As she reached the top, magic buzzed faintly on her skin. Mika’s ward, she assumed. She looked down. Farther down than she’d come up.
It didn’t look much like an amphitheater anymore. Where rows of seats had stepped neatly down toward the stage, stone buttressed the earthen wall she’d climbed. Not solid stone, nor were the boulders arrayed with the tidy geometrics humans favored; it was thicker here, thinner there, with the occasional jut of a boulder clearly not native to this soil. An artistic choice, perhaps. At its foot was bare earth—Mika’s landing pad and sun porch. Beyond that, the half dome where orchestras had played was partly obscured by hard-packed dirt built up to create a lip. The dome’s roof was obscured by yet more heaped dirt. For a startled moment it made Lily think of an enormous sand crab burrowing down to safety.
Dragons always lair in earth and rock. They blocked the mental cacophony. “Hello, Mika,” Lily said—and nearly jumped when a small, gray streak arrowed past her feet. A cat.
I named her Beelzebub, Mika said. His mental voice was different from Sam’s—cool and precise, yes, but without the razorlike clarity, and with a whiff of flavor. It was like the difference between Arctic ice and a snow cone dribbled with a few drops of Bahama Mama. She wanted more syllables at first, but I don’t think her name should be longer than she is. Beelzebub is a use-name, of course.
“Ah—do cats have real names?” Lily eyed the rocky jumble. This was going to be harder than the other side had been. Her bad arm twinged as if already protesting its role in the descent.
Your question is silly. I don’t know all cats.
“I suppose not. Look, do I have to come down there for my lesson? Maybe we could do it with me up here.”
No. Thirty feet below and twice that far horizontally, the shiny coils disposed on the sun porch began unwinding. Mika wasn’t as large as Sam—no longer than a house, she thought, tail included, and dragons were eighty percent tail, neck, and wings. But he was ohmygod beautiful.
His scales were red. All shades of red, from ruby to magenta to crimson, shading into eye-popping orange on the wings currently folded along his back. He glistened and gleamed in the sunlight like every jewel men had ever coveted.
Sam said you had sustained damage to your limb. I perceive it has not healed. Humans heal poorly. This impedes you? Hold still. I’ll fetch you.
“No, that’s not necessary, I can—” But dragons can move fast when they want. Before Lily could finish telling him not to, Mika’s bunched haunches had launched him into the air. He jumped most of the ninety feet between them to land in a blaze of brilliance, wings outstretched for balance. Landed lightly, too, his rear talons gripping a couple of those outthrust boulders.
His front talons gripped her. She made a deeply undignified noise more squeak than scream.
You are very loud, Mika told her disapprovingly. And shoved himself backward off the stone-strewn embankment.
The trip down was scary and uncomfortable—his talons were rough and gripped too tightly—but blessedly brief. They hit with a small jolt and a flurry of dust from his wings. He set her down and folded those wings back in place.
Lily’s legs tried to buckle. She stiffened them. I did not scream.
You think loudly. Or you were. Your mindspeech isn’t that bad. It’s bad, just not as bad as I thought it would be.
Oh. She’d done it again—used mindspeech without meaning to. That had happened three times in the past month. Well, four now. The other three had all been with Rule, which was just as well. Some people would get upset if they found her thoughts in their heads all of a sudden.
You didn’t intend to? Headshaking was not a dragon gesture, but Mika flavored his reply with something very like a disgusted headshake.
“Sam doesn’t want me to practice on my own.”
Of course not. At this stage, you would only acquire bad habits. Sit down and we will start.
She obeyed. “I know why Sam is teaching me. Why did you agree to do it, too?”
You know very little. It is not surprising you ask a great many questions. Mika’s head darted to the right and swung back with a small branch in his mouth. He dropped it in front of her. It burst into flame. Find me there.
Great. She’d hoped a different teacher meant different methods. With a sigh, Lily looked at the small fire.
Her left ankle itched. The flames were too bright, making her squint. Why had she been determined to do this? Because Rule didn’t want her to? Surely she had a better reason.
Oh, yeah. Because Sam told her to. But that reminded her . . . I promised Rule I’d tell you about my headache.
That was pathetic. You sent perhaps one word in three. If I weren’t able to read your mind anyway, I’d have no idea what you said. What headache?
“Have you ever taught anyone?”
No. I thought it might be interesting. So far it isn’t.
“You aren’t supposed to tell your students they’re pathetic.” She went on to describe her brief pain-in-the-skull, ending with, “. . . since kinspeech hurt me in sort of the same way, Rule wants to be assured the headache has nothing to do with my mindspeech lessons.”
Kinspeech is not mindspeech.
“Sam says they’re related.”
You’re related to Beelzebub, since you are both mammals, but you are not Beelzebub. If mindspeech could damage you, Sam would have warned me. Find me in the flame.
When Mika called an end to the session, Lily had found him three times. She lost him again each time, but she was encouraged. She hadn’t been sure how well her practice at finding Sam would translate to finding Mika. Turned out it was pretty much the same . . . a lot like groping in the dark with her hands tied behind her, trying to pick up a feather with her toes. Mostly she failed, but at least now she could tell what the feather felt like if she did come across it.
And her head didn’t hurt. In spite of her insistence to Rule that her mindspeech lessons weren’t the cause of that brief headache, she was relieved.
That was more interesting than I’d hoped.
“Oh?” Lily felt as wrung out as if she’d spent the past hour running.
Not your mindspeech. That remains pathetic. But human brains are interesting—much more elastic than human minds, fortunately, which I suppose is necessary, given your brief allotment of time. You wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to learn much of anything. Yours is forming new synaptic connections quite rapidly.
“You’ve been watching my brain?”
Perceiving is a better descriptive. I am uncommonly good at this.
“Is this perception like what a physical empath does?”
Closer to what one of your healers does. I need to observe that. I am not perfectly clear on the time frame, but since it will fall to me to—oh. You don’t know about that yet.
“About what?”
If you don’t know, I can’t tell you. There was a broody feel to his thoughts. This splintering of time can be disruptive. I am not accustomed to it.
Alarmed, she sat up straighter. “What splintering? What are you—does this have anything to do with—”
The troubles foreseen by your Ruben Brooks? Of course. Oh. You are thinking I meant that time itself splinters. His breath huffed out, hot and smelling of metal and spice, in what might have been amusement. No. I am newly arrived at . . . you lack a referent. It is the time when a dragon begins to grasp threads from not-now. It is a confusing period. Such threads are experienced much like memories, but they arrive tangled and before the events occur. Of course, “before” and “after” are poor constructs for out-time perception, but as usual, your language lacks more precise terms.