I returned to my mother the morning after the family hit Vestel. I wasn’t happy about it. Even the pleasant energy that came with the increased levels of ambient magic did nothing for my mood. It felt like I was leaving everyone back in Karakan undefended, a ridiculous notion considering what they, and especially Mak, were capable of. And I knew that, but since when had my head ruled over my heart?

  It didn’t help that Tam had been right about his concerns. Sempralia would hear about Vestel, probably sooner than later, and it would be hard not to look at what happened in the light of me demanding some serious legal privileges for my family. It occurred to me, about halfway back to Old Mallin, that me being out of the city right afterwards probably wasn’t a great look. How were they supposed to bring legal complaints to me if I wasn’t around?

  I had to swallow my concerns. There was no doubt that if I’d stayed my mother would have made good on her promise to come fetch me, sooner rather than later. Adding her to the equation couldn’t possibly make the situation better.

  Well, not in the long term, at least. Who the hell would even conceive of the notion of messing with us as long as she sat in the inn’s back yard? Assuming she fit, that was.

  She might have to use the square. That would be fun!

  There was another reason I’d have liked to stay, which hadn’t occurred to me until I was leaving. It was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and a kind of scaled down Christmas and New Year rolled into one. A time to be with family. Thinking back, I should have known how important it was; Tam had only mentioned Herald’s birthday as an aside, in relation to the solstice, and Herald herself had mentioned that it was the solstice soon when I brought up her birthday to her. They’d all asked me if I really had to go, and I hated to disappoint them. The day held no intrinsic meaning for me, but it was important to them, and that made it important, full stop. And here I was, leaving them.

  Couldn’t be helped, but I didn’t have to be happy about it. Conscience made a bit of a fuss about hurting their feelings, but I pushed her to the back of my mind. Feeling bad wouldn’t do me any good.

  Embers was at the temple when I arrived, awake and watching the doors. I hadn’t expected anything else; I had the distinct impression that she didn’t like to move around a lot if she didn’t have to.

  “Welcome back, daughter,” she said, and though she gave me an odd look at first she sounded genuinely pleased to see me. “I trust you enjoyed little Herald’s celebration?”

  I settled down on the floor in front of her. “It was lovely, yeah.”

  “‘Yeah,’” she repeated slowly, then gave a sub-bass rumble of a laugh, eyes crinkling with amusement. “Now that it is just the two of us, we shall have to work on your speech. I understand that you have patterned yourself after the local humans. I cannot fault you for it, and should you misunderstand me, I wish it to be clear that I have no objections against you speaking the way you do in a human tongue. But it is a travesty that you do not speak a single draconic language, and we shall have to rectify that.”

  It was French class all over again. The will to live slowly seeped from my body.

  “Do we, really?” I pleaded. “You speak Karakani. Doesn’t every dragon have the Tongues Advancement?”

  “Not at all! Even if they were offered it, many would consider it a foolish waste of an Advancement. Why use something so rare and precious as an Advancement, they would argue, when you can simply spend a few years learning a language if you are so inclined? I disagree, of course. I have traveled much in my time, and humans do love their languages. You can sometimes not even go from island to island, or from valley to valley, without the tongue changing so as to be unrecognizable.”

  She huffed, lost in some memory or private joke, before coming back to the questions. “To answer your question properly: you must learn. Many, perhaps most of our kind will either not deign to speak any human tongue, or they will not be willing to speak what tongues they know with another dragon. And you are… unusual enough, as it is. A male might tolerate it, but imagine if some female in the prime of her life were to arrive here, and you greeted her in a human tongue! I have no doubt that she would respond to the insult with violence. No, daughter, you must learn at least my own native tongue, and preferably that of your father and a few others as well.”

  And my soul was gone, on its way to whatever afterlife awaited humans reincarnated as dragons. This was going to be boring, I had no idea how long it might take, and worst of all, Embers didn’t lie. When she said that my life might depend on me speaking these languages, I believed her.

  It just didn’t seem fair that I’d learned every language, and now there were more languages to learn.

  And, it turned out that those languages apparently used every sound in any language I’d ever heard, plus a bunch of growls and hisses, plus all the dragon facial expressions I already knew and many more, as an essential part of speech. You could speak to each other without eye contact, but you lost so much nuance that you might as well be communicating in grunts and cartoon caveman-speech.

  At least the grammar was straightforward.

  After hours and hours of patiently trying to teach me the very basics, meaning “My name is Draka, I am a dragon” type stuff, we finally took a break. “Come,” Mother said, rising to her feet. “Let us take a turn around the city.” She gave me another one of those odd looks, and without waiting for a response she lumbered over to and through the temple doors. “Well?” she said, turning to look back at me as I stared at her. “Are you coming?”

  Her question finally got me moving. I’d been too mystified to react before. I was looking at her, feeling that something was different, that something was missing, but it took me a moment to figure out what.

  Embers stood outside the temple, but she was dry.

  The rain had stopped.

  Some days the rain was heavier. Some days it was lighter. This had been a lighter day, but at some point, while I’d been focused on trying to speak at the level of a draconic toddler-equivalent, it had simply stopped.

  I stuck my head out of the doors cautiously. It must have looked to Embers as though I was worried the sky was playing tricks on me, and when that thought occurred I looked at her, half expecting her to be laughing at me. What I got was a happy, bone-rattling rumble and the dragon version of smiling fondly — crinkled eyes, big pupils, facing directly toward me. Then I imagined how it must look to her: her baby, emerging from the nest, looking around cautiously.

  To her, with how much bigger she was than me, I probably looked cute.

  “This is an improvement, is it not?” she said, stretching her neck high and her wings wide, as though to catch the still absent sunshine. Some joint or other popped loudly. “I had forgotten these loathsome rainy periods over the centuries. Do you think it is done for now?”

  “I hope so,” I said, though I’d rather she hadn’t asked at all. I didn’t want to jinx it.

  “So do I, little one. So do I. Now, come. Your father came to this city regularly, but I never went along with him, for the sake of keeping the peace. I am curious what it was that drew him in.”

  “Not the Hearts? The Rifts, I mean.”

  “Oh, no. Those came later. After your father died, and the island was scoured. No, I imagine there was something here. Or perhaps he had meetings with whatever king or council the city might have had, but for him to go to them instead of having them come to him… no. No, I think not.”

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  Without another word she leaped gracefully into the air, the wind of her wings buffeting me strongly enough to make me slip an inch or two in the mud. I took off after her, and she led me on a long, slow spiral around the city. We circled the walls, the massive harbor with its mostly intact breakwaters, and the sea cliffs where weathered openings, sized as windows, doors, or larger, hinted that the very bedrock of the city had been excavated. On the next turn we went further in, looking down on many of the same overgrown districts I’d seen with Herald.

  Herald! With the rain gone, I could do this properly with Herald! I’d been only half paying attention before, but with that thought my interest soared, as I started paying more attention to things she might want to see. There wasn’t all that much to see from the air, with all the trees, but I still kept my eyes open. One truly interesting thing might be enough to make up for me leaving her on the most important day of the year!

  We barely spoke during the flight, but Embers’ few comments made it clear that this was also a lesson, in a different kind of language. Every so often she would flick her tail, then change her course. The flicks drew my attention away from the ground, and I wondered what she was on about the first several times, since the movements were so large, but I saw the pattern soon enough. It became obvious when she started doing them and then looking back to see if I’d reacted. A movement like this, and she climbed. A different one, and she dove. Left, right, speed up, slow down; the basics were easy enough. I picked them up before we returned to the temple.

  Things got trickier when she made the movements smaller, and there was apparently a lot of nuance to indicate how much to speed up or dive and such, but I figured I wasn’t getting rid of Embers for a while. I’d have plenty of time to get fluent, if that was what she wanted. And when it got hard to follow, all I needed to do was to let Instinct to the fore. She was unsurprisingly very good at all this dragon stuff, and rarely needed to see anything more than once, like it was, well, instinctive. She’d had much less trouble with the Draconic, too, so sometimes I’d cheated a little, letting her give the right answers when I couldn’t quite manage.

  I didn’t see any problems with that. I was still there, still listening, still trying. I just didn’t want Mother to get frustrated when I made the same mistake the fifth time in a row. Sure, letting Instinct take the wheel in any capacity made me a little more… stereotypically draconic, for the moment, but that may well be a positive in dealing with another dragon. Hell, if I ever met a dragon that wasn’t Embers I might be best off just letting Instinct handle it.

  The flight was another lesson in being a dragon, but it wasn’t only that. It was also a way to spend time together in silence. For the last few turns she gave me the sign to speed up, and then let me catch up so we were flying side by side, and that was how we finished the flight. Long, slow turns, not speaking, just feeling the wind and knowing that the other was there, fifty or a hundred feet away. Every so often I’d look and she’d be watching me, relaxed and happy, and I got the sense that this, this was why she’d come. To see me alive and thriving. And I got it. I sympathized. I knew for a fact that I didn’t have any kids that might suddenly spring out of the bush and surprise me, but it was easy to imagine that if one did I’d want them to be doing well, too.

  Now all I needed to do was to convince her that I was fine where I was, in such a way that she stayed convinced.

  When we reached the center of our spiral I expected Embers to steer for the temple, but instead she pulled ahead and signaled that she was about to turn and dive. I followed her, and the pull from straight ahead as I did told me what her intentions were. A minute later, and still in the heart of the city, she stopped to hover above a Rift, as she called them.

  I didn’t see any signs of tents or any other structures around it, which was a relief since she immediately began to scour the area around it with blue flame. Trees went up like petrol-soaked rags, not only burning and cracking but fully exploding as their sap flash boiled under the unimaginable heat. It got so intense that I had to back off, and her look quickly turned sheepish as she must have realized that I couldn’t possibly land when the damn ground had been turned to molten glass.

  She looked down at the inferno around the Rift, then back to me, and called, “We will return later,” as though this was entirely expected and planned for. Then we spent another five minutes until we found a Rift close enough to a small clearing that we could land and walk the last distance, with Embers occasionally having to push a tree aside, something she did with terrible ease.

  “I expect you still subsist mostly on meat,” she said conversationally as we watched the Rift turn. It was a big one, spinning lazily, shadowy streamers reaching out for several feet in every direction.

  “Fish,” I said. My reserves of Heart power, or just my Heart, as I’d come to think of it, felt mostly full, but with such a rich source so close I was tempted.

  “Hmm? Fish?” Embers looked confused, then brightened. “Ah, from the humans, of course!”

  “Right. They catch loads of these long, thin, really fatty fish that my humans get me by the crate load. Delicious. I used to eat a lot of goat, though. Boar. Deer sometimes. A few rabbits now and then.”

  The first thing she’d said since we arrived here, by the Rift, came back. “What do you mean, ‘still?’”

  “You have consumed the power of a Rift before, yes?”

  “Sure. Plenty of them.”

  “Have you noticed a lessening of your appetite?”

  “For Nest Hearts? Rifts, I mean? When I’ve gone without for a while I feel an urge to go find one, but that goes away once I eat it.”

  “That is normal,” my mother said. “You can only hold so much, especially young as you are. But no, I mean your appetite for meat. Have you noticed it being less after consuming a Rift?”

  “Not really,” I said, but then I thought about it. I really took some time to think back. How much was I eating, really? A crate of fish every, what, three or four days? Less? I’d been eating a whole goat at least once a week when I was half the size. It didn’t add up.

  “Well, fuck me sideways,” I whispered, and Embers’ eyes narrowed with displeasure. Whether that was because she didn’t understand English, or because she didn’t like my vocabulary, I couldn’t tell. “Are you saying I can live off these things?”

  Her annoyance vanished at the question. “You, now? No, not entirely. You are still too young, not yet fully grown into your power. But in a decade, perhaps. And past that, given enough rest you will be able to survive off the ambient magic of the world, especially here where it is so strong.”

  I stared at her in stunned silence.

  When I replied it was as much me thinking out loud as replying to what she’d just said. “I’ll be able to eat magic? I’ll be able to live off nothing but magic?”

  “Not quite. You will need to drink. And you will need some meat, every so often, or your health will suffer. That, or certain soils, though I do not know if your body can tolerate that. Not all dragons’ can.”

  Just like how you can’t live on nothing but sugar, I thought. Dragons may be magic, but we still needed minerals. Maybe other things, too, like essential vitamins and aminos. But still!

  “I like to eat,” I mused, and she huffed a laugh at me. “But that’s fantastic.”

  “It is, is it not?”

  “That’s why you’re staying here!” I said, remembering what she’d said about the intense ambient magic in the city, the buzz that I could feel whenever I chose to focus on it.

  “Just so. A night here is worth ten anywhere else. If it were not yours, I’d be of a mind to claim it for myself. Now, shall we?”

  Again, she didn’t wait for an answer.

  She closed in on the Rift, but she never touched it. She sat down, closed her eyes, and breathed in. That was all. Not that I had any trouble, but she made it look so easy. She inhaled, and great streamers of shadow spun off and into her, and then she gave a great, satisfied sigh and stopped, leaving it somewhat diminished but still there.

  “Come now, little Draka. Your turn.”

  “I can’t do it as elegantly as you can,” I said awkwardly.

  “Of course not. You must leap before you can fly. It will come with time. Go on, now.”

  At her encouragement, and the expectation in the way she looked at me, I shuffled up to the Rift. The Need was entirely silent, but she looked so excited that I didn’t want to disappoint. As she watched, I plunged my hand into the swirling mass, then drew on it as I always did.

  It felt good. Of course it did. I even felt like I had more room, a greater capacity — possibly thanks to crossing a threshold, or simply because of my greater size. Once I got started I drank greedily, letting the power fill that extra space until there was nothing left to take. The Rift collapsed, as did the concentration of power inside me, and then came the familiar explosion, and the brief loss of consciousness.

  When I came to, my mother was curled up protectively around me, her tail pressing me against her belly. I could barely move, but I didn’t struggle. It felt unexpectedly safe, and any urge to free myself melted before the comfortable warmth and pressure of what was essentially a full-body hug. The feeling of universal well-being that followed consuming the Rift didn’t hurt, either.

  I wondered groggily if this was how my humans felt when I cuddled them. I hoped so; it was quite lovely.

  I didn’t struggle, but I did stir. And when I did, Embers lifted her great head to look at me, and when she did almost all of my comfort vanished. She looked so terribly, heartbreakingly worried, and when she spoke, the hope that I was convincing her that I was doing fine felt suddenly incredibly distant.

  “Little Draka,” she said, and if a dragon’s voice could tremble, I was sure that hers would have. “Sweet daughter. What just happened to you?”

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