Chapter Text
Having his very own dragon had always seemed like an impossible dream. Even the finest blacksmiths in Kuttenberg only had the funds to keep the small drakes, no larger than a hunting hound, around the forge. Henry's pa had always told him that he never saw the purpose of a creature that would consume so much meat to produce a little flame.
But when Captain Bernard was assembling men to ride out, he'd mentioned so casually that there was a dragon available for Henry. She was, according to the guardsmen, an inferior beast who'd practically been left out to pasture. She'd never bonded with a rider, nor shown any interest in breeding. If Henry had the stones to ride her, he could find her sunning in the field beyond the training yard.
Henry headed over at once, his heart beating with a desperate mix of excitement and terror. He could barely ride a horse, never mind a dragon. But this was his best chance to be useful in the hunt for the men who'd sold out Skalitz.
At first, he saw no dragon in the field, only long grass and a granite boulder. Then a high scudding cloud covered the sun, and the boulder grumbled and stretched out a long, scaled neck. The dragon—it was a dragon, albeit a smaller and grayer one than Henry had ever seen before—huffed in disappointment at the loss of her summer sunshine.
She turned to look at Henry, her yellow eyes baleful, as if he personally were responsible for the change in the weather. He stood frozen in fear, unable to remember whether dragons preferred to be stared at directly or not stared at at all.
Then he remembered that he had a bit of dried mutton in the pouch at his belt. He'd intended to use it to train Mutt, but it might do for a dragon. He took the jerky out and held it up, palm flat, as he might offer an apple to a horse.
The dragon swung her head closer, nostrils flaring. Henry took a few steps forward, hand still out. With a single lick, the mutton was gone.
The gray beast put her head very close to Henry's, so close that he could see with terrifying clarity teeth as big as daggers. She sniffed him. Each inhalation felt like a gust of wind.
She stood suddenly, her wings snapping out like two massive sails. Henry was suddenly aware of just how large she was, her body as big as a palfrey's, and her wings each twice as long as the span of his own arms.
She was making a strange noise, a rumbling deep in her chest that sounded like a hound's warning growl. It occurred to Henry that he had not asked how she had rejected her previous riders, and whether any of them had survived the experience.
"Easy now, girl," he babbled, as if she were a spooked horse. "I'm no threat to you. I'm a friend."
The dragon snapped her head forward to snuffle at his hand. Henry wanted to flinch, but instead, he placed his gloved palm on her snout, stroking the scales there. She redoubled her growling, but closed her eyes like a contented cat, and rubbed the length of her great gray head along Henry's hand.
And just like that, the dragon was his. He walked back up to the stables with her, to see about getting her fitted out with a proper saddle. When he turned up the next morning to ride out with the rest of the men, Captain Bernard gave him a quick but approving nod, as if to say he'd already known Henry was up to the job. Henry felt a swell of pride, which quickly turned into a different sort of upwelling as his new dragon took off and he found himself clinging for dear life to the saddle as the ground fell away and his stomach revolted at the sudden change in altitude.
By the end of the day, Henry had consoled a bereaved woman, fought a bandit, and found himself one step closer to winnowing out the truth of the attack on Skalitz. And he had flown on his very own dragon, and he hadn't vomited, which was something.
Lord Capon sauntered into the yard as Henry was trying to comprehend the complex straps of the dragon's saddle, under the tutelage of an exasperated groom. "Well, I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see for myself," the lord of Rattay and Pirkstein declared as Henry struggled with a buckle. "I thought that old girl had been put out to pasture for good. What are you going to name her?"
"Pebbles," Henry said, thinking of how perfectly her gray hide had resembled a boulder.
"Hmm. Hardly a name out of legends," Lord Capon said. His own dragon—a well-bred creature with bright yellow scales, naturally—had a mouthful of ancient syllables for a name.
"She doesn't have to be a legend, so long as she's mine," Henry said. Pebbles disrupted his work by sniffing his hands; there had been a treat there once before, and she already seemed to live in hope that there might be meat there again. Henry only hoped that she would always be so easy to please.
* * *
Somehow, Lord Capon got it into his head that Henry ought to learn how to hunt on dragon-back. It was an absurd notion, since Henry had no right to hunt deer at all, except by the permission of the very lord he was trailing after.
In truth, he suspected that Sir Hans only wanted an excuse to fly away from the castle for a few days. Henry had heard all the details secondhand, but he knew that Lord Hanush had caught his nephew in a compromising position with two maidservants at once.
And so he found himself in a forest clearing, tending not only to his own dragon's tack, but Lord Capon's as well. Sir Hans was helping in his own way, lounging by the fire and occasionally shouting useful advice such as, "Really, Henry, you ought to be done by now," and, "Try the one on the left. No, my left, your right."
At last, Henry managed to get both saddles removed and wiped down. He flopped down next to the fire with a sigh. Sir Hans tossed him a wineskin, then waited until Henry was in the middle of a deep swig to ask, "So, which of my guardsmen will be sodomizing you?"
Henry coughed wine down his shirt. Lord Capon laughed himself silly, and was still giggling as he said, "Relax, Henry. Your mean old dragon hasn't entertained a suitor yet, and she's not likely to change her mind. Your hairy ass is safe from defilement."
Henry wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "So it's true, what they say about dragon knights? Isn't it a sin?"
"Oh, the pope gives knights special dispensation. Who else would ride out on his crusades?" Sir Hans said, with a casual shrug. "The priests say that men are capable of sin because we have free will, but when a dragon is consumed by the mating instinct, its knight loses his free will and acts entirely according to that animal instinct as well. Ask Father Godwin if you don't believe me."
Henry looked over at Pebbles, who was doing her best impression of a lump of rock. If the firelight hadn't been glinting in her yellow eyes, she would be indistinguishable from a boulder. Lord Capon's yellow-scaled beast had snaked his head on its long neck to investigate a molehill. Neither looked capable of enticing a man to acts of carnality.
"Have you ever...?" he asked Sir Hans.
"What? Don't be absurd. Aethon is the only dragon of elevated breeding in Rattay, and he'd never stoop to breeding below his station," Lord Capon declared.
Aethon gave up nosing at the molehill and bumped his yellow snout against Pebbles's flank. She snapped at him in irritation, fluttered her wings, and settled into a new position.
"Maybe your dragon just isn't popular with the ladies," Henry said.
Lord Capon tossed a bit of rotten wood at him. "That dragon's a perfect match for you, Henry. Neither of you has any taste at all."