Page 115 of I Dream of Dragons
It feels strangely familiar and comforting. It’s dark, heavy blue, pressing around me, and high above me something flickers.
A reflection.
… I’m underwater…
The realization arrives slowly and wraps around my mind. I’m deep in the sea. Yet I am in human form, and the second trial is over.
I shouldn’t be here, I think. I was walking on dry land. I was inside the palace.
Is this a dream?
But in most dreams you don’t know you’re dreaming, and this one feels too real. I lift my hands, watching the play of distant light on them, the blue reflections dancing on my palms.
I fell, didn’t I?
Fell from the palace, from a balcony…
I waspushed.
Who pushed me? What happened?
Memory returns in jumps and starts as I float underwater, Jai’s jacket open at the front, baring my pale breasts, the skirt of my sodden gown weighing me down.
A handsome face, a blond guard…“Don’t worry, Athdara. I will accompany her to her room.”
Tru.
“Jai is a good man and I won’t let you kill him.”
There had been a sense of weightlessness—much as I’m feeling now, suspended in the water—and a crash that rang my head and knocked the breath out of me…
If I didn’t have gills, I’d have drowned. Tru doesn’t know I’m finnfolk, though he thinks I work for them.
He tried to kill me.
And there is no guarantee I’ll survive this, especially since searching for that flicker of power in me, I find none.
Fine, then. I can’t stay here without my power. I’m lucky nothing has come to take a bite out of me while I was unconscious.
Righting myself in the water, I kick my feet and swim toward the broken mirror of the surface. It’s quite far, and I dodge a few water snakes and a shoal of smirking fish on the way.
Smirking or toothy?Yikes.
My head bursts out of the water and I gasp. That moment when my gills stop working and my lungs draw their first breath is always scary. I cough out some water that I managed to swallow before my gills took over and look around me.
I’m in the open sea, waves smashing into me. I spit out salty water and tread in place, orienting myself.
There. The palace rises over me, which means I can’t have been out for long. I haven’t drifted very far.
That’s good news.
The bad news is, I don’t know how to get back up there. The rocks on which the palace sits look steep and the waves smashinto them repeatedly. If I’m thrown against them, I’ll end up broken into pieces.
I look up and I see a drak circling against the sky. Does it have a rider?
Jai?I think.
But Jai doesn’t know what happened, I remind myself, he’d gone to the infirmary with Arkin. If I could fly to the palace…
