I regarded the jug in front of me with undisguised wariness.
It had been sitting there for several minutes now — golden, foam-capped, entirely untouched — while the table around me descended into the organised chaos of a card game that had rapidly acquired strong opinions and louder voices. I was being ignored, which suited me perfectly. The problem was the jug.
I couldn't drink it. Dragons and alcohol had a relationship I had no interest in exploring in public: even a single sip of liquor was apparently enough to produce significant intoxication in a body that had been reconfigured from the inside out. And I couldn't make it disappear through magic without revealing that I could do magic, which would unravel everything else. So I sat with the jug and glared at it, which accomplished nothing, but felt marginally better than simply sitting with it and accepting the situation.
A quiet sound of amusement came from my right, nearly lost in the surrounding noise.
I turned.
Reichert — Zaren, I corrected myself, the sun having gone down some time ago — had been so thoroughly absent from my attention since we sat down that his presence beside me now registered almost as a surprise. He looked different from this morning. Not dramatically, but noticeably — the formal arrangement of his day had come loose at the edges. His tunic was unbuttoned at the collar, open at the chest, and he was sitting back in his chair with one leg drawn up, cradling his own jug of beer with easy comfort. His free arm rested along the back of my chair, not quite touching me, but close enough that the word encircling came to mind before I could prevent it.
He looked entirely relaxed. It was a more unsettling quality than his usual composure, somehow.
"Not a drinker?" he asked, with the unhurried tone of someone who has nowhere to be.
"I get drunk very easily," I told him honestly. "So I don't, as a rule."
He absorbed this without comment, raised his hand to catch Ivan's eye as the boy passed, and murmured something briefly into his ear. Ivan nodded and disappeared toward the kitchen with the speed of someone always in motion.
"I asked him to bring you something without alcohol," Zaren said by way of explanation, and reached across to pick up my abandoned jug.
I watched him bring it to his lips. And instead of doing the sensible thing and looking elsewhere, I found that I simply didn't. His eyes, when they lifted, found mine immediately — and he held the contact the entire time he drank, with the unhurried steadiness of someone who doesn't look away first as a matter of principle.
I looked away first.
"Thank you," I said, with whatever composure I could reassemble at short notice.
Ivan returned shortly, setting a jug that matched the others in size and shape in front of me — the contents, however, were a warm amber-brown that smelled of roasted grain rather than fermentation. Barley tea. He leaned in as he set it down, dropping his voice beneath the surrounding noise.
"Don't let the old men know you can't drink," he said, with the practiced authority of someone who has navigated this exact situation many times. "They will absolutely never let you leave. And act drunk — convincingly, mind." He straightened, the picture of professional innocence, and was gone.
A low sound came from beside me.
Zaren was laughing — actually laughing, not the controlled half-smile I had seen during the day, but something more genuine and slightly undignified, his shoulders moving with it.
"You should do exactly what he said," he told me, and there was warmth in his voice that I hadn't heard there before. Something looser. Something that might, in other circumstances, be called mischief.
He looked remarkably unlike himself.
Is he drunk already?
The question had barely formed when he answered it by leaning slightly toward me and dropping his voice to the approximate register of a confidential disclosure.
"I'll tell you a secret." A pause that was slightly too long. "I can't hold alcohol either."
His head dropped to my shoulder.
His body followed, boneless and trusting, settling there with the complete relaxation of someone who has simply decided that this is where they are going to be for the foreseeable future.
'You cannot be serious,' I thought, at full volume, inside my own head. 'If you know you can't hold alcohol, why are you drinking it?'
The answer he would presumably have given was unavailable, as he appeared to have left the conversation.
I sat very still for a moment, processing the situation — the weight of a fully grown man against my shoulder, the warm sweet scent of his magic drifting faintly from him, the complete indifference of the rest of the table to anything except their card game.
Before I could determine a course of action, Benedict glanced over at us.
"Ah." He took in Zaren's current state with the resigned recognition of someone encountering a recurring problem. "Did he get into the beer? Idiot man." He shook his head with the affection of someone genuinely fond of the idiot in question. "I'm sorry to ask this, lad — I'd do it myself but—" he spread his cards slightly, revealing a hand that explained everything — "his room is on the third floor. Last door on the left." He winked. "Can you manage?"
I assessed the man currently asleep on my shoulder.
Carrying him on my back was not going to work — he was not conscious enough to hold on, and I wasn't willing to find out what happened when he slipped. I shifted him, got one arm under his knees and the other across his back, and lifted.
He was heavier than he looked, and the angle was awkward, but I had the strength for it.
What I did not have, it turned out, was adequate visibility of the stairs.
With Zaren in my arms I could see approximately nothing below the level of my own chin. The staircase leading up from the restaurant floor was narrow — narrow enough that I had to hold him closer than was strictly comfortable in order to fit us both through it, angling my way up step by step, measuring each one by feel before committing my weight to it. The noise from the restaurant floor faded behind us, replaced by the particular quiet of upper floors after dark.
The first flight was manageable. The second was harder. I stood at the bottom of the third staircase and let out a breath that was not quite a sigh but was close.
"You can put me down."
The voice came from somewhere against my shoulder — quiet, slightly unfocused, but present.
I looked at him. His eyes were half-open, blinking slowly with the effortful concentration of someone trying to re-establish their relationship with consciousness.
"Can you walk?" I asked.
"Mhm." He said it with the conviction of someone who has not yet fully tested the hypothesis.
I set him down carefully. He swayed immediately, and I caught him before he listed too far in any particular direction, getting his arm across my shoulders and keeping him upright against my side. He was warm — the heat of him seeping through my clothing, the kind of warmth that radiates from a person rather than simply existing at their surface.
'I am a Dragon',I reminded myself, as something in me noted that this was a very comfortable temperature. 'I like warm things. That's all this is.'
We climbed the last flight together, occupying the full width of the narrow staircase between us, his weight resting against me in the unself-conscious way of someone whose social judgment has temporarily taken leave. The sweet scent of his magic hung faintly around him, familiar now, less cloying without the enclosed space to concentrate it.
He tripped over his own foot twice before we reached the third floor, and caught himself both times without going down, which I counted as a success.
His door was at the end of the corridor. I reached for the handle.
It didn't open.
Beside me, I heard him produce a faint, breathless sound that was almost a laugh.
"You can't open it that way," he said, with the satisfaction of someone imparting wisdom at exactly the right moment.
I looked more closely at the door.
The engraving was subtle — worked into the grain of the wood so naturally that it would pass for decorative pattern to anyone not looking for it. The lines traced a specific arrangement of symbols around the frame and across the surface of the door itself, interlocking with the kind of precision that only made sense once you understood what it was for.
It required the owner's magic to complete the circuit and disengage the lock. No key. No force. Just the specific signature of one particular person.
I stepped back slightly to give him room.
The sweet smell of magic being actively generated began to gather around him, stronger now than the faint trace from the stairs — warmer, somehow, with the particular quality of something being made rather than merely present.