Chapter 2
I wake up to the vision of the stunningly intricate mosaic laid into the vaulted ceiling of Celestial Sanctuary’s entry chamber.
It’s supposed to reflect how any one of the gods who incarnate as sages—represented by figures in an array of brilliant colors—can find clarity here in this mountain retreat to restore our strength, dancing our katas in forests and lakes.
I guess I did find my strength here, but what I did to make that happen... Peaceful is not the word.
Did protecting the dragon count as peaceful? I didn’t kill anyone, but I did threaten to. What other kind of strength could have not just stopped them, but made them go away?
I don’t know. It’s not what the Order made me study, given that they wanted to use my wrath in a particular way.
But the fact that they didn’t teach it to me doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it could just mean they didn’t want me to know it.
And strength that those who oppress are wary of spreading would be worth learning, I think.
“You’re awake.”
I turn my head, belatedly realizing that the dragon—somehow back in human form?!—is seated right next to me. Watching over me as I slept?
Odd that I didn’t note the presence of his magic immediately upon waking. Even though I don’t know him—I don’t even know his name—perhaps his presence nearby has been continual enough that his proximity didn’t alarm me?
I always noted the presence of the tutors who raised me, though.
Then again, I didn’t believe they had my best interests at heart.
Then again, they weren’t dragons.
“What’s your name?” I ask abruptly.
His eyebrows arch. “Zan.”
We stare at each other.
Okay. Now he has a name. And he knows my name somehow, so we’re not strangers, and it’s not weird that he’s been staring at me while I sleep and I don’t mind it.
Oy.
Carefully I sit up, only then noticing there was something soft under my head.
“Spare clothes,” Zan says. All his earlier emotion is gone from his voice. Worried about my reaction, perhaps? “You can wear them if you want.”
I feel a strange sense of vertigo, looking down and realizing I have been wearing the same sage robes for half a millennium.
And although my magical stasis has apparently prevented them from crumbling off of me, I am coated in a layer of dust.
I can’t even really feel it, but swiping a finger along my arm reveals that my skin tone is pale—not news, it always has been—but not actually ashen.
“...Or you can wash first,” Zan says.
“Wash first,” I agree, oddly queasy.
“I have food too.” Zan begins digging in his pack. “I don’t know precisely how your stasis worked, but it might be wise to have some before moving much. Much more, anyway.”
His tone shifts, just barely, and I find myself glad he’s not as closed off from his emotions as all that.
Because he is so annoyed that I rescued him.
I’ll take it.
But when food emerges, all I can focus on is that I am starving.
Zan has cheese, nuts, bread, jam. Jam.
I hesitate to reach for it out of habit. I always had to be careful not to show preference for foods that I actually like, lest the Order decide it was an opportunity to teach me discipline and deny it to me.
There aren’t priests here, but the reflex to hide myself is long ingrained.
“This is what was in your pack?” I ask instead.
“Yes,” Zan says acidly, “you risked your life for some bread.”
“Is it good bread?”
A pause. “Yes.”
I also pause. “Do you like bread?”
Zan appears to consider that question seriously, regarding the loaf of bread critically. “An old friend used to make the best bread I’ve ever had. My bread standards are high.”
An old friend. Imagine, a dragon having a friend who would bake him bread.
But five hundred years have passed.
His friend is dead.
Zan isn’t, though.
Abruptly I say, “I didn’t risk my life for bread. And I didn’t risk it all, unlike you. Why were you even coming here?”
“Are you even going to eat the food you’re so carefully not looking at?”
Damn it, he noticed.
I purse my lips, glaring at him mildly.
He gives me a vaguely annoyed look of challenge in return.
Zan isn’t a priest.
Even annoyed with me, he’s not withholding food.
Fuck it.
I reach for the cheese with one hand and the jam with the other.
Dairy and sugar: my two great food loves.
Nuts would probably be good for me and I don’t dislike them, but this is the first food I’m going to taste in centuries and maybe it’s okay for it to be sweet.
Zan passes me a piece of bread. I layer just an incredible amount of jam on it and then a mound of cheese and then some more jam on top.
His expression gradually shifts from annoyance to increasing bemusement to carefully bitten-back laughter.
My snack is now so tall it almost doesn’t fit in my mouth, but by the gods I will make it.
I open my mouth as wide as I can and shove it in.
Rich blackberry jam. Creamy cheese. I can’t tell if the bread is good, to be honest; it’s basically just a vessel for delivery of my sugar fat.
Bliss.
When I open my eyes, Zan’s expression is no longer amused, but keen.
Like he can see the shape of all I’ve hidden for so long.
I swallow and shove some more food in my mouth.
I wasn’t sure I would ever wake up, and now that I have, I’m not really sure how to feel about it or what to do.
But the mechanics of maintaining my body are long ingrained, so for now I’ll just chew.
So it’s Zan who next abruptly breaks the silence. “I was betrayed. A potential contact I was evaluating, so it’s not a huge shock, but the timing was unfortunate. I had to risk using them after a run-in with the Order, so I was already low in magic.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
All of it? “Why were you low on power?”
Zan shrugs. “Hadn’t transformed in a while.
This mountain is—was—the only place in Kameya where it’s safe for me to.
I normally use dyes to hide among the people in this empire, but I’ve been active here for long enough that the priests have become cannier about preventing me from accessing their sages. ”
An old, vague memory surfaces. It’s been so long since he’s told me anything, I hadn’t realized— “You’re still smuggling sages out?”
Another shrug. “These days it’s mostly only if I can find them before the Order does. That’s gotten harder, too.”
Oh.
He’s been doing that for so long. A dedication so profound my mind has trouble encompassing it.
I can barely imagine spending lifetimes traveling, hiding, for the chance of maybe being able to help a few people.
No wonder he conceals his emotions so easily, never being able to be open with who he is. The bigger surprise is that he’s lasted this long like that.
And yet—the world hasn’t gotten better.
It’s difficult for me to know how to reconcile that.
“So you came up here so the priests couldn’t follow you?” I ask.
Zan looks me in the eyes. “No. I came here in hope that your magic might prevent me from involuntarily transforming after death, so the priests couldn’t strip me for parts.”
My breath catches.
I was right. He did mean to die here.
Is that why he’s annoyed with me?
If I’m feeling conflicted discovering how much hasn’t changed in five hundred years, what must it be like for Zan, who’s lived it?
“But then you transformed anyway,” I say, which isn’t my fault. “And how can you shift back to human form so quickly anyway? Especially when you were so low on power.”
“I’m fine for now.”
What?
I stare.
He stares back.
I swallow hard, the sweet creaminess somehow clogging my throat now.
There’s a gap between us. Zan and I have been in proximity to each other, we’ve helped each other, but we don’t know each other, not really. I shouldn’t feel hurt that he’s not telling me all his secrets. He’s under no obligation to.
I do anyway.
That’s not his problem, though; it’s mine.
So I take a breath and summon my extensive emotional regulation training and look away first.
And then I notice that unlike me, the temple is clean. Like, pristine clean.
I swipe a finger along the ground like I did to my arm, and it comes back with only crumbs from my bread. What in the world?
“How am I so dusty when the rest of the temple isn’t? People couldn’t get in, but air could, and there should have been—I mean, from before, weren’t there—”
Zan clears his throat. “I did some spring cleaning while you were sleeping.”
I stare at him again after all. “You what?” And then my brain catches up, and I realize— “Your fire. You burned all the grime out of the temple? And—there were bodies, then.”
Zan shakes his head. “No, mostly just bones. Teeth. They take a long time to decay.” He hesitates, and then adds more quietly, “Someone once told me that if you were ever to get a taste of freedom, the first thing you saw should be hopeful.”
The awfulness of my past cleansed in fire.
I wouldn’t have expected that to make a difference, but somehow it does.
Zan asks slowly, like he’s not sure how I’ll react, “Do you want to see? Your first view isn’t what I would have hoped, but we can try again.”
He means facing the priests.
But my first view of freedom was him shattering the walls around me.
“Can we?” I ask. “Try again.”
Seriously, Zan tells me, “I hope so.”
And suddenly, even though we don’t know each other, this moment has become intimate.
No one has ever seen me, truly, before. I both crave it with the intensity of all the wrath I’ve ever felt and also don’t know how to deal with it, so I get up.
Zan gathers the food back into his pack quickly and efficiently; a person who is used to having to flee at a moment’s notice.
To avoid being murdered and stripped for parts.
“Would no one have hidden you?” I blurt. “I know the Quiet was strongest up here, but it extended through the island, and there used to be a town—”