Clearly, he had helped me. He hadn’t let me die. And he very well could have. Because who was I to him, really?

We were strangers.

I was no one. A human he wouldn’t even deign to tell his name.

Maybe the stress of illness had left me weepy, but that stung more than it should have.

“Will you tell me now?” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut against stupid tears. I huffed a steadying breath then opened them again. “Your name?” I pointed at my own face. “Suvi. You understand that. I know you do because you call me by my name all the time. I’m Suvi. You are...?”

I didn’t really expect him to answer, because he hadn’t before so why should he have bothered now?

But his eye brightened with alertness and he suddenly straightened up, like a pupil in class who’d just realized with a surprised sort of pleasure that he actually knew the answer to the teacher’s question. For the first time since we’d been outside, his snout pulled into that fang-toothed grin of his. He bumped a scaly fist against his chest and with his rumbling voice, he answered me.

“Skallagrim.”

And just like that, he ceased to be the alien or the dragon dude.

He had a name, and he’d finally shared it with me.

Skallagrim...

It was something.

A start, at least.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Suvi

Ididn’t let things start and end with learning Skallagrim’s name. My next goal was to learn the alien language. There was only so long I could be hurt and angry about my situation and try to wall myself off from everyone. I was the only human here, and being able to communicate with the dominant species was becoming more and more pressing. That, and I honestly just needed something to occupy my time while I recovered in bed. There was no TV, no internet (as far as I knew anyway, though the room I was in did seem to be powered with something like electricity). There was no small indoor garden to tend to like I’d kept back in Helsinki, no books to read, no socks or scarves to knit. Nothing to do except try to wrap my human brain around the language I came to learn was called Bohnebregg.

At first, the task tired me quickly, even though all I did was listen and try to parse whatever Skallagrim said to me, or to understand what he said to the other alien, Jolakaia, who came each day bringing food and checking on my legs before leaving again. I’d sit up and watch the two of them and struggle along, my mind like sludge as it tried to catch a word here or there. Often, when Skallagrim and Jolakaia had had a particularly long conversation, I’d drop like a rock off a cliff into sleep immediately after. But even in sleep, I kept at it, Bohnebregg words ghosting through my head, echoing on the outskirts of my dreams.

It was something to focus on. A goal to propel me forward when, for the moment, I really had nothing else to look forward to or work on. And boy, was it something to work on. Learning Bohnebregg was no easy feat. Unlike Finnish, the alien language was very gendered. Nouns were gendered (masculine, feminine, and neuter/plural) which affected not only the way articles and adjectives interacted with them but also verb conjugation. This was how I learned that Jolakaia was a Bohnebregg female. Luckily, I had some experience with gendered language constructs from the Swedish I was fluent in and the smattering of French and German I’d learned in school, but it was still tricky for my muddled brain to take on.

It was a lot, so I spent seven full days barely speaking, only listening. But there came a point where simply listening only got me so far.

So then I started asking questions. I’d point at the floor, at my bed, at my face, requesting that Skallagrim rattle off the Bohnebregg counterparts.

I mainly spoke to him in English, and I did this for two reasons.

The first reason was that my human mouth and throat struggled to form a huge portion of the Bohnebregg sounds and syllables. I couldn’t force out the guttural hiss that accompanied male adjective endings or verb conjugations, nor did I have a split tongue to make words practically vibrate in my mouth in order to indicate something in the plural form. The first time I tried to say something in Bohnebregg, Skallagrim had tensed, concern swallowing his face like a storm, before walloping me on the back with his massive hand. I’d tried to speak to him in his own language and he’d apparently interpreted that as his frail little star choking to death on her own saliva. Which, to be fair, I may have actually done. Not to death, of course, but the attempted hiss had definitely created a bit of an awkward spit-in-the-windpipe situation.

The second reason I stuck with English was the more foolish of the two, but I couldn’t shake it, no matter how ridiculous I knew it was. English was the common language spoken among the humans on the mission Skallagrim had taken me away from. Part of me still held onto the absurd hope that one day, Skallagrim would take me back to them. And if that happened, I wanted him to be able to understand what other people were saying.

So, English it was. I narrated nearly everything I did out loud in English – I am sitting; I am walking; I am wearing a white robe like yours; I am drinking water; yes, I like the fish; no, I do not like it when you watch me pee. Pee! You know, urinate, pass water, piss... Oh for fuck’s sake.

Maybe Skallagrim was just as bored and needing stimulation as I was, because he threw himself into the process with gusto. He did just as bad a job trying to speak English as I did Bohnebregg, but he was an enthusiastic participant nonetheless. When I’d mime something at him and say the words – I close the door, I open the door – he’d usually repeat the action himself and then translate it into Bohnebregg so I could become familiar with more and more sentence compositions. The result wasn’t anywhere near perfect, but after three weeks of convalescence and intense, immersive language study, we’d managed to cobble together a somewhat decent understanding of each other.

But spending that much time in my room talking basically only to Skallagrim had the unintended consequence of making me feel a lot closer to him than I was comfortable with. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be his friend the way it kind of seemed like I was now. I wanted to understand him, and anyone else here, so that I could survive and figure out my next steps, not so that I could let down my defences in front of the person who’d essentially abducted me.

But more and more, it felt impossible to keep him completely out. Despite the violent way we’d met, Skallagrim had otherwise proven himself trustworthy. Other than a slightly annoying propensity to pretend not to understand me in certain circumstances (I swear I reached for my toes and said, “I bend over,” about a dozen times before I realized that he was messing with me, a grin stretching his snout, eye glittering with amusement) he didn’t seem to want me for any nefarious sexual purposes. He didn’t appear to need me as some kind of forced labour, either. All he did was make sure I ate and drank and didn’t collapse on my way to the bathroom, all while asking Jolakaia pointed, borderline obsessive questions about my recovery.

Maybe I should have been less worried about accidentally becoming his friend and more worried about...

“Am I your pet?” I asked Skallagrim about four weeks after my arrival at the place called Callabarra (I still wasn’t sure if Callabarra was the word for hospital or clinic or village or if it was just a name of some sort).

Skallagrim was seated, his massive body folded onto a stool that, even with its alien construction, seemed a little too small for his bulk. He lowered the bowl of fish stew he’d been trying to foist on me for the past five minutes. In trying to feed me, he had been reminding me of how I’d tried to coax my old, sick cat Viiru to eat before he’d died, and the question had just burst out.