Cynobria’s eyes flitted over the pages of her Hayar grammar book.

Yselle had been sick lately, which left Cynobria alone at her desk. She’d brought the book with her to leaf through during some of the classes that, she judged, wouldn’t teach her anything new. The small pang of guilt this had caused—most dragons could scarcely afford education, immigrants even less so, and it was only because of her parents’ position as ambassadors she could be here—was swallowed by her rising excitement.

In spite of her early frustrations she seemed to be making progress, though its slowness was excruciating. It had been over half a year since she had started studying Hayar, and some of the more complex structures kept eluding her mind’s grasp.

‘What would be the adjective and the noun derived from the word maintain?’ learnéd Noteuf was saying in the background. She felt his eyes settle on her a split second before he said, ‘Cynobria?’

‘Maintained and maintenance’, she said without lifting her head from above the book.

A brief silence that followed told her something was wrong. She lifted her head to learnéd Noteuf looking at her critically, the rest of the class either staring at her—some confused, some amused—or ignoring the situation entirely. She tilted her head quizzically at learnéd Noteuf. Surely, she’d made no mistake.

‘It would appear,’ he said, ‘you forgot what class you are in.’

…oh.

‘I’m sorry, learnéd Noteuf,’ she said, now careful to speak fluent Krahan. She was mildly proud of herself for knowing the Hayar equivalents of what the rest of the class was learning in Krahan, but any warmth that could have bloomed inside her chest took more the spread-out shape of shame more than pride. ‘I was a little distracted. It will not happen again.’

He nodded. ‘It better not. Such errors will not be tolerated.’

Bold words from a dragon whose Krahan was worse than Cynobria’s. She bit back the reply before it could form and contented herself with digging her claws into the hard wooden desk instead.

For the remainder of the class she refused to look at the Hayar book, instead focusing all attention on learnéd Noteuf droning about things she had long known.

He had, of course, not asked her any more questions that day.

‘Hey, Cynne,’ said Jartain on the way to the next class, ‘is being the best at Krahan not enough now? Did you need to hammer in how well you know… what was it again?’

‘Oh shut it,’ Cynobria said. Then, after a pause, ‘It’s Hayar. And I didn’t mean to use it.’

They passed a bend in the grey-stone corridor. The trio of Tarangeans appeared as lanky shadows walking through the half-light. ‘Of course. Wouldn’t want to show off new shiny scales.’ Jartain grinned.

Cynobria blew hard through her nostrils, a bit of smoke rising up. ‘I’m not—’

‘Easy, Cynne,’ Gevine cut in and bumped Cynobria lightly with her wing. ‘Tain’s just pulling your tail.’

‘Me?’ He raised a talon to his chestplate in mock-incredulousness, then grinned again. ‘Always. You should know better by now, Cynne, than to get so… fired up by it.’ He laughed at his own joke, dark scales flashing with a midnight blue hue as they passed a torch, and was met with reactions varying from Oileau responding in kind to Gevine sighing tiredly. Cynobria shook her head, but could not help a small smile herself. ‘Hey!’ Jartain perked up. ‘Is that a smile I see? Cynne? Are you ill?’

Cynobria frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, you know,’ said Jartain. ‘It’s a rare sight without one of your riddly books.’

‘I haven’t been doing them for half a year now.’

Jartain looked at her, eyeridges raised. ‘That is a lot of time without a smile,’ he said gravely.

Was it? But…

She was ready to argue when she looked at him, at Gevine, at Oileau. She relaxed somewhat, the jest clear in their eyes, only then realising how tense she had been. She smiled a tad herself and said, ‘Maybe you haven’t said anything funny enough.’

Jartain just about choked on his breath, while Gevine and Oileau broke into laughter.

‘You came,’ Yselle said and smiled, frills twitching excitedly, and punctuated the sentence with a sneeze.

‘Did you doubt me?’ Cynobria mirrored her girlfriend’s expression as she unbuckled her tailbag and set it on the floor.

Yselle’s room wasn’t large, but it felt spacious—a common trait in Tarangean architecture and interior design. Out of the four walls, half of one was taken by a window, black curtains neatly tied at its sides, a matching desk underneath, and another boasted Yselle’s works—she was a decent painter, and, as she claimed, that wall was the only canvas big enough to her liking that she could use. Currently it displayed an open sky, a mosaic of colourful abstract birds soaring through it, some of them unfinished. The remaining two were more mundane—a nest and an assortment of chests and pillows, and the mandatory mirror.

‘Anything interesting today?’ Yselle huddled under her blanket, and shuffled in the nest to make more space. Cynobria hopped in and settled next to her, nuzzling her cheek. ‘Not afraid you’ll catch something?’ Yselle teased.

‘I’m already lovesick, it doesn’t get worse than that,’ Cynobria said the line she had prepared during classes when she got bored with Hayar for a time. She hoped it came off naturally. Yselle liked when she was being witty. ‘Classes went as you’d expect. Noteuf was as useful as ever. He even quizzed me!’

‘Poor you,’ said Yselle.

Cynobria cringed. ‘Worse, he did it when I was practising Hayar, the bastard, and instead of Krahan I used that.’

Yselle chuckled, then coughed. ‘You’re so good, you went beyond correct, and failed.’

‘It almost sounds good when you put it like this.’

Yselle smiled, but soon it was replaced with a more serious look, an odd glint in her light purple eyes. She tilted her head. ‘You do this a lot, you know? Find something, and then all the world doesn’t exist except for that one thing.’

Cynobria frowned. ‘Is it bad?’ She placed a wing over Yselle, and her girlfriend’s blanket-covered wiry frame rested against it gently. ‘It’s how I work. I need something to keep myself going.’ She looked up and gestured to the opposite wall with her snout. ‘You have your paintings, don’t you?’

‘I do, but…’ She sighed. ‘Never mind. Do you have the—’ she sneezed— ‘notes from today?’

‘Ah, of course.’ A shadow of a smile crept over Cynobria’s snout. ‘But perhaps… I could deal with something more important than notes first. More important, even, than Hayar!’

Yselle lifted an eyeridge, flicked her ear curiously. ‘And what might that be?’

‘You,’ Cynobria said, and tackled the blanket-wrapped Yselle onto the nest.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Hayar was hard.

It was, indeed.

And Cynobria would crack it.

She could feel herself getting closer. The more she read on it, the more its bizarre cases and syntax seemed to almost make sense. What had felt like randomness before, clarified into rules and patterns. It could hardly be called easy—Cynobria still often found herself lost in the subtle changes in the word order—but with time spent poring over tomes and evenings practising with Dad the improvement was clear.

The latter had been a surprise to her, though it really shouldn’t have. Svars and Hayars had shared a lot of history—at a point having a common ruler—and the camaraderie between the two ran long and deep. “Svar and Hayar, claw for claw, food and drink and helping paw” claimed the old adage. As it was, Dad had spent two years in Hayaroszág prior to his meeting with Mum and had picked up some of the language.

‘I’m much out of practice,’ he had said with a sheepish smile, ‘but I’ll see what I can do.’

“What he could do” turned out to be more than he had let on.

That had been the day of what she referred to as “the ferrule incident”. Ever since then, every evening before bed Dad would come to her room and talk to her in simple, uncertain Hayar that grew more confident the longer they practised, and she would ask him about this thing or that, and then, with time, challenge herself to decipher his words on her own.

‘Wász nar römás a nehveim,’ he said one evening. His accent was entirely different when he spoke Hayar than either Svarish or Tarangean, and for all his supposed rustiness, he was a better teacher than Noteuf.

‘I can’t find my books anywhere,’ she translated, though literally it would have been closer to Nowhere I can’t find my books. Hayar was, she discovered, similar in some ways to her native tongue. Tarangean, for instance, didn’t use double negatives, and some of her classmates struggled with this part of Krahan. ‘And it should be “nehveimet”.’

‘Good catch.’ Dad smiled in a way that told her he had set it up on purpose. She found it difficult, at times, to read other dragons, but she had spent enough time around her parents to be able to pick up on subtle cues. And now she could also see his pride for her, in the way his eyes lit up, the lifting of his posture, the slight puffing of his chest and perked-up ears. ‘Since when are you correcting me?’

They practised a little more, and as Dad was leaving, Cynobria realised with a start that it was almost pitch-black outside, the sky swollen with dark clouds. Even though she lived in Tarange—a country of violet accessors, of air and darkness—the sight made her uneasy. Most of her classmates would have marvelled at it, but her elements were water and fire, and the coming storm brought a pressure to her chest, even in the closed-off safety of her home. She could scarcely fathom that some dragons would still prefer the old ways of living inside caves. Cynobria was perfectly content to let the cavernous dwellings be a relic of the past.

She washed herself and lumbered onto her nest, twisting herself in a neat circle. She loved the way she could sink into it, deep enough to be enveloped in softness.

She muttered overlong Hayar words, trying to imitate Dad’s rolling accent, but before she could quite succeed, the repetition lulled her to sleep.

That night there was a thunderstorm.

Perhaps that was why she woke up.

Even through her closed window she could hear the howling winds, and intermittent bursts of light, followed closely by thunder loud as the sky splitting in half, flashed through the curtains, briefly illuminating the fire-and-smoke patterns on the fabric.

Cynobria sighed and tried to fall asleep again, but the raging thunderstorm outside made reentering her slumber an arduous task, and several sleepless minutes later she gave up. She groaned and stretched, letting her paws sink into the softness of her pillow, her back arching with a satisfying crack. She went to check the time when, above the dying echo of thunder, over the howling wind, she heard something else. It was a murmur, at first, and she was ready to dismiss it, but as she focused on it a little more, Cynobria realised she knew what—who—it was.

Mum and Dad were talking.

Cynobria frowned. It was well past midnight, but far from sunrise too. Why were they up?

It mattered not. Their talk was none of her concern. She headed back to bed, embarrassed by the mere thought that—

‘Jagrav wo…’ she heard Mum say before the sentence was cut off by thunder.

Cynobria stilled, and her heart thudded louder than the wind’s howl.

Not even two words.

But it was enough.

Jagrav.

She had heard that name before.

Twice—the first one she remembered vaguely, the day the news of the blasted Cavrian queen’s death had reached them, and then once more, when she was around ten, Dad had mentioned him, but when Cynobria asked he went abruptly silent, and refused to say anything beyond the fact that he’d been a colleague from work, though the way he’d said it made Cynobria certain he was anything but.

Eavesdropping was bad, yes. But with the raging storm outside to cover her approach and her parents thinking her asleep—when would she get another chance like that?

Cynobria turned away from her bed and approached the doorway. She placed a paw against the door, smooth against her pads, and waited. Waited for…

At the next flash of light her paw tensed, and when thunder boomed she pushed the door just enough to be able to slip out. Any sound it had made was drowned out by the thunderclap, but even without it she suspected her parents wouldn’t have heard. The booms came and went, but the whistling gale was a ceaseless backdrop to this night. In its cover, Cynobria poked her head out the door. The corridor was empty, and the only light in the house, alongside the faint sound of conversation, was coming from the kitchen. She left her room, placing her paws gently on the stone floor as she crept forward.

As she closed the distance, scraps of conversation began to drift to her ears over the din of the wind. There came, ‘...tell her about…’ from Dad, Mum’s vague ‘...yet. Let’s…’, the rest of her response lost. Were they talking about her? She strained to listen more keenly, drawing ever closer, until she reached a corner where she could hear most of what they said, but would still be hard to spot. The puddle of light spilling from the kitchen almost reached her claws.

‘Tell that to…’ said Dad, and mentioned a name, or a few, though Cynobria couldn’t quite make it out. ‘...and Orielle are only two, and she’s...’ He sighed.

‘I know,’ said Mum. She sounded tired. They both did. ‘This is way too early, even with what she wants. Especially with what she wants.’

‘She’s the one making decisions,’ said Dad, resigned. ‘Why is she there again?’

‘Stop it, or we are going to have problems. Jagrav is keeping her in check, for the most part.’

‘For the most part is a nice way of saying she’s controlling him.’

A pause. Then, ‘You know as well as I do that she is not. Even if she… does hold more sway than I would like, we’re still working under Jagrav and—’

This, Cynobria decided, felt like a good moment.

‘Who is Jagrav?’ she asked, coming into the kitchen’s light.

Dad almost jumped when she emerged from the shadows, while Mum stilled and, slowly, turned to Cynobria.

‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

‘I’m fourteen!’ She flared her wings, and immediately regretted it as Mum's baleful stare caught her. Her eyes—usually a warm turquoise—had not a hint of their kind understanding, and were a touch red-rimmed. Her posture was tense, like a predator ready to leap. Cynobria folded her wings back carefully, looking to Dad for support, and finding little. After a moment’s thinking she added, ‘The storm woke me up and I was hungry, so I came here.’ The look on their snouts told her they both knew it was a lie, and they knew Cynobria knew.

Her and Mum’s eyes locked again, as though their snouts were held by taut wire, and Cynobria nervously rubbed one paw against another.

‘Well,’ said Dad, fatigue in his voice stronger than before, ‘take what you want and scram.’

She broke eye contact and went to get something to eat, playing along with this shared charade. She didn’t care what she took. She wasn’t hungry. She forced her paws to stop shaking.

‘You keep mentioning him,’ she tried again. ‘And he seems to be more than a “colleague from work”. You’re working under him? Is he your boss?’

‘Cynobria,’ Mum warned, traces of a growl building in her throat. Even more than that, the word itself chilled her. She rarely called Cynobria by her full name.

She steeled herself. ‘I won’t tell anyone, I promise. I—’

‘Bree, stop,’ Dad cut in, sternly.

‘Why? Why are you being so secretive about it? If you—’

‘No.’

The reply died on Cynobria’s tongue. Mum’s tone was cold, and too calm, and Cynobria knew it was the end. She could try to reason with rejection, or argue against anger, but when Melodia used that voice, there was nothing left to do. ‘You will go back to bed, now. And you will not listen in on us again.’

‘Yes, Mum,’ Cynobria said and, after brief deliberation, headed back the way she’d come.

From the corner of her eye she saw Mum hesitate, as though she wanted to say something more. Cynobria slowed her step, but when it was clear Mum would not say anything more, she picked up her pace again.

For the rest of the night she lay, sleepless, on her cushion, the storm outside slowly dying down. Her parents seemed to have gone to sleep, or at least put out the light, and if they were talking, it was quiet enough that Cynobria couldn’t hear.

Two new figures had joined the mysterious ranks. A dragon whose name Cynobria hadn’t caught, and Orielle, a hatchling of two. They were connected to Jagrav, somehow, and he connected to her parents—they were working for him, it seemed. They served as war-time ambassadors to Tarange, but she doubted that was the correct trail. What was at play here? What were they hiding? She had to find out.

If only she knew how.