She finished her breakfast.
The tree was ancient.Its bark was dark, almost black, with a texture like cracked stone. Its leaves were the silver-green she'd seen from the transport window: broad, thick, casting a shade that was cool and deep and smelled like crushed eucalyptus. November had found it beyond the east garden wall, its roots breaking through a low stone fence at an angle that created a natural backrest. Perfect.
She'd been reading for an hour when the shadow fell across her page.
Rhaezon stood three paces away, holding a plate and a cup. The plate held bread, more of the purple fruit, and a wedge of something that might have been cheese. The cup was steaming.
"You missed the midday meal."
November looked up. The white star was past zenith. She'd been out here longer than she'd thought.
"You brought me lunch?"
"Mathen observed that you had not returned. I was…" the sentence stalled again, the same way it had at breakfast, "I was coming this direction."
November had the sneaking suspicion that wasn't entirely true. He had come to find her. He had brought food. And he was now standing in front of her looking as though he'd rather face the slavers again than explain why.
"Thank you." She took the plate and balanced it on the book. "There's more here than I can eat. Will you sit?"
Something crossed behind his eyes. A rapid calculation of whether to approach or retreat, every muscle holding the question.
He sat. Not next to her. He lowered himself to the ground two feet to her right, his back against the wall rather than the tree, his long legs stretched in front of him. The distance was deliberate. She recognized it.
She tore the bread in half and held out the larger piece.
He took it. Their fingers did not touch. She noticed that he had been very precise about that, too.
They ate in silence for a minute. Then he nodded toward the book in her lap.
"You were reading that in the library last night."
So he had stopped. She'd been right about the shadow.
"Looking at it. The reading part hasn't been going well." She tapped the small silver dot behind her left ear. "My nanite translator can't parse most of the text. It keeps giving mefragments — half words, roots without conjugations. Like it recognizes the language family but not the language."
Rhaezon set down his bread. He held out his hand palm up and she placed the book in it. He turned to the page she'd been studying, the one with the scaled mountain creature. His brow dropped and the severe lines of his face shifted into something more focused, more present, and for a moment he looked like a different person — someone younger, someone who had once sat under trees with books.
"Your translator can't read it because it's Old Drakonian."
"Old Drakonian?"
"A dead language." He turned a page, his thumb running along the margin where faded text bracketed an illustration of something winged and serpentine. "My people stopped speaking it long ago. Before they lost the ability to shift, even. Before the bloodlines thinned." His voice was quiet. "The scholars who wrote these books were recording what they knew before it disappeared. The language went with it."
"Can you read it?"
"A few words. Fragments." The corner of his mouth shifted — not a smile, exactly, but the ghost of one. "More than your translator. Less than the scholars intended."
"That's still more than I've got." November leaned forward. "Tell me what you know. About these." She pointed to the illustration. "About all of it. The animals, the plants, whatever you can translate. I want to learn."
He looked at her. The amber star was behind her, warming the left side of her face, and his eyes tracked across her features. "There is a great deal I cannot translate."
"Then tell me what you can, and we'll make up the rest."
Something in his expression changed. A hairline fracture in the controlled stone of his face, barely visible, instantly repaired. But she'd seen it.
She shifted her weight, scooting across the grass until her shoulder pressed against his arm. The book lay between them, open across both their laps, the spine resting on the place where her thigh met his. He was warm. Not human-warm. Furnace-warm, the heat radiating through the sleeve of her tunic to her bare arm with an intensity that should have made her pull away and instead made her press closer.
Rhaezon went still.
