Page 35 of I Summon the Sea

“My younger sister can’t hear or speak.” Her mouth trembles. “Oh gods, I’ll never see her again, will I?”

A distant boom jolts us.

“It’s just thunder,” someone says.

“That’s when the Eosphors in the sky beat their bronze wings,” the girl beside me whispers.

Silence spreads.

Being with these people stirs up old memories, memories I’ve fought to bury along with my family, my parents, and my little brother. It’s a bad idea, remembering. Forgetting, locking up the bright images and sounds, the bright, painful feelings, is the only way to keep fighting, or else that flame in me that’s urging me forward will gutter out.

“When the old dragon falls through the sky, and a soul thought lost returns to life, watch for the signs in the shifting stars,” the man to my right says, his voice sonorous and low. “A new order will come.”

“He has a name written on his chest,” a woman behind me murmurs. “And the dragon will stand on the sand of the seashore as the vault of the sky opens to another world.”

I shiver. Now they are reciting scraps of the old prophecies, bits and pieces, snatches and snippets, and hearing the disjointed parts somehow makes them sound more ominous and real.

“What will I do?” the girl beside me whispers, a sob catching in her voice. “How will I survive the games? I can’t even run very well. I don’t know how to swim. I’ll die.”

I should be annoyed with her, with her tears, her fears, but another feeling snags inside my chest. The injustice of it. The indignation on her behalf.

She shouldn’t be here.

None of these people should.

The soft weeping and moaning filling the air are justified. These people have suffered and are about to suffer more. They didn’t ask for this.

“May the dragons look over us,” the man is now saying, “may Athdara save us.”

I turn to stare at him. He looks… serene. Calm. Does he even know what Athdara has done? That he chose to increase the number of victims? He sounds as if he’s in awe of him, of the fae man who’s been hunting humans and killing them.

It makes me feel sick.

The girl beside me says in a shaky voice, “They say that if you control the big dragons, the Great Dara, command them to fly anti-clockwise around the Pillar, its rotations will slow, and a gate will open to the other worlds. That’s part of the prophecy.”

I frown. Who cares about the prophecy now? The games are about to start.

“It’s a long prophecy, and it’s a promise of salvation for us all.” For the first time, a faint smile breaks over her face. “I’m Lynn, by the way.”

A long prophecy? Why do I only know a few lines of it? And who says it speaks of salvation?

What else don’t I know? My chest squeezes. I need to be prepared, but nobody told me about this, about?—

The door creaks open, a tall figure filling the opening. The light catches on long, pale hair spilling over broad shoulders.

“There you are,” Tru says. “You got swept along with the tide, didn’t you? Come along.”

Without glancing back at Lynn, I scramble to my feet. Hesitate. Where will he take me? No, I need to stay with the human contestants.

“Hurry up.” He grabs my arm when I don’t move, hauls me out of the building, and slams the door shut. “There are enough sacrifices for the festival. We don’t need one more.”

How can I ask him about a way to join the trials? One of the other humans has to leave instead of me.

“Visit the temple, if you must, pay your respects to Anafia, but be quick about it,” he says as he leads me through a wide street, his hand still clamped on my arm. “Then you’ll have to wait for a boat to get back to the coast. It won’t be easy, especially with the way you look. If we clean you up, it may be?—”

No.I dig my heels in and resist his pull. I lift my hand to my neck and scrub at the symbol I painted there.I’m not leaving.No!

But he’s much stronger than me and hauls me along toward a taller, narrower building jutting up over the others, by the rocky shore, with arched windows and a domed roof. It faces the Sea Palace across the narrow strait.

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