"So let me get this straight," Smolder said. "You can talk. All other scavengers can talk in your own language. All of you are as intelligent as dragons are."
"So you mean I've been keeping an intelligent, sentient creature as my pet for the past twenty years?"
"At least you never ate any of us," Wren pointed out.
"True," Smolder muttered. He looked down at Flower, who was watching the conversation avidly, clever dark eyes darting between them. Could she understand them, even if she couldn't speak the way dragons could? "Can you ask her if...if she wants to leave? If she wants to go back to the rest of the sca - uh, humans?"
Smolder hated to lose Flower, but he thought she might want to go home even more. He thought of the burnt-out ruins of the scavenger village, and his stomach flipped over.
Wren and Flower had an exchange in the quick, high-pitched human language. Then Flower patted him on the leg and said something to him.
"She says no," Wren translated. "She says she likes you better than most humans, and she's totally fine to stay with you in the sand palace as long as she can visit her brother and her niece sometimes."
"She has a brother? And a niece?"
"Yup. Those two other people who were with her when-" Wren paused and thought before finishing that sentence. "When, um, you found her. They were her brothers. One of them has a kid. That's Ivy." She gestured over to where Ivy was chatting with Leaf.
"All right, I can do that," he mused. "I can take her to visit them whenever she wants, unless I'm in the middle of intertribe negotiations or something, as long as you or Flower make sure they don't try to stab me or anything - wait, is her name Flower? That's what I call her, but it's not her real name, is it?"
"It's Rose," Wren informed him.
"Rose," Smolder repeated. It was a pretty name, but strange on his tongue. "All right. Rose. It's going to feel weird calling you that, Rose," he addressed Fl - Rose for the first time, and she grinned at him. "You know, she pointed at a flower on a curtain to tell me her name...I guess I should have looked at what flower it was a bit more closely, huh?"
"Well, up until recently she thought your name was Ember," Wren informed him. "So I guess you're even."
"Ember?" Smolder repeated. "Really?"
As he wandered off Wren could still hear him saying to Rose, "Ember? For twenty years, you were calling me Ember?"
