Skarsh Waterscale's Arc

Chapter 10 of 12

The hoofbeats faded, and the marsh went quiet. The woman lowered herself onto the stone bench where the prince had left the necklace. She pushed the jewels aside without looking at them. Skarsh stood on the boardwalk beside her, waiting for the shake in her shoulders to settle. Artur lingered at the gazebo steps, then said he would walk the tree line and make sure the prince rode on. He left them alone. The drake made a low sound from the water. Not question this time. Warning. Skarsh turned. The drake circled a patch of water near the boardwalk's edge, nosing at something dark caught between the pilings. Skarsh stepped down onto the weathered planks. The wood creaked under his weight. Below, half-buried in the silt where the prince's horse had churned the bank, something pale broke the surface. He knelt and reached into the cold water. His claws closed around a curve of shell. He pulled it free. It was a piece of an old egg, larger than his palm, ridged along one edge with markings burned into the inner surface. He knew the pattern before he had finished wiping the mud away. It was the script of his clutch — the marks his mother had scored into every shell before the hatching. No surface dweller could read them. He was the only one left who could. The woman came down onto the boardwalk. She watched him turn the shell over in his hands. He traced the marks with one claw and read them slowly. A name. A direction. A count of days. His mother had left a record on every shell in the nest, and this piece told him where the rest of his clutch had been carried after they died. Not scattered. Not lost. Buried together, upriver, in a place he had never been told existed. He sat back on his heels. The drake pressed its head against his arm and made the small noise it used when he did not speak for too long. The woman crouched beside him. She did not ask what the marks said. She waited. Skarsh set the shell on the plank between them and touched the largest symbol. He spoke the name aloud in his own tongue, the first time he had said it in front of anyone. Then he told her, in the words she had learned from the scroll, what it meant. A place. A grave. A thing he had not known was waiting for him. The woman looked at the shell for a long time. Then she looked at him and nodded once. She would go with him. He had not asked, and she had not offered. It was already decided between them. Skarsh closed his hand around the shell. Beyond the boardwalk, the mother drake surfaced in the deeper channel and watched them with her young curled at her flank. The marsh was quiet again. But the direction of his life had turned.