Lindír suddenly became afraid, again, that she would be discovered. In the moments after Biorra’s outburst, her lair fell totally silent, silent enough that Lindír’s breath was the loudest thing in that lazy spring afternoon. But even if her breath was half as loud as it felt to her, the subjects of her eavesdropping had their attentions turned inward.
“Don’t say that,” said Camreth, wounded.
“Oh, but it is true. Not to say that I would be happier, or that it would be the correct thing to do. But if you were a tyrant of a patriarch, you could simply tell me to marry Ulkred, and that would be the end of all discussion.”
Camreth sighed. “Even if it were entirely up to me whom you married, I would still listen to what you thought of it.”
“But why would you? It is obvious that Ulkred is the superior choice; he is wealthy, and intelligent, and skilled, and he is a proper scion of his family, and he would give me many pretty and healthy hatchlings.” Biorra rumbled, a sad sound, and said quietly, “It is so difficult, having to think of things every day. Decisions are a curse.”
“Well, if you favor him so strongly, then why not marry Ulkred? If you are afraid of Lindír’s reprisal, treasure, I assure you that she will not lay a claw on you so long as I live.”
A shiver passed down the length of Lindír’s spine at the thought of doing Biorra harm. Hurting one lover had been enough for a lifetime.
As though listening to Lindír’s thoughts, Biorra said, “She could never harm me. The very idea would send her into a frenzy of guilt, I think. For a stray, her sense of remorse is… greatly overdeveloped.”
There was another gap of silence, though in this one Lindír could just about hear the soft sound of one of the dragons moving about. “You love her?” Camreth said.
“Or something like love,” Biorra said. “And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she feels love for me, or something like love.”
Camreth tittered uproariously. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt, yes. If any other dragoness looked at you the way she does, I would have given her a new scar.”
How had she been looking at Biorra? So far as Lindír knew, she had only been looking at Biorra normally, with appreciation. She tried to grasp it in her memory, pin down some definition of her wrongdoing, but there was none. All that she could do was add it to the count of her sins and request forgiveness later.
“And yet you claim to make no interference in my romantic affairs, how very mysterious.”
“There is interfering in your romantic affairs, and there is tolerating disrespect against my youngest daughter,” Camreth said, calming himself. “And a vast gulf lies between those two things. But I cannot expect Lindír to know any different, with how she was raised; and if you find it endearing, ah well, what am I to do?”
“It is… It… It is not merely endearing,” Biorra said, choking on each word. “It is invigorating. That look in her eyes, the way she outthrusts her chest whenever I come near, it is as though I have been thrown, suddenly, into frigid wintery waters.”
Biorra paused expectantly. Camreth said nothing, so she continued, “There are times when I wish that she were not so well-mannered, that she would simply lunge for me, tear into me with tooth and claw and tail. And I, I, I would never actually attempt it, but I feel as though if I could only tempt her severely enough, I might find out if I would actually enjoy it!”
There was a yearning in Biorra’s voice that at once inflamed Lindír’s passions and shamed her for daring to listen in on so private a moment. The urge arose to break the silence and rush forward, but she suppressed it with difficulty. After a while, Camreth spoke again.
“You do not need to say anything more to me; but if it assuages your feelings, I should tell you that I too was once your age, and I know that feeling well. Why not marry Lindír, then, if you feel that way?”
“Well, because Ulkred is…” she began, and ended, for that was all that needed to be said. “And because Lindír is an endlessly frustrating dragoness who I do not understand. Half the time she doesn’t understand what it is that she’s doing, and the other half of the time she will do something, only to contradict herself not a moment later.”
“And you don’t know why that is?” said Camreth.
“No, not at all. She obviously isn’t doing it to spite me, she cares too much for that, and it cannot be ignorance, so I haven’t the faintest idea what could be driving her to play with my emotions so.”
Camreth paused for a moment, thrumming tunelessly in thought. “Do you remember much of me from your hatchlinghood? That is to say… Before.”
“Before? Oh, yes, Before. I was much too young then to remember you as anything more than a dark shape. We’ve spoken about this before, don’t you remember? How Ziorrin had to tell me everything? I thought you liked having a child who had only ever known you as father?”
“I do love that about you, treasure, it’s just inconvenient for the point I attempt to make,” Camreth said. He paused, considering, and there was the sound of claws on stone. “Ask Ziorrin, sometime, about what I was like just after your hatching. I was not a little bit mad. What I was learning about myself frightened me, it upset me, I could hardly bring myself to think it true, and I became so tied up in knots that I lashed out at everyone around me.”
“You don’t need to tell me this,” said Biorra. “And besides, what does it have to do with Lindír? She and Yrsel have spoken about the matter of sex, and she seems perfectly content with hers.”
That would be something of an exaggeration; Lindír still did not know what to make of her sex, and had mostly chosen not to make anything of it. Her sex was her sex, Lindír was Lindír, and if Solseyja was going to consider her a dragoness, then that was that.
“No, I never meant to suggest that,” said Camreth. “Merely that… Ziorrin knew that I had to change before I did. He had come to know me so well over the centuries that when I finally painted the starbursts upon my scales he treated it more as a homecoming than a departure. But I could only see myself in reflection; and reflections are flipped, such that I did not know what I had to do. And that confusion can do odd things to a dragon’s emotions.”
Biorra whined softly, more of an uncertain noise than a complaining one. “So you mean to imply that Lindír is…uncertain? But about what?”
“You know her better than I do.”
Lindír took a step forward, so slow and so careful that neither Camreth nor Biorra could hear her. With the way that the entrance to Biorra’s lair curved, it would take only another step before she could be seen. Again, Lindír could hear the sounds of movement. She thought that perhaps Biorra’s tail was rubbing against the stones as she waved it from side to side, as she was wont to do while in thought.
“I suppose in some sense, changing from a lonely stray to a colony dragon in the midst of a courtship is a little bit like going from a dragoness to a drakkar,” said Biorra.
“It isn’t, but I am glad that you see my metaphor.”
There was a grunt of exertion from Biorra, or perhaps a grunt of soreness as a body which had been still for too long began to move. “Keep looking for it while I’m gone. I need to go speak to her. I think I’ve been a fool.”
In the moment of panic before Biorra rounded the corner and saw what she had done, Lindír lost control over her speech. “Keep looking for what?” she said.
Biorra surged forward, rounding the corner in an instant. She and Lindír met eyes, Lindír cringing back with her tail low and her wings folded, Biorra almost gawky with shock. “How much of that did you hear?”
“None,” Lindír said. “I was, I just wished to see you. It has been so long. Are you busy?”
“You may come in,” Biorra said reflexively. Then, realizing what Lindír had said, she replied, “I just had my father over helping me look for something I’ve lost.”
Biorra’s posture made it clear that the casualness of her tone was an affectation. Lindír hoped that she would talk about what she had overheard, the advice Camreth had given her, for she could not without revealing that she had been listening. But Biorra did not, so Lindír merely said, “What did you lose?”
“Oh, that urn you gave me, the beautiful one with the serpent handle. I promise you that I did not treat it carelessly, it was in a prized position in my hoard, and yet it still vanished.”
Lindír knew where it had gone. He knew it instantly, with every sinew and organ. The urn had been the greatest gift Lindír had ever managed to give, and it had gone missing. Well, who would have had a better motivation to do such a thing than the same drakkar who had made worthless every other gift Lindír had given?
“Ulkred,” Lindír said, his chest suddenly alight with flames.
Biorra leaned back, timidly raising one claw. “Lindír? What’s come over you?”
“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said, already turning away from her. This was how he would prove himself superior. By showing Ulkred to be the thieving bastard that Lindír already knew him to be, and perhaps giving him a few new scars in the process.
“Lindír, where are you going?”
“Ulkred’s lair, of course, to find your lost urn. I’ll be back soon, and once this is all over, then we can talk.”
By that point Lindír was nearly running down the hillside in a six-limbed gait, such that he could not hear Biorra’s objections, nor her cries for Lindír to wait, that she wished to speak to her first. All that Lindír could hear was the rush of blood in his ears and the rush of wind over his wings.
Ulkred’s lair was on the same mountain as Lindír’s was—he briefly found humor in the fact that they were considered siblings—and so was only a short flight to the south. He slammed down outside of the cave entrance, six limbs spread, and roared Ulkred’s name until the thief had no choice but to make himself known.
“What do you want?” Ulkred growled.
“Give back what you have stolen at once, or I will make this difficult.”
Ulkred made a good show of being confused, head tilted to the side and tail raised. “What have I stolen?” he said, his thoughts clearly elsewhere.
“The urn! Do not claim ignorance, thief, what else could have caused it to vanish from Biorra’s lair?”
Ulkred narrowed his eyes at Lindír. “What urn?”
Lindír had had enough of word games and falsehoods. He moved toward Ulkred’s lair, shoulders low. “The urn that I am certain I will not find in your lair, if I investigate.”
Ulkred moved quickly, more quickly than Lindír thought him capable of, to place himself between Lindír and his lair entrance. “Don’t you dare! You may not enter my lair.”
Lindír hissed softly under his breath. “Oh, suddenly so worried? I’m sure I won’t find anything in there that you wouldn’t want me to see.”
“No, you—” Ulkred froze, an evil glimmer appearing behind his slit pupils. He bared his teeth, running his tongue along the outsides of his fangs. “Calm yourself, you animal. You will not enter my lair because it is my lair, and my lair is inviolate! I am sure that in the wilds, where you are from, you have grown used to sharing your lair with worms and rats, but here, my lair is my domain!”
Lindír ignored the speechifying, and took a step forward. Again Ulkred interposed himself. “Out of my way, knave.”
Ulkred’s eyes nearly glowed. “Make me, mutt.”
Lindír did as he was asked. With a simple swing of his head, which was nearly touching Ulkred’s anyway, he dug his horns into the side of Ulkred’s chest and left the smaller drakkar sprawling, bleeding from a cluster of small cuts. But Lindír could not take a step past Ulkred before he let loose the loudest keening cry that Lindír had ever heard, writhing and shuddering as he did.
The urge suddenly arose in Lindír to crush the weakling while he was down, to sink teeth into Ulkred’s throat and end it all there and then. This urge, at least, Lindír was able to suppress for a few seconds, though at the cost of paralyzing him at a crucial moment. For barely a few seconds after Ulkred’s fall had passed before other members of the Mountain-fire family arrived, Ulkred’s mother and siblings all squawking to hear what had happened.
“He’s a thief!” Lindír said immediately. “He stole my gift from Biorra’s very lair, and now he tries to make himself the victim.”
Ulkred rolled over and regained his feet. “I am no thief,” he said. “And even if I were, this brute has nonetheless attempted to enter my lair without my consent; and when I tried to stop her, she battered me aside, as you can see from my injuries.”
Lindír struck her tail against the ground in frustration. Provoked or not, Ulkred was correct; and when Yrsel arrived soon after, the expression on her face made it clear that Lindír had deeply erred. For a short while, everything went on around her. The other members of the family, and soon other dragons from other families, asked what had happened. Ulkred assured them all that his injuries were only superficial. Lindír, meanwhile, stewed in the heat of her own failure. Perhaps her parents had been right.
Then Ulkred raised his voice. “It is obvious that this rivalry has been going on for too long,” he said, “that Lindír has been driven to such degrees. And there is of course the matter of false accusations, and of my injuries. Therefore, to redress all wrongs, I would like to challenge Lindír to a more… civilized form of violence. Trial by combat. Herself against me, as soon as is convenient.”
“Trial by combat?” said Lindír, her interest suddenly roused.
“I imagined that you would much prefer it to a trial by adjudication,” said Ulkred. Such things can take years.”
Lindír narrowed her eyes and suppressed a growl. He was correct, but the lilting tone to his voice suggested mockery. There was something afoot here. “And the stakes?”
“If you win, I shall consider your accusation valid, and submit to any search, and consider this injury a just punishment. If I win, you will be subject to the typical penalties for assault and false accusation. Simplicity itself.”
More dragons were trickling in, swooping down on flapping wings to find the source of the ruckus. Biorra was among them, and Camreth, both too far or too afraid to intervene directly. Lindír turned, making the briefest eye contact with the object of her affections, before looking back at Ulkred with head held high.
“I accept your challenge, then. We shall settle this with claws.”
A ripple passed through the crowd, whispers and rumbles of mixed excitement and disparagement. Trials by combat must not have been a common occurrence on Solseyja, if the acceptance of one produced such a reaction. Ulkred moved on to other concerns.
“Mother, as we are both members of your household, would you like to be the arbiter?”
“Nonsense,” came a voice from the crowd. It was Camreth. “Ulkred is the issue of your own egg, and even if she is part of your family by law, Lindír is an adoptee. You cannot pretend to be unbiased here. Neither can I be; another matriarch will have to volunteer.”
Ulkred scowled at him, but allowed the comment to go uncontested. The assemblage fell briefly into arguing, before the black-scaled dragoness who had presided over Lindír’s trial of entry arrived. Her name was Ildrodor, matriarch of the Night-sky clan, and as soon as she realized what was underway, she volunteered to arbitrate. The trial was set for that evening, at the same circle of stones where Lindír had entered the Solseyja colony.
As the crowd scattered, Ulkred made a point of passing Lindír, shoulder to shoulder. As he did, he whispered to her. “Biorra can love many things. A failure is not one of them.”
Lindír spent the remainder of that day preparing as best she could. She was afraid, at first, that her muscles might have gone soft after long disuse; but a few hours of running, leaping, dodging, swiping at trees and stones with claws and teeth, soon proved that they were only slightly stiff. Over the course of that day, she concocted contingencies, plans for what she would do if Ulkred attacked in such a way, or how she would overcome such a defense on his part, and on and on.
It was late in the afternoon when Yrsel found her, prowling back and forth at the edge of a copse of trees. “By the stars, you are hard to find,” she said as she landed.
“I’ve had much experience in wandering. Is it time, then?”
“No,” said Yrsel. “Soon, but not yet. But I thought… you might wish to make an offering to the ancestors. They might sway things in your favor.”
Lindír growled bitterly. In her many months upon Solseyja, she had made a strong effort to avoid religion as much as possible. She had no dragon ancestors, after all. But that was a close-kept secret, one which she felt willing to disclose to Biorra but not to the whole of the island, so her lack of piety had gone unexplained. Now, though, with Yrsel asking her directly, there was no avoiding it.
So she scowled, and hissed, and went with Yrsel as she wished. The shrine lay in the territory of the Southern Solseyja colony, at the peak of the highest point on the island, nearest to the beloved stars. Each family from each of the three colonies, over a score in total, had their own collection of carved idols, representing notable ancestors, or just the ancestors as a whole. They would anoint these statues in paint made from rare colored minerals, burn fragrant woods and rare cuts of meat.
Lindír refused to ply the ancestors of the Mountain-fire family, though they were technically hers. If they cared at all about this fight, they would throw their lot in with Ulkred. Instead, at Yrsel’s suggestion, she found a rock in a shape that pleased her and made offerings to it. It was a misshapen stone, but one which resembled a man’s form. As she daubed it with bright-colored paste, Yrsel stood beside her.
“She thinks you’re mad, you know.”
“I know,” Lindír said, not pausing in her work. “I’ve heard what she thinks of me.”
“No,” said Yrsel, “I mean that she thinks you are mad for this, specifically. She wishes you hadn’t done it.”
“What’s done is done,” said Lindír. “But after I have beaten your brother bloody and raw… then we can talk. I swear we shall talk.”
Before she knew it, Lindír stood once more in the circle of stones, with Ulkred across from her and half the dragons of the island gathered to watch. Standing, the circle felt much too small for a battle, barely five body-lengths from one side to the other. This would be a brutal melee, that much was certain.
Biorra stood between her parents, to Lindír’s right, and watched the proceedings with visible anxiety. Lindír wished to say something, to assuage her clicking claws and rapid breath by telling her that Ulkred stood no chance. But this close to the beginning of the fight, Lindír felt strangely distant. Those who were not about to dive into the frantic action of combat were separated from those who were by a curtain, transparent but utterly impermeable, one which would not rise until the battle was over.
Ildrodor stood high, reared up onto one of the stones at the position opposite Biorra. “Silence, all,” she announced. “This trial by combat, between Ulkred and Lindír, both of the Mountain-fire family, is about to commence. The crimes in question are as follows: Lindír accuses Ulkred of theft from the lair of Biorra of the Sea-cliff family; Ulkred accuses Lindír of making accusations falsely, of unlawfully attempting to enter Ulkred’s lair, and of striking Ulkred for attempting to prevent her from said course of action. This trial will be fought to the ground, and—”
“To the ground?” said Ulkred. “No, I did not agree to that. I say we fight to submission, and to submission only.” He turned, glaring evilly at Lindír. “I for one do not wish for this fight to end before it has to, and I do not imagine the stray would like that either.”
Lindír imagined, suddenly, in perfect detail, Ulkred crying out his submission. Beaten, wet with his own blood, perhaps even crushed to the earth beneath Lindír’s foot. Yes, she would like that very much.
“To submission, yes,” Lindír said.
Ildrodor spoke hesitantly, but said, “Both parties assent, then. To submission, and to submission alone.”
As Ildrodor rattled off various other rules (no taking flight, no attacks to the eyes or vent, and so on), Ulkred and Lindír both dropped low, limbs splayed, wings to the ground. Ulkred said something that was clearly intended for Lindír alone.
“You’d never met another dragon before you came here, isn’t that your story?” he muttered. “And I know that you’ve been a good dragoness, not getting into any fights since you arrived. You’ve never fought another dragon before, have you?”
Lindír said nothing. But there was something horrible in Ulkred’s voice, a predatory rumble to it. She may have made a mistake.
“I can see it on your face that you haven’t,” said Ulkred. “I have. And I’ve never lost.”
“Begin!” roared Ildrodor. And Ulkred rushed forward.
I don't think Ulkred understands exactly how determined Lindír is. Assuming Ulkred isn't boasting, and wins handily, all Lindír has to do is just not submit. I can't imagine the other dragons will let him kill her, and she has the resilience.