To Shape a Dragon's Breath (Nampeshiweisit #1)

by Moniquill Blackgoose

fancy…I had no doubt that she’d have gotten on fine without me—which made her choosing me mean that much more. She didn’t need me—she wanted me.

“This is how Masquapaug will die,” Grandma said. “Not murdered, like Naquipaug, or smothered, like the Naregannisit and the Akashneisit, but slowly by bleeding away its young people. More and more of you every year. My own grandchildren. I shouldn’t have lived long enough to feel this pain.”

“Dragons are sacred to my people,” I said, trying to understand how she could so casually talk of dragons being put to death. “Being chosen by one is an incomparable honor that changes one’s life forever. The word for ‘dragoneer’ in Masquisit is ‘Nampeshiweisit.’ It means ‘person who belongs to a dragon’—just like Naquisit means ‘person who belongs to Naquipaug,’ and Masquisit means ‘person who belongs to Masquapaug.’ I don’t think that ‘dragoneer’ means the same thing at all, from what I’ve seen. I don’t think that your people understand dragons.”

“I hadn’t been aware that it was at all uncommon for women to be dragoneers,” I said, horrified at the idea that a woman might be hanged just for having been chosen by a dragon. But then, I’d already learned that the Anglish might put a dragon to death for not choosing the right person, so maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me that they’d kill people just as freely.

“I don’t know that there’s an Anglish word for it. It literally means ‘someone who does the work of a caterpillar.’ But really, it means…a little girl who grows up to be a man, or a little boy who grows up to be a woman. Or…someone mistaken in childhood for the sex opposite their true one? It’s hard to say in Anglish. It can also mean someone who’s not precisely a man or a woman—someone with two spirits, or with a trickster spirit that can change from man to woman and back. My great auntie Mamisashquee is a mupauanakausonat. Everyone thought she was a boy when she was a child.”

I had become like Crow, venturing to dangerous and unknown lands to bring fire back to my people. I wondered, as we sat together in one another’s company, what we were going to burn with it.

If you want to go through your whole life pretending that you’re not a nackie, that’s your affair and not mine, but it’s not ever going to work out for you. Everyone else will always judge you as one.” “Do you honestly think that I’m too stupid to know that? That I’m not acutely aware of the fact that I am judged first by my race and second by the fact that my parents were seditious murderers and third by the fact that I’m an undeserving dragon thief vying for a place above my station? All I have in this world is my good reputation, Anequs.” “Your good reputation isn’t going to take care of you, now or ever,” I said. “Your family would.”

Frau Kuiper has plainly said to me that she expects you and me to prove that our people can be ‘civilized,’ and from what I understand, that means ‘made Anglish.’ I’m not interested in pretending to be Anglish or pretending to be just like the other students.

I was going to make sure that the Anglish understood that we had never gone anywhere. That despite their best efforts, we were still living here among them on the lands where we’d always lived. I was going to show them just how many of us there were.

“Your answers to the interview did allude to that,” Frau Kuiper said with a weary sigh. “I had hoped that you might be swayed from such a course by exposure to civilization.” “There is nothing uncivilized about my people, ma’am,” I said coldly.

considered how I could arrange for Theod and Liberty to meet next term. If I was going to be courting both of them, they really ought to know each other.