Free Hidden Cities by Daniel Fox

ever was before was a pirate’s boy, and the most I ever stopped him doing was killing me.” He stopped and smiled, rubbed his nose, perhaps realizing that some might see that as a gift he had. Survival was a place to start, perhaps.
    His face changed as perhaps he remembered someone else, whom the pirate had killed regardless.
    She said, “Not everyone would think it was a slave’s place to keep his mistress from what she wanted most.”
    “No—but some of us, we have to. Sometimes.” He stared out to sea. “Someone else,” he said, “can stop her killing, on the water. It makes her furious, but some boats, some fleets she cannot touch.”
    Ma Lin confessed, a little. “The Li-goddess,” she said, nodding. “This is her temple.”
    “Ah. Is that why she brought me here?” It was a question without an answer; he didn’t wait. “She thinks that only some boats are protected. Someone holds her back, she says. Like I can.”
    “Yes.” Ma Lin was boastful suddenly, stupidly. “My daughter: she speaks for the goddess. I have her here now,” with a jerk of her head back toward the temple, the crowded temple steps, where soldiers and women together were staring at this priestess who dared speak to the boy who rode a dragon.
    “You do? Well, keep her close. The dragon does not love her.Nor those like her. I think there is more than one. She has been waiting for a boat that had no protection.” His eyes found it, and hers followed: the sampan, a speck now on the water. He knew where it was because the dragon knew, she thought. The dragon hung above it, pendulous, a rock in air.
    “You could protect them. You said it.”
    “Perhaps. Yes. But she has my promise. She needs to know whether she can still do this.”
    “You mean she plans to kill those men? And you will let her …?”
    “Will you argue for their lives?”
    For any lives
, she meant to say, she wanted to. But her eyes moved willy-nilly to the beach across the creek, where men lay dead because those in the sampan had slaughtered them.
    “They are rebels,” she said, as if that mattered, as if it could. As if one lord’s service was different from another’s. And then, “They are men too. Like your pirates, like you. Has your dragon not killed enough rebels?”
    Apparently not. He shrugged. “Your emperor would want them dead, because they killed his men. You might want them dead, because they would have killed you too if they had come up here. She wants them dead, because they are abroad on her waters; and because she really, really needs to know. Keep your daughter in the temple there, don’t let her interfere.”
    She said, “I will,” thinking
Shola will;
and, “Can you not …?”
    “I can,” he said, with a faraway look in his eye, “but I promised.”
    Ma Lin turned back to the glimmering strait. Without his sure gaze for guide she had to scan for the speck that was the sampan, and the darker larger speck above it that was the dragon.
    Almost, she wanted to turn around: as if she expected or dreaded to see her daughter stride forth, shrugging off little Shola and fearsome with purpose, inhabited, ridden. If the goddess stoodhere and watched, Ma Lin thought, in Jin’s body, she could prevent it.
    But she didn’t know, or didn’t care, or else Ma Lin was wrong. Or those men out there were not her people, or else they were beyond her reach.
    She didn’t appear, at least, here on the headland or out on the water. Surely she could have shaped herself a body of water, if she had chosen to? She could have risen up to defy the dragon and protect the sampan,
these are my seas …
    But she did not, and perhaps they were not.
    Ma Lin didn’t exactly see the dragon strike. She saw her fall, spear-straight, a dark rip in the sky; but she lost her against the water, where she had already lost the boat, in the scatter of light and confusion of the waves.
    What she saw was the splash of it, a great eruptive rising hurl of sea.
    The dragon,