by Lisa Cach
Yes, Belch had helped make her what she was, and Belch had given her much of what she had. It was that truth that had gradually changed her feelings about the dragon from abhorrent hatred to a sort of protective fondness mixed with fear.
Today George would try to kill Belch, but she would not let it happen.
Alizon popped the rest of the date she nibbled into her mouth, downing it as mindlessly as Belch downed a sheep. She was the mistress of this mount, and she would protect all who inhabited it.
“Come on, try a bite. Don’t you want a bite?”
Alizon crossed her arms over her chest, lips tight together like a baby refusing food. “No.”
“You’ll like it, I promise.” George waved a chunk of his “French toast” at her, speared on the end of a knife. “It’s delicious.”
It smelled delicious, certainly. Saliva filled her mouth, but stubbornness and the self-satisfied way George was eating his cooking kept her from succumbing.
“I could teach you how to make it. It’s simple.”
“It must be.”
“You mean, if a bonehead like me could make it? That doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Here, come on, don’t be afraid to try something new.” He waved the piece of egg-battered bread, glistening with butter and honey, in front of her hood.
Against her will, Alizon’s lips parted. The French toast looked so much better than porridge.
“You know you want it. I won’t tell. Come on, try it.”
He was tempting her as he had last night. Lust, gluttony, what else would this man encourage in her? He was more of a devil than Belch! To accept anything from him would only weaken her, of that she was sure.
But it looked so good… .
“Good morrow, mistress.” Milo appeared in the doorway, saving her from the luscious square of golden bread. He nodded to George, gracing him with a grunt of greeting.
“Good morrow,” Alizon replied.
“Milo!” George dropped his knife back onto his square wooden plate. “My man!” He got up and jogged over to the corner where he had left his chosen sword propped against the wall. “I need your help. I need to sharpen this thing.”
Milo took the sword from him, testing the edge of the blade against his thumb. “I have a wheel in my cottage. I can do it now.”
Alizon grimaced. There was a small whetstone here in the kitchen, if George had thought to ask her. Milo looked pleased to have been asked for help, though. Boys and weapons, it had been the same through all time.
“I’ll go with you. I’ve never sharpened a sword before and want to see how it’s done.”
Milo glanced at George with the same expression she knew she herself wore: one of doubt and puzzlement.
“You’ve never sharpened one?” she asked.
“Er … my squire usually did it.”
His ignorance, however laughable, provided opportunities for those with knowledge. “Be sure Milo does not put too fine an edge upon it,” she said. “It will become brittle.”
Milo looked at her with a blank face; then comprehension came to his features—and a hint of disapproval, though he gave the barest hint of a nod to show he would obey: The sword would shine but barely cut through boiled meat when he was done.
“Really?” George said. “I didn’t know that.”
“It is your strength that will kill Belch, not a narrow edge of steel. Your strength and your wit.”
He gave her a doubting look, obviously hearing the touch of sarcasm that she could not keep from her voice. “Don’t touch my food while I’m gone,” he warned.
She made a noise of disgust and waved her hand at him.
He grinned, then slung an arm around Milo’s shoulders. Milo’s eyes widened in alarm, his face asking, “What now?” But George just steered him around to the doorway, and off they went.
Leaving her alone with George’s plate of “French toast.”
She sidled over to the table and looked down at it. There were at least a dozen little cut-up squares, so many that no one would ever notice if one was gone. She bent over the table and sniffed.
Warm, sweet, eggy.
She dabbed a fingertip in the honey and butter, then touched it to her tongue. So much better than porridge. Should she try it?
No. It would be giving in. It would be losing. In what way, she did not know, but she felt it with certainty.
She was not going to eat any of that toast.
Chapter Fourteen
“You took a bite, didn’t you?” George asked. His sword was sharpened, and he had returned to the kitchen. Here the mistress was finishing sewing up her gory stomach full of dragon treats.
“No. Of course not.”
“Yes, you did. I left a piece right there, on the edge, and now it’s gone.”
She turned to look over her shoulder at the table, where the remains of his breakfast had grown cold and congealed.
“You imagine things.”
“I certainly do, but not this. Admit it: You took a bite, and you liked it. You loved it, in fact. You had a hard time not gobbling down the whole plateful.”
The mistress muttered something dark in the depths of her hood and turned back to her work.
George grinned, knowing he had won a small victory. She had tried it, and liked it, he was sure of it. He almost laughed, imagining her sneaking the piece off his plate, eyes on the doorway as she slipped it into her mouth. He knew better than to chuckle aloud, though—she had been in a bad mood all morning, and he didn’t want to see it get any worse. Maybe it was the stress of what they were about to do that was getting to her.
He should be the one in a bad mood, though, after last night. He had woken this morning with a mouth that tasted like a rat had crawled over his tongue and died in the back of his throat. His head had throbbed, his hands had shaken, and he kept getting glimpses of the weirdly real dreams that had haunted his night.
They had been dreams, hadn’t they?
His headache was gone now that he’d had something to eat and drink—more of that awful beer— and his muscles had stopped their quivering once he had gotten up and done some basic calisthenics to get his blood moving. The snatches of his dreams from last night, though, would not go away.
Usually, unless he fought to remember them, his dreams slipped away within moments of waking. And even when he did make a conscious effort to keep them in his mind, they were likely to be gone the moment he let his mind drift elsewhere.
All that had to have been a dream last night— even though he was dreaming now, while he seemed to be awake. Sleeping dreams inside a waking dream, that’s what it had been.
As if that explanation made any sense.
It made more sense, however, than thinking that Mistress Hard-ass had sat on his bedside wearing nothing under her blessed robe, nothing at all, just as he had fantasized. And it certainly made no sense that she would have let him put his hand between her bare, soft, warm thighs, and then uncover her tight young breast, sitting there with her breath audible as he raised his hand to touch its pebbled nipple.
But that might explain her bad mood.
No. It was his frustrated sex drive, that was all, giving him wet dreams. What else should he expect from this journey through his unconscious? Of course there would be breasts and panting women here.
And howling ghosts?
He shuddered, recalling the pale group of wraiths that had surrounded his bed. God help him, he hoped that they had been a dream within a dream and nothing he would have to face again. What could those wraiths mean, anyway?
The Willie Nelson song about all the girls he’d loved before came to mind. Maybe he had treated them worse than he thought, and this was his guilt come to punish him.
The remains of his cold French toast didn’t appeal to him, but he had to eat what he could, to keep up his strength. A man couldn’t kill a dragon on an empty stomach. He polished off what was left, then cleaned his dishes, including the pan he had used for cooking.
; He was aware the whole time of the mistress watching him from beneath her hood while pretending to be absorbed in her gut sack. She seemed more impressed by his way around the kitchen than by anything else he did or said.
He winked at her. “I bet you’d like to see me in nothing but an apron, wouldn’t you?”
She straightened. “I think it is more likely that you have spent your life employed as a cook, roasting swine and stirring sauces, than as a slayer of dragons. I can more easily imagine you sweating over a fire in an apron than standing victorious over the corpse of a slain beast.”
George made a noise of mock offense, resting his fist with the dishrag on his hip. “You’re showing little faith in my manly powers.”
She snorted.
“Look at these muscles!” he said, trying to make her laugh. He went through a body-building routine of poses, with accompanying grunts of primitive masculinity. “You’ve never seen anything like me!”
“Marry! ’Tis true, I have not!” she said, and he heard mirth in her voice, as he had hoped to elicit.
“A man like me comes along only once in a thousand years,” he continued.
“For which we shall all be grateful.”
“Damn right. Some unfortunates don’t get one like me at all!”
He felt her staring at him, speechless in the face of his refusal to be insulted. Eventually she turned back to her gut sack, her attentions going to something more helpless in the face of her abuse.
George found that he was starting to enjoy her uptightness. Whether last night had been real or not, he had an inkling that she was a wild thing under all that control. He wanted to be there when she finally broke free. His imagination wandered down wanton paths on a similar theme.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Huh?” He blinked at her. In his mind she had been lying on the kitchen work table, vegetables scattered around her outflung arms, legs in the air as she screamed, “Yes! Yes! Harder!” as he thrust inside her.
Instead, she was standing before him holding a bowl with a bloody sack of sheep parts.
“Belch awaits,” she said.
His stomach fluttered. He had been using his lewd imaginings to avoiding thinking about his match with the dragon—in much the way he avoided thinking about a trip to the dentist.
This wasn’t like wrestling, where he had someone with whom to choreograph the fight, calculating moves for their most dramatic effect. This was unpredictable. Life or death. He could get his head bitten off. Literally.
Well, it might be just a dream, but he was learning you could still be scared shitless in a dream.
“Right! Off we go! We wouldn’t want Belch to get lonely,” he said with a bravado he didn’t feel.
Fake it ’til you make it, that would have to be his new motto.
So what, that he used to get queasy watching his dad clean a fish. This was a virgin-eating dragon, dammit, and he would skewer it through its cold, miserable, reptilian heart.
And when he did, not only would Emoni’s daughter be safe, but his hot-bodied little mistress would finally throw back her hood, and he would see surprise and respect in her Michelle Pfeifferian face. She would be so grateful she could finally leave Devil’s Mount, she would fling off her clothes, those perfect pink-nippled breasts of his imaginings offered up, her soft thighs parting as she lay back on her bed and …
“Are you coming, George?”
“Just about.” He threw the dishrag he held aside and picked up his sword. He had forgone the helmet, or any of the other scraps in the old armory, opting for unobstructed sight and movement over the questionable protection those pieces offered. He had had more than one moment to reflect that it was too bad he hadn’t dreamt up some Kevlar and an anti-tank gun for himself.
The mistress was waiting by the closed door that led to the stairwell, a candle in one hand. The bowl was propped on the ledge formed by her slender waist curving into her full, rounded hip. She could visit his dreams any night.
Mentally, he shook himself. Lusting after her was becoming his “happy place.” He would do better, though, to plan out the approach he was going to take with Belch.
But that breast, it had been so close to his fingertips… .
“George?”
“Yes, yes. I’m here, ready and willing.” He held the revolting bowl with the sheep stomach while she unlocked the door, then he gave it back, pulled open the door’s heavy, creaking weight, and bowed to usher her inside. “Ladies first.”
“Cowardly kitchen boys last,” she retorted, passing him.
The stench of Belch was but a whiff on the clammy air, but even that faint trace was enough to bring back in full the terror of seeing that misbegotten son of a crocodile lunging up out of the mist-covered water, jaws gaping, mouth pale pink and lined with ivory pitons of death.
“Fake it ’til you make it,” he chanted under his breath.
The mistress paused to light a torch from her candle, then started down the stairs. George let out a shaky breath and followed.
He was always nervous before a match, but that was different, milder. It was a good sort of nervousness, the type that gave an extra boost to stage performers.
This was of a sort that might have him fumbling his sword and getting torn apart like a secondary character in Jurassic Park.
“Fake it ’til you make it.” He knew how to psych himself up, and that’s what he needed to do now.
Ah, crap, who was he kidding? This matchup had an ass-pucker factor of ten, and like a sea slug he wanted to vomit out his innards and creep away. The last thing he wanted to do was step back out on that rickety wooden platform above Belch’s lair, much less go down inside and poke that dragon with an oversized cocktail stick.
The mistress’s sleeping powder had better be potent, that’s all he could say.
In fact, why not give the lizard an overdose and be done with him that way? Not a noble stratagem, perhaps, but wits were more valuable than brawn. Wrestlers knew that, despite perceptions of the public to the contrary. It was intelligence that put a great match together and let one manipulate the crowd—however moronic the results might appear.
He and the mistress passed through the second door, and the wave of stench that rolled across George made his eyes water. Good Christ. It was like summer roadkill, with a dash of septic tank and a smear of sour sweat for piquancy. The vapors from the mineral water below were an added splash of olfactory pleasure.
George and the mistress made their way through the tunnel to find it all quiet at the open archway at the end: no bellows, no splashing, just a faint tinkling trickle of the hot spring draining into the seawater. George’s sword tip scraped against the stone wall, making him jump.
The mistress did not notice his show of nerves. Good. She also showed no hesitation at stepping out onto the platform. He followed her as if he weren’t on the verge of upchucking his breakfast.
The mist lay thicker and stiller than yesterday, the light from the cave mouth turning it to cotton batting. Rocks protruded from the sea of fog like islands in a Chinese painting, and it was appropriate that there should be a dragon lying in the midst of it, on his raised mound of shore. Belch wasn’t half so decorative as a Chinese painting, though.
The last time he’d been down here, he’d seen only jaws and claws. This time, he got a view of the whole beast, and he was guessing Belch measured about sixty feet from snout to tip of tail. The resemblance to an alligator or crocodile was disheartening, as he recalled nature shows where crocs used the power of their tails to launch themselves straight out of a river like missiles from a submarine, plucking monkeys or birds off the branches of overhanging trees.
Ooo oo oo. He was the monkey man.
He was on the verge of voicing his poison-thedragon idea when the mistress turned and looked at him. Her hood had slid far enough back that he caught his first real glimpse of her face behind the veil of white hair. She had dark eyes—dark, dark eyes—a narrow nose, almost poi
nty; and lips like Betty Boop’s.
She was nothing like Michelle Pfeiffer, with that actress’s pastel coloring and soft eyes. Michelle Pfeiffer should be so lucky as to look like the mistress. This woman was fierce; she was determined. And she was young and vulnerable, which he could see from something hurt and expecting of the worst in those dark eyes.
Everything changed. He couldn’t back down and poison the beast. She would expect more from him than that, would only want a man who lived up to his title, a man who and proved himself strong and honest and worthy. She needed that. She needed a hero to free her from the dragon.
He sighed. At least it was easier to pretend to be brave with an expectant female audience. He could be grateful for that.
He tore his gaze away, not wanting her to suspect how well he could see her, and looked over the rail at his opponent. “It looks like Belch is already asleep. Why don’t I just go down there and kill him now?”
What the hell. He should get it over with. Be a man. Besides, the dragon wasn’t looking dangerous at the moment. Sure, Belch had scared the hell out of him yesterday, but the beast hadn’t actually hurt him. It had been noise and big moves, that was all, just like in wrestling. Or so George tried to tell himself.
“But …” she began.
“He is asleep, isn’t he?” George squinted down at the monster. Damn, but that was a big lizard.
“Wouldn’t you rather be certain he will not wake up?”
“That’s what this is for!” He held up his sword.
“Er. Hmm. Yes, but are you sure he’s asleep? He lies like that when he’s awake, too.”
George propped his sword against the wooden platform wall and took the mistress’s dragon treat from its bowl. The stuffed stomach felt like a water balloon, distorting under the pressure of his hands. He felt a lump that might be an eyeball squishing away under his finger. “We’ll test him.”
