“Oh. So who has the fifth one? Gabriel?”

“No.” I was silent for a moment. “We think the dragon I saw in the shadow world has the fifth shard.”

Her eyes widened. “Baltic, you mean?”

“Yes.”

She whistled. “That’s going to be a hard one to get.”

“It will indeed. The hope is that the other four shards together will give us the ability to get the fifth.”

“Hmm.” Cyrene thought for a few minutes. “I bet that Bao is going to have a thing or two to say about all of this.”

“I’m sure she will, but that’s no affair of ours. Jian insists that Bao is not what she seems, and she has no right to bear the title of wyvern. We really have no reason not to believe him.”

“You don’t really have a reason to believe him, either, but I guess that point is moot. Oh! That’s it, over there,” Cyrene said, pointing to a stretch of beach and sapphire water that was glimpsed between starkly white stone buildings.

It took a few minutes to find a spot to park, so popular was the surfing event, but at last we tucked the car away in the shade of a church and walked the length of the town to the beach, where a large crowd was gathered around a couple of rickety tables. Surfboards lay glistening in the sun up and down the beach, their owners standing negligently beside them, or bent over them waxing the colorful boards with gentle caresses.

“Which one is Neptune?” I asked, allowing myself a moment to admire all the eye candy. Most of the surfers were shirtless, wearing standard knee-length cargo shorts, or brightly colored wet suits, all of them showing off physiques honed by years of swimming and surfing. There were surprisingly few women included, although the ones who were there were as buff as the men.

“I think that’s him, down there,” Cyrene answered after scanning the people. She pointed to the far end of the beach, where two men were emerging from the foaming surf, water glistening on their wet suits, their boards slung to their sides. A third man stood with his board balanced on his head, clearly about to go into the water.

“Which one?” I asked as we set off toward them.

“The one who looks like Neptune, of course,” she said with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

The two men stopped in front of the third, shaking water from their hair as they set their boards down.

“Brah!” the dry man said to one of the two guys. “That was sick air! Epic, totally epic! It’s just too bad that frickin’ Grom snaked you and knocked your stick. You’d have that tail slide otherwise.”