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delicate porcelain teapot held gingerly in one large hand. He paused by Viridius and squeezed the old composer’s shoulder; Viridius leaned briefly into Lars’s arm and then turned back to his work. Lars brought the tea around and filled the five cups on the ornate table by the gout couch. Dame Okra had claimed the couch, putting up her feet and spreading her stiff green skirts around her. Abdo, swathed in a long knit tunic against the cold, bounced on his upholstered chair as if he could barely be constrained to sit, his long sleeves flapping over his hands like flippers. I took the other couch, and Lars settled his bulk carefully beside me, trading me a cup of tea for Orma’s letter, which the other two had just read.
    “Have you heard of anything like this?” I said, glancing from Dame Okra’s scowl to Abdo’s wide brown eyes. “Mental connections have occurred with some of us. Abdo can speak in our heads; my mind used to reach out compulsively to other half-dragons.” Jannoula had entered my mind and seized it, but I didn’t liketalking about that. “What kind of connection is this mind-threading?”
    “I’ll tell you right now, I won’t participate in any mind-threading,” said Dame Okra flatly, her eyes swimming behind her thick spectacles. “It sounds horrible.”
    It sounds interesting to me
, said Abdo’s voice in my head.
    “Do you know whether the Porphyrian ityasaari have ever joined together this way, or used their … their mind-stuff for this kind of physical manifestation?” I asked aloud so Dame Okra and Lars could hear half the conversation, anyway. Abdo’s mouth and tongue were shingled with silver dragon scales, and he could not speak aloud.
    No. But we do know about mind-stuff. We call it soul-light. With practice, some of us can learn to see it around other ityasaari, like a second self made of sunlight. I can reach out with mine a little; that’s how I talk to them. I send out a finger of fire
, said Abdo, sending his real finger in a slow, dramatic arc to poke Lars in the stomach.
    Lars, his lips moving as he read, swatted Abdo’s hand away.
    Abdo gestured at Dame Okra with his head.
Her light is spiny, like a hedgehog, but Lars’s is gentle and friendly
.
    I saw nothing around either of them, but I noted an omission.
What about mine?
    Abdo studied the air around my head, toying with one of his many hair knots.
I see strands of light sticking out of your head like snakes, or umbilical cords, where we three—and others—are connected to you. Cords of our light. I don’t see your light, and I don’t know why
.
    Heat rose in my cheeks. My light was missing? What did that mean? Was I deficient? An anomaly even among anomalies?
    Dame Okra interjected in a voice like a braying mule: “Might we all participate in this conversation? That requires it to be audible.” She paused, her scowl deepening. “No, don’t talk to me silently, you villain. I won’t tolerate it.” She glared at Abdo and waved a hand around her head as if fending off gnats.
    “He says we’ve all got—” The word
soul-light
didn’t sit well with me; it smacked of religion, which brought me quickly to judgmental Saints. “Mind-fire. He can see it.”
    Lars carefully folded Orma’s letter and placed it on the couch between us, shrugging his bulky shoulders. “I can’t do anythink special with my mindt, as far as I know, but I am heppy to be a bead if someone else is the string.”
    “I’m sure that will be fine, Lars,” I said, nodding encouragingly. “Abdo or I will discover the way to thread through you.”
    I don’t think you can reach out like that, Phina madamina
, said Abdo.
    “I’ve reached out with my mind before,” I said, more waspishly than I meant to. I had reached back into Jannoula’s mind; I suppressed that memory at once.
    Recently?
he said, pulling the neck of his tunic up over his mouth.
    “Give me a minute to relax into it. I’ll show you,” I said, glaring at the little