Skarsh Waterscale's Arc

Chapter 11 of 12

They traveled upriver for three days. The woman walked the bank while Skarsh moved through the shallows beside her, the drake sliding ahead through deeper channels. On the fourth morning, the water narrowed and the trees thinned. Skarsh climbed onto the mud and stopped. The place his mother had marked stood ahead of them, half swallowed by moss: a low mound of stacked stone with a carved arch, a small lizard figure worn smooth above the entrance. He knew it without being told. His siblings were inside. He sat back on his heels and understood, all at once, that he had come with nothing. Among his clutch, the living brought tribute to the buried — a shell, a carved stone, a thing shaped by hand. He had spent every hour since the boardwalk thinking of the grave, and not once of what he owed it. He had his claws and the wet leather at his waist. Nothing else. To walk into that arch empty would shame his mother's marks and shame the woman standing behind him, who had chosen to follow him here. He told her. He used her words, slow, so she would understand what he could not fix. She listened. She looked at the arch, then at the water, then at the drake circling near the reeds. She did not offer him anything from her own pack. She waited. The drake made the low sound it used for calling him in. Skarsh turned. It had dived and surfaced twice near a sunken log, and now it pushed something toward the bank with its snout. Skarsh waded out. Caught in the roots was a piece of shell, larger than the fragment from the marsh, ridged and pale, one edge worn to a soft curve. He lifted it clear. It was a shed plate from the drake's own growth, cast off in some earlier season and carried downstream into the roots. He turned it in his hands. The color was right. The weight was right. It was of the drake, and the drake was his brother by every measure that counted in his tongue. He looked at the drake. The drake looked back and did not move. He carried the plate to the arch. The woman came with him and stopped at the threshold, letting him go in alone. Inside, the burial egg of his clutch sat in the center of the chamber, cracked and mossed, the script of his mother still legible along its curve. He knelt. He set the drake's shed plate against the base of the egg and spoke the names he had read from the fragment, one by one, in his own language. When he came out again the woman was still there. The drake had come up onto the bank behind her. Skarsh had arrived empty and had not stayed empty. The debt to his siblings was paid. The one to the woman had grown.