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Dusk Falls
turning fresh to please him, and if any other pieces of the ship
remained, they had long been flung in other directions.
He wondered if he was going to survive, and was suddenly
reminded of his father. ‘We are the Blackthorne family, Dusk,’ Lord
Fell of Dragon’s Nest had told him. Dusk could hear his voice in the
salt-edged wind as surely as if he were standing beside him. ‘We
come from King Blackthorne the First, and we live with his blood in
our veins. We survive.’
‘We survive,’ Dusk mumbled as he lay back down. The glare of the
sun was hurting his eyes, so he closed them. He needed water.
Their family had always been afraid of water. Their ancestral
home of Dragon’s Nest was an island fortress in the middle of the
salt sea, hewn by their ancestor Beryn the Brave from hexagonal
cylinders of dark stone. Dusk had always felt protected in the shadow
of its massive stone walls.
‘Fear death by water, Dusk,’ his father had told him. When you
lived on an island, death always came by sea. ‘Fear it, always.’
When he woke up again, he could not have said if it were night or
day. The sky gleamed like a pearl, but that could mean anything.
Grey and white mixed and swirled until it made him so dizzy he had
to look away.
I need to see
, he thought. Slowly, he set his elbows beneath
him and rolled over, looking to what his fever-addled mind told him
was the north.
In the end, it didn’t matter which direction he looked to. The sea
heaved and churned, restless and endless. He stared at it, and was
reminded of his sister’s eyes. Night Blackthorne had almost exactly
the same colour eyes.
His older sister liked sketching the sea, he remembered. And the
sea eagles too; they came to land near Night’s room, he knew. Their
droppings paled the stone grotesques that hunched on the roof, the
thousand stone raptors that hunched over the walls of the ancient
fortress. Night would stand beneath the grey mantle of an incoming
storm, head tilted back. Occasionally she would stop, snap her head
down, and call to her younger brother to come and see what she
had seen.
‘Look at this! A dragon in the clouds! Right there! That means
summer’s going to stay for longer than we thought, and we’ll have an
east wind.’
He would laugh and say, ‘But that’s just stories.’ He had never
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