She shied away from those memories. Too close, she thought, too close to something. And then they turned a corner and she was in a familiar place. There was the well plaza, just as they had left it, beams stacked to one side, broken mechanisms to another, tools in a third. The ship’s crew had put some hours in on the chain. There was a mended length of it by the well’s lip, the end fastened to the stub of one ancient post that had once supported the well’s cover. Heeby was there, too, standing quietly in the darkness. A sense of dread rose in Thymara.
‘Why did we come here?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘So you could get the Silver. So Tintaglia can live. So all the dragons can become all they were meant to be, and their Elderlings as well. ’ The light from the locket she wore did not reach his eyes here in the open. They were the lambent blue they had always been but the silvery sheen the jewellery gave turned his face to a ghost mask. She did not know him.
He spoke softly but firmly. ‘Amarinda, you have to go down the well. You are the only one who knows how to bring back the Silver. ’
‘My love?’
Reyn spoke the words softly as if he thought she could be asleep. She wasn’t. Couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, and might never sleep again. She huddled by her dragon’s face, her baby on her lap. Her hand rested by Tintaglia’s nostril where she could feel the slow sigh as the dragon continued to breathe. ‘I’m here,’ she told Reyn.
He hitched closer to her. ‘I’m trying to make sense of what I’m feeling. When I was a boy and Tintaglia was a shadowy presence underground, trapped in her wizardwood case, I was fascinated with her. Then she all but enslaved me, and I hated her. I loved her when she helped me recover you. And then, off she went, and for years we heard nothing, felt nothing from her. ’
‘I was as angry with her as you were. To leave us the care of the young dragons, to go off without a word. To send Selden off to Sa knows where, never to return to us. ’ She caressed the dragon’s snout. She sighed. ‘Do you think he’s dead, Reyn? My little brother?’
Reyn shook his head wordlessly.
The night had turned clear, the clouds blown aside, yet it was not as cold as it had been. Spring was in the air. Above them, the moon sailed on and the stars shone, heedless of mortals below. Their Elderling cloaks kept them warm. The stones were hard beneath her. She had her husband and their first-born son at her side and the dragon who had shaped all their lives. Life and death merged at this spot, an untidy tangle of endings. The dragon’s breath flowed over their son. The smell of her infected wounds hung in the damp air.
‘She is still so incredibly beautiful,’ Malta said. She willed her voice not to choke in her tight throat. ‘Look at these scales, every one a tiny work of art. It’s even more a wonder when you realize she determined their decoration, every one of them. Look at these, around her eyes. ’ Her fingers walked to them, traced the intricate pattern of white, silver and black that framed the dragon’s closed eyes. ‘No dragon will ever be as glorious as she was. The young queen Sintara flaunts herself, but she will never be as blue as our Tintaglia. Fente and Veras are plain as tree snakes compared to her. My conceited beauty, you had every right to be vain. ’
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‘She did,’ Reyn conceded. ‘I hate that she dies like this, broken and flawed. Such a waste to lose her. I could feel the hope in the other dragons surge when she appeared in the skies. They need her, they need what she remembers. ’
‘We all do,’ Malta said quietly. ‘Especially Phron. ’
The baby stirred in her lap, perhaps at the mention of his name. Malta lifted the corner of her cloak that covered him. He still slept. She bent close to study his face in the moonlight. ‘Look,’ she said to her husband. ‘I never realized it before. The tiny scales on his brows? They are the same pattern as hers. Even without her presence, he carries her marks on him. Her artistry would have lived on in him. If he were to live. ’ The baby stirred at her touch as she traced his face and whimpered more strongly. ‘Hush, my little one. ’ She lifted him from her lap. His thin arm and scrawny hand sprawled from his wrappings. She put the little hand on the dragon’s brows, held it there between Tintaglia’s scales and her still-soft, still-human palm. ‘She would have been your dragon, too, my darling. Touch her once, before you both go. Imagine how beautiful you would have been if she could have guided you. ’ She moved the baby’s hand down the dragon’s scaling in a caress. ‘Tintaglia, if you must go, give him something of yourself first. Give him a memory of flight, give him a thought of your beauty to carry into the dark. ’
‘I don’t know anything about Silver or about this well. I’m not Amarinda and I don’t know. And I’m not going down that well. Not now, not ever. I hate places like that, dark and small. Go down there in the night, alone? That’s crazy. ’ Her heart was pounding at the mere thought of it. She crossed her arms, hugging herself. Tats. Why hadn’t she wakened Tats and made him come, too? No one knew they’d gone out walking.
He insisted relentlessly, in such a gentle voice. ‘Tintaglia is dying. Now is all we have. Thymara or Amarinda, it doesn’t matter. You have to go down the well. I’ll go with you. You won’t be alone. ’
She tried to fight her way back to her own reality. He was just Rapskal, just strange Rapskal, and she didn’t have to let him bully her. ‘I won’t! I’m tired of this, Rapskal. And I’m tired of trying to help you. I’m going back to the hall to get some sleep. You are being too strange, even for me. ’
She turned to go but he seized her arm in a grip of iron. ‘You have to go down the well. Tonight. ’
She slapped at his hands and tried to twist free of his grip. Could not. When had he become so strong? He did not even appear to be making an effort to hold her as she fought his grip on her. She could not bear the gaze of the stranger looking out of his eyes at her. ‘Let me go!’
Wings flapped and a gust of air washed over her. The paving stones of the square shook as the dragon’s claws met them and skidded to a halt. Sintara! Thymara knew her scent as well as she knew her mind’s touch on hers. Be calm, Thymara. I am here. All will be fine.
Relief washed through her, bringing icy anger with it. She met Tellator’s stare coldly and stopped struggling. ‘Let go of me now. ’ She suggested it calmly. ‘Or my dragon may do you harm. ’
Heeby had advanced on them as she spoke, the spikes on her neck rising at the perceived threat to Rapskal. Thymara caught her breath. This could be bad. She had no desire to see the two dragons fight one another, especially not with her in the middle of it.
Neither did he. His hand dropped away from her arm. ‘You’re right. It’s better this way. ’ He turned away from both of them.
Hurt choked her voice as she rubbed her bruised arm. ‘Rapskal. I loved you. Now I don’t think I ever want to see you again. You’re not my friend any more. I don’t know who or what you are now, but I don’t like it. ’
She turned to go.
‘Thymara,’ Sintara said gently. ‘It will be all right. We have not always trusted one another. But now you must. ’
Thymara walked slowly to the well’s mouth and looked down. An unnameable dread rose in her, a horror of confined dark places. She shuddered. Rapskal had followed her. He did not try to touch her but knelt on the other side of the well. He seized the fastened chain, pulled a length free, and dropped it in the hole. It clanked against the side. He pushed another loop after it, and then another, and suddenly the links were rattling over the stone lip as the chain paid out and down into the darkness. It stopped, taut against the pole, and Rapskal said to himself, ‘Not long enough. ’ He stood up and walked off into the darkness.
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Thymara remained by the well, staring down into it. An eternity of blackness. And she would go down into it.
She lifted her eyes to her dragon. ‘Don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t. ’
Sintara only looked at her. Thymara fe
lt the compulsion building in her. But this was not the dragon pushing her to go hunting when she wanted to sleep, or encouraging her to groom every single scale on her face. This was different.
‘If you force me, it will never be the same between us,’ she warned the dragon.
‘No,’ Sintara agreed. ‘It won’t. Just as I haven’t been the same since you left me hungry, with no choice but to face my fear and try to fly. ’
‘That was different!’ Thymara protested.
‘Only from your point of view,’ the dragon replied. ‘Thymara. Go down the well. ’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. ’ But she walked stiffly around to the other side of the well and knelt by the chain. She put a hand on it. It was cold. The links of it were big, big enough to slip a hand into. Or the toe of her boot.
‘I’ll go first. ’ Did Tellator or Rapskal make that offer? He stood next to her, a coil of line over his shoulder.
‘You can do no good down there,’ Sintara objected and Heeby whiffled nervously.
‘I won’t send her alone,’ he said. He looked at Thymara, his eyes unreadable. ‘Like this. It won’t be easy, but you’re strong. ’ He cocked his head at her and for an instant he was Rapskal again, telling her that one day she would fly. ‘You can do it. Just follow me. ’
She moved out of his way as he knelt beside her. He clambered over the lip of the well, his hands snugged tight to the chain. She saw him grope with his feet, find a toehold in the chain for one and then reach for another. He gave her a strained smile. ‘I’m scared, too,’ he admitted. He moved his hands and slowly he walked down the chain and away from her. She watched until his upturned face had vanished in the darkness.
She glanced at her dragon and made a final plea. ‘Don’t make me. ’
‘You have to go down there. You are the only one who might be able to find the Silver. You knew how the well worked, you knew how to touch Silver and not die. It has to be you, Thymara-Amarinda. ’
She wet her lips, felt them dry and then crack in the chill. She could hear the chain working against the lip of the well. He was still going down. She was furious with Tellator and possibly hated him, but she would not let Rapskal go alone. ‘I’ll do it,’ she conceded. ‘But let me be the one to do it. Please. ’
‘Do you think you can make yourself?’
‘I can make myself do it,’ she said.
She felt Sintara lift the glamour from her mind. It peeled away, making her skin stand up in goose-bumps and leaving the night darker around her. She blinked, becoming accustomed to her lesser human vision and then the gleam of the locket she wore. She did not speak and did not let herself think. She inserted her hands into the links of the chain and positioned herself on the edge of the well. The chain vibrated with Rapskal’s weight. He was still moving down it.
She closed her eyes and remembered her childhood days in the treetops of Trehaug. Climbing had been far more familiar to her than running. She took a breath and stripped her Elderling boots from her feet. She levered her body around and groped for the links of the chain. Her clawed toes found them. She began her descent.
Darkness swallowed her as she went down and then the gleam of the moon medallion seemed to grow stronger. Her eyes adjusted. The walls of the well were not as blank as they appeared from up above. When the gleam of the medallion met the black, there were markings engraved into the smooth face. There were not many and it took time for her to realize they were dates and levels. The Elderling system of measuring time meant nothing to her. But Amarinda recalled that the Silver had risen and fallen, sometimes seasonally and also over the years. Sometimes the Silver was scant; sometimes it flowed so strongly that the well had to be capped, lest Silver flow through the streets. She passed a notation scribed by Amarinda’s hand, for those who could work the Silver tended the wells also.
And regulated them.
The deeper she went, the less she felt like Thymara. She was no stranger to the inside of this well, though climbing a chain down was not how she usually descended. There had been levers and chains and gears. A carefully fitted platform with a hatch once travelled up and down in the shaft, just for visits such as this. She could recall the tediously slow process of turning the crank to travel down or up the shaft, and the loud clanking of the chain as it had moved through the mechanism.
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She stopped climbing. It was getting colder as she descended. Amarinda had never liked coming here, had never shrugged off as routine the task of managing the Silver. It was not the danger of the volatile stuff. The Silver was always dangerous whether confined to a vial on her workbench or flowing in threads down the street. Casual contact with Silver was always eventually deadly for everyone. Amarinda knew the dangers of the Silver and chose to work with it anyway. Slowly she began descending again. But she had never liked the confinement of this shaft. Nor the dark. Nor the cold.
She stepped on his hand. Tellator cursed, the language foreign to her ears.
‘Wait!’ he commanded her. ‘I’m at the end of the chain. I’m trying to tie the line to the last few links so we can get down the rest of the way. It’s not easy. ’
She didn’t respond. She clung to the cold chain in the dark, felt it vibrate with his motions. It swung slightly with their weight. No different from holding tight to a skinny tree, she told herself, and waited.
‘There. I heard the rope hit the bottom when I dropped it. It’s hand over hand from here on down. ’
‘If you step down into live Silver …’ She left the thought dangling.
‘I saw debris down there when they fished for the bucket. I’ll stand on it. ’
She felt him moving again. He was working harder now and his weight jerked the chain back and forth. Her hands were cramping from their grip on the cold metal and the links bit into her feet. She freed one hand to lift the necklace over her head. Rapskal was too far down for her to hand it to him. She gritted her teeth and then dropped it, letting light fall away from her. ‘Look where you step,’ she warned him, and realized that she was back to it being her and Rapskal doing something foolhardy together. She was still angry at being compelled to be here, but was not sure Rapskal was the one to blame for it.
The jerking continued for some time. Bereft of the jewellery’s shimmer, the blackness closed in on her. She closed her eyes and willed herself to remember that the shaft was not truly that narrow. Deep, yes, very deep. So far from light and moving air. She began to tremble and not with the cold. She hated this. Hated it and feared it. Darkness was a thing to her, not just the absence of light, but a choking thing that could cover her over like a smothering hand.
‘Come down,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll catch you. But be careful. ’
She did not want to go down to him, but her hands were losing their strength. She moved down to the end of the chain, and then onto the rope. Her numbed hands slipped, refused her weight, and she slid, shrieking, the rope burning through her hands. He caught her hard and swung her to his side. ‘Open your eyes!’ he demanded of her and only then did she realize they were clenched shut.
She held tight to him and opened her eyes slowly. He wore the moon necklace now. The light it cast was faint and yet bright in contrast to such utter darkness. She looked away from it, trying to let her eyes adjust.
They stood together in the bottom of the shaft. Looking up, she was startled to see distant pinpricks of light. Stars. The walls of the shaft were almost smooth, the seams of the stonework fine and straight. They stood on rubble of metal and pieces of ancient wood preserved by the cold. ‘Stoop down,’ she requested in a whisper. When he did, he brought the light with him as she bent beside him. Squatting, she touched the long-broken platform beneath their feet. Here was a piece of a gear. ‘This is the part that went up and down in the shaft. It must have broken and fallen a long time ago. ’
The necklace moved slightly with his nod. ‘It did,’ he said. ??
?In the quake. The last big one. ’ There was a clutter of sticks that crunched as she stepped on them. Something gleamed among them. Silver?
He caught his breath as she pushed the sticks aside with her bare hands and then peered more closely. ‘It’s a ring,’ she said. She picked it up and her touch woke it. Elderling-made. A flame-jewel lit with a pale-yellow gleam in a jidzin setting. Jidzin. She knew it for what it was now, Silver trapped in iron. She held it between two fingers, using it as a tiny lamp. ‘All kinds of stuff on the ground down here. But no Silver. Just earth. ’ She peered closer. ‘Rapskal, look here, where we can see past the broken platform. The bottom of the shaft is paved with stones! That makes no sense for a well! Think how we lined our drinking-water holes on the way here. We wanted the water to seep up from the bottom and in from the sides. We filtered it, but we didn’t block it. Why would they make a shaft this deep and close it off on all sides from the Silver? It makes no sense. ’
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‘I don’t know. ’ His voice was shaking. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever been down here. I wanted to come down here, but I couldn’t. ’ He swallowed.
‘Well, we’re both here now. ’ She recalled Carson’s frequent words. ‘Everything the Elderlings did, they did for a reason. ’ She turned in a half circle. Her boot snagged on something: a piece of dirty fabric. ‘Someone’s old tunic is down here. Did they throw garbage down here when the well went dry?’
‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No. ’
She tugged at the dirt-caked folds. ‘Look. Here’s a glove. No. It’s a gauntlet. ’ She picked it up by a fingertip, shook it free of dirt and sticks and studied it.
‘There’s the other one,’ he said, but made no move to touch it. He crouched with his back braced against the wall, watching her. She found the mate, and tugged it from under a stone that had trapped it. The stone rolled slightly and tapped against the wall with a hollow sound. She turned to look at it.
‘Amarinda,’ he said, and his voice choked on the word. She leaned closer. It was not a stone she had dislodged. It was a skull, brown and cracked. She stared, feeling the pressure of a scream build inside her. Then it died away to nothing. She took a long careful breath.