The room Emily had been assigned was one-tenth the size of Caltyr’s own. It was one of the three lone human-sized rooms reserved just in case a member of the human forces showed up looking to negotiate, and all three had been gathering dust.
Until now.
Caltyr, Vermonysis and T’allyandria all squeezed into the cramped space. Emily’s body was dwarfed by the bed, which was made for an adult-sized human, but Caltyr felt like everything in the room was just a bit too small for him. It was almost like walking into a very tame prank; the drawers in the dresser didn’t close with his formal fabrics stuffed inside, the bed fit his torso but not his tail, and the roof hovered inches above his head.
“It’s so big!” Emily shrieked, leaping onto the bed. The sheets fluttered underneath her as she began to jump up and down, as kids did. Her one shoe and one bare foot were so dirty the sheets picked up muddy streaks instantly. Lumps of mud scattered joyously across the bedding.
“You’re going to have to sleep on that,” Caltyr warned her, pointing a claw at the bits her feet had touched.
“Oh.” The bronze-haired girl looked down at the dirt coming away from her formerly white running shoe, and slowly sat down. She removed it from her foot and walked around the dragons to place it solemnly by the door, as her parents had taught her. “I dun know how to wash these. Mommy and Daddy always did that for me. How do draggies wash stuff?”
“We have soaps that the earth dragons make for us, and we have the water dragons come together once a week to do the communal loads,” Caltyr explained. “I wouldn’t mind throwing your bedding in. It’s way smaller than Kraven’s.” He shuddered at the upcoming end of the week. He attributed some of his win against Sara to just how damn heavy everyone’s laundry was, and how much sopping fabric he lifted and swirled around on a regular basis.
“I pull the darkness out of the whites,” T’allyandria stated.
“I help dry the fabrics with the wind dragons. With my fiiiiire!” Vermonysis added, waving his fingers around to mimic the fire.
“What could I do to help?” the human girl asked, craning her neck backward to look up at the three of them.
“I wouldn’t worry about that, kid,” Vermonysis said with a shrug. “The Council Leader said she wanted you to stay in your room for the first week, for your safety. We’ll figure out how you fit in after that.”
“Oh. Why?” Emily asked, as if she hadn’t been in the same room as Delphine when she’d given her the debriefing about how the next week was going to look.
Emily was to stay in her room. Delphine was going to stay on the premises and call an assembly the next morning, where they were making Sara make the announcement about Emily’s stay and acceptance to the entire school herself, or else her standing as a council member would be in even more serious jeopardy.
They expected there to be some understandable backlash. Caltyr, Vermonysis and T’allyandria had been assigned to take care of the human and protect it. T’allyandria had accepted on the basis that she could still leave to teach her class on the element of Shadow, and would be given a bonus of some kind, to be discussed later.
The gears in the child’s head turned as she thought back on all the things that had just happened. There were a lot of things. While many of the council members seemed elated when Caltyr won, there were almost as many eyes that looked upon her with derision. Some even seemed scared, which perplexed her.
They were the ones with huge knife-like claws on the ends of their fingers and armor for skin! “There were a lot of draggies who didn’t like me,” she agreed, her face falling with each word.
“There were a lot of dragons with reasons to hate humans, including myself,” T’allyandria corrected her, wrinkling her nose ridge in disgust, “but they didn’t not like you. They don’t even know you.”
“Yeah,” Emily agreed glumly. “But I like them, even if I don’t know them yet.”
“Just give em’ time,” Vermonysis said softly, reaching out a hand to pat her tiny shoulder. “They’ll come around once they get to know how resilient you are. You survived in the woods all by yourself for over a month.”
“Dragons do value grit. Now, I’ve brought you something.” T’allyandria produced a package wrapped with a neat bow.
“A present?” Emily asked, forgetting instantly what they had been talking about in the face of a shiny new something. She reached out her fragile hands and took the wrapped bundle.
“Yes. I procured you some clothing that may fit your body, and some ties and belts for if any of it is too small. Do not wear any of it yet; you will soil it. I will take you to the showers and help you cleanse your skin and hair of your month-long stay in the wilderness,” T’allyandria explained as Emily pulled on the ribbon and the package unfurled.
They didn’t have much human-shaped clothing at the ready, so it was a modest collection. Delphine and Kraven provided what they could; mismatched stuff pulled from dead humans who passed away in battle or in and around their land.
They didn’t make a habit of killing children, but they’d picked up some outfits over the years.
Emily opened her mouth and half-squeak-half-gasped at the folded pile of clothes. “Mister left leg and right leg can be warm again!”
“Yes,” T’allyandria agreed with a chuckle, particularly about her legs being ‘misters’ when the rest of her stringy body was female. “And you may contact myself, Caltyr and Vermonysis with one of these whenever you need assistance.” She pulled out four necklaces, one human-sized, and handed them out.
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“Simply speak into any of the shadows in your room and we will hear you through these.”
Caltyr turned the necklace around in his hands, studying it. It had a leather band tied securely and intricately around a pure black gem that didn’t glimmer in the light when he moved it. It ate up the light around it rather than reflecting it back at his eye.
“A cool magic necklace AND warm clothes? This is the best day ever in a whole month. Except for when Vermon brought me a whole cake.” The child thought fondly back at the day when she’d shared half of a dragon-sized cake with Vermonysis. The vomitous part of her night had sucked, but it had been rainbow-icing-colored, so that was pretty cool.
“You were the cake thief?” T’ally asked, betrayed. With her powers being what they were, any kind of secret that slipped under her radar surprised and offended her.
“She lost her shoe,” Vermonysis admitted. “She wouldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t find any human shoes.”
Emily placed her clothes on a clean section of her new bed, and tried to find the darkest corner of her room. Considering her room was a hollowed out oval with a door sealing one side, it proved to be a difficult task, so eventually she just knelt down next to the underside of her bed.
“NICE PURPLE LADY!” she bellowed, and her voice came thundering through all three of their necklaces at once. “YOUR EYES ARE PRETTY!!”
T’allyandria soaked in the excessively loud compliment, fluttering her long eyelashes.
Vermonysis let loose a high-pitched, shocked scream at the sound that exploded through his necklace, and Caltyr’s, and T’allyandria’s, rattling his eardrums. “Damn, that’s… that’s working, alright.”
“I didn’t know you could do something like this with shadow magic,” Caltyr mulled in awe. He looked between the kid’s crouched body and his new necklace.
“You’ll have to come to my class more.” T’allyandria grinned, her neck straightening subtly. “You can do that between fetching things for Emily and getting me those flowers. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
“I have other classes too,” Caltyr groaned.
“And suddenly they’ve become less important,” she assured him, half-commanding him, though she didn’t appear to be swirling with magical energy this time.
“You did take Sara down with one of her own lightning blasts. I think you’re doing alright.” The lightning-and-fire dragon recounted the battle with a look of bewildered pride.
“This pretty-eyed dragon’s friendship won’t be bought with just a single rare skull. A cake isn’t complete without icing, as I’m sure Emily would agree, and your offering of a bare skull will not be complete without its flower crown,” T’allyandria asserted, as if she were being abundantly reasonable.
Caltyr tried not to sigh. “I’ll get you some appropriately rare flowers, T’ally. I just wanted to visit the library and do my research first, so I didn’t bring you something too common.”
The shadow dragon swished her tail wisely behind her, as if she’d been waiting for this moment. “Well, if only you’d mentioned this to me sooner. Malika tends to an abundant campus garden with her light powers, and she studies the local flora in her free time. I’m sure she would have a suggestion for you. Go see her, and tell her I sent you.”
Malika. Caltyr had been intending to visit the light dragon eventually, but on his list of ‘friendships to rekindle’, she had been the last on the list.
Malika and Miss Tavren had been close too, once upon a time, even more-so than he had been. Malika had been their protege, with brilliant white scales unmarred by a second element. She was a mirror image of Miss Tavren, almost like her actual child.
He had specifically enrolled in another dragon’s light class to be free of being reminded of the teacher he had murdered every time he saw her alabaster face. And, more than that, to free her from the fate of having to see her mentor’s killer every day of her life.
Caltyr looked at T’allyandria’s grin and he knew right then that she had been planning this, maybe even right down to when she first demanded a rare flower.
But why? Was she helping him out, or did she secretly have a grudge against the light dragon that she wanted to use him to drive her mood into the shitter?
“I can just go to the library. I’ll make some time,” Caltyr decided.
“But you’ll go to Malika instead,” T’allyandria decided with a nod. “She may even have one of the flowers you need, and she loves to be of assistance. And she owes me a favor.”
The water dragon was about to respond, but Emily cut in first, “Uh… draggies?” The human yawned so wide her mouth took up over half of her face. She stretched her tiny limbs out. “My body is telling me it’s tired, so can you go now so the nice purple lady can show me how to use the showers here? I really wanna try my new bed.”
Vermonysis nodded, and so did Caltyr. He hadn’t realized the time, but he was sure it had to be nighttime now from how quiet the halls were. Even his own limbs were beginning to protest at the thought of moving, and his feet ached from where the lightning had passed through them.
“Sure thing, Emily. I’ll see you when I see you, probably when I bring you some breakfast in the morning,” Vermonysis said as he pushed through the cramped doorway.
“Bye, Vermon,” the human sing-songed, and then turned her light brown eyes to Caltyr.
She made her way sleepily across the room and put her hand on one of his haunches. “You did a good fight. Go sleep now.”
Caltyr smiled. Until he felt a faint, barely-there wave of magical sleepiness pull his eyelids downward, which pulled his face into a shocked ‘o’.
Did this kid have some kind of magical talent? Could she cast magically in the same way T’allyandria could now that she was wearing the magically imbued necklace, or was this coming from the earth scale Delphine had entrusted her with?
Was this some kind of sleep spell, or was it a command like T’allyandria could impose?
Emily toddled over to T’allyandria’s side. The two of them squeezed past him, but not without T’allyandria raising a brow at his awkward standing there.
“Did the child not just ask you to leave?”
“She did, but I think I felt her use… some kind of magic on me.”
T’allyandria’s mouth fell open. “Are you sure? When I questioned her about whether she’d ever eaten dragon flesh, she told me no.”
“Let’s talk about this tomorrow,” Caltyr said with two fingertips poised on his forehead. This could be a whole rabbit hole in and of itself, and could even end in calling yet another meeting with the council.
“I will be available after my morning class.”
T’allyandria and the tiny human left together then, headed in the direction of the showers.
He took his aching body to his bedroom and settled in on his mountain of bottle cap-shaped treasure. He peeled his formal garb off and curled his tail and neck around himself such that he resembled a dragon donut.
He fell asleep thinking of flowers, Malika and, distantly, Miss Tavren. He wondered how Malika would react to her favorite teacher’s killer approaching her one day out of the blue to ask her urgently about rare flowers. He wondered about the kind of person Sara’s mother had been, considering what kind of person Sara was now.
And then he heard himself snoring.