The Dragon Queen of Cruithia glided through the air, landing on the redesigned palace roof with a thud. She stumbled, but managed to remain standing.

Lindy—who had swapped out her ornate noble robe of office with her old maid uniform, and looked very happy about the fact—rushed in with a beaming smile. "You're getting much better at those landings!"

"Still almost fell over," grumbled Josse, her voice comprehensible, if a little distorted. The multitude of puncture wounds decorating her tongue where she'd accidentally bitten it didn't help.

"But you didn't," agreed Steven, walking over at a more sedate pace. He was now the one wearing the insignia of regent, being somewhat more suitable for the role than Lindy. Also, Josse felt he deserved the punishment. "You're still standing, and you didn't crack a single tile."

"Only because you had them all reinforced again a couple of days ago. I could hear the mages."

"Anyway," deflected Steven, dropping that subject like a hot potato, "how was Slargina?"

"Prepared. Far too well prepared. They were well aware our dragon was active but weakened. Thankfully, they weren't expecting me to be working in tandem with our army, and we routed them without significant losses."

"Good. Every spy in the capital would have noticed the fight between us and the dragon, as well as the fact you ended up grounded for weeks, but we did well to keep the knowledge that you and the dragon switched bodies under wraps. We were fortunate no-one managed to raise an invasion force quickly enough to take advantage, and that by the time they did, that missing bit of information caused them to miscalculate their strategy. Given that you're living here, in the palace, I expect the more careful thinkers will put two and two together soon enough, but at the rate you're improving, I'd wager they've already missed their opportunity."

"I have no idea how you think like that," said Lindy, who, as mentioned, was very happy to have been reduced back to a mere maid. Not that she didn't have problems of her own to deal with. The question of how to dress a dragon was trivially solved by the way dragons didn't generally wear clothes, but Josse had refused to give up her baths, and bathing a dragon required dealing with some serious logistical difficulties. The palace roof wasn't the only area that had needed to be hurriedly remodelled, and Lindy now had a squad of a dozen helpers working under her. Even so, the task still took them an entire afternoon.

Thankfully, dragons didn't need to eat much, even if they were physically capable of doing so. An occasional cow kept Josse's belly full, and it didn't even need cooking first. They tasted like garbage to her, but having never eaten a human, she didn't exactly have a point of reference. Nor did she intend to find one.

... However appetising Lindy smelled. And she was right there.

"It's not something that's taught," said Steven, breaking Josse's train of thought before any drool could leak out. "You just take a few dozen people and toss them into the palace for a few decades. The ones with the correct mindset are the ones that survive."

Josse snorted, almost setting Steven's toupee on fire in the process. If asked, she would certainly have claimed it to be an accident, not having quite mastered control of her flame breath.

Steven wouldn't believe her, so to save the mild lèse-majesté, he didn't ask.

"Well, after all that fighting, you deserve a nice, long rest," declared Lindy. "Let's get you back to your chambers."

"I wish I could, but I have another magic lesson later," complained Josse. "Blasted tutors aren't going to cancel simply because of a small war."

Lindy thought back to the brief period in which the team of sour-faced governesses had been trying to mould her into a fit regent, and didn't feel she could disagree.

Josse plodded heavily through an archway into the palace's new, spacious top floor, grumbling all the while. Magic was cool, and suddenly having the mana capacity of a dragon was awesome, however much she complained. Needing to learn to walk again was less awesome, but she was getting the hang of it. The bigger problem was that she wasn't sure she'd ever learn to completely ignore the appetising scents that surrounded her. Maybe Morgana—once she finished figuring out how to apply her favourite curse to a dragon—could find some way of switching off her sense of smell?

In a particular cell, deep in the dungeons built under the knights' barracks, there was nothing but silence. There was nothing in there to make noise. After all, why would they have kept the dragon around? A few days with the interrogators to extract what information they could about his lair and any traps that may have been set around the mountain, and they had no further use for him. Keeping him any longer would be nothing more than a pointless risk. Had it been an option, they would never have resurrected him alongside Josse at all.

And so the dragon had met an ignoble end, not at the edge of an executioner's axe or a hangman's noose, but at the point of a knight's spear, with no spectators other than Steven, a mage and another few knights. After all, they could hardly execute the body of their queen in public, and the fewer people who knew about the switch, the better. He had been struck down in his cell, then the corpse carefully incinerated by magic. All that had left the dungeon was unidentifiable ash.

The public needed to be told something, of course. The dragon arriving in the castle and the subsequent fight couldn't have been kept secret, and needed some sort of explanation. They'd gone with a tale about how the dragon had issued a challenge after witnessing the continued growth of the kingdom but being disturbed by the recent regicide. That after the knights' victory, he'd been impressed by their might and had decided on a new Pact. One that acknowledged humans as equals rather than food, even to the extent of moving his lair to the palace to help out with the power vacuum left by the death of the royal family.

Anyone who personally knew the dragon—or who knew dragons at all—would have had a fit of hysterics at the mere suggestion, but this time, the effect that previously hampered Josse worked in her favour. The general public didn't personally know any dragons. Their information came from only hearsay, and so those who controlled the rumours controlled public perception.

Children would stop in the street as Josse flew overhead and wave happily at her, believing but uncaring that they were waving at something that, only a month earlier, would have sooner disembowelled them than asked their name. Propaganda was in the middle of remodelling the dragon into a hero, and the fickle people allowed it to happen.

That only left the problem of the royal family, which was oddly proving more problematic than rehabilitating the reputation of a few dozen tons of dragon. Since everyone already believed that Josse was a treasonous murderer, they simply rolled with it, much to Lindy's disgust. The story was that Josse killed her father, then a group of nefarious officials took advantage of the inexperienced Prince Doran, and then... they killed him for not going along with their plans? Or he killed them, at the cost of his own life, to protect the kingdom from corruption? The rumours were deliberately woolly, but the end result was clear; the new king and corrupt officials were all dead.

And then the dragon had declared itself queen in order to, in her own words, 'prevent a civil war'. That seemed wrong on at least two levels, but again, no-one knew the dragon. When they stopped to consider it, just where had the information the dragon was male come from? Had everyone just made an assumption? Despite the size and nakedness, and the several occasions on which 'he' had flown over the castle in recent weeks, had anyone ever seen positive evidence of manhood on display? Very few people had sufficient understanding of dragon biology to know that any manhood, if it did exist, would be tucked away into a pocket, well protected by overlapped scales and hence invisible from the ground.

The various branches of the royal family took offence at the dragon declaring herself monarch, but no-one wanted to fight each other to stake a claim on the throne, let alone fight a dragon, and so things fell into a stalemate as the various candidates jostled each other to 'advise' the new regent instead. After all, the dragon wouldn't want to stay in the palace forever, would she? She'd want to go back to her own lair, and then a new king or queen would be needed. And when that time came, if she'd had the chance to see their ability, surely the dragon would understand that they were the best choice.

Josse found their antics amusing. Even if she never intended to, the fact that she could simply eat them if they got too annoying went a long way towards making them seem less irritating.

And so the kingdom of Cruithia overcame its crisis. Not a crisis caused by the dragon; had Doran been a capable ruler, and not fallen into his co-conspirators traps, the general population of the kingdom would barely have even noticed the regicide. Josse's fate would have been utterly horrific, but wouldn't have caused trouble to the kingdom as a whole. The crisis was purely one of Doran's manufacture.

Josse was therefore understandably quite glad her brother had been as incompetent as he was.