Chapter 4
Zan finds a pair of slippers for me in my bedroom. They won’t hold up well to hiking through a forest, but he assures me we can acquire boots in Crystal Hollow for the return trip.
But Zan pauses after closing the door behind us, considering it with a frown. “I think you—we will need a lock,” he finally says. “It was never a problem before, since almost no one could come up here. And it was a signal that anyone who could was welcome. But now...”
Now, anyone can come up here.
Now, there’s no safe places for sages.
“Not a sanctuary anymore,” I murmur.
Zan looks at me sharply. “For now, it can be your sanctuary. We’ll just put up a boundary that you don’t have to actively maintain.”
What about other sages, though?
I look toward the temple. Its doors are open again.
“Hmm,” Zan says thoughtfully, following my gaze.
I turn away. I don’t want to give the Order more reasons to target me.
I sacrificed five hundred years because of them. Whatever I may have deserved for what I’ve done, I don’t believe I owe more than that.
And I don’t know what else I could do, even if I wanted to.
Establishing a region safe from the Order’s magic demonstrably wasn’t enough, after all.
I walk toward the path down the mountain, and Zan follows without a word.
The sun shines on my face, and not because I’ve been taken to a battlefield. The slippers are soft but unfamiliar on my feet. There are flowers blooming all around me, close enough to touch, wild and free.
I don’t know this world, how to make sense of it.
“Do you know the names of the birds?” I ask Zan.
“It’s hard for a dragon to get close to birds,” he says with a touch of what I’m now sure is his wry humor, and maybe also a touch of sadness. “But I can tell you about the trees.”
We’ve reached the path from the clearing where the flowers grow to the edge of the forest. “Why didn’t trees swallow up the temple grounds? Flowers still grow, so it can’t have been my magic.”
“It’s my landing pad in dragon form, so I keep it clear,” Zan explains. “High enough in the sky, there needs to be a wide opening or you miss it. Are you ready?”
To leave the place where I have been trapped for five hundred years?
Or to leave the place where I claimed my power for myself?
“No,” I say, and start down the path anyway.
It’s narrower than it used to be, but then, no one is marching cohorts of priests and enough supplies for all the temple’s residents up and down its trails anymore.
Zan keeps pace with me. “It’s spring, so there’s a lot in bloom right now. I’m happy to teach you what I know, but there are going to be lots of new things for you today. Would you like to know about the trees first, or Crystal Hollow? It’s changed a lot since your time, but I can give you a tour—”
“Why do you know Crystal Hollow well?” I interrupt.
I find I’m less interested in the world—and how he can use it to distance himself from me and also his own emotions—and more in him.
Zan pauses, glancing at me like he’s not sure how to answer this question. “It’s the only place in the empire I can interact with people without having to worry about the Order,” he finally says.
“But why are you still here at all?” I press. “After all this time, why haven’t you left Kameya? Or returned to the dragons? I obviously don’t know dragon culture well, but from what I remember dragons don’t stay in one place for even a generation—and that’s without being specifically targeted.”
“Rather than merely generally targeted?” Zan returns with false lightness.
Even in my time, the dragons were one of the main tools the Order used to justify their existence.
By making dragons into a public enemy—focusing on dragons’ supposed greed in their unwillingness to share the excessive magical wealth that they can’t even fully use, and in so doing distracting from the Order’s wealth—and moreover making them into an enemy that a normal person couldn’t easily defeat, dragons became a convenient deflection, the “real” problem.
“You know what I mean,” I say. “There’s a difference between general bigotry, which is obviously bad, and the powers that be developing policies to entrap you specifically.”
“I notice,” Zan says, still in that light voice, “that you’re not addressing the matter of stealing children.”
Not talking about “the dragon in the kitchen,” as the saying goes. The implication being that it’s flatly ridiculous for a dragon to belong in the cozy center of a home.
I’m pretty sure Zan has more idea what to do in a kitchen than I do, however.
“I don’t have any idea if dragons do in fact steal children, or if so why,” I say. “My information there comes from the Order, and it always seemed very convenient for them.”
“Oh, dragons absolutely steal children,” Zan says. “I’m happy to blame Kameyan priests for many things, but they didn’t invent that one, even if they have embellished it. Dragon society is deeply fucked up.”
Huh. Not what I was expecting him to say, though it strikes me that Zan is attempting to make me think of him in the worst possible light and I’m not sure why.
Then again, I saw his hunger, before he remembered to veil it.
He’s no more had the luxury of acting on his wants than I have. How much harder would it be to act against your instincts when they’ve been reinforced for five hundred years?
“Is it true that dragons can’t have children without humans?” I ask.
To my surprise, he answers me directly. “Female dragons can, and their offspring are always dragons. That’s why you’ve never fought a female dragon—they’re not permitted to leave the eyries, lest something befall them.”
“I didn’t actually know there were female dragons,” I admit.
Zan nods. “And if anyone asks, I will deny it. I have no intention of making the world less safe for them, when they’re already so trapped.”
I nod. “I will keep the secret no matter what.”
A quick, habitual motion with my hands flares my magic, making this an official vow.
Zan’s eyes widen, and he inclines his head deeply in appreciation for my commitment.
I’m not sure why. He must have realized I wouldn’t tell anyone, surely, or else he’d never have said anything. The vow is merely an acknowledgement that I understand the weight of what he’s told me.
Maybe he didn’t expect me to be sympathetic, given the subject matter, but how could I not be?
Then Zan continues, “Male dragons, on the other hand, are more common, and we can breed with humans. Human women mostly don’t birth dragons, but when they do, we take them to raise among dragons and never have contact with their mothers again.
Or any of the human offspring. If they don’t, we still leave, because we will have to try again with another human, and any resources at our disposal we save for the next possible broodmare.
Young male dragons are released from the eyries for this purpose, you see, and until we return with a child, we are not considered adults.
And until we are considered adults, we are not permitted to mate. ”
Wow is there a lot to unpack there.
That was not the change in my foundational understanding of the world that I thought was on the agenda for today.
“I’m beginning to see where your disdain is coming from,” I say as evenly as I can manage. I’m a master at emotional regulation, but I am still Wrath-powered, and that is a whole bombshell of yikes. “If mating for dragons isn’t a matter of sex, what is it?”
Zan won’t meet my eyes. “You know dragons are vulnerable when they return to dragon form.”
“Yes.”
“Without a mate, a male dragon must live in the eyrie for security or be trapped in human form. With a mate, you can draw strength from your partner, and the power required to sustain a dragon is considerable—that’s why our scales are so sought after, after all.
And it’s also why our mates can only be dragons. ”
I feel a pang at that, which is patently ridiculous. I barely know him. And in any case, he’s explaining to me why he hasn’t done this.
Anger at my own self flares, and I squash it ruthlessly. I am not going there, trapping him with my barely-even-fledged expectations like I have been trapped before.
His hunger isn’t for me as a person.
Zan continues, “To be free to take your dragon form and go where you please, you have to have a mate.”
“But you haven’t returned,” I say, “for at least five hundred years.”
Zan nods. “We’re probably about the same age, technically speaking. When I saw you for the first time, I’d only recently been turned loose to breed.”
The amount of scorn he puts on that last word I feel in my bones.
“And you still haven’t.”
Zan does look at me then, and his anger is visible, too. “I am uninterested in abandoning women and children for a horrific metric of adulthood. If I am a child in the eyes of those who consider that action worth merit or a rogue for refusing to conform to it, so be it.”
So, so much about the world I never knew. Never had a chance to know.
So much about him.
“Have you ever been tempted?” I ask. “To settle down? Since you’re already considered rogue?”
Zan pauses, looking at me.
I can’t look away from whatever is in his gaze.
“Just once,” he says.
And then he turns away and keeps walking down the path.
Heart pounding unreasonably, I hurry to catch up. “That means dragons won’t bail you out of trouble, too, doesn’t it?” I ask. It’s why he had to flee to the temple. “That’s why you’re on your own. Do they care that you haven’t come back?”
Zan barks out a laugh. “Oh, they care. Periodically they send some youth to try to pressure me. I suspect it’s become another rite of passage, a way to demonstrate to the elders that they can be trusted.”
“Wow.”
“Indeed. As I said: fucked up.”
“How far does that go?” I ask. “Would dragons work with the Order to ambush you?”