by Ruby Sirois
“Oh—it was… fine.”
I stifle a snort. The waitress is unfazed.
“Would you like something else instead? We have a wonderful white chocolate and elderflower panna cotta with crispy almond biscuits on the dessert menu tonight. All homemade. I recommend pairing it with the locally-brewed elderflower saison we just put on tap.”
Emelie’s eyes flick to me. “Oh, I don’t—”
“We’ll take two, thanks,” I say.
The waitress nods and leaves to take care of the order.
“You don’t need to be shy, häxan.” I caress the soft curve of her cheek with two fingers. “I don’t want you to ever deny yourself around me—whatever that might entail.”
My eyes drop to her lips.
“Besides, I like watching you enjoy yourself—whatever that might entail.”
“It’s hard not to enjoy myself when you’re around.”
“All you have to do is ask.”
“Oh, believe me, I know. I’m doing my very, very best not to.”
I raise an eyebrow at her, but I like that she’s coming out of her shell with me. I feel like I’m getting a glimpse behind an exclusive curtain which very few people get to see.
Our drinks and desserts arrive. Her eyes light up at the first taste, then fall half-closed. The sensual way she enjoys flavors has an immediate effect on me.
“This is amazing,” she says with a little moan. “Mmm. Light and creamy with just a hint of elderflower and lemon. Really decadent.”
Emelie follows it with a sip of the elderflower saison.
“Wonderful pairing,” she says, licking a bit of foam from her upper lip. “That waitress knows her stuff. It’s dry, with the perfect amount of acidity to take the edge off the rich panna cotta. Highly carbonated, almost too much for the style, but I like it. Sort of a champagne feel actually.”
She watches the waitress tend to another table.
“I wonder if she’s looking for a new job. We could use someone like her.”
Following Emelie’s lead, I scoop up a jiggly bit of panna cotta and spoon it into my mouth.
It’s silky-smooth and luxurious, the flavor of sweet cream followed by a delicate floral hint of white chocolate.
I follow it with a sip of the saison beer. It is like champagne, as she said—dry, with a hint of an acidic tang. Perfumed lightly with elderflowers and a hint of hops, it tastes like springtime—nothing like any other beer I’ve ever tasted.
The complex flavors of the dessert and drink, which I thought at first would clash terribly, marry in a way that heightens and enhances them both.
“I like the acidity,” I say, admiring the bubbles rising in the glass through the straw-colored liquid, “but it should have a little more. Häxan, I think you should make something like this, but with rhubarb and elderflower instead. It’s the perfect springtime pairing.”
She looks at me, surprised and delighted.
“That’s one of my favorite combinations. And how did you know that? Springtime pairing?”
“‘That’s what I do. I drink, and I know things.’” I raise my glass to her in salute and take a sip.
“Are you—wait, are you quoting Game of Thrones?”
Her tone is incredulous. She’s trying not to laugh.
“Dragons watch HBO?”
“If I hear something involves dragons, naturally I get curious. It’s just common sense to keep track of current mythology. Call it keeping an eye on global markets.”
She shakes her head, looks at me over her glass.
“And?”
“And what?”
“I’m dying to hear your opinion. Was it accurate?”
I snort. “Hardly.”
“How so?”
“She acts like they’re her children, yet all they are to her is overgrown guard dogs. War machines on a leash. If she’d really loved them, she’d have let them go as soon as they were big enough to start their own hoards—not chained them in a basement. Not forced them to build hers.” I pause. “She sacrificed them, one by one, in a bid for her own power. So that was the real tragedy: dragons dying without a hoard.”
“The real tragedy?” She looks thoughtful. “It’s that important, huh?”
“A dragon without a hoard is no dragon at all.”
“I didn’t realize it went that deep.”
“It’s cutting out an organ. Trying to live when you’re half-dead. It’s part of your soul cut away.”
“Wow.” Her voice is quiet, serious.
“Did you… have you lived without a hoard? Lost it somehow? You got so intense all of a sudden.”
My body stiffens. It’s the last subject I want to broach.
“Sorry if that’s too personal. I’m sorry, forget it—now I feel bad. You don’t have to answer, Ragnarr.”
I take a deep breath. Let it out.
“Once. I rebuilt it.”
“Not that it’s anywhere near the same, but I guess I felt a lot like that when I got divorced.”
“Any man who would throw you away is a damned fool.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you to say, but Peter wanted a family and I—couldn’t. Couldn’t get pregnant. Couldn’t stay pregnant. It was really stressful. And then—” she hesitates. “I’ve never been skinny, but I put on some more weight with all that, with the stress and the hormones, and all of a sudden he wasn’t attracted to me anymore. He met someone else. Younger, prettier. He divorced me the second she got knocked up.”
“Blind as well as a damned fool.”
She laughs, a little bitterly.
“Ja. He was a real ass. Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell. It took a lot of work, getting over it, but I love my body no matter how it looks. I’m on my feet all day long, lugging around hundred-liter fermenters, carrying thirty-kilo buckets of honey. I might be bigger, but I can do everything I need to do to run production for So Mote It Bee.”
She sets her jaw defiantly, as if daring me to argue. I wouldn’t dream of it; I like her obstinate corners.
“No matter what anyone says, I know my worth. And I don’t want to change myself for anyone.”
“Don’t,” I say. I mean it. “You’re very resilient. Strong on the inside.”
“I guess. I just did what I had to in order to survive. If that’s being resilient or strong, so be it. I’m just me. I don’t know how to be any other way.”
Emelie scrapes up the last of her panna cotta, licks it off the spoon. She plucks the last almond biscuit from her plate and nibbles at it.
“Strong and humble. Very draconic.”
“Humble? You?” She laughs. The sound is light and musical. “Somehow I don’t believe that.”
“You’d be shocked and amazed at how humble I am. Especially considering.”
“Considering?”
“Maybe you haven’t put two and two together, but I am quite well-off.”
“You told me that when we met. Besides, that’s why I called you in the first place, remember?”
“You thought I was just a grumpy dragon hiding away in a dank cave somewhere. I don’t think you understand.”
“Help me out, then.”
“Let’s just say I’ve had a great number of years lived in human form to build and grow my hoard. I have international investments. Own properties across Europe. Some other things. I won’t bore you with the details.”
“Properties.” She narrows her eyes at me. “Wait… are you our mystery investor?”
“Strong, humble, and clever. Racking up the points, häxan min.”
“And do you own the house on Stortorget? You do, don’t you.”
“I own lots of things.”
“So you ended the café’s lease just for us? Just for me?”
“You made a wish, I granted it. I just had no need to use magic to do it, and it was much easier that way. I believe in being economical wherever possible. First rule of dragoning.”
“But your disc—” her fingers drif
t to the polished metal, a crescent of gold gleaming at its edge in the candlelight. “It turned partly gold just like you said.”
“Well, we did have a deal. Just because I didn’t need to use magic to grant it this time doesn’t mean it didn’t count as a wish.”
“Oh. Gods, I feel stupid now.”
“Why would you feel stupid? Au contraire, you figured it out on your own.”
“I mean, maybe I could have found a normal investor—”
“With a free property on Stortorget? Who also happens to be enchanted with you, and is very much enjoying being on a date with you?”
“I’m just, well, I guess I’m starting to like you too. A little bit, maybe.”
She holds out a tiny measurement between thumb and forefinger to demonstrate.
“I fail to see the problem.”
I bring those fingers to my lips.
“Why does that have to feel so nice…” she sighs. Pulls them away. “I just don’t want you to think less of me.”
“Less of you?”
“Like, I’m a gold-digger or whatever. Because I’m really not, despite the circumstances. I’m not that kind of girl.”
“I’m a thousand-year-old dragon. I think I know a gold-digger when I see one. I know you’re not it.”
“I don’t want you to think… oh, I don’t know.”
“Lilla häxan.”
I raise her chin up with my forefinger and thumb.
“I’m not going to ask you for anything you don’t want to give.”
She raises an eyebrow at me.
“Doesn’t sound like the dragon I met in a sacred circle making demands a few weeks back.”
“That was different.”
I don’t want to tell her that the difference is that I’m getting to know her now, to like and respect her. I admire her passion, her strength, her intelligence.
It was the enticing glimpse of her golden aura, as well as her beautiful curvy body that drew me to her at first. But what holds my attention now is her—what’s inside. Her resilience, her opinions, her draconic fire.
I don’t want to admit to her that she is anything but a trinket to me. It’s hard enough having to admit to myself that a häxjävel could be anything else to me. Because the last time almost broke me.
“You’re dangerous.”
Her statement takes me aback.
“Me?”
I’m actually a little offended.
“I would never be dangerous to you. I’d die before any harm came to you.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
“I—I’ve been hurt before. Like I told you before, about my ex. I mean—” she hastens to add, seeing something flare in my eyes. “I mean emotionally. He never hit me or anything. But now it’s really hard for me to trust people. Men. Romantically. You know, trust issues kind of thing.”
“Trust issues.” I’ve never heard the term before, but I recall my own. Push them away. “I suppose I’m familiar with the concept.”
“I’ve thrown myself into my work and So Mote It Bee for the past five years just so I don’t have to seem like I have enough free time to date. I love what I do, don’t get me wrong—but deep down it’s partly been an avoidance mechanism. I haven’t been on a date, much less even had sex with anyone since I was married to Peter.”
Emelie looks ruefully at her empty glass.
“Oh, you don’t want to hear this. I guess I’ve had enough truth serum for one night, I’m embarrassing myself. You must think I sound like a loser.”
“I think you sound like a passionate, driven woman who knows how to take care of herself.”
I’m pleased by the idea of Emelie not dating, waiting those years for me, as if she knew on some level that she is meant only for me. She is even more lovely in my eyes because of it.
“You think that wouldn’t appeal to me?”
“You’re a dragon,” she says wryly. “Deadly and mysterious. Who knows what appeals to you?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” I turn her hand over, plant a kiss in her palm, close her fingers over it. She takes a long, shuddering breath. “You do.”
9: Ragnarr
1253: Stockholm, Sweden
“I do not love you, Ragnarr,” Fröja said.
Her deep blue eyes, once brimming with an emphatic facsimile of love, now glittered with a cold and scornful truth. Her face, so delicate, so beautiful to me only hours before, was twisted into ugliness by haughty disdain.
“And I never have.”
Her right hand clutched the handle of a softly glowing coffer containing the entirety of my hoard, carefully collected bit by bit for two hundred years and stashed for safekeeping inside its magically infinite interior.
The opposing handle was in her lover’s fist. Her accomplice. Her coven-mate. Johannes.
Damn him.
Damn them both.
Months before, I had scorned the wisdom of the dragons, spurned the ancient advice which warned me away from a häxjävel’s embrace.
It had been I who helped rebuild her village after a forest fire.
I, who comforted Fröja after plague took half her family.
I, who conjured enough grain for them to survive the winter after a failed harvest.
I, who had declared my love for the very woman who later cast away that love into the dirt just for the lust of my treasure.
And what had all my goodwill, my naïveté won? What was the cost of my faith?
Betrayal. Robbery. Heartbreak. The loss of my pride, my hoard, my woman.
The shattered pieces of my heart seethed with hatred and anguish and despair.
I longed to turn them both to ash. To obliterate them from the earth. From history.
But in her left hand Fröja grasped the token of love I’d forged for her myself from hoard-gold in the throes of devotion and trust—the one that protected her and all she held dear from draconic magic. My magic. The only thing that now kept me from incinerating her and her lover, and reclaiming my hoard. Blinded by love, fooled by her deceit, I’d freely given her the very chains by which to bind and rob me.
I threw my head back and screamed, spitting fire to the heavens. My claws dug deep into the bedrock, sending cracks skittering through the stone like rotten ice. My tail lashed furiously, ripping up lichen-spotted saplings in its wake. I rose rampant and roared, my powerful wings fanning the pines around us into a wall of flame, a crackling hellish mass of resinous torches reaching to the stars.
Any other human would have fled in abject terror in the face of my volcanic wrath.
But Fröja—oh, my Fröja!—and Johannes… they only laughed.
“Go on then, Ragnarr Thoringr,” Fröja said as if to a child. “Get on with you. Throw your fit, slink back to your lair. We’ve bested you and I have your treasure. By the very token you made me, I’m even protected from becoming your hoard and from your wrath—and there’s nothing you can do for it. Fool.”
My vision crimsoned with rage. I split my jaws wide, shrieked fire at them. It exploded from me, uncontrolled, lightning-hot and sparking with hatred.
But my fury parted neatly around the two häxjävlar like river water around a boulder, and they stood smirking up at me, quite unharmed.
Humiliated, their mocking laughter ringing in my ears, I took to the wing—leaving my life, my love, my hoard behind.
* * *
When at last I emerged from my lair months later, gaunt and lean, I had come to a decision.
Never again. Never again would I hold anything but the deepest loathing for häxjävlar. Every last one of them, until the end of time, would pay the interest on my stolen hoard and my broken heart.
They would all pay dearly for what Fröja had done.
1560: Uppsala, Sweden
“Ah, Thoringr! You have more information for the Inquisition, I hope?” the archbishop of Uppsala said, laying down his quill as I entered.
The room was soot-stained
and winter-dark, lit only by the dying embers in the hearth and a spray of stinking tallow candles upon his work-worn desk. A hint of chill breeze blew in intermittently through a crack somewhere, whistling faintly when it came.
“Rome awaits with bated breath what you bring us this time.”
“I do, your Excellency—collected from my recent travels across northern Europe.”
I reached into my fine woolen doublet for the latest list of witches I’d compiled over the last six months. The mellifluous droning of monks at vespers echoed distantly against dank stone walls.
“I am most sure you will be pleased.”
Reaching greedily for the parchment, the gaunt man drew it from my hand, read it over, then tucked it away in a heavy drawer with care.
“I never fail to be impressed by your efforts, my son,” he said, pulling out a heavy leather bag from the same. It bulged with coin, its dull clinking a sweet music to my draconic ears.
“Few have done so much to help the holy cause as you.”
“I have a passion for the destruction of häxjävlar, your Excellency,” I said piously, sketching a bow. “As the Bible says, none shall suffer a witch to live. These are words by which I strive most ardently to live. If I may humbly continue to serve the Church thusly, as I have already for many years, I will at its end consider my life most well-spent.”
A sanctimonious simper. “Would that more of the noble laity were half so zealous in the service of the Holy Church. It would ease the clergy’s burden greatly; and, its cause eradicated, the Inquisition would be completed inside of a year. To be certain, such an occurrence would greatly please Our Lord. I pray that it may be so.”
He bowed his tonsured head over folded hands for a grave moment, then crossed himself with a flourish.
A pompous ass, but he served my purposes well enough.
“As do I, your Excellency. From your holy lips to God’s ears.”
I weighed the bag deftly in one hand before tucking it away above my heart.
Each coin was another häxjävel’s back broken and ground into the dust by the boot-heel of my vengeance. I relished adding every last one to my quickly growing hoard.
