By the time I had finished — the scented oil worked through my hair, the strands dried over fragrant smoke in the old way, a midnight blue lehenga settled into place, my now considerably longer hair braided and threaded through with jasmine flowers — I felt, if not restored, then at least composed enough to pass for it. A reasonable facsimile of a person who was managing.
I arrived at the dinner table before Arvid and sat waiting while the kitchen staff moved efficiently around me, covering the surface with dishes. The smells that rose from them were rich and layered — warm spice, the particular fragrance of rice steamed with pandan leaves, the deep savoury pull of slow-cooked things. Beautiful smells, genuinely. And they produced in me absolutely nothing in the way of hunger.
This was one of the changes I was still absorbing.
Hunger, as I had known it my entire life, was simply gone. I could go without eating for as long as I chose and feel no particular lack — no hollowness, no fading energy, no gnawing insistence that something needed to be addressed. The body I now occupied did not operate on that system.
After enough curiosity had accumulated, I had sat down and studied my own constitution with the careful attention I might have brought to a complicated text, working through what I could sense and what I could infer, until the shape of it became clear. I absorbed natural energy from the surrounding environment — the ambient life of the world, the slow energy of growing things, of air and earth and water — and converted it into magic, which sustained me. The excess was constant: those small drifting particles of light I had noticed while flying over the ocean, spilling from me without effort, absorbed back into nature, turned again to natural energy, drawn in and expelled anew in an unbroken cycle. I was, in essence, both drawing from the world and replenishing it simultaneously, endlessly, without any intervention required on my part.
The less poetic implication of all this had taken me a moment to arrive at, and when it did, I had stared at the ceiling for some time processing it.
If food could be consumed, it simply entered the same cycle — converted to magic and expelled as ambient energy rather than through any of the ordinary human mechanisms. Which meant I would never again require a chamber pot as long as I lived.
It was, I had concluded after careful reflection, perhaps the least majestic thing about being a dragon. Functionally magical waste. I had taken a few minutes to sit with the fundamental indignity of that before moving on.
Eating remained possible, technically. It simply served no particular purpose, and increasingly it didn't feel like something my body was interested in. Abstaining felt more natural than participating.
My thoughts were still occupying themselves with these mundane draconic matters when the aide appeared in the doorway, Arvid at his shoulder, the two of them mid-conversation with the focused shorthand of people wrapping up business they had started somewhere else.
"Make sure the location is undisturbed," Arvid was saying, his voice carrying the quiet authority of someone whose instructions are recorded rather than discussed. "Good visibility, wide prospect. A hilltop would be ideal — somewhere elevated."
"Noted, your Majesty." The aide completed whatever he was writing, offered a respectful nod, and departed.
Arvid turned toward me, and something in his face eased — a small but visible shift, the particular quality of a man who has been managing things all day and has arrived somewhere he didn't have to manage them.
"My dear." He crossed the room with an unhurried purpose. "I apologise — I was meant to be here earlier. The work was persistent this evening."
He didn't need to apologise. I nodded anyway and began filling his plate.
He sat down, the chair scraping briefly against the floorboards before settling, and surveyed the spread with genuine appreciation. He reached for a dish and served himself with the easy appetite of someone who had, unlike me, actually eaten a reasonable amount today.
"The speared fish is excellent this evening," he said. "You should eat, my dear."
I reached for a roti from the tray in front of me without particular enthusiasm, added some chicken curry to my plate, broke a piece off and dipped it into the sauce. Put it in my mouth.
The texture was fine. The flavour was correct. My body simply regarded the entire exercise with complete indifference, as though I had put something in my mouth that bore no relationship to anything it needed.
I set the roti down.
"What were you building?" I asked, when the silence had stretched long enough that the question felt natural rather than interrogative. His earlier conversation with the aide had been circling in the back of my mind since the moment I heard it. I didn't know whether he would be truthful about it. I felt the need to ask regardless.
He stopped reaching for the rice and set down the serving spoon with the alacrity of someone delighted to change course.
"I'm glad you asked." He turned to face me fully, and his eyes had that particular gleam they got when something had genuinely captured his interest. "It's the Rulha Temple — the one I promised to build. The craftsman's boy from the northern village completed a blueprint, and we've been working from it to develop the full plan. The budget has been approved, the ministers have signed off on it. The only remaining question is the site — we need the right location before we can break ground. Elevated, good prospect, undisturbed. Once that's settled, construction can begin."
He said it with the enthusiasm of someone sharing welcome news.
I looked at him and kept my expression exactly where it was.
'The temple he had promised to build after I survived the dagger attack.'
The dagger that had come from a tomb he almost certainly knew about. The attack my nanny had carried out with a weapon that should never have been in her hands. And then the prayers — prayers offered to a god he did not believe in, prayers sincere enough that Rulha had been moved to answer them, to come, to heal me and leave something of himself behind in the process.
He had prayed for my life. And he had been the reason my life needed praying for.
The bile that rose in my throat was sudden and unambiguous. I pushed the plate away.
"That's wonderful news," I said, with a smile that I constructed carefully and placed with precision. "I'm glad it's moving forward."
He looked at me. Then at the plate I had pushed away. A slight frown.
"You've barely touched anything. Is the food not to your taste this evening?"
"It isn't that." I reached for the wash basin a maid held toward me and rinsed the curry from my fingers, taking a moment to choose my words. "I don't really have an appetite anymore. Not since becoming—" I left the sentence where it was. He knew what came next.
He leaned forward slightly. "You don't eat at all now?"
"Not out of necessity. I absorb natural energy from the environment — convert it inward, expel the excess as ambient magic, which returns to nature and completes the cycle. It sustains me without interruption." I accepted the small towel offered to me and dried my hands. "Food can still be consumed, but it follows the same path. There's no particular need for it."
"That's remarkable," he said, and he meant it — I could hear the genuine fascination beneath the words. He was looking at me the way he sometimes looked at unusual information, with the focused attention of someone cataloguing something for future consideration. "What else has changed? Are there other differences?"
"Minor ones, mostly." I set the towel on the tray. "The bathing water needs to be considerably hotter for me to feel anything useful from it. And I can shift my appearance into anyone or anything I can hold clearly in my mind — this form I'm wearing now is conjured, not physical in the human sense."
He was still watching me. Still waiting.
I exhaled.
"I can also take my dragon form. Fly. Breathe fire." I set my hands flat on the table. "That's the summary of it."
I was tired. Not physically — I had slept, and the bath had helped, and the jasmine in my hair still smelled exactly as it should. I was tired in the way that comes from maintaining a performance, from holding a face in position over something it does not reflect, from sitting across from a person you love and a person you no longer entirely trust and knowing they are the same person.
I was tired of pretending that everything was fine.
The jasmine smelled lovely. The dishes steamed gently in the lamplight. Arvid watched me with eyes that were warm and interested and gave away nothing except exactly what he chose to give away.
And I sat with my hands flat on the table and wondered, not for the first time, what he actually saw when he looked at me.