My uncle fixed a clasp for her yesterday.” He whispered with the insistence of a boy determined that someone should notice how much he knew.

Ama lifted her eyes towards them. Her hair was braided close to her scalp, and a piece was missing from the rim of her left ear. She looked tired, more like a merchant after a bad night than someone Edran’s mother needed to protect him from. Yet the hand holding the mask was gripping its edge fiercely.

“What about me?” he asked.

Mera turned. “Please go inside.”

He remained where he was. His mother moved between him and Ama, and suddenly he was small again, so small that her skirt blocked his view of the stranger’s face. She had stood like that in the past when someone in the street asked her name. He stepped beside her.

“You know her,” he said.

“No,” Ama replied before Mera could speak. “But I think she knows why I’m here.”

The mask lay face-up in her arm. A drop emerged between its bronze lips, dark and round as resin, and Edran was about to draw Ama’s attention to it. Then the pressure returned behind his ears. This time the river was silent. The noise came from close by, dry and rough, like someone dragging a hand over the inner wall of an empty jug.

“Dessic.”

He stared at Ama. Her mouth was closed. The bronze beneath her thumb had been rubbed bright.

Nobody else seemed to have heard anything. Bodil was arguing with the boatman over whether an earthquake could be predicted, and Tovan was looking curiously from one face to another. Only Mera stood perfectly still.

“Why is she saying that to me?” Edran heard the hoarseness in his own voice only when Ama asked him to come closer. He stayed where he was. “It’s a name from a story.”

“What name?” Tovan asked.

Ama covered the bronze face with the cloth. “What did you hear?”

“You were standing right beside me.”

“I heard something. Before I trade on it, I need to know whether we heard the same thing.”

In winter his cousin had told him stories while they mended nets: Dessic, the First Hunter, whose spear was said to have pierced even dragon scales. In one telling he stood with a hundred men beneath a blue wing; in another, he hunted the Blue. Edran had asked Dahrim how both could be true. Dahrim had pulled the thread through a torn net and said that first you needed to know who was telling the story. Edran had taken it for an excuse. None of those versions belonged here, on this jetty, between fish blood and the bucket of guts.

“Dessic,” he repeated.

Mera pressed her lips together. Then she took the wrapped fish from Tovan, pulled the loose leaf tighter and pressed the parcel back into his hands. “Go home through Bodil’s yard. Tell your mother to keep you all away from the water today.”

“I can stay and help.”

“Not today.” When he had crossed the yard, she caught Edran by the arm. “We’ll talk inside.”

He let himself be led. What he wanted to ask her was none of the neighbours’ business. Ama followed as far as the stairs and stopped there. At the landing the Saolim were hauling in their ropes; Bodil carried away the basket of fish, and the boatman kicked at a loose plank. Little remained of the argument about the earthquake but scattered shouts.

It was too warm in the house. The first loaf lay uncut on the table, and a piece of dough hung over the rim of the bowl. Mera took a cloth from its hook and wiped her hands, though the flour was long gone. Her eyes moved towards the open door, then to the little window beside the hearth.

“This has happened before,” Edran said.

She did not answer at once. Outside, Ama asked a passer-by the way to the upper landing. Mera drew the cloth over and over through her fingers. On the jetty she had examined his hand in front of everyone; now that they were alone, she would not look at him.

“With your hand?” she asked at last.

He had meant to speak of the sound. The white imprint on the board stopped him. “Sometimes in winter. When I’ve been outside a long time.”

“Only in winter?”

He looked at her, and she sat down. She seemed a stranger in her own house, as though someone had seated her at a table where she could not find the knives.

“I thought if it happened less often…” She broke off and rubbed the cloth across her fingers. “You never said anything.”

“What was I supposed to say? That water freezes under my hands? That sometimes I know who’s behind me before I hear them?” He paused. Tovan’s step on the third plank had seemed so ordinary that he had never wondered whether the creak came before the knowledge or the other way around. “You knew.”

Mera nodded, almost imperceptibly. He hoped she would explain that it was an illness, something that ran in their family and harmed nobody. Instead she folded the cloth, smoothed its edges and laid it beside the loaf.

“When you were small, it happened more often. I kept you away from the river and hoped you would forget.”

There had been summers when he watched the other children swimming from the window. His fever might return, she had said. Once a small boy had slipped in the mud below and everyone had laughed. Edran had sat upstairs, picking at a loose fibre in the windowsill until his finger bled.

“And the name? What does Dessic have to do with us?”

Before she could answer, Ama came through the door. All three masks were covered. “There are men at the lower landing asking after a house in this lane. One of them mentioned your name.”

Mera sprang up so quickly that the chair struck the wall. “How many?”

“I saw two. One stayed by the boats. I don’t know whether there are others with them.”

Edran looked from one woman to the other. “Who are they?”

“I don’t know them,” Ama said. “But the one I spoke to wouldn’t turn his neck. He turned his whole body to look at me.” She turned to Mera. “Is there a back way out?”

“Through the smokehouse into Bodil’s yard.”

“Take it. I’ll see if someone’s waiting there.”

Mera caught her wrist. For a moment the two women stood together without a word; then Ama nodded and passed through the low opening beside the hearth. Edran heard her footsteps on the smokehouse tiles, followed by the soft scrape of the yard door.

“You have to tell me what’s happening.” He blocked his mother’s way as she moved to follow Ama. “Now. Not later.”

She put both hands on his chest. “For twenty-six years I’ve tried to keep you out of stories in which people like us don’t grow old. If those men have come because of what happened this morning, there’s no more time to talk.”

“People like us?”

She glanced at his hand. He drew it back, though she had not reached for it, and let her pass into the opening.

In the smokehouse the smell of old fires was so thick he could taste it. Two rows of fish hung from the beams, and beneath them was stacked the dry alder wood Bodil had let them buy on credit. Mera knelt before the stack and began moving the logs aside. Edran helped her without knowing what they were searching for. When she pulled the flat stone out from the foot of the wall, he remembered Dahrim sitting in that very place once.

His cousin had fitted a new blade to Edran’s plane that day. Edran had been too young to pilot a boat, and old enough to try anyway. After repairing the tool, Dahrim had shown him how to spot a split plank before taking to the water. He had smelled of wood shavings and the oil he rubbed into his boots. An insignificant memory, yet Edran could not push it away. For years, Dahrim had been, above all, the man who did not come back. Now the room smelled of him again.

Mera drew a long, narrow bundle from the hollow. The oilcloth had turned white along its folds. When she handed it to him, she held on a moment too long, as though still tempted to push it back under the stone.

“Take this with you. Don’t open it until Baisu is behind you.”

“Is it Dahrim’s?”

She lowered her eyes to the bundle. “He left it here.”

Outside came the crash of wood against wood, followed by Bodil’s voice. Edran caught only the word delivery, shouted too loudly and too clearly. Mera pushed a log in front of the open hollow and straightened.

“If we’re separated, go north until you reach the old road. Stay away from the riverbank. They can see you from the water.”

“We won’t be separated.”

She looked up at the narrow smoke vent beneath the roof. He knew her well enough to be sure she would have argued if she had had an answer. As a boy, he had climbed up there to take birds’ nests out of the flue. He doubted he could still fit through, and was suddenly certain that she doubted it too.

A floorboard creaked in the front room. Not the one by the door, which gave beneath every step, but one farther inside, near the table. Edran held his breath. Beyond the strands of the raffia curtain, a head took shape, then a shoulder.

“Edran Veyr?” The voice was calm, almost courteous. “Your neighbour thought we’d find you here.”

Mera put a finger to her lips and pointed upwards. Then she stepped to the curtain and drew it a little aside. “My son isn’t here.”

Through the gap, Edran saw a man in a dusty travelling cloak. No weapon was visible. Pale clay clung to his boots, clay that did not exist here by the river, and his cloak was fastened right up to his chin although the sun had long since reached the yard outside.

“Then we’ll wait,” the man said.

Edran tucked the bundle beneath his belt and set a foot on the woodpile. Behind the stranger lay the loaf on the table, beside it the overturned chair and the bowl from which dough continued to spill over the edge. At that table, his mother had told him Dahrim would probably never return. She had folded her hands so he would not see them shaking.

Now she held the curtain so tightly that the raffia fibres creaked.

Edran took his foot off the wood. He would not leave her alone with this man, not through a smoke vent. The oilcloth resisted his fingers; he had to work his thumbnail beneath a brittle fold before it opened. Inside lay a knife with a broad, dark blade and a hilt of green-patinated bronze. It was plainer than he had expected. No jewels, no writing, only a shallow hollow where the thumb was meant to rest.

When he touched the hilt, he smelled rain on hot earth. The scent was so distinct that he raised his head. For an instant he thought he saw light falling through a green wing membrane far above him. Then there were only the tiles beneath his feet and smoke in his throat.

It was nothing like the sound at the river. That had nearly drawn him over the planks; here all that remained was the image of a leaf with light passing through it, though there was no sky above. He tried to hold on to it, if only because the smell had briefly given him back the house as it had been before the stranger came. But the harder he tried to remember, the less remained. The bronze cooled in his hand, and then cooled further, until a trace of frost formed on the dark blade.

The stranger pushed the curtain farther aside. The skin above his collar was stretched tight, with hard, overlapping ridges rising beneath it. Edran knew that pattern from the fish on his board. Here it lay across a human throat.

Mera backed away from the man. Edran stepped beside her, holding the old knife low against his leg. The stranger’s gaze travelled from his face to the frosted blade, and for the first time his expression changed.

“You wanted to talk to me,” Edran said. His breath hung white before his mouth, in a kitchen where bread had just been baked. “Then let her pass.”

The man took a step back.