Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman Page A

eyes the color of a summer sky.
    “Please call me Nedouard,” said the doctor, taking pains to speak clearly. It was hard for him; I could see his black tongue laboring to make up for the stiffness of his beak, and he couldn’t help the curious snapping sound where language required the lips he didn’t have. “The little fellow said you were all half-dragons. I had believed there were none but me.”
    I sat down across from him and rolled up my left sleeve to show the silver dragon scales spiraling up my forearm. Nedouardhesitantly reached across and touched them. “I have a few of those as well,” he said softly. “You are fortunate to have escaped this.” He gestured toward his beak.
    “It seems to manifest differently in everyone,” I said. Abdo obligingly stuck out his scaly tongue.
    Nedouard nodded thoughtfully. “That doesn’t surprise me. The surprise is that humans and dragons can intermix at all. But what about—” He nodded at Josquin.
    “Oh, not me,” said the herald. He’d gone pale, but he tried valiantly to smile.
    Dame Okra said grudgingly, “I have a tail. And no, I won’t show you.”
    Nedouard accepted a cup of coffee from Abdo with an almost inaudible “Thank you,” and then there was an awkward silence.
    “Did you grow up in Segosh, Nedouard?” I asked gently.
    “No, I was born in the village of Basimo,” he said, stirring his coffee, though he’d put nothing in it. “My mother took refuge there, at the Convent of St. Loola. She’d fled her home; she told the nuns my father was a dragon, but they didn’t believe it until they saw my face.”
    “You were born with …?” I mimed the beak. “My scales didn’t come in until I was eleven. Abdo’s came in when he was … six?” I looked for confirmation; Abdo nodded.
    “Oh, the scales came later,” he said. “The face, alas, was always as you see it. My mother died in childbirth, but there was never any question of the sisters caring for me, however malformed—St. Loola is patroness to children and fools. They raised, educated,and loved me like a son. I wore a mask outside the convent. The villagers were fearful at first, but I was steady and peaceable. They came to accept me.
    “Basimo was ravaged by plague when I was seventeen. The convent took in the sick, of course, and I learned to care for the victims, but …” He picked up a spoon and set it down again, drummed agitated fingers. “In the end, there were only five of us left. There is no village of Basimo, not anymore. Only the name I brought with me.”
    “How do you manage here?” I asked, careful not to add,
With a face like that
.
    He heard the omission, though, and looked up cannily. “I keep my mask on. Who would dare touch me to remove it?”
    “Your patients don’t find the mask ominous during years without plague?”
    “My patients are so grateful that they don’t mind what I look like.” He cleared his throat and added, “And there are no years without plague. Some years it doesn’t reach the rich, but it always lurks among the poor.”
    Nedouard attempted to sip his coffee at last, but his beak was too ungainly for the tiny cup. Dame Okra made a scoffing noise, and Nedouard set his cup down, clearly mortified.
    I glared at Dame Okra and said doggedly: “We’ve had many plague-free years in Goredd. There hasn’t been an epidemic in my lifetime.”
    “Goredd is different,” said Nedouard, his grizzled eyebrows raised. “Quigutl eat your garbage, so you have fewer rats. It’s rats that bring plague. I’ve done experiments, written treatises, but I’ma self-taught doctor with this …” He gestured at his face. “Who’s going to listen?”
    “We will listen. All Goredd will listen,” I said firmly. “I am on a mission to find all our kind. Goredd requires our assistance with the dragon civil war, but once that’s over, I hope we might form a community of half-dragons, supporting and valuing each other.”
    Dame Okra rolled