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 doyouknow 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’swithoutbeing 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 theOrder’swealth—and moreover making them into an enemythat 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.”
