The Magician's Gift

The magic is doing something very rude to my body, and I have opinions about it.

I can't express those opinions because my jaw is currently rearranging itself, which is exactly as unpleasant as it sounds and also deeply presumptuous. I did not ask for this. I was perfectly happy dying in a field. Well, not happy, but I'd made my peace with it, which is more than can be said for whatever is happening now.

My scales are leaving. That's the only word for it. They're retracting into my skin like they've been called, which is offensive because those scales have been with me for three centuries and have turned aside arrows, claws, one very determined knight with a lance, and an incident with a collapsing cave that I don't like to talk about. They are excellent scales. They are my scales. And they are sliding away like they've somewhere better to be.

My tail is next. I feel it going, shortening, thinning, vanishing, and I want to scream but my mouth is the wrong shape and the sound that comes out is nothing I've ever produced. Half roar, half something I don't have a name for. Somewhere nearby, a human yelps.

Good, I think viciously. Someone else should be upset about this.

The hands on my shrinking, diminishing, increasingly insufficient body press harder, and the magic intensifies. Everything is light and pressure and the nauseating sensation of being compacted. I am being squeezed into a container several hundred sizes too small, and the container appears to be made of skin. Human skin. My skin, apparently, though I've never seen it before and I'm not enthusiastic about the introduction.

Wings. My wings are going.

That one I feel.

Not the pain. The absence. Like someone has taken the sky out of my back and replaced it with nothing. Two flat bones where the base of my wings used to anchor. Shoulder blades, I think humans call them. The most useless bones in any skeleton. What are they even for?

The light fades. The hands lift away. And I am lying in a field outside a town whose name I don't know, and I am not a dragon anymore.

I am something small and soft and shaking, and the grass is wet against skin I've never had, and the first thought that forms in my undersized, profoundly inadequate skull is:

Two arms. I have two arms. I used to have four legs and two wings and a tail that could shatter stone, and this body has given me TWO ARMS as a replacement for all of that. That is not a fair trade. That is not even in the general vicinity of a fair trade. I want to speak to whoever is in charge of this.

"Why?" I say, or try to say. What comes out is a croak. My voice is small. My voice used to echo off mountains.

The man standing over me is human. Obviously. Tall, thin, wearing robes that look like they've survived interesting times. His hands still glow faintly. He looks down at me with an expression that might be compassion, or might be the face a person makes when they've done something enormous and aren't entirely sure it was wise.

"I couldn't watch something so majestic die," he says. Like that explains it. Like that's a reason to rearrange someone's entire existence without asking.

I open my frustratingly small mouth to tell him exactly what I think of his decision, his magic, and his presumptuous hands, but he's already stepping back. The glow fades from his fingers. He looks at me one more time, and I swear there's an apology in it, somewhere under the calm. Then he turns and walks away.

He walks away.

"Wait," I croak. "You can't just... I'm... you..."

But he's going. Moving through the crowd of stunned humans who part for him like water around a stone, and then he's past them, and then he's gone. Just like that. He has turned me into a human and walked off into the sunset like a character in a story who doesn't have to deal with the consequences of his own heroism.

I am going to find him. I am going to find him and I am going to have words.

But first I have to deal with the more immediate problem, which is that I am naked in a field and approximately forty humans are staring at me.

I can't see them well. My eyes are wrong, the colors muted, the distance blurred, and everything too close. Dragon eyes can pick out a silver coin at half a mile. These eyes can barely see past the ring of gawking faces. I've gone from eagle vision to something subterranean. Mole vision. I have the eyes of a burrowing animal and I find this personally insulting.

The hair is another problem. There's something on my head, a lot of something, falling into my face and sticking to my wet skin and generally making itself a nuisance. I bat at it with one hand and discover it's attached to me. Wonderful. I have been given a body that grows decorative fibers out of its head. What possible purpose could this serve? It's getting in my mouth.

Also, I'm cold. I've never been cold before. I have breathed fire since birth, I have slept in snowdrifts for fun, and now my skin is covered in tiny bumps and I'm shaking like a leaf in a gale and I am absolutely furious about it.

"Is she... is that..."

"Did the dragon just..."

"Someone get the..."

The humans are talking over each other in that way humans do when something has happened that they haven't organized a committee about yet. I catch fragments through the chattering of my own teeth, which is a horrifying experience. My teeth are rattling. Against each other. Involuntarily. This body has been mine for approximately thirty seconds and it's already doing things without my permission.

I try to stand up. This goes poorly.

It turns out that standing on two legs is not, as I had always assumed, the simplest possible method of locomotion. I had four legs for three centuries and never once thought about the mechanics of it. You just stood. All four corners held you up. Perfectly balanced, perfectly stable, perfectly logical. Two legs is an engineering disaster. All of my weight is stacked on two narrow points of contact, and my center of balance is somewhere around my midsection, which means the entire structure is essentially a tall thing trying very hard not to be a short thing.

I make it halfway upright. My legs, of which I have exactly two and they are ridiculous, wobble violently. I pitch forward. A human gasps. I do not fall, because I am a dragon and I refuse to fall down in front of an audience, but it's a near thing and my dignity is hanging by a thread.

Also, my arms keep trying to help with the balance, but they don't know how. They just wave around. I look like a bird that's forgotten how to fly, which is so close to the truth that I refuse to think about it any further.

"All right, love. All right. I've got you."

A woman is beside me. I don't know when she arrived, because these human ears are apparently for decoration, but she's wrapping something warm and soft around my shoulders. A shawl. It smells like kitchen herbs and soap and something warm underneath, something that isn't a scent so much as a feeling. Safe. Home. Although I don't know whose home or why it would smell like this woman's shawl.

I flinch. Not from her, but from the contact. Fabric against bare skin is a sensation I have no framework for. It's soft and slightly scratchy and everywhere, and my nerve endings are so overwhelmed that I can't tell if it's pleasant or terrible.

"Shh, love. I've got you. Let's get you inside."

She's round-faced, flushed, with the kind of hands that have been busy every day of their life. She's not looking at me like I'm a monster, or a miracle, or a curiosity. She's looking at me the way I've seen mother animals look at young that have fallen out of a nest. Practical concern. Immediate action. Less what are you and more you need soup.

I don't want soup. I want my scales back. I want my wings and my tail and my fire and my hoard and my sky and my body that didn't shake.

But what comes out of my mouth is: "I can't feel my tail."

"You haven't got a tail, love."

"I know. That's the problem."

She makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be the kind of noise humans make when they're trying not to cry. I can't tell yet. These human ears don't come with instructions.

"What's your name?" she asks, gently steering me toward the town. I'm leaning on her more than I'd like. My legs are still not speaking to me.

I open my mouth and try to say my name. My real name, my dragon name, the one that sounds like fire crackling through gemstones and takes about three minutes to pronounce properly.

What comes out is a screech.

Not a dignified screech. Not the battle cry of the last dragon. A screech, high and thin and terrible, like someone stepping on a cat in a crowded room. Three nearby humans stumble backward. A child starts crying. A dog barks.

Well. That was horrifying.

"Right," the woman says, unfazed in a way that suggests very little in this world fazes her. "We'll sort that out later. I'm Magda. You're safe. Can you walk?"

I can walk. Poorly, ungracefully, on two legs that bend in ways I find unendingly confusing, leaning against this stranger who smells like herbs and home and doesn't seem to mind that five minutes ago I was a dragon who could have eaten her house. But I can walk.

I don't look back at the field where my blood is soaking into the grass. I don't look up at the sky I can't reach anymore. I look at the cobblestones under my bare, extremely inconvenient feet and I think: I have been alive for three hundred years. I have survived everything the world has thrown at me. I am not going to be defeated by bipedal locomotion.

I trip on the first cobblestone.

Magda catches me.

"Steady," she says. "Almost there."

The town is warm and close and smells like bread and woodsmoke and something metallic from the forge, and all of it is too much. Too many smells, too close, too loud, too human. A door slams somewhere and I nearly leap out of my borrowed skin. My ears pick up everything: conversations, footsteps, a chicken making what I assume are important chicken announcements. None of it is filtered the way dragon hearing filtered things. Dragon hearing could isolate a single coin dropping on stone from half a mile away and ignore everything else. Human hearing is apparently just all the sounds, all the time, have fun sorting through that.

But Magda's hand is firm on my arm and her shawl is warm around my shoulders, and she is walking me toward a building with a lit window and an open door, and I can't think of a single reason not to follow her except that I am a dragon and this is absurd.

Being absurd has never stopped me before.

We reach the door. Warm air hits my face. Warm for a human, probably. For a dragon it's barely a suggestion of temperature, but this body finds it meaningful because the shaking eases slightly. Magda guides me through the doorway. Someone inside says something I don't catch. Magda says something back, firmly, in the voice of a woman who has decided what is going to happen and pities anyone who tries to argue.

She puts me in a chair by a fire. Wraps another blanket around me. Someone puts a cup of something hot in my hands, and I discover that hands, fingers, all ten of them, seem excessive but can at least hold things. I stare at the cup. Steam rises from it. It smells like flowers and honey.

"Drink," Magda says.

I drink. It's sweet and hot and I don't know what it is and I don't care because this strange, small, inadequate body responds to it like a gift. The warmth spreads through my chest and the shaking slows a little more.

Something is happening behind my human eyes. They're leaking. Clear fluid, running down my face, and I don't know how to stop it because this has never happened to me before. Dragons don't do this. Dragons have fire. This body has warm salt water and no manual explaining any of it.

"That's all right," Magda says, as if she can see exactly what I'm thinking. "That's just what bodies do, love. Let them."

I am not going to let them. I am a dragon. I am going to sit here and drink this absurd flower water and figure out how to stop my face from leaking and then I am going to find that magician and explain to him, at length, what happens when you rearrange a dragon without her consent.

But first — the flower water. The flower water is actually quite good.

My eyes close. Magda's hand rests on my shoulder, warm and steady. The fire crackles. Somewhere in the room, someone whispers is she really a... and Magda says hush in a tone that could silence thunder.

I am a dragon in a chair, wrapped in blankets that smell like herbs, drinking flower water while my face leaks.

This is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened to me, and I once got my tail stuck in a crevasse for three days.

My eyes close again. This time they don't open.