He was using her. Together, he and Grandmother would use her whole family. “I wish I could speak to you,” he murmured in a language she didn’t understand. “I wish I could have the chance to explain.”
She blushed happily and spoke in a language she thought he couldn’t understand, telling him the day was beautiful, and he was beautiful, and she was so glad her father liked him now.
He smiled and smiled and told her she was beautiful with his eyes. That much, at least, was true.
TWENTY-SIX
GAN did not like this realm. Oh, she’d been in worse ones, but she’d never had to stay in any of them and she’d been here for days and days in spite of it having huge dragons that wanted to eat her. She might not be a demon anymore, but she was sure she still tasted good to dragons. The dragons, however, were not the worst thing about this place.
There was no chocolate.
Gan sighed in mournful near-silence so the people around her wouldn’t hear. She was tired of having to be quiet, tired of no-chocolate, and tired of all these feelings she didn’t understand. It was like being scared, but not about anything that was happening. About things that hadn’t happened and maybe never would, and a lot of that not-exactly-fear wasn’t even about her. It was about her friends. She was worried about them.
Gan wasn’t used to worrying. She didn’t like it. She wanted it to stop.
Absently she stole a sticky-sweet bun from the stall of a vendor who was distracted by yelling at a young boy who couldn’t go dashtu and had to do his stealing the hard way. He didn’t seem to be very good at it.
The gnomes kept telling her how wrong stealing was. She didn’t get it. Gnomes paid a lot of attention to owning stuff, but they thought owning was the same thing as having, which was just silly. You could only own the things you really loved. Everything else you just had—you ate it or used it or whatever. You might get mad if someone took something you’d planned to use, but that didn’t make stealing bad. Right and wrong weren’t based on what made people mad at you or on what made them like you. Old Woman had told her that.
That’s what Gan called Li Lei Yu in her mind—Old Woman. Old Woman was special. Important like a friend, but not the same as a friend. Gan couldn’t come up with words for what she meant, but for some reason she didn’t want to use one of Old Woman’s regular call-names.
Old Woman had had lots of call-names over the years, which wasn’t surprising with someone so dense with üther. You didn’t get that kind of density just by staying alive a long time. You had to live both widely and deeply, and Old Woman’s üther went really deep. Like a dragon’s, almost. Just now she was using three call-names—the one she used back on Earth, one that she’d made up to use on their trip, and the one her family used. They called her Grandmother.
One thing about Old Woman Gan did have words for: she almost always made sense. Like when she said that right and wrong weren’t the same thing as if people liked you or were mad at you. That made sense. If Gan stole some more food and gave it to that boy who wasn’t a very good thief, the boy would like it but the man she stole from would be mad. One would say she’d done a good thing and the other would say she’d done a bad thing.
Right and wrong were complicated, but that’s because they were a soul thing, and souls made everything complicated. Gan’s soul was very new. She’d only started growing one when Lily Yu became her friend, so she didn’t have right and wrong figured out yet. Old Woman said that most people didn’t. She said, “Never trust people who think they know everything about right and wrong. They stopped thinking a long time ago.”
Old Woman was good at making sense of things. Good at putting words to things that confused Gan. Maybe she should ask Old Woman what to call her.
The street Gan was on was wide and full of people. Some had carts they pulled and some carried stuff on their backs, but most were just busy going someplace. Gan passed through a tall, decorated arch with a lot of other people and got a look at where everyone was headed.
It was a big, green, open place. There were a few buildings, too, but mostly it was open space. Wide open spaces gave Gan the shudders. These people had some sense, though. The paths they used to go between the buildings were shielded from above by trees, and the market—which was where most of the people were headed—had a big roof over it. A dragon could still get you in the market, but he’d have to land first, so he probably wouldn’t bother. Dragons preferred to swoop down on prey from the air, not go chasing it on foot.
This must be the government place. Rule Turner and Old Woman had expected her to find the nodes in the government place because the spawn would want to have all that power close by where they could control it. They’d been right. The nodes were out in that big, open space, pulsing like twin hearts. Right in the middle of it.
Well . . . not exactly. The exact middle was marked by a tower. The tower had a red disk on top and a door in its base and was halfway between the nodes. Probably it was tied to them in some way, or why have it there? Hey, maybe that’s where the gate was?
Gan squinted at the tower as if that would help, but no. She couldn’t sense the gate from here. Closed gates were hard to sense unless they’d just been used. She’d have to get close to sense it. Only there was no way to do that without walking out across a lot of open space, and . . . whoops. She hopped aside just in time before a man with a long beard walked into her. Then she moved off the path so she could think without people colliding with her.
Walking across a big open space was never a good idea when there might be dragons, but it was especially not a good idea at the government place. Old Woman thought the dragon spawn sensed magic the same way she did, which was kind of like the way Gan sensed üther, which meant the spawn could sense Gan when she was dashtu. Probably they wouldn’t be able to see her, but they could sense her. And the spawn were all here in the city now. She knew what they looked like, or at least she knew their descriptions. Plus they’d have more üther than the humans around them, being both dragon-born and longer-lived, so she should be able to spot them.
No spawn seemed to be around now, but they were probably in one of those buildings because of their plan, which was really complicated. It involved Lily Yu and gates and the Great Bitch, whose avatar Xitil had eaten, making her crazy. Making Xitil crazy, that is, not the Great Bitch, though Gan thought maybe the Great Bitch was crazy, too, and wondered if she’d once eaten someone who didn’t agree with her.