Lindír expected that, the next time he and Biorra met, she would act coldly towards him, and shun his affections in favor of Ulkred’s, making it clear that she much preferred the drakkar’s attentions to the dragoness’s. That evening, at dinner, that expectation was destroyed. Biorra arrived when the communal meal was already well underway, Lindír gnawing at the bones of the ram before him in order to get to the choicest organs, and immediately went to him. As it happened, there was an open space to his right, a space which she promptly took, tucking her limbs beneath her torso and wrapping her wings about herself as a shawl.
“Biorra,” said Lindír. He was suddenly acutely aware of the difference in size between them: even lying down she had easily half an arm’s height on him.
“You sound surprised,” she said. “I would hope you haven’t forgotten about our courtship between this morning’s gift and now.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Lindír said. “Of course I haven’t forgotten, I could never forget. I simply hadn’t expected that… after everything that had happened… you would be quite so forward.”
Biorra blinked twice, bending her neck down to place her on a level with Lindír. “Everything that has happened? Lindír, we’ve been courting for a day and a half and have hardly said a word to one another. The heat of the moment may have struck me dumb, but I do not plan on this being an entirely wordless courtship.”
“But what of…” Lindír had no impetus to speak of Ulkred, and given that Biorra seemed determined to pretend that that event had not taken place, she dropped the matter. “The meat is very good today. Must be a good season, or something to that effect.”
“Well, it must be good if you say it is,” said Biorra. “I imagine living as a stray must have made you into quite the connoisseur.”
Lindír felt subtly as though he were being mocked, though he failed to discern the nature of the mockery, if it existed at all. “What do you mean?”
“Well, here on the island we have mutton, we have porpoise, we have fish…” Biorra looked up at the sky, translucent membrane flicking thoughtfully across her eyes. “…and that’s about it, I think. With all of the North your domain, I assume you were not limiting yourself to just lamb and porpoise?”
Lindír grimaced. He had switched over to habitually speaking the native tongue of the dragons of Solseyja, but his command over it was still somewhat limited. Sheep and porpoise were the only food animals whose names he knew. But if Biorra was asking, then he would have to improvise.
“I can hardly describe them,” he said. “The woods of the mainland extend scores of meadows in every direction, and in them live these… tremendous beasts, standing as high as your elbows, and with huge horns spanning on either sides of their heads. Sometimes I would kill one and stay in the same place for a week in order to be able to eat all of it.”
This had much stronger than the expected effect, as Biorra’s eyes began to glimmer and shine in the evening light. “And you hunted these beasts?”
Lindír found herself momentarily speechless. Those lambent eyes made her scales uncomfortably hot, and in turn that burning shamed her, that so innocent a look produced such a reaction. And besides, for what had she earned Biorra’s attention? Feeding herself?
“It isn’t as though it was difficult,” she said, pressing herself to the earth and taking another strip of meat. “I have fire and wings, and they did not.”
“Still! You hunted on your own, in the wilds. You must have been swooping down on them like an eagle, all aflame.” Biorra’s voice drifted oddly, as though her brain and her mouth were moving at slightly different angles. “No wonder you have such a figure, if that’s what you were doing.”
Lindír nearly forgot to swallow. “A figure? What figure?”
“Yours, of course.” Biorra bared her teeth.
“I think you may have run up against the limits of my knowledge of the language.”
Biorra trilled softly under her breath, then leaned in close so that she could speak softly. “You’re so small for a dragoness, and yet you still have quite the musculature. Very handsome, though not any dragon would admit it.”
Lindír fell completely silent. Not for lack of response, but the opposite: too many reactions at once, none of them able to be verbalized. She turned back to her meal with the affect of one who had forgotten Biorra was present at all, though the flames in her stomach flared until her chest lit up like a lighthouse and sparks dribbled from her jaws.
Biorra retreated, rumbling concernedly under her breath as her expression became more and more a frown of confusion. There were a few times where Lindír heard her from over her shoulder, inhaling in a way that suggested she was about to speak; but it never came to anything. Eventually she stood, trotting to the pile in the center of the circle to fetch herself something to eat.
Without the distracting pull of Biorra’s presence at her flank, Lindír could sink into the half-dark, meditate on the soft babbling and animal clicks of other dragons in conversation. Never in her entire life had anyone spoken to Lindír the way Biorra just had. To be told that her body, these scales and sinews, were not merely proper but handsome, admirable, that she was not merely a dragon but a dragoness worthy of attention and praise, bordered on the unsettling. She had always known that it was right for her to be a dragon, and that dragons were creatures of awe-inspiring might and magnificent form; but when she thought about herself? Ámnistr had treated her as a combination of child and pet. The Countess had treated her as a weapon. Razan was not to be considered. So the only memory she had relating to her body was her parents, telling her about her scales being a curse.
Biorra returned not long after, two lambs hanging from her mouth the way dogs carry ducks. She settled down to eat quietly and efficiently, swallowing the meat in large chunks. This, too, Lindír found attractive.
“I thought I was supposed to be the one praising your beauty,” she said. “To… prove the strength of my loyalty to you.”
Biorra stopped eating, and again gazed into Lindír’s eyes. Lindír wished that she could say the right thing to assuage whatever Biorra was feeling, for the slack-jawed glare and soft trill implied some kind of upset or uncertainty.
“If I see the one courting me is of handsome make, I won’t remain silent merely because she courted me and not I her. Besides, we are both dragonesses.” She paused, running her teeth along her gums. “But if you would like it, then praise away. I can be vain.”
Lindír did not understand all of this, and would have to ask Yrsel about the particulars later in order to understand every word. But she understood more than enough. “When you move, it is less like you’re walking and more like you’re swimming, even on land. Your scales are so smooth and brilliant, like new glass. Have you ever seen new glass? And I think your tail is…”
“My tail?” said Biorra, recoiling.
“It is, um, serpentine. Well-formed.”
“You cannot take a compliment to your own figure, and yet you speak openly of my tail,” Biorra said, tittering nervously. “What manner of creature are you?”
“I don’t know,” said Lindír.
The conversation soon turned to mundane things, stories of Lindír’s past and pointless island gossiping, though Biorra made sure to pepper every discussion with those incomprehensible jokes that she found so humorous. Lindír was fairly sure that they were not at her expense, though the fear that they were was ever-present in her mind. Still, by the end of the evening, when all the mutton had been consumed and every story told, Lindír found a new confidence arising, and a new satisfaction. She had not once managed to touch Biorra, scale to scale, and yet she felt that her longing had been fulfilled.
The next day, while sunbathing upon a rock by the side of a lake, Lindír caught sight of Biorra and Ulkred reclining together on the far shore. Biorra was apparently holding Ulkred entranced with her speech, though Lindír could not hear what was being said from that distance. All at once, she remembered that she was not merely in a courtship. She was in a duel of courtships, and Ulkred was her foe.
Those first few days set the pattern. Lindír would make some demonstration of her desire, some connection with Biorra, and Ulkred would upstage it. It was the worst with gifts; Ulkred was about the same age as Biorra, and had been accumulating treasure since the instant he’d left his mother’s lair, meaning he could make casual gifts to rival the size of Lindír’s entire hoard. Lindír could not give Biorra a smattering of coins, not a well-polished river stone, not an extra portion of meat at dinner without Ulkred arriving at Biorra’s lair the next morning with some delicately constructed bauble, or a sack of polished aquamarines, or a sculpture freshly bartered from the nisken.
This, of course, did not stop Lindír from trying. When the next trade day came around, Lindír ran herself ragged finding every lot of hoard-goods which she could afford to pay, stockpiling the collateral she would use to acquire Biorra’s heart. That she spent the next months so beset with tasks in service to the nisken that she could hardly even speak to Biorra, mattered little.
And besides, Biorra was going to speak to Lindír whether she took the time for it or not. When Lindír left his lair for a week to spend shifts turning the mill, Biorra flew down when the mood struck her, to lounge adjacent to Lindír in the hot dust of the dragon courtyard and bother him with questions about humans that he only had half the energy to answer. Once, when Lindír grew ill from attempting to eat the wrong type of fish, Biorra still appeared at his lair’s entrance, asking if he’d ever visited the sea pillars of the northern coast. He could not answer, and yet at the same time could not bring himself to tell her to leave.
Ulkred had, of course, been to the sea pillars of the northern coast. And to everywhere else in Solseyja. He knew the island like the scales on his own snout, and made absolutely sure that everyone, Lindír included, was fully aware of that fact. He was the master of Solseyja, and when he became old enough it was obvious that he would be the finest patriarch the colonies had ever seen.
Lindír, of course, was not aware of what sorts of private meetings he and Biorra had, of where they walked wingtip to wingtip, and what they spoke about when they did. But there were signs. Biorra would arrive late at dinner, her claws stained with soil. She would drift off into her own thoughts, expression intense, and not return to awareness for some time. Her moods would shift oddly, and sometimes she would be preoccupied with some matter of politics or island economy with which Lindír was entirely unfamiliar; or else her whole demeanor would become jocular and airy. Lindír could only assume, therefore, that Ulkred was a conversationalist of the highest caliber, knowledgeable in all things which she was not, able to charm Biorra with his shrewdness and intellect. All Lindír had in comparison were retold stories and the brute wisdom of the wilds.
And then there were the times when Lindír and Ulkred were able to compete directly for Biorra’s attention. Once, by coincidence, in the heat of summer, all three of them ended up on the same western beach. Ulkred and he both came upon the idea to go hunting, and flew out to sea in search of fish. Ulkred returned first, carrying a huge marlin between his claws. Lindír, meanwhile, did not return until most of the others had left, for he had tried to carry off a small whale, been dragged into the ocean by the creature’s weight, and was forced to swim to shore.
At the festival of the new year, marked at the end of autumn, the dragons of Solseyja all gathered together to feast in the name of their ancestors, the dragons lost to time who watched over their descendants still. There was food, of course, meat eaten not raw and freshly-slaughtered but cooked in liquid fat and fresh herbs. Dragons sang and played music on huge brass drums and intricate constructions of carved bone and clay piping, the droning notes echoing off of the mountaintops for miles. And in the skies above, dragons danced.
Lindír did not want to dance. He didn’t want to be involved in any of it, but Yrsel had convinced him to join in the celebrations, as was the habit between them. The dancing, the food, the music, all of it was to venerate the ancestors; but Lindír’s ancestors were, each and every one of them, human. Even if a dead human had the power to protect him—which he doubted—would they not look upon him with the same scorn and disgust as his parents had?
But he watched the sky, darkening into twilight, and watched the dragons dance. Camreth and Ziorrin danced with each other, slow and gentle as the stars. Yrsel danced, quick and agile, and Lindír caught her with half a dozen drakkars over the course of the evening. And Ulkred and Biorra danced together. Two ribbons, tying and untying great knots, over and under and side by side, passing like knights in a joust, soaring and diving and falling toward each other but never actually touching.
When Biorra landed, she was panting for breath, wings dragging across the ground. The exhaustion made her look beautiful, as did the rising moon casting its argent light upon her scales.
“I know you never had time for dancing as a stray,” she said to him. “But I want to see what you can do. I wonder how well chasing wizards and catching elk trains you to dance.”
Lindír had no idea if she could dance well, but she did dance that evening. Biorra danced with her, and by the time they both landed she was so exhausted that she fell asleep on the open field. Lindír stood watch throughout the night, and fled to her lair as soon as her love awoke.
As winter seized Solseyja in its grip once again, the timing of the daily meals again moved from evening to midday, when the dragons could still move and eat instead of being placed in a forced lethargy of sunbathing. A far-ranging drakkar named Scirvant began to tell stories. He told of a band of vikings who had thought themselves clever when they had tried to make their raids in the dead of winter, when the militias would all be holed up indoors. It was to their misfortune that they had then been caught in pack ice and stranded: but the misfortune of the vikings was the fortune of the dragons. Who knew what sorts of treasure they had gathered?
Scirvant told this to Lindír directly, and had done the same to Ulkred; and it soon became clear that he expected them to go on the attack. Indeed, the whole of the colony did. After the fact, during conversations with Yrsel, Lindír would come to understand that courting drakkars—or dragonesses who courted like drakkars—were expected to be the most daring.
But at the time she required no such justification. If there was treasure to be found, treasure which might give her some small advantage in the long war of gifts, then she would go. She wolfed down the rest of her meal and spent the rest of that day in a mad pell-mell, searching for someone who could lend her a bag or basket or something that would allow her to carry her gains home.
By the next morning she had that bag, on loan from Camreth. She flew from Solseyja with all her speed, following Scirvant’s directions; it was not long before she saw in the distance the orange blotch that was Ulkred. They flew through the frigid air for hours, and as her heart rushed and the thrill of an impending fight came upon her, Lindír’s claws twitched with some of the feral energy of her time in the wilds of the North.
There was, indeed, a great longship trapped in ice, exactly where Scirvant had indicated. The men of that ship were vikings one and all, with long braided beards and steel caps, suits of mail and vicious fighting-axes and war-hammers, tattooed men who loved gold more than they feared death. They loitered and brooded about their becalmed vessel, feeding on seal-blubber and pilfered millet, waiting for the day when the ice would thaw and they could return to their own villages far to the frozen north.
Threescore of fighting men, armed and armored, vicious savages and murderers all, fighting for their lives, their ship, and their stolen loot. Before two fully-grown dragons, they may as well have been a flock of sheep. Lindír charged in, grabbing a viking in each claw and hurling them to their deaths, while Ulkred swept overhead, breathing out a blast of flame. At first Lindír thought that foolish, for burning the boat would render the treasure lost; but even without a single tongue of flame touching wood or sailcloth, the ice half-melted, forcing the vikings to flee to their vessel.
With their prey tightly packed together, bristling with weapons and flinging arrows and javelins with mad abandon, the dragons could kill at their leisure. They bit and slashed and crushed, every weapon the raiders could bring to bear bouncing off of their scales without a scratch. Lindír had not tasted human blood in some time; the taste intoxicated her, both sickening and invigorating. The taste, the shouts and screams in a half-familiar human tongue, the tactile sensation of metal giving way under her claws, all of these things served to swell the old battle-lust, to send her toppling back into the rage and joy of combat which she thought had long forsaken her. Her heart beat with ferocious intensity as Lindír lost herself to blood.
When, eventually, the vikings scattered, dropping their weapons in terror as they sought anywhere that was not within reach of the dragons, Lindír suddenly found herself almost alone. Her whole body trembled, six limbs outspread and torso slung slow as she waited for more to come.
“Quite the fighter you are, stray,” Ulkred said, pawing away at the longship’s rowing benches in search of treasure. “Truly, the skill and grace of a wild dog you have, learned in the wild. Do you fuck the same way? I’d hate to see Biorra getting her tail torn clean—”
Lindír wheeled around, the flame glowing brightly in his belly and sparks spilling from his jaws as he let loose a growl of hate. He had restrained himself from every one of Ulkred’s previous taunts, no matter how crude or how sophisticated. But now his blood was up and there were no witnesses; for a moment, a fantasy played out in Lindír’s mind of him tearing Ulkred apart there and then, and feasting upon his innards.
Ulkred did not give an inch of ground, even as Lindír was poised to lunge. He instead clicked his tongue and narrowed his eyes contemplatively. “And so easily baited, too… But I cannot deny your strength. Come, stray, let us see if there is any loot worth having here.”
The vikings had stolen a great deal of food, and with her experience in human cuisine Lindír was able to sniff out the sweetest cakes and freshest meats and devour them all. As for hoard-stuffs, there was less than she had hoped. The majority of it was contained within a single small box, stuffed with a panoply of jewelry: pearl necklaces, carved narwhal ivory pins, amber pendants, rings of red gold and black onyx. As well, some of the vikings had carried swords and axes of such construction as to be worthy treasures all their own. With Lindír and Ulkred both having gorged themselves, they argued over the splitting of the treasure well into the evening, and once they had awoken, they argued past dawn as well.
Lindír’s cut of the treasure she parceled out upon returning to her lair, and gave it all to Biorra as gifts, one or two objects at a time over the course of over a month. It was a paltry thing compared to what Ulkred could offer, as always, but it meant that Lindír could keep showing her devotion while still keeping enough of a hoard to herself to be worth naming as such.
As spring approached, Lindír found a strange contentment within herself. Yes, it was true that Biorra’s heart could have only belonged to Ulkred, that this courtship would inevitably be cut short by her acceptance of Ulkred’s love, but perhaps there was something to be said for that which was temporary. Ámnistr had had something to say about that, about taking pride in things which were perishable. Lindír hardly remembered him any more.
Regardless, it was the case that Biorra gave some of her attentions to Lindír, and that he enjoyed those attentions. He enjoyed being listened to. He enjoyed the way she looked at him as though he were a perpetual source of wonder, amusement, confusion. Biorra’s presence and breath was a spark of heat in a blizzard, and he relished it. Even in the worst moments of the courtship, when Lindír had no choice but to present Biorra with some gift that Ulkred had already made appear worthless, or offer his assistance in some task that Ulkred could do a thousand times more skillfully, Biorra acted as though Lindír was all she wanted. The trill Biorra made in the back of her throat, the flutter of her wings: what more could a dragoness wish for?
These were the sorts of thoughts that poured, treacly and half-formed, through Lindír’s head one spring afternoon. It was the warmest part of the day, which meant that Lindír had had no choice but to find a large expanse of bare rock in one of the outlying hills and soak in all the heat his wing-skin could gather. He had done it before, having discovered this spot some fortnight earlier; and he would go on to do it more after. But on that particular day, Lindír was roused from his half-sleep by the sound of a dozen pairs of dragon wings flapping overhead.
Biorra was among them, as was Ulkred, and Yrsel, and several other dragons who he knew from the colony but not personally. It struck him as odd nearly a fifth of the colony would be going in the same direction at once. It became even more odd when, instead of continuing to some further destination, every single dragon present descended into a large rocky crevasse a meadow or less from Lindír’s rock. That was what finally pushed his curiosity beyond the point that it could no longer be ignored. Cursing the loss of sunlight this would bring him, Lindír rose up onto all six limbs, ran forward, and leapt into the air in search of what was drawing so much attention.
The crevasse was longer and deeper than it had appeared from outside, a deep crack in the earth, baring huge expanses of stone. As he approached, Lindír realized to his shock that there were signs of draconic presence. At the edge of the crevasse were many large shards of glass, cloudy and oddly-shaped, with the apparent purpose of catching sunlight and sending it into the crack below. Moreover, the walls of the ravine were covered in runes. Hundreds of them, thousands, scores of thousands, single words and brief notes and scrawling documents, and each mark bearing the signature not of a hammer and chisel, but of a dragon’s sharp claw. Dragon-runes, then, as was also evidenced by the fact that Lindír only partially understood them.
He landed a ways away from the center of attention, only just close enough to hear what was going on. Ulkred and Biorra were in front of the crowd, Ulkred reared up onto his hind limbs, one wing on the wall for stability as he read the runes. All the others listened, though Biorra had a place of pride, apart from all the others. Lindír caught only the very end of Ulkred’s speech, but it was clear enough what he was doing.
“For diamond’s luster pales and gold does rust; I cannot compare these to you, but must.”
A moment of silence fell across the crowd. Every pair of eyes, including Lindír’s, was concentrated on Biorra, and the space between herself and Ulkred. Biorra was well aware, and before she even spoke made sure to tuck her wings properly against her sides.
“Well,” said Biorra, “Of course that was a wonderful poem, my dear Ulkred. I had not thought you so well-versed in verse!”
“I am but an amateur,” Ulkred said, with a simpering indirectness that made Lindír scowl. “But I found myself inspired. By you.”
“By my beauty or by my poetry?”
Ulkred tittered quietly. “Both, I suppose. I do not think I would have chosen poetry if not for what you showed me some few days ago, after all.”
Biorra seemed almost embarrassed by this statement, shrinking back from Ulkred, who at this point dropped back down onto four limbs and began to approach her. “I—I did not think you had taken any notice,” she said earnestly. “Interesting. But, no, really, I am quite flattered. This must have taken such work to do, and all by your own claw.”
“Indeed,” said Ulkred. He turned to the onlookers. “That is all of it. Unless you should like to eavesdrop on the conversation of two courting dragons, I suggest you disperse.”
They did disperse, while Ulkred and Biorra took flight and headed off. The only thing that preserved Lindír’s heart and sanity was luck: luck that the two of them set off in the opposite direction from where he had stood to watch the whole thing. Not all of the dragons set off in that direction. Many passed him as he stood, rooted to the spot, and a few even shot him glances of pity as they passed.
Lindír felt that same pity for himself, but it passed ere long. When he was left alone in the crevasse, surrounded by the writings of—decades? menturies? millennia?—of dragons past, he crept forward until he found himself before the place where Ulkred had stood. It was a long inscription, some fourteen lines. The verbiage was only barely familiar, and the meter completely foreign, using rhyme instead of the alliterative forms of human poetry. Lindír had no way to judge its true quality, though he very dearly wanted it to be awful.
Lindír knew songs, from his time with Ámnistr. He knew the human poetical forms, from his childhood in the Red Citadel. It couldn’t be that hard to write a poem. Could it?
I feel you; prose and poetry are very different artforms, and from my experience people good at one are less good at the other, myself included.
I feel sad reading this chapter