Chapter 12 #3
It was the best breakfast she'd ever had. And she had a feeling it was only the first of many.
* * *
After breakfast, Marina walked the Colony.
Not for any official purpose. Not checking structural reports or coordinating supply logistics or reviewing Melessra's data. Just walking. Seeing the place she'd chosen to live with the eyes of someone who was staying rather than visiting.
The corridors were different when you weren't rushing through them.
She noticed things she'd missed in three weeks of crisis management.
The carvings in the stone walls and geometric patterns that told stories she was only beginning to learn to read.
A group of young Weredragons playing a game that involved tossing heated stones between their hands, the stones glowing orange as they passed through the air.
An elderly craftsman in a workshop alcove, carving volcanic glass into shapes so delicate they looked like frozen water.
She stopped at the workshop. The gray scaled, ancient craftsman, had steady hands despite his age. He looked up at her without surprise. Gossip moved faster than seismic waves, apparently.
"You're the human," he stated.
"I'm Marina."
"I know who you are. Everyone knows who you are. You're the woman who came to the research cavern at three in the morning and told Melessra her calculations were wrong."
"I said her baseline parameters needed adjustment. That's different from wrong."
The craftsman's mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. "Sit down. I'll show you something."
He turned back to his work. He was carving a small figure from a piece of deep purple volcanic glass.
It was a dragon in mid-flight, with wings spread and tail extended.
Every scale individually rendered with a precision that made Marina's scientific mind marvel at the craftsmanship.
The glass caught the bioluminescent light and scattered it in violet sparks.
"How long does a piece like that take?" she asked.
"This one? Three days. Some take weeks. The glass tells you what it wants to be.
You just help it get there." He held it up to the light, turning it slowly, checking angles she couldn't see.
"I carved one for the prince when he was born.
A small thing, a dragon hatchling with its wings folded.
His mother held it in her hand during the naming ceremony.
It's in the royal chamber now, on a shelf beside the door. "
"I didn't know Toren's mother."
"Nobody did, really. She died when he was four from the fever that swept the Colony that year.
" The craftsman set the figure down and picked up a different tool.
This one was finer and more precise. "Boradrith never recovered.
He became the king we have now; effective, careful and closed.
The man he was before her death was different. He was warmer and more like his son."
Marina sat in the workshop alcove and listened to a stranger tell her about the family she'd just joined.
The craftsman's voice was low and steady, his hands never stopping their work as he spoke about a queen who'd died young, a king who'd turned his grief into governance, and a prince who'd inherited his mother's warmth and his father's stubbornness and who had, against all probability, fallen in love with an alien.
"You'll be good for them," the craftsman said when he finished. "Both of them. The prince needs someone who sees what he sees. And the king needs someone who reminds him of what he lost."
"I'm not trying to replace anyone."
"No. You're trying to add something. That's different, and it's harder, and it's what this Colony needs." He held up the finished dragon figurine and examined it one more time. Then he held it out to Marina. "Take it. Its a gift for the woman who came at three in the morning."
The figure was small enough to fit in her palm. The purple glass was warm from his hands, and when she held it up to the bioluminescent light, it glowed from within. The volcanic glass was capturing and amplifying the light the way the crystallographic arrays captured and amplified data.
"Thank you," she said. She meant it for more than the gift.
"Thank the glass," the craftsman replied. "It told me what it wanted to be. I just helped."
Marina walked back to Toren's quarters with the glass dragon in her palm and the bond humming in her chest. She set the figurine on the shelf beside his sleeping platform, next to the pouch that held his collection of human artifacts: the whale movie, the children's book, the faded photograph and the worn earbuds.
Human junk and Weredragon glass, side by side on a shelf. Two species' treasures, sharing space.
The alliance in miniature. The future in a handful of objects.
Marina Livingstone, chief scientist of the Vulcana expedition, human representative on Dobromia, bonded mate of the prince, stood in a stone room inside a volcano and felt, for the first time in her adult life, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
The bond hummed its agreement.