Weaponless now, all the brothers could do was retreat before the creature’s vast maw, yelling for help as they did so.

“Geneva! Somebody! Please God, it’s going to eat us alive!”

“I’m coming!” Geneva called back to him.

She was still digging through the vomitus, searching for her sword. Her endeavor was not helped by the violent rocking of the boat, which was escalating as the dragon’s motion turned the waters around the Belbelo to a seething frenzy.

The dragon’s maw was a foot or two from the brothers now.

Having nowhere else to run, Mischief fled into the smoky cabin.

“Meat!” the dragon yelled, determined to devour its mutilators. “You are all meat!”

The spikes on the dragon’s hood prevented it from getting through the door, but the maddened beast wasn’t going to let a little detail like that stop it. It shook its head back and forth with such violence that the doorframe cracked and broke. Then it pushed its head in through the opening it had made and into the cabin.

The brothers were trapped.

“Kick it!” yelled Fillet.

“Punch it!” yelled Drowze.

With no hope of escape to left or right of the monster, and only the prospect of its hot-breathed throat ahead, Mischief went into a flailing frenzy, punching its snout, its lips, even its gums. But it availed him nothing. The worm thrust its head into the cabin and closed its teeth around the brothers’ body. It did so with a curious gentility. No doubt it could have bitten Mischief in half if it had desired to do so, but it apparently wanted to torment him with a slow devouring, to which end it dragged the screaming brothers out through the smashed door.

On deck, everybody was yelling now, with the exception of Tria. Threats, demands, prayers: all were being offered up to keep Mischief from being eaten alive.

The dragon was unmoved. Slowly—almost majestically—it lifted its head, the brothers’ body hanging out of either side of its mouth, and began to sink back down into the frantic waters of the Izabella.

In one last act of desperation, Tom ran to the edge of the boat, reached out, and seized hold of Mischief’s hand.

Somehow the worm managed to speak, even though it had a choice piece of meat between its teeth.

“Two for the price of one,” it growled.

“Geneva!” Tom yelled. “For A’zo’s sake, help us!”

“I’m here!” Geneva yelled back to him.

She had finally located her sword. Not waiting to wipe the slime off it, she raced over the pitching deck to strike the enemy afresh.

Tom had caught hold of the rail of the Belbelo with one hand, but his grip on the slick rail was tenuous; and every time the dragon pulled to loosen Tom’s hold, its teeth sank more deeply into John Mischief’s body.

He and his brothers were not bearing all this in silence. They were letting it be known that this was an agony; eight voices, all howling or sobbing or shouting, demanding that something be done to free them before it was too late.

Geneva yelled out to the dragon now, as she came to the side of the boat.

“Put them down, worm!” she demanded. “Or I take jour life. Down, I said!”

The dragon looked at Geneva’s sword from the corner of its blood-blackened eye. Then—seeing that if it held on to its quarry for another moment, Geneva would slash its throat—it did three things in quick succession. It let go of John Mischief, who lost his grip on Tom and fell into the water; it lifted one of its taloned forefeet and brought it down on the side of the boat, crashing through the deck and all the boards beneath to a spot well below the waterline. And finally it picked upTwo-Toed Tom and threw him as far as it could from the Belbelo.

As the creature turned back, Geneva’s sword slashed across the dragon’s upper chest. The worm unleashed an agonized din; the pitch of its vibrations such that all the nails in the deck shot up out of the boards, leaving only the pitch that the shipwrights had used to seal the vessel holding the boards together.

Then it dived after Geneva with terrifying speed, its pursuit driving her back across the boat, her weight enough to crack the pitch and separate the boards.

In that instant the Belbelo—which had endured much, and mightily—became a doomed vessel.

“Hemmett!” Geneva yelled. The Captain had been at the wheel throughout the dragon’s attack, attempting to keep his vessel from capsizing in the tumult the worm had created. “Get Tria off the boat!”

“But my ship—”

“There’s no help for it, Captain! Save the child!”

As she spoke, the dragon’s jaws snapped closed, three inches from Geneva’s face. Its stinging, rancid blood, along with a wave of heat from its pierced lung, erupted from the wound she’d made in its chest, spattering her arms and neck, but she refused to let the pain drive her back. She held her ground, even though the wounded dragon snapped again and again, almost taking off her face. Luckily, with only one eye its spatial judgment was spoiled so that it repeatedly missed its target. But the sound when the teeth met was terrifyingly solid: like the din of an iron door slamming closed over and over.

Geneva took a deep breath and lifted her sword. She knew she would not have a second chance at the blow she was about to deliver. She would have to drive down, behind the solid breastbone, in order to pierce its heart. It would either find its way into the dragon’s vitals and kill the damned thing, or she would miss and the worm would swallow her.

Making a silent prayer to the ninety-one goddesses of her homeland, she raised her sword.

The creature was preparing to snap at her again. She could hear the muscles of its jaws creaking like an immense spring as they opened.

Trusting to the goddesses and her instinct to guide her, she ducked down beneath the dragon’s jaw and put the tip of her sword against its scaly throat. She met resistance immediately, as though she was pressing against bone. Cursing, she tried another place.

The dragon opened its mouth, expelling the stench of its stomachs.

This was it! She had to strike. It was now or never.

She pushed; and yes, the sword broke the armor of hard, gray-green scales and pierced its flesh.

She threw all her body weight against the sword. It was enough. The blade slid down behind the creature’s breastbone.

She felt the worm’s serpentine body shudder as the blade ran down into the cavity of its breast and pierced its vast heart. Its mouth, already gaping, opened a little wider still. And from deep, deep within the vile convolutions of the thing there came a noise like the growling of a thousand rabid dogs.

“Die,” she said to it, just loud enough that it would hear.

Then she twisted her blade in its heart. The rabid din got louder, and the stench from its stomachs became foul beyond measure: the smell of death released from the entrails of the beast.

Slowly, the dragon’s good eye slid to the left, so as to fix on Geneva one last time. It curled back its upper lip, baring its formidable array of teeth. But this was all an empty show. Its din was dying away. There was no real fury left in its wounded body.

The dragon trembled down to its stinking core. Then, putting both its front legs on the side of the sinking vessel, it pushed off.

Geneva let her sword slip out of her hands rather than risk being pulled into the sea as the dragon made its departure. She stumbled back onto the disintegrating deck, which was now six inches deep in water, scarcely believing that she’d bested the beast.

“Are you alive?” McBean yelled to her.

“Just,” she said.

While Geneva had been fighting with the dragon, McBean had broken out the little red lifeboat and had launched it over the opposite side of the Belbelo. Now he was hurriedly depositing Tria—for whom the dragon had forfeited its life—in the boat.