If you have never seen a dragon throw its head back and laugh (and I suppose very few have), it is a sight not easily described. I hastily tugged my hat down as a fine mist of caustic venom descended around me. A few invisible drops smarted on the backs of my hands.
“You are not boring, little witch,” the dragon said. It looked this way, and then that. To my amazement, it seemed to be making a show of casualness, of reluctance.
“Hmm,” it said. Then: “Do you like riddles, little witch?”
I closed my eyes.
I hated riddles.
“I have played at riddles a time or two.”
“Well then.” The dragon shifted its weight, settling into the mountainside like a great jarl settling into his broad, bearskin-adorned chair. “Come up a little closer, witch, and choose a stone to sit upon, and we can play at riddles for what you wish. But if you win, you must grant me a boon.”
How under the Wolf Sun of my fathers did I keep getting myself into situations like this?
But I was a man on kin-business, blood-bound to do what I could. Damn my brother anyway, for being a simple farmer, for being the victim of a brutal scheme, for dying of a dragon’s miasma, for getting me into all of this.
I walked up to the smoking crater as if I had not a fear in the world—certainly without any cringing as I came under the shadow of the dragon’s wings—and while I was selecting a rock of the correct height for sitting, could not resist a peek over the edge into the vent.
I almost fell in.
I had expected the vent to contain… shining masses of gold, perhaps. Seething masses of lava.
Not a careful circle of boulders each as big as a cart, and a claw-raked ground of soft ash within, like a giant’s campfire ring. Upon that, dead in the center, lay three enormous mottled eggs like the last remaining embers.
The dragon, it seemed, was not an it but a she.
“Well,” I said. “I see what you mean by ‘obligations.’”
Have you ever heard a dragon chortle? I have, and it was in no way rendered less unsettling by the knowledge that this was a female with young. For nothing on the waters and the wide wide world is fiercer than a mother.
I found a rock, as directed, and as directed I seated myself upon it. I swung the pack with the jars down between my knees and set it gently on the stones.
“So, little witch,” said the dragon. “Shall we play?”
“You go first,” I said. “Best two out of three?”
The dragon stretched and sighed, settling itself. “I believe it is traditional. As for that boon—”
“As long as it’s not my stringy hide.”
She sniffed. “I dislike the taste of woad, and I see from your forelimbs that you’re pricked all over with the stuff.”
I glanced down at the old and faded ropes of tattoos. They were meant to be for protection, to ensure the forbearance of the gods.
First time in my life that the damn things actually worked.
“If you get a boon if I win,” I said, “I get a boon if I lose.”
“It can’t be the same as the stakes,” she said cagily.
“What forfeit will you have of me if you win?” I pushed my hat back as she thought about it.
“Have you a hoard?” she asked, finally.
I thought of gold and silver and jewels of great store. The wealth of a lifetime spent riding the whale-roads, reaving and trading. The price of my retirement, when I found a place I wanted to retire. All safe in a vault down in Ornyst, where there were bankers and banks.
I thought about kin-duty. I thought about my sister-in-law.
“Not on my person,” I said.
“Wager your hoard against my venom, then,” the dragon invited.
“Don’t you even want to know how much I have?”
She hissed a laugh. “It’s enough that it’s valuable to you. That’s what makes a wager interesting. That, and the story that attaches to it. That someday I may say to my children, yes, this is the gold I won riddling with a sorcerer, while you were yet in the shell.”
It was a dragonish way of thinking, and not so alien to anybody who had gone a-viking. I touched my arm-rings, fingering them until I found the one that had been a gift from Ragnar when he was a sea-king and I sailed at his command. When we had been bright and young and too naïve to know any better.
I said, “If you will wager both your venom and your leaving, I will add my adornments to the pot. Those mean more to me than any hoard.”
None of it was the richest that I owned, but it was enough—ear-rings and arm-rings, the brooch that closed my cloak and the clasp that pinned my hair—to lend me dignity. I felt a sentiment for each object. Especially since I had so recently won it all back from a murderer.
At least it wasn’t my coat and boots this time.
“Your folk should move on, not me. This land is far more suitable for me than…”
There are few things more eloquent than the dismissive flick of a dragon’s talon, it turns out.
“That’s likely true,” I admitted. “But you have to understand that the people of the village have built houses and barns and planted crops. Our lives are short. They won’t have time or resources to up stakes and build those houses anew someplace else.”
She said, “There are far more suitable places for your sort to live than there are for brooding eggs. I won’t be the last to come here, so long as the earth stays hot.”
“I can’t wager for my folk any more than you can speak for yours.” I hoped she wasn’t a dragon Queen, or something, who did have the power to bargain for the whole. Anyway, the future wasn’t my concern. She was right; this was a stupid place for a settlement.
She huffed at the back of her throat, not hard enough to spray venom—but hard enough to cause a mist of it to curl from her nostrils and ignite into a transparent lash of flame. She tilted her head to regard me, and I got the oddest sense that her interest was more in the bargaining and the company and the game than in who lost or won.
Sitting on eggs must be extremely boring for a creature with wings to span the open skies. I’d only had the broad sails and swift rowers of a dragon-boat to carry me, and although now my joints ached even in good weather and my feet hurt every day, I could not bring myself to settle into a farmstead and raise cows. Though I was no youth to harden my muscles on an oar without injury, I could not see myself raising a hall and draping a big throne-chair with wolf-hides and bear-hides to cushion my ass and seem fierce at the same time. No matter how much the saddle galled my behind.
I might have more in common with this dragon than I did with Ragnar or with my brother.
Damn Arnulfr.
“Done,” the dragon said. “I shall begin.
“I am the shrill singer
“Who rides a narrow road.
“With two mouths I kiss hard
“The hot and pliant maidens.”
I blushed, because I hadn’t been expecting racy double-meanings from a dragon. But I knew the answer to this one, when I thought about it a little. “Hammer,” I said. And then, “Smith’s hammer. The road and the maidens are the metal to be forged. The mouths are the two ends of the hammer.”
The dragon snorted another curl of fire, slightly larger than the last one. How good was the word of a dragon, anyway? Especially when exposed to a little frustration?
Perhaps I should have been surprised that the dragon knew about hammers—but the dragon knew about treasures, and steel for swords and gold for gauds alike must be refined, then hammered pure.
I hoped there were other human things the dragon knew less about. I said,
“I am the black horse.