stroked me with her hand in precious rings.”
“You mean you’ve hurt girls?”
“I have even killed…” Reason paused. “Why should you want to know about my past? Think of the dragon. You’re lucky you found fun. Mind your own business.”
Her Reason’s past is no one else’s business, is it? Estella frowned. That doesn’t make sense. Considering, of course, that her Reason had been taken from her by magic, and she’d been trapped in it, anything could have happened to her that she didn’t know about. If the situation is extraordinary, it must be handled differently. It is better not to ask Reason what he himself does not want to tell. He was already ranting about the dragon’s past mischief.
“Last time, the dragon ate a brewer and then wondered why no one else made beer. He even crawled into the kitchen to burn everyone there. Anyway, acted like a serviceable worker who stopped being fed for no reason.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Of course, you weren’t there yet.”
“Were you?”
It seems strange that her mind was born before hers. Maybe that’s why it got lost in the beginning. Reason chuckled slyly.
“You know too much, you’ll grow old early.”
Estella immediately wanted to look in the mirror. No wrinkles? Mind chuckled something very snidely. She didn’t have a mirror with her; she must have left it on the dressing table in her bedroom. But if she rubbed her dragon scales with her sleeve, they were just as reflective as a mirror. Her face looked fine. There was no sign of aging yet. And she was too young. She wasn’t even twenty. The dragon really liked her. And as everyone knows, dragons only like the youngest and most beautiful girls. An aging lady would not have been to his liking.
As luck would have it, just as she was about to make nice with a dragon, a sentry snuck into the dungeon.
“So long since anyone’s been down here,” Reason muttered as he heard the clatter of his armor, “your song is what got the sentries going. You ought to keep your voice down.”
“So the dragon wouldn’t have heard me! He wouldn’t have woken up.”
The watcher’s helmet was already gleaming in the passage. The dragon moved only the tip of its mighty tail to send the sentry tumbling to his feet. The armor thundered loudly. The halberd flew aside and nearly decapitated Reason. Thankfully, Reason was very agile and bounced off the blade in time.
“It’s like war at home!” He complained, while the dragon had already clawed at the guard and was about to unleash a blast of fire on the unfortunate man.
“No, it is not here! It would set the whole castle on fire! Not, Emerald!” Estella whispered, but the dragon could not hear her. But it was impossible not to hear Reason howling at the top of his lungs. He was waving his clawed paws vigorously, leaping onto the pile of barrels in front of the dragon, and shouting:
“Stop it! You’ll burn another brewer. Who’s going to make you beer?”
The dragon scratched at the back of his head with his claw. Drunkenness was not a hindrance to his quick wits. But he had let the sentry go for nothing. He was no brewer, so he began to panic.
“We must fly away while your guards run about the castle looking for the dragon, and when the clamor dies down we’ll be back.”
Reason was right. Estella herself was terrified of the conflagration that could break out as soon as an armed detachment burst into the dragon’s dungeons. She tried to climb onto the dragon’s back, clinging to the spikes. She did not succeed. She herself only slid down the dragon’s fur. If the dragon hadn’t have held her up by his wingtip, she would have never made it onto his backbone. But there, between the big green spines and the ridge that extended from her head to her back, she sat down comfortably in the saddle.
“Let’s fly! Take me for a ride!” Estella asked, but the dragon did not respond.
“That’s not the way to ask,” Reason jabbed him with a claw, and the dragon sprang away. She barely had time to land on its back.
Reason slid onto the dragon’s ridge like a nimble black flea. There was a broad opening to the outside of the dungeon, but no one could see it because King Abraham’s cloaking spell had obscured it. If Reason hadn’t told her all this, Estella herself wouldn’t have known why they’d found themselves too quickly in the starry night beyond the castle.
The only unpleasant thing was the rattling of the guards’ weapons from behind and the shouting:
“The dragon has kidnapped the princess!”
“The whole henhouse is abuzz,” Reason grumbled grudgingly.
“It is the barracks, not the henhouse,” Estella corrected.
Reason chuckled.
“And I’ll prove to you that the keepers’ barracks is no better than the henhouse, where a cunning fox will wring everybody’s neck in the morning.”
“Do you want to etch a dragon on the soldiers, or do you want to claw them yourself?” For some reason Estella was more afraid of Reason’s claws than she was of dragon fire.
“No. What’s a castle without guards? The neighboring kings would laugh at us. I have a better idea. When we get back, I’ll go to the cellar and pour all the guards some wine that’ll knock out their memory. They’ll think they’ve only dreamt of the princess being kidnapped by a dragon. Besides, there was no kidnapping. You rode the dragon yourself. Did you know that in the old days, riding a dragon was considered a great art?”
“Emerald didn’t kidnap me,” she repeated dumbly, trying to shield her new friend. “But to deprive the Watchers of their memories is despicable. They might forget their families, their duties…”
“And above all, they would forget their pay and rations,” Reason summed up. “We’ll avoid any unnecessary expenditure in the future.”
“Forget wages, that’s all right, but rations…” She squeezed her eyes shut in the strong wind that came from her flight. “People die if you don’t feed them, don’t they?”
“But an army of zombies wouldn’t be as much trouble as it was today. The dead are more docile than the living. True, they rot quickly, but skeletons can serve and fight, too. Believe me!”
Estella was no longer listening to him, but was enjoying her flight. The towns and villages below became so small, as if they were toys. If you ride a flying dragon, it’s as if you are the queen of a toy kingdom. You can’t even see the people below. But the starry skies are very close. It seems as if you could reach up and touch the stars like a bed canopy.
“When we get home, I’m going to order myself a star-colored canopy to resemble the night sky.”
“We could not get back!”
“What do you mean?”
Reason chuckled. Clinging to the twisted horn on top of the dragon, he clearly felt like a flight captain.
“When I fly, I feel like the king of the universe,” he declared. “I wish I had wings of my own.”
“Did you have wings?” Estella wondered. The only thing protruding from his skinny black back seemed to be hump-shaped growths.
Down below she glimpsed the roofs of fanciful castles and fortresses. She’d never seen such architectural marvels before.
“This is no longer Aluar!”
“That’s right! We are already abroad!”
“We’re abroad!”
“What did you want? Do you want to spend your whole life in your own country with a flying dragon?”
“I thought we’d