Once there was a girl who became a man.

No.

Once there was a man who wore his glamour like a cloak, clutched against the cold. When the staring eyes passed over him, he shuddered. Only once did he loose his fever grip on his magics, and then like an avalanche, the worst thing happened. He's still paying for it.

No.

There was a mother who loved her child very much, even though she abandoned it to strangers, because she hadn't the courage to raise it herself, and because she wasn't entirely certain that she was sane.

There was also a dragon.

CHAPTER ONE

ACHE (ANEIRIN, AGE 16), BALMAGE UNIVERSITY

When you whisper into the wind from Scapegoat's Tower, with your fingers twisted into the rocks lining the window and your heart dancing with birds' feet in your inner ear over the sheer drop of thousands of feet, the wind throws your words back into your face curiously twisted as by a mad poet.

After weeks of silence, you despise yourself for the pathetic things that bubble in you to say, but you still say them. I'm so alone! you say, the words welling up from within you like the hot springs in the Bathhouse you have never visited, words salt and sweet full of misery, and the wind laughs and croons to you. Your voice doubles as always in your ears; your own lighter, high-pitched voice covered by the dropping cadence of your glamour which keeps its heavy grip on your vocal cords and always reminds you of yourself, even when there are no mirrors around, even when you have managed to forget yourself, which is almost never.

You are embarrassed by your words before they even slip from your mouth but you can't take them back. As if pleased by your silliness, the wind coos at you. It ruffles your hair on your hot scalp and sends cozy fingers down the neck of your robe until you frown and gasp and move away from the window. You are no longer that frowsty-haired child rejoicing in the breath of the Dragon under your bare feet; your dignity is too fragile for such jests. But then, as if in subtle revenge for the slight, the wind brings your words back to you echoed from the far peaks of your ancient friend Mount Goregole and you hear them twisted and warped into mockery. You hear the answer, I'm so in love! And you shuffle on your feet and think of the way that the boy you don't speak to in Fifth Form has little fine hairs sprouting dark on his upper lip, which bead with sweat when he concentrates at the desk next to you, and how even with the way that boys play in the warm sheets at night in an all-boy's school, you have no hope—EVER—of him seeing you for who you are, because.

Because you can never drop your glamour.

You may never lose your glamour but who you are is lost. Even you cannot really remember her, the one who haunts you from the past with her dry eyes and her aching throat.

If anything she was forgettable, you decided long ago, and you are busy forgetting her with every door you open in the University, every book you read, every class you take. Ani was nothing but a girl who didn’t deserve her happiness until it was gone, and you have forgotten her.

She does not seem to have forgotten you.

You whisper to the wind, "How can I forget her?" and you wait as an eagle wheels by so close you can hear the hushy thrum of its pinions, but there is no answer from the chill wind, and why would you expect it? As if drawn by sorcery your eyes seek out the dark roofs and pale stone walls far below you that make up the town clinging to the steep mountainside the way that periwinkles cling to boat hulls; on such a clear sunny day, you can see its reflection in Lake Eversee like a toy village in a storybook. Or so you used to think when you ran through its streets as a child and looked up at the soaring towers where now you are caged. Your feet can still feel the thud of those stones under them. You remember the little pale divot in the grey cornerstone where Third and Larch streets embraced near The Sign of the Clarhoud; once you caught your toe there and bled for several steps before you noticed, so absorbed had you been in your game of tag. Perhaps there are still toeprints of blood in the stone and your friends notice them and think of you. Perhaps they do, but.

But your friends have probably forgotten you. Why would they remember you? Bitter gall, familiar by now, rises in your throat and makes you impatient. They were forgettable too, those scruffy children of bakers and bankers, children who had never felt the mothy kiss of a ghost on their cheeks. You turn away from the window and slip through the elbow-scraping manhole in the floor to begin your long descent to the lonely mews overlooking the barracks where you will writhe tonight in sleeplessness amongst the snores of all the other boys. You would wait, but Eight Bells has nearly rung its haunting carillon and there will be no food if you are late to Later Meal. The metal staples in the wall are scored by floral crosshatching and just wide enough for your hands and your feet; your real hands and feet, not the glamoured ones. Rumor has it that this tower was built for a prince of the early days to climb up and be alone and see clear to Tiranel where his beloved lived, though you know that is impossible, because you've tried to do that and you have failed.

You've tried, you've craned your neck around the stone windowsill and tried to catch with your eager stare the city's fabled glistening domes and pearly walls, but always all you can see from this window is the unfolding rich quilt of farmlands that stretch in fenced duchies north and west from Balmage; you never see glorious Tiranel the City of Kings. You wonder what it would have been like to be born a prince with that pale sleepy snake drowsing between your legs and servants waiting near you to wipe your nose when it ran, to taste your food for poison and die in your stead. The royal token set aside for University and enough coin to rent Castle Thoughtful with all its secrets. The pleased attention of every Master, even the ones who don't secretly hope you will take them with you to the Royal Court to be your tutor. Playmates who don't dare elbow you until you bruise, because they could lose their elbows if you so choose. The pick of the girls from surrounding mountain peaks, or your own mistress brought at great expense from some faraway place to languish in the town of Tavrel, like your own great-great-great grandmother Sarah, she of the glinting eyes and the cold kisses.

You wonder these things but while you wonder your hands and your feet never stop alternating down the pins in the walls. The air slowly warms as you descend. There is the smell of cooking—bread and turkey gravy—and finally your feet in their soft leather shoes find the stones at the bottom of the tower. Before you open the door you expand your Hearthsense out of a hard-won sense of self preservation, and it's a good thing you did. Haver stands there waiting with his arms crossed behind his back. He is a head and a half taller than you, even wearing your glamour, and easily twice as broad, and beneath the fat of him there is muscle you have cause to dread; beneath the muscle there is more to fear.

You feel terror clench in your throat. Breath hisses through your nostrils. He will be thinking of the way you casually broke his staring shadow-bull in the last Illusions class; he will be thinking of how you blew your breath on its heaving opaque shoulders and it dissipated into his face without even a bellow, and of how everyone—even the Prince—laughed at him. He will be thinking about how last night when he came to your bed with his twitching fists he found only mounded blankets, no flesh and no bones and no pleading.

How did he know where you were?

You were careful enough to get here unseen; you crept in your cloak of stillness through the side hallways, the hidden doors, following your own winding truth to this tower you have loved for its stillness since you discovered it in your first year. He's too large even to fit through the door. How long has he been waiting for you? Has he been thinking while he waits about breaking your fingers beneath his feet? About the crunch your nose would make as it buckled beneath his fist? When you move you can still feel the ugly bruises from last month, though they've faded to yellow blotches. You strum your fingers over your ribs and do not wonder at the pain and pleasure you feel seeping from your bruises.

You sag to the floor, your legs flopping in front of you and your hands collapsing idly in your lap. Eight Bells rang its last lingering chime minutes ago. Later Meal is lost to you; this will be a night you sup on night wind and slake your thirst with cold water from the deep well below the dormitories. You're not a stranger to this meal. If anything, it is an easier meal than to walk through the gauntlet of eyes and snickers, unsure when a foot will trip you and send you flying across the floor under the dancing illusory pig someone forms from the turnips and gravy in your bowl of soup. By now you would think some other unhappy soul would be the school whipping boy, but the world stopped forming itself to your wishes the day of the avalanche, so many years ago, and you remain Aneirin, choking on your magic and your glamour and slinking from hall to class hoping to avoid being noticed by anyone, anyone at all.

You sink your Hearthsense into the stones around you until you feel not just their rough cold fingers probing your back but also your back relaxing into their caress. You feel the weight of your bones and the weight of your bones on the stones. Even the scruff where your robe splays out over the rough surface you sense like a leaf brushing your hair.

You push your Sense outward, slowly. You can feel Haver's feet glowing warm through leather boots with hide soles and you have the strange sense of being a rock that envies a human's circulatory system, and then you are distracted with the in-and-out pulse of his breath, and how you can smell the sour vinegar sweat and musk of him, a smell you could pick out in a crowded room after the three years it has haunted you. Your awareness is air current, plucking at the pale hairs on his chin and prodding his eyelashes. You think of sucking his breath from his lungs and strangling him, but as always, you don't.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Then, without a conscious decision, your Dreamsense wakes and slips into his thoughts as is has done so many times. You lose more of yourself into the stones below you; you catch images—a crosshatching of bright orange fabric embroidered in fantastic horned beasts over the curve of small breasts, the flash and purl of a waterfall, and dark hidden eyes—and feelings like bafflement and fascination and the physical need to punch something. You are so absorbed in the awareness of the boy outside the door that it takes you long minutes to realize that the dark hidden eyes you spy in his awareness are your own, they are your glamor, your shell, and that it's not only hate swirling in his thoughts any longer but something much more confusing and terrifying and mixed, something that turns your belly to water. He doesn't hate you so much as he used to. No, he doesn't only hate you.

The cold-water knowledge pools in your belly, eating at your thoughts like acid as your Senses return to you and you reel your magic into your chest, leaving only a thread between you and the other boy. Hate was easy, unalloyed. When Haver hated you, you knew exactly where you stood with him. Where he stood with you was always much more confusing, but by now you expected that.

Alliances happened all the time between the boys who had left their families and the hope of a girl's warm bed for the austere halls of Balmage University. An older boy would take a younger boy under his wing, protect him from the others, send him on errands and work him through endless tasks from boot-polishing to knob-polishing. Leather and flesh, not so different. A master would spot a beautiful boy, eight or six, barely off his mother's tit, and slip him little tidbits of food and knowledge in exchange for devotion, a warm bed, private favors. Even boys in the same class would explore relationships like this, would spend their nights spooning in the moist darkness of the barracks, where the Masters had long given up on surprise bed-checks. You had never done this; you have decided your sexual curiosity withered the night you met Haver. Maybe, your unwillingness to explore infatuation has built walls around you. Certainly you feel removed from everyone around you.

In your observation—remote, you feel, as if you're standing on Scapegoat's Tower and viewing the entire Kingdom of Tiranel—, the entire University is one huge, complex power play, every player hungry for the same things: recognition, money, a warm kiss in the dark. You in your uttermost soul are no exception to this, though you hate yourself for your weakness and generally avoid gazing that deeply into your depths.

Today you have learned something new. That Haver's inner self has begun to shift from sheer disgust into something softer terrifies you in a way you can't begin to understand—you can only feel it in your trembling knees and in the harsh breath through your throat. You can smell your fear-sweat, feel it slimy under your arms. Your body feels fear in much the same way you felt it those three years ago, after you picked the straw out of your hair and sponged away the small trickle of blood down your thighs. It is a feeling you hate, because it is weakness. It is childish. It is everything you have left behind you. In your mouth, your sharp teeth have found your lower lip and now you taste salt and warm copper on your tongue. The flavor and the pain startle you out of the memories and fix your attention on your surroundings, so they have blessed you.

Now you notice the wall. The wall looks back at you, peaceful, ancient. You can become me, it says to you in a sibilant, grinding groan. You know this—have known it for years—, but the knowledge disturbs you in your Tiranel-bred soul and you try not to think of it usually. If anyone witnessed you doing it, you aren't quite sure whether you'd be exiled for improper magic use or imprisoned indefinitely for observation in the laboratories far below your feet. You yourself aren't even certain what branch of magic stonewalking would fall under—Hearthsense? But you know you are fooling yourself when you call it Hearthsense, because it is not the comforting glow of the Hearth magic inside you that calls to the stone that has been built into structures or that forms the ageless Spine rooting into the long-fossilized skin of the First Dragon. It is that other, that deep well of magic, the terrifying one, the one with the eyes like gold-spattered fire and long black cat-pupils and no eyelashes. The one that never blinks. That watches you always.

You are standing now but don't remember getting up. You turn your eyes to the whispering wall directly beside you on the north side of the chamber; chips have flecked off the mortar surrounding irregular stones that ranging from a hands-breadth to larger than a harfox. The stones themselves are made from a kind of granite threaded with pearl and metallic tiger's eyes—some bizarrity of the Deep Spine, probably brought here by magic and placed together by magic—and you can taste them on the back of your tongue. They taste of stillness, and of stories that unfold quietly over countless years and are never told to anyone.

Your fingers sink into the stone like cream. Now your wrist is absorbed, then your arm to the shoulder. You feel the stone swallow you and you are at the same time relieved in the very core of you—it feels so good, so right, and you are moving away from Haver without alerting him at all—and repelled by the way the lidless magic well begins to tremble inside you when you use it. The cool stone closes over your face like the soft summer waters of Lake Eversee and you begin to breathe, somehow, you've never figured out how. Your thoughts slow. Your sense of self, always at risk of fracturing and flooding out from your body through your Hearthsense and every other sense, coalesces into a burning coal at the center of you. Stone thoughts, stone imagination, stone heart flows through you and with utter relief you abandon yourself to swim through the wall to the north.

Time slows. Before, you could feel your heartbeat and you could smell your sweat. You felt confusion, anger, terror, excitement—the usual cocktail of humanity Haver's presence exploded inside you. Now, you can remember those emotions but all you really feel is the slow arcing of stone. If the stone has a heartbeat it is so slow it simply feels like a gentle rocking in your core. Your eyes see nothing, but you feel no claustrophobia. You angle your elbows ahead of you. Your foot pushes through the stone and pulls you on. You make slow progress; normally impatient, your slowness feels right. It pleases you.

Haver stands at the small wooden door to Scapegoat's Tower. You can still feel him. A long spiraling corridor arcs on both sides of him and you go north, wading through the curving wall that is easily a full ox's width. The thread of connection between you thins, evanesces, breaks. You have always been bound by proximity. When you feel him no longer, you stop walking and sag your relief into the stone. If only life at the University were as easy as stonewalking. If only you could transcend your awkward, hostile, lonely self the same way the stoneself does. If only the Dragon kiss on your forehead would stop burning and pulsing. The stone cradles you with such comfort that, for some time, you forget to come out.

Perhaps two days have passed when you finally emerge from the wall. You untangle yourself from the stone with the feeling of leaving warm bedsheets, and tumble out. Your left hand comes first, then your arm and the left side of you, your head and your right shoulder and your right hand. Your robes swing around you, stone dust turning the black into charcoal. Dust sifts down from your shoulder-length hair; when you run your thumb along your sharp cheekbone you feel the minute grit on your skin. Licking your lips coats your tongue with the same dust, and with the long memories it contains. You like it.

When you emerge from the rock you have no idea what time of day it is, or how long you have been gone. This has happened before, with no consequences. Classes went on without you. Your dormitory-mates were uncurious. Your Masters had no questions for you. You theorize you could fall into a chasm and months would go by without anyone missing you. There are times when you think this thought and, feeling the way your inner self aches at it, you think it again and again and again until you can't breathe. In a strange way it feels wonderful to be the one administering your pain.

This time, it has happened again. You walk along the corridor, your feet making soft padding echoes off the halls, and make your way to your Secret Room, where you draw cold water from the pipes and wash yourself, shivering and hating your puny limbs, and put on your other robe. You rake your fingers through your wet hair and pull it back with a leather tie, floating your palm over your head to make sure no errant strands point at the ceiling. Your boots you kick against the wall until they lose most of their dust. Before you found your Room you had to go to the baths at night when they were cold and empty of people and your risk of discovery was low. You hated that, the nakedness and the fear of watching eyes.

You hear Bell seven. You will be late for Advanced Maths. Briefly, you think of skipping class, but there is a test coming up and you had hoped for a little more time with the topic before sitting for the exam. Haver will be at this class—somehow you seem to have all the same classes, all the time—but otherwise it's generally safe. Luckily the classroom is only a short walk from your Room—come out of the door that doesn't exactly exist, turn left and walk along the hallway for three hundred paces and then step into the magical lift which brings you like the contents of an owl's pellet up hundreds of feet to the fifteenth floor of the Tower of Discovery.

It's going to be alright, you think to yourself as you raise your right hand to shove open the great carved door to Master Xixiel's classroom. No one has missed you, except for Haver.

You know he missed you because when you step inside, he turns his head sharply and stares at you. Surrounded by boys like him—fair-haired second and third sons of minor Dukes, and their vassals—you can sense him flaring to life at your entry. The connection between you snaps into place; you have a hook in your heart and so does he. To your Dragon-enhanced magical sight, the air between you thrums bright green and red. Unlikely he can see this, but still you shudder and drop your eyes. You sidle across the uneven floor to your desk near the front where you sit, your knuckles white in your lap and the droning voice of Master Xixiel filling your ears along with the steady in-and-out of Haver's breath, somewhere back behind you, where he can watch you and you can't watch him.

Nothing happens of note in your class. No one mocks your late entry or casually punches you in the arm. Haver only watches you without making a move, but you know he will do more than that to you soon. In your belly the fear and anticipation mingle, depriving you of your appetite even though you have eaten nothing but stone for two straight days.

When Haver catches you alone in the Wolverine Quarter three days later and slowly, methodically, bruises each of your fingers and toes under his boots, you almost find the courage to meet his pale eyes, but not quite. The corridor echoes with your whimpers and his hard panting breath, like the stable did three years ago. You catch a droplet of his sweat on your cheek like a tear. Not a word is spoken but there is the sense of an exchange.

Later, when you are quite alone, you touch yourself in fascination and repulsion. Then, you vomit over a parapet until you are an empty, soiled bucket. Stone dust floats around you, at least in your imagination.

This is what you know of desire.