Night fell. The dragons gathered for their evening meal, and Lindír did not appear. Few noticed her absence, and fewer still paid it much mind; surely she was asleep, or lost in thought, or had gorged herself upon seafood and felt no need to eat. But Biorra did notice, and wandered out upon the darkness, searching everywhere she knew Lindír frequented.
She stumbled into the crevasse, and there found quite the unusual sight: Lindír seated on her haunches, scratching runes into the stone walls. The stray’s expression was tight with stress, her chest glowing like a lantern. Biorra approached only slowly, creeping along with as much stealth as she could muster. Were it not for a wrong step sending a shower of stones clattering across the ground, she could have gotten close enough to bite Lindír on the tail.
Lindír rose up, whirling around, head low and limbs spread. “Who goes—Biorra?”
“What are you doing here?” Biorra said.
Lindír froze, glancing over her shoulder at the wall of the crevasse. “Finding solitude,” she said. “It’s quiet here.”
Biorra paused, looking over Lindír, over the stone around them, up at the night sky, down at herself. “Mind if I join you, then? Just you, me, and the night?”
“Not at all,” said Lindír, pasting herself against the stone wall in order to block Biorra’s view.
Biorra stalked closer, and this time there was something different about her movement. It was still possessed of that incredible grace which was Biorra’s signature, but now there was a sinuousness to it, a sideways sway to her. She kept her neck low to the ground, and her legs planted wide, and her tail undulated through the air.
“The whole night to ourselves,” she said; her voice was oddly strained, with a panting edge to it. “Out of courtesy, I’ll ignore the fresh marks on the wall and instead ask you this: how do I look?”
The spotlight of Lindír’s chest fell upon Biorra very well. She was still wearing all of her jewelry, the firelight making the gold bands shimmer and glow on her horns, around her wrists, down her tail. Lindír felt odd. Her scales were tighter than usual, her heart fluttered, and her eyes did not want to remove themselves from Biorra. Never before had she desired more desperately to touch the object of her courtship. But that desire shamed her. She stepped aside.
“It’s a gift,” she said, her feelings too fraught to control herself. “But it is not ready for you, and I am afraid that to see it in this incomplete state might be more of an insult than anything else.”
“A gift?” Biorra ran her tongue along her teeth, but with her jaws open wide enough that Lindír could see every twitch of muscle and drip of saliva. “Have you been attempting poetry?”
Lindír bowed low, though keeping her eyes on Biorra. Why did she find it so difficult to breathe? “I saw Ulkred’s gift to you. And I thought perhaps I should copy after him for once. Do you wish to see it?”
“I do,” said Biorra, turning her attention away from Lindír and toward the mark of her claws upon the wall.
Lindír watched her body carefully for any sign of pleasure or displeasure as she stepped aside, allowing Biorra to approach the wall. So focused was she on Biorra’s emotions that she did not notice the position of Biorra’s tail, not until the very tip of it struck her across the snout. It was a light impact, more of a flick than anything else, but it still elicited a soft, shrill sound from the back of Lindír’s throat.
Biorra rose up onto her hind legs, planting her arms on either side of the inscription so that she could read it carefully in the dim light.
Kno me, the strei
with fyer brite,
hu sleeps inn the dei
annd flys at nnite.
But whenn yew’r here
with sceiles so blu,
I wannt to cheer
fore I love yew.
Lindír wondered how much force it would take for her to dash her skull upon the rock, and if she could generate that force if she started running from where she stood. It would be an ignoble end, and certainly the spray of blood and brains would be an unpleasant experience for Biorra, but at that moment Lindír felt it to be the preferable course of action.
“How long did you spend working on this?” Biorra asked, looking over her shoulder.
Lindír was mute and nearly paralyzed. But she could look, tracing her eyes up and to the left from the final poem. Biorra followed her gaze, traced out the long arc of runes upon the wall, a scattered trail of fragments ranging from a single letter left uncompleted, to half-made verses all clustered together. Pieces of “I am” and “Know that” and “You are” stretched nearly Biorra’s entire body-length off into the distance.
“So this is where you’ve been,” Biorra said. “I’ll have to show you how to make practice sheets out of tree bark. We only have so much space here in the echoing pass, and I know how you feel about trees…”
She dropped down, turning back to Lindír in a slow, demonstrative spiral, her spine curling into place, wings held daintily off the ground as though she were afraid of them becoming dirty. Lindír took a step forward before he even knew what he was doing, the allure so strong that for a moment he could not control it. What was it about this evening that was causing him to feel so? Every movement of Biorra’s was more tempting than the last, until the need in the pit of his belly was an ache.
“Do you…?”
“Like it? It’s very sweet.” Biorra paused, translucent membrane fluttering across her eyes. “Now, why are you looking at me like that?”
Lindír couldn’t bring himself to turn away, so he shut his eyes instead. “My apologies. I don’t know what’s come over me.”
“You don’t know?”
“I do not.”
Biorra made a rumble in her chest, then said, “Open your eyes, Lindír, I’m not offended.”
Lindír did. Biorra had drawn even closer without his realizing, her movements utterly silent.
“You don’t have to write me a poem if you don’t wish to. That was Ulkred’s kind of gift, and yours can be different. I suppose it might qualify as cheating if I told you what kind of gift I would like, but…” she looked around theatrically, “Nobody will know.”
“And you wish for me to cheat? Or, to cheat for me, I suppose?” said Lindír, struggling to piece together the words.
“Oh, there are many things I wish to do right now,” Biorra said, her voice a quiet purr. “But yes, there is a gift I want to ask you for, in specific.”
This, at least, was something that Lindír knew well. She puffed out, raising her head high and forcing her chest forward. “Name it, then. If I have it, I will give it. And if I do not have it, then I will find it.”
Biorra’s pupils dilated. “When you were asked about your past, by my father and by others, there were always questions you avoided answering. How it was you came to be raised by humans, and the origin of that mark upon your chest. I want to know them. And I promise you that if you do tell me the answers to these things, I will tell none other, not without your consent at least.”
Lindír’s heart stopped, just long enough to send the shock of its absence throughout her body. “Those questions have the same answer,” she said. “And I suppose… I suppose that…”
Her limbs felt cold, dreadfully cold, and suddenly very sore.
“You do not have to tell me if you do not wish. It is a gift which I desire, and a gift only you can give, Lindír, but it is nonetheless only a gift.”
And, she thought to herself, what would be the price to giving it? Did she believe Biorra to be dishonest, that she would break her word and spread the story around? Surely not, given that if the story got out, Lindír would know that it was Biorra who had done it; and Biorra could not possibly hate her that much. Then the only price was in telling it, in having one dragoness in the whole world who knew the truth about what Lindír really was. But if that dragoness was Biorra…
“My parents, the ones who birthed me and sired me, are human,” she began. “I have a twin brother, even, who is human. And I, too, would have been born human, had it not been for a curse laid upon my mother by a salt-witch as price for my brother’s conception.”
This took Biorra aback. She did not look away from Lindír’s eyes, but softened slightly, and her voice was closer to its natural tone when she said, “You speak the truth?”
“I am not much of a liar,” Lindír said. She swallowed a thickness of phlegm which had formed in the back of her mouth before continuing. “They loathed me, you see. When I was an infant I mauled my brother, and merely birthing me irrevocably maimed my mother. So they held me below the castle, hardly feeding me and allowing me to walk about only when I became too aggressive to manage.”
“Humans,” Biorra said with a sneer. “No wonder you’re so small, if they mistreated you that badly. And…you said both my questions had the same answer. How does the scar factor into it?”
Lindír shook her head, at the same time folding her neck down so that she could just barely look at the pale skin on her chest out of the corners of her eyes. “It’s not a scar. That is the one piece of evidence as to my true origin, I think; the one part of me which was spared the curse. It’s my one human feature, a patch of scaleless skin.”
Now Biorra was looking at Lindír’s chest. Her wings twitched with a desire to cover herself, but at the same time a warm glow came over her, and she allowed Biorra’s eyes to wander. The great blue dragoness must have seen the flaw before, but had never examined it the way she did then, close up and with the keen interest of a vain creature examining its own reflection in a pool.
“Human skin. I’ve met precious few humans… may I touch it?”
Lindír’s tongue was a numb weight of limp flesh, her teeth were barbed and locked together, her jaw was a massive ungainly thing of wood or perhaps carved antler. “Yes,” she squeaked.
With permission given, Biorra lifted one arm, and extended one claw, turning it upwards in order to be able to feel with the most sensitive pad of her finger. She made contact gently, a gentleness that only she could have managed, and with her eyes locked on Lindír’s began to trace out soft arcs upon the softness of Lindír’s skin.
Lindír’s heart beat a thousand times a second, his whole body attuned to the center of his chest. His hind legs shuddered so greatly that they nearly gave out entirely, slipping apart under his weight as the soft tingle of Biorra’s touch made him forget how to carry himself. A shrill whimper escaped from between Lindír’s jaws. For a second, Biorra seemed to ignore his distress, her eyes growing wide and hungry and her mouth falling open in an image of delight.
But, after a moment, she bashfully retracted. A pang of longing shot through Lindír’s heart. He wanted, he wanted desperately, he was frenzied and besotted with want, though it damned him to do so. His eyes focused on the nearest thing: it was Biorra’s face, her mouth still half-open as she breathed heavily and slow, her eyes huge and dark in the night.
Lindír reached up, extending his neck until the tip of his snout lay just below Biorra’s jaw. As he had seen other dragons do in moments of utter closeness, he opened his mouth, and placed himself around her, and bit down so very gently, just barely enough to feel the hardness of her scales against the needle-points of his teeth. Biorra breathed his breath, and made a soft, lowing noise. His thoughts were screaming, but he could not hear them above the hammer-blows of his own heart. He found another angle, capturing her snout and play-biting again.
Then Lindír regained his senses. He relinquished his grip on Biorra and shrank back, coursing rapacious desire replaced by a cold terror. In the shadows upon Biorra’s face, she saw hatred most profound.
“Lindír? We do have the whole night to ourselves, you know.”
She might as well have been deaf for all that Biorra’s words had any impact on her. “I know, I know, I am sorry, I am sorry, please forgive me.”
“What?” Biorra tilted her head to one side, taking an unsure step forward.
“I, I, I lost myself, I was overcome, I know it is no excuse but I didn’t mean to hurt you, please believe that if nothing else…” She retreated, ever faster, until her tail ran up against the edge of the ravine. Lindír did not even fully believe her own words: she wanted forgiveness for Biorra’s sake, not for hers; she knew that she had stolen that bite from Biorra entirely out of her own lust.
Biorra let out a shrill bark of confusion. “Lindír, what are you talking about?”
“Please forgive me!” she whimpered.
“I forgive you, I forgive you, but I do not know what for!”
That was the final straw. She did what she had done, and still Biorra forgave her? In a blind panic, Lindír ran, ran until she could spread her wings and take flight, leaving Biorra behind her. Where she flew she paid no mind, only crashing to earth when tiredness overtook her near the southern coast of the island.
The tone of their courtship changed after that night. Biorra, to Lindír’s ever-growing shock, continued to acknowledge him as suitor, and respond to his compliments and offers of assistance. But there was a new distance between them. Where once Biorra would joke and grin, now she would mutter and grimace; gone was the cordiality which Lindír had built up over so many months.
It would have been one thing if Biorra had hated him; that Lindír could understand, and he would have held that bitter pain next to all the others in his heart until the day of his death. But she did not hate him! More than anything else she seemed unsure whether to give him warmth or coldness, love or disdain. The source of this ambivalence, when Lindír had stolen a play-bite, was something he could not understand. Unless, of course, Biorra were in the same position: wishing to hate him, but possessing too much forgiveness in her gentle heart to hate him with all of her being.
Another trade day, Lindír’s seventh since his arrival on Solseyja, rapidly approached. That, he decided, would serve as the resolution of the matter. He would find a beautiful gift, something to exceed any gift previously given. In giving it to Biorra, he would wipe clean the slate of his wrongdoing, or else prove to both himself and Biorra that there would be no redemption.
On the day of, Lindír wandered, anxiously patrolling the trade grounds in search of the perfect gift. She passed by shining gold and fresh-carved gems, fine ceramics and artworks which had been the products of years of labor, and dismissed them one by one as insufficient. It would have to be something exceptional, something unusual, something to show that this was more than the usual sort of gift. For a while, Lindír thought that she was doomed. She had set her sights too high, set herself to a task too great; no gift could fix this rift.
But then, out near the edge of the field, she saw something that renewed her spirits. A young nisken woman stood alone; and by her was an enormous urn, as tall and as broad as a horse’s shoulders, forged in bronze and beautifully decorated. Even the simple metal plating of the urn’s body was covered in runic script, apparently gibberish but beautifully written. But there was more than that: a cast serpent spiraled around the urn as a replacement for handles, and the lid was so constructed as to appear to have been woven out of individual strands of bronze, like the weave of a basket.
“What do I need to give you to have this?” Lindír said.
“Oh, not much at all,” said the nisken woman, her expression and voice the very picture of innocence. “It’s my first work, you see, and I wanted to prove to my teacher that my work was worthy of a dragon. All I could ask for you is to do me a favor and…”
She suddenly went still, all aside from her whiskers, which twitched frantically, and her tail, which instantly moved under her skirt and out of view. “Is something the matter?” said Lindír.
“You’re the stray, aren’t you? The one who…” The nisken took small but quick steps forward, wrapping both arms around the urn as though it were a dear niece or nephew. “You don’t want this, I assure you. It… The quality of the bronze doesn’t match with your scales.”
Lindír saw nothing discordant between the urn and her scales, but then, she did not have the wisdom and skill of a nisken. “I’ll have it anyway. I intend on giving it away as a gift.”
“I see,” squeaked the nisken girl. She looked up at Lindír as though she were fully intending to eat her, which seemed odd.
As Lindír completed the trade, and arranged when she would go to complete the favor for the craftswoman (tomorrow, the favor being a simple errand of moving a large quantity of sheep’s manure from one place to another), she did her best to move gingerly and give the girl some space. But that did nothing to assuage her fear, and Lindír was forced to conclude that it was out of her control. She gave the urn to Biorra that very evening. Or, rather, she waited until Biorra was not likely to be in her lair before leaving the urn just beyond the entrance, scratching her own name into the dirt to ensure that Ulkred could not take credit.
Despite Lindír’s hopes, the urn resolved nothing. Biorra neither warmed to Lindír’s presence, nor finally severed ties, and indeed hardly even mentioned it at all. This strange half-courtship, at once familiar and uncomfortable, continued to drag itself along by its hands for two more days without showing any sign of changing course. Lindír had expected failure, expected rejection, but the absence of any change proved intolerable.
Finally, she realized that there was only one remaining recourse. Even if it ended the courtship, even if it meant Biorra never speaking to her again except in anger, even if it meant the whole of Solseyja coming to know of her crimes, Lindír resolved to speak to Biorra directly. It took her hours of agonizing to gather the necessary force of will, but that afternoon she set out to do it. She would go to Biorra, explain what had caused her error, and beg for forgiveness–or at least an explanation.
Lindír landed a ways away from the entrance to Biorra’s lair, and with mousy strides she approached the cave’s broad mouth. Just as she prepared to ask for permission to enter, though, she heard voices from within.
“Of course I was surprised, everybody was. From the way you were acting the day after, I almost think that you were as surprised as any of us. But merely being surprising is not enough for me to start controlling your romantic affairs.”
It took Lindír a moment to recognize that voice, soft and deep, as Biorra’s father, Camreth. She closed her mouth, dropped into a crouch, and began to take long and shallow breaths in hopes that he, and presumably his daughter, would not hear her. Eavesdropping did not become Lindír, being subtle and duplicitous, but at that moment she wanted nothing more than to hear what they had to say.
“Sometimes I wish you were a tyrant,” Biorra responded. “It would make it much easier for me.”
Really, Biorra? You have no right to be upset here, given you now know exactly how little your partner knows about dragon culture.