Draka

When the Heart exploded, I did not pass out. A wave of absolute silence, of anti-sound, passed through me, and then the Heart shredded itself in a torrent of energy that spread in every direction, streamers crackling between the ground and the ferns and the branches of trees and even seeming to jump outward from raindrop to raindrop. But I was fine. It was actually quite pleasant, a comforting warmth that replenished what I’d just lost and made me forget for a moment about the cold rain hammering me.

Mak and Herald, on the other hand, dropped like their strings had been cut.

I don’t know exactly what happened between seeing them hitting the floor and them waking up. When they finally stirred, and my heart started beating regularly again, we were huddled beneath my wings under that same tree. I’d curled up protectively around them, and my eyes hurt and I was babbling about how sorry I was. I couldn’t say when I last apologized to anyone before that, at least not an honest, heartfelt apology, but it was all that would come out of my mouth until Herald was suddenly scratching the base of my nub of a horn.

“It’s okay,” she croaked. “I’m okay. Sore everywhere, but… okay.”

“I’m sorry! Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry,” I blubbered. “I thought I’d killed you! What would I do if I’d killed you?”

“You’d’ve probably turned into a blubbering mess,” Mak said, then let out a long, slow breath. “Wow! This advancement of yours is really something. Herald can’t understand you, though.”

Herald just laughed weakly. “What are you two conspiring about?” she asked, and I realized that I’d been speaking English.

“Gods and Mercies, I’m just so glad that you’re alive,” I told them both. “You told me to be careful and I… I should have listened better. Are you sure that you’re not hurt?”

“Feels like I just had a really bad nap, but yeah,” Herald said, patting me reassuringly.

“And you, Mak? Are you all right?”

“Same. But Sorrows take me if the energy I took from the Heart doesn’t cancel it out. It’s like… Gods, it’s like all my advancements got stronger. I feel stronger, tougher, faster, everything! When you spoke in your ‘ancient dragon tongue’ —” I could hear the sarcastic air quotes “— I just understood, as though you were speaking Karakani! And replying was the same thing. I just talked! Is that what it’s always like for you?”

“Yeah,” I said, almost giddy with relief. “That’s what it’s always like.”

“Dragons are fucking bullshit,” she said appreciatively, and all I could do was to agree.

We returned to Karakan after that. I was still up about two full Hearts from what I could tell, and my sisters were sore, wrung out, and had been soaked for long enough. It was time for them to get warm and dry again, and we all wanted to do some experimentation before that evening, when I was going to meet the Tesprils.

We’d already learned that the minors Mak had borrowed from me were supercharged, which was very exciting. I’d always judged them to be weaker versions of my own, but if her Tongues was now as effective as my own, the same might very well go for everything else.

I was a little envious at the thought that Mak and Herald’s minor Advancements might be affected. Mine certainly weren’t. I would have noticed by now. At the same time I could do crazy things with my magic that Herald couldn’t, so it probably balanced out in the end. Not that knowing stopped me from being greedy.

The first thing Mak did once we got back was, they told me later, to casually got up to Kira and start speaking to her about something completely inconsequential. Except that of course she did it in Kira’s own dialect of Tekereteki. According to Herald, Mak spoke it so flawlessly that Kira didn’t even realize until Mak switched to classical Tekereteki, what Herald and Mak had grown up with.

“You should have seen her,” Herald said fondly as she told me about it. Her and Mak had only taken the time to change, and then brought Kira and Ardek with them into the cellar for an impromptu lunch. “She hugged Mak so hard that I thought I might have to pry her loose.”

Kira blushed. We were all speaking slowly and clearly to give her a chance to keep up. “Ardek understand,” Kira said, then corrected herself. “Under-stood? But not tell!”

Ardek, sitting next to her, laughed and threw his hands up to defend himself as Kira swatted at his shoulder playfully.

“Have you missed it so much?” I asked Kira in her language. “I had no idea.”

“Neither did I,” she said. “But hearing it from Mak so unexpectedly… it’s the language of my birth, you know? Of my childhood, and of my first love, and everything. Hearing it used to talk about something so normal as what we’re serving for dinner tonight… I don’t know. When the two of us speak it always feels like it’s something profound and important, and Ardek…” she faced him and put her hand on the same shoulder she’d been swatting a minute before. “You work hard. But only a few weeks, yes?”

“Few weeks,” he agreed happily, and I got the feeling that was as much as he’d understood so far. “I learn!”

“You learn,” she said with a smile, then turned back to me. “But I haven’t been able to just chat for a long time. I couldn’t help myself.”

“I get that. I had one day of not being able to talk to anyone and it almost killed me.”

As we talked, and they finished their meal, I thought about that. Kira had an ability to get along with most people even if they couldn’t talk to each other, but I knew that she’d been working her ass off to learn Karakani. She liked to talk, it was as simple as that. And I knew that it had been tough for her to not be able to speak with most of the people around her, but it had been a long time since I considered what that did to her emotionally. No wonder she was latching on so tightly to Ardek. As far as I knew, he was the only one who’d bothered to learn a word of her own dialect.

Part of me wondered if he’d started learning before or after Kira became interested in him, but with the way he looked at her when he thought no one saw, with the adoration that was evident on his face, I decided it didn’t matter. It was a sweet gesture either way.

A few days earlier I’d asked my sisters if they thought that truly Kira liked Ardek, or if it was his Advancement pulling her in. I’m not sure what I would have done if they’d said no — what were the ethical ramifications of magic making people like you? How enormous of a hypocrite would I be if I, of all people, objected? But they were both convinced that while Ardek’s Advancement might have laid the groundwork, it only made people friendly towards him. Anything beyond that was entirely on his own merits.

As I watched Ardek out of the corner of my eye, seeing how he kept looking at Kira’s eyes, her hair, her lips, and only very rarely dipping beneath her neck, I wondered how he himself felt about the whole situation. I’d more or less come to terms with how I myself affected people. I would never know how some people would have felt about me if I’d never messed with their heads. Mak, Ardek and Kira all loved and respected me, but how real was that when they literally couldn’t feel anything negative towards me? All I could do was try my best not to abuse their love, and not to worry about if they’d hate me if things were different.

But what about Ardek? He’d chosen that Advancement knowing what it would do. He’d done it to survive, but how had it affected him over the years since? When you know that every single friend you’ve made in the last few years is, to some degree, being forced to like you, what does that do to a person?

I thought about how easily he’d made peace with becoming one of my humans, and suddenly I saw him not as a mercenary street kid who’d been dealt a series of bad hands, but as just a lonely young man who wanted to fit in somewhere, with people who genuinely liked him. If Kira had shown him some genuine affection, it was no wonder that he’d latched on to her as tightly as she had to him.

In the end, it really looked like they cared for each other. Two people whose lives I’d torn to shreds, brought together because they’d had the misfortune of being in my path. I hoped they could find some happiness together.

With the meal over Kira and Ardek went back upstairs, to continue whatever they’d been doing before the impromptu lunch. Herald, Mak and I immediately got to testing.

“I think we can all agree that the Advancement that helps with languages…” Mak said, looking at me.

“Tongues,” I supplied.

“Right. Tongues is definitely much stronger now. I can speak both your English and Kira’s odd Tekereteki like I grew up with them. I know words that I’ve never heard before in my life. And maybe Charisma helped keep Kira from realizing what was happening, but it’s hard to say. I think Charisma and Command are both going to be hard to test. The same goes for my own ability to read intentions. I just don’t know how we’ll be able to compare the effects with and without this extra Heart power. And my healing… We’d need someone to be massively injured to know if I can heal worse wounds, and we can’t exactly cut someone open just to heal them. But the others? My own grace and speed, and the strength, stealth and fortitude that I get from you, Draka, those should all be easy. We’re all pretty familiar with what I can do normally, right?”

She then proceeded to step over to Herald, bend her knees and, before Herald had a chance to protest, wrap her arms tightly around her legs and lift her. Then Mak started to walk around the cellar, with our sister above her waving and wobbling and occasionally bending to avoid hitting her head on a beam.

“A barrel!” Herald protested once the surprise wore off. “Use a barrel, you horrid little gremlin!”

Mak laughed, but she did put Herald down. Eventually. “That was easy,” she said. “I know I’ve been able to lift you since I got Draka’s Advancement, but this was much easier.”

“I would rather my weight not be used as a measuring stick for how freakishly strong you are!”

Mak, properly chastened, switched to barrels after that. There was no truly standardized barrel in Karakan, but most of them looked to be a bit under three feet tall and held maybe forty gallons. She could, with some difficulty, lift a full barrel over her head. Getting the right grip and balance was as big of a problem as the actual weight.

I’d seen a lot of crazy things in the six months since I woke up on Mallin. If a man a foot taller and four times Mak’s weight had done what she just did, I would have been impressed. Seeing Mak hoist more than four hundred pounds over her head, and then put it down carefully, that was something else.

“All right,” she said, grinning and breathing heavily. “Safe to say, I’m much stronger. I could barely get one of those off the ground before. I could get used to this! How long does it last?”

“I depleted mine pretty quickly last time,” Herald said. “But I used my magic a lot.”

I had to think about it. “A single Heart lasts me… I’m not sure. Ten days or so, maybe? That’s if I go easy on the magic. Very little Shifting or messing with shadows.”

“So I might need to top up every few days,” Mak said thoughtfully. “Or at the very least if we expect trouble.”

“I don’t mind, if we have time and you’re okay with flying that often.”

Mak shuddered “If you promise not to drop me, I’ll just be a big girl and keep my eyes tightly shut.”

“I have had some thoughts about that, actually,” Herald said. She looked cagey, and I got a strong impression that she had more than just thoughts.

“Go on,” I told her.

“Well… it really started that time I almost fell off.”

“Please don’t remind me,” Mak muttered. “It almost killed me when you told me.”

“So what did you come up with?” I asked.

“Well, um… I thought something to help keep me safe on your back, or someone else, how tricky could it be? It’s not a saddle!” She said that very emphatically. “More like a harness for both you and whoever you are carrying. And then I thought about how you carried Mak and Kira on the front, so I designed something for that, too. Val helped me make some sketches, and…”

“You’ve already had them made, haven’t you?” I asked.

“I only ordered them, a few days ago,” she admitted. “But yes. I got some very strange looks from the bagmaker, but she said she’d have them ready in a week.”

“Same one as when you ordered my bag?”

“She did such a good job the first time, so yes.”

Mak snorted. “She’s going to get some funny ideas about you, sweet sister.”

“Oh, hush, you!” Herald said, blushing furiously.

We spent the next hour or so testing the rest of Mak’s physical capabilities. She’d always been graceful, both from her experience as a dancer and from her Advancement. Now she moved, leapt and tumbled with agility and precision that would make Earth’s finest ballet dancers and circus acrobats green with envy.

Her speed was also noticeably improved. Her Advancement had always been more about control than actually moving faster, and that was still true. Herald thought of a few different tests, like snatching a nut out of her palm or cutting a handkerchief multiple times with a sword as it fell towards the floor, but for me the most impressive demonstration was when Herald threw a bunch of wooden skewers into the air. Mak would snatch them all one by one before they hit the floor, and Herald would increase the number and repeat. Mak topped out at seven.

Her stealth… honestly, I couldn’t tell. The girls both agreed that it was improved and I trusted their judgment, but to me Mak’s steps had already been soundless, and there was no way for me to fairly assess how well she hid herself when I could walk right up to her blindfolded and with headphones on.

That left her fortitude. It would have been easy to test to the breaking point, but Mak chickened out and I refused to push her. None of us wanted to find that the breaking point happened to be where she cut through skin, muscle, bone and all. We repeated the same trick they’d done to freak out everyone else, with Mak trying and failing to cut her own forearm until the skin dented and taking her improved strength into consideration. That would have to do.

With all of Mak’s physical Advancements plus Tongues so much improved, there was no reason to believe that her others would be any different, and we left it there. Only her healing was a mystery. It would have been lovely to know how and if it was improved — Mak hoped for some kind of limb regeneration — but we simply weren’t willing to hurt anyone to test it.

Herald was comfortable that she’d already found what the Heart’s power did for her shadow magic — no new abilities, but everything felt easier — but she hadn’t paid attention to what it might do for her minor Advancements. Since the power didn’t affect my minors, and I was her only point or reference when she’d first consumed part of a Heart, it hadn’t occurred to her.

While we hadn’t known that we’d need something to compare to, Herald had a pretty good idea about what her normal limits were. “I will not be able to get a really good idea until we can try this outside, where I can shoot,” she said. “Preferably in the forest. But we should be able to do some tests here.”

This turned out to be my time to shine. The problem was that we had trouble thinking of good ways to test her. We tried doing the sticks-in-the-air thing, to see if hand-eye coordination could substitute for pure speed. The conclusion was yes, somewhat, but it didn’t really say much about if she’d improved or not.

“Well,” I said as we talked about alternative methods, “maybe we should just do it in reverse. See what you can do now, and then test again when the Heart wears off. Do you have any balls?”

“Like for games?” Mak asked.

“Well, yeah. But smaller would be better. Or maybe… hey, here’s an idea: you have dried beans and things, right?”

“Sacks and sacks,” Herald confirmed.

“All right, let’s get some small pouches, like fist sized—”

“My fists or Mak’s?” Herald asked.

Mak rolled her eyes. “Oh, hah, hah. Very funny, shovel-hands.”

“Something that sits nicely in your palm,” I said, smiling at their bickering. Despite all the horrible shit they’d been through, their relationship was so much more relaxed now than when I’d first met them. “Maybe four or five, all the same size and weight or as close as possible, ideally.”

Getting that done took no time at all, and in about fifteen minutes we had Herald juggling four balls. Five was too much, but considering she’d never juggled before in her life and I’d only ever barely managed three with lots of practice, I was suitably impressed.

Reflexes were also pretty easy to test, since I’d done it in school with one of those sticks you drop. We didn’t have one with markings, of course, so we first used Mak as a benchmark, making notches wherever she grabbed the two-foot pole we’d found. We then had Herald try.

She grabbed it the moment I dropped, each and every time.

We tried to test her eyesight by having Mak write some letters very small in charcoal on one wall, but the cellar wasn’t large enough, and Mak couldn’t write small enough, to find her limit. She did have to really focus when she was right up against the opposite wall, though.

“That about does it for today, I think,” Herald said once we were done. “I can tell you that I certainly feel like all of my minors are doing more, now that I know to look for it. I would love to try the same tests once I have…” she waved her hand in front of herself, looking for a good word. “Burned off? That works. Once I have burned off the Heart I have in me now. When do you want to go out again?”

“Dunno,” I said. “I’m almost full up, but I’ll need to go dreamwalking soon. After that, I suppose?”

“You should take Kira with you,” Mak suggested. “We know that she can charge lightstones and open and close the gates, but we need to see if it’s only people like Herald and I who can ‘eat’ from the Hearts. People who are— you know.”

“Who belong fully to you. Or to any dragon, perhaps,” Herald finished for her with a contented smile.

“I’ll do that, if she’ll go.”

“Good. Now, it is getting late in the day, and I saw a small crate in the kitchen which smelled suspiciously like fish. You should eat and rest, big sister. You would not want to be tired when you meet your new servants, would you?”