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“I amnota dragon.” My fear slid into something softer-edged. A desperate plea. I was a human. I couldn’t be anything else. Despiteall the evidence to the contrary. I repeated it as though the conviction alone could make it true: “I am not a dragon.”

She looked at me almost amused now. “I think you know you are.”

I shook my head. “I can’t be. They don’t exist anymore.”

She nodded, but the motion was so indulgent it was insulting. Like she was trying to appease a small child who was one breath away from a tantrum. “Well, apparently notallare gone. You know what they say...”

They?They who?

I shook my head, wishing she would stop. I didn’t want her to make sense, to be right. I didn’t want her to persuade me. To say something that would make me believe the unbelievable. I wanted a reasonnotto believe.

“Magic,” she continued, “cannot be destroyed. It might hide, but it is always there. It never goes away. It lives in the bones, in the soul of this world. What you are, this...” She gestured to me. “It was always in you, rooted deep.”

Always in you.Like a tooth waiting to emerge, patient for its turn, for its day to break free.

I shook my suddenly throbbing head. The dragon had always been inside me? Hiding? A secret all my life kept even from me? None of this was right. I pressed fingers to my temples, my denial sharp, my confusion as wild and deep as the bramble in the woods surrounding us.

I had always assumed being the whipping girl was the thing that set me apart from others. But maybe it was more than that.

Maybe it was this.

“Magic cannot be destroyed,” she repeated.

And that seemed counter to everything I knew. The whole purpose of the Threshing had been to destroy dragons. Humankind had thought it possible. Kings and queens had sent their armies to see it done.

It had beendone.

We had been told that magic—or magical creatures—wereresponsible for all ills. All evils. Every plague or injustice suffered could be laid at the feet of dragons.

If I was one of them, did that make me evil, then? Did I need to be wiped from existence? I was not a bad—

I started and stopped, cringing at the phrase that hovered on the tip of my tongue.

I was not a bad person.

But was I even a person?

“Come.” Thora held out a hand for me to take. “Let’s warm you up inside the house. I have some clothes you can wear, and I’ll fetch you something to eat. You’ll feel better once you have a proper meal.”

If only she were right. If only that would fix everything.

“YOU CAN’T STAY HERE.”

Thora delivered this over oats and milk sprinkled with sweet cinnamon, as though I were a child and she wanted to ply me with something tasty while she snuck in a bit of foul-tasting medicine.

It did not make the words go down any easier.

As I sat at her table, wearing a borrowed dress of warm wool laced at the front, the nearby fire popping and crackling in the hearth, the words dropped like a rock in the air between us, heavy with a hardthunk.

She said it again... either for emphasis or because my continued silence begged her to repeat herself. “You can’t stay here.”

I didn’t meet her gaze. My spoon quickened, stirring fiercely through the oats, expending some of my restless energy.

You can’t stay here.

I moistened my lips. I wanted to ask why. Why had she brought me here at all if it was only to now eject me? And yet I could not summon the question, too reluctant to reveal how vulnerable I felt.

Sitting at her table, wrapping an arm around my bowl and pulling it close to the edge as though it might be taken away just as everything else had, I felt so small. On the verge of tears. This time the tears would be real, though. This time they would fall like rain from my eyes.