My father was a cold-drake; revenge and malice flowed through him as blood through a lesser being. He stole the only daughter of a high mage from her walk along the cliffs of Hightower and sprouted his seed within her womb, then tore the babe—me—from her dying body. He named me Kamorr, which means ‘the cold death’ in the speech of the cold drakes, then cast me into the sea to live or die.

I lived. I was half cold-drake, and my body shaped itself to the waves, my teeth to the fish I caught there. I grew strong.

My father watched and smiled.

I wandered too far south one year and a fisherman caught me in his nets, bound me tight in cord and fishing weights, then drew me out of the water into air. I do not recall it well, save for light and heat and pain, but the fisherman told me later that I was a serpent who cried in a voice like a seagull’s and wept. I had dried by then, and like a cold drake, my skin had cracked into seven pieces, releasing the form within. But unlike a drake, my inner form was human.

“Put her skin in this box,” said the apprentice, and they did, unwrapping the net to remove each piece while I blinked at them, newborn to land. As they lifted the last piece away, some part of my sea-grown mind understood what they took, and I reached for it. For my trouble I gained a single scale before they locked my old life away from me. Pressed to my finger, it bonded to my nail, pearly-white and silver, as sharp as whetted steel.

The apprentice, seeing that, gave me a glove of white doe’s hide and spelled it so that I could not take it off. Then he wrapped me in one of my own dead mother’s gowns and stepped back to look at me.

I do not know what he saw, but I can imagine. My shape was slim and sleekly curved, like a drake, not like the human woman my mother had been. The gown, moth-eaten and forgotten so long in her chests, hung on me as a rag.

He sighed and looked toward the fisherman. “She needs a woman’s touch,” he said.

“I’ll get my wife,” said the fisherman. He left to fetch her.

I may not remember how I looked, or how he looked, or what chairs stood in the room or what pots bubbled on the hearth, but I remember the words. Remembering words is part of what a cold drake is.

The fisherman’s wife came and took up the care of me. I could repeat everything she said, save that much of it was the same as what she said to every young thing, whether it was chick or child. The one thing she said that mattered was, “She needs a name.”

The apprentice looked at the fisherman and the fisherman looked at his wife, and she said, “Men!”

Then she looked at me and said, “You shall be Jinan, which means ‘silver’ in the old language.” And I was silver, silver-haired and silver-eyed, my skin as pale as the doeskin glove upon my right hand.

She took me to her own home, her husband and the apprentice trailing her like tails. There, she took away my mother’s gown and gave me a blanket instead. She set a bowl of soup in my lap, held my hands while she taught me what a spoon was for, and sent her husband and the apprentice out to fetch her marketing. “If you’re going to stand and gape,” she snapped to their protest, “You will be useful!”

There I stayed, as she remade my mother’s gown to fit me, then taught me the craft of stitching, helping me remake another. Spring rolled into summer and then to fall. She taught me spoons and bowls, cups and kettles, needles, thread, and fabric. She taught me please and thank you and the names of every household thing and every man, woman, and child in the village. Her name was Marta.

She did not teach me the prickly feeling of eyes that followed me everywhere. That was a feeling I had always known, but my sea-shape had never paused for it, concerned as it was with weather and currents and the flight of fish. Now, though, it was a shiver along the soft, pale skin of my hands and face, an itch between my shoulders.

It wasn’t the stares of the villagers; the touch of their attention evaporated as soon as they turned away. More, it smelled like the doeskin glove: it smelled of magic.

Marta clicked her tongue and frowned when I told her this, then essayed to divert my attention from it, since neither she nor I could do anything about it. She taught me the name of the Hightower mage: Taracas, and his apprentice: Pir. Pir, when told of my itch, could do nothing either. It made him frown.

Pir taught me the name of the cold drake—Vambar. I did not recognize it; my father had not named himself before throwing me to the sea. In any event, Vambar was a human word and a human name, not a sound a drake would answer to.

“It was a great tragedy when your mother was lost,” Marta said, bustling around her hearth on the first day of autumn. She was making bread and I was making Pir a winter gift. “Your lord grandfather pined for days, drawing bowls of water from the well and staring into them until he went blind. Pir drew the water then, and when he failed to find your lady mother, he took your grandfather to the city of mages in the south for healing.”

I paused in my needlework, a leap of dolphins riding a wave around the hem of a blue shirt. “But Pir is here,” I said.

“He came back,” she replied, and she turned to smile at me before going on about the business of breadmaking. “He came back to find you, and here you are.”

“Not me,” I said, because precision is a passion of cold drakes, as much as words. “My mother.” I used my nail to slice a white thread, then slipped gray into my needle and continued my work.

“You are as much of her as can be found,” she said, and there was so much truth in that, I had to put my needle down to think about it.

Pir came in then, ducking through the door, halting with his mouth open when he saw me. He did that a lot. “Your glove!”

I picked up the glove from among the threads in my sewing basket. “It is here,” I said, and watched him look toward Marta.

Marta snorted at him and punched her bread. “She heard your spell, lad. She hears you lock and unlock the sheep gates. Do you think she forgets?”

He closed his mouth. He did that a lot, too, whenever Marta answered his questions. He looked back to me and said, “I did it to save you trouble.”

The glove, he meant; Pir was good at not saying what he was talking about.

I had gotten good at knowing what it was he really said. “And yourself trouble, and Marta, and everyone else.” My gaze met his. “It is very sharp.”

His gaze dropped and his face flamed. Marta laughed and said, “I think that isn’t the only part of you that might draw blood, Jinan.”

“I have only the one scale,” I said.

She only laughed again, and started making rolls.

Pir coughed. “It is the first day of fall,” he said. “Come to fair and have your fortune told.”

Marta startled and frowned at him, and Pir ignored her, looking at me. I said, “I thought one’s fortune was for one to discover, not for someone else’s telling.”

“If you, of all people, follow someone else’s telling of your fate, I will despair for us all.” He smiled and held out a hand. “Come to fair.”

My turn to frown at him. “You are confusing, Pir,” I said, but I set the shirt aside and put my glove on before taking his hand. I heard Marta tutting at us as we left.

The fair was a busy thing, with odd noises and strange smells, and unlikely colored tents set up on the commons below the tower. There were sellers of cattle and carpets, baskets and birds, a juggler, a drummer, a trio of sweet-voiced singers who told bawdy jokes with their eyes demurely downcast. The fortune teller’s tent sat at one edge of the noise, at the base of the steps to the tower. It was hung with bunches of ribbons in all colors, like the bunches of herbs hanging in Marta’s kitchen. The teller himself sat bundled in robes and wraps under the front awning, a strip of lurid pink silk bound about his eyes.

I looked at Pir, but he only smiled and waved me into line behind the weaver’s daughter.