(no subject)
For clodia_metelli 's prompt, from weeks and weeks ago. Original, I guess.
“…and on Wednesday I had witch.”
There was a pause, and a ripple of light in the dark. Tendontearer leaned forward on what looked to be her second set of elbows and her first display of interest of the whole afternoon.
“Tell me more,” she suggested.
“Er,” said Hangslast, who had shared this detail in expectation of congratulation, not interrogation.
“She tasted more or less like mailman,” she offered, after a moment’s consideration; “only mintier.”
Hangslast was a rather young dragon.
“Hmm,” said her hostess. Her mouth stretched long as she moved to scratch a soft place on her side with one hind leg, and Hangslast saw great teeth glitter in the deep pouch of that horned cheek. “You know your way around the magical tablecloth, I can see. But that wasn’t quite what I meant.”
“Oh,” said Hangslast. In the silence that followed, she thought wistfully about the gelatin of unicorn hoof she’d espied at the far corner of the tapestry they were squatting on, and then, when she noticed that the tapestry was not in fact a tapestry and was, in fact, a cloth from a giant’s table, albeit a heavily embroidered and lightly stained one, thought worse of it.
She had another helmetful of the tea instead, and tried valiantly not to slurp. She was hindered in this by the visor, which Tendontearer had seen fit to leave attached, and which bounced horribly against Hangslast’s lip every time she tipped the helmet up.
“What did you mean?” she said at last, when it became clear that Tendontearer was not going to clarify unprompted.
“How,” said Tendontearer, enunciating beautifully around her teeth, “did you catch her?”
“Oh!” said Hangslast, with more enthusiasm. “It was easy. I caught her house, you see. I’ve been watching her for weeks and she leaves her house to run around on its own every day from half past four to half past six, and it’s fast, you know, but quite stupid. I suppose because it’s part chicken. Anyhow, I had the legs off that and then I knew that all I had to do was wait inside and flame her as soon as she got within a hundred yards of the door.”
“That must have been uncomfortable.”
“Yes, extremely; I expect I still have creases in my wings from those damn rafters. But it was worth it, I think. Delicious, even better than mailman.”
“Did you take a look at what she’d left behind, while you were waiting?”
“A little,” said Hangslast, puzzled. “Well, I checked the cabinets for knights, in case it was like in Beanstalk and the Jack. There weren’t any.”
“And you didn’t happen to see a silver knife in these knightless cupboards, did you?” said Tendontearer. The quality of her voice had altered; it sounded richer, now, which in a dragon means she is amused, probably because she’s got more gold than you and has just thought of how best to keep it that way.
“No. Only herbs and liver and things.”
Tendontearer began to speak, then stopped, as something appeared to occur to her. She sighed.
“You ate the liver.” It wasn’t a question.
“And the herbs,” said Hangslast. “I needed something to distract me from the rafters, didn’t I?”
“Of course.”
“Should there have been a knife?” she asked, uncertainly.
“Not at all,” said Tendontearer, in a tone that forbid further inquiry. “Carry on with your story.”
“There’s not much more to it than that,” said Hangslast. “It all happened just as I had planned. She came flying towards me from the west, you know, from just over this ridge, and she looked simply furious, or at least I assume she looked furious- I couldn’t see her funny little eyes from there but she was all bundled up in rosy light, you know, and that couldn’t have been natural-“
“No, indeed,” murmured the older dragon.
Hangslast failed to hear her. “- and she came plunging down over the pines, and I let out a beautiful concentrated stream of my hottest flame (because I was really quite tired of that little hut, you know) and roasted her where she sat. Easy as burning toast.”
“I like toast lightly crisped,” remarked Tendontearer. “Lightly crisped toast absorbs more blood .”
Hangslast was slightly put out at this reception of her story, which seemed to her, now that she’d said it aloud, a rather wonderful one, and deserving of some acknowledgment from even a dragon as old and proud as Tendonterror.
“But less heat,” she argued, her annoyance making her bold. “What good is a soggy, lukewarm loaf when you could have bread with the coals still red in it, glowing through the gore?”
Tendonterror was no longer meeting her gaze; she seemed instead to be staring at Hangslast’s half-exposed belly. Hangslast curled a little in around the tender flesh, suddenly conscious that she was in another dragon’s cave- a dragon whom she had yet to see most of, thanks to the depth of the cool gloom- and she had just contradicted her.
But Tendontearer made no move to challenge Hangslast’s position as mistress of her own intestines, and after another tense minute Hangslast began to relax. Perhaps, she thought giddily, this was the first step towards establishing a more equal relationship with Tendontearer. Perhaps Tendontearer would start to accept her as a proper opponent, and not a kind of barely tolerated niece, now that she had proof of Hangslast’s cleverness and iron- or at least acceptably bronzed- willpower.
In her excitement, Hangslast entirely failed to notice the most obvious source of Tendontearer’s interest in her stomach, which was the ruddy glow that was beginning to show through the translucent flesh.
“You make a compelling point,” said Tendontearer.
“What?” said Hangslast, and then remembered what they’d been speaking of. “Oh, yes. I do, don’t I?” She preened.
Tendontearer pulled her gaze away from Hangslast’s abdomen and let it fall on the heap of gold just behind her, or at least on those bits of the heap of gold that peaked out from under Hangslast’s carefully draped lower half. Her head tilted almost imperceptibly to the left.
“Yes,” she said, absently; and then, in a very different tone, a very much higher and sweeter one: “If you get soot on this cloth, you can kiss all hope of crumpets farewell. It’s marked up badly enough as it is.”
“What?” said Hangslast. “I was speaking hypothetically, of course I wouldn’t burn toast here and now, it’s your tea service.”
Tendontearer ignored her. One of her long ears was pricked, now, the dark hole dilated, the scales on the rim glinting as they were pulled apart by the tautening skin. Hangslast listened, but heard nothing, aside perhaps from some faint moist echoes of her own words coming from inside her, and that was perfectly normal and to be expected when you spoke not by means of air and vocal cords but other, stranger mechanisms: every word a modulation of flame.
Her hostess’s eyes were once again focused on hers, she realized.
“Why don’t you sit back,” Tendontearer said. “Make yourself comfortable. You can take the heap to your right, as well. Spread out a bit.”
Hangslast was briefly so overwhelmed by this show of respect that she could not speak. “Oh- oh my. Oh, thank you,” she said, when she had regained her tongue. “You’re simply wicked. I’ll just do that, then.”
She dragged her upper body off the patch of tablecloth that depicted some long-dead giant’s face and also, very vividly, his diet, and slumped onto the second heap with a sigh of perfect contentment. As an afterthought, she sank her forelimbs first-elbow-deep into the mounded jewels on either side. It was unspeakably comfortable; every ancient coin a cool kiss between her fevered scales.
Tendontearer looked at her critically. “That will suffice, I suppose,” she said, again in a strangely changed and pitched voice. “Proceed.”
Hangslast pondered this instruction and decided it must mean to continue doing exactly what she was doing, which was sinking, exquisitely slow, into the gold. So she did.
It was when she encountered a crown, and rolled onto her flank a bit to dislodge its sharp points from the vulnerable inside of her thigh, that she saw the glow reflected off the treasure, its particular hue lending a human, bloody sheen to the metal that made it peculiarly attractive, like wealth fresh from the battlefield, or as lesser dragons called it, the supperfield. But she had no way of knowing that the source was her own underside, which she could hardly see in her present position, and not some enchanted object at a lower strata still; and in any case she was then distracted by the sight of the time, as displayed by a pocket watch that had been thrown up when she was rooting around for the crown.
It was half past four. And now Hangslast knew she had really made important progress that day, because every day before that, when she had visited Tendontearer for tea, Tendontearer had shooed her out at four twenty five, claiming she had an appointment.
“How lovely this is,” she sighed, and, because she could not resist, she closed one eye in a carefully calculated gesture of calm contempt well beyond what she could ever really bring herself to feel around Tendontearer.
And then, in what was also, as it happens, a carefully calculated gesture of calm contempt, she exploded.
There was an awful light and a terrible noise and a slight rise in local humidity.
When the first two had faded, Tendontearer slithered over to what had formerly been two separate piles, and tsked at the damage that had been done to her careful architecture of gold and gold and more gold.
“Good afternoon,” she said to the witch.
The witch climbed to her feet, and then climbed out of Hangslast’s. The silver knife flashed once in her hand; it had a tendency to reflect events around it at a slight delay.
“Not really,” she said, in a voice as dry as the deserts out of which dragons are first made: this on account of having no moisture left in her crackling body, after dying in dragonfire and clawing her way back to life through walls of dragonflesh.
“No,” agreed Tendontearer. “You know, when I said not to get soot on the cloth, I didn’t really mean for you to get guts on my gold, instead.”
“You allowed the plan,” said the witch. “Besides which, you like wasting centuries licking assorted humors off your hoard. It’s your idea of a hobby. Do you think I don’t remember the poodle incident?”
“Using poodle in the singular like that seems misleading,” said Tendontearer coldly. “But let us speak of other things.”
“Right,” said the witch. She yawned. Black-burnt skin cracked and peeled off her jaw.
“Did you intend to puncture the gas sacs like that?” Tendontearer asked.
“It was the quickest solution,” said the witch, in a way which brooked no further speculation.
Tendontearer was immune to brookings. “Because I thought you said you were simply going to cut your way out.”
“You must have heard wrong,” said the witch. “Understandable. You’re getting old, and there was quite a lot of muscle in the way.”
“Hmm,” said Tendontearer, and because the witch had once been human, bared teeth, in what might or might not have been a polite attempt at a smile.
The witch looked around her at a blast zone described by diamonds and dismembered extremities; at the treasure, with its bloody green sheen.
Thoughtfully, she slid the knife into her chest, the flesh and charred ribs parting to let the silver pass and closing over it.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve been drowned and hanged and halved and crushed, but hardly ever burnt.”
“What, really?” said Tendontearer. “I’m astonished. It seems like such an obvious choice. Burning should only be the first step, of course- by rights, the ashes ought to be scattered to the wind, afterward-”
The witch gave her a filthy look.
“Why don’t you offer me some quenching water for my poor throat,” she interrupted.
“Oh, no,” said Tendontearer pleasantly, for she had once before given the witch water from her mountain, and regretted it. “You can have tea.”
The witch made a face. More skin fell, and in larger pieces, dropping darkly to the bright ground like leaves.
“Very well,” she said. “With sugar, please.”
“Just as you like,” said Tendontearer, and went to make a second pot.
“…and on Wednesday I had witch.”
There was a pause, and a ripple of light in the dark. Tendontearer leaned forward on what looked to be her second set of elbows and her first display of interest of the whole afternoon.
“Tell me more,” she suggested.
“Er,” said Hangslast, who had shared this detail in expectation of congratulation, not interrogation.
“She tasted more or less like mailman,” she offered, after a moment’s consideration; “only mintier.”
Hangslast was a rather young dragon.
“Hmm,” said her hostess. Her mouth stretched long as she moved to scratch a soft place on her side with one hind leg, and Hangslast saw great teeth glitter in the deep pouch of that horned cheek. “You know your way around the magical tablecloth, I can see. But that wasn’t quite what I meant.”
“Oh,” said Hangslast. In the silence that followed, she thought wistfully about the gelatin of unicorn hoof she’d espied at the far corner of the tapestry they were squatting on, and then, when she noticed that the tapestry was not in fact a tapestry and was, in fact, a cloth from a giant’s table, albeit a heavily embroidered and lightly stained one, thought worse of it.
She had another helmetful of the tea instead, and tried valiantly not to slurp. She was hindered in this by the visor, which Tendontearer had seen fit to leave attached, and which bounced horribly against Hangslast’s lip every time she tipped the helmet up.
“What did you mean?” she said at last, when it became clear that Tendontearer was not going to clarify unprompted.
“How,” said Tendontearer, enunciating beautifully around her teeth, “did you catch her?”
“Oh!” said Hangslast, with more enthusiasm. “It was easy. I caught her house, you see. I’ve been watching her for weeks and she leaves her house to run around on its own every day from half past four to half past six, and it’s fast, you know, but quite stupid. I suppose because it’s part chicken. Anyhow, I had the legs off that and then I knew that all I had to do was wait inside and flame her as soon as she got within a hundred yards of the door.”
“That must have been uncomfortable.”
“Yes, extremely; I expect I still have creases in my wings from those damn rafters. But it was worth it, I think. Delicious, even better than mailman.”
“Did you take a look at what she’d left behind, while you were waiting?”
“A little,” said Hangslast, puzzled. “Well, I checked the cabinets for knights, in case it was like in Beanstalk and the Jack. There weren’t any.”
“And you didn’t happen to see a silver knife in these knightless cupboards, did you?” said Tendontearer. The quality of her voice had altered; it sounded richer, now, which in a dragon means she is amused, probably because she’s got more gold than you and has just thought of how best to keep it that way.
“No. Only herbs and liver and things.”
Tendontearer began to speak, then stopped, as something appeared to occur to her. She sighed.
“You ate the liver.” It wasn’t a question.
“And the herbs,” said Hangslast. “I needed something to distract me from the rafters, didn’t I?”
“Of course.”
“Should there have been a knife?” she asked, uncertainly.
“Not at all,” said Tendontearer, in a tone that forbid further inquiry. “Carry on with your story.”
“There’s not much more to it than that,” said Hangslast. “It all happened just as I had planned. She came flying towards me from the west, you know, from just over this ridge, and she looked simply furious, or at least I assume she looked furious- I couldn’t see her funny little eyes from there but she was all bundled up in rosy light, you know, and that couldn’t have been natural-“
“No, indeed,” murmured the older dragon.
Hangslast failed to hear her. “- and she came plunging down over the pines, and I let out a beautiful concentrated stream of my hottest flame (because I was really quite tired of that little hut, you know) and roasted her where she sat. Easy as burning toast.”
“I like toast lightly crisped,” remarked Tendontearer. “Lightly crisped toast absorbs more blood .”
Hangslast was slightly put out at this reception of her story, which seemed to her, now that she’d said it aloud, a rather wonderful one, and deserving of some acknowledgment from even a dragon as old and proud as Tendonterror.
“But less heat,” she argued, her annoyance making her bold. “What good is a soggy, lukewarm loaf when you could have bread with the coals still red in it, glowing through the gore?”
Tendonterror was no longer meeting her gaze; she seemed instead to be staring at Hangslast’s half-exposed belly. Hangslast curled a little in around the tender flesh, suddenly conscious that she was in another dragon’s cave- a dragon whom she had yet to see most of, thanks to the depth of the cool gloom- and she had just contradicted her.
But Tendontearer made no move to challenge Hangslast’s position as mistress of her own intestines, and after another tense minute Hangslast began to relax. Perhaps, she thought giddily, this was the first step towards establishing a more equal relationship with Tendontearer. Perhaps Tendontearer would start to accept her as a proper opponent, and not a kind of barely tolerated niece, now that she had proof of Hangslast’s cleverness and iron- or at least acceptably bronzed- willpower.
In her excitement, Hangslast entirely failed to notice the most obvious source of Tendontearer’s interest in her stomach, which was the ruddy glow that was beginning to show through the translucent flesh.
“You make a compelling point,” said Tendontearer.
“What?” said Hangslast, and then remembered what they’d been speaking of. “Oh, yes. I do, don’t I?” She preened.
Tendontearer pulled her gaze away from Hangslast’s abdomen and let it fall on the heap of gold just behind her, or at least on those bits of the heap of gold that peaked out from under Hangslast’s carefully draped lower half. Her head tilted almost imperceptibly to the left.
“Yes,” she said, absently; and then, in a very different tone, a very much higher and sweeter one: “If you get soot on this cloth, you can kiss all hope of crumpets farewell. It’s marked up badly enough as it is.”
“What?” said Hangslast. “I was speaking hypothetically, of course I wouldn’t burn toast here and now, it’s your tea service.”
Tendontearer ignored her. One of her long ears was pricked, now, the dark hole dilated, the scales on the rim glinting as they were pulled apart by the tautening skin. Hangslast listened, but heard nothing, aside perhaps from some faint moist echoes of her own words coming from inside her, and that was perfectly normal and to be expected when you spoke not by means of air and vocal cords but other, stranger mechanisms: every word a modulation of flame.
Her hostess’s eyes were once again focused on hers, she realized.
“Why don’t you sit back,” Tendontearer said. “Make yourself comfortable. You can take the heap to your right, as well. Spread out a bit.”
Hangslast was briefly so overwhelmed by this show of respect that she could not speak. “Oh- oh my. Oh, thank you,” she said, when she had regained her tongue. “You’re simply wicked. I’ll just do that, then.”
She dragged her upper body off the patch of tablecloth that depicted some long-dead giant’s face and also, very vividly, his diet, and slumped onto the second heap with a sigh of perfect contentment. As an afterthought, she sank her forelimbs first-elbow-deep into the mounded jewels on either side. It was unspeakably comfortable; every ancient coin a cool kiss between her fevered scales.
Tendontearer looked at her critically. “That will suffice, I suppose,” she said, again in a strangely changed and pitched voice. “Proceed.”
Hangslast pondered this instruction and decided it must mean to continue doing exactly what she was doing, which was sinking, exquisitely slow, into the gold. So she did.
It was when she encountered a crown, and rolled onto her flank a bit to dislodge its sharp points from the vulnerable inside of her thigh, that she saw the glow reflected off the treasure, its particular hue lending a human, bloody sheen to the metal that made it peculiarly attractive, like wealth fresh from the battlefield, or as lesser dragons called it, the supperfield. But she had no way of knowing that the source was her own underside, which she could hardly see in her present position, and not some enchanted object at a lower strata still; and in any case she was then distracted by the sight of the time, as displayed by a pocket watch that had been thrown up when she was rooting around for the crown.
It was half past four. And now Hangslast knew she had really made important progress that day, because every day before that, when she had visited Tendontearer for tea, Tendontearer had shooed her out at four twenty five, claiming she had an appointment.
“How lovely this is,” she sighed, and, because she could not resist, she closed one eye in a carefully calculated gesture of calm contempt well beyond what she could ever really bring herself to feel around Tendontearer.
And then, in what was also, as it happens, a carefully calculated gesture of calm contempt, she exploded.
There was an awful light and a terrible noise and a slight rise in local humidity.
When the first two had faded, Tendontearer slithered over to what had formerly been two separate piles, and tsked at the damage that had been done to her careful architecture of gold and gold and more gold.
“Good afternoon,” she said to the witch.
The witch climbed to her feet, and then climbed out of Hangslast’s. The silver knife flashed once in her hand; it had a tendency to reflect events around it at a slight delay.
“Not really,” she said, in a voice as dry as the deserts out of which dragons are first made: this on account of having no moisture left in her crackling body, after dying in dragonfire and clawing her way back to life through walls of dragonflesh.
“No,” agreed Tendontearer. “You know, when I said not to get soot on the cloth, I didn’t really mean for you to get guts on my gold, instead.”
“You allowed the plan,” said the witch. “Besides which, you like wasting centuries licking assorted humors off your hoard. It’s your idea of a hobby. Do you think I don’t remember the poodle incident?”
“Using poodle in the singular like that seems misleading,” said Tendontearer coldly. “But let us speak of other things.”
“Right,” said the witch. She yawned. Black-burnt skin cracked and peeled off her jaw.
“Did you intend to puncture the gas sacs like that?” Tendontearer asked.
“It was the quickest solution,” said the witch, in a way which brooked no further speculation.
Tendontearer was immune to brookings. “Because I thought you said you were simply going to cut your way out.”
“You must have heard wrong,” said the witch. “Understandable. You’re getting old, and there was quite a lot of muscle in the way.”
“Hmm,” said Tendontearer, and because the witch had once been human, bared teeth, in what might or might not have been a polite attempt at a smile.
The witch looked around her at a blast zone described by diamonds and dismembered extremities; at the treasure, with its bloody green sheen.
Thoughtfully, she slid the knife into her chest, the flesh and charred ribs parting to let the silver pass and closing over it.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve been drowned and hanged and halved and crushed, but hardly ever burnt.”
“What, really?” said Tendontearer. “I’m astonished. It seems like such an obvious choice. Burning should only be the first step, of course- by rights, the ashes ought to be scattered to the wind, afterward-”
The witch gave her a filthy look.
“Why don’t you offer me some quenching water for my poor throat,” she interrupted.
“Oh, no,” said Tendontearer pleasantly, for she had once before given the witch water from her mountain, and regretted it. “You can have tea.”
The witch made a face. More skin fell, and in larger pieces, dropping darkly to the bright ground like leaves.
“Very well,” she said. “With sugar, please.”
“Just as you like,” said Tendontearer, and went to make a second pot.