Chapter Text
Shackles bit into his wrists, the metal burning after so long in the sun. Chay licked his cracked lips before he could stop himself, opening a scab that had already opened four times. Blood trickled down his chin. Seagulls wheeled above the rock where he was chained, waiting for the dragon to come for him.
He twisted his neck to look out at the ocean beyond the bay, black clouds building up on the horizon, lightning stabbing the water. Below the sound of the waves, the first cracks of thunder.
Chay coughed, his throat gone dry from so long in the sun. Once upon a time, he might have been able to sing away the storm. But his power was gone.
“What good is a witch without his powers?” the townspeople had laughed when they’d left him here. “You might as well feed the dragon.”
They didn’t know about the sea salt in the links of the chains, the corrosion eating away the metal, though the seawater burned his wrists. Out to sea, another bolt of lightning came down. Chay counted the moments before the thunder. The dragon was coming closer.
One of the shackles came loose in his hand. Chay doubled his efforts on the one that remained, throwing his weight against the chain.
Please, he whispered to the ocean, and a wave crashed against the rock, hard enough that the chain jostled free. Chay yanked at the shackle around his wrist, but the metal was firmly locked in place. It couldn’t be helped.
He gathered the length of chain against his chest and dove into the water.
Even though he was powerless, the ocean wouldn’t let him drown. Chay still choked on seawater, kicking to keep himself from sinking as thunder sounded, louder below water, quieter above. He needed to get to land.
Not to the town. They were on their own against the dragon now, the creature that brought storms into the bay. Chay had faced off against the monster for years, singing to calm the winds, sending the worst of the lightning out to sea. Perhaps if he’d stayed on the rock as a willing sacrifice, the townspeople might have had a chance.
The waves pushed him towards the rocky cliffs that half-circled the bay. Stormclouds boiled overhead, warm just above the water, cold at the top. His eyes gone blurry from seawater, Chay searched the sky for midnight-blue wings.
A shadow swooped over the water. Lightning spiderwebbed across the surface of the waves.
Chay went under. The dragon roared.
The sound caught him off-guard, the shock of thunder ripping through him. He lost his hold on the length of chain against his chest. Metal slipped through his fingers. Chay kicked furiously to keep himself from being dragged down into the waves.
Saltwater burned his lungs as he came up to find the dragon circling the rock where he had been chained. Wing-beats pushed water into his face. Another roar, this time ending in a high note, like keening. The stormclouds raced towards land.
The dragon turned back to sea. Back to him. Chay quit fighting the chain and sank. The ocean couldn’t kill him, but the dragon would.
Another lightning strike across the water. Another blast of thunder, so close that Chay could feel it in his teeth. His chest was too tight; the breath he’d taken was gone. He thrashed his way back to the surface, but by now sea and air and sky were all black.
Please, he asked the ocean, thinking of the sea caves in the cliffs. Lightning crept along the clouds, silhouetting the dragon in their midst. Chay sucked in a breath as the dragon screamed. Then dove.
Straight for him.
Chay saw eyes like tide pools against scales of midnight blue. Then nothing.
Metal scraped against metal. Chay opened his eyes to find a man kneeling beside him, picking the lock on the shackle around his wrist. Corroded from salt, the chain fell to pieces between them, clanking to the rocky floor of the sea cave.
Lightning flashed outside. Chay saw dark brows set in a pale face before thunder shook the rocks.
“Who are you?” Chay asked, but there was no time. He hauled himself up against limestone wall of the cave, worn smooth by thousands of years of dripping seawater. “The dragon will kill us if he finds us here.”
A wave smashed against the cave entrance. Chay blinked away the sea spray as the man reached for him.
Flash of lighting. “Who hurt you?” the man asked, in the moment before the thunder.
They didn’t have time for that, but Chay’s legs betrayed him when he tried to get up. His wrist burned where the shackle had been. He cradled his arm against his chest.
“The townspeople left me for the dragon,” he told his rescuer as the wind shrieked past the cave entrance, the gusts blowing white.
The man rose to his feet. Outside, lightning sliced open the sky, the thunder following so quickly that Chay couldn’t stop himself from clapping his hands over his ears. Don’t go formed on his lips as the man walked towards the cave entrance, but the words didn’t come until he had gone. He reached for the ocean, but he was surrounded by rock.
The rain band moved in, spattering against the walls and floor of the cave. Chay shivered, listening to the gusts whine through the cracks in the rock. He opened his mouth to sing the storm to sleep, but he was helpless without his power.
Eventually the storm lulled him into a half-haze. He watched the lightning without blinking; the thunder provoked no response. The storm wore itself out as it moved inland, the clouds going from black to exhausted gray.
Chay shivered as watery light breached the cave once more.
“You’re awake,” came a man’s voice from behind him.
Chay shot to his feet, staggering as blood rushed to his head. One of the man’s hands clamped around his elbow, steadying him. Chay took a breath as he wavered.
“You never told me who you were,” he said when the cave had stopped spinning around him.
The man kept holding onto his arm. “Kim.”
“Chay,” replied Chay, but the man said nothing.
He looked behind him for the first time and saw the space beyond the cave entrance. Silver glittered in the watery light the storm had left; silver coins were strewn on the floor alongside tangles of silver necklaces draped over silver ornaments set with blue stones. The pile filled the rest of the room, narrowed the tunnel to another cave room beyond the first.
He was in the dragon’s hoard. Chay stumbled back against Kim’s chest.
“No,” he realized as he saw a room full of treasure. He shrugged off Kim’s hand, turned to face him. “You’re here to steal from the dragon’s hoard. He’s going to kill us both when he finds us here.”
Kim blinked.
Chay left him—wobbling a bit—and headed for the nearest pile of silver. Surely the dragon had some supplies amidst the display of wealth. He put down the cloak and dug in, tossing aside the first item he found, a silver goblet, set with rings of lapis lazuli. Metal clanged against the floor as he worked.
“How did I get here?” Chay asked.
“I found you,” said Kim from behind him. “In the water.”
Chay eyed a silver candlestick and accompanying candle, dark outlines of gems encased in the wax. It was too heavy to be practical. He threw it into another pile.
“You had a good plan, waiting for the dragon to leave to sneak into his lair,” Chay mused. “We can use your boat to escape.”
“Boat?”
Something that wasn’t silver caught his eye. Coins scattered everywhere as Chay knelt to drag a battered wooden lap harp out of the hoard, most of the strings still intact. He tweaked one of the tuning pegs, then struck an out-of-tune note that echoed through the cave.
Kim was staring at him.
Chay adjusted the tuning peg. “We’ll scrounge for supplies before we go.” He shivered in the breeze from the cave mouth. “It’s not like I can go back into town to get my things.”
He set aside the lap harp and rose—his head spun, but he stayed on his feet—to inspect another room. The limestone cliffs around the bay held systems of caves, tunnels and rooms. All of them must be filled with treasure.
“Why did the townspeople turn on you?” came Kim’s question as Chay half-fell into a room filled with instruments, lutes and harps and lines of silver flutes arranged from shortest to longest.
“I’m a sea witch, but I lost my powers,” Chay took one of the flutes off the cave wall and blew a sour note. He winced. The humid sea air did the instrument no favors. “The townspeople thought they would be spared if they sacrificed me to the dragon.”
They had been wrong. The town hadn’t seen a storm that ferocious, not since Chay had been old enough to stand against the dragon.
He nearly dropped the flute when Kim draped a cloak over his shoulders.
“They hurt you,” Kim remarked as Chay adjusted the cloak, trying not to think too hard about its previous owner. “Now they’re dead.”
That made him look up, but Kim had already turned back towards the cave entrance. His footsteps fell away and Chay let him go, exchanging his flute for a harp. He struck a note, the tuning on this instrument ringing true, and sung under his breath.
He felt the loss as he left the room of instruments, but there were no supplies here, and he could hardly take them all with him. Chay poked his head in the next room to find a library, volumes and scrolls and enough loose pages to start a fire.
Chay rifled through the pages on one of the tables, looking for map. Instead his fingers closed on a ring, the coldness of the metal burning his fingers. He squinted at the strange shapes etched into the metal, trying to make out the meaning of the symbols.
“Don’t touch that,” said Kim from the threshold of the room. He held a bow; he’d strapped a quiver of arrows across his back.
Chay dropped the ring back into the pile of papers. “Is it cursed?”
Kim said nothing, so Chay followed him out of the library, past the room of instruments. He pulled the cloak tighter as they returned to the cave entrance, hissing as one of his lacerated wrists scraped against the limestone walls.
Kim was at his side too quickly.
“I’m fine,” said Chay, though he could already feel the fear-driven energy that the dragon had given him fading. “I won’t hold you up.”
Kim shot a dark look in the direction of his wrists, now hidden beneath the cloak. He strode into one of the tunnels, leaving Chay to peer out at the ocean, slate-gray after the storm. No sign of the dragon.
Foot-scuff against stone. Chay turned to face Kim, a pack now slung over one shoulder. A silver-topped vial glittered in his hands.
Chay came closer. Their hands brushed as he took the vial, its crystal depths filled with a night-black substance, oily enough that he could see his reflection on the surface. His stomach rolled.
“Is this—?”
Kim nodded as Chay unstoppered the vial and took a tentative sniff. It smelled like iron and ichor.
“It will heal you,” said Kim, his pupils as black as the vial of dragon’s blood. “Your powers will be restored.”
“But,” Chay broke in, because all magic had a price.
Silver gleamed in Kim’s eyes. “Once you steal from the dragon’s hoard, you’ll belong to him forever.” Beyond the cave, Chay heard distant thunder. “He’ll never let you go.”
A wave smashed against the rocks. The tide was coming in.
“I have no choice,” Chay replied, thinking about the nights he’d spent with the dragon, destroying the creature’s storms before they could strike the coast. “I’ve always belonged to him.”
He swallowed the contents of the vial before he could change his mind. The dragon’s blood turned his world to shades of silver. Chay’s wrists burned where the chains had been, his throat stung when he tried to breathe. Power unfurled inside him, salty and deep, darker than the lowest trench on the sea floor.
A second wave broke upon the rocks of the cave, soaking his feet and ankles. Chay opened his eyes.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
Kim looked down at his bow. “Don’t.”
The decrepit rowboat bobbed in the bay, its hull warped from years of neglect. Already water splashed in the bilge. Just one of the dragon’s silver coins would buy them a more sea-worthy vessel, but they didn’t have time to return to the hoard. The sky held its breath; humidity pooled on Chay’s forehead.
Chay shooed the bilgewater from of the leaky hull and firmly told the ocean to stay out. Power shimmered around his fingers as he worked, translucent like the jingle shells children plucked out of the sand.
He hopped in the boat when he was confident it would not sink and waited for Kim to emerge from the dragon’s cave. Kim kicked crumbled rocks in front of him, his brow as dark as the cloudbank that had moved inland.
Chay picked up the battered oars, but Kim took them from his hands.
“It’s a very nice boat,” Chay told him. The ocean agreed, pressing to get back into the bilge. “You must have had it for a long time.”
“No,” said Kim, pushing off the rocks. “Where are you going?”
Nowhere fast, thought Chay, as he eyed Kim’s attempts to row. He spun another spell, giving the water beneath the boat the excitement of a riptide.
“You never told me where you were going,” he began, not wanting to impose himself on Kim’s travel plans. “Don’t you have a hideout where you keep the things you steal?”
Kim glanced at the cave behind them. A dolphin leapt in the distance, followed by another. Hia had always loved the dolphins, even though they didn’t talk to him the way they did to Chay.
“I lost my powers trying to find my brother,” Chay confessed, drawing his attention. “Do you remember when the king’s soldiers came last year?”
The king needed more men to fight in his wars, the soldiers had said when they came to the town. They had taken the oldest son of each family and put them aboard the largest ship Chay had ever seen—a ship he should have been able to find—and sailed beyond his consciousness.
“I missed hia, but at least I knew where he was. Or I thought I did,” Chay continued. “But the soldiers came back. They said the ship had never arrived.”
Maybe if he’d found the town’s missing sons, its people wouldn’t have turned on him. Chay bowed his head as Kim made another half-hearted attempt at the oars. Tiny waves lapped against the hull. The ocean hadn’t known where hia had gone, and the ocean knew everything that happened in its depths.
Chay should have been able to tell if danger had befallen thm, if they’d gone overboard, if sharks swarmed around—Chay swallowed—bodies in the water.
“Someone must have taken them,” he told Kim. “But who could be powerful enough to defy the king?”
Kim looked upward. Out to sea, against the horizon, stormclouds began to build against the sea breeze.
“You have your power back,” Kim replied. “Do you really want to go searching for someone more powerful than the king?”
For hia, anything. Chay leaned back against the side of the boat, letting the waves become rhythm, clunks and thunks against the old hull, the ocean waiting for his counterpoint. Chay hummed, the sound wispy in the back of his throat, a tune to match the rowboat, whatever horizon they were sailing to.
Not for them the grand swelling of strings, the triumphal horns of the larger ship that had taken hia away. Chay cast out his power like a fishing net, sinking deep to the sea floor, stretching wide to the edges of shoreline.
Tattered sails upon a fallen mast. Chay jerked upright.
“You don’t have to stop singing,” said Kim.
Chay looked to the west, where the ship had last been seen. The dragon’s blood had returned his powers and then some.
“I shouldn’t, now that the dragon is looking for us,” he commented, steering the tide beneath them. They would need supplies for the journey.
Kim fumbled with the oars, impeding their progress before getting them out of the water. “Why—” he began, and had to take a breath before he continued. “Why does the dragon hate you?”
Chay watched the clouds stagger against the sea breeze overhead. A thin bolt of lightning hit the water far away. Not close enough to worry the dolphins, who came to investigate them. And then swam away when Kim craned his neck over the side of the boat.
“We’re old enemies,” he told Kim, though the stories said that dragons could live for centuries, even millenia. When he was gone, the dragon would find another sea witch to fight. Not a comforting thought.
Chay fed more power to the waves beneath them, the shoreline getting closer as they approached the town just beyond the bay.
“How much money do you have?” he asked Kim, who’d given up on rowing entirely as he watched the departing dolphins.
“What’s mine is yours,” Kim replied, turning his attention to Chay as they continued to sail across the calm water.
Chay pulled the hood of Kim’s cloak over his head as another person saw him and glared. He hadn’t thought that anyone outside the bay would recognize him.
But he was used to the looks. The townspeople had never trusted them either, not even after the years of Chay’s sea magic calming their storms and hia’s earth magic working deep in the soil to bring their crops to life.
Kim found him, then, a sack of supplies dangling from his hand.
“I got what you asked for,” he told Chay. “Should be enough food for a few days.”
Good, so they could avoid the towns that dotted the coastline. Chay matched Kim’s steps as they headed out of town, hiding in Kim’s profile. They’d left the rowboat along a secluded patch of coastline, hidden within a thicket of water-loving trees.
“Khun Kim,” came a voice from behind them.
Kim shoved Chay behind him as he whirled, backing away as the newcomer approached, his clothing as black as his sideburns. A ring glinted on his finger. Chay strained to see the symbols on the crest, but then Kim backed into him, and he could see nothing.
“Khun Kim, your presence is requested.”
Chay could feel the tension in Kim’s shoulders. His knuckles were white around the neck of the bag he carried.
“No,” said Kim, whirling again, keeping himself between Chay and the newcomer. Chay caught a hint of the man’s cool gaze before Kim took his hand. “We’re leaving.”
The man didn’t let them. He raised his voice before they’d gone more than three steps. “You’ve been quite visible lately. It has raised concerns.”
Kim tugged at his hand. “Don’t turn around,” he muttered to Chay. Over his shoulder, he called, “I’m not going.”
He towed them away as the man tried one more time. “Khun Korn will be disappointed. Khun Kinn as well.”
Kim’s grip tightened enough that Chay gritted his teeth before squeezing back. They left the man behind, Kim’s steps making Chay lengthen his. They passed by the town’s market, closing for the night—they’d bought supplies just in time.
As they turned onto the path that led into the forest, Chay asked, “Do you want to leave tonight instead of tomorrow? Whoever’s looking for you, they won’t be able to find you once we’re out to sea.”
Kim looked upward as they passed into the forest. Moonlight began to filter through the trees.
“If they really wanted me, they would have taken me already,” he decided.
Chay squeezed his hand again. “You must have stolen something very important from them.”
As the forest darkness descended around them, he saw a shadow at the corner of Kim’s mouth. They left the path, making their way through the underbrush, following the steady lap of waves till they arrived at the shoreline where they’d left the boat.
Kim checked the ropes that kept the vessel in place while Chay shook out their newly-acquired bedrolls, placing them a respectable distance apart, the soft fabric finer than the blankets he and hia had at home—but he supposed he didn’t have a home anymore. Kim had said that the dragon had killed the townspeople. The storm must have scythed far inland, pushing surge from the bay up into the streets.
A tentative note made him turn. Kim had withdrawn the lap harp from the dragon’s cave from one of their packs. He plucked another note, slowly, as if he hadn’t played in awhile, before stilling the strings, the resulting sound muted beneath the night susurrus of crickets and lapping waves.
“I’ll keep watch,” he offered, this time strumming a chord.
Chay didn’t argue. Even with the dragon’s blood flooding his veins, the day was tugging at him. He curled into his bedroll as Kim began to pick at a quiet song, the notes barely carrying past the clearing. Chay looked up into the canopy of leaves above them, listened for the punctuation of waves behind them. He closed his eyes.
The dragon was waiting for him. Chay drowned in tide pools of black and green gone brackish with time. He recoiled, but he couldn’t wake up.
So he swam through moonlit waters until he reached the rock where the townspeople had chained him and left him as a sacrifice. Sharp edges of stones cut into his palms as he crawled from the ocean, keeping an eye on the dragon circling through the stars overhead. It dove.
Chay shrank back against the rock, but the creature disappeared into the water beside him, slipping into the ocean with only a ripple to mark its passing. Chay squinted against the moonlight, searching the water for the dragon in its depth. Far out to sea, he found the scaled end of the dragon’s tail.
“I drank your blood,” Chay told the waves. “I know what I agreed to.”
But the dragon continued to toy with him. An air bubble on the other side of the rock had him scrambling away.
Then the dragon’s tail swooped overhead, long enough to curl around a house. Chay ducked, his hands over his head.
“Stop it!” he shouted, his voice echoing over the still ocean. “Whatever you’re going to do to me, just—do it. You can’t keep me like this forever.”
Like the lap harp in the dragon’s hoard, grown old amid piles of unchanging silver. Far away, Chay heard music.
The dragon flew, water left smooth in its wake, its wings the color of the night sky, blotting out the stars. Blackness as the creature winged in front of the moon; brightness as wings swept past him, driving Chay down against the rock.
The dragon’s keen shattered his mind. Chay clawed at his ears, pinned under the downdraft of its wings.
“Why?” he made out as the dragon dove, louder in his mind than in his ears. Chay crawled forward, watching the water.
“Why what?”
The water was black as the sky above, depthy and depthless at once, opaque as Chay searched for movement.
Moonlight gleamed silver on the ocean, nowhere near the moon, and Chay found himself looking into the dragon’s eyes as it rose. He fell back as the head broke the surface, the midnight blue scales laced with silver, each eye larger than he was, the snout longer than the tallest building in town.
The dragon’s voice was softer this time, modulated in his mind.
“Why are we enemies?”
Chay woke, tears mingled with sweat on his cheeks. He wrestled himself out of his bedroll, gulping in air, the dragon’s words driving into him.
“We’re old enemies,” he’d told Kim that afternoon. The dragon had been watching him, then, to know what he had said.
As across the campsite, Kim was watching him, silver moonlight gleaming in the green-black pools of his eyes.
Chay swiped sweaty hair off his forehead. “Sorry,” he rasped, and coughed to clear his throat. “Just a dream.”
He flinched as Kim got to his feet, twigs snapping as he retrieved a canteen from their supplies. He walked toward Chay, who pressed his hand against his throat to assuage the raw feeling there.
“A dream,” Kim prompted, the canteen dangling from his fingers, the water within sloshing like waves.
“About the dragon,” said Chay as Kim came towards him. “He’s coming for me.”