“I thought you were drowning!”
“I was.” Sintara heaved herself to her feet. Her wings she held half open and dripping still. Water sheened off her scales to make mirrors for the starlight on the broken paving stones. Sintara snorted, and sneezed suddenly, surprising them both. “I flew,” she said, and the force of the thought behind the words eclipsed her dip in the river. “I flew, I hunted, I killed. I am SINTARA!”
She roared the last word, and Thymara felt it as sound, wind, and thought. The dragon’s elation lifted her own spirits. For one moment, all fear and anger were gone, replaced by mutual triumph.
“You are indeed,” the girl affirmed with a grin.
“Build a fire,” the dragon commanded her. “I need to warm myself.”
Thymara glanced about hopelessly. “There is nothing here that will burn. The driftwood that does wash up is wet. This city is all cold stone. Most of the wood left is rotted to splinters and dust.” As her words dashed the dragon’s hopes of warmth, the girl shared again just how cold Sintara was. Colder than she’d ever been, and hearing the slowing thumps of her heart as her body reacted to that cold.
“Can you walk? We can at least get you inside of a building. It might be a little warmer there.”
“I can walk,” the dragon asserted but not strongly. She lifted her head. “I almost, no, I can, I do remember this place. The bridge is gone. And the river has eaten more than two streets and half of a third. There used to be warehouses along here. And docks for the smaller boats. And up the hill from them were the Grand Promenade and then the Plaza of Dreams. And past that, two streets past that, there was the . . .”
“The Square of the Dragons.” Thymara spoke the name quietly into the gap left by Sintara’s pause. She did not know where the knowledge came from, not clearly. Ancestral memory. Was this what Rapskal had been trying to explain to her? That once she had dreamed deeply enough with the stones, she could remember the city for herself?
“And a grooming hall fronted it. I remember it well.”
Sintara stepped up her pace, and Thymara hurried to keep up with her. The dragon lurched as she walked. “Are you injured?” the girl demanded.
“Some cracked claws on my right front foot. They are painful, but they will heal. Once, the grooming hall was where a dragon might go for such an injury. Elderlings would cut away the cracked claw and bind the nail with linen and then varnish to protect it until it grew again. They stitched gashes from mating battles, too. And removed parasites and scale lice and such.”
“Would that they were there now to help you,” Thymara said softly.
The dragon did not seem to hear her. “And there were soaking pools, some just of hot water and others with a layer of oil on top. Oh, to soak in steaming water again. And then emerge to wallow in a sand basin, and then to have servants groom the sand away and leave my scales gleaming . . .”
“There is nothing like that left intact,” Thymara said quietly. “But at least we can get out of the wind there.”
The dragon soldiered on, walking silently now, and Thymara matched her pace. They turned a corner into a street brightly lit with memories, but if Sintara were aware of them, she made no sign. She strode through the night bazaar of incense and freshly cooked meats and breads, and Thymara followed her.
The reality of the dragon made the ghosts seem paler in comparison. Their gaiety seemed frail and false, an echo of a past that had never lasted into a future. Whatever they celebrated, they did so with futility. Their world had not lasted, and their windblown laughter seemed to mock them.
“Here,” Sintara said, and she turned to mount a long flight of shallow stairs.
Thymara ascended beside her in silence. Then, when they were within two steps of the top, the entire frame of the doorway suddenly burst into golden light. A welcome of music and fragrance swelled out as the remnants of the doors creaked back on their hinges. Thymara thought it a part of the stone’s illusion, but the dragon halted and looked about in wonder.
“It remembers!” she said suddenly. “The city remembers me. Kelsingra remembers the dragons!” She lifted her head high and suddenly bugled a clear call. The sound echoed in the chamber before her, and in response, light flooded it.
Thymara was transfixed by wonder. It was light, real light, not a memory of bygone times, and as she watched in awe, the second and then the third story of the buildings lit, and golden light flowed like beacons from the windows. As if they were twigs catching a flame, the buildings to either side suddenly responded as well. Light flooded and filled the Square of the Dragons. Thymara turned to look back on it. The statues that edged the square flushed with color, and for the first time she realized that the colored tiles that had seemed random when she walked over them were actually a mosaic of a great black dragon.