“I am the Duke of Scotland still,” Benjamin said. Smoke continued to curl about his figure. “Put away your wings, darling.”
“You might prefer your drinks hot, but I prefer mine with ice, distilled down to their very essence.”
“You can’t take me, Rowena. Not here. We would destroy this hotel of yours.”
Her body began the change, pushing her through the ceiling. “It’ll be worth it.”
And then she roared.
2019
New Sky
“Did you win?”
Rowena laughed. “Of course, I won. I had to pay for reconstruction. Two full city blocks were damaged or destroyed in the fight, but I like to think of it as a community project. Job creation, that kind of thing. It was excellent for my reputation. They even named a school after me.”
“What happened to the Duke?”
Rowena did not move. “I keep him close at all times.”
Miranda’s gaze shifted to the gold dragon statue and back to Rowena. She cocked an eyebrow.
“Never scorn a dragon.”
Krista D. Ball is an award-winning author of over twenty books, including the popular non-fiction guide, What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank.
BLAKE JESSOP
THE RISE OF THE DRAGONBLOOD QUEEN
Part One: Sarissa’s last Spring
“We hath nary a choice, sire,” the chancellor said. He leant on a cane of carved ivory, too old to kneel properly before the king.
“There is always a choice,” Sigmund said. Even kneeling, the knight was a big man, as unbending as an oak tree. He struggled with the high speech. “I beg thee; allow me to command thy castle guard against the beast.”
“Thou art brave, sir knight, but unwise,” the chancellor croaked. “Sire, our army contends with the heretic Zenatans in the south. The dragon hath chosen a fateful moment to renew its war on thy house. Princess Sarissa must be sacrificed to foul Fafnaer, or the heart of thy kingdom will burn. “
The princess, a sullen and intemperate teenager who no prince had yet consented to marry, sat rigidly beside her father. For once, a minor note of panic had infiltrated her usually dour and demeaning voice.
“What shall we do, father? Who will save me?” Sarissa said, stubbornly refusing to speak the language of kings.
The king and his knights and the chancellor all looked at each another.
Sigmund dragged Sarissa down to the cliffs by the water and set about tying her to a convenient tree. The castle loomed high behind her, and bells clanged and clamored from the wharfs below. Far across the bay, visible only as a shadow above the diamond shimmering of the waves, was the dragon’s island.
“Let me go!” Sarissa yelled. She had run out of energy for wriggling, and her hair was loose from its ribbon and stuck across her eyes.
“This is my most shameful day as a knight,” Sigmund said, “I have always… favored you, princess. I wish there was a way to save you.”
“There is a way to save me, you giant wretch, do anything but this!”
In spite of her protestations, Sigmund lashed Sarissa efficiently to the tree and retreated as fast as chivalry would allow.
Suddenly alone, Sarissa squirmed briefly, then gave up. The rope was harsh and prickly through the thin fabric of her dress. Part of her still doubted the dragon was even real. She squinted at the distant horizon and huffed the hair out of her face. Nothing.
“Perhaps there is no dragon,” she said, “perhaps terrible Fafnaer is just a myth.”
Sarissa blew at her hair again, and saw a speck in the distant sky. She lost it in the sunshine off the waves.
The first herald of Fafnaer’s arrival was screaming from the docks. The beast flew in low, and as the screams rose, so did he. Lost to sight for an instant below the lip of the cliff, the dragon shot skyward to blow the hair out of Sarissa’s face in a titanic beating of wings.
Sarissa could hardly believe how big Fafnaer was. The dragon settled its claws on the edge of the cliff as surely as a giant bird of prey. Something shifted inside Sarissa. She had started her day sulking about the prospect of being married off to some snot-nosed prince or taking any more dancing lessons, but now those anxieties melted from her like dew at first light. The terror was merely mind-shattering until the dragon spoke, at which point it invaded her soul.
“Cowards, mice, traitors!” the dragon punctuated the words with gouts of flames that burned the leaves above Sarissa’s head.
“I expected more,” the dragon roared on, “King Reginn the sixth was much cleverer. He would at least have tested some new war machine on me. You surrender your daughter as meekly as sheep during the cull!”
A tiny spark of irritation cut through Sarissa’s trembling.
“Stop yelling,” she yelled; “I won’t spend my final moments listening to you ignore me. My father already ignores me enough. Eat me and get it over with. See how much he cares!”
The dragon stopped.
“What did you say?” it rumbled in a lower voice, looking down at her.
“Eat me! All I am to my father is a burnt offering and all I am to you is a snack. I am utterly insignificant.”
The dragon settled down on its haunches and squinted at her.
“You are indeed a little chit of no particular consequence. If, for some reason I cannot yet conceive, I chose to listen, what would you say that I would find so very interesting?”
“If I told you what I really thought of you, my father, this kingdom, and your stupid war with my family, your scales would fall off. You worm. You fire-drooling old lizard. You corpse-breathed overgrown salamander.”
The dragon looked surprised for a moment, then its great scaly brows gathered like thunderheads. Sarissa plowed on.
“I have so much scorn for your idiotic plan to vex my father than one language can scarcely contain it. Perhaps thou wouldst prefer that I cursed thee in the speech of kings?”
The dragon’s voice held both the timbre and immediate peril of an earthquake.
“Thou dasn’t.”
“I dast,” Sarissa yelled into Fafnaer’s fearsome collection of scales and teeth. “Thou smellest like a furnace full of unwashed undergarments! Thy scales art rusty and thy plans those of a drooling babe hoping to frighten his wetnurse!”
High on the hill, the king averted his eyes. He had long since lost the sense of his daughter, and full though his mind was of the war in the south, he could not bring himself to look.
“Has it eaten her yet?” He said, slipping into the common speech.
“No, my lord,” the chancellor replied, fingering the beads of an ornate necklace of state.
“What’s happening, then?”
Sigmund shifted in his armor and looked through his fine Zenatan seeing glass.
“She seems to be begging for her life, sire.”
“The poor creature,” the king said.
Sarissa stopped to draw breath. The dragon had craned its neck down to listen to her tirade. He was as long as six ox carts laid end to end, scaled in deep red, and horned with ancient ivory. His breath smelled like a blacksmith’s forge.
“Is that all?” Fafnaer said, lowering his great head to one side to look at her with one giant, golden eye.
“Yes. I could probably think of more, but I’m going to get eaten first,” Sarissa sniffed. “I’ll never be a queen. I’ll never fall in love. I’ll never get to write any poetry or learn to dance. I don’t even like dancing, but now I never will. I’ll never turn eighteen and marry some poxy prince. Just eat me and get it over with!”
The dragon looked around the tree and up at the castle ramparts. There was a glint of glass.
“Convince me,” the dragon said, “to spare you.”
Now it was Sarissa’s turn to look surprised.
“What? How?”
Fafnaer cleared his throat with a sound like a thousand brazier coals popping.
“What I meant,�
�� Sarissa said, “was how do you plan to defeat my father by eating me when you could just fly up to the castle and drown it in fire?”
“I do not seek just to kill him, Princess. I seek to torment him.”
The girl gazed up at the dragon with something like pity.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Fafnaer asked.
“If all you want to do is hurt my father, then you are as much his slave as I am.”
Fafnaer looked at Sarissa for what seemed like a long time.
“Well?” the princess said, “are you going to eat me?”
“No,” the ancient dragon answered, and gripped the trunk of the tree. Its claws sank into the wood and she felt the roots groan beneath her slippered feet.
Part Two: Sarissa’s Fifteenth Summer
The flight to the dragon’s island was a dark rush of wind and cold, because Sarissa kept her eyes closed the entire time.
After many frigid minutes, there was a gut-loosening sensation of descent. The dragon freed her from the ropes and cast the tree into the sea. His scales were smooth and warm against her skin. The air grew suddenly close, and Sarissa’s feet were set bare upon the ground. Her slippers had long since fallen off.
“Open your eyes,” the dragon said in a hot gust; “we’ve landed.”
Sarissa did, and was struck dumb. She stood in a magnificent cavern supported by great pillars of stone. Some ancient people had built a longhouse in the cave, and the beams that once supported its walls still stood high above her head. Beyond that was the dragon’s hoard. A shining mountain of gold and jewels, casks of wine and stacked rolls of hand-woven tapestry. Every imaginable kind of plunder leant against the cavern’s walls.
“That’s… impressive,” Sarissa said. She saw the figurehead of a longship protruding from the hoard. The dragon slid by her like a colossal cat and curled itself amongst the broken oars with a huge creak. The boat was big enough to have thirty men rowing on each side. Fafnaer looked down at Sarissa from atop his kingdom.
“The taking of all this gold was amusing, but the hoarding of it is blander than you think.”
Sarissa hugged herself and stared up at the dragon.
“Well, you’ve caught a princess,” she said, “what is your usual procedure with royal captives?”
“I will keep you as a plaything.”
Sarissa put her hands on her hips. Acid entered her voice, but when she spoke she felt angry rather than petulant.
“Oh, how lovely. Your munificence is as boundless as your hoard of gold. I can scarcely contain my joy at exchanging my life as a royal lapdog to become an overgrown cat’s ball of yarn.”
“You are the most ungrateful princess I have ever met. You have known luxury beyond what most could ever dream.”
Sarissa let out an enormous sigh. “Then why has every moment of it felt like a cage?”
“Most riches are,” the dragon said.
“You’re the one sitting on a pile of gold,” Sarissa said. The dragon snorted and puffed. It felt like being buffeted by air from an oven.
“Are you laughing?” she said.
“I am.”
“Well, in that case I will not be a plaything.”
“Are you certain?” the dragon said, and smiled a smile as glinting and cold as the sunrise at harvest.
Sarissa ran along the ancient ceiling beams and the dragon chased her. She wobbled and stumbled and naked terror lanced through her guts every time she slipped. The dragon hunted her from below, sending up little gust of fire from its nostrils whenever she started slowing down.
When she finally fell, screaming, the dragon caught her with surprising delicacy and put her down. She lay still and panted for a while. When she finally opened her eyes, she found Fafnaer looking down at her.
“Your beams are unsafe,” Sarissa said, and the corners of the dragon’s scaly jaw twitched. Sarissa realized a few things at once. Fafnaer was not going to eat her, for a start.
“And you have been very bored,” she said.
Living with the dragon presented complications. There was nowhere to sleep, and Fafnaer often ate nothing but rancid sheep and goats. Once she discovered that she would not be devoured out of hand, Sarissa started searching the dragonhoard for necessities. She found an ornate four-poster bed that must once have been the property of a queen, and made the dragon drag it over by a shimmering rock pool.
Each day she tried to think of new ways to occupy Fafnaer, who proved to be surprisingly subtle company when he wasn’t in the mood for chasing her around.
“I’m bound to stop being amusing eventually,” she said, “what happens when I run out of ideas?”
“I will return you before winter,” the dragon replied. “I hibernate.”
“I have to go back?” Sarissa hadn’t thought about going home.
“Yes. Now, amuse me. Have you a singing voice?”
“I do, but my matron said it was raspy.”
“Sing anyway.”
So Sarissa sang, and stopped, laughing, when Fafnaer began humming along. It felt like being accompanied by a blacksmith’s bellows.
“The matron was right,” Fafnaer said when she ran out of songs, “you rasp, but your voice has personality.”
Sarissa bowed.
After a week, Sarissa began to smell. She dug around the edges of the golden hoard until she found an enameled brass tub with clawed feet. The dragon seemed pleased with this project, and disappeared from the cavern to return with a huge armful of branches and small trees. He kindled a fire under the tub and waited expectantly.
Sarissa started to pull her grungy dress over her head, and suddenly stopped.
“Well?” Fafnaer said, “wash.”
“It is a well-known fact that dragons are lecherous, perverted monsters who love nothing more than the sight of maidenly flesh.”
“You paid too much attention to your nursery rhymes. I am a dragon; I hatched from an egg at the centre of the earth itself. I feel no more lust for you than you would for a mouse.”
Sarissa thought about that. Steam rose from the surface of the water and wafted into the air.
“Oh skies,” she said, “what’s the difference?”
She cast her clothes aside and stepped gingerly into the water. She emerged, after a long, blissful time, like a maiden from the pool.
“What is that?” she pointed.
“That is a tapestry woven from flaxen seeds grown at the farthest reaches of the known world. It was the personal banner of King Reginn the third, your great-great-great-great grandfather, and I took it from him at the battle of-”
“Please be quiet, oh mighty lizard,” Sarissa said, “and give it here. I need something to towel off with.”
Late that summer, Sarissa stood like a statue, chin cupped in one palm, clad in a long woolen shirt that had once belonged to a warrior who tried to kill the dragon in a bygone age. All around her were rickety representations of knights and queens and men at arms. On a board carved into the stone floor by Fafnaer’s claws, the princess and the dragon were playing chess.
Sarissa walked amongst her pieces, and uncertainly shoved a rook a few paces forward, then started to shove it back.
“Leave that piece there,” Fafnaer said.
“But I’ve thought of a better move,” Sarissa replied. “I would not move it back if I didn’t have to. These rooks are devilishly heavy.”
“Once you stop touching the piece, the move is complete. That is the most ancient rule of the game of kings.”
“I am no king.”
“No excuse,” the dragon said breezily, a little smoke curling from his nostrils.
Sarissa abandoned the rook to its fate. “Then how am I supposed to win?”
“You won’t.”
While her pieces fell with the inevitability of snow, Sarissa sighed theatrically and gazed at the vaulted ceiling. It had been a while since she ran the beams.
“
Another game?” the dragon asked, placing a knight pinched delicately between two scimitar-like claws into a fatal position at her rear.
“No, I beg you to leave me to stew in my humiliation. I need sleep.”
“You are improving,” Fafnaer said, “not enough to win, but improving.”
“I am trying to divine how you will use your queen,” Sarissa said sweetly. She walked over to one of her knights. “This poor fellow looks particularly vulnerable.”
The dragon reached out a great claw.
“I could defend my pawns, or take one of yours, or perhaps, as you suggest, take this knight.”
His queen knocked the knight aside with a crash of steel plate. As the dragon spoke, Sarissa paced the edge of the board until her feet happened upon a tassle dangling from a tapestry affixed to one of the stone pillars.
“But I am hardly that foolish,” Fafnaer continued, beginning to move the queen back. “You set this trap like a child. Now pick up your knight and-”
Sarissa grabbed the tassle and gave it a violent tug. The tassle was tied to a rope, the rope to another, and that one to a beam above the dragon’s head. A weak and blackened log crashed down from above and broke one of the dragon’s horns with a tremendous crack.
Fafnaer cast the beam aside and lunged toward Sarissa, who cowered against the pillar.
“That is a poor way to try killing a dragon!” His breath smelled like molten iron.
Sarissa quailed. Her imagination had not done Fafnaer’s anger justice. Tears ran unbidden down her face.
“Explain yourself before I devour you!” Fafnaer roared. Sarissa trembled, but she had made her move.
“That queen must stay where she is if I am to win.”
“What?” the dragon’s anger ebbed fractionally.
Hear Me Roar Page 23
