82. Helena
Helena
“Ifucking knew I saw a dragon,” Helena said as she came to.
She was in a nest of gold and leaves and sticks and jewels, and she vaguely knew she should be terrified, but mostly she felt vindicated.
“You don’t need to sound so smug. It’s not like you’ll live to tell anyone,” said a voice, husky and deep.
The dragon was enormous, easily the size of two grown owl-bears, though much longer if neck and tail were included.
Perhaps if Helena managed to befriend him, he would allow her to take his exact measurements.
She was so fascinated with the dragon’s capability for humanoid speech she wasn’t particularly concerned that aforementioned speech contained a death threat.
Her only real concern was that seeing the dragon this close proved that Bertram was right about her making too many assumptions from afar.
The dragon had a bright red occipital ridge on his head, yes, but there were white stripes across his face, starting at his snout and moving all the way down his neck.
One of the stripes was above his eye, and there was a beautiful red patch on the side of his snout.
He was a pileated dragon (Draconis pileatus) rather than an ivory-snouted dragon (Draconis ovuphilus principalis).
That still didn’t prove that the ivory-snouted dragon was extinct.
The important thing was that Helena was 1000000000 percent right about there being a dragon in the area, and right about the dragon’s general size and coloration, and Bertram could get absolutely fucked.
Ideally by her.
While repeatedly telling her how right she was.
Of course, she would first need to disprove the dragon’s statement about her not living to tell.
“I wasn’t aware dragons were capable of humanoid speech,” Helena said.
The dragon sneered. “You thought us mindless beasts.”
“Oh, no,” Helena said, “I don’t think humanoid communication is superior at all, and I don’t think any beasts are mindless.
With the exception of certain invertebrates.
But not all invertebrates. Sea jellies don’t have brains, so, yes, I’d consider them mindless, but octopodes are invertebrates and are largely considered one of the smartest species on the planet—sorry, that’s probably not important right now.
I should introduce myself; I’m Helena. I’m a doctor. And you—do you have a name?”
The dragon considered this for a moment, as if unsure whether or not she was worthy to possess such knowledge. “You may call me Leroix.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Leroix—“
“Liiiiiiiiessss!” the dragon hissed.
“Okay, so, maybe it’s slightly less nice since our first interaction was you knocking me out and our second interaction was you saying you were going to kill me, but truly, it’s very awe-inspiring to be this close to a dragon.
I study otherfolk—or, non-humanoid beings—I—how do you like to be referred to? ”
“I do not like to be referred to,” Leroix said.
“That’s fair,” Helena said. “All I meant was . . . I know humans have been messing up the natural world for a long time, and that’s threatened a lot of species, so I’m glad you’re still here.”
“Why do you care?” Leroix asked.
“Why wouldn’t I care?” Helena asked.
Leroix fell silent.
From behind him came the hissing of dragons, punctuated with rumbles and chirps.
Helena peered further into the darkness of the cave and saw a large group horde of dragons, seemingly talking amongst themselves.
There were all shapes and sizes, from as small as a long-tailed planijay to as large as a crimson rhinocerose, in colors ranging from muddy camouflage to seemingly made of crystal and emerald, all clicking and hissing.
Leroix nodded and turned back to Helena. “Money. Fame. Large-scale food production. Shelter.”
“Hmm?” Helena said.
“You asked why you wouldn’t care about the dragons. Those are reasons my kin and court suggested.”
“Right. Of course. But I do still care about dragons, regardless. Also . . . you called them your court? Does that make you . . . are you their king?”
“Of a sort,” Leroix said, after a moment. “I suppose that’s as close to understanding as a human could get. Now. We must know what you humans are scheming. We have questions before we kill you.”
“Oh. Okay. Um. I have to tell you, it’s not particularly motivating for me to answer when I know that once I do, I’ll die.”
“If you’re not going to answer our questions, we shall kill you now,” Leroix said.
“And now I’m motivated!”
“How many humans are there, living in our valley?”
“Just me,” Helena said. “And I’m only mostly human.”
“LIIIIIES!” Leroix hissed. “You lie already! We have seen another! A male!”
“Oh, yes, but he’s not human.”
Leroix’s huge nostrils flared. “If he walks on two legs and uses your speech, he is as good as human.”
“In that case, there’s two of us. For the record, I am one-quarter pixie, and my friend is a half-orc half-vampire.
We started our excursion with a vampire and are sometimes visited by a full pixie.
So there have been four humanoid beings in total, but only two of us are living here.
We’ve kept the team small to not interfere with the local ecosystem. ”
“And yet you are breeding an army to invade us!”
Helena was baffled. “No? We’re not?”
“My dragons say that you have been mating with the male many, many times.”
Helena flushed. “Oh. No. No, no. I mean, yes, we’ve—we’ve been engaging in sexual intercourse, and yes, that’s how our species reproduces—“
“YOU SEE? IT IS YOUR PLAN!”
”—but I’m not trying to reproduce.”
The dragons behind him hissed and clicked. Leroix nodded to them, then turned back to Helena.
“We all know that humans do not have to lay eggs,” Leroix said.
“Correct.”
“That they do not need to sit and hatch them for years.”
“Also correct.”
“They say that a human male inserts himself into the human female and when he withdraws, a live baby comes out, with no egg at all. They say he has inserted himself into you many times, and you must therefore have hundreds of babies hidden away in your lair.”
“Oh God,” Helena said, with genuine horror. “No. No, no. Okay. So human reproduction—a baby has to develop inside you for nine months before being born! But besides that, I have something in me that keeps me from getting pregnant.”
“And how must you free yourself from this curse?” Leroix asked.
“I did it to myself. Well, I paid someone to do it to me. I don’t want to have any babies. Ever. And certainly not for the purposes of to create an army.”
A dragon from behind Leroix made a series of high-pitched clicking noises, ending in a puff of smoke.
Leroix turned to Helena. “They wish to know—if you are not attempting to breed an army of babies, why has he been inserting himself into you so much?”
Helena buried her face in her hands and wondered if it would be better if the dragon had just eaten her.
“Because it’s fun and releases chemicals that my brain likes,” Helena said. “And also, it turns out that we love each other.”
“Ah”—Leroix nodded—“he is your fated mate.”
“Uh. I don’t . . . think that’s . . . a thing.
For us, at the very least.” Helena bit her lip.
“He only just told me that he loved me, and I didn’t get the chance to say it in return before you grabbed me.
And I would really, really, really like to tell him that I’m in love with him.
That I’ve always been in love with him. So, if there’s any way you could not kill me so I could say all those things, that would be so awesome. ”
Leroix was silent for a moment.
“Perhaps it is only the two of you,” Leroix conceded, “and perhaps there is no army being bred. But my court has other concerns. They say you murdered an owl-bear. They saw you hit her with a spell. They saw you over her dead body.”
Helena bit her lip. “It was a tracking spell. I came here to try to protect her, to protect all of you. The owl-bear was killed by a truck. It was the very thing we wanted to prevent. We rushed to save her, but it was too late.”
The dragons rumbled amongst themselves. Leroix listened, then nodded.
“They say you stole her cub-chick and claim it as your own,” Leroix said.
“Well. Sort of. We took the egg to hatch it after she died, so at least her baby would survive. But when she hatched, the cub-chick claimed me. I don’t know what color spectrum dragons see in, but my eyes have this silver ring in them; I hear that’s something that happens in certain species of dragons with filial imprinting too. ”
“Turn your head, little human,” Leroix ordered.
“Mostly human,” Helena mumbled. But she turned her head slowly back and forth as Leroix stared her down.
“I do see the imprintation marks,” said Leroix.
“I was actually wondering about their purpose,” Helena said.
“If it’s to help the offspring identify the parent, it feels odd for it to be such a small feature that can really only be seen up close.
If you think about the ‘follow-me’ markings on a waterbuck or Iokapi or dredd unicorn, that makes sense to see from a distance.
So, these marks that are only visible up close—is it to show the offspring that this is an adult they can trust, that they can take food from?
Is it to show potential mates that the parent is still in the midst of raising dependent young and therefore not available to create new offspring?
It’s also okay if you don’t know; there are plenty of things even in the human body we’re still discovering the . . . function . . . of . . .”
Helena trailed off as she realized that Leroix was not interested in contributing to the literature on dragon physiology as intra-species behavioral cues. “Never mind.”
There was more rumbling from the dragons behind Leroix.
“My kin tell me that without a doubt, you have been planning to build here, to tear down the last of our precious mountains for the sake of your unrelenting human greed.”
“That’s not true!” Helena said. “We’re trying to stop the potential for any construction.”