“God forbid,” said Mina. On a whim, she closed the book and handed it over to Colin. “Do you know who might’ve written this? Stephen didn’t, but—”
A second too late to catch herself, she heard Stephen’s Christian name come from her lips. Done was done; flinching or correcting herself would only call more attention to what she’d said.
“He’s foisted himself on fewer of our relatives than I have,” Colin said, as if he’d heard nothing out of the usual. After a few minutes flipping through the book, he laughed and shook his head.
“You don’t know?”
“Oh, I do. I was just feeling sorry for you reading it,” said Colin, “and a bit for my cousins, living with the man. It’s my Uncle Georgie, and a man more fond of speeches you never met. Though he was a good sort, at that.”
Mina glanced out past the door and saw that the hallway was empty. “A dragon named George?” she asked, keeping her voice quiet despite the immediate lack of witnesses. “Your family likes irony, doesn’t it?”
“As it happens,” said Colin, shutting the door, “the legend’s gotten it a bit twisted. Which is just as well for us, really.”
“Oh?”
Ignoring the several perfectly good chairs around the room, Colin perched on the windowsill like an overgrown schoolboy. “From time to time,” he said, “one of us gets stuck, ye ken. The oldest ones didn’t, from everything I can tell, but the oldest ones were free from all sorts of difficulties that we have now.”
“Like, ah, continuing the line?” Mina asked. She gestured at the journal. “He mentions a, um, rite.”
She looked away from Colin’s face as she spoke, lest he see too much interest in hers and connect it to his brother, but his reply came easily and casually. “Aye—it’s why we’ve not outnumbered you mortals, living as long as we do. Something about being neither truly mortal nor truly not. We’re somewhere in between, like—”
“—a stuck window?”
Colin laughed. “That’ll do, though it’ll never make a poem. At any rate, the same thing goes for changing form. Sometimes we get trapped in one shape or another. When it’s man shape, there’s no worry in it, save that the man sometimes misses dragon’s form. When one of us loses himself—or herself—in the dragon, though, that’s a worry.”
“For more than being conspicuous?”
“So I hear. It’s not happened any time in my day, but…” From the windowsill, Colin eyed her for a minute, considering whether to go on. “The thing about…beings that aren’t human…is that most of them aren’t people.”
“I’d rather assumed that,” said Mina.
Colin shook his head. “No, I mean they’re not just men in funny suits. They see the world differently. They seehumansdifferently. You’ve grown into certain sentiments that I don’t have, but I’m far more human than the…Elder Folk, let’s call them. Not all of them see human beings as prey, mind—Stephen and I wouldn’t be here otherwise—but when a dragon goes mean, it goes very mean very quickly. And a man stuck in dragon shape can slide almost as fast.”
In dragon form, Stephen had been about five times Mina’s size. She remembered flaming eyes and teeth like razors. “What happens then? When someone does get trapped?”
“Depends on how it happens, I’d think,” said Colin. “I’ve heard that some of them go away to live…elsewhere…and I suppose they do well enough at it. There’s more society than the human sort, after all, if you know how to find it. But if they become a danger to others, then the rest of us generally see to the matter.”
“And that was Saint George,” said Mina, a little faintly. Part of her was still trying to deal withelsewhere.
“That was Saint George,” Colin agreed. “Not actually my uncle. The name’s been passed down, you understand. The name of the one he killed…hasn’t.”
“Seems like hard luck for him.”
“It might have been. Stories say he’d been an unpleasant sort even before the change. But then, we’d say that afterward, regardless. We’re not completely immune to certain human tendencies, after all, and one of them is rewriting history.”
Colin didn’t really look anything other than human, not then. Lounging in the faint sunlight, wearing a gray tweed suit that probably had cost more than Mina earned in two years, he could have been any idle young man about town. Stephen gave off a much greater feeling of power. Certainly he was the less forthcoming of the two.
Despite those considerations—or perhaps because of them—Colin’s presence was much less comfortable. Mina couldn’t imagine talking to this man over breakfast, and not just because she’d never seen him there. She certainly couldn’t imagine trying to reassure him when he felt guilty.
Kissing him was completely out of the question. Mina would as soon have tried to hug the tiger at the zoo.
“You said I’ve got certain sentiments that you don’t,” she said.
“It’s a bit of an assumption, I admit,” said Colin, “but yes. We all grow up with a set of rules, aye? And even if you break them,” he went on, with an arch smile that said he had some experience with that idea, “you still know you’re crossing a line and you might have to pay for it later. Your rules are different than mine. So are your consequences. When you can’t just outlive your enemies—or your friends—it gives you a different perspective on the straight and narrow.”
Mina took a deep breath. “And Stephen’s perspective is like yours?”
“Oh, in some ways. But he’s always known he was to be the next master of Loch Arach—our lands back home. That makes a difference too. An heir isn’t anentirelyseparate species from his younger brother, perhaps, but then, neither are my people anentirelyseparate species from human beings.”
