First light lingers overlong, dyeing the clouds like an ageing bruise. Even after she gets her blood up walking the long spiral hall, the night-chilled air scrapes down her throat and creeps into her ears. The ache in her jaw is almost enough to cover the spark of pain that rushes up her legs with every step.

Animals have short memories and no care to mind a young woman’s strained mood. The dread that smothered the upper valley as the Bronze Lord swept in to land is long behind, and the air is heavy with birdsong. Emilia feels her face twist as she picks out a belligerent snowgale warning a rival off his chosen mate.

She plucks yellow petals from stands of ridgefurze as she passes, laying them flat against her tongue. Chrysanthe is better for dyeing Sungold; all furze-flowers can offer is their nutty sweetness. In good years, when the Scar is quiet, a few wildsmen might make this climb at the trailing end of autumn.

Each winter solstice, once the history-songs are sung and the ready ‘prentices titled as crafters and fighting men, the whole village comes together for Suncalling. They sing and dance and celebrate the Sun’s protection, pass out brightberry cordial to the children and golden mead to the adults, eat little yellow sweetcakes made with preserved furze petals, and offer up magic to strengthen the Sun for its next year of battle against the Moon.

Tucked high and deep into her least-used bookshelf is an almanac she’s never found comfort reading the way she does other books, whose Scholar author can’t never have felt a touch of the Sun’s light with how he claims the turning of the seasons is all just numbers and alchemy. Today, Emilia would be well pleased if she could sit reading about soulless heartlander astronomy until last light. She’ll enjoy the furze petals while she can, and never mind the scrapes and pricks on her fingers.

By the time she’s run out, the Sun is properly up, heath has given way to scrub, and the woods aren’t so far off. After backtracking thrice to get around a thick swathe of bramble she could have sworn wasn’t there on the way up, she realises the trees don’t look so large to her, now. Even the mightiest hundred-span spruce seems narrow as a reed against the wingspan of a dragon.

It’s hard to get her head around the Bronze Judge, even after their talk this morning.

“I think this a fine chance,” he had said, “for some learning. Tell me what you think I might offer your nobility, and what you think I might want from them.”

It had unsettled her; she couldn’t tell what kind of answer he was looking for. But he’d waited while she foraged for thoughts, hunter-still and patient. She hadn’t been – not scared, but it had felt more like telling Hunter Saban what she’d learned about wildscraft and herbcunning, so he knew what she still needed teaching, than being harried by the older women about her future. By Young Tom and his lackeys demanding to know where she’d been and what she’d been doing.

Everybody wants to keep what they think is theirs. A noble wouldn’t be happy with a dragon meddling in her affairs rather than keeping to his own. Dragons take and take and take; she’d be thinking about what she had to lose rather than what she stood to gain, even though a Camlan Kingdom with the friendship of a dragon could do so much to reduce the threat of the Scar, free up riches and men…

Yet, when the Scar simmers too low, the Marquises of the Barrier Hills find themselves at loose ends behind the ever-churning Bloody Marshes. They start sizing each other up like Butcher Damek with a fresh elk. The heartland nobles are always at loose ends, rich and fat and sheltered.

The Magistrate is at loose ends, too, with everything arranged just as it pleases him. What would he be like with towns and cities and leagues and leagues of truewild to prey on?

So she’d imagined herself like a heartlander. Safe behind the marcher lords, where a Scarbeast attack is talked about like news. Fancy dresses with their own little wardoffs stitched in gemthread, worn just once for all the hours on hours of work it takes a whole passel of craft-masters to make one. Her manse all decorated like a little copy of the Bronze Judge’s lair, with a whole town of Oathmen laid out around it. Contracts with Guilds, a monopoly or two from the Thrones, and nobody else matters except for how they can make her richer or safer.

What do I fear of a dragon? What do I want of him? What can I offer him?

She fears he might quarrel with the marcher lords, destroying them and setting the Scar on her. She fears he might destroy her. She fears losing her monopoly to craft beyond mortal skill, or such craft being taught to the Oathmen of her rivals. She fears her riches being taken away to his hoard and facing the choice of war with a dragon or grubbing in the dirt like a peasant, because her skin is soft and pale and her body is weak and she can’t tell lavender from ergot. She fears he has a mind like the dragon-tales speak of, and she’ll end up doing whatever he decides and thinking it’s her own idea. She fears that he’ll deal with her rivals and not with her.

She wants him to destroy the Scar, or as much of it as possible, so she doesn’t have to pay as much in tithes and taxes. She wants him to teach her Oathmen, especially her alchemists. She wants him to come to her defence if she’s ever threatened. She wants him to deal with her instead of her rivals. She wants him to destroy her rivals without anyone knowing she turned him on them, so she can have more contracts and more monopolies and more wealth and less fighting over it. She wants the Camlan Kings to not think she’s a threat, unless she’s sure the dragon will destroy them, take the Thrones or give them to her. She wants him to have the kind of mind the dragon-tales speak of, because she knows what it is to hunger for more no matter how much you already have, to look at the world and ask ‘how can you be useful to me?’.

She doesn’t know what she can offer him, if he doesn’t want to demand taxes like other dragons. The Camlan Kings wouldn’t never let any mortal lord accept Oath from their people without swearing to them in turn. They’d certainly never deal with a foreign noble, no matter what the offer. For a dragon? She can’t say. The Scar-lords trade with Uncle because they all know every chance they take for themselves is a chance the Scar doesn’t get to kill them. The marcher lords sometimes trade with him at removes, if they feel the need to weight the scales. No Earl has ever had anything to do with a trader, or if they have Uncle’d die for speaking of it. They’ve enough Oathmen to cover any craft you could name, save what’s banned to them by monopolies, so they hardly even deal between themselves. And never mind some higher lord!

But mortals are mortals, and a dragon is a dragon.

It hadn’t all come out that pretty. She’d let her mouth run while she thought, crossing back over herself, guessing and recanting. Once she’d near enough played out the mine, the Bronze Judge had stopped her.

“That will do for a starting point; you lack practice and training in rhetoric –” he’d explained ‘rhetoric’, as he did for each new word “– but those can come with time. I have found that very few mortals will easily admit a lack of knowledge; your willingness to do so, and to apply reason in its place, continue to speak well of you.”

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Emilia knows that pain. The world is so much bigger than it had seemed when she was small; there’s no craft or land or history on which all her books together could hold enough knowledge you’d never want for more. Her friends will listen to her about her reading, ask polite questions – they’ll be happy that she’s happy, and that she’s sharing her happiness with them – but none of them much care for aught beyond their crafts.

Oliga’s interest in teaching-chants and tale-songs is only proper for a ‘prentice Teacher. Hana is barely even a ‘prentice; like as not she’d have been titled this winter gone had she already greeted the Sun. Weaver Danuta is near-blind now, hands more gnarled with every season, and only through skill and stubbornness has she yet to set aside the loom and become Old Danuta.

Idony and Hana’s joy in tales of courtly nonsense is silly and girlish enough to pass unremarked; more so for a ‘prentice Dyer and Weaver, who must surely dream of swearing Oath to a noble and turning their craft to better ends than peasant garb.

Her friends’ only true flaw as girls is not caring for Emilia’s impropriety.

She hopes they’re well. Guilt strikes her as she realises they must be wondering after her; they’ll surely have heard by now it was her as brought the warning. It’ll be a good hundred degrees of the Sun before she reaches the village again, and she’ll have to go to the Magistrate first thing.

Remembering the end of her talk with the Bronze Judge puts a flush on her face. She’d been well pleased with his praise, but what followed had been less pleasant.

“I know no better than you whether your Kings will wish to deal with me – there is much that I can offer, but though I have learned to recognise mortal emotions, I am often lost as to what provokes them. Without knowing, all we can do is ask. And the first step, before we must consider Kings and Dukes, is your Baron and his Magistrate.”

She’d gone up to meet him in the first place for fear of them starting a fight that would see the village put to flame! Forgetting that to chase after dragon-tales, full of royalty and high nobles – foolish. Embarrassing.

Almost worse, for how calmly he corrected her; it must have seemed to an onlooker very much like Oliga at the schoolhouse, taking every childish whimsy in stride. Having drawn them back to the matter at hand, he’d put aside the question of what he might have to offer. To low nobles, so far from the War King’s support, a dragon’s offer of parley was its own reason to accept.

Once he’d given her a message to carry, he’d moved on to teaching – or, really, to promising her that there would be teaching, once things had settled enough for the time to be set aside.

“In the meantime,” he’d added, “a first step to improve your rhetoric is to be specific. We are different people, from different places, who have learned different things and different amounts of things. I can suppose what you mean to say, if I am uncertain. But how can I be sure I suppose correctly, if you are not clear? I have found that mortals will use even the slightest unclarity as an excuse to decide that you have said what they think you have said, whatever the truth of your words.”

The dragon-fear is as famous as dragons themselves. As famous as their hoarding and their fire. She’d seen the Bronze Judge trying to cover his unnatural stillness, but she hadn’t understood. Not until she thought of the Magistrate trying to act a noble, Young Tom playing at courtship with a thin cloth of manners thrown over his Scarbeast soul.

“Words are easy, Lord. Anyone can use ‘em however they like and never mean one piece of it. It’s how you say things as really matters, how you stand and the face you’re making and the look in your eyes. I get in trouble a lot, ‘cause I can’t never fake being grateful to be told I’m a fool for not thinking marriage and babes are more important than – than reading, or learning, or being happy.”

“Ahh. And so, when I do this..?”

He’d tilted his head again, as strange and wrong as before; Emilia nodded. “Aye, Lord – it don’t come natural to you, anyone can see it. It’s well that you’re trying, but…”

“Using the wrong gestures may be worse than not using any at all. Not quite a dual language, but a composite one; the physical components modify the verbal. Fascinating. How would one best go about learning?”

“I’m sorry, Lord, everyone just – knows. I don’t think it’s ever taught, no more than speaking is; there’s some as can wear any face that pleases them, whatever’s in their heart, but I’ve not never been one of them. I s’pose for mortals you’d learn from your parents, or whoever raised you. For dragons…”

It’s not a helpful answer. He watches her duck her head – remembering the movement and what prompted it? Writing it down in some journal of the mind, tucked onto a bookshelf with all the other mortal gestures he’s learned?

“There are many schools which teach students to speak languages other than those they are born to. Yet I have never found one which teaches this language of the body.”

She’d been surprised, then wondered why; she’s read of foreign lands whose speech is different, and Dushya – one of Uncle’s people – talks only in his birthtongue, though he’s always understood her just fine. If other languages exist, why should schoolhouses not teach them?

Foreign travellers aren’t welcome in Camlan lands; no noble would let time be wasted on better speaking with the few who dare. As soon as they can walk, boys start the training that threshes out future Armsmen and Knights from crafters and Militiamen. Girls learn at their mother’s knee what it takes to keep a house, and are tried out on the handful of crafts as are proper for them; by the time the boys know who’ll go to the Baron’s keep – sometimes, for Squires, even on to the heartland – most girls are already ‘prenticed.

But not all kingdoms suffer the Scar.

If she was a noble, she’d believe that a dragon would deal with her to get more power. She’d believe a dragon thinks like her, because being a noble obviously makes her better than everyone else. She wouldn’t believe that those deals come without traps in, because hers wouldn’t.

Emilia isn’t sure she believes it. If the Bronze Judge lied, how would she be able to tell?

Doubt had crept in like cloudfog drifting down the valley. If dragons were mortals, and you got all of them anyone’s ever written of gathered together, the village would still outnumber them thrice over. One of them showing up here and now, only a year before she comes of age and Young Tom demands to marry her – she’d thanked the Sun for her fortune, but A Study on Dragons spent a whole chapter on how dragons are clever enough that their plans often seem like a lot of really good luck until you look back at how it all lined up.

Turning her worries round and round in her head takes her well into the woods. The brush whispers, rustles – she freezes in place as a carpet of grey-brown fur parts around her ankles. A skulk of foxes follows, driving the hares’ pell-mell flight. In their wake, the undergrasses stand back up – mostly – and the usual noise of the forest returns. She plucks a limp stalk, breaking it off at the crease so as not to hurt the rootweb, and takes the chance to double up her braid-tie.

Scrubfowl bwok in distant startlement at the bray and crash of a goathog taking offence to the disturbance. Emilia angles her course away.

There’s no way the Bronze Judge’s scale could fall out of her bag, but the strangeness of it under her fingers still comforts her. She could go the rest of her life and not know what runs through a dragon’s mind. What does it matter if or why he uses her, when being used means a whole manor in his lair and a library bigger than she could ever finish and freedom from Young Tom?

Every wildsman and their ‘prentice will be picking through the upper woods today, and they’ll none of them hold their questions until she’s back at the village, however prettily she asks. She has to stop distracting herself and figure out what she’s going to say if she meets them.

Will they even believe her? She hadn’t thought of it, and she’s got the scale, but – it’s one thing to see a dragon and pass warning. It’s another to run off and talk to him and bring back a message. Everyone gets told dragon-tales as a child. Everyone knows what dragons are like.

It’s lonely, when you weren’t cast from the right mould.