“Who are you?”

  I couldn’t think of anything that Mother could have possibly said to terrify me more than those three words. And the cold, calculating way that she looked at me gave me no relief. This was no suspicion or misunderstanding; no, she knew that something was off about me, and I didn’t know what to do. Instinct had been the one who was good at handling Mother; I’d gotten away with a few half-truths here and there, but that was when she had no reason to doubt me. Now she suspected me. She’d be looking for falsehoods, and if she caught me in a lie…

  If I told her the truth, I had no idea what she might do. But if she caught me trying to deceive her, she might actually kill me. She had stayed here for me, because I asked her to. For my sake, she’d been away from her hoard for… how long? Over two months, surely. She’d taught me, guarded me, gotten into a few scuffles and put herself through inconvenience and discomfort for my sake. If she’d done all that, and then caught me lying to her face, her pride might actually force her to just kill me. And then, I had no doubt she’d do the same to my humans, just for the sake of it. This was someone who advised me to destroy cities and nations as retaliation for a slight; there was no way she’d let anyone close to me live once I was gone.

  No, as terrifying as the idea was, I was going to have to confess. But even then I was going to have to be careful. And I was going to have to do it with a brain full of chemicals telling me to Shift immediately and flee to the deepest, darkest hole in the mountains, because the most powerful creature I had ever imagined was angry with me, and that anger was an almost physically painful pressure all over me.

  “I am your daughter!” I told her, and there was nothing theatrical about how pitifully my words came out. I pressed myself to the ground, drew in my wings, and curled my tail around myself, making myself as small as I possibly could before her. “I am as sure of it as I can be without Kin-sense. But—”

  Mother interrupted me. She didn’t even have to raise her voice beyond what was normal for a creature of her size. When she spoke, I choked. “If you are my daughter,” she said, “then why am I sensing her somewhere else? Somewhere close?”

  “I— I don’t know!” I told her honestly. “But if—”

  Again she interrupted me. This time she turned to the humans, who were watching us with so much fear that it lay in a cloud about the shrine. She spoke only three words. “Bring her out!”

  I couldn’t look. My attention was fixed entirely on Mother, but I heard shuffling from the Shrine. They knew what she meant, and they obeyed. Steps approached, hesitantly and with difficulty, and then I heard Avjilan’s voice, full of regret, tell me, “I’m sorry. She would have killed us.”

  And then I heard the voice I’d longed for. The one I’d sensed approaching. The one I’d somehow expected, and dreaded to hear. “It is all right,” Herald said — weak, and tired, and so very brave. “She was going to find out eventually. I just wish I had a chance to tell you first.”

  Only then did I turn my head to see Herald beside me, Avjilan carefully helping her sit beside me. She was wrapped in a blanket, her face pale and drawn, and she gave me a wan smile as I looked at her. “Find out what?” I asked, dreading the answer. “Tell me what?”

  When Herald answered me, her face changed. It was subtle, but I knew her so well that it was impossible to miss. The fear was no less, and there was still some affection in the way she looked at me, but the kindness in her eyes vanished. And when she spoke, her voice was so very much like my own.

  Through Herald’s eyes, Instinct looked at me and said, “Hello, little ghost.”

  Despite it all, despite my fear of Mother’s judgment and the mild horror I felt at seeing and hearing my colder, crueler half speak through my dearest friend, I felt relief wash through me. “I thought you were gone,” I said hoarsely. “I thought we’d lost you.”

  “No such luck,” Instinct said. And then her eyes changed again. The kindness was back, and in her own voice Herald said, “She does not mean that. She knows that you would not want her gone.”

  She changed again, and Instinct said, “But perhaps it would have been better if I had been. I did not intend for this to happen.” Then she — or Herald — turned to look up at Mother, who had been observing us in stony silence. “Hello, Mother,” she said, and for all that Instinct liked to pretend to be fearless there was no disguising the trepidation in her voice. “There are things you must know.”

  For a moment, when Sower of Embers, Reaper of Flames looked at Herald, she looked so lost that despite my terror it almost broke my heart. Then she took whatever weakness had come over her and shoved it aside, and there was only suspicion and anger left. “Go on,” she hissed, and it was like when we first met, back in that cave on Vanar, where the harness Herald had commissioned to let her ride me more safely still lay discarded. Where Embers had seemed so determined to kill Herald that I’d attacked her. “Explain why while I can barely feel you, ever since this morning the thread that should lead me to my offspring has been pulling me more and more strongly to this building. Explain why my own senses tell me that this human is my daughter. Convince me.”

  She didn’t need to tell us what to convince her of. The “to let you live” was pretty damn implicit.

  “I am your daughter,” I insisted before Instinct could speak. “But…” My voice trembled so badly with the fear of what I was about to admit that I had to stop and gather myself. Fear of the thing we’d kept hidden from her, and from everyone except Herald and Mak, for so long. It took long seconds during which all I could do was to hope that Embers’ patience would not suddenly end before I managed to continue, confessing the sin of my existence before her and the eight humans there who did not already know.

  “I am your daughter,” I started again, “but I am also a human woman. Or the soul of one, at least. Together, they are Draka. Them and… me.”

  Embers was, to put it mildly, unsatisfied by this explanation. She gave off a long, displeased huff, and the weight of her displeasure, which already lay on us so heavily as to almost be suffocating, seemed to double. The air she exhaled was so hot that Herald flinched — or Instinct, in Herald’s body. I wasn’t sure whether or not Instinct could do more than speak. But despite Embers’ displeasure she was a dragon, and while dragons were quick to anger and prone to expressing that anger in terminal ways, they were also curious.

  She leaned in, close enough that I could feel the furnace heat of her breath even before she spoke, and the look in her eyes made it entirely clear that when she said, “Elaborate,” she was giving me a second, and final, chance.

  “When your daughter told you that the humans did something to her, that was true,” I babbled. “They… we think it was this man named Sekteretesh. He killed He Who Darkens The Night. At least he claimed so in an inscription we found.” Embers’ breath grew even hotter at that, and a low growl started deep in her chest. I forced myself not to simply mess myself and lie down and die, and carried on. “After he did that, he took us. All of your children with Night. There is a room inside the mountain, with an enchantment on it, and… I’m sorry, the memories from then are all my dragon half’s, and she was so young it’s hard to—”

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  “Continue anyway,” Embers growled.

  Through Herald, Instinct spoke, and her voice was only marginally steadier than my own. “They sent my siblings up, one by one. At least some of them. I am sure of that. They may have simply taken some away with them when they left. Whatever they were doing, they must have failed. Until it was my turn. I only remember the cage, and the tunnel. And then nothing, until I awoke centuries later with a little human ghost to keep me company. Confused, thinking she was still in a human body, desperate to get back out into the sun. She drove me out from within the mountain, to the cave and the ledge on the mountainside where you once rested, waiting for your mate. And we have been together ever since. Growing closer. Merging. The one who speaks to you from my body is… I do not know a good word for it. Our child, perhaps. She contains much of each of us.”

  Embers had listened with admirable patience, considering the circumstances, but the weight of her displeasure never lessened. Her posture never became less threatening, nor her breath less hot. But she didn’t annihilate us, which I took as a hopeful sign.

  “You are telling me that a human soul burrowed its way into my daughter,” she stated, and every fear I’d ever had about her finding out the truth about us resurfaced, in 4K and theatre-grade surround sound. “That it is, in fact, you who are my daughter, who has now apparently been displaced into this human. And that the one who inhabits your body is not that human soul, but some product of the combination of it and your own. Is this correct?”

  “It is,” I replied meekly.

  Embers’ head swung back to me with terrifying speed, her eyes narrowing and her lips peeling back in true anger as she growled, “I was not speaking to you, Little Ghost. Do not speak uninvited again.”

  I didn’t reply. I let silence be my answer as I prostrated myself in the ashes of the clearing, and she must have been satisfied with that since my life didn’t come to an unceremonious end.

  Turning back to Instinct-in-Herald, Embers asked again, “Am I correct in my understanding?”

  “You are,” Instinct answered.

  “And to whom have I been speaking these months?”

  “At first, the one that most of the humans think of as Draka. The combination. The little ghost,” she said weakly. Then she became more lively and earnest as she said, “But lately, it has almost always been me! We can choose who controls the body, and she and the other, they saw how much it pleased me to be fully myself with you. They had no objection to leaving me in control whenever we spent time with you.”

  “If that is so,” Embers asked, low and dangerous, “why have they banished you to this fragile form? And how?”

  “They did not!” Instinct insisted, defending me and Conscience in the face of an angry dragon a hundred times her current size and a million times as powerful. Lying silently on the ground beside her, I felt like absolute shit for every suspicious or uncharitable thought I’d ever had about her. She’d promised once that she’d never try to get rid of us, and it was humbling to see just how strongly she meant that.

  She gave a stumbling, stammering explanation of how we since recently could see and hear and everything else through our followers, and speak through Herald; and about the dreamscape and how we’d been able to visit the dreams of those we touched even before then. And then she gave a somewhat embarrassed account of how we’d gone down the spiraling stairs to the chamber beneath deep our feet, where we’d found the massive crystal which she, in a fit of uncontrollable curiosity and desire for power, had touched.

  “I thought I died,” she said plainly. “The power tore me loose from my body, and I have not been able to find my way back. The Herald saved me.”

  Even my fear of Embers couldn’t keep my curiosity at bay at that point. I didn’t actually speak, though; I looked at them, my other half and my dearest friend in one flesh, and they understood.

  “I cannot say how I did it,” Herald said, speaking quickly and throwing frequent glances at Embers to see how she’d react. With how strongly she stank of fear, I could barely understand how she stayed coherent. It was a wonder she managed to speak at all! “I think I was having a lucid dream. You were — or I suppose she was — alone and afraid, tumbling through the air out of control.” Then, despite her fear, she smiled. She was visibly trembling, and she smiled! “She was— do you remember how small you were, when I first met you? She was waist high on me, no more. Adorable. And fearsome, of course!” she quickly added with a glance at Embers. “I… do not ask me how, but I grabbed her, and held on, and promised that I would do anything to keep her safe. To keep you safe. Both of you. Or all three, I suppose.”

  Embers gave a huff long and hard enough to make Herald throw her arm up to shield her face, and send her blanket fluttering and her hair streaming behind her. Then she sat up straight, looking down on us in judgment. “I will think,” she declared ominously. “My senses tell me that my daughter stands before me, in the body of a human who speaks both in my daughter’s voice, and that which I know to be her own. Meanwhile, my Kin-sense barely recognizes the one whom my eyes and nose tell me must be my child. It is… you are cruel to do this to an old mother. To have kept such a thing from me for all this time, instead of laying the truth bare as you understood it. Had I been younger, I would have destroyed you already for your deception, be you my progeny or not. Now… I must think. Do not dare to think to follow me.”

  She directed those final words to me in particular, with a look and a tone that told me that this was not a cry for help. Nor was it a plea for me to make the decision to talk this through for her. There was no doubt in my mind that for all the hesitation she’d expressed, if I disobeyed she would kill me. If not out of anger and embarrassment at having been deceived, then out of frustration at not knowing what to do. I couldn’t say how I knew — something about how she held herself, perhaps something in her eyes — but I was absolutely certain that I was looking at a dragon on the edge of slipping into a rage. And if that happened to Sower of Embers, Reaper of Flame, I doubted that anyone or anything could save us.

  I had been thoroughly humbled and humiliated. But I couldn’t find it in myself to feel any shame. How could anyone be anything but humbled in the face of Embers’ anger? I counted myself lucky just to be alive, never mind free and unharmed.

  After Embers left, flying east across the harbor, Herald crossed the few feet between us and collapsed against me, weeping into my neck with her arms around me. “Mercies! Oh, gods and Mercies,” she wailed, shaking with sobs as she released all the terror she’d barely been holding at bay.

  “It’s okay,” I choked out. I was holding together only barely better than she was.

  “I thought she would kill us! I thought she would actually kill us!”

  “You were so brave,” I told her, cocooning her in my wings as the others snapped out of their fear-paralysis and began rushing out to us. “So brave. Both of you.”

  “She— she is still here,” Herald said, fighting to get her voice under control. “I do not know why she is not speaking, but she must feel so awful. So abandoned. Her mother rejected her, Draka!”

  “We don’t know that. Not for sure. Not yet.” I said that, but it was with far more hope than certainty. Sure, Embers hadn’t killed us herself, but without her to defend us we were, and there really was no other way to put this, fucked. Behold Her wanted me dead. I wasn’t sure about Unquenchable or Quake, but it was really a question of whether they’d be satisfied with taking most of my territory or if they’d want to get rid of me entirely. Even Grace, for all that he’d expressed his gratitude, had said outright that he recognized my ownership of the island because Embers was backing me. If she decided to just go home, could I count on that gratitude to mean anything? I had no idea. For all I knew, he might just decide to get rid of me and take Mak and Kira for himself, forcing them to heal Presence whether they wanted to or not.

  “What do we do now?” Mak asked. On top of being worn out from healing Presence, she was badly shaken. She might have had it the worst of all of us, honestly. Not only did she have to deal with facing Embers’ anger the way the rest of us; not only did she have to watch me and Herald in the dirt before her, possibly one wrong word away from being annihilated by a flame that boiled rock; but she had to deal with my terror screaming into her as well. It was no less amazing that she was there, on her feet and speaking, than it was that Herald had managed to keep it together for as long as she had.

  “Now we go inside,” I said, looking eastward, in the direction where Embers had long since vanished beyond the trees. “We go inside, we sit down, and we figure out how to survive this mess.”

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