Scaled Hearts

The scales along my spine itch when he's near. Not the pleasant kind of itch, the kind that means a storm's coming or your body's telling you something you don't want to hear. This is the other kind. The kind I've learned to swallow down like a stone.

Kaelen is on the training ledge again, wings half-spread against the morning thermals, and he's showing off. Of course he's showing off. When is he not?

"Watch the angle," he tells the young ones gathered below him. His voice carries across the cliff face like he owns the wind itself. "You drop your shoulder like that, you'll tumble straight into the ravine. Ask Vesper. She knows."

My jaw tightens. I'm halfway up the eastern path with a basket of fish balanced on my hip, and I do not stop walking. I will not give him the satisfaction.

"I don't need to ask Vesper anything," one of the fledglings says, a girl named Sorrel with scales the color of wet slate. "She's the one who taught us the shoulder roll in the first place."

Kaelen laughs. It's a sharp sound, all teeth. "Did she? Must've been a slow day."

The basket handle digs into my palm. I keep climbing.

Three years I've lived in this colony, and Kaelen has made it his personal mission to remind me I don't quite belong. I'm not from the mountain line. I came from the lowlands, from a nest that got flooded out when the river changed course, and the mountain dragons have never let me forget it. Most of them are fine. Indifferent, at worst. But Kaelen? Kaelen treats my existence like a splinter he can't dig out.

And the worst part, the part that makes me want to fly into a cliff face at full speed, is that I noticed him first. Before he opened his mouth. Before he decided I was his favorite target. I saw him on the western ridge my second week here, silhouetted against a sunset that turned his bronze scales to fire, and something in my chest cracked open like an egg. Stupid. So stupid. The heart doesn't care about evidence. It just wants.

I reach the storage cave and set the basket down harder than I mean to. A few fish slide onto the stone floor.

"Easy there."

I turn. Maren is behind me, her gray-green wings folded neat against her back, a knowing look on her face that I'd like to slap off.

"I'm fine," I say.

"You're doing that thing with your jaw."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you're grinding your teeth so hard I can hear it from across the cave."

I exhale through my nose and pick up the fallen fish. "He's insufferable."

"He's Kaelen." Maren shrugs like that explains everything, and maybe it does. "He's been like that since his father died. You know that."

I do know that. I know his father was the colony's lead hunter, that he fell during a bad migration season two winters back, that Kaelen took over the role before anyone thought he was ready. I know he pushes the younger dragons hard because he's terrified of losing another one. I know all of this. It doesn't make me want to claw his face off any less.

"That doesn't give him the right to be cruel," I say.

"No. It doesn't." Maren picks up a fish and starts scaling it with her thumb, efficient and unhurried. "But you're not exactly neutral about him either."

The words land like a slap. I keep my eyes on the fish.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you don't."

The morning passes in a blur of chores. I mend a torn net, help old Ferran sort the herb stores, and spend a solid hour pretending I'm not scanning the sky for bronze wings every time I step outside. By midday, the sun is high and hot, and I've almost convinced myself I've shaken him from my head.

Then I go to the water pool.

It's a small basin fed by a mountain spring, tucked behind a curtain of moss and rock. Private. Quiet. I strip off my tunic and wade in, letting the cold shock the tension from my shoulders. The water comes up to my waist. I close my eyes and tilt my head back.

"You're in my spot."

My eyes snap open. Kaelen is standing at the pool's edge, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I can't read. Amused? Annoyed? Both?

"Your spot," I repeat. "I didn't know you owned the mountain."

"I claimed it. Two years ago. Ask anyone."

"I'm not asking anyone. I'm bathing."

He doesn't leave. He just stands there, and I become acutely aware of the water lapping at my bare skin, of how the sunlight catches the droplets on my shoulders, of the fact that he's looking at me like he's trying to solve a puzzle he doesn't like.

"You could turn around," I say.

"I could." He doesn't.

My face heats. I sink lower into the water, which is a mistake, because now I'm crouched like a cornered animal, and he knows it. His mouth curves. Not quite a smile. Something sharper.

"You know," he says, "for someone who's always telling the fledglings to stand tall, you spend a lot of time making yourself small."

"I'm naked, Kaelen."

"I noticed."

The words hang between us. I want to throw something at him. I want to disappear. I want, and this is the part that shames me, I want him to keep looking.

He turns away. Finally. But not before I catch it, a flicker in his eyes that isn't cruelty. Something else. Something that vanishes so fast I could convince myself I imagined it.

"Pool's yours," he says, and walks off into the trees.

I stay in the water until my fingers prune and the sun starts to slant. When I finally climb out and dress, I find a single bronze scale resting on my tunic. It's warm. It's his. I don't know when he left it, or why.

I should throw it away.

I tuck it into my pocket instead, and I hate myself for it.