Chapter 5: Above

"Now will you tell me?" Shizuku said, into the dark.

They were lying tangled in the white silk, with the dome of pearl glass glowing faintly above.

His hand was drawing slow circles on her hip.

"Tell you what?"

"You said to ask you again after I had slept in your bed. I'm in your bed. I'm not sleeping, but I've earned it."

He was quiet so long that she thought he had dozed.

"No one has died in my house," he said at last. "Not one person, Shizuku. Not ever."

She turned to look at him.

"Then they're"

"Not here."

She understood it the way he meant her to.

They drowned trying to swim out, she thought, or the village killed them afterward, or he sent them away to something worse.

It was a terrible thing to feel anger and desire for the same man in the same moment.

She stayed where she was, with his seed still warm on her thighs and his mark burning on her shoulder.

"That's still not an answer."

"No. I will give you a different one." He sat up and the silk slid off his chest. "Come. Wear something warm."

"Where?"

"You asked for a ride home, did you not? I cannot give you that yet. I can give you the way up."

The great white-and-jade dragon rose through the lake with Shizuku on his neck.

She lay flat along the cold ridge of his spine with her fists in his mane and the pearl at her throat blazing.

His scales were as big as cartwheels and smooth as wet porcelain, and they slid under her knees in great rippling waves.

She had never been so high or so afraid or so happy.

They broke the surface at midnight.

The air smelled of pine and water.

The sky above was a bowl of stars, and the mountains stood around the valley like the black walls of a well.

And there, on the southern shore, were the lights of Kuramizu.

Shizuku found her own house by a lamp that ought not to have been lit.

The house stood at the head of the valley where the stream came down, with the terraced Spring Fields below it in silver rows.

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