The sun was out, and my feet were slapping against the warm cobblestones like two enthusiastic trout. I walked barefoot because my last pair of sandals had fallen victim to a jealous goat. Long story. Involving wine, seduction, and a market brawl. Also, I may have bet them in a game I didn't fully understand.
Beside me, His Grumpiness limped along, scales glinting dully, one wing tucked in like a wounded swan. He'd refused to fly today. Claimed his shoulder hurt.
"Old battle wound?" I asked sweetly.
"Sleeping on a rock shaped like betrayal," he muttered.
I watched him limp along beside me, one wing tucked in like a scandalized dowager. We must've looked like a traveling circus: one scaly pensioner and one barefoot harlot with a sunburnt nose.
After a while, I said, "You know, I've been thinking."
"That's always a warning sign," he muttered.
I ignored him. "We've been to a lot of places lately. And I've been doing most of the talking."
"You've been doing all of the talking."
"Exactly. So, clearly, I'm the linguistic asset in this partnership."
He didn't even look at me. "Mmm."
"No, really! I'm what scholars call… polyglut."
"Polyglot," he corrected absently.
"Right. That."
"Prove it. Say something in Toemachan."
I beamed. "Ai yama torakai, sailor-boy."
He stopped.
"You just said 'love you long time, sailor.'"
I blinked. "Oh. Did I?"
A snort of smoke curled from his nostrils. "Try again. Another language."
"Sabrabenan," I declared. "Torrai yalim, seafarer-san."
His eyebrow ridge rose. "That's the same phrase. Just with more syllables."
I shrugged. "Different region."
"Delivdan?"
"Karima shonta… big tip, no questions."
"Same phrase again."
"It's a classic, okay?"
He gave me a look—the kind that said he was questioning not just my education but the entire arc of his immortal life.
"Do you know any phrases that aren't about solicitation?"
I gasped. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me. Any noble declarations of wisdom? Ancient poetry? Anything not moaned through a veil in a pleasure house?"
"I resent that!"
"Resent it all you want. Every 'language' you know seems to revolve around… services rendered."
I huffed. "That's not fair. I know all kinds of things."
"Like how to say 'half price until dawn' in fourteen dialects?"
I crossed my arms. "Sixteen."
"Exactly."
We walked in silence for a few steps. Well, I walked. He limped like a retired warhorse with gout and emotional baggage.
"I do know poetry," I said finally.
He groaned. "Here we go."
"No, really. I can recite in Delivdan. That's a noble tongue."
He muttered something about oxen dung being noble too, but I ignored him and cleared my throat.
"Zharru vem talra, vem tukkal,
Putta dral mek sha'kall,
Humpa grall, winey swell,
Tippa tappa, moan and yell—"
He stopped in his tracks and gave me a long, horrified stare.
"What?" I asked, blinking innocently.
"That was a dirty limerick."
"It's street poetry," I corrected. "Raw. From the gutters of Drahm's Row. Very authentic."
"It had a rhyme scheme built around pelvic motion."
"It speaks to the human condition!"
"It speaks to your condition," he muttered, resuming his limp-walk with a pained expression.
"Fine," I said, wounded. "You want something useful? I know praise words. Flattery. Royal compliments. In Toemachan."
"Oh, I'm brimming with anticipation."
I drew myself up, shoulders proud, voice lilting like I was about to curtsy. "Aiya shentu vel'mak toi," I purred.
He winced. "Please tell me you don't say that often."
"All the time. One of my regulars said it means 'Moonlight Maiden.'"
He coughed, nearly tripped. "That does not mean Moonlight Maiden."
"It doesn't?"
He gave me a look like he was debating whether to let me keep breathing.
"It's a vulgar idiom," he said flatly. "Roughly translates to... 'the tight-lipped cave that sings at night.'"
I stared.
"Oh."
He nodded.
I blinked again. "Well… that's… poetic in its own way."
"Only if you're a drunk sailor with a poetry kink."
I looked down at the cobblestones, cheeks a bit pink. "He did bring wine."
"Of course he did."
There was a pause. Then I muttered something under my breath.
He glanced down. "What was that?"
"Nothing."
He narrowed his eyes. "Was that more street poetry? Or another veiled offer involving your allegedly sacred cave?"
I rolled my eyes. "Forget it."
"No," he said, tail twitching. "Now I must know."
I sighed. "Fine. I just… I was wondering if that phrase is why I failed the audition for the Duke's harem."
He blinked. "That and the fact that you bit the examiner."
"I did not!"
"You did."
"That was the other time."
He stopped. "There was more than one?"
I looked off into the horizon. "Define 'bit.'"
He gave me a look of ancient, exhausted disbelief.
"Oh don't act like that," I huffed. "He was grabbing without consent."
"I thought you said it was a performance-based evaluation."
"It was. And I performed boundaries."
He sighed so hard it stirred the dust on the road. "You are like a living scandal pamphlet."
"And yet you keep me around."
"Like a rash I can't reach with ointment."
I smirked. "You love me."
"Love is a strong word."
"Like 'tight-lipped cave'?"
"Don't start."
I kicked a pebble and grumbled, "Fine. Make fun of me, Mister Educated Dragon. Make fun of a tartlet. Of a pavement flower. Just because I didn't go to some fancy finishing school or Draconage College."
He raised a scaly brow. "Is that a real place?"
"I don't know! But if it is, they wouldn't have let me in. I had to work for my bread. Real work. Hard work, Mister Dragon. On my back. On my knees."
He snorted. "I didn't go to college."
I blinked. "You didn't?"
"Dragons don't have schools," he said, offended at the very notion. "We don't sit around in little desks with sharpened claws and parchment scrolls."
"Then how do you know all this?"
He puffed out his chest a little, which is saying something when your chest is the size of a shed. "Ancient wisdom. Passed down our bloodlines. Generation to generation."
I tilted my head. "That's kind of lovely."
He gave me a look. "Have you ever talked to a toddler dragon?"
"…No?"
"Obsessed little beasts. All the knowledge in the world, but no social filter. They'll corner you for hours describing obscure fish species and the mating calls of alpine wyverns. You cannot escape. You cannot."
I tried to picture it — a baby dragon lecturing passionately about freshwater eels. "Oh."
"Oh indeed," he said with the thousand-yard stare of someone who's been cornered by a baby cousin at a family funeral.
I started to smile.
Then I asked, "So is that how you know all the dirty phrases too?"
His wing twitched. "That's from personal experience."
I stopped and sat on a sun-warmed rock, leg lifted like a tragic ballerina mid-rehearsal, squinting at the sole of my foot.
"There's a splinter," I announced dramatically.
Behind me, the Dragon let out a noise halfway between a sigh and a death rattle. "That's what you get for stomping barefoot through a pine grove like some half-naked dryad on a sugar high."
I glared at him over my knee. "This is your fault. You burned that Amazon."
"She tried to spear me."
"She had good sandals! Thick soles. Leather straps. Arch support."
"They were three sizes too big for you, Saya."
I dug at the splinter with a twig that was probably not medically approved. "Fashion is about compromise."
He snorted. "So is surviving a dragon attack."
I yelped as the twig snapped and jabbed something tender. "Great. Now it's deeper. This is it. This is how I die. Infection. Sepsis. Toe rot."
He groaned. "You are not dying from a splinter."
"I might. Unless you carry me."
There was a long pause.
"My shoulder still hurts," he muttered.
I froze. "Excuse me?"
He stretched—very pointedly, very theatrically—and added, "Rheumatism. From the last cold snap."
I narrowed my eyes. "Are you telling me I'm too heavy?"
"No," he said quickly. "You're… dense."
I gasped. "Rude!"
"Not like that!" he backpedaled. "Dense like… compact. Full of… potential energy."
"I haven't eaten anything since yesterday morning!"
"You had wild apples."
"Wild apples don't count."
"They're technically food."
"They're technically air in fruit cosplay."
He sniffed. "I'm sorry. Next time I'll roast you a goat in a wine reduction."
"Next time," I said, still picking at my foot, "you don't set fire to women with decent footwear."
I finally yanked the splinter out with a victorious hiss and flung it into the grass. "There. Now you can carry me."
He blinked. "You just said it doesn't hurt anymore."
"No," I said sweetly, holding up the foot like a relic, "I said the splinter's out. I'm still emotionally wounded."
He stared at me.
I blinked prettily.
He turned away, grumbling something about "back pain" and "should've joined a monastery."
I reached for my pack—empty except for lint and regret—and sighed.
"Still hungry."
"Still dramatic."
I hopped off the rock, limped exactly three steps, and groaned. "Ugh. Nope. Can't walk. Foot's cursed."
He sighed like a martyr. "Fine."
He lowered a wing, muttering under his breath.
I grinned, hopped aboard, and patted his neck. "You're such a good beast."
"Don't talk."
"Strong, majestic beast."
"Still don't talk."
"My dense, rheumatic hero."
"I will drop you."
"No, you won't," I purred. "Because then you'd have to listen to me scream about it all the way down."
He growled, lifted off, and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, "One day, I swear, gravity will be my accomplice."
But his flight was smooth.
His wing curled a little tighter around me.
And I didn't say it aloud…
…but he totally liked carrying me.
Even if I was compact and emotionally fragile.