The Dragon's Heart

When the I heard the cry of the lookout I raced out onto the deck. There it was! The great mountain capitol of the dragonewts. I had to force my way to the edge of the railing through a mixture of merchants, officials and even aeronauts, for though the crew of the airship had made this same journey many times before, I'd been told the sight was so astounding that familiarity did not lessen its impact.

It was an understatement. Across the wide sea of cloud, boiling white and lit salmon- gold by the morning sun, a great dark pinnacle had appeared. This was the Dragon's Tooth, and the thin wisp of smoke that rose from its summit to stain the sky was a warning that it was no mere mountain but a volcano.

"Look," said a boy beside me, dressed in the uniform of an aeronaut yeoman. His finger sought out a part of the mountain as it grew closer. "There, on the right!"

I and the others beside me sought out the target of his pointing. On the side of the mountain, as though growing from its dark stone, was the castle of the dragonewts. Huge curved ramparts cut in tiers from the cliff and towers constructed from the remnants of the stone speared up into the sky, topped with red-and-gold pennants. Lights burned throughout the myriad of windows like stars scattered across a night sky. Yet despite the viciousness of the castle's aspect, it was beautiful, a brutal beauty like that of the dragonewts themselves.

"I had no idea it would be so huge," I muttered. The boy laughed and was about to say something else to me when orders were barked and he scrambled away with his fellow aeronauts across the deck to their stations.

"Frightening, isn't it," said the merchant on my other side. The only ones left now were the passengers of the ship.

I shrugged. "Beautiful, too, though."

The merchant snorted. "Be careful of that eye for beauty, lad. The dragonewts are not to be trifled with. We all have to hope it doesn't come to war"

I listened politely. I'd heard a lot of such talk recently. Tensions had risen between our nation and that of the dragonewts over a territory dispute, but it had not yet come to blows. It would not, I knew. For decades dragonewts and humans had engaged in a game of pushing and posturing. This current disagreement over the southern islands was no different.

But then, my father was ambassador to the dragonewts, and so I was privy to more accurate inside information. He didn't often speak about such things on the few weeks of relaxation he received when he joined my mother and my brothers at home to celebrate one of our seemingly endless series of religious festivals, but the hints were enough.

The merchant continued his spiel. I only half-listened, nodding politely and making the odd conciliatory murmur at some of his more outlandish statements: the dragonewts were on the point of declaring war, the ambassadors were about to be recalled, there was a fleet of their airships hidden somewhere in the southern islands poised to strike our cities on the south coast if we didn't back down...

"Fishing rights," the merchant snorted. "All over fishing rights. Of course the scalies reckon they have a religious right to the southern ocean, even though our interests have long been established..."

I stopped listening and frowned. His use of the common slur 'scalies' irritated me. Such ugly xenophobia was becoming more and more common, but luckily I heard little of it where my family lived.

I didn't want to hear any more. I muttered my apologies and went below decks. We would be mooring in a short while and I had to get my luggage in order.

My heart raced. I'd been in a state of excitement since my father had sent word for me to join him here in Dragon's Tooth. I'd never visited the land of the dragonewts, although I knew much about it. As the youngest son of the family and far from the favourite, I wasn't in the running to take over my father's position so this trip was for pleasure rather than business. My father had asked me to pack my best clothes since my stay here was to be an extended one.

I was happy for the distraction. Life back in Varvasena, despite its myriad of pleasures, had become boring. It was a cosmopolitan city, it was true, of tabernas and cafes and sun-drenched porticoes, but I had little to do there. As the youngest, I was the leftover. Already one of my brothers had joined the army, another the church, and of course the eldest would inherit my father's position, since it was a hereditary one. I found myself thinking back more and more to my schooling. Those had been difficult times for me, but they'd had the benefit at least of having been exciting.

The school had been an international one in the free city of Lampeti. As neutral ground, many ambassadors sent their children there for their education. My brothers hadn't remained there long, since they had were careers waiting for them back home, and with them gone I'd had to fend for myself, which I had without incident - until she came.

I still burned with shame at the thought that it was a girl who had bullied me. Well, perhaps girl misrepresented the situation. She was a female dragonewt, her name Lanissa. That pretty name and - damn it to hell! - her infuriating beauty, intelligence and confidence had all helped to hide a black heart.

I don't know why she singled me out for special attention. I was the only one she would trip with her tail, the only one she would tease unmercifully with her sharp tongue, the only one she'd grab from behind and lift high into the air while she laughed at my wildly kicking feet.

I hated heights. I always had. I usually stayed below decks when airships took off, fearing the sight of the earth receding. In flight I had little problem so long as the ship remained high enough that the clouds became a second ground. But Lanissa, once she had discovered my weakness, had never given me a moment's peace.

I wondered where she was now. Did she live in the capitol? I recalled that her father had been a government official, a rather high-up one. She'd always had the best clothes and all that a child might desire. Of course, I myself had been no pauper, but...

The ship shuddered, the shouting and footfalls of the crew loud through the wood of the deck as they moored the ship.

We'd arrived.

--

As I jockeyed for a place on the deck, juggling my luggage and jostling with the other passengers to cross the gangplank, a consternation arose on the dock. I couldn't see anything due to the crush, but I heard the clatter of armour mixed with exclamations and protests.

Crested helms and the tips of tridents bobbed over the heads of the crowd. Dragonewt soldiers, boarding the ship.

The people before me were pushed aside and a soldier appeared. Like all dragonewts, he was tall, almost seven foot. He was clad in red armour, richly embossed in gold, from the top of his crest to the tip of his tail. His helm, faceless but for the golden slit-pupilled eyes behind it, swivelled as he scanned the crowd.

His eyes settled at last on me. He stepped forward, took hold of my arm and threw open his visor. He scanned my face carefully, then grunted.

"This is the ambassador's son," he said.

Other soldiers appeared and cleared a path through the crowd to the gangplank. The one holding my arm looked down at me.

"Come with me," he said.

What choice did I have? With the soldier still gripping my arm, I struggled to lug my suitcase one-handed, but he grew irritated by the delay and with the click of clawed fingers had another soldier relieve me of my burden. This second individual grinned down at me with a mouth full of needle-sharp canines as he lifted the suitcase effortlessly with his muscular tail.

The crowd watched, hushed, as I was led off the airship.

I swallowed. So the merchant had been right. It was war.

-

"It's not war," said my father. We were sitting in his drawing room, having tea served to us by his human maid. The cushions at my back and a hot cup of tea in my hand were all the more welcome given the fact that I'd expected the soldiers to lead me straight to either prison or execution.

Instead they'd brought me to my father's domicile. It was a dragonewt home, huge rooms carved out of the living rock, but furnished in human opulence, tapestries and dividers making the space more pleasing to the human eye. Walls of dragonewt homes are traditionally decorated with relief carvings documenting the deeds of famous ancestors, but here the gory details were chastely covered by patterned blinds.

"But I'd heard that-"

"It's not war yet," my father interrupted. "But we are most definitely on the cusp of it."

"The southern islands?"

He nodded. "Among other things. Our air-force is on high alert, ready for the inevitable attack."

I slumped back in my seat. "So war is inevitable?"

My father made no reply. His eyes considered me over the tea cup as he took a deep draught. My father always drank tea like that, in a single or at most two draughts, no matter how hot it was. He hated laziness, hated delays. No wonder I was at the bottom of the list of his favourite sons.

"No," he said. "It's not inevitable. Although the whole dragonewt government is clamouring for war, and many of our own people, idiots every one of them, are doing the same, the decision to declare war falls to one individual and one individual only - the Suzerain "

The Suzerain was the leader of the dragonewt nation.

"So what are the Suzerain's feelings?" I asked.

"Despite the clamouring of the senate, he does not want war." He waved away the maid's proffered refill of his cup. "The current Suzerain is a reasonable man. Lucky that tensions should finally broil over while he held the sceptre." He leaned forward. "He's an old friend of mine, as well. You've met him."

"The Suzerain?" I put my cup down. "When?"

"When you were still at school," my father said. "Do you remember the play?"

I groaned. The play? How could I forget it? I'd made a fool of myself in front of everyone, students and teachers and parents alike.

Yes, the play. When I was voted the lead male part of the hero I thought that I was finally shaking off my unpopularity. But when I discovered that Lanissa was playing the heroine, I knew what had happened. She'd had the other students vote me in as a joke.

But I couldn't just quit. I was too proud for that. If Lanissa was trying to humiliate me that way, I wasn't going to let her. The rehearsals themselves were not that bad. I had reams of lines to learn, but Lanissa for whatever reason played along and refrained from her usual pranks. I had no idea at the time that she was just lulling me into a false sense of security.

Even the night of the play everything seemed to be going well. The play was an old story, the usual star-crossed lovers thing, set during the civil war. The heroine was of course supposed to be human, but being a mixed school many of the human parts were being played by non-humans.

There was no denying the fact - that night Lanissa looked beautiful. It was the first time I'd ever seen her in a dress - she'd refused to wear one for the full dress rehearsals - but there was something about her as we waited behind the stage. She was nervous. I'd never seen her nervous before. The strange fragility had stripped her face of its usual fierceness and the wings furled at her back shivered.

She grabbed my arm. "I have to ask you something," she said. She began to lead me outside but I shrugged myself free.

"Let's just get this over and done with, okay?"

Her face took a strange cast, but then it shifted to an expression I knew all too well: irritation. She stormed off.

During the entire play she kept missing her cues and improvising, but somehow she pulled everything together enough that the audience didn't once suspect there was anything wrong. The rest of us, though, had to fall over ourselves to keep the play moving in the right direction.

The final scene came. As the hero, I was to defend her honour against the villain, my wicked half-brother. As I drew her aside and stepped forward her tail slipped from her dress and I stumbled over it. My sword went spinning across the stage.

I stood there, frozen in panic. Lanissa looked to me, challenge in her eyes. What did she expect me to do? It was her fault! The crowd began to murmur and with a sigh of exasperation she strode forward and snatched up the sword herself. She grabbed my arm and pulled me behind her and challenged the villain, who had been standing there the whole time watching the debacle unfold with horror on his face. Rescued, he threw himself back into his role and fought Lanissa while I was forced to play the role of the maiden whose honour had been besmirched.

Lanissa knocked the sword from my half-brother's hand and forced him to yield. Then, her hand around my waist, she drew me tight against her.

Those dark-slitted golden eyes stared into my own and I froze. She arched a single pretty eyebrow.

"Kiss me," she hissed.

"What?"

"This is the part where you kiss me!"

"Kiss you?"

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, never mind. I'll do it."

Then without delay she leaned over and dipped me at the waist, kissing me on the lips to thunderous applause.

As soon as the curtain had fallen, I breathlessly pushed her away.

"What the hell were you trying to do?" I snapped at her.

Lanissa's eyes flashed and her crest bristled. "Save the play, of course. When you tripped over..."

"You tripped me over with that stupid tail of yours!"

Her mouth fell open in shock and her second eyelids slipped over her pupils, which always happened when she grew angry. "Stupid? You're the one who...!"

"I hate you!"

I pushed past her and ran from the theatre. Lanissa came after me, calling my name, but I made sure she didn't catch up with me.

Afterwards, the play was applauded for its progressive re-imagining of the old story and Lanissa was praised by everyone. Things always ended up like that. Everyone always thought the best of her, no matter what she did.

After the disaster of the play I avoided her. Luckily, she left school soon afterwards. Her father, then ambassador to Lampeti, was promoted and recalled to the capitol. I never saw Lanissa again. But I still often thought of her. You didn't easily forget a humiliation like that.

"Yes," I said at last to my father's question. "I remember the play. So the Suzerain was there? The only dragonewt I remember in the audience was Lanissa's dad."

My father nodded. "Yes, that's him."

A dark pit opened in my stomach and I scanned my father's face for any trace of a joke. It was a desperate ploy. My father seldom joked. "But he wasn't the..."

My father snorted at my confusion. "Of course he wasn't the Suzerain back then. Have you forgotten all the lessons I gave you about dragonewt culture? How the Suzerain is determined by single combat?"

No, I hadn't forgotten. "So that means Lanissa is daughter of the Suzerain," I murmured. "Good for her." Like I said, everything always seemed to turn out well for Lanissa.

My father smiled. "I'm glad you remember her. You two were good friends, as I recall."

"Well," I said. "I wouldn't exactly say..."

My father ignored me. He brushed aside the teacup before him and reached over the table to take my hand.

I stared at his hand, horrified, wondering whether I'd said something wrong and my father was going to pull me across the table and thump me. He didn't, which was actually far more disturbing. My father never showed affection like this.

"Son, I'm sorry I called you out here without telling you what this was all about. But I couldn't risk you refusing to come if you found out."

If I found out? Something was wrong. I felt the pit in my stomach widen and fill with ice.

"I have a request to make of you," my father continued. "But first you have to promise me to hear me out, to actually think over it before you refuse."

"What is is?" I asked.

My father sat back and steepled his fingers. He often did that when he was nervous. "Like I said earlier, the Suzerain and I are good friends. And I am respected by the dragonewts, as much as any human is. They may distrust our government, but after living here with them for a decade they have come to trust me. And so the Suzerain and I have come up with a way to avert the war. The plan involves you."

"Me?" I cried. "But you know I'm no soldier. I have no idea about military matters or-"

My father laughed."Fortunately for you, the plan has nothing to do with fighting. We're trying to avert a war, remember, not start one."

"But I'm not much good at anything else, either," I protested.

"That may be true or it may not," said my father. "But you have one thing to commend you: you're single."

"Single?" I repeated. "But I don't know how that..."

Oh. Oh no. No, god.

My voice fell to a horrified whisper. "You're not seriously suggesting...?"

My father nodded. "The Suzerain has a number of daughters, and luckily one is still unmarried, and luckier still-"

I stopped listening. There was no need. When it came to matters of luck, both her good and my own lousy luck, I knew there was only one name my father was going to say.

Lanissa.

I said nothing for a long while. Then I shook my head.

"Impossible," I said.

"Why?"

"Father, you've forgotten what she was like in school. She was a horrible bully. She made my life a misery."

My father's brow furrowed. "Really? You never said anything about it."

"I told you multiple times," I replied. I had, but my father had always been more focussed on matters of state than on the state of his own son.

"Surely that's all in the past," he said. "It's been more than ten years. From all reports she's become a delightful young female."

I laughed, then. "Now I know that that's got to be impossible," I said. "And I also know something of dragonewt culture. They marry in their late teens, right? Lanissa is my age. So she never got married, and I know why."

My father sat back. "You disappoint me, son."

"I know," I said. "I always have."

"Son, do you remember the trip we took to Smila?"

I nodded. Smila was our southernmost city. On the southern coast, it lay beside the beautiful middle ocean. It was famous for its long beaches of pure white sand, its sunny plazas and shaded, wisteria-draped colonnades.

"As we speak, our air-force lies hidden in the mountains of the hinterland. We have intelligence that Smila is the point where the dragonewts will invade from."

"Invasion?" I whispered.

"We have no chance of saving Smila. But we have to make a show of resistance, or else our people will become demoralised."

"So all the people there..."

My father's face was grim. "Too many to evacuate, and anyway, as soon as we started, we'd be alerting the dragonewts to the fact that we're privy to their military communications. They'd strike immediately. We've calculated our potential losses, best case scenario, at ten to fifteen thousand."

I closed my eyes. Those beautiful plazas bombed to ashes, the gorgeous beaches soaked in blood. The horror of the vision sickened me.

And yet, I felt another sickness, deeper down, a nauseous panic.

I knew what it was. It was the realisation that I was going to say 'Yes'.

-

My father was of course pleased with my decision. He clapped me on the back and grinned and made a lewd joke that I refuse to put down on paper.

I'd assumed that after agreeing to the marriage they'd take me straight away to see Lanissa, but it turned out I didn't really know as much about dragonewt culture as I thought I did.

"The bride and groom may not see each other until the wedding itself," my stylist explained to me. She was an older dragonewt and rather short, around six foot. Like all stylists, she was a walking advertisement for her skills, wearing elaborate make-up - dragonewt females favour different types of mineral foundations that give their skin and scales a glittering quality. Her large eyes were all the more striking for the black kohl around them, shining like gemstones, and she wore her dark hair long, in ringlets.