He could do nothing against the sudden side-to-side whipping of the branches, except shake himself free, launching sidewise from his perch, more flailing than flying those first perilous moments as he plummeted, until he gained some lift, turning the tumble into a dive down the face of the cliff toward the river, rocks and boulders and dust falling with him—

  He arched his back to rise, straining wingtips away from the madness of mounds of water shaking in the river, of some strange tearing noise behind him.

  He leveled, beat wings against the noise, turned in time to see portions of the grove crashing to the ground, whole trees sundered, and then his tree, twisting against rock and dirt, turning and shaking, sliding down the crumbling cliff face toward him.

  With a tremendous shudder, the entire edge of the peninsula gave way, with the Laar engulfed in dust and sliding toward the water below. Unbalanced by the sight of the collapse, and unnerved by the noise, Stregalaar nearly collided with a branch—his branch!—as it slid past him.

  The river took the flood of stone and dirt; the tree's descent slowed, and stopped. The sounds like thunder were gone now, but above the hillside were cries of dragonish despair. A glance showed Stregalaar that much of the grove lay at angles, and a new rift in the land split it in two.

  In confusion Stregalaar looked back to his tree, seeing the nest still largely in place, though at an odd angle, as the trunk and tree leaned back against what was left of the hillside it had once crowned.

  What must he do? He spun in the air, heard piteous cries, saw the uncertain motion of guard dragons as they dropped down from the heights to survey the damage. In the sudden near silence, he heard a tree hum. His tree. The Laar called.

  * * *

  The tree's hum was odd, strained.

  Stregalaar whistled diffidently in response, as if to an injured elder. He would normally circle the tree several times, announcing his arrival as he descended. Now—he fluttered back, hovering against the light breeze.

  How was he supposed to behave, after all? This was outside of Hargalaar's teaching. The nest was surprisingly intact, the dreaming place easily accessible even with the tree's unnatural lean against the cliff-face. The smell of sand and salt water was strong, as was the smell of bruised leaves, but his own nest still had some lure.

  He was disoriented, though, with dark earth between him and the sky where there should only be a view of the horizon, clouds, and distant waves.

  He settled finally, for the first time in his life uncertain of the tree's solidity.

  The Laar muttered to itself like some scavenging seaflyer arguing with shells unwilling to open. Stregalaar saw dream-fragments he could not understand, felt as if he had flowing sap pulled from broken root tips, as if his green leaves bled on the rocks.

  Watch winged-one, from on high. Return to your nest this night, for we are not yet splintered, came the dream, but from beneath came something else: that sound again, and motion. This time the motion was not side-to-side but as if the tree tried and failed again and again to return to its height, up and down, up and down so he was shaken and flung into the air haphazardly. Gathering wits as he gathered air, he pumped his wings and rose, trying to rise above the rumbling danger.

  Below, the shaking continued, as before his horrified gaze the entire peninsula shredded, not falling on his tree but subsiding like a dying fish into damp beach sand. The Laar subsided as well, roots awash in the semi-salty water, then the crushed branches lay slowly back into the sea, and was swept into the river current.

  His tree! It was moving! The ground had given way around it entirely and now the water it had tapped with long roots had control of it, and was bearing it off!

  Unbidden his flight curved—he knew the Laar lived. He must follow, he must observe, protect. He must protect.

  Dragons. Now he could hear the sound of other dragons, some keening with despair, others in terror; the shaking had begun again and the hill the grove stood upon was rent with strange crevasses. Many of the trees had lost most of their leaves if not most of their limbs in the fury of the disaster, and besides the dragons other creatures rushed about randomly, trying to find someplace not afflicted by this dread calamity.

  Below, his tree was picking up speed as it found the center of the current, spinning slowly as it was swept along. He paced it for some time, barely above a lazy glide, using the sea breeze and wing twitches to guide himself. Sometimes he felt he heard the Laar hum. Sometimes the tree's bobbing showed him quick glimpses of pods still intact. The shore was more distant now, the calls of other dragons barely audible.

  A freshening breeze from landside surprised him; he rose, and let the wind spin. The tide had turned suddenly, and unlike its usual pattern, the water retreating rapidly toward the sea, carrying his tree faster and farther away from the grove. The breeze brushed his cheeks. He flicked his inner lids against it as he saw the receding beach, unnaturally wide, and full of fish and wrack. The Laar's leaves stirred as if they were wings on which it sped away from the land now that it was free . . .

  Stregalaar flew above the tree, and looked ahead, his eye drawn to the horizon, where a strange line had sprung up, sweeping across the bay with inevitable majesty.

  His first impulse reached his wings and he turned to face the threat, to unsheathe his claws that he might rip and rend this thing, or distract it as Hargalaar had told him to distract herd leaders fronting a stampede of grass-eaters.

  This was no stampede. It was as if the horizon itself was charging, and there was another rumble and roar from below.

  It was too much: as much as he tried to think, his wings knew an ancient answer.

  He flew higher. He strained to climb away from the madness, for it appeared the whole world was rushing to swallow him and his tree. His wings knew the world was bigger than he was, that nothing but another dragon dares chase a dragon into the sky.

  * * *

  His gaze never wavered as that wall came on; he let flight take care of itself and observed. As he rose he could understand what he could not from sea-level: this was no moving cliff nor rapid fog, but a wave like no other. It came at an amazing speed and as it came it rose. It appeared to extend beyond his vision in both directions up and down the coast, as it sped relentlessly toward his tree.

  Building, the wave came on.

  Then was by, distantly roaring but unlike the land-roars there was no new damage. His tree was like flotsam after a storm-tide; it lifted and then dropped into the following trough with some speed. The wave went on, growing even taller, until it burst upon the land, crashing over the grove-spot, seeming to suck from the sky those dragons who dared it.

  The grove and the hill beyond disappeared under foam and spray. The sea ran up the river, and then the thunder of that clash of land and sea rumbled to him.

  Beneath: his tree Laar floated, crushed side down, no longer making obvious headway toward the greater ocean, no longer swirling in circles. Instead it left a slight wake as from somewhere more land-wind touched and shook the leaves, the branches leading, the heavy trunk half submerged, following.

  Stregalaar strained to see the land and watch the Laar at the same time; he thought of the grove, but there was no sign of it as sea ate at the land. He wavered, took two strokes toward the land, torn. He needed to know what had become of his grove-mates, but—the Laar.

  His wings ached. He was very tired; his nest was near, and dry.

  With that thought he spun in air, closed on the tree, and slowed to a near hover as he came over the tangled sticks and branches of his nest. Wings vibrating in the breeze he allowed his forward motion to fail, and he stepped onto the restless and sea-slicked trunk, barely a step away from a pair of new formed pods.

  * * *

  It was late in the day and still the tree did not dream. If he listened hard Stregalaar thought he felt mumbles and mutters; sometimes a particular branch or limb would hum briefly, or leaves would flutter oddly, but how much of that was due to the ocean and waves and how much to the tree's will he had no idea. The Laar had rarely done this when planted firm.

  They were moving, though. The motion of the tree in the water was somewhat like the motion of branch in a light wind, but the rhythm in it was wrong. Studying the thing Stregalaar realized it was because the whole trunk was moving—there was no strong point the tree was bending or swaying from.

  He inched upward as far as he could, which was not to the old strong trunk-top but to the rather bendy end of his own branch, which swayed doubly from the waves and his weight. He would have to dream with the Laar tree about that, if the tree would listen. Hargalaar had let him know the tree would listen, pointing out the broad platform that used to be beneath the nest and which now worked as a windbreak.

  His view from this vantage point was surprisingly limited. He could see waves and clouds and a distant mist on the horizon. He'd felt a touch of fear when he first sighted that mist . . . but this was not a moving wall of water, merely the ordinary motion of fog, a near daily occurrence in some seasons.

  In the other direction, when he deliberately searched it out, was the blurred line of land. The clouds he could see building there boded a wet night, and even as he watched he saw a flicker of lightning in the growing storm.

  In the water all about them were signs of the cataclysm they had survived: broken, brainless trees and limbs, clumps of bushes, leaves and berries, even unappetizingly dead animals. Fish and sea things moved among the dead, eating what they would.

  He took note of several of the scavengers, who were big enough to be a problem at close range.

  The scent of the ocean mingled with the scent of torn limbs and roots, for the tree's slide down the embankment had taken a toll. Too, there were other scents of note: fresh and broken leaves, salt tang, damp earth. Not all of the scents were familiar, and even of those he knew the proportions were grossly changed from what he was used to.

  Gripping the branch carefully in the face of what appeared to be a larger than usual wave, Stregalaar turned his back on the land once more, to find the mist growing from the seaward side. With weather closing in, he would need to be extra alert in the night. Leaving his perch for a quick snack of pod, he sought the jumbled tangle of the nest, and stepped into it with a will. Granted the Laar's new arrangements, he would eventually need to reshape the nest. For the moment, what he needed was respite.

  Tucking claws around the nest's still-firm backbone, he let the ocean's breeze bring him smells until with closed eyes, he slept.

  * * *

  The rain did not reach them that night, but the fog did, closing in even before the day was done. The thunderstorm rumbled away for half the night, and it wasn't until near-dawn that the fog relented, permitting sight of the fading night-guides overhead. Between the movement of the waves and lack of life-long landmarks it took him a moment to recognize their patterns as the clearing continued, but before full dawn he'd seen that nothing there had changed, which was good.

  The full morning brought a chill breeze carrying odors familiar and unfamiliar, this one becoming strong enough to flap the leaves and change the progress of the tree through the water. The wave action felt more pronounced, from time to time giving the tree a high end and a low.

  If the tree dreamed, it was not sharing.

  Stregalaar stretched, nibbled on a pod, and threw himself skyward, the shore invisible until he caught the wind and soared higher.

  It wasn't until he gained more height that he saw his tree was part of a mass of stuff, its top branches now gathering in other flotsam. There were other smaller clumps about, but they all seemed to be moving in a wide curve, as if the river's current reached this far and no further.

  Tree-gift or not, he knew he could not live only on pods, so he soared even higher, looking for likely schools of fish, or even perhaps some of the small seaflyers . That idea intrigued him but then he looked down to the tree. The seaflyers, even at half his weight, were able defenders solo and aggressive predators in groups. Perhaps this was not the time to test his skills thus. Perhaps the best choice would be small fish, after all.

  * * *

  Foraging took longer than he had expected. The fish here were less relaxed than those closer in to the shore, more alert to shadows. He was accustomed to keeping an eye on the spray to gauge surface winds, and had depended on the breaking waves to bring fish back to the surface. Lacking comfortable reference points, the simple act of fishing was more energetic than he was used to.

  More, he found himself staying within easy sight of the Laar, concerned twice when he'd misunderstood its motion in the swirling current.

  There was also the inconvenient lack of nearby perch or rock on which to eat the prey at long last captured. He could eat some of the smaller fish in flight, but others took a place to work and rend; and of the flotsam available his tree was the most stable and the most familiar. He had always kept to Hargalaar's rule about not filling the nest with fish bones, but this was problematic now.

  Lacking better options, he returned to the Laar to eat. After, he cleaned as well as he could, pushing the scraps over the edge of the nest and into the sea. The meager catch had taken the edge from his hunger, but he knew that soon he would be wanting a larger meal.

  His eyes were drawn to an unusual trunk-side motion—something was pulling the scraps he had cleared below the surface of the water. This would bear watching: he surely didn't want to attract pests or competitors!

  Returned to thoughts about the future, Stregalaar moved again to the dream spot, closing his eyes against the distractions of outer sight.

  There was no muttering to be heard in the dreamplace, no visions, no voices. Rather, there was the feeling of being watched, a feeling akin to the one he'd had when faced with being accepted. The tree was aware of him, the way Hargalaar had known when he slept and when he woke.

  Concerned, he tried dreaming at the tree—

  "Laar, I would sleep in my nest!"

  For a moment, perhaps, a hum. A twitch of leaves.

  A small pod, bright green, beckoned, releasing a scent of fresh water and clean sweet juices.

  Branch-with-wings . . . Stregalaar straightened eagerly. The Laar spoke—but so faint! Almost, it seemed to be his own thought, a memory or—your nest is here. He settled his wings noisily. It was, after all, only a memory of what the tree had promised to provide when first he had arrived. Ever since he'd had a nest, and sweet pods, and a thing to do—to be the wings and the eyes of the Laar.

  What more did he need at the moment? The tree was providing a place to sleep, the tree was providing pods. What more could a dragon need—

  Reality he knew: in a while he would need food. In a while again, he would need a place to sleep.

  In the meantime, the Laar needed what a tree always needed: a dragon to see to the tree's environment as best he could. Were the fishes feeding on the branches as well as the scraps? Would Stregalaar need to eat in flight and drop scraps randomly?

  Working with this dreamless and wordless message, the dragon snatched at the small ripe pod and took again to the air.

  * * *

  The air was clearer now, and the angle of light made it easier to see into the waves. Stregalaar noted that as he caught the wind and soared, tucking the thought away as he had tucked away the information that the long-eared nibblers expected danger from the ground or that root-grubbers in a group would put up a dangerous fight.

  In this light he could also see the debris from the land swirling into a pocket of current and moving on, the sand-rich water easily distinguishable from the green-blue of the greater ocean. Higher he soared, and finally he saw land, a misty edge on the horizon.

  Between the land and the Laar, much closer to the traveling tree than the misty land, was a mass of green and brown and beige. Stregalaar knew what islands were, but he couldn't recall seeing this one earlier, though he might have missed it in the fog. He dipped a wing and started a long glide in that direction, sharp eyes unable to make sense of what he saw, until he realized that this was like the Laar's progress through the waves, except much bigger. Where the branches, grasses, and flotsam that traveled with the Laar were barely twice the canopy in size, this mass was big enough for a dragon to land on, could he find a suitable spot amid the jumbled junk. And where the Laar's shape could be picked out from its companions from a height, the large mass seemed random, like sticks on the sand on a storm-tide morning. Too, there was a busyness—a motion around the thing that drew his hunter's eyes without informing him.

  A wing flashed and that quickly he had the pattern. It was a flock of seaflyers playing in the air near the large mass; their motion that had drawn his eye and confused him all at once. Stregalaar slowed his approached. Seaflyers . . . were risky. They seldom came to the beach, which was well for dragon and for seaflyer. While they could soar, most of their time was spent close to the surface of the water, from whence they could alight, float, and take off. Unlike dragons, they were comfortable diving for their food if need be. It was rare to find one solitary; they hunted, nested, and slept in flock. These, now that he could see them clearly, were wheeling and diving over the mass in a fashion far from random.