Marielle looked back at him frantically and then at Tamerlan, lying still in the bottom of the boat, blood pooling under him. A piece of masonry had fallen on him as he lay, unable to dodge, wounding his leg.
She dropped her oar and crouched down, lifting the masonry and throwing it overboard.
The boat rocked as a fruit shop hit the canal, plunging five boats underwater in the blink of an eye. Marielle gasped. Her hands weren’t working. Her mouth wasn’t working. It was like a scream was stuck in her throat.
“Hurry!” Jhinn called over the screams and wails around them.
“Legends preserve us! Dragon have mercy! Mercy!” the voices wailed.
Marielle shook herself. The panic around them was overpowering – the scent of it thicker than the scent of magic had been in the Seven Suns Palace. It clogged her nose and threatened to wash her sanity away in a tide of awareness. With effort, she opened the hatch, dragging Tamerlan to it and then shoving him inside and closing the small door.
“Are you sure he is safe in there? He will drown if water gets in the boat!”
As she spoke, water washed over the bow, soaking her dress and filling her mouth and nose. Marielle looked up, a cry ripping from her throat at the huge wave swelling toward them. It swallowed the edges of the Alchemist District, raising the canals to street level and flooding the streets with a roar of river water.
Marielle risked a look up, up, up past the curve of the city, rising up above them like a wave to where the spine of the dragon was showing as the Seven Suns Palace slowly fell off its back like limescale chipped from a basin. The Sunset Tower hung precariously from the rest, attached by a single thread of metal gears before falling from the Palace and tumbling down, down, down to crash into the Spice District – or what used to be the Spice District. Now, it was awash with water, the boats usually lining its docks jettisoning from land like a flock of birds taking off.
She gasped, almost choking on her own vomit before retching over the side of the gondola. Nothing felt real. Not anymore.
She shuddered, willing her hands back into submission and grabbing her oar again and digging into the swirling water. Broken crates and bobbing barrels, sinking debris and screaming people filled the water.
“We need to stop,” she said through teeth chattering from the shock. Her hands shook and her heart pounded. “We need to rescue those we can.”
“Rescue?!” Jhinn’s cry sounded like a curse. “We stop and we die. Row! Row for your life!”
She opened her mouth to argue when the river erupted, sliding toward them and swallowing up everything around her in a massive swell. Their tiny craft bobbed to the surface, water splashing over the gunwales as it buoyed up on top of the swell.
“Drop the oar and bail!” Jhinn cried and as Marielle scrambled for a bailing bowl as what could only be described as a wing tore itself from under the river, mud, fish, human skeletons tied to heavy rocks, and sunken wrecks spilling from its leathery surface to pour back into the river.
Their craft was sucked into the depression in the water as Marielle bailed for all she was worth, filling the bowl with water and flinging it over the side again and again. She tried to focus on the motion and to block out everything else. It was too much. Too much for the human mind to comprehend.
The Jingen’s Glory Bridge sailed over them, shaken from the wing like an unwanted vine ripped up by a gardener. Marielle’s eyes rolled in horror as one of its massive girders passed inches over her head.
Thought had ceased. She could no longer plan, only react, no longer think about what she should do but only what she was doing. No longer hope for anything, not even to live. It was one breath to the next, one action to the next.
Water from behind them rushed into the depression, propelling them forward down the Albastru River. There were so many vessels on the river that it seemed to be its own city, alive with a crowd of people, but Jhinn’s tiny gondola sped past all the others, riding the rising water like a horse racing down a track.
A huge river barge loomed in front of them, when suddenly it rolled, spilling into the sea as the tip of a tail bigger than a canal skimmed a hundred boats off the river with a single flick.
Marielle’s eyes followed the length of it to where it pulled free of the Trade District, spilling docks and cargo, ships and businesses into the mud nearby. Please, Legends grant her mother safety in the Trade District! Her home was on the mudflats there. There was a chance it wouldn’t be devastated by the tail uprooting from the ground. But even as Marielle thought that, the water of the river surged across the flats, swallowing the buildings up in the river’s ravenous swell.
Her heart was in her throat and nausea swelled through her as the little boat shot out through the supports of the tottering hulk of the Sea Breeze bridge. On one side of it, the tail of the dragon swung, clearing buildings and ships in its path. On the other side, where once the Spice District had been was now nothing but muddy, swirling water.
She bit down hard on her lip, tasting blood as they cleared the bridge and spat out into the brackish water beyond where the Albastru flowed into the Queen Mer Ocean and the currents beyond.
Behind them, the city continued to fall, piece by piece, life by life, destroyed by the dragon her blood was meant to appease.
Lord Mythos had been right.
Carnelian – the traitor! – had been right.
If she had only died, none of this would have happened at all.
The moon shone brightly above them, lighting the debris, picking out the silhouette of the dragon as his wings finally pulled fully free and he flapped them, sending the little gondola spinning with the force of air from his wings while he lifted up from Jingen and into the air.
Legends help whoever was still alive in the houses and streets on his back! Gods above help any living souls still clinging to life there.
Marielle could not help. But she sobbed helplessly as if her many tears could fix the horror she had caused. Her tears fell into the sea and swirled with the brackish water and in the depths below, something stirred.
Epilogue
Marielle
“HE’LL SURVIVE,” MARIELLE said. “I think.”
She worked on Tamerlan’s wound with gentle hands. He looked so young as he slept, his head resting on the blanket Jhinn had pulled from one of his hidey holes. They’d cleared the hull of debris and water before pulling him out of the air-tight cabinet at the front and cleaning his wound. It wasn’t the first stab wound Marielle had tended or seen tended. Even before she was a Scenter there were wounds among her mother’s friends. She had a deft hand for stitching and Jhinn was surprisingly well stocked.
Jhinn paused along one of the river banks as she sewed by the light of his small lantern, pulling a few carefully wrapped packages out of a hole along the bank and stuffing them into the space Tamerlan had occupied.
“What are those,” she asked.
“The source of all that trouble,” he said before tying a small bobbing craft behind them with a thick rope.
“A dragon?” Marielle teased. She was starting to like his intense manner and clear fondness for his friend.
“The magic that Tamerlan used back there. The magic of the Legends.”
“Magic of the Legends?” she asked, preparing a poultice from the herbs in Jhinn’s store. It was hard to do it well in the lantern light. Even from so far downriver, the sounds and smells coming from the city kept her on edge and ill. Her head swam with the licorice black despair wafting downriver and the heliotrope of agony swirling with it.
“He called it the Bridge of Legends. Smoke the right ingredients, and a Legend will take you over and use your body – for good or ill. He was using it to save his sister. Is that you? Are you Amaryllis?”
Marielle shook her head as she wound a clean cloth around the wound.
“Then he failed,” Jhinn said. He cleared his throat. “Not that I’m sorry he saved you. But that sister meant everything to him.”
They were both silent for a long moment as Marielle bandaged and Jhinn put his head in his hands, his first break in hours. He smelled of seaweed and cedar, of ash and salt, of hope and determination.
“I wish I had a brother like that,” Jhinn said.
“So do I,” Marielle agreed, trying hard not to think of her mother in the Trade District and of Captain Ironarm in the Government District, of Carnelian who she thought was probably dead and of the Lord Mythos who was a better person than her – who, it turned out, loved the law like she never did.
She pulled the cloak Tamerlan wore over his body like a blanket, gently stroking his cheek. She wasn’t his sister. He didn’t need to risk everything to save her, and yet he had. And he was both beautiful and monstrous in her eyes because of it. Both the savior of her life and the demon who had ruined her city.
The sun rose in the east, kissing the water with glimmers of gold and shining warm hope over them. And far in the distance, it caught on hints of white on the horizon.
“Sails,” she breathed. “Perhaps they bring help with them.”
“I don’t think so,” Jhinn said, watching under a shading hand with tired eyes.
“Why not?”
“Those are Queen Mer’s people.”
“Waverunners?”
“What Waverunners wish they were. The Retribution. The scourge of the land.”
That didn’t sound like help at all.
“Prepare for the rise of the Legends,” Jhinn said. “Prepare for the sifting of souls.”
Marielle shivered, looking down at Tamerlan. She owed him her life. However much she might regret him saving it. She looked over her shoulder at the crumbled ruins of the city tumbled in ragged heaps far behind them and then back to the peaceful, innocent looking face of the sweet man lying on a blanket at the bottom of the boat.
She owed him. And whatever came next, she would protect him. Maybe together, they could repay the debt they owed to Jingen, to the law, to life itself.
I HOPE THAT YOU ENJOYED reading Summernight as much as I enjoyed writing it. You can continue with the story here in Dawnspell: Book Two of the Bridge of Legends or chat with us about it in the Discord group.
Appendix
DIAGRAM OF THE SUNSET Tower in the Grand Hall many thanks to Harold Trammel for his work on the creation of this diagram of the Sunset Tower.
Behind the Scenes:
USA TODAY BESTSELLING author, Sarah K. L. Wilson loves spinning a yarn and if it paints a magical new world, twists something old into something reborn, or makes your heart pound with excitement ... all the better! Sarah hails from the rocky Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario -
learning patience and tenacity from the long months of icy cold - where she lives with her husband and two small boys. You might find her building fires in her woodstove and wishing she had a dragon handy to light them for her
Sarah would like to thank Harold Trammel and Eugenia Kollia for their incredible work in beta reading and proofreading this book. Without their big hearts and passion for stories, this book would not be the same.
Sarah has the deepest regard for the talent of her phenomenal artists – Francesca Baerald who designed the gorgeous map for this series and Lius Lasahido and his team at Polar Engine who created the gorgeous cover art that accompanies this book. Without their work, it would be so much harder to show off this story the way it deserves!
www.sarahklwilson.com
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