The Dragon Queen

— Duran —

“Come with me,” I said, holding out my hand.

Emre just looked at it.  Her face was streaked with ash and tears.  It was the face of all Dezang, but the only one I wanted to see.  Let the rest burn.  What did I care?

“This is my home,” she said finally.  “My people.”

“Your people are dying and your home belongs to the dragons now,” I said, and she flinched at the word “dragons.”

I knelt, and took her hand, though she had not accepted the offer before.  I touched her face, brushed her soot-darkened hair back, and she met my eyes in surprise.  She was older than me, but so like a child.  I always forgot that it was not my place to comfort and protect.  It was my place to usurp and destroy.  But my heart had never been in it.

“Emre, come away with me.  Leave all this.  What does it matter?”

“This is all I’ve ever known.  What else is there?” she asked.  “I’ve never even been outside the city.  I would not survive.”

“You will always be safe with me,” I promised.  “When have I ever let you down?”

This coaxed a tiny smile.  “Never,” she agreed.  “Duran, why are you so brave?”

“It’s the dragon in me,” I said lightly. “We fear nothing.”  It was a lie; I had plenty to fear.  But for Emre, fearless was all I could be.

— Emre —

Duran was the most amazing creature I had ever known.  She was beautiful in her own fierce way — with eyes the white-blue of the northern ice and hair like the heart of a flame.  She liked to call herself plain, but there was no face I’d rather look at.

When we were both very young she burned a man before my eyes.  It was to save me.  He had been hired to kill me, but before he could touch a hair on my head, the fire leapt from behind the grate and he fell, shrieking and cursing, till he was all eaten up.

I stood transfixed in terror, but Duran took my hand as we ran from the room

I knew it had been her doing, and I was afraid.  But she hugged me and brushed away my tears, and showed me how she could do little tricks with fire.  Harmless games, and theatres starring little flaming men.  The fire did not burn her.

From that point, we were the best and most loving of friends.  She did not tell me until much later that it was not an enemy of my father, but her own mother, who had sent the man to murder me.

— Duran —

We came from the north, where the dragons live.

“My beautiful girl,” my mother said often.

My mother was beautiful, and the king of men adored his queen.  The people called her the Dragon Queen; so unimaginative a name, so plain and forthright.  So like humans.  My father had been human, and so was I, in a way.  I could not fly, I had no dragon-form, and I should have been killed.  My mother once fled her home rather than let me meet my rightful fate.  She fled to the south and captured the heart of a king.  She could have captured the heart of any man, but not any man would do.

“I am not beautiful.”  Always, I protested.

I was plain as a human and would have been plain as a dragon, had I been able to become dragon at all.  My mother’s people could not understand why she clung so stubbornly to such an unfortunate creature.  The offspring of a dragon-human seduction was never blessed to be the best of both breeds, quite the opposite.  Dragon parents were seldom sentimental about it, since no dragon could love their human conquest, or the brat it sometimes produced.  They were usually extinguished upon birth.

“Emre is beautiful.  I am plain; an imp as they all call me.”

“Hush — don’t even speak that trollop’s name,” she responded.  “You are better than her by far.  Why, you have the blood of dragons in you, she is but a mere human.”

“My father was human, doesn’t that—”

“Your father was unimportant.  You are a princess because you are mine.  Never forget that.”

My mother said these words with more pride than affection, but I could hardly blame her.  She was dragonkind, and they do not love as humans do.  That she loved me at all is a wonder.  I was a mere shadow of all that she was.

When she was human, her hair was the palest blonde, like sunlight on snow, and when she was dragon, her scales shone like white gold.  She was a tall and slender woman, with something of the dragon’s long body and tail in her form.  When she was her true self, I loved her best.  No one else could see her that way.  They called her Dragon Queen because she came from the north and yet the fact that she was not merely a pale, fierce northern woman was a rumor, a myth — a closely kept secret that somehow, everyone knew, if only in their darkest dreams.  They called me the little fire girl, the imp, the devil child.  The humans would have stomped me out as gladly as the dragons, but I was the Dragon Queen’s daughter, and no one would dare.

I was five when my mother became queen, and I a princess, though the title never seemed to suit me well.  She married a man known as the King of Dezang; but I always thought of him as the king of men, because the true of King of Dezang was the king of dragons.  This king of men had a daughter, and from the first I knew that my mother would destroy her if she could, and of course she could, because she was the Dragon Queen.

— Emre —

My father’s death changed everything.

My step-mother had never had any love for me; this I knew.  She was cold and distant, but I didn’t care.  I was not looking for a new mother.

When my father died, the throne was to be mine.  I was his eldest child.  His only child.  But the title of “Dowager Queen” did not sit well on the head of that proud creature.  I should have seen it coming, I suppose.  The idea that she would simply cede everything to a girl she so obviously hated seems silly now.  Trite, and trusting.

Duran had known.  There was no soul alive who knew the Queen better than her daughter.  The King, my father, had never even come close.  And yet, I do not think that even Duran had guessed that all of Dezang would burn before her mother saw it in my hands.

I was asleep in my bed when she came for me.  Every assassin she had ever sent for me had died, if not by knife or arrow, then by fire.  Duran’s fire.  Now that I was Queen, she was determined to kill me herself.

She burned through my bodyguards and my walls.  Now that my father was dead there was no pretense of humanity about her.  It was the sight of a dragon that welcomed my waking eyes.  A brilliant white monster with death in its mouth.

I would have died surely this time.  But when the jaws opened and flames leapt out, it was not me they engulfed.  It was Duran.

She did not burn.  The flames surrounded her, where she stood at the foot of my bed, her arms outstretched and hands splayed to capture the fire.  She glowed as if made of the fire herself, and then in another moment there was no fire at all.

The Dragon Queen stood there, silently, eye to eye with her daughter.  I heard nothing, but somehow I knew that they were speaking to each other, in the way that dragons do.  I cowered in my bed.  What else could I do?  Heir to my father’s throne, maybe, but still I am no more than a girl of sixteen, terrified.  Terrified, but not alone, for I had Duran.

— Duran —

My mother had loved a human child when all her people told her not to.

Perhaps that is why I thought that, in the end, she would understand why I loved a human girl even though she had told me not to.

She had to have known, all those years, that it was me who kept thwarting her attempts to kill Emre.  There was anger and betrayal in her eyes when I blocked the flames from Emre.  Not surprise.  Disappointment, not surprise.

“You would choose her over me,” she hissed, deep in my mind.

I could not speak like dragons do.  I could listen, but not reply.  I could have replied with my human mouth, spoken the answer, but why?  She knew it already.  All I did was look her in the eye, and remain silent.

“So be it,” she said.  “You have chosen the human, and so you are nothing more than a human to me.  You are not my daughter.”

And then she flew away, out the window, into the night, and began to burn.  All of Dezang burned that night.  One dragon can destroy an entire city, no matter what the tales of human heroism might say.  All it takes is one dragon who wants it bad enough.

I saved Emre, and in doing so, condemned thousands to burn.

— Emre —

“Come with me,” she said, holding out her hand.

I looked at it, dumbly, unable to think of anything besides the fact the Dezang was burning.  All of it was burning.

Go with her?  Where?  Where would we go?

“This is my home.  My people,” was all I could say.

“Your people are dying and your home belongs to the dragons now,” she said, and the words rang harshly in my ears.  The terror of her mother’s true form was fresh in my mind.  It was only a matter of hours since we’d fled from the castle and through the streets, till we reached the gates.  I could still see the mouth full of gleaming white teeth opening to reveal the throat, so like an abyss, just before . . . .

Duran took my hand, startling me out of the dark memory.  She brushed my face tenderly, and said, “Emre, come away with me.  Leave all this.  What does it matter?”

I loved her, but I was afraid.  “This is all I’ve ever known.  What else is there?  I’ve never even been outside the city.  I would not survive.”

She shook her head.  “You will always be safe with me.  When have I ever let you down?”

I could not help but smile.  “Never,” I conceded, and marveled at how strong she was in the face of all this terror and betrayal.  “Duran, why are you so brave?”

“It’s the dragon in me.  We fear nothing.”

I took a breath and wiped the tears from my cowardly face.  If she could endure flames for me, I could stand up, and continue on.  What else could I do?

— Duran —

As soon as we were outside the city gates, she came for us.  A vast shadow emerging from the clouds of smoke, and then, into the moonlight, her white scales shining.  She circled us, and I was truly afraid.

Emre fell to the ground and covered her head, as if that would do any good.  I spread my arms and faced my mother, not knowing if it would do any good, either.

The flames poured down from the sky, and I could barely contain them.  I made them all come to me, till I was blind and staggering under my mother’s fury.  The flames shrieked and spat all around me, and I thought I might become the fire.

And then there was silence.  The Dragon Queen circled slowly above us in the sky.  Her voice in my mind said, “Do you think you can stand against me?  Your father’s blood condemns you to the ground, how long can you last?”

I did not answer.

“It was all for you.  You were to be queen after me.  You were to be the heir of Dezang, not her.  I care nothing for the throne, not for myself, I have the skies.  You ungrateful, ugly child.  Everything I have done for you, you throw back in my face.”

Finally, I answered.  “I am not your puppet.  Perhaps if we play this game long enough, I will fall and you can kill Emre, but don’t claim to be doing it for me.  Nothing that you do has ever been for me; you could never understand what I have wanted.”

She did try, again, and again, to burn Emre.  But the flames always landed on me.  I could not fly, but I could burn.  Oh, how I could burn.

In the end, I was the victor.  I do not know if she gave up, or simply ceased to care.  She flew away, back to the north.  I never saw my mother again, after that night.  By loving Emre I had lost the creature that had once loved me, in her own strange, destructive way.

I am the Dragon Queen now.  Not the Queen of Dezang, but of Airidan.  It hardly matters.  One land of men is much the same as any other.  It is all my mother ever wanted for me.  She could not understand that without Emre by my side none of it meant anything.

I do no understand the love of dragons, but then, I do not understand love at all.  It is beautiful and brave, and it burns entire cities to the ground.

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