One Moon

You wake up because something is breathing on your face.

It smells like hot pennies. You open one eye. A pair of enormous silver eyes looks back, two inches away, on the end of a long blue neck.

"Morning," you croak.

The hatchling sneezes. A tiny spark lands on your pillow and you slap it out before you're fully awake, which is a skill you did not have yesterday.

You're in a bed. A real one, enormous, with heavy grey linen and a carved headboard of dragons twisted together. The room is round, with tall arched windows full of white cloud. Above the cloud, there's sky so blue it looks fake. Your scrubs are draped over a chair, still stiff with dried fluid. You're wearing a long linen shift you don't remember putting on.

The hatchling has been sleeping on your sternum. It's the size of a loaf of bread, all elbows and knees, its neck so long it has to fold it in an S to rest its chin on your collarbone. When you sit up it slides down into your lap and complains about it, a scratchy chirping sound like a squeaky hinge.

"I know," you say. "Me too."

Someone knocks. Before you can answer the door opens and the prince walks in.

He's changed. Black shirt open at the throat, black trousers, black boots, a silver torc around his neck. In daylight he's somehow worse. The sun from the window lands on his cheekbones like it was paid to. A girl in a grey apron carrying a tray behind him takes one look at his profile and walks straight into the doorframe.

He doesn't notice. He looks at you, at the hatchling in your lap, and something tightens in his jaw.

"You slept," he says, like an accusation.

"I tried. He wakes up every two hours. Like every newborn I've ever met."

"He ate?"

"Raw fish. Your healers brought a bucket around four. He wouldn't take it from them. He took it from me." You keep your voice even. "He bit Fenwould. Twice."

A muscle moves at the corner of the prince's mouth. It's not a smile. It's the place a smile would go if he were a different person.

He sits in the chair by the window, pushes your scrubs aside with two fingers like they might be contagious, and leans forward with his elbows on his knees.

"I'll be plain," he says. "I don't like humans. I don't trust them. Humans from the Lowmarch valley have been stealing our eggs for three hundred years, and the last time one of you came up this mountain, it didn't end well for my family." He says it flatly, like a weather report. "You are the last thing I would have chosen for my son."

"Wow," you say. "Okay. Good morning to you too."

"But he chose. And Fenwould is right. I've read every book in the archive since midnight. He'll die without you." His gaze drops to the hatchling, who has started gnawing on your thumb with soft toothless gums at the back of his mouth. "So I'm asking you to stay."

"For how long?"

"One moon." He nods at the window. "Our gate to your world, the Storm Gate, opens at the storm-moon. Twenty-eight days from now. By then he'll be strong enough to start eating from others, and Fenwould thinks the imprint will loosen. On the night of the storm-moon I will open the gate with my own breath and send you home, if you want to go." He meets your eyes. "You have my word as a prince of Drakemoor. A dragon doesn't break that. Ever."

You think about Rochelle, who's probably called the police by now. About your apartment, the plant you're definitely going to kill. About Nana Louisa asking for you on Thursday and you not coming.

You look down at the hatchling. He's fallen asleep with your thumb in his mouth.

"Okay," you say. "I'll stay. But I have conditions."

The prince's eyebrows go up. The scarred one only goes halfway. "Conditions."

"I run the nursery. My way. Nobody bleeds him, nobody chants at him, nobody puts him down in a cold corner because it builds character. I want clean water boiled, fresh fish, and a list of everyone who touches him." You take a breath. "And you show up. Every day. He's your son. He needs to know your heartbeat too."

He's quiet for so long you start counting again.

"Fine," he says.

"And he needs a name."

"Royal hatchlings are named at their first flight. Not before."

"That could be months. I can't keep calling him 'the hatchling'." You look down at the sleeping blue creature, at the impossible neck folded in loops across your knees. "Noodle."

The prince looks like you've slapped him. "Absolutely not."

"Noodle," you say to the hatchling. He opens one silver eye, chirps, and closes it again.

"He doesn't know what that means."

"He likes it."

"He is the heir to the throne of Drakemoor."

"He's a noodle. Look at him." You hold out your free hand. "And I'm Ava, by the way. Since you never asked."

"I know your name." He doesn't take the hand.

"You've never used it."

"No," he agrees.

The prince looks at his son, coiled in your lap like spaghetti. His jaw works. Then he stands, reaches into his shirt, and pulls out a curved piece of slate-blue shell on a leather cord, the size of your palm. It's the top of the egg. The inside shines like the inside of a seashell, pink and silver and green.

"The two halves of a royal egg stay joined," he says. "Write on the inside of one with your finger, and the words appear on the other. We call it shellspeak. I have the bottom half." He holds the shell out. "If anything happens to him, anything, you tell me. Immediately."

You take it. It's warm. When you touch the pearly inside, it shimmers.

At the door, the girl with the tray gasps out loud and nearly drops it.

"What?" you ask. "What's wrong?"

The prince doesn't look at the girl. He looks at you, and for a second his face is unreadable.

"The two halves," he says, "are traditionally kept by the hatchling's two parents."

Then he walks out.

He takes Noodle at sunset.

It's his right, he says. You need sleep, and he's spent the day watching you feed his son trout in tiny strips and sing him half the radio hits of the last ten years. He watched closely. He thinks he can manage one night in the nursery, which is three doors down from your guest room, if you're within reach.

Noodle screams when you hand him over. You make yourself walk away anyway. Imprint or not, he needs his father, and his father needs to try.

You lie in the huge bed and stare at the ceiling. You are Ava, you tell yourself, the way you do after a bad shift. You are a nurse. You've handled worse. You can't think of anything worse. The shell sits on the pillow next to your head, quiet.

At eleven, you hear the screaming through three stone walls.

At eleven-thirty it hasn't stopped.

At ten to midnight, the inside of the shell begins to glow, faint silver, then brighter, and letters burn up out of the shimmer in a jagged, unpracticed hand, like whoever's writing has never written to anyone before.

He's crying again. Tell him something. Tell me too.