Isn’t it?
“What do you plan to do with those?” I ask harshly. “Buy off the priests?”
Kovan’s severe expression somehow grows severer, and I resist the urge to shrink away. “No.”
I wait.
“That’s it?” I finally ask. “Just no?”
He scowls. “I understand why you would ask me that. Learned Muka would praise the idea, and might have thought of it herself if she’d been under less duress. But no, I am not going to give or sell Zan’s magic to the priests who would kill him. They cannot have any more of him.”
Stupid, treacherous heart.
But I dared the man to try, and heis.
The admission makes me angrier, but— “I can’t keep them safe here.”
He nods. “You will not have to.”
“Areyoukeeping them, then? Or hiding them?”
Kovan breathes out. “Since Zan still had power, as do his scales, I thought I might use them to power a barrier, preventing the priests from scaling the mountain at all. But I can’t make it work.”
Then he meets my eyes again and says in a low voice that strikes my core like a bell, “But I will make something work.”
Damn it.
Damnit.
It would be so much easier to just write him off.
To not risk letting him be able to hurt me again.
But that’s not who I want to be, is it?
That’s why I let him in at all.
That’s why I dared talk back to a sage.
I’m not going to let other people’s fear close me off to the magic of this world.
I pick up one of the tiny, shimmering white scales. On a dragon, all the scales together look like armor. Alone like this, they look like I could crush them between my fingers.
Wryly, I realize there’s an obvious metaphor here. Thanks, universe, I get it. Blargh.
“You should try farther away from the temple,” I tell Kovan.
At the same time he says to me, “You’re not nullifying the magic of the scales.”
I blink at him. “What?”
“I can still sense magic,” Kovan explains. “It’s how I am locating all the scales. Your magicdoesn’t affect them.”
My hand holding the dragon scale shakes.
Which is stupid. A sage just told me Iwasn’tbreaking them.
But I breakeverything.
