by Lilly Pink
“Welcome to the House of Healing,” Ameretat said then, answering Zoe’s unasked question. “Normally, there would be a few other healers here, but we have no patients at the moment so I sent them home when we spotted Kian flying in. Not that they’re bad people, but as you might imagine, everyone is curious about you, and I thought you might need a moment to yourself.”
“Thank you,” Zoe said with a sigh. “It has been kind of a crazy day. Everything here is so…. unreal. We don’t have magic, or dragons… or anything like this in my world. I guess I’m having a hard time accepting it.”
“I don’t blame you,” Ameretat said, easily, patting a cloth-padded table to indicate that Zoe should sit. “That’s a lot to take in. I can’t imagine how I’d react if I suddenly found out I was pregnant by some guy I barely remembered meeting in my dreams. And then waking up in a different world where everything you thought you only imagined was real? Kian’s taking it personally, I assume?” She extended her hand in Zoe’s direction, and it began to glow with a green-gold light.
Zoe sighed and nodded, her shoulders slumping. “I think he tries not to let it bother him, but I know it does. I’m not sure what to tell him.”
“I think all you can do is give it time. I mean, I can tell you this is real until I’m blue in the face, but that’s not exactly proof, is it? Kian has always been one to trust his intuition, to put his whole heart into everything. And he’s loved you for so long. I think it’s hard for him to look at the situation from the outside.” Ameretat lowered her hand and smiled. “I mean, you know he’s real, at least? You agreed to come with him, and you seemed happy to be with him.”
“Yes. That does seem kind of illogical, doesn’t it? Even when I knew I was dreaming, I was sure somehow, that he was a real person. Like someone from a past life, or a ghost, or I don’t know.” Zoe shrugged. “I guess even my own attempts to rationalize everything don’t make much sense.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’m sure once you’ve settled in, everything will start to feel less surreal. And I can almost guarantee that once you’ve given birth, you’ll know it’s real and wish it wasn’t,” she added with a knowing laugh. “It’s hard to tell much this early, but the pregnancy seems to be developing completely normally. You’re healthy, the baby’s moving around in there fine, with a nice strong heartbeat. I’d guess you’re about three months along.”
“Are pregnancies the same length for your people?” Zoe asked, abruptly made aware of the fact that people who lived thousands of years might develop at a leisurely pace.
“Don’t worry,” Ameretat said with a grin. “It’s just nine months for us too. Something about the mother shielding the developing child from the time-altering effects of magic exposure. Next time, I’ll break out all the tools and let you listen in on the heartbeat and stuff, but you look tired. Plus I don’t think Kian would forgive me if he missed that.”
He rushed into the room as if he’d been summoned. “I am sorry it took me so long to get here, but I was stopped no less than three times on the way here. I believe they were lying in wait. Is everything well?”
“Everything is fine,” Ameretat said easily. “But I think you ought to take Zoe somewhere to rest and eat. She looks half-dead. She flew a long way for her first time.”
Kian looked more closely at Zoe and seemed concerned by what he saw. “I am sorry, my heart. I should have taken things slower, but I was anxious to return. We will take it easy for the rest of the day.”
Zoe would have liked to reassure him, but the truth was that, now that the excitement and joy of flying had worn off, she felt exhaustion settling into her bones. She bid goodbye to Ameretat, and let Kian guide her to their rooms, which was located on one of the upper floors of Darisam Eunir. Luckily, the tower had magically operated elevators, because Zoe knew she wouldn’t have been able to make it up so many flights of stairs.
A meal was delivered less than an hour after their arrival, a huge variety of food, some rich and flavorful and some simple and comforting. “Do they really think we’re going to eat all this?” she asked Kian with wide eyes.
“I doubt it,” he replied with a smile, putting down the book he had been reading to her. “Likely, Ameretat informed the kitchen to add some less exotic food, in case your stomach was sensitive. She has always been good at thinking of things like that, and I likely would not have. As I’m sure you have heard, she despairs at my incompetence.”
They spent the rest of the day in their rooms. Kian read to her for a while, and then they talked while he answered a few letters. There weren’t many, since everyone lived in the palace most of the time, but it was still considered proper for certain kinds of requests and announcements to be issued in writing. The alphabet was like nothing Zoe had ever seen, but Kian assured her that she could be taught to read it easily.
That night, she laid in his arms listening to his breath fall into a slow sleepy rhythm, and she poured her heart into asking whoever was listening to please let it all be real. Or at least, if it was a dream, she hoped she would never have to wake up.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next few weeks were busy ones. Zoe had lessons in magic with Darya, and Zhubin taught her some self-defense. It was both traditional and necessary, Kian had explained, for her to have some weapons training. “Kumarinatu is still a dangerous place outside the palace walls. There are things in the deepest woods that could easily take down a lone dragon. And though I would like to assure you that the palace itself is safe, I cannot truly make that promise.” He wouldn’t say much more about the subject, except to say that Kumari politics were once notoriously bloody, and times of change were always the most dangerous.
After trying her out with several types of weapons, Zhubin told her that, though he would teach her to fight using a rapier and dagger together at a later time, he thought she was most suited to staff work and archery. For that, she would train with Shahin. She was good with a longbow, and the master hunter believed that with practice and the aid of focused spell work, she would be a truly formidable archer.
However, that wouldn’t be helpful for close fighting. The advantage of a staff was that it was a weapon that could be improvised from many random objects and could provide attack as well as defense.
Every day they would go through the forms, and when Zoe became proficient with one skill, Shahin would add another. After about an hour of that, they would have a few practice matches, so she could actually see and feel the moves in action. There were very few people who were actually trusted enough to spar with her, so it was often Shahin himself who she battled, but not always. She would need experience fighting people with different styles, and learn to take advantage of weaknesses in opponents of different sizes by changing her technique.
Perhaps Zoe didn’t take this training as seriously as she should have, and that was partly because she couldn’t imagine she’d ever have to do much in the way of fighting. She was rarely, if ever, alone, and she had certainly never left the palace since they had arrived. Plus, she figured most combat situations could be solved by becoming a dragon and chomping her assailant in half.
But there was also the fact that, deep down, this was all still a game to her. A game of waiting for the end she was sure was coming. She wasn’t completely convinced it wasn’t a dream, though she supposed that most of her dreams didn’t cover so many mundane activities in detail.
The other possibility, which had seemed more and more likely as time went on, was that Kian would tire of her, now that he saw what she was really like. Zoe had met most of the women in Darisam Eunir by now, and had realized that compared to even the kitchen staff, she was boring, uneducated, and weak.
Kian had seemed distant lately; he was busy with the duties of running the kingdom, small as it was, and often stayed up late in the night, researching. She figured it was only a matter of time before he realized that his feelings for her were just an adolescent crush that had gone on way past its due date, and
he would discard her for someone more suited to him.
It would, of course, break Zoe’s heart, but considering she’d been dropped into the middle of a fairy tale, it hardly seemed reasonable to expect to marry the handsome prince, too. A part of her was already preparing herself for what seemed, to her mind, like the inevitable conclusion.
The disaster she expected came in a way that she hadn’t imagined. Shahin had introduced a new sparring partner, a fierce woman with bright red hair in long braids, whose name was Ankila. She wasn’t very talkative, though Zoe saw in her demonstration match with Shahin that she was quite skilled, fighting in a fast style that relied on agility and misdirection.
Zoe knew she would lose; she always lost, but no one ever really hurt her, not wanting to upset Kian. That was part of her lack of caution, but another part of it was frustration. Though she hadn’t even been able to put into words yet, Zoe was tired of waiting for this fantasy to end.
She was tired of feeling like the dumbest person in the room, tired of being treated like a precious artifact, tired of people acting like she was special but never explaining why. Zoe knew better. She was a boring, ordinary person, who had a boring, ordinary life, and that was exactly what she deserved and ought to expect. It was time for the universe to stop fucking with her or whatever, and for things to get back to normal.
With all this on her mind, she readied herself to face Ankila in the practice ring. There was no way she’d be able to outmaneuver or overpower someone with so much experience, so Zoe decided to go for fierce and unpredictable. She figured this plan would only work for a few seconds, but it might allow her to get a few good hits in if she was lucky.
Shahin counted to three and said go. Zoe didn’t even wait for him to get the word all the way out before she flung herself at Ankila like a madwoman. It actually went better than she expected at first. The other woman was so stunned that she didn’t even move when Zoe swung her stave hard against her unarmored shin. But then Ankila got mad, her eyes narrowing in an expression that was surprisingly close to hatred.
She did not hold back as the others had. Her first blow cracked so hard against Zoe’s left arm that she cried out in pain, her staff falling from nerveless fingers. And then, despite Shahin shouting at her to stop, she struck Zoe so hard on the side of the head that she fell stunned to the ground.
Her ears were ringing and the world swam sickeningly, but Zoe was pretty sure Ankila spat in the general direction of her face. “You aren’t even worth my time,” she hissed. “Certainly not his.” Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to express her agreement with that sentiment as it became imperative that she closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, she saw that she was back in the House of Healing, feeling surprisingly well considering everything that had just happened. Her arm and head ached, and her mouth tasted of cloves, but otherwise she was intact, and sitting up didn’t make anything worse. Ameretat probably did some sort of healing magic on you, said her mind. Zoe had been hoping her magical gifts would run to healing, but so far, they mostly seemed to be geared toward accidental explosions.
There were familiar voices in the corridor. “I promise you, she is perfectly all right. You really ought to let her rest.”
“Please let me through, Ameretat.” Kian’s voice was terse but somehow, also plaintive. “I swear if you do not move out of the way, I will teleport you to the roof again.”
“Stubborn ass,” the healer muttered as Kian came pushing through the door curtain.
He looked Zoe up and down for a moment, as if making sure she was all in one piece, and then he strode to her, taking her by the shoulders, but not for comfort. “What were you thinking? Is this some sort of game to you?” he asked, his voice fierce but not quite shouting.
She was more than a bit surprised by his reaction. “Kian, I don’t…” she started to say, but he kept talking right over her.
“Shahin said that you ignored everything he taught you and threw yourself into a fight like a lunatic. With no regard to your safety or anyone else’s. You could have been seriously injured. Is this some part of bizarre plan to force yourself to wake up? This is not a dream anymore, Zoe, if you die here, you just die!” By the end of his tirade, he was actually shouting, and there was a part of Zoe that realized, with more wisdom than she usually possessed, that this was mostly his fear speaking.
But a larger and louder part of Zoe was through with being reasonable. Tears were already streaming down her face when she shoved his hands away. “Maybe I wanted you to wake up, Kian. I’m sure you heard all about what that woman thinks of me. You’re the only one who doesn’t see it.
I’m tired of being treated like a fragile treasure, too delicate to touch and too dumb to be spoken to. I know I’m nothing special, and so does everyone else. This is not a fairy tale; people like me don’t get happily ever after. I’m sure you’ve got some rainbow fairy princess to marry, who will understand all this magical bullshit and be able to sing birds out of the trees, or make dreams come to life, or whatever it is you’re looking for.
Why don’t you just face the truth and send me to work in the kitchens? At least I’d be useful there,” she finished bitterly, barely able to speak through her own heartbreak. Kian looked stunned, and he reached for her, but she pushed past him, as well as Ameretat, her furious hurt carrying her right out into the corridor. Her feet didn’t want to stop, and so she kept going until she was almost running, ignoring whatever sounds of protest came from passers-by.
Back in the House of Healing, Ameretat pulled back the curtain to find Kian still standing in the middle of the room looking as if he’d been hit over the head. “Well, that went fantastically,” she said in an acid tone. “Remind me to never ask you for relationship advice.”
He dragged his hand over his face and shook his head. “I did not handle that very well, did I? I should go after her. As upset as she is, she might leave the palace entirely, and I…” he took a shuddering breath. “I cannot lose her.”
“You stay right here, dunderhead,” the healer said, shoving him unceremoniously into a chair. “I’ll send someone to find her. Someone who has more than a drop of common sense, and far less feet in their mouth.”
***
Zoe had eventually hidden herself in one of the more secluded gardens. She had wanted to leave, just fly off into the wild where she could be alone, but she knew that even as a dragon, she’d be unlikely to escape unseen during the day. I’ll wait until nighttime, she told herself. By then, she reasoned that the guards wouldn’t be watching so closely for her and she could slip away in the darkness before anyone realized she was gone.
There were probably plenty of empty caves in the mountains where she could live for a while. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to hunt as a dragon. Maybe there were even other empty dragon houses like Kian‘s tower out there somewhere.
You don’t want to leave Kian. You love him, said her traitorous thoughts. “It’s better this way, better for everyone,” she muttered, drawing her knees up to her chest and hugging herself. The air got cold as the sun started setting, but the garden was peaceful and completely empty. Zoe wondered how long she could stay there without anyone noticing.
“You are clever at concealing yourself, my lady,” came Darya’s voice from behind her, making her jump. “You should be going out with the scouts.”
“Ha!” she retorted in a mirthless laugh. “I’m sure that’s just what they want. Being saddled with a rank amateur who they have to be nice to because the king has some bizarre attachment.” Zoe set her head on her knees with a scowl. “No thanks.”
The older woman came to sit beside her, giving her plenty of space, and looking out into the garden with a soft smile. “You will have to excuse their haughtiness somewhat, I‘m afraid. No one here has been an amateur at anything for more than fifty years. It has been quite a while since we have been given the opportunity to teach.”
“Sometimes I forget how long you all live. And Ki
an is the youngest here,” Zoe said with a sigh. “I suppose it’s fitting that everyone treats me like a child.”
“They do not know how to treat you. To us, you are more of a symbol than a person. A herald of change. We approach with fear, with wonder, with confusion, but sometimes we forget you also have feelings,” Darya replied with a wry grimace.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why does everyone think I’m so special? Just because I’m pregnant? Believe me, in my world that’s nothing to write home about.”
“Perhaps not. Here, it is like a tale come to life, but there is more to it than that. Do you know why the Kumari have not borne any children?”
“I don’t know,” Zoe said, frowning as she realized how incongruous it was. “I just took it at face value, but it doesn’t really make sense. Most of you seem young enough, and there’s a pretty even mix of genders. Are you all related or something?”
“If that were the only problem, I suspect we would have overcome our qualms about close family mating, for the sake of survival alone,” Darya said with a grim chuckle. “The Kumari cannot conceive children with just anyone, as I believe is the case with your people. All of us have one true mate, bestowed by the gods. Part gift, and part curse. A payment of sorts, they say, for the privilege of being dragon-born, and intended to keep our population from expanding too quickly, I suspect.
A Kumari who finds their true mate will never want another, but it has been centuries, maybe more than 1500 years, since any of us have found our intended. Thus, no children. Faizel and his wife were the last mated pair. She died in the same accident that killed Kian’s father, perhaps eighty years ago now, and their only child died young.”
“You mean, Kian and I are… soul mates, or something like that?” It certainly explained the strength of her feelings for him, though there was a stubborn part of her that was upset about being bound to a stranger by some weird magic arranged marriage.
