Chapter 2 The Meeting
Behind the broken wall, there is a stack of clothing alongside a bucket of stagnant water and a washrag—in case I ever need to clean the blood of my enemies off my skin before dressing.
I snag up the tattered dress and pull it over my head.
Many of my clothes have been ripped apart at times by my hasty shifting, and all of them have been let out as I grew from a girl into a woman, so the seams are uneven and jagged.
Cherry is a self-taught seamstress, and I am none at all.
We do the best we can, however, and this dress, though only falling to my calves and extremely worn and ugly, at least covers all that ought to be covered.
Dressed, I stride back out of the hall. I can tell from the continued sharpness of my eyesight that they are still partially in dragon form—a thing that happens when I'm anxious.
From an outside view, I know my eyes will appear slitted like a snake's just now, a sight which Cherry finds disturbing, and our new visitor likely will as well.
But the partial shift at least allows me to see him with perfect clarity, even where he stands a hundred yards away, across the wild garden and chasm.
I make my way over to him, hopping onto ruins to avoid tangling my feet in the briars and tall grass.
I pause at the edge of the rope bridge, and Marton sees me.
I can make out his shock with perfectly clarity, although I know he can't see me half as well as I see him.
To him, I will only be a vague human-girlish shape.
But he clearly sees that I am not a dragon.
He approaches the rope bridge from the other side, hesitating as he looks at its rickety condition.
And it is rickety. The ropes are worn, many of the wooden slats rotten or missing.
We make no effort to keep the bridge in repair, because it serves as an additional deterrent to interlopers.
We could destroy the bridge, and I've wanted to do it many times, but Cherry hates the idea of being trapped here if anything should happen to me.
I frown down at the ricketiness of the bridge now.
Marton is of no use to me if he falls to his death.
I will not even have a very entertaining story to bring to Cherry.
And I don't want to have to take my clothes off before him in order to shift again and fly across to fetch him.
I'm not sure why. My naked body has never occasioned much interest to Cherry, or to anyone else back when I had other people in my life.
But I was a child then, and...I am a woman now. It's almost strange to think about.
I am still thinking hard about this when Marton takes a step onto the bridge from the other side. I freeze in surprise.
This scholarly, gentle man is going to cross our deadly chasm?
Willingly? There are brave knights who have not attempted as much.
There are also brave knights who have run screaming from their first sight of a dragon, so perhaps I shouldn't measure much by knighthood, nor the thing humans call bravery in themselves.
I back up to watch as Marton makes his careful way across the bridge.
He is mindful of the rotten boards, and doesn't grip the ropes too tightly.
His face is all concentration as he steps, watching his feet.
The bridge sways in the wind, and the smell of his sweat rises fresh on the air. But still he comes on.
I have to marvel at his determination, as well as his courage, but I try not to read too much merit in it.
Many terrible men have courage, and almost all of them have determination.
By necessity, I'd actually reckon, a terrible man must have determination, elsewise he would not be able to accomplish so many terrible things.
Marton makes it across the bridge, onto the steady ground not ten feet from me. The closest any human but Cherry has stood to my human form in years. I brace myself as he looks at me.
He called me beautiful before, but that was when he expected to see a dragon, and saw a dragon.
Now he is expecting, presumably, a pretty princess, and that I am decidedly not.
My hair is black as pitch and wild with kinks, my facial features too sharp.
And right now my eyes are dragon eyes. My skin, I know, has the slightest green tinge that could almost be mistaken for an olive hue by one who doesn't know what I am.
But all of me communicates my wrongness to those of ordinary humanity.
Something of monstrosity screams out from my pores and repulses them.
Marton looks at me. And looks. And looks some more.
No less entranced by my human form than he was by my dragon one.
Now his eyes dart from my eyes to my hair, nose to mouth, to the exposed skin at my neck and arms and calves.
Cataloguing, as he did before, the parts of me that seem the most unusual and deadly.
And like before, he is more surprised and amazed than horrified. Truly, something must have gone very wrong in him at some point to make him so tolerant of dreadfulness.
He opens his mouth as if to speak, but no sound comes out.
Frowning, I introduce myself, manners stiff with disuse. "I am Tarah."
He blinks at me, and responds quickly, "I am Marton."
I frown the more heavily. "I know."
His cheeks color, flushing the most human shade of pink. "I—yes. Sorry. I said that before. When you were..." Marton looks back over his shoulder, to the spot where we stood on the other side of the chasm, me in my dragon form. He glances back at me, and colors again.
Very odd.
"I thought it would be easier to talk this way." I indicate my humanness. Marton nods vigorously. "I was interested in what you said before," I continue, prompting him, "about protectorkin and the royal family of Ithyma."
Marton's eyes brighten. Widen. "Yes. But you must be familiar with the legend? Your ancestors—"
"My ancestors were human," I interrupt him. Whether he takes me for the princess or not, that much is true. "I have heard no legends of the kind."
"No? But surely the old stories are told here in this nation?"
"Never to me."
"But you—that is—do you mind my asking? Are you—are you the princess of Ithyma?
But you must not be," he realizes, "for you said your name was Tarah, and I had heard her called.
..something else—girlier—I can't recall.
" He seems distressed, both at the possibility of offending me, and at his inability to recall the princess's name.
I am almost amused. "I am not the princess." What a revelation that is.
"But she..." He glances up at the castle over our heads.
A growl slips out before I realize what I'm doing, and then it's too late to mask the sound. A very inhuman sound. Marton's eyes widen, and of all things, he grins. "Oh." It is the slightest noise of awe, escaping him, and I cannot understand it at all.
He seems enraptured by everything that usually unsettles. Delighted by what has disgusted others. Awestruck by what has frightened them.
"Were you dropped on your head very often as a child?" I ask in honest curiosity.
Marton stammers and blushes. And apologizes. "I am—that is—I didn't mean—I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry about the princess, nor to make you...uncomfortable." He winces. "I was only..."
I'm too bewildered to respond. Uncomfortable, he says. Men regular lob axes and swing swords at me, and he's worried that he's made me uncomfortable. With words.
I lift my shoulders in a shrug, showing him that it's alright.
The gesture feels stiff, and for some reason, I am painfully aware of my hands and elbows.
What do I normally do with them when I'm just standing still?
To hide my confusion, I turn, indicating with a hand that Marton should follow.
I head deeper into the ruins, once again climbing onto the larger chunks of stone that peek from the tall grass.
Marton follows me as I leap from stone to stone.
His movements are deliberate and capable, but not necessarily graceful or easy.
He studies each step before he takes it, and executes it carefully.
He's strong and quick, his muscles well defined beneath his clothing, but I think he isn't used to much real exertion.
I pause when we come to the ring of stone in the center of what used to be the courtyard.
There are only a few plants rooting through the gaps in the stones here, and it's as good a place as any to talk.
I take a seat on a tumble of rock—I think it used to be a fountain or sculpture of some kind—and Marton hesitates a moment before he does the same, sitting across from me.
He opens his mouth, but I speak first. "Tell me more about these legends."
"Of course." Marton smiles, his hazel eyes bright on me. "What would you like to know?"
I wrinkle my brow in thought. "The king—" But no, I shouldn't talk about that. "The royal family. You say they were dragon shifters once?" Why have I never heard a tale of dragon shifters in Ithyma? Others like me, in my own country. You'd think someone might have mentioned it.
"Yes, the protectorkin," Marton nods, tucking a lock of longish blonde hair behind one ear.
My eyes dart to the shape of his cheekbone before I can help it, and something indefinable pinches in my chest. I rub at the spot, frowning as Marton continues, "The protectorkin were supposedly able to take on the forms of dragon, I believe, and maybe other beasts as well.
The legends say so, as do some histories.
"
"And how long ago did these legends take place?
" I try to focus on what he's saying instead of the very real personness of him.
Skin and hair and eyes, shoulders and thighs and muscles bunching as he shifts.
"The most recent account I found of the protectorkin was from about a hundred years ago.
Very recent, by historical standards. A very young legend, and a very fresh history.
How it could have been overlooked or forgotten in recent years is beyond my ability to say.
You say the people of Ithyma do not talk of the old legend?
They do not speak of the multiple forms of the royal family—of the protectorkin? "
"I have never heard it mentioned," I say truthfully. "But I..." I trail off, debating. Then I decide to be more honest still. "I have not been around many people, not since I was a young girl."
"You..." He watches me with wide eyes. Hesitates. "You have been here all this time? With...?" He doesn't need to fill in the blank for me. With the princess.
"Yes," I admit. My back teeth grind together. I just admitted to Cherry's existence. To a stranger.
Marton takes a sharp inhale, but resists his obvious urge to ask more about it.
"Ah," he says, in a tone of put-on casualness.
I snort. Very well. "But my princess is not a dragon shifter," I change the subject.
Sort of. "She is not...protectorkin, as you call it.
Neither is her—" I stop myself again. Neither is her father, I was going to say.
But...do I know that for a fact? I don't remember much about him; it was such a long time ago, and I met him so briefly.
Just long enough for him to charge me with his daughter's safety, calling on my loyalty as one of his subjects.
He gave me my mission, and I have carried it out.
I rack my brain, trying to recall his features, to remember anything about him that was.
..off, different. Something about him that was like me.
He was tall, I remember, finely dressed in robes and a crown.
Intimidating, to a young peasant girl. But could some of that intimidation have come from a sense of.
..otherness about him that I had not noticed explicitly at the time?
"No," Marton breathes, "I would suppose not.
Not if you were able to..." He quickly changes directions.
"I suppose if it's become a forgotten legend, whatever it was in the bloodline that made them able to shift forms must have been weaned out over time, from.
..interbreeding with...ordinary humans." He blushes madly.
I ignore the way my face feels as if it's caught aflame.
It is an interesting theory. And it explains, perhaps, why the king was so quick to respond to rumors of my existence.
Why he sent men to my village, not to slay me, but to enlist me.
But what was the danger his daughter needed protecting from, that no one else could defeat but me?
Why do all these men come after her? None of them have ever spoken of their reasons.
I wonder if Marton would know. He has more information of the wider world than we do. But asking him reveals my sacred mission from the king, and I don't know if I should speak of it.
There is so much I do not know.
Just then, a shattering cry rips through the mountain air around us. "TA-RAH!"