“On eight legs I bear my rider.
“He holds no rein.
“At the end of the journey it is he who is left in the stall.”
I am not sure dragons frown. Their scaled foreheads are not designed for furrowing. But I could not shake the sense that the dragon was frowning at me.
After a little while, she responded calmly, “A coffin and its bearers.”
I sighed. “You can’t blame me for trying.”
The tongue flickered. “Can I not? Here is my next one.
“We are the old women
“Who walk on the beach
“We braid the shells and seaweed
“In our white hair.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Do you forfeit?” The dragon leaned forward eagerly. Its talons tensed as if already imagining raking through treasure.
“Not so fast!” I held up a hand and tried to ignore the warmth of the dragon’s breath ruffling my hair. Unless that was just the wind off the volcano. What walks on a beach…? Crabs. Birds.
“Waves!” I said suddenly, as it came to me. The word burst from my lips before I could second-guess myself. “It’s waves!”
“It’s waves,” the dragon agreed, sounding slightly disappointed.
“My next.” Of course, because I was looking at a dragon, I could only think of one riddle.
Hoping she wouldn’t be offended, I said,
“I am a dragon with only one wing.
“But of limbs I have a score.
“I fly to battle.
“I grow more fearful when I shed my scales.”
“Really?” the dragon said.
I spread my hands. The rock was making my backside ache. I tried not to fidget. It would only make me seem nervous.
Of course, I was nervous.
“A long-boat,” the dragon said. She yawned before she continued. “The limbs are oars. The scales are the shields hung over the gunwales and retrieved when the men go to fight.”
“You’ve seen that?”
“I’ve destroyed a few. Sometimes they’re full of livestock. Or treasure.”
If dragons didn’t frown, did they smile? Or had she always been as toothy as she seemed now.
“What do we do if it’s a draw?” I asked.
She chuckled. “A sudden-death round? By which I mean, then I eat you.”
I couldn’t tell if she was joking and I didn’t want to ask. It might be better to let myself lose. I could always find more treasure, after all. Never mind that it would take a desperate Viking indeed to give a berth to a man as old as me, and those were the sorts of raiders who did not come home with their ships wallowing with gold.
“Last one,” the dragon said cheerfully. Did they play with their pray, like cats?
“A stone on the road.
“I saw water become bone.”
How on earth did that happen? It was a metaphor, of course—riddles always were—but what was water a metaphor for? Blood that clots? A stone was hard, and so was a sword… brigands? Something that could stop a journey?
No. No, of course not. The water wasn’t the metaphor. The road was the metaphor. The whale-road, the ship-road. The sea. What was a stone on the sea?
“An iceberg,” I said.
“Brave little witch,” the dragon remarked. She lifted one talon and waved idly. Her opalescent eyes seemed to enlarge until I felt as if I were falling upward into them.
I’m not sure how long I gaped at her, but I was startled abruptly back into my skin when she said, “Hurry up, then. Let’s see this done.”
My mind went blank.
My wit ran dry.
I could think of not a single riddle.
No, not true. I could think of a riddle. But it was a children’s riddle, and not one worthy of a dragon. I needed something better. Something clever. Something I stood a chance of stumping her with.
She sighed a slow trickle of flame.
Dammit.
I said,
“Fat and full-bellied
“Welcome and warm
“I rise with joy
“Though my bed is hard.”
A loaf, of course. A loaf, puffing up and baking on a flat hearth-stone before the fire.
No sooner had the words left my mouth than I thought of half a dozen better ones. The onion riddle with all the dick jokes in it… anything. Anything at all would have been better…
There was the end of my chance to save my kinfolk. There was the end of my chance to put this obligation to rest—
I was so engaged in flyting myself that I thought I must have missed the dragon’s answer. And indeed, when I lifted my eyes again, she was staring at me quizzically.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t hear you.”
She snorted rather a lot of fire this time. “I said, I don’t know. I don’t know the answer.”
“What?” I said, foolishly.
“Little witch, tell me the answer.”
“Bread,” I said. “A loaf of bread. It rises when you cook it on a hot stone.”
“Fascinating.” The tip of her tail twitched like a hunting cat’s. “Fascinating. Is that where bread comes from?”
She sounded genuinely excited.
Dragons, it seemed, knew about death and war. But not so much about baking.
Her wings folded more tightly against her sides. “Well, you’ve won. That’s the end of the riddles, then.”
“I have another one for you,” I cried, struck by inspiration now when it was too late. “As a gift. No wager.”
The dragon definitely had facial expressions, and this one was definitely suspicion. “No wager?”
“None.”
“What do you want if you win?”
“Just the joy of winning,” I said. “Here.
“Alone I dwell
“In a stone cell
“With a gray roof.
“Though kept captive
“None holds the key.
“I am not soaring above the halls of dawn.
“I do not see the sun rise.
“What creature am I?”
She stared, tongue flickering. Moments passed, and I worried I had misunderstood her—or worse, offended her.
When she burst out, “Me!” she nearly incinerated me with the spray of her venom. “It’s me! Oh, sorry…”
“I’m fine. It’s fine.” I remained standing, so I could dodge faster if there were more outbursts. And to get away from the eyewatering, sinus-stinging smoke curling from the cinders where the eitr had fallen. “Unscathed.” I held out my hands to demonstrate.
“Good,” she said. “How odd it is that a small, frail, temporary person like yourself should make me feel so clearly seen.”
Well, from her point of view, I supposed I was all of those things.
She had been lying along the edge of the vent, just her head and forequarters poking over. Now, with a motion that was half slither and half chinning herself, she crawled up to the rim and stretched out. “Did you bring vessels?”
“Jars,” I said, lifting the pack.
“Cheeky,” she said.
“What’s worse?” I asked. “Preparing too much and not using everything, or needing a thing and not having it to hand?”
“You swore to grant me a boon.”
She had me there. “I did.”
“I’ll give you the eitr. You won the wager honorably. And I will leave this place and take with me my two children. We shall make our nest further from human habitations, though I must complain that there are more and more of you with every passing season. If you cover the whole damn landscape and keep breeding even when you encroach on other people’s nesting grounds, I don’t see how you can complain about a little volcano.” She sighed. “And here I am helping resurrect your whelps, who will probably just make more of you.”