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?”
Zan sighs. “They haven’t, to my knowledge. They hate the Order, too, for obvious reasons. But I’m not sure that means they wouldn’t. The Order isn’t a threat to their power the way I am in existing separate from them.”
That, I understand too well.
Maybe that’s why he felt he could tell me.
“So you visit Crystal Hollow,” I say, turning the subject from the most difficult core. “Do people not recognize you, year after year? Your appearance... I wouldn’t say it’s forgettable.”
A flash of humor through the bleakness of his gaze. “Damning me with the faint praise.”
“On the contrary, from what I understand of human aging, remembering anything at my age ought to be considered miraculous,” I quip.
A smirk teases his mouth. “Are my looks miraculous, then?”
I nod, completely seriously. “Yes.”
He looks at me sidelong, his eyes brighter.
I roll my eyes. “Surely you know what you look like.”
The humor fades as he looks away. “Few people see me like this. I use a spell to change my appearance whenever I’m among humans. My natural appearance is too obviously other; I would be tagged as a dragon in instants.”
Oh.
I realize he didn’t directly respond to my statement, and I wonder if he does not, in fact, remember what he looks like so easily, after centuries of living primarily with an altered appearance.
“I didn’t know dragons worked spells,” I say instead of addressing the new dragon in the kitchen.
“We don’t. But Kovan discovered that my scales could be used to anchor your priests’ spells. I keep a stash of them at the cottage to replenish as needed.”
“And for the sages,” I surmise. Sages’ eyes gradually change color permanently to match our magic the more we use it.
For some sages it takes longer, but anger is an easy emotion for a child. My eyes have been magenta for as long as I can remember.
But Zan shakes his head. “No. Another sage can sense the spell. It’s safer for the sages who come here to suppress their power so their eye color doesn’t change.”
I have surprisingly mixed feelings about that. The Quiet offered sages a way to hide, gave them an opportunity to live their life as something other than a sage.
