His wolf chuffed at him, amused and annoyed, for his wolf had known this all along. Ah, well. He let that go, too, content with the moment, the smell of tea, and the company of the woman who wanted him to call her grandmother. He was, he realized, calm. Truly calm. He smiled, realizing something else. She hadn’t insisted on the tea ceremony because she needed it.
At last the tea was poured, large teapot to small, small teapot to cups. This time they drank. Neither spoke for a long moment, then Rule said, “Thank you . . . Grandmother.” The word felt odd in his mouth. He had never used it in a personal sense before.
“Búyòng xiè,” she said, and paused. “That is a phrase used when an American would say, ‘You’re welcome.’ It does not have the same meaning. Literally, it says, ‘Do not be formal.’ It has been interesting to be surrounded again by the culture of my youth.”
“Interesting in a good way, I hope.”
“Interesting,” she repeated. “You did not ask if these secrets are dangerous to you. I will answer anyway. It is unlikely any of the dragons will be angry enough to kill you. This would create a schism with an ally they need to defeat her. And on that, dragons are united: she must be defeated. I will now tell you why.”
“You haven’t asked for my promise not to repeat it.”
“You have better sense than to spread information that dragons consider intensely personal. I will suggest that neither you nor Lily tells Cynna Weaver. She might feel a duty to include it in the clan memories. This would be unfortunate.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“Very well.” She abandoned her kneeling posture with a soft grunt, bringing her legs around to sit tailor-style. “This is a tale of the distant past, so distant that even the sidhe have no record of it save a few tales spun into myth. Such myths, like those told by humans, hold kernels of truth wrapped in gauzy invention. They speak of godlike beings who enslaved other races. That much is true.
“In this long-ago time, a race arose much gifted in mind magic and much devoted to conquest. To ownership. I could tell you they saw other races, other sentient peoples, the way humans see cows or horses or pigs, but this makes them seem more human than they were. Humans often form attachments to animals. This race of owners formed attachments only to their own race. With others, they were not cruel for the sake of cruelty. They were indifferent. This was their reality: they were people. All other beings, sentient or beast, were to them as a stone or the wind. Part of reality, but things, not people. Things to be destroyed, ignored, or owned.”
“Selective sociopaths,” Rule murmured.
“You would see them so, but this seeing makes them seem like damaged humans. They were not. Their minds were alien to yours. To mine, also. You and I could better understand demons than we can these owners.
“Some things came easily for this race, such as mind magic. But they were not innately powerful. Canny and Gifted, yes, but not with great power. Because of this, some places were able to withstand them. This was, to them, intolerable.” She sighed faintly. “The memories of dragons are long and can be passed down, in part, to their offspring. Yet even dragon memories do not tell how the race of owners found this realm we are in now. It may have been by chance rather than design. Nor do we know with precision how they first enslaved dragons.”
Rule felt the jolt of that bomb. “They what?”
“Do not interrupt. What I tell you next is deduction, since dragon memories do not extend so far back. The owners would have seen that dragons possessed what they did not. Power. Great power. But at that time all dragons were mind-blind, impervious to mind magic . . . except, as you know, at one time. Through a naming ritual, the owners took control of the minds of newly hatched dragon babies.
“Once they had a sufficient number of hatchlings, they left this realm. Nor did they ever return here. We do not know why. It may be that they knew from the start that they would need to alter their new slaves, and therefore were not interested in harvesting additional unaltered dragon babies. The owners were not themselves skilled at body magic, but one of the races they had enslaved was. It is thought this was a sidhe race, but that is speculation. Still, we know that at some point they took their mind-slaved dragons to these experts, who altered them at a genetic level. Female dragons are difficult to control, you see. Even the owners could not fully control an adult female, for dragon instinct is too strong. Also, they wished to control the reproduction of their property. The easiest way to do so was to make dragons all male.”
“Before that, they weren’t always born male?”
She snorted. “You cannot believe that evolution resulted in a race that is entirely male. One in which none can become female without a great deal of tinkering. Of course dragons were not originally so.” She paused, then continued. “The owners raised their stolen babies and, at some point, changed them as I have said. When the babies became adults, they used them. With the power of dragons behind them, they became unstoppable. More realms fell to their ownership.
“This went on for what humans would consider a long time, but dragons live a long time. These stolen dragons lived for hundreds of years knowing what had been done to them. And they learned. They learned much about magic, especially mind magic. Their owners encouraged this, for they wanted the use of those great minds along with their magic. This was a mistake. At some point one of the dragons—not of the first generation, we think, but the second—learned a new thing. Something the owners could not do. Something they did not know was possible. He segmented his mind.”
Rule’s eyebrows lifted. “Humans who do that are considered insane.”
“Humans do not understand minds. This dragon is remembered by several call-names. The most common is Yì Sǐwáng. When Yì Sǐwáng segmented his mind, the set-apart portion was not controlled by his owner.”
“Were the owners telepathic?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. They did not experience the thoughts of others, but they perceived thoughts in their own fashion. Because of this perception, Yì Sǐwáng had to not only segment his mind, but shield the segmented portion and hide his shielding.”
“All at the same time? At his first attempt?”
“He was,” she said simply, “a genius. The first task he set for this new segment of his mind was to find a way to secretly teach this skill to the other enslaved dragons. There is a long story about how he did this. It is useful for teaching young dragons, but you are not a young dragon. I will skip it. The result of Yì Sǐwáng’s teaching you can, I think, guess.” She stopped abruptly. “My mouth is dry.” She waved at the teapot, then picked it up and poured more hot water over the leaves still in the small pot.
Rule asked softly, “What does Yì Sǐwáng mean?”
Her smile was small, tight, fierce. “A Thousand Million Deaths.”