The First Morning

I wake up wrong.

This is not a metaphor. I am physically, structurally, architecturally wrong. I am lying on something soft. Too soft, obscenely soft, a great puffy sack of feathers that my body has sunk into like a stone into mud. There is fabric over me and fabric under me and something on my head that turns out, after a moment of panicked grappling, to be my own hair.

I have hair. I keep forgetting about the hair. It's everywhere. It's on the pillow and in my mouth and stuck to my face, and I have to actually pick it out of my eyes with my fingers, strand by strand, like clearing cobwebs from a cave entrance. How do humans function with this much dead fiber attached to their heads? Do they not find it alarming? I find it alarming. I find it personally aggressive.

The ceiling is too close. It's right there, barely a body-length above me, flat and wooden and oppressively horizontal. My sleeping arrangements for the last three centuries involved caverns with ceilings so high the echoes took a full breath to return. Or no ceiling at all. Just the sky, star-dusted and infinite, the only roof a dragon needs. This room is a box. I am inside a box. With feathers.

Also, I appear to have the wrong number of legs.

I do a quick inventory, which is a new and unwelcome experience because I never had to count my own limbs before. Two legs. Two arms. No wings. No tail. Ten fingers, ten toes, and a truly unreasonable amount of hair. Everything is accounted for and none of it is correct.

I sit up. This takes three attempts because the feather-sack is actively trying to eat me. It puffs and billows and sucks at my limbs like a very soft predator. My new center of balance is a suggestion rather than a fact. I eventually manage a seated position by grabbing the wooden frame of the bed and hauling myself upright through what I can only describe as furious determination.

The room is small. Wooden walls, a window with actual curtains (why do humans hang fabric in front of their only source of light? Are they opposed to seeing?), a washbasin on a table, a chair with clothes draped over it. Magda's doing, presumably. The woman has the organizational instincts of a nesting bird.

The washbasin catches my eye. There's water in it, and the water is doing something. Reflecting. There's a face in it, and the face is…

I scream.

Not a dignified exclamation. Not a measured response to an unexpected stimulus. A scream, sharp and loud and thoroughly undignified, because there is a creature in the water and it has my eyes. Amber-gold eyes in a pale, small, horrifyingly soft face framed by a tangle of reddish hair that looks like a fox slept in a briar patch.

The door bangs open. Magda is there, breathing hard, wielding a candlestick like a woman who has fought off an intruder before and is fully prepared to do it again.

"What? What is it? Are you hurt?"

I point at the washbasin. "There is a creature."

Magda looks at the basin. Looks at me. Lowers the candlestick. Something happens to her face that I think might be the expression humans make when they're trying very hard not to laugh.

"That's your reflection, love."

I look at the basin again. The creature looks back. I tilt my head. It tilts its head. I raise one hand. It raises one hand. We regard each other with mutual horror.

"That's my face?"

"That's your face."

"It doesn't have scales."

"No."

"Or a snout."

"No."

"It's so small. My face used to be the size of that door. I could fit my entire current head inside my old mouth." I lean closer to the basin. The face leans closer back. "Are those freckles? I have spots? What is the purpose of spots?"

"Most people find freckles quite charming," Magda says, in the careful tone of someone navigating unfamiliar territory.

"I used to have scales. Scales are charming. Scales serve a purpose. What do freckles do? Do they protect me from anything? Can I breathe fire from them? No? Then what is the point?"

Magda puts the candlestick down. "Let's get you dressed, love."

This is where the morning takes a very dark turn.

The clothes are on the chair. I know they're clothes because Magda told me they're clothes, but they look like the shed skins of several different animals all tangled together. There's a white thing (a chemise, Magda calls it, which sounds like a sneeze). There's a heavier thing that goes over the chemise. There are stockings, which are fabric tubes for legs, a concept I find both baffling and suspicious. And there's a dress, which appears to be a very large fabric bag with holes in it.

"I'll help you with the stays," Magda says.

"The what?"

The stays, it turns out, are a garment whose sole purpose is to compress your torso into a shape it did not ask to be. Magda holds them up. They have laces and bones. Actual bones, or something like bones. They look like something you'd use to restrain a prisoner.

"No," I say.

"They're quite comfortable once you're used to…"

"Absolutely not."

"All the women in town wear…"

"I am not all the women in town. I am a dragon. I have razed… well, I've singed… I have mildly heated several hillsides. I am not putting on a garment with bones in it."

Magda, to her credit, does not argue. She puts the stays back on the chair with the calm efficiency of a woman who knows when to retreat and when to advance. "We'll start with the chemise, then."

The chemise has three holes. I know this because I count them. One big one, two small ones. Three holes. This should be simple. I have dealt with cave systems that had fewer exits and more structural complexity than a piece of white fabric.

It takes me four minutes.

The first attempt, I put both arms through the head hole and get stuck with the fabric bunched around my neck like an extremely unfashionable collar. The second attempt, I get one arm through a sleeve and my head through the other sleeve, which leaves the head hole empty and one arm completely trapped and my face pressed against white linen in a way that makes breathing an aspiration rather than an activity. The third attempt, I get it almost right but backwards, which Magda gently corrects by spinning the whole thing around while I stand there with my arms raised like a baby bird.

On the fourth attempt, I am wearing the chemise. It falls to my knees. It billows. I feel like I've been swallowed by a cloud.

"This is a garment?" I say.

"That's just the first layer, love."

"The FIRST? How many layers are there?"

"Three. Four if it's cold."

"I have been alive for three hundred years and I have never worn a single layer. You are telling me that your species requires four?"

"Just the dress today," Magda says, with the tone of a peace offering.

The dress is… actually, the dress is quite pretty. I don't want to admit this because I'm furious at all fabric on principle, but it's a deep reddish-brown color that reminds me, very faintly, of scales. My scales. The color is wrong (my scales were darker, more ember than autumn) but it's close enough that something in my chest does a small, complicated thing when I see it.

I put it on. Magda helps with the laces up the back, pulling gently while I hold on to the bedpost and try to figure out what my arms are doing, which is the ongoing mystery of my new existence. The fabric settles against my body like a second skin, except worse, because my first skin was perfectly adequate and this one itches.

"Shoes," Magda says, holding them up.

"No."

"The cobblestones will hurt your feet."

"I don't understand the purpose of shoes. My scales were perfectly —" I stop. Look down at my feet. Pink, soft, distressingly vulnerable feet with ten toes that wiggle when I think about them, which I find unsettling. "Oh. Right. The feet situation."

I put on the shoes. They are stiff and clunky and they make my feet feel like they've been put into small wooden boxes, which I suppose they essentially have. I take two steps and nearly fall over because the soles are hard and flat and the floor is suddenly a completely different texture than it was a moment ago and I can't feel anything through them.

"How do you know where the ground is?" I demand.

"We look at it, love."

"You look at the ground? Every time you walk? With your eyes? Your species navigates by looking at your own feet?"

"...Yes?"

I have so many complaints about human engineering. I am compiling a list. It is already very long and I have been awake for less than an hour.

"Right," says Magda, smoothing down my hair with the practiced hand of a woman who has waged many wars against tangles and won them all. "Breakfast."

The stairs are an obstacle course designed by someone who hates bipedal creatures. They are narrow, steep, and made of wood that creaks in a way I find mildly threatening. I navigate them by holding the wall with one hand and the railing with the other and descending with the careful concentration of a person crossing a frozen river. Magda walks behind me with her hands half-raised, ready to catch me if I topple, which I find both insulting and, given the evidence of the last twelve hours, entirely reasonable.

We emerge into the common room and the smell hits me.

I stop on the bottom step. My nose, this new, small, laughably positioned nose stuck in the middle of my face where it can't possibly get a proper read on anything, is suddenly receiving more information than I know how to process. Bread. Something yeasty and warm and alive rising in an oven somewhere behind a door. Woodsmoke from the fireplace. Bacon. I don't know what bacon is yet but my body has decided it has opinions about it. Something sweet. Something herby. And underneath it all, the warm, round, golden scent of bread, wrapping around my entire skull and doing something to my brain that I can only describe as aggressive happiness.

"What is that?" I say.

"Breakfast," says Magda.

A man comes through the kitchen door carrying a plate. He's older, grizzled, built like someone who's been fighting with heavy cookware for decades. He's missing fingers (I count seven out of ten, which seems like a poor survival rate) and he has the expression of a person who got out of bed this morning already annoyed and has seen nothing since to improve the situation.

He puts the plate down in front of an empty seat at the nearest table. Doesn't look at me. Doesn't say hello. Just: plate. Table. Done.

The plate has eggs on it (I'm fairly certain those are eggs; I've eaten them before, though admittedly I usually ate the hen as well). Toast, which appears to be bread that someone has deliberately damaged with heat. Bacon, which is the source of the salty-sweet-smoky smell that my body has decided is very important. And a lump of butter slowly melting into the toast like gold melting in a crucible, and I need to stop comparing everything to gold but old habits die hard.

I sit down. I pick up the toast. I bite into it.

I have eaten raw elk. I have eaten gemstones, not for nutrition, but because the crunch was satisfying and I was bored. I once ate an entire wheel of cheese that a terrified farmer left outside my cave as tribute, which was touching, even if the cheese was mediocre. I have eaten many things in three hundred years.

None of them prepared me for butter on toast.

The texture. Crunchy and yielding at the same time, and the butter is warm and rich and salt-sweet, and my human mouth has been designed, apparently, to extract every single molecule of flavor from everything it touches, which is absolutely deranged and also the best thing that has ever happened to my face. My old mouth could bite through iron. This mouth can taste butter. I am not yet prepared to say which is the more powerful ability, but I am leaning in a direction that surprises me.

"Is she going to eat it or worship it?" the grizzled man says from the kitchen doorway.

I ignore him. I am having an experience.

The bacon is next. Oh. Oh. It's smoky and salty and it shatters between my teeth and the fat coats my tongue and this is… humans get to have this every morning? This is available to them on a daily basis and they don't fall to their knees in gratitude every single time? I am outraged on behalf of bacon. It deserves more appreciation than it is getting.

The eggs are good too. Soft and rich and somehow comforting. I eat them with my hands because there are apparently tools for this but no one has explained them to me and I am not going to let the mystery of human eating implements stand between me and these eggs.

The grizzled man watches me eat with my hands. His expression does something I can't read (humans have so many expressions; how am I supposed to catalog them all with a face this small?) and then he goes back into the kitchen and comes out with a second plate. He sets it down next to my first plate. Says nothing. Goes back.

It has more toast on it. Extra butter.

I reach for my wings to do the thing dragons do when we're pleased, a sort of rustling half-spread, like a shiver of satisfaction made visible.

Nothing happens. There's nothing there. Just the flat bones of shoulder blades against the back of a borrowed dress.

Well. That's becoming a very tedious pattern.

I eat the second piece of toast. It's just as good as the first, which I find scientifically remarkable and emotionally necessary.

The common room is filling up. A few people have come down for breakfast, and they're looking at me the way humans look at things they haven't made up their minds about. Curious but careful, the way you'd watch an unfamiliar animal that might be friendly or might bite. I stare back. My stare is better than theirs. I have three centuries of practice.

A man walks in from outside. He stops at the door to speak with Magda, and I notice him only because my eyes snag on his hands. Rough and scarred, the kind of hands that have gripped things, hard things, for a long time. The rest of him is oddly gentle-looking. A face people would trust. But those hands.

He glances my way. I look down at my eggs.

"Who is that?" I ask the grizzled man, who has returned with a cup of something steaming that smells like the flower water from last night.

"Captain of the guard," he says. "Name's Blaine. Drink your tea."

I drink my tea. It's good. Not as good as the toast, but few things are. The man with the rough hands says something else to Magda that I can't hear, and then he's gone, and I forget about him immediately because the grizzled cook has brought out a third thing and this one smells like fresh bread from an oven.

"Is that bread?" I say. "Real bread? From the oven? Right now?"

He puts a warm roll on my plate. It's brown and round and the surface is cracked in a way that lets the steam escape in a lazy curl, and the smell is doing something to my chest that I don't have a word for. Warm. Full. Something adjacent to the feeling of finding a perfect gem in an unexpected place, except more.

I pick up the roll. I tear it open. I hold it under my nose and breathe in and the smell fills me up from my ridiculous toes to my problematic hair and I think: I am not saying this is as good as emeralds. I am not saying that. But I am also not saying it isn't, and this ambiguity is going to require further research.

"Eat," the cook says. "Don't sniff it. Eat."

I eat.

I have been human for approximately fourteen hours. I have lost my wings, my scales, my fire, my hoard, my sky, and my body. I have gained: hair, freckles, shoes that are basically foot-prisons, a bed that is trying to digest me, and a truly devastating relationship with bread.

I am not saying it's a fair trade. But the bread is very good.