Talking To Dragons

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “All really good Princesses have knights,” Shiara said firmly. “And you wouldn’t want a second-rate Princess, would you?”

  “All of them?” the dragon asked plaintively.

  “Well, not all of them,” I said. “Some of them have Princes instead.”

  “Princes are much worse than knights,” Shiara said thoughtfully. “They tend to have magic rings and sorceresses for godmothers and things like that. With knights you only have to worry about their armor and weapons, and maybe once in a while an enchanted sword.”

  “My love has no need of magic!” the Princess broke in indignantly. “For he is most strong and skilled, and never has he been beaten in combat with sword or spear. Woe! That he is no longer at my side!”

  “I don’t think I like the sound of this,” the dragon said uneasily. “Maybe if I just—”

  There was a loud crashing sound, and a rather tinny-sounding voice said, “What ho! A dragon?”

  The Princess stopped crying very suddenly and sat up quite straight. “Hark! My love approaches! Now shall you see his prowess for yourselves!”

  There were more crashing noises. The dragon backed up a little more, looking nervous. A moment later a knight in a somewhat dented suit of armor fell through the middle of the thickest clump of bushes, right in front of the dragon.

  “On guard, monster!” the knight said as he picked himself up. “Prepare to die!” He pulled out a sword and waved it at the dragon. Well, actually, he waved it a couple of feet to one side; his helmet had slipped a little, and evidently he couldn’t see very well. The dragon looked at him, and then back at Shiara.

  “This is a knight?” it said.

  “My love is the bravest of knights!” the Princess cried.

  “If this is a knight, maybe I can handle him after all,” the dragon said. “He doesn’t look so bad.”

  “Ah, hideous reptile! No longer do I fear you, for my love will defend me! Yea, he will defend me even unto death!”

  “Now, wait a minute, Isabelle,” the knight said. He pulled off his helmet, looked at it disgustedly, and threw it on the ground behind him. “I’m perfectly willing to kill dragons for you, but who said anything about dying?”

  “You are my knight, and my brave love!” the Princess said dramatically. “Oh, save me from this awful monster, who would carry me off and eat me!” She sprang up and threw her arms around the knight.

  “It’s going to be a bit difficult for me to save you if you hang about my neck like that,” the knight said apologetically. “It’s quite awkward. If you’ll just sit down, I can see about doing this properly.”

  The Princess only hung on to him more tightly, which made his aim almost as bad as it had been when he was wearing his helmet crooked. The dragon was watching them closely, and its eyes were starting to glow. “You certainly aren’t very polite,” it said.

  “My love is the soul of courtesy!” the Princess said from behind the knight. “For he is a knight most gentle and well spoken, much given to—”

  “I say, Isabelle, must you go on like that?” the knight said. “It’s rather embarrassing. Do, please, sit down and let me fight the dragon. Then you won’t have to worry about being eaten, you know.”

  The Princess gave a small scream. “Alas!” she said in a quavery voice. “Behold my sad state! For now must I watch a bloody battle, and perhaps see my love slain before my eyes, and become a captive of this monster.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Shiara, and before I could stop her she marched over to stand between the dragon and the knight. I followed her, hoping I could get her out of trouble if I had to.

  “Ah, save me!” the Princess said as we got closer. I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be saved from the dragon or from Shiara. Shiara glared at her.

  “You shut up,” she told the Princess. “You’ve caused enough trouble already.”

  “I say,” said the knight. “If we’re going to discuss politeness ...”

  “We aren’t,” said Shiara. “We’re going to discuss battles. Battles between dragons and knights. Why do you want to fight this dragon?”

  “Knights are sworn to do battle with the beasts which ravage the fields, carry off innocent maidens, and generally make a nuisance of themselves,” the knight said. He sounded as if he were reciting something, and he didn’t look very pleased about the idea, but the Princess nodded approvingly.

  “Well, this dragon isn’t ravaging anything, and it doesn’t even want your stupid Princess,” Shiara said.

  “I do, too!” the dragon broke in. “If I’m not going to carry her off, I could eat her after all. And if I fought a knight, no one could say I’m not a proper dragon, even if I don’t have a Princess.”

  “I really don’t think that’s a very good idea,” I said. “Princesses aren’t all that common, after all.”

  “Besides, you promised me you wouldn’t,” Shiara said.

  “I did not!” the dragon said. “I only said I wouldn’t waste a perfectly good Princess, and I don’t think this one’s so great. Eating her wouldn’t be much of a waste.”

  “I don’t think that would be very polite,” I said. “Especially when you’ve talked to her this long without bringing it up. You really ought to ease into these things gradually, you know.”

  “Are you sure?” the dragon said.

  I nodded.

  “Oh, all right,” said the dragon. “I won’t eat her, then. But couldn’t I fight the knight anyway? Just for practice?”

  “I say, that sounds like an excellent idea,” the knight said, brightening perceptibly. “A sort of exercise for both of us.”

  “A tourney!” the Princess cried. “Oh, brave and clever, to think of such a thing!”

  The knight looked pleased. So did the dragon. It nodded, then whispered to Shiara, “What’s a tourney?”

  “It’s like a battle, only no one gets hurt. Usually.”

  “Not even a little?” the dragon said. The knight started looking worried again.

  “Of course not!” Shiara said to the dragon. “It’s a show of skill.”

  “If you were trying to hurt each other, it wouldn’t be a tourney,” I added. Actually, it wasn’t going to be a tourney anyway; there are very specific rules about what a tourney is, and a practice fight between a dragon and a knight just doesn’t qualify. I decided not to say so.

  “Oh, all right, then,” the dragon grumbled. “I don’t know why I’m letting you talk me into this. How do we start?”

  9

  THE HARDEST PART was getting the dragon and the knight to agree about rules. The Princess didn’t help much. She kept talking about the marvelous tourneys she’d seen, and which knights had been wounded. The dragon would start looking at the knight, and pretty soon it would want to know why it couldn’t bite off one of the knight’s arms, or at least a hand. The knight would get worried, and the Princess would start crying, and Shiara and I would have to talk the dragon out of it. As soon as the dragon agreed, the Princess would cheer up and start talking about tourneys again.

  Finally, Shiara told the Princess to shut up. It wasn’t very polite, but it worked. Well, sort of. The Princess didn’t stop talking, but as long as she was complaining about Shiara and not talking about tourneys we didn’t have any more problems with getting the dragon and the knight to agree.

  When we finally decided on the rules, we had to draw a circle in the middle of the clearing for them to fight in. It was harder than it sounds. For one thing, a circle has to be pretty big if a dragon is going to fit inside it, even if it’s a small dragon. Also, the moss in the Enchanted Forest grows awfully fast. By the time we finished drawing the circle, the first half of it had already disappeared. Shiara watched for a minute, then looked at the knight.

  “Are you sure you have to have a circle to fight?” Shiara said.

  “I really do think so,” the knight said apologetically. “It wouldn’t be a proper tourney without it, don’t you see.”

  “I’m s
ick of proper dragons and proper Princesses and proper tourneys,” Shiara said under her breath. Fortunately, the dragon didn’t hear her.

  We started redrawing the circle, trying to make the line wider this time. The knight scratched at the moss with his sword. Shiara used a stick. So did I; I didn’t think Mother would approve if I used the Sword of the Sleeping King to cut moss. Nightwitch and the dragon sort of dug at the ground. The Princess sat under a tree.

  Eventually we finished, and the knight and the dragon stepped inside the circle. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Shiara demanded.

  “Someone has to say ‘Go,’“ the knight said in a reasonable tone.

  “Go!” I said quickly.

  Shiara gave me a disgusted look, but she didn’t say anything, because as soon as I shouted the dragon and the knight got started. They were fairly evenly matched. The dragon was much larger, of course, and it had a very good sense of timing, but it didn’t have much experience. The knight was wearing armor, which helped, and he was obviously used to fighting, but he was a little awkward most of the time. They were both good at dodging, though; they each managed to take three or fours swings without hitting the other. The dragon was just starting to take another swipe at the knight, when a little tree sprouted up in front of him and hit him in the nose.

  I was surprised. I mean, even in the Enchanted Forest, trees don’t usually grow that fast. The dragon was even more surprised than I was. It sort of reared back, and its tail came around very fast to balance it. Nightwitch was a little too close and had to scramble back out of the way. “Hey, watch out!” Shiara said.

  The dragon jumped and swung around, looking as if it expected another tree to pop up behind it. Its tail swung in the other direction, and the end of it caught the knight right in the middle of his chest plate as he was trying to back out of the way. The dragon yelped, the Princess screamed, and the knight fell over backward into the pool of water that my sword had made when the Princess had tried to take it.

  He sank out of sight right away; evidently the pool was a lot deeper than it looked. The Princess screamed again and leapt forward. I ran over, too; by the time I got to the pool, the Princess had hold of the knight. She wasn’t quite strong enough to pull him out, but she wasn’t letting go, either.

  Shiara got to the pool about the same time I did, and together the three of us managed to get the knight out of the water. He was unconscious, and he had a large dent in his armor where the dragon’s tail had hit him. The Princess checked to make sure he was still alive and then burst into tears.

  “Alas! See now how sad is my fate! For my love has been grievously injured and I am without protection in this awful place. Ah, woe is me!”

  “Is he dead?” asked the dragon from right behind me. I jumped a little; I hadn’t noticed it come up. It peered curiously over my shoulder at the knight.

  “Monster!” said the Princess. “Your base attempt to slay my love has failed! No second chance shall you have to harm him while I can stand between you! For if my love be slain, I shall care not whether I live or die, and thus I now defy you.”

  She threw herself across the knight’s chest. The knight coughed, moaned, and opened his eyes. “I say, Isabelle,” he said weakly. “That really is a bit uncomfortable.” The princess sat up and started weeping all over his face. It didn’t seem to make him much more comfortable.

  The dragon was still peering. “That was a very good fight,” it said to the knight. “Except for the last part. My tail still stings; I think I sprained it. Is armor always that hard?”

  The knight tried to answer and started coughing instead. The Princess cried harder, until Shiara said pointedly, “I don’t think all that water is doing him much good.” The Princess stopped crying and glared at Shiara for a minute, then turned back to the knight. Somehow, she looked a lot more unhappy now that she wasn’t crying. I felt sort of sorry for her.

  Finally the knight managed to get his coughing under control. He looked up at the dragon and said, “I do believe I agree with you about the fight. That trick with the tail is quite good; I don’t believe I’ve seen it before. I really must remember it.”

  “Actually, it was something of an accident,” the dragon said modestly. “But I think I could do it again if I tried. Did you really think it was good?”

  “Oh, quite,” the knight said. I got the feeling that he would have tried to bow if he hadn’t been lying on his back. “I think perhaps you broke one or two of my ribs.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the dragon. “Is that bad?”

  “It is certainly a bit uncomfortable,” the knight said. “I don’t really blame—”

  A coughing spasm interrupted him. The Princess looked alarmed, but she didn’t start crying or anything. I saw Shiara watching the Princess with a surprised look on her face, and right about then Nightwitch sprang up onto the knight’s chest.

  “What is this? Go hence, and leave my love in peace!” cried the Princess.

  “You let my kitten alone,” Shiara said warningly.

  The Princess stopped in mid-reach and looked over at Shiara. “And shall I neglect anything that may bring comfort to my love in his hurt?” she said.

  “Nightwitch isn’t going to hurt—” Shiara started, then paused. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Go ahead.”

  I stared at Shiara in surprise, but she was watching the Princess and Nightwitch. The Princess got scratched a couple of times before she finally managed to pick the kitten up and move her. By then the knight wasn’t coughing quite so hard anymore, but he still didn’t seem up to talking. Shiara frowned at him. “You don’t sound very good,” she said.

  The dragon stuck its head farther over my shoulder. “If you can’t fix him, can I eat him?” it asked hopefully.

  Nightwitch hissed. The knight looked alarmed and tried to say something, but all that came out was more coughing. The Princess said, “No!” very loudly and looked as if she wanted to throw herself on top of the knight again.

  “Of course not,” Shiara said. “You promised.”

  “It wouldn’t be polite,” I added. “After all, that was why you had the tourney.”

  The dragon looked hurt. “I was just asking.”

  “Ah, what are we going to do about them?” I said hastily, waving at the Princess and the knight. “They can’t stay here, not with the knight hurt like that.”

  “It’s not so bad, really it isn’t,” the knight said, looking at the dragon nervously. He started coughing again right away, but it didn’t sound as bad as it had before and he stopped fairly quickly.

  “I suppose you could come with us,” I said after a minute. It wasn’t so much that I wanted his company, or the Princess’s; it was just that I didn’t see what else I could do.

  “That’s frightfully kind of you,” the knight said. He looked uncertainly at the dragon. “Very kind, to invite me to come with you. All of you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t asked the dragon about its plans yet. But you’re quite welcome to join us, if you want to.”

  “Yes,” said Shiara. “I’m sure you’ll be very useful when the wizard comes back.”

  “Wizard?” said the knight. He was so alarmed he almost started coughing again. “What wizard?”

  “Well, actually, there are several of them,” I said. “Every now and then one of them shows up and tries to do something to us. The last one left when the dragon showed up.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be back in a little while,” Shiara said. “Or one of the others will. They’ve been chasing us all over the Enchanted Forest.”

  “You know,” the knight said, “I really don’t believe it would be a good idea for me to join you. I should almost certainly be a bit of an inconvenience, you see. Wet armor rusts, and with that and the ribs I’m afraid I’d be a little slow. Thank you terribly, all the same.”

  “If you don’t come with us, what will you do?” I said.

  “Mrow,” said Nightwitch.

 
“Morwen!” Shiara said. “They can go to Morwen! She’ll know what to do for them.” Nightwitch started purring loudly, sort of like a pepper grinder with rocks in it.

  I thought about it for a minute. “It sounds like a good idea, but will she want to?”

  “Morwen likes helping people,” Shiara said. “And I’m sure she can take care of both of them.”

  “You know Morwen?” said the dragon. “I like her. She used to give me apples out of her garden.”

  I tried to imagine a dragon eating apples and failed. I could imagine Morwen giving them to a dragon, though.

  “Who is this Morwen?” asked the Princess, clasping her hands in front of her. “Think you that she could help my love, indeed?”

  “Morwen’s sort of a friend of ours,” I explained. “She lives back that way, with a lot of cats, and her house has kind of a strange door.”

  “I didn’t have any trouble with it,” Shiara said. “And she has nine cats. She told me while you were asleep.”

  “Nine cats?” said the Princess, looking puzzled. “But what has that to do with my love, who is so grievously hurt?”

  “I said it wasn’t that bad, Isabelle,” said the knight uncomfortably. “Really, I wish you wouldn’t make such a fuss. I shall be quite all right in a little, I’m sure.”

  “If this woman with the many cats can help you, then shall we go to her,” the Princess declared with more spirit than she had shown about anything else. “For you are my love, and I will have you whole and well.”

  “Oh, but really, Isabelle—”

  “I’m sure Morwen won’t mind,” Shiara put in. “She fixed Daystar up just fine. She’s even good with wet swords.”

  The Princess looked thoroughly confused, but the knight brightened a little. “Are you quite sure? Because I’m frightfully wet, sword and armor and everything, and it would be very nice if I could keep it all from rusting. It’s rather expensive, you see.”

  “I’m sure she could manage that,” Shiara said. “Of course, you don’t have to go. You could stay here and wait for the wizard to come back.”