They called the place he went the Jade Quarter in the capital of the Eastern Sea — a city of narrow ladders, low-slung tea houses, and merchants who could sell you a rumor in exchange for a coin. He arrived carrying a trunk of notebooks that smelled of cedar and ink, and in his pockets, the small things he always kept: a compass with no magnetic pull I could see, a photograph of our mother at the fair, and a scrap of paper with a single line of poetry in a tongue that tied no one to a single land.
The dragon — she called herself Yù (not a human name, but a sound that settled like silk) — told me how she had watched him for a season. He moved like a man with doors open inside him; everyone who met him left with something that was not there when they came: a question lodged in the bud of their mind, a new way to see an old street, a sleepy tailor who began designing clothes for astronomers. He taught at night in attics and in dim cellars. He argued with priests and bakers and magistrates with equal appetite. He was, Yù admitted with something like a ruffle of memory, the only one who could pick apart a riddle she had carried since before men had names for smoke.
"Why him?" I asked. Rage still hummed in my veins.
"Because he listened," Yù said simply. "And he answered."
When he disappeared, it was not with the clamor of a man hunted. There were no obvious marks of a scuffle, no blood on the doorframe. People said he left in the middle of the night for reasons of study. Others whispered that he had been seen arguing with servants of the Eastern Trade Syndicate, men with coin in their hatbands and coldness in their eyes. A courtesan swore she saw him walk into the river and vanish through the fog. A magistrate told me to leave the matter alone.
The cross on the mountain said different things to different ears. To me it pointed to a grave and nothing that could lift him into the light.
So I came to Yù for one reason: she had seen him when he was alive. If dragons remember, perhaps she remembered what men forgot. If she could name the faces that had touched him last, then they could be hunted, found, and burned like dry straw.
Yù blinked, ancient pupil contracting and unfurling. "I remember. But remember a dragon also remembers the cost of turning memory into execution. Do you know what vengeance takes, child of the plains?"
"You tell me," I said. I wanted to believe I would be ready for the answer.
She did not answer with a list of prices but with a map. Not a map of the city, but a map made of bones — a labyrinth of consequence that linked the Eastern Quarter to the far ports, to the ivory courts of scholars, to the secret vaults of a merchant house named Lian & Graves. Each point pulsed faintly in my vision as if still warm with the life that had fed it. When she traced the line with a claw, I felt the echo of my brother's footsteps — quieter, then louder — until the path led to a shape I knew too well: a name repeated in the ledger of my dreams.
"They will not die by simple blade," Yù said. "They are woven into an order. To break them is to unweave much else. What will you do when their fall tears wider nets than theirs? Will you care then, or will you only listen to the hunger?"
The rope in my hand felt heavier.