by Sam Hall
“There was a temporary truce to drive them back, but unfortunately the numbers of disgruntled people without a dragon were so high, the King and his remaining loyal dragons were driven out, to move beyond the continent. If they returned, this would be seen as an act of war. The ways of the riders changed. Eggs were taken from queens once they were hatched, the subsequent dragons bonded to those who they were given to at birth. They were parent, groom and lord and master, all rolled into one. Dragons were raised simply, their intelligence directed at physical feats to make them more effective beasts of war, not their natural bent of philosophy, history and the sciences. But that’s not the sum total of their crimes.” Nadice’s voice quavered as she turned to the queen dragon. Greynell licked carefully at her claws before placing them down and facing us.
I ask permission to show you my story. Her voice sounded huge and echoing in my mind. I looked at Flea, who’s shocked expression indicated he was hearing this too. I nodded.
My view of the field, the sky all dropped away. Instead, I saw a big cavernous room. The light was low but I could make out a clutch of massive eggs before me. “C’mon,” a harsh voice said and I saw two men, each carrying a plasma spear, the blades flickering in the gloom. “Through here, you stupid beasts!” the other man said. They moved aside as several dragons ambled in. They slowed when they saw the eggs, their heads going down and their paws beginning to drag, just like Miazydar’s had, but the riders jabbed their sides with plasma spears, forcing cries from them before making them walk forward. “Stop here, you bloody things. Stop!”
My view of the room changed as if the camera was pulled up on a string. It’s not a camera, I realised, I’m seeing what the queen saw. This was confirmed when I heard her hiss when my view rapidly changed as I assumed she crouched over her eggs. “Get back you bloody broody bitch,” the second man said, snapping his spear up into a defensive stance. “Rab, get around her other side! Take Bayran with you. He can send some spikes into the cow’s muzzle if she’s gonna be difficult.”
The other man and dragon charged forward, spear raised, spiky tail upraised. My view shifted slightly from side to side as if she was questioning whether to hold her ground or not. The other man darted in and placed his arms around an egg and then all hell broke loose. She roared her denial, Greynell, her voice reverberating through the cavern. The view of the rider grew rapidly larger, the sound of her jaws snapping at the men filling the air, but plasma spears struck out, slashing at her face, her screams cutting through the noise, harrowing sounds of pain. I saw her claw at the intruders, great scythes of keratin cutting through the air but they were met by the implacable plasma blades. Nothing stopped them. Her screams grew higher as talons were cut through, the tips landing on the sandy soil. The male dragons shouldered into her space, defending their riders, their massive feet threatening to crush her eggs in their eagerness to get at her. If she continued she would lose them, she seemed to realise but if she didn’t she would still lose them. Finally she drew still, making a low keening sound.
I know that sound; I thought as I watched the men come closer. Her wail was inarticulate, yet spoke clearly to her pain. It’s as if words were too weak a device to be used to describe what she felt, that all her outrage, disgust and hatred must come out unrefined and unchanneled, the only response to this violation she was allowed. She was forced to watch the men manhandle the eggs, tapping each one before moving to the other. Then the ultimate betrayal was committed.
“This one’s a queen,” one man says. The other one wandered over, blade at the ready. He stopped for a moment, looking into her eyes, his dragons muscling in around him. He raised his spear, a note of warning, of menace, of pleading shaded the queen’s cry. He smirked at her as he let it fall, slicing the egg in two.
Chaos reigns, my view of what was happening swinging wildly as the queen attacked. I heard screams, hers, the other dragons, then the men and see splatters of blood. Briefly I saw the neatly sliced eggshell crush under the paw of one of the intruders, the poor little dragon embryo trampled to a bloody mess. Spears flashed, claws raked, jaws snapped and rent. Then her eyes whipped around as an egg began to rock. She rushed towards it, trying to right it before screaming again. When her head snapped back, a plasma blade had cut through her tail, the white of her vertebrae showing clearly between her neatly cauterised flesh. “We’re taking the eggs,” one of the men said, leaning heavily on his spear. “There’s more riders on the way and more dragons. We’ll keep coming until the queens are dead and the rest have been removed. A couple are already cracked and seeping amniotic fluid and will bloody die if we don’t take them. So stand down if you ever want the chance to hatch a brood again.”
“I never want to do this again,” she said, her voice sounding hoarse and raw.
“Then let us remove your burden,” the rider said.
“The cracked ones first. Save them first,” she replied. He nodded, then jerked his head at the other rider. One of the dragons began to whimper in the quiet. Several of its toes lay neatly severed on the ground, blood oozing sluggishly from the wound. The second man cuffed the beast, it jerking back to lessen the blow, its sounds much quieter as the other loaded the eggs onto a specially constructed cart.
“I escaped some months later,” Greynell said. I blinked, the beautiful wildflowers and blue sky that reappeared somehow sinister after what I’d just seen. “They took me out to mate when my next season came, thinking me too far gone to lust to struggle. While I had come into my mating time, no such feeling clouded my judgement. They didn’t realise they’d killed all that in me. I killed the dragon they’d put me with, rutting fool and found my way out of the pen, taking for the skies.” Her eyes soaked in the sun’s rays, somehow taking strength from them. “We’ve made our way, living among the hinterlands beyond Aravisia, Nadice slinking across the border when she needs to.” She shifted, her tail wrapping around her body and I could see then the now well-healed rend in her flesh. “When Nadice’s contact said she’d another fully sentient dragon who seemed to remember the before times, I could scarcely credit it.” The dragon turned her eyes to us, the great lavender orbs taking us all in. “This is my first time on Aravisian soil since I left. I find this beauty….disquieting.”
“What happened…” Flea’s voice cut out and he stared at the grass for a moment, his throat working. “What happened to you was fucking disgusting. I wished Tess’d never come here before and now I regret like hell that we did. But what do you want from her? What do you want to do? Overthrow the government that allows that shit to happen? I assume they still do that, kill the females so they can control which dragons are born and who gets them?” Nadice nodded. “How does Tess fit in your revolutionary plans?”
“There are no bloodless revolutions, so we’re loathe to compound the blood spilt of my children, of so many dragon’s children, with the blood of others,” Greynell said. “We have no battle plan, no bombs set, no plots afoot. When Scalla told Nadice and I about your dragon, I came, to a country I swore I would never return to until the regime had changed. I did so because you need to know the very real threat you pose and to what lengths they will go to, to ensure you either conform or are eradicated. My desire now is the same as it has always been: I want everyone to have a full set of the facts so that they might draw their own conclusions.”
We ate the rest of our meal after that, but the mood was subdued and we were eating more because food was thin on the ground than from enjoyment. Nadice and Greynell bid us goodbye once the group had had their fill. “If you have ever a need,” Nadice said, “let Scalla know.” She turned to Greynell. “We try to stay clear of Aravisia, but you… I hope our fears are unfounded.”
24
Jez looked worried when we walked in the door, no doubt our faces telling the story of the meeting more eloquently than we could. Flea filled her in on the details, his spare descriptions somehow more able to acknowledge the horrors at the core of this dragon-democracy. We left Jez to
pack away what was left of the picnic basket that Scalla had kindly donated, both of us drifting towards the bedroom as if on autopiolet. I wanted to go up to the eyrie and curl into the arms of Miazydar, but somehow that felt like spitting on the corpses of those unborn babies if I enjoyed what they would never have. Instead, the two of us stripped off and slipped under the cool sheets.
Do dragons love their children like humans do? I asked M tentatively. I really didn’t want to know, the thought the barest of pushes towards him.
Yes. We don’t keep them by our sides for as long as we mature more quickly, but mothers are incredibly protective of their eggs. They must, it’s the only way to get an apex predator to watch over her progeny until they hatch and see them safely raised. She would use her harem of mates as a means to bring her food because a queen would never walk away from her offspring.
I felt the wrench in my heart as actual physical pain. My gasp getting Flea’s attention, his body curling around mine as I rubbed at my sternum. To have spent all that time growing those children inside you, feeding them nutrients from your body, sleeping, walking, hunting while those tiny beings grew within. She must’ve felt like the greatest warrior, on a quest to make magic, creating new life with her own. The drowsy satisfaction of being full with child, too tired to do much more than keep them alive until the trauma of birth tore her and them apart. She must’ve sat crouched over her brood, ready to use the entire might of her massive body to protect them from every threat, to give all she had to see them grown. And being a huge reptile capable of flight, that confidence would’ve been justified. Instead the spears, now weapons for dragon control, I realised, rather than tools of combat, were used to tear all of that away, slicing up potential dragons and tossing them on the refuse heap for having the misfortune for being born female.
Flea rolled me over, tucking me into the hollow of his body, surrounding me with his arms, tangling his fingers in my hair. The slight yank on my scalp felt good like the tension there was replicating what was inside me and somehow easing it. I clawed myself closer, unable to bear the tiniest of separation. It hadn’t happened to me, with a male dragon no one I cared about was likely to face the same difficulties, but I couldn’t push away Greynell’s awful grasping hopelessness, just trying to make sure her children survived.
I ended up with my face buried against Flea’s chest, my mouth dragging against his flesh, my nose full of his scent: pine sap and cigarettes. I rubbed my bottom lip against his skin, wanting to get my head away from the technicolour, slo-mo replay of the queen’s memory. My fingertips trailed against the hard planes on his torso, me trying to force my attention away from what I’d seen and back to the here and now. His stomach jerked when my fingers brushed over his nipple, his eyes dropping down to try and catch mine. “Tess?” he whispered.
I moved so I hung over him, looking into those mysterious hazel eyes of his, thinking I saw a similar pain in them, or perhaps that was just my reflection. I dropped my head, then stopped, feeling his breath fan over my face. I heard a low hum inside my mind, tuning out the rest of the world. “It’s OK,” he said with a rasp, reaching up to touch my cheek. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, not yet.” I closed my eyes and let out a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding.
“You’re giving me permission to use you.”
“I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms. I’m giving permission for you to seek comfort because God knows, I need some right now too.”
Last time had been a frantic, clutching thing but this? This was quiet and fragile. With his approval, I got lost in the terrain of his body. Sometimes sex is a narrowing down of focus to erogenous zones, a not entirely calculated ticking off of a checklist to arousal, making sure to get your partner off so you can. Instead, I found myself strangely freed from expectation, from a desire to please. My fingers almost studied his form, tracing and underlining the shapes of his body. I was so engrossed that I actually jumped a little when he reached out and touched me. The hum inside my head stuttered momentarily but then settled when his hand rubbed up and down my arm. I closed my eyes again, just focussing for the moment on the animal pleasure of being stroked.
When I opened them I leaned down and placed a careful kiss on his mouth. When his lips, his tongue, moved, when I tasted that combination of nicotine and mint, something rattled my composure. Arousal twisted hard inside me, almost making me gasp in response. My fingers dug into his shoulders as my tongue slipped beside his, his hands pulling my hips down until I clearly felt his erect cock rubbing as we kissed. The hum in my head swelled louder, becoming almost a living, pulsing thing like a painless headache. My body went loose when he shifted me slightly with his iron grip, using the slickness of my folds to slide me up and down his length. That was probably only a tiny distance but felt like so much more. His skin grabbed at mine a little, forcing the hood of my clit to stretch, then release, stretch then release until I was independently working myself against him. I pulled away from his mouth, instead I undulated in the cool afternoon air, my torso and neck forced into a fluid echo of the jerk of my hips. I slid further up, the head of his cock catching at my opening, hinting, teasing at what it would feel like to push him inside. My teeth sunk into my bottom lip as I circled my hips, feeling his hard intrusion stretching me. “Tess…” he gasped, holding me lightly, so lightly as if to make sure I could go if I wanted to.
“Shit, condom,” I said, shaking my head. My brain was so full of that omnipresent hum that thoughts got lost. I forced myself away from him and he rolled over, grabbing one from the bedside drawer. I watched him roll it over his rigid length. “Flea, what if…?”
“This is just now,” he said, pushing me back and crawling over me. “Think about what you want now. Tomorrow, the next day, we may not even have. If we do, we can cross that bridge then, yeah?” I nodded. His mouth descended on mine, his lips felt like silk. “Yeah?” he asked, his voice gone to huskiness.
“Yeah, fuck me, Flea.”
He groaned at my words, positioning himself between my legs and then I was too. My head flung back as I felt that delicious pinch. I felt like my clit was sitting up and taking notice as he slowly worked himself inside me, the dragging sensation stroking something inside as well as out. My fingers dropped to where I needed them most, rubbing myself as he thrust into me, the slight pain warming up into an expansive, all-consuming pleasure. I couldn’t help it, I pushed back, wanting him deep, feeling him slamming into me. He seemed to feel the same and with implied permission, his fingers dug into the bed when his hips began to snap.
The fucking took it all away, emptying me out of everything I worried about, cared for or was, leaving me empty and free. I was pleasure. I didn’t need to carefully adjust my stroke or the angle of my hips, everything felt good. The pleasure increased in a leisurely spiral. For once, I wasn’t worried about getting off or needing too much from my sexual partners; I was almost limp with bliss, a passive observer of my own experience. And what an experience. My consciousness got jerked back to my body as I got closer and closer. He was pounding into me, hard, my body tightening around him but unable to prevent his relentless onslaught. And I didn’t want to, it carried me along like a tidal wave cresting.
“Ah!” I cried out, falling on the bed. I took a massive sigh of relief as the most beautiful, transcendent crystalline pleasure washed over me. My eyes opened wide, but I saw nothing, sensation clouding my mind, driving out all conscious thought including the hum. It was so intense I was a little shocked when Flea finally emptied inside me, flopping down at my side. I continued to blink, trying to clear my vision, not entirely sure what had just happened. I didn’t need to. Flea disposed of the condom and then pulled me to him, entangling our bodies and stroking my back until I surrendered to sleep.
25
The next morning I marched over to the field for dragon rider training feeling hungry (we’d slept most of the afternoon and all night away) and really awake. I was without Miazydar, apparently he wou
ldn’t be needed today. It was going to be a whole day session now that we’d been included in the upcoming war games, which was great for developing my fighting skills, but I was betting Bhechro wasn’t letting the academic assessments slide either.
I looked at the beasts swirling in the sky above me; the spears left stacked in the supplied rack and saw something entirely different. Had any of these people wearing the spiffy uniforms cut open queen eggs or slashed at a dragon’s face to keep her from retaliating as they slew her children? Who exactly pulled that job?
“Hey, you ready to learn how to fight on dragon back?” Keel said, running over to greet me.
“Why do you learn how to do that?” I said. “Dragons would have to be long range weapons you’d use to flame the shit out of enemies, or with clouds of acid or barrages of spikes. Why would you teach people to fight in close combat on the back of a dragon? One splice into their spines and they’re incapacitated. Surely the priority is to keep the enemy as far the fuck away from your gigantic sentient dive bombers?”
“We have a problem here, Lieutenant?” I looked over to see Captain Keya had arrived with another soldier in tow.
Keel shook his head, looking me over with a smile. “No, the cadet here was making some very good points about the practicality of fighting on dragon back, about how vulnerable that leaves our dragons.”
Her eyes snapped to mine, one eyebrow lifting. “Question is, cadet, do you want your bond sundered or do you want to remain at your dragon’s side? We’re trying to help you with the latter.”
