by Calista Skye
“Yes, yes,” the woman says dismissively. “I have seen your silver. It is not very convincing. But it might have to suffice. I will give the three of you some more time to find a more suitable tribute for me. As long as it takes me to enjoy this young female. The first to give me gold wins, boys. You should be running!” She laughs again, but there’s no joy in it.
All three males take off, toga guy clearly struggling to maintain his dignity as he strides off after the two others.
I have no idea what’s going on here. But it is about gold, that’s for sure.
And for some reason, being alone here with this dragon lady scares me more than having those other guys here, too. There is a menace to her that reminds me a lot of the way Kyandros made me feel right before I shot him that day in the woods. A lightness, a studied innocence camouflaging evil intent.
I look around, seeking a place to run. The dragon lady is much taller than me, but she has a feminine shape and may not be able to run as fast as Kyandros. Bune is very big. Perhaps, I can escape her.
Her hand shoots out and grabs my wrist so hard I can hear the bone creak. “You’re thinking of escape! It’s adorable. Nobody can escape me, and nobody has. Certainly, not a lesser female like you.” Her smile is heart-stoppingly pretty in its otherworldly perfection. But there is only ice and death behind it. This thing feels more alien than Kyandros ever did.
I try to yank my arm away, but she doesn’t budge at all.
She taps her lips as if thinking. “Actually, it could be some good sport for me. At some point I will let you escape. Then I will catch you again and punish you for escaping. If you don’t escape, I will punish you for denying me my fun. But first, I will do what those complete idiots who brought you neglected. Sweet young female of the lesser type: where is the gold on your planet?”
32
- Kyandros -
A chill goes down my back at her question. “What I hold in my hand is mine and nobody else’s.”
Delyah nods. “I agree. We will not take it from you. But we must know what it is. Our impression of you is incomplete, Kyandros. We don’t even know the right questions to ask you, as you yourself have noted. Now, you don’t appear to be hiding much. Your clothing wouldn’t allow it. But your fist is closed. Please open your hand behind your back.”
“It is something of great value to me. Not to you. And it is mine.”
Delyah confers with the other women again. “I promise that we will not take it from you. I will approach now and take a look. Nobody else will see.”
She laboriously gets to her feet, but the man beside her holds her back. “That is not safe.”
“Nothing about this is safe, my love. But it is important.”
’My love.’ Her words resonate through me.
The man gets up and finally draws his sword. “If any harm comes to my wife, I will slice your head off,” he says calmly.
I just stare daggers at him. How can such a crude idiot be married to the sly Delyah? I recognize her wiles. But she has the upper hand.
She comes walking, keeping her distance until she is behind me. “Please show me now,” she says softly while her husband tenses up.
I force myself to relax my fist and open the hand.
Delyah’s cool fingers unwrap the treasure.
“Who gave you this?” she whispers.
“Mia.”
She is silent for a short while. Then she puts it back in my hand. “I have taken nothing. Keep it.”
My fist greedily clenches around the ball of leaves again, anxious that she might be lying. But I immediately feel that the treasure is intact and I relax marginally.
Delyah walks back to her log, but doesn’t sit down. “We will have to think about this, Kyandros. Now, it looks like it might rain. We invite you to come inside the cave.”
Strong hands help me get back on my feet, it seems to me a little gentler than before. Then I’m walking into a deep cave with a very lived-in look. It smells better than Mia’s and my cave, but still it seems a poor and incomplete dwelling.
I am allowed to sit down by a wall, and the opening to the cave is closed by the presence of four large slayers that all look down but give me every impression of being extremely alert.
“Why are you here?” I inquire, my frustration needing an outlet. “Your tribeswoman is lost in the jungle. And here you stand. Watching a helpless prisoner with your blades bared. Are you then the weaklings of the tribe? Those who must do the menial tasks? Those who cannot be trusted to do a man’s work?”
The men don’t react, and that frustrates me more.
“Or you are kept here, uselessly, while someone is stealing your hoa... your possessions.”
They remain still and vigilant, while at the same time being relaxed. Nothing I say will affect them.
I take a deep breath. Mia is alone somewhere. She never returned to this village.
Where did she go? To the waterfall to get more gold?
No, that does not ring true.
If she’s not here, it means she was probably caught by someone. A dragon, of which there are many in the woods.
Which dragon would take her?
Impossible to know. Unless....
A strange coldness goes down my back, and I can feel the spikes back there rise up as if preparing for battle.
Unless Berilona found her.
The Duchess is known for her hatred of any female younger than her. And any female of any other species she meets will certainly be younger than Berilona’s three hundred and something years. Mia most definitely is.
Berilona has been close to the cave where I spent so much time with Mia. Perhaps, she saw the smoke from the fire and so inferred that I was not alone, because dragons don’t need fire to keep warm. Perhaps, she realized that the only company any male dragon would keep would have to be a female.
And perhaps she came sauntering to take a look after I had left Mia in my mad rush of gold fever, determined to find Berilona and give the gold dust to her. Perhaps she took Mia with her, or lured her somehow.
I groan out loud, and the guards finally raise their faces and look at me.
Right now, I don’t care what they look at. Mia might well be in the clutches of Berilona, a noble dragon who both acquired and kept her title because of her legendary cruelty. Where most dragons enjoy murder and massacre, turning masses of lesser beings into a mist of blood, she likes to take her time with one individual at a time. Just one, always a sentient female, whose final hours and days are then so gruesome and painful and horrific that the victim usually seeks death by her own hand if the smallest chance presents itself. They will rather die than have their lives continue in the presence of Berilona.
I have seen the results of that once or twice. Then, it didn’t move me much, except for my lack of understanding for why Berilona preferred such small-scale terror, while certainly gory enough, to the much more overwhelming killing of many in a short time. And now, thinking of Mia subjected to that kind of treatment, it makes the color and the light go out of my mind. It feels as if the hot ichor drains from my body.
“Why do I care?” I mutter. “What is she to me?”
I barely notice the guards stirring, looking at each other.
‘I’ll be your hoard.’
Mia said that. But she can’t be a hoard. A hoard is less than what she is. But what is she?
I lift my head. “Slayers.”
I use a lot of persuasion in my voice, and all four guards reply with an immediate “Yes!”
“Are you allowed to talk to me?”
“We are not,” one says.
“Go and get someone who is. The woman Delyah. And the man she was with. The other chief.”
One man walks away fast, while the three others widen their stances and tense up as if worried that I will now attack them.
I squeeze the ball of leaf in my hand behind my back. Berilona is the only way I have to leave this planet. If I don’t give her the gold, I will
never escape. I will live out my days here, bereft of my hoard and my reputation and everything a dragon seeks.
I can’t expect Mia to find any more gold. And anyway, a small drizzle of gold dust is not sufficient at all. Only an advanced planet with a large population could produce the kind of hoard I would need to come into my own and to be content for just one heartbeat.
Delyah and her black-striped warrior approach the cave and come inside.
“You wish to talk to us?” the man says, hand on the sword by his side.
I look at Delyah. “You called that man ‘my love’.”
She smiles. “Many times every day.”
I focus on the man. “And you called her your ‘wife’.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t smile.
“A wife is a woman to whom you’re married?”
“It is.”
“I know the word. But now I don’t think I know the full meaning of it. You two are married. You are wife and...” I have forgotten the word, if ever I knew it.
“Husband,” Delyah states. “We are husband and wife.”
The man is huge and striped and clearly a fierce dragon slayer. From the way he looks at me, I sense that he has slain already. The woman is small and unbelievably round and as soft-looking as Mia. They are extremely different. And yet they so clearly belong together.
I think I’m getting close.
I take a deep breath. “Why?”
The two exchange glances, and the bemused look on both their faces tells me everything I need to know.
The man gives Delyah a little kiss on the forehead and leaves. He says something to the guards, and they draw closer to me.
“Kyandros,” Delyah says and laboriously sits down on a heap of furs by the opposite wall. “Let me tell you about love.”
33
- Mia -
“Let me hear that cute voice again.” Berilona smiles sweetly and casually inserts a needle-like claw into the fleshy part of my hand, right under the thumb.
I groan. I’m determined not to scream. The pain is really bad, but I won’t give her the satisfaction. At the same time, I’m conscious about exactly how many points on my body there are that she can pierce. Thousands, most of them probably more sensitive than the hand.
The claw goes deeper, and I realize that I can’t take it after all. “Aaaah!”
She keeps it in there, sticking it a little deeper, before she slowly takes it back out and puts it into her mouth, sucking my blood off it. “Mmm. Not as sweet as I expected. But maybe we’ll make it sweeter. When you’re all screamed out, it will taste differently. It always does.”
She takes the finger out of her mouth and calmly digs the claw back into the same wound.
I keep the scream down, and this time I succeed. At least she’s given up the gold questions, and that is a little victory for me.
“Wonderful,” Berilona says. “You are resilient. Or rather, you think you are. Those are my favorite. Such a pleasure when you finally break. I hope you will make it last.”
“Fuck you,” I spit.
“Oh, we will get to that,” the stunningly beautiful dragon woman purrs. “But not, I think, in the way you’d like it.” She makes an upwards stabbing motion with one finger, tipped by that needle claw.
I cringe. That is really going to hurt.
No. That would hurt, but it won’t happen. I will find a way out of here. Away from her. And I will do it long before she can do that to me.
She sucks on the fingertip again. “I am not the first dragon you met.”
I don’t reply.
She smiles mischievously. “How do I know, you ask? You’re not quivering. You’re not cowering. You’re not even shaking. You’re not mesmerized by me. You have met dragons before. And you have survived the encounter. I find that interesting. Tell me?”
She’s holding both my wrists in an iron grip that doesn’t waver at all. My hands are starting to swell from the pressure, going dark red with blood that can’t flow back. I have tried to kick her and to yank myself away, but she is bigger than me and much stronger. I can’t hit her.
I don’t know how to get out of this. She’s holding me tightly, showing no inclination to let me go. She’s just torturing me.
My only hope is to be rescued. The cavemen from the village must come and get me. I am genuinely surprised they’re not here yet. They should be inside Bune right now, having cleansed it of dragons.
They will come. Meanwhile, I just have to stay alive and as intact as possible.
“We were held captive,” I begin, hoping that my story will keep her from torturing me. “By a dragon called Troga.”
The dragon raises an eyebrow. “You were?” She reaches out and takes my left ear between two fingers, then slowly pierces it in a way that’s much worse then when I was fourteen and my mom finally allowed me to have that done. “Go on.”
I try to kick her again, but my foot only finds empty air.
Berilona still holds my ear, and now she lifts her hand, forcing me up on tiptoes. I can feel the tissue in my ear tearing.
“I said go on.”
I can’t hold back a pained yelp, and I can hear the hopelessness in it. “She had burned a trench and she kept us inside it…”
34
- Kyandros -
“Then he came and rescued me. He almost died in the process, but to him, that was a cheap price to pay. He would have died for me. It was just coincidence that he didn’t.”
I listen while Delyah tells me about herself and Brax’tan, her husband. I have never listened so intently. Every word speaks to me. Every sentence burns itself into my soul. Because I recognize all of it.
She smiles, a radiant flash of white in her tanned skin. “And then we got married. Because we both longed for it. We both needed to be married. I needed to be married to Brax’tan. As much as I needed to breathe. And now I still need him. As much as I need to breathe. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” And I do. I understand completely.
Mia is not from Xren at all. Just like Delyah, she comes from another planet.
Mia is not my hoard, but I knew that already. My confusion is gone.
She’s not my hoard.
She’s my beloved.
The world becomes clearer, the air crisper. The power flows through me, the ichor becomes fluid again, becomes burning hot and fills me up with the sheerest bliss.
Delyah’s eyes widen.
The four guards rush into action and carry her fast out of the cave while they shout for help. The steel wires around my wrists and ankles snap by themselves. The cave shrinks around me, and I walk out of it. Blades are slashed at me, and they hit my scales with sparks and clangs that do no damage.
I extend my wings and beat them once, and it sends me high into the air. Bolts of the same type that Mia shot me with bounce harmlessly off me.
Under me is the village. The village full of dragon slayers. The village where I was captured and bound, all my dignity stripped from me.
How small the slayers are! How insignificant! How weak they appear to me now!
I’m invincible.
And will show them exactly that.
35
- Mia -
My voice is going hoarse from all the screaming, and all the little wounds Berilona is inflicting on me are not just terribly painful. They also drain all my strength and resilience from me. I have given up my decision to not make a sound, and I can tell that she enjoys that.
“That Troga must have been a pitiful excuse for a dragon. Nothing like me. I grow tired of your squeaky voice. Be quiet now.”
A needle claw digs into my elbow and scrapes against bone. I scream again, because I just have no choice.
Berilona’s eyes flash. “I told you to be quiet! I will punish you for that. But first, I will tell you something. Just because I enjoy hearing myself talk, you understand. It will not help you at all. Now, I will soon leave this planet. I will mate with a worthy male, and he and I will
leave through the void. Before then, I will kill everyone in your tribe. I know where it is.”
Defiance rises in me. “You can’t. You don’t have the strength. They are all slayers.”
She laughs. “Don’t be deceived by this pitiful human form. I can Change into dragon form anytime I want. And after I mate with the male, I will be strong. Strong and terrible beyond anything you can imagine.”
“Not as terrible as Kyandros,” I throw out there for no particular reason except wanting to hurt this bitch. “He’s not dead, by the way. He just doesn’t want to mate with an old and worn-out hag like you. He’s gathering a hoard.”
For the first time, Berilona’s smile fades and she squeezes my wrists harder. “A hoard? What do you know about Kyandros?”
“More than you do,” I say, grimacing at the pain in my wrists. “For instance, he despises you and calls you ’that old slut’.” I’m not even sure about what I’m saying. I just need a break from the torture.
“How do you know?”
I withstand her piercing gaze pretty easily. She’s not quite in Kyandros’s league. And after all, she’s not really a dragon. Just an alien. “You never wondered where he was? What he was doing? He was with me, planning how to build his hoard. And he did find gold. A heap of nuggets the size of your saggy tits. For him. Not for you. For his hoard.” I’m kind of babbling. But if I can’t hurt her physically, then I’ll say anything that might affect her mental state. True or not, I don’t care.
She pulls me closer. “Nuggets? On this planet?”
“No, on Mars. Yes, of course, on this fucking planet!”
Berilona fixes me with a reptile stare. “Where are you really from? I have seen the men in this jungle. They’re clearly slayers. You are not. Most tribes have no females at all. The way you speak is not the way of a primitive cavewoman. Kyandros would never notice these things. But another female would. You come from another planet. Where?”
