The Lady King

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Once, they’d been in the skies, if you believed that sort of thing. How that could have been Rilke had never been sure; ‘dragon’ had an altogether different definition at the time.

Songs spoke of wolf-headed monsters with lightning in the thousand sword-like teeth crowding maws the size of towers; of razor-edged wings that stretched from dawn to dark across the horizon and dragged down over them endless night; of claws that could rend mountains and eyes that drove kings mad and hide that even molten gold couldn’t singe, diamond couldn’t scratch, lightning couldn’t scar. Dragon was a curse, dragon was a swear. What lived in the Valley now hardly deserved the name anymore.

These were worms.

But Rilke needed them.

The end of the path lay ahead of her; a barricade of collapsed stone shearing the trail from the rest of the mountain and cascading down the near-vertical face of the peak in a jagged landslide frozen in time. The Valley was in fact a crater at the summit of the mountain the dragons had once, she was told, used as their rookery, in their age of glory. She lived in a world of things with the wrong names.

The Little Folk had collapsed this road the day of the Bargain - to prevent the dragons slithering out or something else slithering in, it wasn’t clear. They’d already cheated their greatest enemy out of their only defence and their kingdom and their dignity, Rilke for one couldn’t see why they’d need to trap them in the Valley, too.

But the cruelty of man was something she’d become intimately aware knew no bounds, so perhaps there wasn’t a reason. Perhaps it had just been amusing to someone long-dead.

All it meant today was that the rest of the way up would be a climb.

Rilke abandoned the broken branch that had been her staff this far up and tugged her gloves out of her pocket. When her hands touched the cliffside, thunder pealed overhead. The wind snarled past, sour and humid. Rilke jammed the toe of her boot into the stone, hooked both hands over her head, and hauled herself up.

It was by no means impossible to get to the Valley with the road obliterated. She’d come up here hundreds of times with her friends when they were all younger, already expertly trained in the art of cruelty, to throw rocks at the worms, taunt them, throw them hunks of skinless fruit pretending it was meat, just to watch them humiliate themselves on their pathetic, deformed legs fighting for it.

She fumbled for a hand-hold, knuckles and shoulders burning as she ascended.

It wasn’t an easy climb, but if they could do it as children she thought it couldn’t be beyond her now. They’d made it up and down every other day between classes, sometimes with full satchels of food and books, sometimes in their training armour, sometimes barefoot.

Her boot slipped, the smooth sole sliding uselessly out of the next foothold, regardless of how tightly she’d been curling her toes. And then the next, and the next.

Rilke’s arms burned and her ribs cained where she’d battered against the uneven cliffside thrice. Maybe there was something to climbing the way they had done as children. She walked her hands along the ridge she was clinging to and swung her foot up onto a thin plateau just beside. When it didn’t crack immediately, the rest of her body followed, and she tore her boots off with a snarl. The useless, cheap leather was already soft and slippery from the hike up. They were no good to her now.

She dropped them below to where her walking stick lay. One of them hit the edge of it, and the branch skittered away, swinging out over the edge of the road. It rolled once, twice, and then succumbed to pull of gravity, plummeting off the side of the mountain.

Great.

Rilke kicked a collection of gravel after it in spite. Then it was back to the ascent.

There wasn’t much between her and the mouth of the Valley. A hundred feet? Less? The only real obstacle was the steepness and the brittleness of aged stone.

The further she climbed, the thicker the air became. It clung heavy to the mountainside, laden with a brewing storm and the stink of brimstone. Real brimstone; sulphur - not that rot they sold to the disenfranchised, though the smell was similar.

False brimstone was more earthy, which was a strange comparison, Rilke mused, considering real brimstone actually came from the earth. She didn’t know what they put into the false stuff, only that it was cut with herbs, and it did more damage to her people than even their rulers did.

The rulers didn’t partake in it (overtly) but for as much as they taxed the heart and soul out of every other possible thing a person could try to produce, brimstone, for some reason, was unregulated and fairly cheap.

Maybe it was because it made people easy to quell. Brimstone was easy to make, easy to get, and easy to get addicted to; with the people spending all their attention and pittance on brimstone, they had very little energy left to consider the way they lived, much less to object to it.

Maybe it was that brimstone was so easy to produce that the rulers simply couldn’t stamp it out completely, or couldn’t be bothered exerting that much effort to try.

Or maybe it was just funny for the high class to watch from their tall windows, painted with limestone to mask the scent of the lesser folk, as the pathetic writhed and thrashed in the filthy streets, giggling in their hallucinations. Street dragons, they called them. For their humiliation, the way they moved, or the smell, or maybe all three.

This is what dragon meant these days.

The wind battered Rilke’s side, bringing a humid curl of true brimstone with it. Thunder growled again overhead. The rim of the Valley loomed.

Loose sediment crowded under her nails as Rilke dug her hands and feet in, a blistering ache in her back, and hauled herself over the edge.

A short plateau relieved her of the climb, and would likely be the last relief she had today. Depending on how the day went, it might be the last relief of her life. Rilke decided to give the moment its due, and collapsed on her back on the thin lip that ringed the peak of the mountain, panting raggedly.

She was sweating and sore. Her breath was heavy in her lungs, misshapen by the humidity. The hair on her arms and legs stood on end in the crackling atmosphere.

A reluctant tilt of her head, followed slowly by her shoulder, then her hip, brought her to lie on her side, propped on one arm, staring down into the Valley.

The inner walls were almost as steep as the cliffside she’d just faced. Sheer, uneven rock swept down to an outcropping of sleek black stone, while veins of mineral and and sickly, yellow-green mould continued descending into the darkness, spiralling around the inner edge until the depth and the angle blended and there was only black, and no indication of how much further down it went. On the outcropping, a weak spread of grass made for a nesting space, and here there was movement, at least a little. The flicker of a tail, the twist of a head.

The worms. Dragons.

There were few here at the moment. This was probably her best chance at getting more than one sentence out before she was gummed to death.

Rilke rolled into a sit, dangling her legs over the edge. Calf, knee, thigh, hip - she kept what little grip she could, sparing one last glance down into the nesting ground just to be sure she hadn’t been seen yet and they wouldn’t be waiting at the bottom to surprise her. Nothing moved any more than it was a minute ago.

She let her body slide fully over the edge, arms burning anew as she held herself in place for the climb down.

The angle of the incline was almost equal to standing straight, and Rilke descended less by actually climbing and more by letting the loose stone roll away with her and digging her fingers in when she needed to slow down. It didn’t always stop her.

She dug a river in the cliffside as she passed, a vein of her own. Her legs jarred as she came upon the nesting place, where the loose sediment abruptly became solid ground, and Rilke tumbled into the landslide that had followed her, gravel spraying into the shell of her ears and her nostrils and her scalp.

Hawking dirt out of her nose like a pig was not the impression she had been hoping to make. Although - through streaming eyes she took in the full distance she had just come - considering she’d never actually practised this part of her descent, it was lucky grazed hands and knees and a face full of gravel was all she’d come away with.

Rilke gathered her courage. She snarled the last of the sediment out of her nose, scrubbed her face and shook out her hair, and braced her poor limbs to pick her up one last time.

When she rose, it was waiting.

The worms - dragons - seemed much smaller from the safe distance of the rim. Up close, Rilke suddenly couldn’t help the bolt of dread that zipped along her shoulders and spine.

It was probably ten feet in length altogether - and at least six of those were currently looming over the little intruder, a corded mass of ropey muscle bound in sleek black skin, embossed with shimmering, tesselated scales. Rilke almost wanted to touch it.

Its face was round, almost flat, and it was more like an eel than a worm from this distance, with its slitted nostrils and small, watery eyes. It advanced slowly, several stumpy pairs of webbed feet parting the grass and stone between them while the greater mass of the body wound to and fro like a snake.

It didn’t move with any kind of haste, but instead with a purpose and a presence Rilke had not remotely been prepared for. She’d stumbled back against the wall of the Valley before she could stop herself.

This seemed to amuse the dragon. Even slower, almost at a strut now, it let its colossal body slink to the ground, more little legs unfolding from where they’d been tucked under its scales to provide support, until its head hovered just above Rilke’s own.

One of the eyes was watery and weeping, and looked to be mostly blind. It swung its head around to examine Rilke with the other. A rumble rose from deep in its belly, slipping from its maw in a hiss of sour, smokey breath. A tear formed in the skin about its lips as it opened its mouth.

It should have bolstered Rilke; seeing this small, sad remnant of the species, riddled with rot and cataracts, slipping about on its stupid legs, its head twitching now and then the way her grandmother’s had as she deteriorated.

But she had grossly underestimated just how much scarier pride can make a thing. And for all its failings, the dragon had retained at least the grandeur of its predecessors, and its presence radiated a smouldering offence that gave her the impression that it knew exactly how to use what little it had to maintain its old reputation.

Her breath was hot against her top lip as she stepped away from the wall.

The dragon rumbled again, and this time it resolved, clumsily albeit, into words,

“Do you have meat?”

Its mouth tangles awkwardly around the Little Folk tongue - another part of the Bargain. The dragons had once had a language of their own, one that transcended the need for mouth shapes and sound, one that radiated directly into the mind. But it was as good as dead in this age. Attempts to communicate now forced themselves over the tongue and between the teeth - the dragon twitched faintly with every few words, like it was trying to resist to compulsion to keep opening its mouth.

“It is so hard to get anything but lizards up here.” Its head jerked, an acrid gust of air washed over Rilke as it sniffed her.

Her heart hammered against her ribs. She hadn’t brought anything - just herself, her stick, her own damned pride. And she hadn’t even brought her stick the whole way.

“I can get you lamb.” She said. The dragon’s head flicked, this time curious. “Young - young as you like. Butchered to perfection, only the best cuts.”

The dragon rumbled again, and it occurred to Rilke this was its way of laughing.

“Or I could butcher you here myself. And enjoy every cut.”

She didn’t step back, though it took some fight. Instead, she stepped around the dragon, circling it until there was some distance between their faces, and she had more than a sheer cliffside behind her.

“Oh, but then who would bring you your lamb every day?” Even the grass was hot beneath her feet. The whole Valley thrummed with draconic warmth. “Or yearling calf? What about river eel? I’m sure you’ve missed those.”

The dragon rounded to face her languidly, folding several pairs of feet back beneath its scales as it settled, scrutinising her.

“Why would any of your kind bother to return every day?” The dragon didn’t sound amused anymore. “Why today even? At all?”

“I have a Bargain for you.” Rilke said. She wasn’t sure how she had room to get the words out around her heart, which had crawled up her throat and was trying to replace her tongue.

The dragon’s head lowered, neck inching out to loom over Rilke again.

“Do you think we have not made enough of those with your kind?”

“That’s the best part.” She practised this conversation; hundreds, thousands of times before this moment. Courage, girl! “I’m here to offer you the chance to challenge that Bargain.”

This time the dragon didn’t rumble - it keened. It threw its head back and belched peals of shrieking laughter into the air, where the walls of the Valley took it up and echoed it cacophonously into the very heart of the mountain.

“The Bargain was set before even I was born! I was old long before you and your small kin ascended our mountain to throw stones at us - yes, I remember your stench.” The dragon lowered its head down over her. “This is older than you by centuries. You would do best to remember you own power. You have nothing to offer us.”

“Yes I do.” Rilke trembled. Her chest was empty and fluttering. The dragon was already angry, for a moment she considered not even saying the rest. Her eyes flicked around the Valley, she felt the phantom scrape of rock on her hands as she imagined how quickly she could scale the walls again, if she could outpace the dragon. She couldn’t.

Its acrid breath curled between them. She would die running. She may die speaking. No point but to go on.

“You can challenge a Bargain if it was won without honour.”

It was smart enough to know, it had to be. The dragon’s eyes glittered as they narrowed, keen, quietly, increasingly furious as it pieced together her unsaid words.

“There was no dishonour among the dragons.” It said, very quietly. Its tongue did not warp around the words this time, too carefully chosen.

Rilke felt strangely peaceful at the prospect of her death. She had no more to lose.

“There was among the Little Folk. They cheated.”

The dragon’s neck flared, smoke poured from its slitted nostrils. The stones around it scattered as it swept into motion, circling Rilke angrily.

“We have suffered for centuries! And all along for nothing?” It rounded on her, and she had to take a step back to avoid its jaws as it snapped again, words mangled now in its anger. “So why now? How could you possibly know this? And why tell us? Are you not happy in our glorious land, with our hunting grounds and our prosperity? Have you grown bored of plenty?”

“If there is plenty down there then few know of it!” Rilke snapped back. Perhaps fear emboldened her, or perhaps she and the dragons shared a similar fury at their treatment. The dragon retreated somewhat, smoke still pooling around its face. “The old blood was arrogant enough to cheat magic, do you think they somehow found their charity after driving you out? Whatever glory your lands had once has been gutted by now. My people live in squalor under jealous, cruel men who are so obsessed with their own grandeur they’ll take it at the expense of their own families!”

“So, vengeance?” The dragon snarled. “Is that what you seek from this? You are displaced and displeased, so you are willing to sacrifice your entire people?”

“Not the entirety.” Rilke reasoned. “I would hope that you’d have the courtesy to leave a few of my choosing un-sacrificed. But the rest, yes, I’m actually counting on you destroy them. They’re not fit for this place any longer.”

The dragon circled her once more, slower this time. She could hear the stones beneath them scatter individually as its little feet pushed them aside, cautious, curious.

“There must be more you have to gain from this.” It said. “Why come all this way, tell us this? It could cost you your entire people, something must remain to balance that prospect. No amount of fury would persuade one to sacrifice their species.” It tilted its head low again, examining her up and down with its remaining eye. “Or perhaps we simply overestimate the logic of Little Folk. But still. What do you gain, coming up here, making yourself vulnerable with these claims? What would stop me butchering you where you stand and challenging the king myself?”

“First of all, I don’t think your teeth could take it.” Rilke felt confident enough to tease the creature she was trying to bargain with only because of her position. If she weren’t so sure in that, she’d be kneeling and grovelling, as her shaking legs were inclined to do. It at least earned a snort from the dragon, though she couldn’t tell if it was humour or not, so she hastened to her point. “But secondly, the king isn’t part of the old blood. After the fall of the dragons the throne was squabbled over and murdered to gain so many times one of the old blood hasn’t sat in it for probably as long as you’ve been alive. His majesty doesn’t even speak our language, and he’s more interested in making people fight for entertainment than do anything else a king ought to do.”

“So the blood was killed off.” The dragon huffed smoke again. “Then, again, there is no point to your being here! Dishonour or not, if the blood of the Bargain has died out there is no challenging it now, you waste our time.”

Rilke narrowly avoided stamping her foot. “I don’t! The blood isn’t on the throne, but it’s not dead. I have it.”

“Ah, so that is it. Little princess, are we?”

“Actually, I would be king.” Rilke corrected.

The dragon rattled with amusement again. “A lady?”

“King is only a title. Women have taken it before. I should have it - and I’m going to.”

“So there is logic in the Little Folk.” The dragon mused. “But you do not really expect to inherit the throne after restoring the dragons? When we return to our lands you will rule nothing.”

“I will rule my people.” Rilke shot back. Her chest still shook hollow with nerves, but without her the dragons had nothing; she could make her demands, and the time to do so was now. “We fight, in the castle arena, in the presence of the official rulers, witnessed and accepted in honourable combat. You will win, and the Bargain will be reversed. As only one of the blood has the power to do this, everyone will see me for what I am, and I will have the unquestioned right to rule my people. You will then allow the ones I choose to go free with me, and we will leave your lands forever. I will be king of the Little Folk, in whatever new lands we find, and the dragons will have everything that was taken from them.

The wind sailed over the Valley, sending loose gravel scattering down the walls and filling the place with the smell of sulphur and storm. Rilke felt the warmth from the belly of the mountain in her feet. She said no more, watching the dragon.

It unwound from around her, settling back in a pile of its own body. Its rotten eye had gathered with liquid in this time, and it shook its head to clear it.

“Tempting.” It allowed at last. “Delicious, and tempting. But you speak of honourable combat. I see not how, in your arena, with your weapons, there can be a fair challenge for the dragons. Surely we aren’t to stage the victory?”

In honesty, Rilke went cold as she realised she hadn’t actually thought of that. She looked the dragon up and down. Its presence was impressive, but… She took in its droopy, blind eye, the splatter of rot splashed over its face, its sad little legs.

“Of course not.” She found herself saying, as stunned as the dragon by what came out of her mouth next. “I’m going to train you. It’ll be a fair fight.”

The dragon wheezed smoke as it laughed again, this time a sour note of derision bubbling out of its gullet. “The Little Folk will train me? In war?”

“Well, if you don’t think you’re up to it, I’ll just find a worm who is.” Rilke snapped.

She didn’t have time to be horrified by her words this time before the dragon was on her.

She hadn’t even seen it move. Suddenly it was all around her, pinning her arms at strange angles to her side and constricting. Her shoulder flared, then twinged, popped, in the span of a second, and she cried out as she felt the tendons stretch the wrong way. The dragon’s eel-ish face swept down over her, dousing her with its sour breath. She saw crackles like lightning this close, stray embers from a bonfire, dancing at the back of its throat. From this distance she could see the dragon did in fact still have teeth; short, cracked and discoloured, but needle-thin and in so many rows she had no doubt it could make good on its threats to butcher her in a heartbeat.

At the back of its throat, where the sparks danced, a slimy beak opened in the darkness, slowly leeching translucent black liquid into its maw that glowed as the sparks skittered across it. Its breath took on the smell of sulphur and rain, like the wind howling through the Valley.

“Perhaps I will go and find myself a worm worthy to fight me.” It growled. A spark escaped, struck Rilke on the temple. She heard her hair and skin sizzle, and writhed in pain. The dragon coiled tighter.

“You can’t!” She gasped. Her ribs creaked as the dragon’s stone-stiff hide ground against them. “There’s only me!”

“Of the entire old blood?” The dragon rattled. “Only the little lady remains?”

“They killed us!” She wheezed. When she breathed out, the dragon tightened itself - she wouldn’t be able to breathe back in soon. It was going to strangle her. She was going to die right here, for nothing. “So they’d never be challenged! They took the throne and murdered every one of us they could find!”

“So convenient they did not find you.” The dragon purred.

“We hid!” She screamed in pain. “Changed our names, by the time my grandmother was born they thought we were gone! But they had to be sure - they only allowed families to bear one child. I have no cousins, no uncles - I was born with a twin, my mother hid her for three days before we were found.”

The dragon relented just enough to let her breathe, apparently interested enough to hear her out, and Rilke was surprised when her breath came out as a sob.

“They found us,” she said, “and they strangled Elaine right there beside me in our cradle. Then my mother, for keeping her. My father became a gladiator as punishment, I doubt he lived long, he was a baker. My grandmother raised me, told me everything - so I could do something! I’m your only hope! I won’t live long enough to bear children, not how they make us live, so the blood dies with me, and you’re doomed to be worms forever! You need me! It has to be me!”

The stink of brimstone filled her nostrils, brought tears to her eyes with its stench. Rilke squeezed them shut, gasped, as the crackling of lightning grew louder in her ears, sparks struck her cheeks, the dragon began constricting again.

And then. Air.

Her lungs expanded, and her ribs inched outward to accommodate. Breath trickled into her lungs. The dragon began to release her.

It unwound slowly, twining to pop her shoulder back as it did. Rilke yelped, but the pain was only that of relocating the joint. The dragon did not attack.

It slithered back to its place, eyeing her with a superior kind of amusement. Rilke staggered when it let go completely, but didn’t collapse. They watched each other, wordless, for a long time.

“So I… take it you believe me?” Rilke asked finally. Her voice was ragged. She drew a heaving breath.

The dragon settled back onto the coil of itself, smoke issuing lazily from its nostrils. The sparks in its mouth had faded.

“We have as much to lose as each other.” It said simply. “If you are lying to me, you will die soon anyway. I am interested to see how much truth such a little creature can hold. I suppose I will see tomorrow, when you return.”

Rilke’s battered heart fluttered with hope finally.

“You’ll do it?”

“We shall see if you can do it.” The dragon returned.

Overhead, thunder growled, low and close. Rilke scanned the walls of the Valley, the slippery gravel.

“You should start climbing now.” The dragon rumbled with an airy, teasing laugh. “You may not get back out once the rain starts. I will meet you here at dawn.”

And it swung around lazily and began to slither back over the stones.

Rilke turned back for the cliffside in a daze, barely even feeling the pain of the day, the stone under her nails, the warmth under her feet.

“Calf.”

She stopped, turned back. The dragon was watching her over its back with its good eye.

“Yearling. A nice fat one. I fight better on a full stomach.” It turned away again, rattling like thunder. “You did promise.”