Creatures of the flood, p.18
Creatures of the Flood, page 18
That thought got her up again, every time she fell. It gave her the strength to ignore the bruises, the ache in her lungs, and the cuts on the pads of her paws.
The slope eventually became easier, and the ground warmer and more earth than rock. They ran down between cliffs and along valley floors, sometimes having to pick their way past trees and rocks that had been shaken loose from the higher slopes when the earth growled. They splashed through freezing-cold snowmelt as it streamed down to join the river, and made their way around and past huge columns of rock that seemed to be the last remaining evidence of some much older mountain peak that had once stood there.
High Sun passed, and Leaf gasped the blessing under her breath and kept on running. By Long Light she was starving and weak. She tried to stumble on, but Dasher stood in front of her, and she no longer had the energy even to step around her small friend. She sank to her belly on the ground. Dasher ran off and found a bamboo stalk, dragging it back to her in his teeth. She spoke the blessing aloud, thanking the Dragon for his gift of endurance, and almost collapsed into howls of grief as she spoke the words. But then they ate, and after they had, she got back to her stinging paws. Soon after that they turned a corner and found themselves looking down the valley toward a lush, wooded slope and, beyond the wavering branches, a glimpse of glittering water.
The sight of it put strength back into Leaf’s heart.
The journey between the trees was slower, exhaustion creeping back into Leaf’s limbs as she had to pick her way between the trunks and over rocks and down slippery, moss-covered slopes. But at last, at Sun Fall, Leaf and Dasher burst out onto a wide, stony bank that sloped gently down to the edge of the water.
Leaf stumbled to an unsteady halt, kicking up pebbles. She looked around for purple leaf, and with a relief so intense it made her dizzy, she saw a stand of distinctive purple bamboo growing out from between two rocks.
But she saw something else, too. At the edge of the water, sodden and still, there was a black-and-white-furred shape.
She ran toward it.
It was a panda cub, half-grown, about Leaf’s own age. The panda was lying on her back in the water, paws splayed, her chest rising and falling shallowly. She was still alive, but sleeping, while the river lapped over her back legs and almost up to her chin.
“Got to pull her away from the river,” Leaf said, and bent down to try to grab the scruff of her neck so she could drag her back. But as she did, she saw something on the panda’s paw.
Her pads were black, except for one. Her grip pad was as white as the snow on the mountain. As white as Leaf’s was.
“No,” Leaf said. “It can’t be . . .”
But it is.
Shadowhunter sent us here. Shadowhunter is a servant of the Dragon.
The Great Dragon brought me to this spot, just in time. . . .
There was no other explanation, and certainly no time to seek one. Leaf grabbed the other panda and pulled her back out of the river. As she did, the panda groaned and coughed. After a few paw steps, she wriggled out of Leaf’s grip and flopped over onto her belly.
“Hey! Lemme go . . .”
Leaf backed away, as the panda spat water onto the ground. She staggered upright, taking two attempts but finally standing on four shaking paws. Her fur was matted and sopping wet, and she looked up at Leaf and Dasher with confused anger in her eyes.
“What’s . . . who are you? Where am I—is this the Prosperhill? I don’t know you. Where’s Sunset? I need to . . . he’s . . .” She trailed off, catching her breath. Then she blinked, and shook her head, and when she looked back at Leaf, her eyes seemed clearer. “Oh. I remember.” She sat back on her haunches. “Where am I? Who are you?”
“You—you aren’t going to believe this,” Leaf said. Despite the panda’s annoyed demeanor, and Plum’s desperate situation, and her own bruised and aching body, Leaf’s heart was filling up with a kind of joy she had never felt before. She looked into the eyes of the other panda, and then she sprang forward and nuzzled her cheek. “My name is Leaf. I’m your sister!”
Chapter Twenty-One
GHOST JUMPED AS A golden bird took flight from a branch above his head with a loud cry. The leaves above rustled as the bird passed through them and vanished from sight. Ghost stared after it, but there were too many branches and too many leaves—almost as soon as it had moved, it was just gone.
There had been birds on the mountain, and plenty of other creatures too, but they had all seemed to stay far away from the leopards and from each other. Down here in this strange green-and-gold land, there seemed to be animals everywhere he looked—beetles, birds, small rodents. He’d even glimpsed a monkey, on a distant hill, swinging from the branch of a tree.
In the forest beyond the mountain, it was warm, and it was damp. Moss grew across the rocks, not even seeming to need earth to root itself in. The ground was soft, and parts of it were wet and stuck to his paws, getting into his fur. Instead of slick ice that could cause a fall, here there was deep mud that seemed to want to suck him in and keep him forever. The hills were just as steep, though not so high, and there were so many trees. Even looking down from the high places, half the time he couldn’t see the horizon for all the leaves.
It wasn’t bad, exactly, but he wasn’t sure he liked it. He felt crammed into a space that wasn’t big enough for him.
“I miss the snow,” Shiver said. She shook herself, and cleaned her muzzle with one large paw. “It’s sticky here.”
“We’ll get used to it,” Ghost said. “There’s more prey here, anyway. There must be. We just have to figure out how to hunt it.”
And anyway, he thought, we can’t go back.
“I wonder what Snowstorm and Frost are doing,” Shiver said softly.
Ghost had been trying not to wonder that. Whatever he pictured his siblings doing, whether they were still mourning Winter or had moved on with their lives, it made him sad to think about it. “Probably hunting,” he said stiffly. “And we should do the same. I don’t really want to eat bugs again, even if they were easy to catch.”
“Me neither!” Shiver agreed. “Maybe we should split up. Double our chances.”
Ghost felt his heart sink, but then he shook himself. There was no use being sad about it—he was no leopard, and Shiver would do better by herself, even if she had to stop to catch her breath all the time.
“Good idea,” he said. Then he added, almost to himself, “Perhaps I’ll figure out how a bear is supposed to hunt.”
“Right!” Shiver said brightly, and licked his cheek. “I’ll go this way, you go that way, and I’ll meet you back here to share what we catch. It’ll be fine. Just don’t get lost!”
Ghost nodded. He looked around, as Shiver slipped away into the bushes, and tried to study where they were. But everything looked the same to him—trees and rocks, and then more trees. He guessed he would have to make sure to follow his own scent back, or find Shiver’s. He could still do that, even if there were a lot of unfamiliar sounds and scents in this strange place.
He started walking, moving slowly and sniffing the air as he went. Unlike the bare slopes of the White Spine, he soon found a prey-scent—and then another, and another, and one that might have been the same one but might just have been very similar. They crisscrossed over the forest floor in such a confusing mess that he sat back on his haunches and scratched at his nose for a moment.
He tried to remember all that Winter had said about hunting. It stung to think of her face, but he had to find something to eat. He recalled that she had once said that if there were prey-scents, but no prey, that meant they would come back. All a leopard had to do was conceal themselves somehow, and wait.
Ghost brightened. That had been hard to do on the bare mountainside, but in this crowded forest there were plenty of places to hide. He crawled under a nearby clump of ferns and settled in to wait.
But the longer he sat there, the more restless he felt. The fur on his belly was getting muddy, and beetles crawled over his paws, and then up and over his back. A fly buzzed around his nose, and he tried to huff it away, and then he tried to ignore it, but the longer he lay there, the louder the buzzing seemed to get, until he lost his temper altogether.
“Get off!” he roared, rearing up and swatting at the fly. It flew away, and so did a bird that had landed in a nearby tree, but now took off with a loud squawk.
Ghost sat up in the ferns and sighed. There was certainly no point staying here now that he’d alerted every prey creature anywhere nearby. He clumsily climbed out of the bush and walked away, shaking his head. If this was how bears were supposed to hunt, he wasn’t a much better bear than he had been a leopard.
As he was walking, he heard a strange sound. It sounded like the splashing that the snow made in the summer when it melted and ran down between the rocks. But he could see no water nearby. Puzzled, and happy to have something to distract him from his search for prey, he decided to follow the sound.
It grew louder as he walked downhill, over the mossy rocks. The ground became even wetter, and then he came around a huge tree trunk and saw something in front of him that stopped him in his tracks. Between the trees ahead, there was a stream, just like the ones that formed in the mountain. But it was enormous.
Ghost made his way to the edge of the water, treading carefully, not wanting to fall into this monster of a stream. There was another forest on the other side, with more rocks and trees. But the stream seemed to stretch out forever to his left and right, the impossibly large mass of water rushing along. How much water could there be? How far did it go? If he walked along it, would it finally vanish between the rocks like the streams did, or would it just go on and on?
He carefully dipped a paw into the water. It wasn’t as cold as the snowmelt, but it felt good. He suddenly felt thirstier than he ever had before, and he carefully put his face down to the surface and drank. It tasted clear and wonderful. He drank and drank, letting the water splash his face until his fur was wet and his belly was almost full.
“You are thirsty,” called a distant voice. “Have you walked a long way, to be so thirsty?”
Ghost’s head snapped up, sending a shower of droplets through the air. He turned, looking along the bank of the stream to see who had spoken, but there seemed to be nobody there.
“Over here, friend!” the voice said, and Ghost realized it was coming from the other side of the monstrous stream. He peered across, and saw a shape sitting on a rock that jutted out into the water. It was large and rounded, but he recognized it at once.
It was another bear.
For a moment he couldn’t speak, as excitement, fear, and guilt fought each other in his mind. It was the same kind of bear as the one he’d encountered in the cave. In the daylight, he got a clearer look at the markings and saw that there were large circles around the eyes and a stripe over the back and the front legs.
Does he know that bear from the cave? Will he know I hurt it?
But then, he had walked all day, and come so far since the cave, and anyway, how would this bear have crossed the massive expanse of water?
His excitement began to push through his fear.
“My name is Ghost,” he called back.
“By the Dragon,” said the other bear, scratching behind his ear. “I believe you are a panda! A lean and powerful panda, to be certain, and all white.”
“What—what’s a panda?” Ghost asked.
“Why, we both are!” said the panda.
Ghost stared at him, and then looked down at himself. He didn’t have the black markings, and he was more muscular where the other bear was round. But the longer he looked, the more he saw the similarities. Their ears were the same shape, their muzzles the same length.
“I’m a panda,” he whispered. Then he said it again, louder, until he roared it across the water to the bear on the other side, splashing his paws in the stream. “A panda! I’m a panda!”
“Didn’t you know? Was that why you seemed so unhappy when you first came down the hill?”
Ghost’s joy faded a little, and he sat back heavily on his haunches. He felt overwhelmed by all this: the water, the trees, and now this panda—this other panda—who spoke to him so kindly. As if he was worth speaking to.
“I did come from far away,” Ghost said. “I—I lost my mother. I had to leave my littermates—but they weren’t actually my littermates—and my mother, she’s dead, and they were right, I didn’t belong there, I’m not a leopard, and . . .” He stopped, embarrassed at how little sense this must be making to the kindly panda on the opposite bank. “I came a long way,” he said again.
“That sounds very hard,” said the panda. “But I’m so glad we’ve found each other! The Great Dragon must have brought you here. And you may have lost your home, but you’ve just made a new friend. Ghost the panda, my name is Sunset Deepwood.”
Epilogue
SUNSET DEEPWOOD IS A traitor.
Shadowhunter’s tail lashed restlessly, sweeping pine needles from side to side as he paced through the trees, a little way from the clearing where the two panda kittens and the fox-bear were gathered around the one called Plum.
Sunset Deepwood is alive, but he’s turned bad.
This didn’t make any sense.
He didn’t doubt the word of the second triplet. The Dragon had clearly sent her to them, across the impassable river, to rejoin her sister and deliver this news. But there was so much about all of this, everything since the flood, that still didn’t make sense.
Where is the third triplet? And why has the prophecy taken so long to come true?
He wanted to roar his frustration aloud, to snarl up at the Dragon Mountain for answers, but he restrained himself. It would only frighten the pandas, and they were going to need to trust him.
He returned to the clearing, where Plum was weakly sitting up while Leaf helped her eat the purple leaf. Rain was sitting nearby.
“I’m glad to help,” she said. “But listen, my mother’s name is Peony. It’s not Orchid. She’s alive, on the other side of the river. None of this makes any sense. You see that, right? Why would having the same colored paw pads mean we’re sisters?”
“Have you ever met another panda with the same pad?” Leaf challenged her. “Because I haven’t!”
“Well . . . I mean . . . no,” Rain admitted. “I haven’t. But it still doesn’t mean I’m going to believe I’m a Dragon Speaker. . . .”
“You will be a Dragon Speaker,” Shadowhunter said. Rain looked up and saw him, and he saw the fear and determination in her eyes even as she pulled herself up and turned to face him, as if she believed she could fight a tiger if she had to. “Whether you believe it or not.”
Shadowhunter saw a sudden flash of recognition and fear in the eyes of Plum, now that she was coming out of her fever, and dipped his head in acknowledgment. At his paws, he heard a small growl. He looked down into the face of Dasher, and felt his whiskers curl a little in an involuntary smile. The fox-bear was so tiny, yet here he was, growling at a creature he knew could and would devour him if they had met under other circumstances.
It is good that they have such a brave and faithful friend, he thought, however small. They will all need to be brave, before this is over.
It was difficult to leave them alone on the mountainside, but he knew he had no choice.
“Speaker Leaf, I must depart,” he said.
Leaf looked up. “Where are you going? To find our other triplet?”
“Yes—among other things. If you are in danger, make for Fang Top. And may the Great Dragon watch over you all.”
He turned to go, and heard Dasher and Rain both let out soft sighs of relief.
“Shadowhunter,” Leaf called. He looked back. “May the Great Dragon watch over you, too.”
Shadowhunter nodded once, satisfaction in his heart as he bounded lightly over the rocks and between the twisted trees.
She’s learning.
There was a reason the Great Dragon had chosen the tigers, the fiercest creatures in all the Bamboo Kingdom, to act as its Watchers. A tiger watched over every Dragon Speaker, made sure they lived to adulthood, and guided them finally to the lair of the Dragon, where they would come into their full powers. The succession had always gone quickly and smoothly, for countless generations . . . until now.
The Great Dragon must have a great deal of faith in me, he thought wryly, to give me three Dragon Speakers to bring to its lair all at once, and to scatter them across the kingdom.
Or is it four . . . ?
What could have happened to Sunset Deepwood, to turn him into a liar who would attempt to drown his own successor?
It felt like much more than a year since the night before the flood, when he and Sunset had met by the river. Sunset had been unable to stop pacing the bank, worry streaming from him in waves that made the tiger’s muzzle curl. He had told Shadowhunter that he was about to die. Shadowhunter hadn’t wanted to believe it, but Sunset had been too preoccupied with what would come afterward to accept his sympathies or his grief. He had told the tiger all about the prophecy, about the triplets who would come after him. He had all but begged Shadowhunter to protect them.
“No matter what happens, my old friend,” he had said, “promise me you will guard them with your life.”
Sunset, it seemed, now had other plans. But Shadowhunter had made that promise, and he intended to keep it.
No Watcher has ever failed their Speaker, and I will not be the first.
He would get to the root of Sunset’s behavior, and he would deliver the triplets to the Dragon to face their destiny.
But first he needed to hunt. He turned his muzzle to the sky, the stars glinting above him, and scented the air. Then he sprang from his perch and bounded away, toward the heart of the Bamboo Kingdom.
