Chapter One

The Silver Road

Grace Dugan

The dream always began the same way. Zuven was standing in the centre of a clearing in the jungle. Stars filled the night sky. The clearing was unnaturally bare, as if the saplings that once grew in this place had been weeded out; it was round, too, as round as the moon which shone over her shoulder and cast her shadow onto the long grass.

This was the third time the dream had come in only five moons. The first had been the night of her adulthood ceremony, when she’d slept alone in the village’s shrine hut. She had thought the dream was a special gift of that night, that it would not come again. But it had.

This time, like the others, she was drawn towards a gap in the wall of the jungle. She walked from bright moonlight into lacy shadows. Vines and scrub closed around her path until it was almost a tunnel. There was no screech of cicadas in this dream jungle, no sounds of seed pods dropping through the understorey from the canopy above, no wind, no scurry of lizard feet or hooting of night birds. The first sound Zuven heard was a rumbling of water, a soft thunder. A brightness appeared ahead; it had puzzled her the first time she’d seen it, but now she knew it was silver-white sand.

When she stepped onto the beach, the sand and moonlight were too bright. Before her the water crashed and sucked, an endless shattering of luminous foam. It was a sea that could only exist in dreams; she was sure the real sea could never be as huge and wild. To either side of her, the beach curved forward in a great white crescent.

Zuven crossed the damp, harder sand and stood where the cool water washed her feet. The waves drew the sand from under her and she sank up to her ankles. She looked out at the grey curve of the horizon, hoping to see something, an island or a boat maybe, but it was empty.

A wave swept past her shins and she felt something wrap itself around her leg. As she picked it up she saw it was a piece of cloth, a narrow flagscarf as long as she was tall and plain white, the kind only worn by Servants of the angels.

It was an omen, a sign that her wish would come true: she would one day enter the Service of the angel Gumadia.

Zuven walked out of the water, holding the flagscarf up between her hands. When she reached dry sand, a heavy cloud passed over the moon, and the light dimmed until the beach no longer shone. A cool wind blew through her hair, but the waves grew smaller and smaller until the sea was calm.

Zuven saw a ripple in the shallows; a snake slithered out of the water. It emerged from the shallow foam, two body-lengths long and as thick as her arm. In the dim light, its scales shone gold. She took a few steps back, but it appeared not to notice her. Its long body rippled across the dry sand and disappeared into the jungle.