18 #2
The dragon chuckled, climbing out of his chaise.
“I have had centuries to add to my collection.” He started to leave the makeshift sitting room and then he came over to Gathren’s mother and drew a small silver key from underneath one of his scales.
He dropped it on her lap. “If thou leavest me, I shall hunt thee down, and I shall bring thee back, and I shall never be moved again to allow thou to have any such freedom. Mark me, my love. Mark me well.”
“I won’t leave,” muttered her mother, annoyed, picking up the key and undoing the shackle at her wrist. “You’re ever so dramatic, really.”
“With me,” said the dragon to Iahir. “Thou strange elf, I find thee amusing, I must say. Let us see what we can do about a pipe.”
Iahir got up and the two of them walked off into the darkness.
Gathren looked at her mother. “I suppose you were serious, and you don’t actually wish to leave.”
“I was,” said her mother. “But I would like it if you would come for the harvest holidays, I must say. I also can receive letters from an estate to the south. Tafnir has an agreement with the owner there. So, we can write again. But tell me, darling, who is that elf?”
“Oh, him?” said Gathren. “He’s the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
She was reeling.
Could a person be in a relationship with a dragon?
Was her mother really doing… things with a dragon?
Ugh. Gathren did not want to think about that.
GATHREN TRIED A lot of arguments. The fact that her mother was now in a romantic relationship with the man who had murdered her uncle and half of their neighbors, however, which seemed as if it was a very compelling bit of information, did not really faze the woman.
Her mother seemed to have come to terms with that some time ago.
Instead, her mother asked all about the orc invasion and how that had progressed.
Gathren began telling her all about Dathor, and how he’d come in and started talking about how they should not tear down the entire structure of the elven government, and how she had been sort of swayed by it and sort of not, and how she had ultimately sabotaged everything that Dathor had been trying to do in the first place with her impulsive and not-well-thought-out assassination plan.
“But you killed him?” said her mother. “The High King is dead?”
“Well,” said Gathren, “yes.”
Her mother threw back her head and laughed with sheer, unadulterated joy. “Marvelous. Truly marvelous. To think, my daughter did that.” She leaned over and kissed Gathren on the cheek.
Gathren was not certain how to feel about that. “Yes, but Mam, you didn’t see what was happening there. The orcs were killing everyone. They were killing little elf children, and I—it was my fault.”
“Well, war is awful, my darling,” said her mother.
“And I don’t hold with such behavior, of course.
But you know it wasn’t your fault. It was Findas’s own fault.
He wrought this. If he had not treated the orcs as vermin, they would not have struck back in such a way.
You know as well as I that it is his fault. ”
Gathren remembered Iahir saying something similar. Perhaps that was the best way to think about it, in the end. “You forgive me then, Mam?”
“I have no reason to be angry with you, my girl,” said her mother.
Gathren looked at her mother, trying to hold back her tears. All of this, and all she wanted was her mother to approve of her, it seemed.
Not that her mother had ever held back her approval, not truly.
Her mother had always supported and loved her.
It was only that she had been missing it, she supposed, her mother’s support.
And it was good to have it back, it was only that she was not at all certain she wanted her mother to be living in a dragon’s lair.
Her mother was gentle about it but firm.
“Tafnir is not perfect, of course, but then, no one is. I can see how some other person would not be able to forgive being chained up. I don’t know if you presented the idea to me, if I would say that it is something forgivable.
But you must understand that it did not start that way.
It started with he and I meeting out in the fields and talking for hours and forming a connection between the two of us.
You know, if it comes down to it, I’m not saying what I would want for you, my darling, is this elf lord, but I see it’s rather gone too far for me to intervene. ”
“What are you talking about?” said Gathren, who had certainly not shared with her mother that Iahir thought he was in love with her or that she had some stupid fascination with him in return.
“Well, why else would he be here?” said her mother. “Do elf lords go about helping orc warrioresses to rescue their mothers from dragons, generally speaking?”
“He… he just doesn’t want to go home,” said Gathren.
“Why not?”
“He won’t tell me,” said Gathren. “Something about his father. Maybe he feels trepidation about people finding out he killed the High King. I don’t know.”
“Didn’t he volunteer to kill Findas?”
“Well, yes, but I don’t get the impression he really thinks things through,” said Gathren. We have that in common, she thought.
As if summoned by their discussion of him, Iahir and Tafnir appeared again, both puffing on long wooden pipes, talking together animatedly.
“It really is fascinating,” said Iahir to all of them.
“His speech is a sort of amalgamation between something ancient and something current. It’s as if certain elements of it are too ingrained to be changed, but he is obviously being influenced by conversing with your mother.
Sometimes he says startlingly modern turns of phrase. ”
Clearly, everyone liked the dragon except Gathren.