I was trying to thrust my skirts back down, push him away, drag myself free: useless. He held me with such casual strength. And then he reached for his own hose, and I said aloud, desperate, without thinking, “Vanastalem.”
Power shuddered out of me. Crusted pearls and whalebone closed up beneath his hands like armor, and he jerked his hands off me and stepped back as a wall of velvet skirts fell rustling between us. I caught myself on the wall trembling and struggling to get my breath while he stared at me.
And then he said, in a very different voice, a tone I couldn’t understand, “You’re a witch.”
I backed from him like a wary animal, my head spinning: I couldn’t get my breath properly. The gown had saved me but the stays were strangling-tight, the skirts dragging and heavy, as though they’d deliberately made themselves impossible to remove. He came towards me more slowly, a hand outstretched, saying, “Listen to me—” but I hadn’t the least intention of listening. I snatched up the breakfast tray, still sitting atop my dresser, and swung it wildly at his head. The edge of it clanged loudly against his skull and knocked him staggering sideways. I gripped it with both hands and lifted it up and swung again and again, blindly, desperate.
I was still swinging when the door burst open and the Dragon was there, in a long magnificent dressing-gown flung over his nightshift, his eyes savage. He took one step into the room and halted, staring. I halted too, panting, the tray still upraised mid-swing. The prince had sunk to his knees before me. A maze of blood was running down over his face, bloody bruises across his forehead. His eyes were closed. He fell over onto the floor before me unconscious with a thump.
The Dragon took in the scene, looked at me, and said, “You idiot, what have you done now?”
We heaved the prince onto my narrow bed together. His face was already blackening with bruises: the tray upon the floor was dented badly with the curve of his skull. “Splendid,” the Dragon said through his teeth, inspecting him—the prince’s eyes were staring and strange, dull, when he lifted their lids, and his arm, lifted, fell limply back to the cot and dangled off the side.
I stood watching, panting against the bodice, my desperate fury gone and only horror left. As strange as it may sound, I wasn’t only afraid of what would happen to me; I didn’t want the prince to die. He was still half in my head as the shining hero of legend, all confusedly tangled up with the beast who’d just been pawing at me. “He’s not—he’s not—”
“If you don’t want a man dead, don’t bludgeon him over the head repeatedly,” the Dragon snapped. “Go down to the laboratory and bring me the yellow elixir in the clear flask from the shelf in the back. Not the red one, and not the violet one—and try if possible not to break it as you bring it up the stairs, unless you want to try and persuade the king that your virtue was worth the life of his son.”
He laid his hands on the prince’s head and began to chant softly, words that shivered along my spine. I ran for the stairs clutching my skirts up against me. I brought the elixir back up in only moments, panting with haste and the confinement of my stays, and found the Dragon still working: he didn’t interrupt his chanting, only held a hand out towards me impatiently, beckoning sharply; I lay the flask in his hand. With the fingers of one hand, he worked out the cork and tipped a swallow into the prince’s mouth.
The smell of it was horrible, like rotting fish; I nearly choked with nausea just from standing nearby. The Dragon shoved the flask and cork back at me without even looking, and I had to hold my breath to close it. He was clamping the prince’s jaw shut with both hands. Even unconscious and wounded, the prince jerked and tried to spit. The elixir was glowing somehow from inside his mouth, so bright that I could see his jaw and teeth outlined like a skull.
I managed to shut the flask again without retching, and then sprang to help: I pinched the prince’s nose shut, and after a moment he finally swallowed. The brilliant glow went down his throat and into his belly. I could make it out still traveling all throughout his body, a light underneath his clothes, thinning out as it branched away into his arms and legs, until at last it died away too dim to see.
The Dragon let go of the prince’s head and stopped chanting the spell. He sagged back against the wall with his eyes shut: he looked drained as I had never seen him before. I stood hovering anxiously over the bed, over both of them, and finally I blurted, “Will he—”
“No thanks to you,” the Dragon said, but that was good enough: I let myself sink to the ground in my heap of cream velvet, and buried my head on the bed in my arms sheathed in embroidered golden lace.
“And now you’re going to blubber, I suppose,” the Dragon said over my head. “What were you thinking? Why did you put yourself into that ludicrous dress if you didn’t want to seduce him?”
“It was better than staying in the one he tore off me!” I cried, lifting my head: not in tears at all; I had spent all my tears by then, and all I had left was anger. “I didn’t choose to be in this—”
I stopped, a heavy fold of silk caught up in my hands, staring at it. The Dragon had been nowhere near; he hadn’t worked any magic, cast any spell. “What have you done to me?” I whispered. “He said—he called me a witch. You’ve made me a witch.”
The Dragon snorted. “If I could make witches, I certainly wouldn’t choose a half-wit peasant girl as my material. I haven’t done anything to you but try and drum a few miserable cantrips into your nearly impenetrable skull.” He levered himself up off the bed with a hiss of weariness, struggling, not unlike the way I’d struggled in those terrible weeks while he—
While he taught me magic. Still on my knees, I stared up at him, bewildered and yet unwillingly beginning to believe. “But then why would you teach me?”
“I would have been delighted to leave you moldering in your coin-sized village, but my options were painfully limited.” To my blank look, he scowled. “Those with the gift must be taught: the king’s law requires it. In any case, it would have been idiotic of me to leave you sitting there like a ripe plum until something came along out of the Wood and ate you, and made itself into a truly remarkable horror.”
While I flinched away appalled from this idea, he turned his scowl on the prince, who had just groaned a little and stirred in his sleep: he was beginning to wake, lifting a groggy hand to rub at his face. I scrambled up to my feet and edged away from the bed in alarm, closer towards the Dragon.