Dongwu’s brown, human eyes stared at Kaz, then through him, and she said, “What are you? You look like one of my kobolds, but if you were, you would obey.” Tufts of fur reminiscent of eyebrows drew down over her eyes, and she suddenly looked disturbingly like Lianhua did when presented with an interesting rune.

Truthfully, Kaz had never expected to meet the creator of his race, and if he did, he thought he should have hated her, but there was something almost…pathetic about this female. She had done terrible things, but those things had resulted in Kaz’s existence, as well as that of every other member of his race, and beneath her gruffness and anger, she seemed more frightened than anything else.

“Kobolds aren’t yours,” he told her. “We don’t belong to anyone, no matter how we came to exist. And we aren’t going to obey anymore, either. Now leave Li alone. She’s not Qiangde, or even a member of his court, just like you’re not Nucai or Zhangwo, and you will not hurt her.”

As he said these words, there was a hint of that power that had filled his voice when he told her no, and Dongwu’s eyes widened. Her grip on her hammer didn’t relax, but she did lower it slightly. “How long has it been?” she asked, but Kaz didn’t think she was talking to him. “Long enough?” Then she shook her head, answering someone they couldn’t hear. “Not that long, surely.”

“More than eight hundred years since Qiangde died, as best we can determine,” Lianhua said. Kaz glanced over to see that she had circled around until she was standing close to him, and her hands glowed with her golden ki, ready to attack or defend, though he wasn’t sure which.

“Two thousand years since the Diushi rose, and a thousand since they disappeared,” she went on. “You’ve been here for a millennium, Xion Wu. Is that ‘long enough’?”

“A thousand years?” Dongwu whispered, glancing down at her hammer. Her fingers tightened on the handle, but more as if she sought reassurance from its solidity than like she was planning to attack again. Taking a step back, she said, “It’s easy to lose track, here. No days and nights, you know? At first I used clocks, desperate to know, but once I became this,” she gestured to herself with her free hand, “it didn’t really matter, so I stopped. I asked one of the traders, once, and it had been almost a hundred years since Qiangde died. I never asked again.”

Her eyes came back to Kaz’s, and she lost the look of a pup who had just learned their parents were dead. In the space of a breath, she became the powerful smith who had threatened Li, but then she dropped her hammer to her side and inclined her head.

“You’re right. I don’t know this dragon, any more than you know me. If she has managed to inspire such loyalty and,” her eyes narrowed, flashing with ki, “form such a bond, then someone like me has no right to judge her while asking you not to judge me.” She almost managed a smile. “Too harshly, anyway.”

To everyone’s surprise, it was Kyla who answered, and they all looked toward her voice. Once Dongwu stopped trying to flatten everyone with her ki, Kyla had vanished, though Kaz had seen the haze of her ki moving slowly toward Dongwu. Now she stood, knife in hand, surrounded by the thickest shield Kaz had ever seen her produce, and glared at Dongwu.

“Judge you?” she asked, voice shaking. “Are Kaz and Lianhua and Tegra right, and you made us by imprisoning and torturing other people, then used us as…as tools? Then, when we weren’t needed anymore, you just came here and hid for a thousand years, doing whatever you wanted? I thought you were my friend.” The last word was almost a whimper, and for the first time, Dongwu looked truly pained.

Turning her back on Kaz and the others, Dongwu held her arms wide, exposing chest and throat to Kyla. “You, more than most, little Magmablade, have every reason to hate me,” she said. “If you want to kill me, I won’t stop you. That mithril blade Ija had me make for you should be able to do it, if you try hard enough.”

Kyla stared down at her glittering weapon, and Kaz finally realized why his cousin looked different. It wasn’t just the new pack, or the beautiful loincloth that must have come from Lianhua, or even the new and deadly-looking blade she held. Kyla was wearing a necklace, heavy with treasures from her time among the humans. She was an adult.

“No,” she said softly, lowering her knife. “There’s been enough death. You owe us an explanation, though. An explanation and an apology.” Her eyes lit up with a spark that looked more like the Kyla Kaz knew. “And new weapons. And I’ve always wanted earrings.” She reached up and fingered the fuzzy edge of one ear.

Dongwu laughed, and it was an utterly human sound, without the rough growl that edged kobold voices. Had she made herself develop that rasp so she seemed more like a kobold, or was it only there when she spoke?

Li peered out over Kaz’s shoulder, her front paws braced against his back as if ready to push him out of the way. If the tunnel hadn’t been so small, he suspected she would already have grown to her largest size, but Kaz wasn’t so easy to move. Not anymore.

she said.

Dongwu was the first person who didn’t react with surprise upon hearing Li speak. Instead, she turned, resting her hammer across her shoulder as she said, “Actually, I’m very, very smart. That’s the problem. Now, come on. That sword blank is as far along as it’s going to get for now.”

She started toward the passage leading out of the blazingly hot forge room, and everyone else exchanged glances, then followed after with varying degrees of reluctance. Raff inserted himself between Dongwu and everyone else, though Kyla kept trying to get around his bulk. Lianhua and Yingtao checked each other over for injuries, and then Yingtao seemed to melt in the heat, even her hair drooping until Lianhua wrapped an arm around her waist and supported her from the room.

Kaz and Li were last, with Li remaining small - not without some convincing from Kaz - so she could cling to his back and shoulders. Kaz paused in the archway, staring up at the ki-stones that blazed within the seemingly unblemished rock, their patterns more complex than any he had seen before. Then he glanced back at the wreck they’d made of what had probably been a neatly ordered space, sighed, and ran after the others.

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Their destination turned out to be a hut well within the area heated by the forges. Kaz couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live there, but given how powerful Dongwu was, she probably barely noticed the temperature. Still, it was enough cooler that Yingtao looked noticeably better, and Raff seemed more cheerful and less damp. Li, of course, claimed it was too cold, though she didn’t actually look uncomfortable.

“Come on,” Dongwu said again, opening the door to the hut. When Raff hesitated, her ears twitched, and she said, “It’s bigger than it looks.”

Raff bent over, clearly intending to just poke in his head, but the moment part of his body passed the threshold, he vanished. Everyone jumped, and Yingtao’s knives were suddenly back in her hands again. Then Raff reappeared as suddenly as he’d gone, but this time he had a huge grin on his face. “C’mon,” he told them. “Wait’ll you see this.”

A matching smile turned up one corner of Dongwu’s mouth, and she motioned for the rest of them to follow, which Kyla instantly did, vanishing on Raff’s heels. Yingtao went next, though she made an impatient Lianhua wait until she came back out to get her. Kaz and Li were last, hanging back as Kaz examined the hut with ki-filled eyes.

Li said.

Kaz stared at it. Li was right. Nothing about the hut seemed odd, and when Kaz looked inside, he could only see the same shadowy space that lay inside any kobold hut. But no humans moved around in there, and there was no way he could miss them. Raff alone would take up a large part of the space, even though the hut was larger than usual to accommodate Dongwu’s height.