Captive

Sir Morgen gingerly makes her way through the dragon’s warren of mountain tunnels. It’s very traditional, in layout: multiple obvious entrances into the ambush labyrinth at the front, the warren proper behind that for those who can run the gauntlet, at least one bolthole escape tunnel — which she is not privy to — and right at the back: the princess chambers. That’s where the draconic association with kobolds comes from, though really a dragon will employ anyone available they believe they can trust, or eat afterwards: they need someone who can do human-scale architecture. It’s a point of pride that they don’t simply drag captives into a hole in the ground, like some kind of oversized weasel; they furnish them in comfort.

Malvox is elderly, and Morgen’s never read a history of the dragon taking any notable princess anyway. The princess hole is nice enough, though obviously long disused; when Morgen’s horse startled at the dragon’s appearance and threw her, and she broke her leg, Malvox insisted on extending hospitality.

The leg is probably always going to ache for approaching rain, but she’s mended enough to walk, now. She could broach the subject of departure. But she’d been crossing the mountains with her coat of arms freshly abated and spirit sore, disgraced, and has nowhere in particular to go.

She spent the long winter with her leg splinted, talking with Malvox. She suspects the wyrm is old enough that half of what she says is wasted, unretained by memory, but the company does them both good. Malvox talks incessantly of princesses, and Morgen, gently and politely, tries to talk through the political changes over recent centuries of history; of tiny patchwork kingdoms consolidated, uneasily and sometimes unwillingly united within the borders of new, larger, ambitious nations, identity stamped imperiously upon them like the faces struck on coinage. She hints, carefully as she can, that the modern dearth of princesses is due to there being objectively rather fewer of them.

“Good morning, sir knight,” the dragon says.

“Well met, noble wyrm,” Morgen returns, limping to the breakfast table. It’s something of a distance to walk, but Morgen must needs exercise her leg to strength, and the dragon prefers company to letting her dine alone in the princess hole, and she must needs also be courteous.

The dragon’s kobold retainers yip and scurry, dragging chests around, flipping lids up and down in patterns bewildering to Morgen. But it must all mean something to the dragon, comprehended instantly in its peripheral vision even as it converses with her, directing things with the smallest flick of ears or claw or tail. Two kobolds finally run up and deposit a specific chest in front of it, throwing it open.

“Do princesses even still wear these, sir knight?” the dragon says wistfully, as the kobolds painstakingly lift out a veil-trailing hennin.

“I’m sure so,” Morgen says stoutly, knowing it’s unlikely either of them will ever look upon a court of ladies again to know different. “What finery, noble wyrm. What care you take of it.”

“It would be nice to see it worn,” Malvox says wistfully. “Just once.”

They are both discarded things, loathe to admit it, in aching camaraderie. Morgen leans sideways in her chair, reaching far enough to lay a rough, inadequate, comradely pat on the knobbed joint of a draconic limb. They’re silent, for a while.

“You should try it on,” the dragon says suddenly, and Morgen drops her spoon into her oatmeal and stares, appalled and dumbstruck. Malvox stares back at her, vast and opaque and suddenly seeming wholly less comprehensible. “Come now,” the wyrm says, deep and dangerous. “You’ve been teaching me, these winter months, though you think me too age-stupefied to learn; there are no princesses now, not for you to serve nor me to ravage. I’d see this finery worn, just once. Just once, sir knight.”

“I’m not a lady,” Morgen stammers, and terribly, the dragon leans its face toward her, looming death-jaws and huge burning gaze, and sniffs, pointedly as a scenthound, then licks its lips with its wicked dragon tongue.

“Yes you are,” Malvox rumbles.

“Noble wyrm!” She flushes; shudders, feeling naked suddenly without her arms and girded armour. “Thou knowest full well what my words meant; I am a knight—”

“You are small,” Malvox says, in a voice like the shaking of the earth, “and I am a beast,” and Morgen looks into teeth and claws and firey eyes and feels the truth of it, in a way which she has not, all winter: that she has fallen into the comfort of the lies of comradeship transcending opposition, of the companionship of shared obsolescence, of outlasting a dying world and its dying manners together. Malvox is a beast. She lurches to her feet. “Put on the hat,” Malvox says, terrifyingly ravenous in alien ways. “Put on the hat.”

“I cannot!” Morgen says

“PUT ON THE HAT,” the dragon roars, and Morgen runs, as best she can on her leg, terrified that at any moment through the twisting tunnels a devouring maw will snatch her, rend her, crush her. She flings herself into the tiniest, twistiest corner of the princess hole, drags some musty fallen tapestry entirely over herself, and weeps, and huddles in silence when she can weep no more, and sleeps when dread and vigilance exhaust her.

She goes to breakfast the next day, because she knows not what else she can do. The dragon sits halfway across the chamber from the table set for her, curled up with its back to her, like a sulking hound. She hobbles in, seats herself, and eats kobold-provided oatmeal in silence.

“Sir Morgen,” Malvox says eventually, stiffly. Morgen says nothing. “Sir Morgen, I beg you find it in your heart to forgive an ancient wyrm.”

Morgen says nothing.

Claws flex across stone. Malvox says nothing more, either.

It could have been the end of it, had the wyrm been sincere.

Morgen wakes to find all of her clothing spirited away by silent kobold hands, and walks to breakfast on stone-chilled feet, a meagre blanket clutched around her, simmering with helpless rage.

“I am not a princess!” she snarls from the chamber’s mouth, and Malvox laughs, wicked and rolling.

“Sir Morgen,” the wyrm says. “I love princesses. I love knights. They are the best of your tiny human games. But I am ancient, and I do not forget that royalty is not a tree that grows wild on the earth, nor princesses a fruit that flowers naturally. You tell me that princesses die out, and I shall be sad, but still I shall build my warren such, and still I will fill it.”

The chest sits in the middle of the floor, lid closed.

“I am not a pretty lady for such finery,” Morgen says, unyieldingly firm, and Malvox moves like a serpent, great coils gliding around and dizzyingly around one another, face cresting its own slithering mass to peer at her.

“Who says so, Sir Morgen?” the wyrm says slyly. “Who says that you are not?”

She swallows bile. “You twist my words, wyrm.”

“You’re cold,” the terrible creature says. “Why don’t you dress.”

She firms her jaw.

“No?” Malvox purrs. “Then perhaps I can warm you against the furnace of my skin.”

“I am perfectly comfortable, thank you,” Morgen lies frostily, turns around, and stalks away with as much dignity as she can scrape together on cold bare feet. Breakfastless, she climbs back into bed, heaping as many blankets as she can find on herself, and scowling beneath them, understanding perfectly that meals and clothing are both hostage to her cooperation — to her subjugation to the wyrm’s demands.

Like a princess.

She spends the rest of the day, hungry and abed. In the night, naturally, the dragon forces her hand by having its kobolds steal all but one of the blankets. If she remains recalcitrant, she supposes, she’ll wake the subsequent night to grabbing hands whisking that from her and fleeing.

She sits to breakfast with a mien of cold iron. “Can I expect a wyrm’s hospitality to extend to sustenance?”

“You wound me,” the perfidious beast says.

“Mine eyes do not see you bleed,” Morgen seethes.

The kobolds bring her oatmeal. One, trailing behind the others, pushes a set of fine woollen hose onto the table by her elbow — prettily embroidered with a floral motif — which she ignores.

Malvox coils and coils, winding treacherously closer inch by inch as she eats.

“Sir Morgen,” the wyrm croons. “Do your feet not take chill?”

If her eyes had power to injure, the dragon would be flayed.

“Morgen,” the wyrm says.

“You cannot simply do this!” Morgen bursts out.

“Why not?” Malvox turns its head to put her beneath one unnerving, unblinking eye, like the unceasing scrutiny of conscience. “The age of knights dies. I am a beast; I live on. Why should I not keep your tiny games alive in miniature, and play them here for my own amusement?”

“You cannot do this to me,” Morgen says, and finds that her voice has shrunk, under that terrible gaze.

The dragon puts one clawed foot upon the table before her, and casually clenches it, claws grinding and wood moaning. A mountain of muscular power, the wyrm looms over her, bending closer; she cowers.

“What would you do, sir knight?” Malvox says, cruel and soft. “Call your horse, that threw you and fled? Walk naked across the mountains on your own leg, which pains you?”

“I am not a princess,” Morgen whispers.

“Has nobody ever wanted to ravage you, Sir Morgen?”

If they had, it never occurred to Morgen enough to even notice. She jerkily shakes her head, not so much in denial as desperately warding off the entire conversation.

Malvox inhales, and it seems to Morgen that the dragon can smell her every fear, every tiny internal misery, every weakness. She frantically pushes her chair back.

The dragon, unblinking, flings the table away from between them with a flick of its wrist, shattering somewhere against a wall. Morgen shrieks and sprawls to the floor, chair overturning and blanket tangled about her feet; and then the dragon is upon her like an ocean wave, a smashing, tumbling, overwhelming weight, scale and heat, ridge and scar and rippling muscle. She dimly knows the wyrm must be preventing its bulk from breaking her bones and snuffing her out; the fact floats somewhere outside her singular presence in the moment, screaming, ground between stone and flesh. On and on she is roughly buffeted.

Eventually, with a roar, Malvox shudders all at once, all the flesh that touches her and all she can see of it, and Morgen shrieks anew as she’s bathed in thick and steaming liquid. For long moments more, the dragon is poised over her, sighing in a long, groaning way, and she fears crushing anew; and then the wyrm slithers aside and exposes her to the air, shivering, scraped, tearstained, soaked and sticky.

“You will wear dresses,” the dragon says lazily, arrogant, unbrookable, rolling onto its side. Morgen does not move; she stares at the ceiling. “You will do whatever I want. The age of the knight is over, Morgen; I’d expect some wait for anyone to come a-jousting to rescue you.”

She whimpers, faintly.

“Pretty girl,” Malvox says softly, and flickers out its tongue to whisper across the point of her bare shoulder.