It took a long while before Embers released me, saying that she had to get back in the air. Apparently it wasn’t only Behold Her she needed to guard against, though she’d take any opportunity to kill the ruby dragon. Unquenchable and Quake, the silver and emerald pair, hadn’t taken any overtly hostile action, but they did want a part of my island. For the past few days, Embers said, they’d been making moves that looked suspiciously like they were searching for an opportunity to swoop in past Embers, and Indomitable before her; whether out of curiosity over what they were guarding, or because they knew I was there and they wanted to make an attempt on my life, no one could say. It didn’t matter one wit to Embers. She wasn’t going to let them anywhere near me, the palace grounds, or the northern part of the city in general, and they trespassed at their own peril.

  When Embers took to the sky again, the humans and I returned to the cellars. We stayed there the rest of the day, though we spent the daylight hours on the upper floor, where we could see the sky. It would have been best to get started on clearing the stairs, but that wasn’t so urgent as to risk getting caught in the open. We could live with ropes and undignified scrabbling for a little while longer.

  With a clear way out, and with Embers back and seemingly having forgiven me, I finally felt secure enough to let Kira heal me. And I do mean that I let her—while I certainly wanted to be healed, her desire to see me whole again was even greater. She’d been visibly uncomfortable any time she looked at me, and I’d heard her and Ardek talk about it in low voices, with her expressing how difficult it was to see me hurt and not to be allowed to help. Of course, she didn’t say it like that; the way she put it, it was like she couldn’t help, not that I wouldn’t let her. And her perspective was probably as correct as mine. If I told her not to do something, the only way she could do it would be if she convinced herself that following my command would cause me far more harm than going against my will. Herald and Mak were experts at justifying anything they thought needed doing, no matter what I thought best, but Kira was far too careful and honest for something like that.

  Even if I hadn’t already known how much it weighed on her to see me hurt, it would have been obvious from her relief when I finally asked her. She didn’t waste any time, either; she immediately ordered me onto my good side so she’d have unfettered access to my wounds and crippled wing. The only reason she didn’t drop everything was that I’d made sure there was nothing to drop; she’d been talking with Sarina, and I purposely waited until the conversation wound down and Sarina declared that she was going to take a nap before talking to Kira, so that she’d be unoccupied.

  The moment I spoke to Kira I became the center of attention, and once I’d laid down the humans were all watching curiously—including Sarina, who’d postponed her nap and dragged Marvan closer to get a better look.

  “I’m going to focus entirely on the wing,” Kira told me with an assertiveness that only really came out while she was treating a patient. “In the morning you should ask one of your relatives if they can bring you a great deal of meat; if Tammy’s hand is anything to go off of, I suspect you’ll wake ravenously hungry. In the worst case, if they’re unavailable or unwilling, we have several pounds of dried venison left. But I’d rather we didn’t go through it all just yet.”

  “I’ll ask,” I promised her. And then she got to it. It went almost exactly as it had when she healed Tammy’s hand. Instead of the slow, controlled healing that both she and Mak usually employed, the magic coalesced around her heart in a blinding ball that shot down her arms and out through her hands into the base and tip of my wing.

  Only then did I remember what had happened to Tammy in the moments afterward. I jerked on the floor hard enough to almost knock Kira off her feet, making her jump with surprise and the fear that something had gone terribly wrong. “What?!” she exclaimed. “What is it? What are you feeling?”

  “Itchy!” I told her, barely biting back a whine. “My whole wing is so damn itchy!”

  “Oh.” She relaxed against me with a relieved chuckle. With the sudden anxiety gone she looked terribly tired, which I knew to be nothing unusual after spending all your magic on healing. “Oh, gods and Mercies be praised. That’s to be expected. Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else?! I swear, my scales are itchy! Not just my hide; my scales!” My outrage was almost entirely real. “Have you ever had your fingernails itch, Kira?” I asked. “Because that’s what it feels like!”

  “Can’t say that I have, no,” she replied, still laughing wearily. She wasn’t alone, either. Pretty much everyone in that room who understood any Tekereteki was grinning. Even Tammy, who took everything to do with me with the utmost seriousness, had an amused little smile on her face. “Honestly, I’m glad to hear it,” Kira continued. “I think we can safely say that it’s working.”

  “It had better,” I groaned, fighting the urge to roll over on my injured side and just grind it into the stone floor, over and over. Switching back to Karakani I told the room, “Alright, laugh it up. Get it out while I’m too itchy to do anything about it.”

  “It—” Tammy tried to say, but a burst of giggles finally found their way out. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked by how bright and melodic her laughter was, but I was. It just didn’t gel with the image of the absolutely heinous human being I’d carried around in my mind for so long, and was only slowly learning to let go of.

  “It will go away by morning, I think,” she finally managed, holding up her half-formed hand by way of explanation. I might have objected that we had no way of knowing that, but she really was in a better position than anyone else to estimate how long my ordeal would last. Then her face scrunched uncertainly. “Hope it will grow faster. All bones still there. All muscle, too? Only, ah… thin skin to grow?” She took a while to add that last bit, then immediately gave up and switched back to vulgar Tekereteki. “You only need to regrow the membranes, isn’t that right, Great Lady?”

  “I couldn’t say for sure. Kira?”

  “She’s right,” the healer said. “From what I could tell all the muscle is still there, though you lost a lot of skin—or I should say hide and scale in your case, I suppose. I couldn’t guess how long it might be before you can fly again, but considering how far Tammy’s hand has come… I first healed it a month and a half ago, but it’s grown far more in the ten days since my second attempt than in the month before. I think we have every reason to be hopeful!”

  “It might be worth the itch, is what you’re saying,” I said, hoping to every god I’d ever heard of that she was right.

  “That is exactly what I’m saying. Assuming,” she added, her tone becoming about as stern as she could ever be, especially with me, “that you get enough rest and food.”

  “Alright, alright, I promised!” I grumbled, shrinking from the tiny tyrant. “I’ll ask someone in the morning.”

  “Good. Then we should sleep,” she stated. She gave me a questioning look, her eyes asking for permission, and I nodded.

  “Thank you,” I told her. “And you’re right. Let’s get some sleep. If I can, with this hellish itch,” I added as she left to join Ardek. She didn’t quite stagger over there, but it was a close thing. And the way she draped herself over him, while adorable, looked much more like bone-deep fatigue rapidly catching up with her than any kind of public display of affection.

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  I slept much better that night than I’d feared. Once I settled in and forced myself to relax, the fatigue of healing caught up with me as quickly as it had with Kira. I drifted off despite feeling like someone had stuffed my skin with the scratchiest wool.

  Kira had been right. Of course she had; when it came to healing, she knew what she was about. So when I woke the next day, with everyone else already bustling around me, I felt two things: rested, and ravenously hungry. It wasn’t quite so bad that I feared I might start following the scent of mule down the corridors, but I really needed to get out of there and see if I could either get someone to bring me something to eat, or hunt something myself.

  Kira examined me before I left. What she saw pleased her greatly.

  “Look here,” she said, gently stroking her finger over the sensitive scrap of membrane between the bit of my right wing corresponding to a forearm, and that analogous to a really long little finger.

  I obediently did as she’d asked, craning my neck around and looking where she was touching. “It tickles,” I said, not sure what she meant me to see.

  “I’m sure it does, but look closely. See here? This was torn yesterday, and today it’s not only whole, but there’s a finger’s width of new skin! Here, see how it’s a dark pink at the very edge, turning black as it approaches the limb?”

  “I do!” I confirmed, excitement and hope rising inside me. “Kira, you absolute treasure, it’s working! Not that I doubted you, but seeing it…”

  At a loss for words to describe just how much I loved her in that moment, I settled on rumbling and nuzzling her a bit. “Thank you,” I said. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

  “It’s my joy and pleasure,” she said, pressing her cheek to mine, hands pressing tight to the sides of my neck. “Now go, before you plunder all our rations. You must be starving.”

  “You know that I am.”

  I left the humans with the suggestion that they should figure out a way to hoist the mules up through the hole to the surface, then went that way myself. No one was waiting, but I hadn’t expected them to be. High above me, though, was the unmistakable form of my mother, circling as she guarded me and mine against any new attempts to get close by Behold Her or the two other untrustworthy dragons.

  It choked me up a little, to be honest. For so long I’d worried about what would happen if she found out about me and my headmates. Then it had happened, in possibly the worst way possible, and her absence, being unable to see or talk to her about how she was processing it, had just made the fear and anxiety worse. Now… well, things weren’t back to the way they’d been. She was still clearly hurt and confused about the whole situation, with Instinct residing in Herald instead of the body she’d been born into. But she’d accepted all of us as worth protecting, and that was the best outcome I could have reasonably hoped for.

  It also put me in a rather tough spot, morally. Your average dragon might have disagreed, but I felt that I owed Embers. I wasn’t sure what exactly I owed her, but I definitely owed her something. In the aftermath of Behold Her’s attack I’d been mad about Embers leaving, and perhaps I’d been justified, but it was all too easy to see things from her perspective. How heartbreaking it must have been to learn that the daughter you never knew that you had, whom you’ve been, by dragon standards, bending over backwards to accommodate, had been keeping things from you and even straight up lying to you sometimes. Yet all she’d done was to scare the piss out of us and leave. She could have done so much worse, and by dragon standards she would have been justified. She chose not to. She chose the way that didn’t cause irreparable harm, and then she came back, willing to give things another go.

  I owed her my own forgiveness, if nothing else. Leaving had opened the way for Behold Her to attack. Maybe Embers had known that; maybe she’d been too distraught to consider it. Either way, what Behold Her did wasn’t Embers’ fault, and it had been unfair of me to ever blame her for it.

  I watched Embers circle as I thought. She must have spotted me at some point; before long she landed near me, her wings kicking up great clouds of the dust that was nearly all that remained in the wake of Behold Her’s withering breath.

  “Good morning,” I told her, still uncertain how to address her.

  As though reading my mind she said, her voice clipped and formal, “Good morning, little one. I feel I should remind you that when greeting someone, the polite thing to do is to use their name.” Then, before I could apologize or make any reply at all, she huffed softly and relaxed the tiniest bit. “But I understand your hesitation. I confess that I thought all my descent on whether or not I should address you as ‘daughter.’ I am still not certain. That is my daughter’s body; my nose leaves no room for doubt. And you say that part of my daughter’s soul is within you. And yet…”

  Hesitantly, not at all sure what her reaction might be, I spoke into the silence she left. “If it helps, I feel like you’re my mother. Just as I feel that the human woman who birthed my human side was also my mother.”

  “And yet you lied to me.” There was no anger in the way she said it. Disappointment and frustration, yes, but no anger.

  “I did. We did. And I wish I could say it was all for your sake, but we were afraid how you might react. I and the remainder of the human soul feared that you might wish to get rid of us. If anyone had a way, we thought, it would be you. And Instinct—your daughter, that is, the parts of her that are not in me—she refused to be parted from us. As far as she’s concerned, we all belong to each other. What dragon would willingly part with anything that was hers?”

  Embers looked at me in silence for just long enough that my nerves started to fray. Had I said something terribly wrong? Then the tension released as she gave a soft, amused huff and said, “I cannot believe that I never pushed harder to find out what was so different about you. At your age, none of my other children have been able to say much more than ‘Food!’ or ‘Mine!’ And I just let it go with an explanation as weak as ‘The humans did something to me.’ Tell me, Draka. Your human side. The human soul who inhabits my daughter’s body, and which makes up so much of you. How old is it? How many years did it have to live, and learn, and mature before being fused with my daughter?”

  “Twenty-five,” I admitted. “Though she has—I have—filled another year since.”

  “Twenty-five years,” she mused, lowering her head to look at me more closely. “Old enough for a human to have children of her own. No wonder you are so well spoken, yet know little to nothing of any draconic tongue. And no wonder you so readily call those three humans your siblings.”

  I couldn’t think of a safe answer to that, so I kept silent.

  After a moment she said, “You told your granduncle and cousin about you.” She was hard to read, but I imagined her a little reproachful. A little hurt, even. “I would not have expected you to. Not after how carefully you kept me unaware.”

  “I made a mistake with you,” I said, hoping that she could read my regret. “I didn’t want to repeat it with them. They’ve helped so much when they didn’t have to.”

  “Hrrm. At least you are learning,” she replied. The hurt was still there. After a short while she continued by changing the subject. “Tell me, did you know much of dragons in your human life?”

  “Nothing,” I replied honestly. “I thought dragons had only ever existed in stories.”

  “Hrrrm. I am sure there are many such places these days. Lands too poor, and where the humans are too much of a nuisance, for any dragon to bother establishing a territory.

  You should tell her. Conscience’s voice rang clear and insistent through my mind. We already told her just about everything. Might as well stop with the lies and secrets altogether.

  I sighed. I didn’t answer her, but she was right. I couldn’t see how it might possibly make things worse. If anything, knowing that I wasn’t from this world might make Embers a little friendlier toward me, assuming she believed me. At least then there was no chance that I’d been involved in what happened to her daughter, other than as an unwilling participant.

  “I’m not from this world,” I told her. I spoke quickly, the words tumbling out of me in case I lost my nerve halfway. “At least I don’t think so. The stars are all wrong.”

  “Oh?” she said, tilting her head. “Did you come through a Rift, then?”

  Her reply, curious yet casual, wasn’t anything I’d expected. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it shook me to my core or anything, but it raised questions. Such as: “Does that happen? Humans coming through Rifts?”

  “I cannot say. You should ask my uncle about it. He may know more, and I am sure that he will delight in correcting your ignorance if you give him a chance. But you claim to be from another world. How did you come to be here if not through a Rift?”

  “As I am? I’m not sure what to tell you. I was never a human in this world. I died, I think.”

  “You died?” she asked, a skeptical flare to her nostrils.

  I sighed in an entirely human way, and said, “Yes. I died.” And then I told her the whole story, the way I hadn’t dared to but should have done from the beginning. Falling. Dying. Waking in this body. My challenges and triumphs. Friendship, loyalty, and betrayal, capture and escape, and all the other dirty details I’d kept from her for fear of how she might react. How I didn’t know what exactly had driven the change from Human and Dragon to Conscience, Draka, and Instinct, but how it seemed to have ended after the worst emotional trauma I’d ever suffered, along with a sledgehammer or two to the head. I told her about what it had done to the relationship between myself and Mak, and all the other humans in the long run, and then I just kept going.

  Before, during our confession, there was still a lot we’d held back. Now I told her, in essence, everything. All the sad, dirty details.

  I wanted Embers to forgive us. I wanted her to be our mother again. I wanted her to trust us. And if I wanted her to trust us, I was going to have to start by trusting her.

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