Chapter 23
Sky
Here is what nobody tells you about being kidnapped by a dragon: it is boring.
I’d been in the cave for a full day. I knew it was a full day because I’d watched the light at the mouth of it go from afternoon-gold to sunset-orange to dark to the thin gray of dawn and back up to morning, a whole rotation of the planet, an entire twenty-four hours of my life, and in all that time the dragon had done one thing, which was stare at me.
And I was hungry. Thank fuck he’d let me eat one of the hand pies. There was a spring pouring down from a wall of the cave, and when I’d asked him if it was safe to drink, he’d nodded.
Or I was pretty sure he was nodding.
He wasn’t menacing. If he had been pacing, breathing smoke, sharpening something — fine, great, I’d have known where I stood.
Instead the enormous red-orange catastrophe that had plucked me off a public road in front of my troll boyfriend lay across the door to the cave with his chin on his claws, watching me like I was a television he hadn’t decided whether to turn off.
The cave was nice. I’d always pictured a dragon’s cave as a deep dark hole, with a pile of treasure, bones of his victims, and the lingering aroma of past mistakes.
But the cavern went up and back farther than the light from the cave opening reached.
He had a soft, warm glow about him, and when I dared to move closer, being near him was downright cozy.
If you could ignore the teeth and claws and the kidnapping, anyway.
The hoard was deeper back, and I hadn’t explored it, out of respect for the teeth and claws. But it was pretty even from a distance, a glittering slope of jewels and precious metals heaped against the far wall. And, near the top, catching the light, a stack of books.
They were familiar books. I’d have known those spines anywhere, because I’d spent a week and a half reading them in a wagon. The Highwayman’s Bounty. The Stonewall Bride. Half of Moerrven’s backlist, dragged up a mountain by a giant lizard with excellent taste.
“You know he’s losing his mind right now,” I told the dragon, for maybe the ninth time, resuming my pacing because pacing was the only cardio available. “Moerrven. He doesn’t do feelings very well, but we’re working on it. But I see you like his books.” I pointed and the dragon looked.
“Or do you not read your hoard?” I rounded on the dragon. “Do you even get that? He’s down there thinking I’m dead or being digested and you’re up here just staring at me like a weird stalker.”
The dragon looked at me.
The dragon, I was increasingly sure, was a little irritated with me. There was a quality to the staring now, a flatness around his molten eyes, the expression of someone waiting for you to finish.
“Don’t give me that,” I said.
He heaved himself up, and my heart gave a big stupid lurch, because he was huge, and even more intimidating when he moved, scales sliding over muscle, wings unfurling and stretching to the walls of the cave before folding back in.
He crossed the cave with a clink and a drag, lowered his huge head, and dropped something at my feet.
A piece of paper, slightly singed.
I picked it up. It was another flyer, with the same bad drawing of my face as the one we’d found on the pillar.
Except this one was newer, the ink still sharp, and at the bottom, where the last one had said only reward for true word, this one had a number.
An actual sum. A genuinely embarrassing amount of money for the safe return of one twink.
I looked at the slope of gold against the wall, which contained, conservatively, the GDP of a small nation.
I looked back at the flyer.
“Are you kidding me,” I said. “This is what this is about? You are sitting on a Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of treasure and you snatched me off a road because somebody put a bounty on me? You want the reward?” I waved the paper at the hoard, at all of it.
“Buddy. Babe. You have so much gold. You have a gold problem. This is like a billionaire stealing a coupon.”
The dragon’s tail twitched.
And then the rest of that flyer caught up with me.
Somebody at the Court of Feravael was willing to pay a fortune for my safe return: the same court where Pip was, right now, with the Queen’s people and their amazing treatment and an entire palace full of professionals whose actual job was finding lost humans.
For one whole second, I thought about encouraging this. All I had to do was pat the big guy on the snout, tell him yes, buddy, go collect your coupon, and I’d be air-mailed straight to my best friend, door-to-door twink delivery, no wagon required.
Then Moerrven was there again, the picture I’d been trying not to look at for a full rotation of the planet: him on the road below me, getting smaller, running after a dragon like he could catch one, his arms reaching for me long after there was any me left to reach.
My stomach went slow and sour, and it had nothing to do with hunger.
He was down there right now, frantic, tearing across the county with no idea whether I was alive, and he’d already buried one person he loved.
Pip was safe, and Pip knew I was coming. Moerrven only knew a dragon had taken me. Moerrven first, then Pip. That was the order, and it wasn’t even close.
“It’s ridiculous,” I told him. “It’s genuinely ridiculous, and also—” My stomach picked that moment to growl, loud and tragic, echoing off the stone.
“—also I am starving, okay. You ate three of my hand pies, and that is my very favorite flavor. And believe me, I’ve tried them all.
Have you tried the Bog Hollow variety? Fuck, those are good.
Anyway, now I’ve just made myself hungry. ”
Another tail twitch. Enough with the tail twitches. I was becoming hangry, and hangry Sky was a force to be reckoned with. I mean, for a normal-sized human person.
“I am going to need a meal, and I’m not seeing a kitchen up here.
What’s the plan? What do I eat? Do I eat this?
” I snatched a gold coin off the edge of the hoard and held it up, a thing I had absolutely not been authorized to touch.
“Am I supposed to eat gold nuggets? Because I have a lot of feelings about my dental work and none of them are positive.”
The dragon watched me, and I lost it.
“I want to go home,” I said. “I want to go home and I don’t even know which home I mean anymore.
I just want Moerrven to hug me and maybe let me spank him for letting me be captured by a dragon, and then I want him to tell me he loves me, even though I’m not sure if that is even the slightest possibility since he’s still mourning his wife. ”
And then I had an idea, the way I have all my best and worst ideas, which is suddenly and with total commitment.
“Okay. New plan. You’re going to fly me down.”
I flicked the coin back onto the hoard, no dental sacrifice today, and marched up to the dragon.
Up close, he was the size of a building, and warm as a space heater.
He watched me come with what I’d swear was alarm.
But I was a man on a mission, and the mission was a grumpy troll, so I grabbed a ridge of scale at his shoulder and hauled myself up onto his neck like I was mounting the world’s most illegal horse.
I straddled the broad burning column of him, pressed both palms flat to the scales, and opened my mouth to demand my ride.
But the second my bare hands touched the scales, something shifted beneath me, and it wasn’t the dragon standing up to take me home.
He shuddered under me like a struck bell, head to tail, and the heat spiked, and the light of the scales flared so bright I had to shut my eyes.
And the great solid bulk I was straddling dropped out from under me, shrank, impossibly.
I fell the last foot to the ground, landing in a crouched position, and when I opened my eyes there was no dragon.
There was a man.
He was kneeling in front of me where the dragon had been, close enough to touch, and he was — okay.
I have never in my life, on either side of a magic mirror, seen anything as beautiful as him.
He had light brown skin with a warmth to it, like a vibration of the dragon fire inside.
A long lean cut of a body, all of it completely naked, which meant I had a great deal more detail about his proportions than I necessarily needed.
I suppose there’s no way to wear clothes if you can shift your body into a dragon the size of a small house.
His eyes, when he lifted them to mine, were not human.
They burned. Orange as embers, the one piece of the dragon that had come with him into the smaller shape, and they were looking at me like I was the first warm thing he’d seen in a hundred years.
“Holy fucking shit. You’re a guy,” I said, with great dignity.
He didn’t say anything. He knelt there and looked at me, breathing like he wasn’t sure the air would still work for him in this body.
The strangest part wasn’t his beauty or the fact that he’d just been a dragon, it was something even weirder. I didn’t want to fuck him.
And I knew, with a sick, swooping, total certainty, that I was in love with Moerrven.
I shrugged out of my jacket. I don’t know why that was my first move. Some deep San Jose instinct that says when a man is unexpectedly naked and sad you offer him outerwear. I held it out.
“Here. Cover your — you know. Your good bits.” I gestured at the general situation. “It’s a lot. You’re putting a lot out there.”
He looked down at the jacket, then back up at me, and hope moved across his ember eyes, hope that had been waiting a long time to ask anything of anyone.
“Do you not… want my good bits?” It wasn’t a line. It was genuine and a little fragile, like he already didn’t believe I’d say yes.
“No,” I said gently. “I don’t. And not wanting you is, objectively, the stupidest thing my body has ever done.” I pushed the jacket into his hands and folded his fingers around it. “You are — okay, you are unfairly beautiful, it’s actually rude, you should warn people. Also, put on the jacket.”
He held the jacket up to himself and frowned. “I do not think it will fit.” His eyes had gone bright and wet, ember to molten, and he held the jacket to his chest like it was the gold and the gold was nothing. “Why do you not want me? You seemed to like talking to me.”
“Because I went and fell in love with a testy hundred-and-twenty-seven-year-old troll named Moerrven. I am gone for him. Completely. There’s no room in here for anybody else’s good bits.”
He smiled. It was a small smile, and a rusty one, like a door that hadn’t opened in years.
He turned his human hands over and looked at them like he’d forgotten he owned a pair. “You reached me,” he said. “No one has reached me in a very long time.”
“Yeah, well.” My throat had gone tight. “I don’t actually know what that means.”
“The dragon is me, but he is not. And I am him, but I’m not.
Two souls inside one body, and his is the more powerful, because he’s a dragon.
It’s… sometimes it grows difficult to fight my way out.
But then the touch of a special person reaches me.
Bare skin, against my head or my neck. Nowhere else works.
It unlocks the door that he has barred shut. ”
“I’m Sky. Sky Liang. What’s your name?”
“Oallian Vyranthos,” he said. “Well, the dragon is Vyranthos, and…”
“You are him, but you’re not,” I said.
“It’s complicated. And dramatic. But if you call me Oallian, maybe that’ll help remind him that I’m in charge at the moment, and keep him at bay.”
“Oallian.” I tried it out, and watched it land on him like the first warm day after a long winter. “Okay. Hi.” I looked at this devastating, lonely, ridiculous creature and I felt the unmistakable beginning of a very strange friendship. “Do you, perhaps, want to be friends?”
He blinked at me, then that timid smile returned and he nodded. “I have not ever had a friend.”
“Not one? Ever?” I sat with that for a second. “I can’t even imagine it. I grew up in a family with five kids. Five. I had the opposite problem: so many people in one house that being alone was a luxury item.”
He looked at me the way he’d looked at his gold, like I’d named a hoard. “Five,” he said. “How does anyone get noticed in a crowd of five?”
“You get loud. You get funny. You learn to do a backflip in the living room during somebody else’s graduation party.
” I shrugged, like it was a bit, because it usually was.
“And mostly you still don’t get noticed.
You just get told to quiet down. Anyway.
It worked out. Look at me now, best friends with a dragon. ”
“How old are you, anyway?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s no calendar in this cave. Perhaps I should steal one?”
I laughed. “You made a joke. Did you make a joke? Oh, this is going to be good. We do need to figure out how to get back to Moerrven, though. Because the poor guy has had enough heartbreak. I mean, assuming he loves me back.” That thought hit hard.
“Why wouldn’t he love you back?” Oallian asked. “You reached me.”
“Is that… a quality trolls recognize? Dragon-reaching?”
“No. But it bespeaks a certain quality of character. So I assume he loves you back. It’s only natural.”
Only natural. Right.
“Fuck, I hope you’re as wise as you sound. Also, you still haven’t covered your dick.”
He sighed, and lifted the jacket. “It is very, very small. Perhaps I could fashion a loincloth.”