Author's Note: I think I can I think I can I think I can.
I stared at the tongue of fire between my hands and tried to clear my mind.
This was harder than it should have been. My brain felt like a bar of soap in a kuo-toa's bathtub. It kept squirting off in strange and disturbing directions.
It hardly helped that I had no idea whether it was day or night. For that matter, I had no idea what month it was. I could have asked for a calendar, but svirfneblin apparently had no concept of calendars. They barely seemed to have any concept of time. Terrible food arrived at random intervals, delivered by glum, gray-faced, three-foot-tall people who never spoke.
I was not used to the idea of a quiet gnome. It was unnatural. I wanted to poke at them or set their toes on fire or rub their little bald heads. Anything to provoke a response.
I realized that my mind had wandered again. I pulled it back and focused on the flame, trying to feed each thought into it as it arose.
My eyes began to unfocus.
Meditation was the key to calm. I had not meditated lately. No doubt that was why my mind was so unsettled.
I examined that thought and then let it pass through me. I had been unsettled. Very well. That was then and this was now. Failure to achieve calm before did not preclude its achievement after.
Thoughts of meditation led naturally to thoughts of Drogan. He had taught me the way. It was hard for a wizard to teach a sorcerer. We approached magic from opposite directions. Wizards drew it in from the outside. Sorcerers let it out from the inside. One was brain. The other, blood.
Still, some principles crossed the boundaries. In both cases, control was vital. No one could control such power if they could not first control themselves. Meditation, study, and practice honed the mind and encouraged self-control. Drogan could not teach me to be a sorcerer, but he could teach me self-control.
I had often considered that, of all the old dwarf's accomplishments, his finest had been to teach the art of self-control to the bastard offspring of a madwoman and an orcish berserker.
My emotions had always ruled me. Sometimes, when I was younger, I thought my flesh might peel away from my bones with the force of what was in me. Fear and joy, pain and lust, laughter and sadness, they all seemed far more real than the world around me. Then, when my power began to come out, that seeming became reality. Suddenly, without intending it, I found myself with the ability to make my emotions…manifest.
It was a terrible thing to be thirteen. It was even worse to be thirteen and accidentally setting everything around you on fire.
But I had survived those terrible in-between years, and with Drogan's help, I had learned to govern my ungovernable emotions. Or so I had thought.
Then Drogan had been poisoned and Undrentide had happened, and since then I had felt the strings that held the pieces of me together and the emotions in, the threads I had so carefully strung all throughout my mind…I felt them fraying, snapping, and all my careful weaving coming undone.
I needed to be calm, but calm kept slipping out of my hands, and the harder I tried to hold it, the more it slipped away.
I did not know what to do.
I wished Drogan were here. I could have used his advice. Failing that, I would have killed for the chance to play one more game of stones with him in front of the fire.
The flame winked out. I touched my face. It was wet, streaked with tears I had not even known I had been shedding.
I stared at the wetness on my fingers, too surprised by the sight to formulate any coherent opinion about it.
A soft snore made me look up. The dragon was sleeping. Smoke rose from his nostrils. It joined into a ring above his head to form some kind of a deranged halo.
He was curled in a protective C-shape around another, much smaller figure. She was asleep. She often was. Sometimes she woke, washed, picked at her food if pushed to eat, ignored her food if not, and then slept again. By unspoken agreement, Brown and I had both insisted that she stay in the main chamber of our prison-slash-guest quarters from now on, rather than in one of the smaller antechambers. We both wanted her under our sight. Gods only knew what she would do to herself if we let her out of it.
I wondered when I had started to worry about her. It might have begun in the desert, when I had seen how she refused to back down in the face of anything, even certain failure. It might have been when some thoughtless sally of mine finally startled smile out of her - such a rare thing, she was far too serious for her own good - or when she had accepted a challenge from me just to blacken both my eyes and make me cry mercy, or when she had stalked and beheaded a derro, bare-footed and bloodied and fearless, like a better class of warrior goddess. Whenever it had begun, though, it had ended with the undoing of her geas and her suicidal apology, for which I could not help but forgive her. The alternative was to let her try to apologize again, and I did not think either of us would survive that.
No. I could not hate her, though I could strangle her for being so hells-bent on getting herself killed. Or kiss her for still being alive. I could not seem to decide. Not that it mattered. She would gut me either way, if I tried.
I rubbed my face, adjusted my position to ease an ache in my hip, closed my eyes, and tried to focus on my breathing.
My attention turned inward, and further inward still. My breathing evened. I drifted on the edge of emptiness.
Eventually, my eyes opened again. I was not calm, but I was calmer.
The dragon was watching me with his banked-coal eyes. "How is she?" I asked, speaking softly to avoid waking Nadiya. My voice felt much steadier, and my eyes were dry. Drogan was no less dead, but the knowledge no longer made me feel quite so close to falling to pieces.
Brown twisted his head around to look at the girl. "Asleep," he said, his voice almost as hushed. His head swung back to me. His foretalons flexed in what I had come to recognize as a sign of anxiety. "What do we do? She's hardly said a word in days."
"Take her weapons, tie her hand and foot, and chain her to the wall until she promises to stop trying to kill herself," I answered. Then I sighed. "Oh, who am I fooling? She will probably gnaw through the chains. Or contrive some way to hang herself with them."
Brown uncoiled very carefully and stood. Nadiya did not move. As quietly as possible, the dragon padded over to me and sat. "I can understand why she's so sad," he said, lowering his head so that his muzzle was level with my face. "She's had her whole life turned upside down and inside out. She's lost her family, or as good as."
I could hardly deny the obvious. "Yes."
The dragon's crested head drooped. "What a dreadful thing to have in common. "
It was. "Yes."
Brown was silent, but his silence was, as ever, only a temporary reprieve. "How old were you when your mother died?" he asked.
At this rate I would be better off I just went back to thinking about Drogan. "Thirteen."
"What did you do? After, I mean."
I remembered the sound of wet dirt hitting soggy fabric. "Buried her and left," I said.
"Why did you leave? Wasn't it safe to stay?"
"No. The area I grew up in was plagued by orcish raids, and the locals were hostile to anything or anyone related to anything orcish." I was most likely the product of one of those raids. I had never asked my mother for confirmation. Bad enough to know it. I did not want to hear it, too. "Fear of my mother kept the worst of their hatred at bay. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of a hedge witch's curse. Then she died, and the day after that, one of them ginned up the courage to come at me with a knife. Alone. I managed to kill him before he killed me. I left. It was that or stay to get torn apart by an angry mob."
The dragon's face showed his horror. "That's terrible."
"It is what it is." Not everyone I had met had hated or feared me for what I was, but enough had that I found it safer to expect their despite, even to welcome it. The alternative was an unendurable cycle of hope followed by disappointment.
The dragon continued to prod. Perhaps he was as much in need of a distraction as I was. "How did she die?"
"A fever." It was easier to say if I kept my voice dispassionate, as if it forced the feelings away in mind as well as voice. "Something in her lungs." Mother had always been frail and sickly. Sometimes I thought the only thing holding her together was her sheer force of will. It was enough, until the last year. Then, that last year, the fever had burned through her like wildfire. Not even her will could stand in the face of that.
The dragon laid his head between his forepaws. "At least you had the chance to say goodbye," he murmured.
"What is the difference?" Nothing – no pleading, no tears, no harsh words, nor gentle ones either – nothing I had said in those last long hours had been enough to keep her there. "Dead is dead."
"And I don't even know if mine is dead," the dragon returned. His eyes were sad. "Not for certain. I just know she would have come back if she could have, and she didn't, so she's either dead or captured, just like Nadiya's mother and sister." He brightened. "But at least Nadiya has us to help her."
I seemed to have no choice but to help her. The weight of the geas was gone. Another weight had settled in its place, one I had not anticipated and could not put a name to but which held me tighter than any geas. Perhaps it was pity. Perhaps it was friendship. It was hard to tell. I'd had too little experience of either. "Yes," I said.
"Wasn't there anyone to help you? Anyone at all?"
"Not for...six years?" I tried to remember. With no way to track the time, the years had blurred together somewhat. "Perhaps seven. Eight at the outside."
Brown winced. "You were alone all that time?
"No. I was part of a circus troupe. I was the bearded lady. Amazing what you can do with a wig, a pot of rouge, and a pair of pig's bladders. A dwarven woman tried to compete for the part, but the judges all agreed that Xanos looked better in a dress." I looked at the dragon's blank expression and sighed. "Yes, I was alone."
"You had nowhere to go?"
"No." I supposed I could have thrown myself off of a cliff, thus conveniently combining death and burial in one very steep step, but for some reason my will to live had always been just that much stronger than my despair. "Not really."
The dragon seemed stuck on this point, not to mention Hells-bent on protesting. "Surely there must have been someone, or somewhere-"
I snorted. "Who?" I retorted. "Where? Oh, I went into villages sometimes and offered to do odd jobs in exchange for food and shelter, but more often than not I found myself asked to leave – sometimes politely, sometimes at the end of a sword." I thought for a moment. "Cities were better," I added. "There were other half-orcs, and I was able to blend in. To an extent. But that only meant that if I was not dodging rotten vegetables, it was because I was dodging a press-gang or the town guard."
I had evidently confused him. "Why were the guards so angry with you?"
A memory came to me. I chuckled at the remembrance. "Ah. Well. Once it was because I was walking too slowly."
Brown blinked. "What?"
"I was lost and looking for a specific cross-street. The guard found this suspicious."
"Why would he do that?"
I spread my hands wide. "I have no idea." I grinned. "Possibly he saw my pensive expression and took it as an indication that I was looking for someone to rape."
The dragon peered at me. "I don't get it. That's not funny. Why are you laughing?" he asked.
My grin faded. "Better than the alternative," I said. I shrugged. "But those kinds of incidents were probably for the best. They encouraged me to avoid populated areas. An untrained sorcerer is an accident waiting to happen. Best if I happened somewhere off in the woods, where the worst I could do was turn a few acres of trees into coal."
The dragon settled into a sphinx-like crouch. "Wasn't there anyone who could train you?" he asked.
"There were, but I had neither the money nor connections to be accepted to a school. I was forced to look for an unaffiliated wizard or sorcerer in need of an apprentice, preferably one who did not try to slip alarming sub-clauses into my apprenticeship contract."
"What kinds of clauses?
I thought back. "One gave me the opportunity to serve for a period of four and a half-months, at which point I would be the guest of honor at a ritual to summon a hezrou." I rubbed my chin. "There was also an alchemist who was willing to try to teach me if I was willing to be his experimental subject for a series of new poisons he was devising," I added. "Oh, yes. And a necromancer who wanted the rights to my spleen. I never understood that one. One would think he'd want my entire corpse, or if not at least a collection of the most important organs, but no. Just a spleen. Very strange."
The dragon stared at me. "Bahamut's Breath," he swore. "And I thought Ghufran was mad. How do you find all of these people?"
"Just lucky, I suppose."
"You call that luck?"
"Well, I still have a spleen." And I had found Drogan, which was a stroke of fortune by any standard. Before Drogan, I had begun to seriously consider returning to that necromancer, signing his damned contract, and then slitting his throat once I had learned all I thought I could safely learn from him. It would have been the first step down a long and bloody downward slope for me, but if my choice was between remaining a victim or becoming a monster, then, by the gods, I would be a monster such as the world had never seen. Drogan had turned me aside from that, probably to the benefit of many more than myself. Hatred and despair made some paths seem so…easy. "All things considered…I think you might call that lucky."
"All right, I understand what you're saying, but I still maintain that's the strangest definition of lucky I've ever heard of."
I shrugged. "What can I say? Xanos has lived a strange life."
The dragon blinked owlishly. "I suppose you have," he murmured.
With that comment, the conversation thankfully ebbed.
In the silence, I looked at Nadiya. Her full lips were slightly parted in her sleep, leaving her in serious danger of inhaling her own hair, which fell in a snarled hank across her face. She had not brushed it in recent memory. "That cleric of Segojan," I said. "She struck me as someone who would rescue a kitten from a tree. Or a baby bird from a hungry cat."
"She is," Brown agreed. He drooped. "At least, I think she is. After Ishi, I'm not sure if I can trust my own judgement."
My judgement told me that a deep gnome who was willing to defy her race's xenophobia to help an injured surfacer was among the likeliest allies we had found here so far. "Send for the cleric, and we will see if she knows how to heal broken hearts as well as broken ribs." Gods knew I had no knack for it. I could not even heal my own.
"I'll try." The dragon went to the outer door. I heard a brief exchange. It had the tone of an argument, but the dragon was nothing if not persistent, and he soon returned. "They'll send for her," he reported. "Though they won't say when she might come."
"Good enough." I uncrossed my legs and stood, stretching. There was still an ache in my throat, and a hollow, lonely feeling in my gut. I was sick to death of that feeling. Abruptly, I turned to the dragon. "Have you ever played stones?" I asked.
"What's that?"
"I suppose that answers that question." A sorcerer never lacked for charcoal – I always kept a collection of quill-sized sticks on hand just in case I ran out of ink and did not feel like having to open a vein just to write a note - and a grid drawn on the floor would easily serve as a board. That only left the stones, but coins would do for playing pieces in a pinch. "I will teach you how to play. In the meantime, teach me the language of the damned. If we are ever to wring any concessions from our hosts, we are not like to do it through an interpreter."
Brown hesitated. Understanding filtered in slowly. "What, gnomish?" He looked at me warningly. "You do know that it has seventeen tenses, don't you?"
"Yes. I know." I retrieved a roll of parchment, a stick of chalk, and a bag of coins. Then I sat in front of the dragon again. "I called it the language of the damned for a reason."
His voice was dubious. "If you're sure-"
"Do either of us have anything better to do?"
The dragon blinked. Then he shrugged. "I suppose not." With one foretalon, he sketched a series of angular letters in the dust. "This is the word for 'dragon'."
