Light spills around the corner. Emilia wonders how she was seeing so deep into the Twin Peak’s roots when there’s not a single Sunstone in the roof or walls, but the question falls out of her head as an avalanche of polished bronze scales flows up the hall. She could almost believe the murals come to life as he passes, the way the light and shadow plays across them. Every stride of his wings makes the web of muscles at his strange double shoulders bunch and flex. Her fingers itch for quills and inkstone.

“What brings a lone mortal to a dragon’s lair? I understand it is frowned upon for young women to travel unchaperoned.”

She curtsies as best she can on unsteady legs, focusing on the weave of her tunic under her fingertips. “Well – well met, Lord Dragon. I’m Emilia, from the village down in the valley. I - begging your pardon, Lord Dragon, but we’re only peasants. We don’t have gold or treasure to pay tax in, and only a little coin for trading. And if – well – Uncle says the Baron’s hired Delver alchemists a time or two – so –”

As hard as she tries, her throat tightens until she can’t speak another word. A golden eye watches impassively for five, six, seven heartbeats. She could fall into its catlike pupil, darker than the space between the Stars, and vanish.

“And you desire that your village not be caught in a potential crossfire?” That’s a new word, but if Delvers are going at it with a dragon, the meaning makes itself clear enough. “Or perhaps that was an attempt at threat.”

She’s gone as sickly pale as the Moon, she knows it. “No! No, Lord Dragon, I only meant – I only –” she heaves in a shaking breath, fighting for control of her voice. The knuckles of her left hand ache, clasped under her right. “The Baron doesn’t visit, not for years. He’s half a Delver himself, Uncle says, always off fighting Scarbeasts in their dens. We’ve got a militia for when one comes up the cliffs, or when a ‘prentice Delver finds they aren’t up to it and decides they need provisions to see them home, but they’re none of them even Armsmen. All the tales say you need alchemists and Knights to fight a dragon; I only thought it might be better if nobody got the idea it might have to happen anyways.”

“Then all is well, is it not? I have no desire to open hostilities; mortals are so very social, once one of you decides I am a problem it will be all over the continent before I can so much as cry parley.”

If it weren’t for the magic that rolls off him like mist from the Highfall, she’d never be able to keep up with struggling to figure out what he’s saying under the lordly words and trying to say everything right herself and being respectful and staying on her aching feet. Old Yorl would thump her proper hard with his cane if he knew she’d drunk of it, but if a dragon decides he wants her dead, what does it matter if she burns up outside from dragonfire or inside from it turning its undigested magic against her?

“Thank you, Lord Dragon – only, um. It just takes one side to start a fight. Even if the Baron’s never here, the Magistrate still looks over us and sends messages to tell the Baron what’s what. Only he never cares about what’s right, just what makes him rich. So if he thinks he’ll profit on it, he’ll tell it like you swooped in and took me. And even though I’m not really sworn under him – I don’t greet the Stars a woman ‘til next summer and my Ma died birthing me and I never had no Pa – the Baron… he’s a fighter, see? He knows fighting, well enough he doesn’t never have to stop and think about it. So he doesn’t. And a dragon is the biggest kind of fight there can be. So if the talking doesn’t happen first, there might not be any.”

It takes a moment for her to realise all of what’s come out of her mouth in her distraction. She darts a glance up, then feels foolish; even if his face changed with his thoughts like a mortal’s does she wouldn’t know what anything meant on that great scaled muzzle.

He’s not saying anything, either. Just… watching her. Ten heartbeats. Eleven.

“Is there – my books say dragons are called by titles, like the Ruby Wrath or the Death of Light..?”

“We know each other by the sense of our magic; so few ever truly speak with mortals that there has never been any widespread need for the adoption of names. And so, amongst yourselves, you have titled us as you feel fitting.” There’s something uncanny to the way he tilts his head, choosing to echo what most people just do as part of talking. “I have had some number over the centuries, but I believe ‘the Bronze Judge’ or ‘the Scales of Wealth’ would likely be most appropriate. If I am to engage with mortal civilisation, taking on a title agreeable to inclusion in its existing structures seems the wiser course.”

“You – I’m sorry, Bronze Judge, I don’t know a lot of the words you’ve been using, but it sounds to me like you want to join the kingdom? I’ll be what help I can, only, I’ll be better help if I know for sure what it is you’re wanting.”

She wonders if the fluttering snap of the wind pulling her scarf tight was a hint at what those claws might feel like.

“Not in the sense of swearing fealty – you call it Oath, here? – but I have lived several hundred years, and in that time I have often seen mortals work together to do things none could ever have done alone. Dragons have great personal power, but we feel no need to group together as mortals do. Settling too close to another is an insult at best, and so we live alone and apart.” His lordly speech rises and falls like autumn grain when the wind sweeps along the terraces. It might be soothing if it didn’t put her in mind of how the Magistrate tries and fails to sound like this. “I have wondered for a long time what could be done if we were more willing to work with others. There are things I want that your kingdom can more easily give me than I can find for myself, and things your kingdom wants that I can offer. Would we not both benefit from giving each other these things?”

“Maybe, Lord, but only if you’re offering things you make or do yourself. My Uncle Enryk owns a trade caravan, he stops by twice a year for provisioning and brings me books and teaches me while he’s here – but trading isn’t…” her face screws up, because she loves Uncle, but: “people don’t respect trading. I don’t know how it would be for a dragon, Lord, but selling things you bought from someone else just so’s you could sell them on dearer, people don’t like it. A good crafter works for his village, or swears Oath to a noble. Join a Guild, if they’re city folk. They won’t respect you if you trade. Or if you’re named for it, Lord.”

“Well, I was hardly going to sell off my hoard!” Uncanny, again, but in his stillness now. The Bronze Judge doesn’t move with his amusement, not face nor body. It’s one thing to know dragons aren’t mortal, but seeing it makes it easy to understand why the tales all speak of how terrifying they are just to look upon. “Still, that knowledge will likely save me a mistake in future; I thank you. Is there anything you would like in return?”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“I – the stories say dragons take maidens as part of their taxes, some of them. There’s a boy. I want… I…” Heat burns at the corners of her eyes.

“Not to be taken away from him? No, clearly not. You wish to become part of my hoard, in order to avoid this boy.”

He doesn’t have any issues reading her. That’s more than passing strange; a dragon might recognise fear or a flinch, but she’d learned how to hide those years ago. Not so much her disgust, even when it got her into trouble.

“Yes, please. I – I –” She can’t remember the last time she cried, but it must have been years; the tears come haltingly, chest and shoulders hitching, throat clenching as she’s forced to squeeze them out. The sting of her knees hitting the stone passes by in the distance. Covering her face as best she can, she tries to stifle her sobs, but the panic and shame of falling apart in front of the dragon she’s petitioning only make her shake harder. “I –”

“Take your time, Emilia. I will not begrudge a mortal for merely having mortal emotions.”

It hurts to cry and it hurts to laugh and both of them together hurt worse; this isn’t how the world works! Here she is, gone to pieces in front of the most powerful lord she’s ever met, and he’s been nothing but kind.

A smear of tear-blurred bronze carefully lowers itself until – she scrubs at her eyes – he’s laid on the ground, catlike, belly to stone and chin not much higher. Golden eyes meet grey from only about two or three times her height, and he shifts his head again. It’s deliberate and forced and off. But: he’s trying. He looks at people and what they do when they talk – he must, because how else would he think to do this at all, or have learned to read mortal faces – and he’s trying to talk to her like people talk to each other.

“The things I most value in mortals are wit and reason and a willingness to learn. You have offered me useful advice, and asked of me useful questions. You did not panic or flee even when I scared you, and when your nerves were more settled, you spoke clearly and well. You are plainly quick of mind, which is far more important than how much you have had the chance to learn – I can teach you, or arrange for you to be taught. And few indeed would have had the courage to ask a dragon to change how they speak to suit the listener’s understanding!”

Oh.

“I do not usually care to hoard living beings.” Everything inside her lurches. “It is a cruelty to limit an animal’s ability to range as it wills, and they tend to fare poorly away from their natural homes. A willing mortal, however, may prove workable. We shall see.”

Oh, Sun and Stars.

Wait.

“…What happened to your voice?”

The dragon’s laughter is free and clear and as rich as the rest of his lordly speech, and she doesn’t feel like he’s making fun of her at all.

As the sun passes below the Twin Peak, she finds a better seat on a likely-looking rock and learns. Uncle nearly always has Delvers taking passage on his caravan: they get sitting travel and good food all the way back to the heartland, and the fighting’s not much worse than they’d do on foot anyways. Strong delvers can be rich as any lord, so she’s seen a few lutes and lyres played, turning the shivering of their strings into beautiful sweet sound. It’s amazing to find out that people’s voices work the same way – that if she puts a hand to her throat as she sings, she can feel the ‘vibration’ of the little strings inside her neck.

It makes sense, too, that dragons speak with alchemy instead of strings. There was one Delver minstrel who had a really huge lute, and it sang deeper than Old Yorl’s pipe-roughened crooning of the history-songs each solstice. She can’t imagine what strings the size of a dragon’s neck would sound like!

The last hearth-glow begins to fade from the sky, and she pulls her scarf up around her face, looking out into the Scar. When she was knee-high to an aurochs, a copse of gnarled cronetrees lurked on the southeastern horizon beyond a leagues-wide swathe of pretty, perfumed flower-fens. Now, the bloody stain of their leaves has spread over near that entire span. Old Yorl would call it an omen. Emilia will content herself that at least the cronetrees wear their nature proudly.

She shivers, then startles as the leathery sails of the Bronze Judge’s wing unfurl between her and the growing southerly wind.

“You will need shelter for the night, and flying you down to the village unannounced would likely scare them too much for anyone to be sensible about it. Come along; you may guest with me, and return afoot in the morning to speak to your Magistrate, carrying my call for parley – do you know the word?”

Even at last light, his scales glitter like the Meltwater at high Sun as he flows back into his entrance-hall. Nothing that big should move so easily. She shakes her head, even though he didn’t look back, and smiles when he answers anyway.

“To parley is to speak under an oath of peace, to try to make a deal that will stop – or avoid starting – a fight. In war, most often, a party will ride out from each line of battle to meet on the field in full view of both armies, or the defenders of a fortification will permit an alchemist of the sieging army to raise an officer level with the outer walls. In this case, there is a clearing northwest of your village which I think would suit.”

She knows the one – a spur of granite juts out high and sharp by the Meltwater, swarming every summer with boys scrambling up the river face and competing to make the biggest splash, finish the hardest routes, climb to and dive from the highest point. Its northward lee is always shadowed, so despite being well-sheltered, fertile clay loam, no great trees grow there and it just isn’t worth farming. It’s still rich in berries, wild herbs, and other scrub-forage – also in ankle-twisting burrows, and hadn’t that been an awful autumn – but she supposes that when you’re four stories at the shoulder, even the most tightly knotted brush may as well be bare earth.

“So as to make sure I know what you’re wanting, Lord – the Magistrate will ask me – you want to talk to the Baron about, about making a deal between you like nobles do, so you can live here without having to fight him over it, and getting introduced to the rest of the nobles so you can deal with them too?”

“Just so.”

“And if it’s well – can I ask what it is you’re offering, Lord? Only, if you want the Magistrate or the Baron to trust that you’ll talk to them instead of…”

“Doing as my kin do, and demanding under threat of death and ruin?”

“… Aye, Lord. I only think it might help if I can show them you do talk. If I can tell them what kind of things you’re wanting and what it is you’re offering, that might help them think of how it could work instead of how it could go wrong.”

“A fine thought. It will likely take some time to talk through the matter fully, however, and while dragons may be fond of rest it is mortals who need it.”

The eye he fixes her with is too cold for the amusement in his scolding. She feels like she’s starting to figure him out a little, now.

“I have noticed you drawing on my magic.”

Ducking her blush into her scarf, she quickens her pace. How far beneath the Twin Peak is the Bronze Judge’s lair? The corner wasn’t a corner at all, but the start of a spiral that continues the entrance hall’s slope down into the mountain’s roots. There must be powerful alchemy at work to keep it standing, with how hard Miner Bodan works to stop his tunnels collapsing when they’re hardly big enough for mortals; she still doesn’t know if that means the murals following them down are truly some kind of powerful wardoff or if it’s not visible to the eye at all.

There’s plenty of dragons, carved down to every individual scale; many of them are shown killing all kinds of foemen and Scarbeasts, and many others gathering and protecting hoards. Dragon-tales don’t have much to say about art except for the bits about stealing it. Do most dragons just not make any of their own? Or do mortal tales talk about dragons like Smith Arter talking about her Uncle, picking out all the ways he’s no more perfect than any other person and ignoring all the ways he's no less? She doesn’t know.

And while she’s thinking about the murals, why can she still see past the pool of brightness cast by the Bronze Judge’s scales, three full spirals and counting under the mountains with not a single Sunstone to be found?

Four and a half spirals deep, she forgets about the sourceless light entirely.