“But—”
But he wanted to know what Cradock would say about him, in his official reports.
“Captain Wray, I never finished telling you the story of that hunter,” he said. A long pause; Wray looked haggard, a What now? expression. “I sold him,” Cradock said. “To a man who wanted a good hack.” Wray seemed to shrink within his uniform. “Have some tea,” Cradock offered, seeing that the message had been received.
“Nothing can change the nature born in its blood,” he said, quoting a Greek poet, most apt for this ocean. “Neither cunning fox, nor loud lion.” Nor coward, though he would not say that. He could take no pleasure in Wray’s humiliation, but in the Navy there were no excuses. That was the great tradition.
Fool’s Gold
“It’s been done to death,” Mirabel Stonefist said.
“It’s traditional.” Her sister Monica sat primly upright, embroidering tiny poppies on a pillowcase. All Monica’s pillowcases had poppies on them, just as all the curtains on the morning side of the house had morning glories.
“Traditional is another word for ‘done to death,’” Mirabel said. Her own pillowcases had a stamped sigil and the words property of the royal barracks do not remove.
“It’s unlucky to break with tradition.”
“It’s unlucky to have anything to do with dragons,” Mirabel said, rubbing the burn scar on her left leg.
Cavernous Dire had never intended to be a dragon. He had intended to be a miser, living a long and peaceful life of solitary selfishness near the Tanglefoot Mountains, but he had, all unwitting, consumed a seed of dragonsfoot which had been—entirely by accident—baked into a gooseberry tart. That wouldn’t have changed him, if his neighbor hadn’t made an innocent mistake and handed him dragonstongue, instead of dragonsbane, to ease a sore tongue. The two plants do look much alike, and usually it makes no difference whether you nibble a leaf of D. abscondus or D. lingula, since both will ease a cold-blister, but in those rare instances when someone has an undigested seed of dragonsfoot in his gut, and then adds to it the potent essence of D. lingula… well.
Of course it was all a mistake, and an accident, and the fact that when Cavernous went back to the village to dig his miser’s hoard out from under the hearthstone it was already gone meant nothing. Probably. And most likely the jar of smelly ointment that broke on his scaly head—fixing him in his draconic form until an exceedingly unlikely conjunction of events—was an accident too, though Goody Chernoff’s cackle wasn’t.
So Cavernous Dire sloped off to the Tanglefoots in a draconish temper, scorching fenceposts along the way. He found a proper cave, and would have amassed a hoard from the passing travelers, if there’d been any. But his cave was a long way from any pass over the mountains, and he was far too prudent to tangle with the rich and powerful dragons whose caves lay on more lucrative trade routes.
He was forced to prey on the locals.
At first, sad to say, this gave him wicked satisfaction. They’d robbed him. They’d turned him into a dragon and robbed him, and—like a true miser—he minded the latter much more than the former. He ate their sheep, and then their cattle (having grown large enough), and once inhaled an entire flock of geese—a mistake, he discovered, as burning feathers stank abominably. He could not quite bring himself to eat their children, though his draconish nature found them appetizing, because he knew too well how dirty they really were, and how disgusting the amulets their mothers tied round their filthy necks. But he did kill a few of the adults, when they marched out with torches to test the strength of his fire. He couldn’t stomach their stringy, bitter flesh.
Finally they moved away, cursing each other for fools, and Cavernous reigned over a ruined district. He pried up every hearthstone, and rooted in every well, but few were the coins or baubles which the villagers left behind.
Although the ignorant assert that the man-drake has powers greater than the dragonborn, this is but wishful thinking. Dragons born from the egg inherit all the ancient wisdom and power of dragonkind. Man-drakes are but feeble imitations, capable of matching true dragons only in their lust for gold. So poor Cavernous Dire, though fearsome to men, had not a chance of surviving in any contest with real dragons—and real dragons find few things so amusing as tormenting mandrakes.
’Tis said that every man has some woman who loves him—at least until she dies of his misuse—and so it was with Cavernous. Though most of the children born into his very dysfunctional birth-family had died of abuse or neglect, he had a sister, Bilious Dire, who had not died, but lived—and lived, moreover, with the twisted memory that Cavernous had once saved her life. (In fact, he had merely pushed her out of his way on one of the many occasions when his mother Savage came after him with a hot ladle.) But Bilious built her life, as do we all, on the foundation of her beliefs about reality, and in her reality Cavernous was a noble being.
She had been long away, Bilious, enriching the man who owned her, but at last she grew too wrinkled and stiff, and he cast her out. So she returned to the foothills village of her childhood, to find it ruined and empty, with dragon tracks in the street.
“That horrible dragon,” she wailed at the weeping sky. “It’s stolen my poor innocent brother. I must find help—”
“So you see, it’s the traditional quest to rescue the innocent victim of a dragon,” Mirabel’s sister said. “Our sewing circle has taken on the rehabilitation of the faded blossoms of vice—” Mirabel mimed gagging, and her sister glared at her. “Don’t laugh! It’s not funny—the poor things—”
“Isn’t there Madam Aspersia’s Residence for them?”
“Madam Aspersia only has room for twenty, and besides she gives preference to women of a Certain Kind.” Mirabel rolled her eyes; her sister combined the desire to talk about Such Things with the inability to name the Things she wanted to talk about.
“Well, but surely there are other resources—”
“In this city perhaps, but in the provinces—” Before Mirabel could ask why the provinces should concern the goodwives of Weeping Willow Street, her sister took a deep breath and plunged on. “So when poor Bilious—obviously past any chance of earning a living That Way—begged us to find help for her poor virgin brother taken by a dragon, of course I thought of you.”
“Of course.”
“Surely your organization does something to help women—that is its name, after all, Ladies’ Aid & Armor Society….”
Mirabel had tried to explain, on previous occasions, what the LA&AS had been founded for, and why it would not help with a campaign to provide each orphaned girl with hand-embroidered underclothes for her trousseau, or stand shoulder to shoulder with the Weeping Willow Sewing Society’s members when they marched on taverns that sold liquor to single women. (Didn’t her sister realize that all the women in the King’s Guard hung out in taverns? Or was that the point?)
Now, through clenched teeth, Mirabel tried once more. “Monica—we do help women—each other. We were founded as a mutual-aid society for all women soldiers, though we do what we can—” The LA&AS charity ball, for instance, supported the education of the orphaned daughters of soldiers.
“Helping each other is just like helping yourself, and helping yourself is selfish. Here’s this poor woman, with no hope of getting her brother free if you don’t do something—”
Mirabel felt her resistance crumbling, as it usually did if her sister talked long enough.
“I don’t see how he can be a virgin, if he’s older than his sister,” she said. A weak argument, and she knew it. So did Monica.