82. Helena #2
“Then why do they say you wish to build a bigger road if not to bring more of your kind here into our precious mountain?” Leroix asked.
“Oh! Yes, yes I am trying to build a road—“
Leroix nodded solemnly. “Then we are agreed, and you must die—“
“No, no, no!” Helena said. “I want to build roads for you—for the otherfolk and the mundane animals too! The roads will go over the places where humans have already built their roads, so you all can cross safely, without running into cars. To protect other animals from meeting the same fate as the owl-bear.”
Leroix blinked slowly. He turned to the dragons behind them, and there was a lot of clicking and hissing.
“I . . . hm. It seems there are no more accusations to lay at your little human feet. And yet, we cannot let you leave alive, not having seen our home and our number.”
“But I’m here to protect you!” Helena protested. “I understand why it would be frightening that a mostly human knows where you are, but the only reason I was even in the Folio Mountains is because I’m trying to help.”
Leroix was silent.
“I’m not a threat to you. I swear. I don’t blame you—I can see why you thought I would be. You were protecting yourselves. So, I’m not wondering why you took me. What I’m wondering is why now.”
Leroix didn’t respond but simply paced back and forth in agitation. Helena watched him closely, his uneven lumbering gate, his slightly irregular breathing—
“You’re sick, aren’t you?”
Leroix roared with fury.
“That’s why you took me now. Because you felt it was your last chance to protect your People.”
“I will not tell you my secrets or my weaknesses, little human!”
“Human doctor,“ Helena reminded him. “Well, mostly human doctor. But the important thing is, if you let me try, I might be able to save you.”
“This could be a trick. You may only wish to get close enough to kill me.”
“I want to help you! How can I prove that to you?”
The dragon considered this for a long moment, his court whispering and clicking behind him.
“Tie your life to mine,” Leroix finally said. “I will tell my court that if I die, you are to be killed at once. But if I live, then I shall give you marriage to the one with whom you do not have an army of babies.”
“Um.” Helena shook her head. “I don’t think you can just give me a Person to marry—“
“Yes, because I will grant you leave to live, and then you will be married. Is that not what humans call it when they live with a mate?”
“Okay. Sure,” Helena said, deciding it was not worth it to try to explain the finer points of matrimony. “What if I try to heal you, but you die anyway?”
“Then you also die,” said Leroix.
“Which was your original plan anyway.” Helena nodded. “So. Okay. I’ll do what I can to heal you. Do you know what’s wrong with you?”
“There is infection in me,” Leroix admitted. “Right upon my chest. You humans call it a fistula, I believe. Or a fyst. Something of that nature. Soon it will reach my heart, and I will be gone.”
“May I see it?” Helena asked.
Leroix raised his great neck, revealing a huge lump of malformed scales on his chest.
Helena’s eyes lit up with excitement and relief. “That’s a cyst! I can remove it, and relatively easily—“
“You lie,” hissed Leroix. “No one here has been able to save me!”
“Well, presumably no one here has medical training. Or opposable thumbs. And if dragons had the ability to easily rip out one another’s scales, I assume that would be relatively poor defense in a fight.
But I have tools, tools specifically for dragons!
Given to me by Hippolyta, of the Midsummer Knights.
You may know of them—they were protectors of dragons even before the Great Merge. ”
“The Midsummer Knights, yes,” Leroix said, slowly. “Yes, I do know them.”
“If you let me get my tools—“
“You do not leave this cave,” Leroix said.
Helena’s face fell. “I can’t help you with my bare hands. You have to trust me to go get my tools. If you know of the Midsummer Knights and know that they trust me—and if you don’t believe me, I can call Hippolyta and have her tell you herself.”
“I know the deep skills of your technology,” Leroix huffed. “You could easily fake such an exchange. You do not have my trust, and you do not leave this cave.”
Helena looked around the cave for what she could use—there were a few stalagmites and stalactites that looked sharp, but Helena highly doubted she would be able to cut through dragon skin with any rock.
Still. Better to try to open a cyst with a rock than to give up and volunteer for immediate death.
Suddenly, Leroix raised his great head in the air. He sniffed, his upper lip pulling back to reveal his sharp teeth.
“Do you smell something?” Helena asked.
Leroix didn’t respond, so Helena continued nervously chattering on.
“That’s called the Flehmen response, by the way. What you’re doing. It’s German for ‘to bare the upper teeth,’ if you were wondering.”
“SHE’S HEADED STRAIGHT FOR THE CLIFF FACE,” came a familiar voice from outside.
Bertram.
Helena’s heart sank—now not only was she in danger, but Bertram was too.
“I DON’T THINK SO,” Diana shouted back. “I THINK SHE SEES SOMETHING WE DON’T. brACE FOR LANDING!”
“YOU’RE GOING TO—“
There was a loud crash from outside, and then Lovey burst through the cave’s entrance, closely followed by Bertram.
“MRAAAW!” Lovey screeched.
Bertram’s terrified expression melted the moment he laid eyes on Helena.
“Helena,” Bertram breathed, his voice so heartbreakingly gentle, his relief so palpable, that Helena couldn’t help but run to him, dragons or no dragons.
Helena threw her arms around Bertram and kissed him deeply.
“I’m in love with you too,” she said. “I should’ve said it immediately. I shouldn’t have set foot outside that tent without saying it.”
“You did nothing wrong,” Bertram assured her. He smoothed her hair, held her face, ran his hands down Helena’s arms, as if checking to make sure she really was there, alive and whole. “You didn’t know you would be—“
“Taken by a dragon?” Helena asked, catching Bertram up on the crux of the situation. “But I was. So. Is there something you’d like to say to me?”
“I love you, and I’m glad you’re alive,” Bertram said.
“And?” Helena raised an eyebrow.
Bertram looked between the dragon and Helena, Helena and the dragon.
Bertram huffed. “Well, he’s not an ivory-snouted dragon.”
“Petty human distinctions,” Leroix hissed.
“But he is a talking dragon,” Bertram said with surprise.
“All dragons are talking dragons,” Helena said, reproachfully. “Arguably, many forms of non-humanoid speech are more effective and nuanced—“
She was interrupted by a furious roar from Leroix.
Engrossed as she was in conversation with Bertram, Helena completely missed Lovey’s wanderings.
It seemed that Lovey had jumped onto Leroix’s tail and sunk all sixteen talons and her beak into his scales.
“LITTLE BEAAASTIE! HOW DAAARE YOU!” Leroix turned and opened his mouth. Smoke emerged from it, as if he was preparing to spout flames.
“No, DON’T!” Helena shrieked and ran to throw herself between Leroix and his target.
“Helena!” Bertram yelled. He rushed toward her, but two dragons blocked his path.
Leroix paused as Helena stood between Leroix’s massive jaws and Lovey, who still clung impressively to his tail.
“Please, kill me if you have to, but leave Lovey out of it!” Helena begged. “She’s just a baby; she doesn’t know any better!”
“I understand her instinct to protect her ‘mother.’ “ Leroix said the word as if it were distasteful to him. “But for a youngling to attack an elder dragon king shows a level of folly that I cannot comprehend. Unless”—a sudden spark lit in Leroix’s eyes—“unless you trained the Little Beastie to attack a dragon!”
A spark of realization struck Helena. “Oh! Yes, I did!”
“She’s lying,” Bertram said, struggling to break through to her. “She’s just trying to protect Lovatch!”
“Yes and no.” Helena looked up at Leroix. “If you promise not to kill me before I’m finished, I can explain it to you.”
Leroix narrowed his eyes. “You have three sentences.”
“Oh. We’re fucked,” Bertram said with quiet despair.
Helena glowered at him, then steadied herself. “Okay, sentence one! Wait, does it count as a sentence wasted if I lay out to you where each sentence starts and stops?”
“That was two sentences,” Leroix said. “You have one left.”
Helena gritted her teeth and nodded. She took a deep breath.
“Because owl-bears play roughly with one another in a way that would tear my skin, Syr Hippolyta from the Midsummer Knights Dragon Protection Society gave me a glove made from the scales of a Magellanic water-dragon collected unobtrusively after an ultra-catastrophic molt, and I taught Lovey that she could wrestle as hard as she wants and bite as hard as she wants whenever I’m wearing the dragon-scale glove, and only when I’m wearing the dragon-scale glove, and your tail is the only other time she’s encountered dragon scales, so due to stimulus generalization, she believed that the twitching of your dragon-scale-covered tail was an invitation to rough-house—SEMI-COLON—if she were attacking you in earnest rather than playing, you would see her fur spiked and the feathers on the ruff of her neck standing straight up, and she would be making agitated, aggressive noises rather than just playing silently with all fur and feathers relaxed. ”
“That . . . was a run-on sentence,” said Leroix.
Helena swallowed.
Leroix turned to slowly look at his tail, blinking in fascination at the baby owl-bear curled around it.
Lovey cooed happily as she gnawed at the tip of one of his scales with her sharp beak, the sound like metal on metal.
Lovey looked up at Leroix, briefly let go of his tail, and then pounced on it again, this time wrapping herself all the way around it so that she was upside down under the tail.
Her own tailfeathers spread out, then closed again, and a happy little shudder ran over the cub-chick.