“I know that it takes place in the mountains,” I said. “I know that it is hard. I know that not everyone who is chosen makes it through.”
He sighed. “All true,” he said. “Everyone thinks it will be wonderful, to become a sorcerer and learn the secrets of magic, but much of it is not wonderful. Much of it is the same as anything else, only harder. They take naïve and foolish youths—well, not so young in your case—and forge them into dragons. Most do not enjoy the process, and many do not enjoy what they become, either. But still none can say no.”
I wanted to stop. I even told myself to stop, to throw the bone down and run away, but I didn’t. Instead I kept walking behind him, still clutching the bone wand to my chest.
“What does the bone do?” I asked, in order to keep myself from thinking of my failure to escape. “Why is it special?”
“All things that are infused with the essence of dragons are filled with power, Laela,” he told me. “Including, it seems, you. We use wands of bone to give us strength and help focus our power.”
“How did you get it?” I asked. “You can’t just hunt down a dragon.”
“No, you can’t. Not that we would. Especially since no one has seen any dragons for generations. But there are many graves in the mountains.”
I looked down at the wand. I didn’t like the thought that it was the result of grave-robbing. But I couldn’t let go of it even so.
We came to the inn. The thunder—or was it the mountains spitting fire?—was getting louder. When we ducked inside, the innkeeper and the half-dozen people who had come in to take shelter from the storm stared at us.
“This way,” said the man. I followed him down the corridor to his room. I realized I had never gone into a strange man’s room, and I suddenly wondered if my unusual act of recklessness was about to be repaid by a very ordinary and banal punishment. The bone wand felt comfortingly warm under my fingers and against my chest. I wondered if it would protect me. If the stories I had heard were true, then no, it would not, for all its comforting, living warmth in my hand.
“Shut the door,” said the man. I did so even though I didn’t want to, I couldn’t say why. He bent over a chest on the floor and began rummaging through it.
“Here we are,” he said, pulling something small out of the chest. “Try this.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He opened his hand, revealing a glass vial half-full of a red liquid that glowed even in the gloom of the shuttered room and rainy day. “The second part of the test,” he said.
“What do I do with it?” I asked.
“First of all, take it from me. Give me the wand, and take the vial from me.”
My fingers did not want to release the wand, but they wanted to touch the vial with its strange liquid, that was lit from within like a ruby in full sunlight despite the twilight surrounding us, even more. In a moment the wand was gone, and the vial was in my hands.
“How does it feel?” asked the man.
“Warm,” I told him. “Even warmer than the wand.”
“But it’s not burning you?”
I shook my head.
“Good.” He reached over and, gripping my hands in his own, unstoppered the vial. “Now, I’m going to pour a tiny amount into your mouth. Just a drop, do you understand? Take no more than a drop.”
“I have to drink it? Why?”
“Because that’s the test,” he told me.
“What is it?” I tried to ask, even though some part of me already knew, but before I could get the words out, he had brought the vial up to my mouth and forced the neck between my lips, tilting it so that my head tipped back and a tiny drop of the red liquid rolled out and landed on my tongue.
Fire...I was diving into the fire, but there was no pain...soaring above a snow-capped mountain spine, looking down at all the land and all the settlements, and knowing they were all mine, that I was the mistress of everything I could see from wherever my wings could take me...
“Well, look at that,” whispered the man. My eyes, which must have shut in my ecstasy, came back open and followed his gaze to my hands. In the glow from the vial it appeared for a moment as if my hands, too, were glimmering, with an iridescence like a bird’s feathers or a snake’s scales.
I jerked back, pulling free of his grip. “What was that?” I demanded. “What happened? What does it mean?”
“What does it mean?” he repeated back at me. He smiled crookedly, revealing sharp teeth that in the uncertain light looked almost fang-like. His eyes, though, were wholly human, and sad. “It means you are a dragon, Laela. Just like me.”
2
The man, whose name, he told me, was Joki, told me to arrange to set off the next morning. I told him I couldn’t possibly leave that soon. I had affairs to settle, and people who needed me. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could leave at all.
“And what will you do here, Laela?” he asked. “Sit at home in your empty cottage, waiting to help with the breech births of babes who won’t thank for you for your troubles, and then—because you will live a long life, like all of our blood—write their wills when the time comes for them to leave the world they were so troublesomely brought into? They won’t thank you for that either. Your sacrifice will be in vain. Come with me. At least this way your life will be worth something.”
“And what about you?” I
