The Dragon's Heart

"What, really?" I heard a strange tone in my voice, and I was surprised to recognise it as disappointment.

This pleased the stylist. "Oh, you have the rest of your lives to look at each other, after all. It's inauspicious to tempt fate by seeing each other before the sacrifices have been made and the venue subjugated."

Subjugated. Even though dragonewts spoke Common as well as their own language, it was peppered with phrases such as this, direct translations from the dragonewt language, as I understood. My father was fluent but I'd never mastered more than a few words. The language demanded a level of control over the throat I just couldn't seem to attain.

I looked at myself in the mirror. She'd done a good job. I'd been worried, at first, that I would end up with some dragonewt style - I'd never suited braids or any of the other ways dragonewt males fashion their hair. But the stylist knew all about human styles and after a few looks at my profile and my portrait she'd quickly made up her mind.

She turned the chair I was sitting on and let me look at myself from different angles.

"I really like it," I said.

The stylist smiled, showing row on row of needle-sharp teeth. The effect was alarming on such an otherwise auntie-like face.

"You look very handsome indeed," she said, placing a taloned hand on my shoulder. "Why, I'd marry you myself. But then you would have to fight my husband to the death, which might prove a bit of a problem. He has a bad leg, though, so you would have a chance of beating him."

Dragonewt humour? I could never tell and my smile was awkward. She helped me out of the chair, which was difficult to do considering the complicated array of armour I was wearing. Another unexpected element of dragonewt culture. There had been some frenzied searching for armour that would fit my rather-average human frame and a lot of muttering about not having time to do a proper job with a custom piece of armour, until one of her assistants had found just the thing: a suit of armour so perfect it might have been made for me.

I admired myself in the mirror. The armour made even my harmless self look dangerous and I was proud of the fact until I discovered it was a child's armour I was wearing.

"My son's," explained the assistant. "He was a very big boy."

I sighed. Well, it didn't matter. Luckily, I wouldn't have to wear this for long. dragonewt weddings were short affairs.

The armour was still being polished with me in it when my father came in. He stopped and gave a low chuckle.

"Does it really look that bad?" I asked.

"No," he said. "You look good. I'm just laughing at the whole situation. Funny that the survival of our country should come down to this." He sat down in the chair before the mirror and swivelled to look at me. His leg, his old war injury, was obviously giving him grief.

I frowned. "Father, I want to do the right thing, but..."

He shook his head. "Look, I know we've had our ups and downs over the years, son, but I need you to know something." He sighed and looked away from me, his eyes scanning the engraved stone of the wall. "I'm... I'm really proud of you."

I stared at him. Hearing my father praise me was not something I'd been ready for.

"I wish your mother was alive to see this," he continued. "She'd be so happy. We often used to talk about which of you would marry first."

"I don't think she expected it to be me, or that I'd marry a dragonewt," I said.

"You're doing a good thing," my father said. "That's all she would've cared about." He stood back up. "I have a few more things to discuss with the Suzerain and his people, so I suppose the next time I'll see you is at the wedding." He tapped my now-armoured shoulder and left.

"There," said the stylist, giving my cuirass a final buff. "Perfect." Again that toothy grin. "The daughter of the Suzerain will have a fun time peeling you out of that."

"Peeling?"

She laughed. "Oh, did I say something silly? Forgive me. My Common is a bit rusty."

And yet somehow I didn't think her Common was as rusty as she made out.

-

I glanced over the cards which held my vows. I was still having trouble memorising them. My father stood nearby, dressed in his suit. He always seemed comfortable in whatever place or situation fate found him. Well, he wasn't the one getting married, so I guess he could afford to be relaxed.

The taboo about seeing the bride did not extend to the bride's family and I spent a few awkward moments upon my arrival at the temple talking to Lanissa's mother and father, me in stuttering dragonewt and them in heavily-accented common. The Suzerain and his wife, although they were generally terrifying with their spines and teeth and wide, predatory eyes, were little different from the parents of human girlfriends I'd been forced to meet. The Suzerain, despite his size, was affable, and he slapped me on the back almost as soon as he met me.

"This is the boy," said the Suzerain. "I was telling you about him, dear. Did I not say he was a fine example of a human?"

Lanissa's mother looked me over. "Is he not a little small?"

"Hah," said the Suzerain. "Do not let that fool you. The smaller the dog the sharper the bite, so they say."

She sniffed. "No one says that."

The Suzerain chuckled. "They do, they do. It is a saying we borrowed from our human friends." He turned his slitted eyes to me. "Is that not right, son?"

Son. The word had a dreadful finality to it.

"Uh," I said.

"Damn right," said the Suzerain. "But observe me, babbling like an idiot." He took my elbow and indicted a group of dragonewts in one corner of the temple grounds. "See them? The Council. No doubt they have been looking this way the whole time. No doubt they will characterise our conversation as some sort of conspiracy. Well, we will show them, will we not?"

"Uh," I said.

The Suzerain's wife went to talk with my father and so the Suzerain grabbed the opportunity to take me aside. He leaned closer, very much in the conspiratorial fashion he'd mentioned just a few moments before. "Look, son, between you and me. About Lanissa?"

I stared at him. His face was deadly serious.

"She takes after her mother. Treat her with respect and she will be an excellent mate. But do not let her get her own way over everything. She will just end up bullying you." He sighed. "I wish I had had someone like me to give me this advice."

"Well," I said. "Lanissa and I..."

The Suzerain nodded."Yes, yes, of course. You have a history. She used to talk about you all the time, you know. And that play!" He laughed. "People still talk about it."

"Oh good," I said.

His serious face returned. "Son, you have got to make this work, you know. I am sorry to thrust everything on your shoulders, but we had little choice. Your father explained to you about how seriousness is this situation?"

I nodded.

"We do not want war, but there are many dragonewts who do. But you know what people like better than war?" He tapped my cuirass with a talon. "A wedding. If you are successful, the Council will have no popular support for their insanity. There was some rough negotiation necessary, though," he continued. "A few arms needed to be twisted off."

"Oh yes," I said. "Another human saying. But it's just 'twisted', not 'twisted off'."

He blinked at me. "A human saying?"

The music started. His wife reappeared and whisked him away, but not before he winked at me. My father took his place at my side.

"Ready?" he asked.

"No," I said. "But I'm never going to be ready. Let's get this over with."

My father laughed. "Oh, come now. It's a wedding, not an execution."

That remained to be seen.

-

The wedding was a mix of both traditions. There was a wedding march, but also the dragonewt crossing of the swords, where I walked the gauntlet alongside my father of weapons clashing all around us and filling the air with flying sparks. We would come to no harm, I'd been assured, since barely a handful of grooms had been decapitated in the history of the ritual.

The blades came pretty close, though. I wondered how they'd chosen the swordsmen, whether there had been time for a vetting process to weed out potential sympathisers of the war-party. My heart raced, but nowhere near as fast as it did when the sanctuary of the temple came into sight. The dragonnnewt priestess with her elaborate beaded headdress was waiting for us. I glanced about for the bride. She was nowhere to be seen.

Conflicting emptions surged in my chest. Relief that the wedding wouldn't have to go forward, humiliation at the thought that she'd decided to stand me up, despair at the thought of the war that would probably soon erupt.

But as soon as I reached the bottom of the short set of steps she came out of the wings. Led by two small boys, one a dragonewt and the other a human, she was dressed in a long white wedding dress in the human style. She was totally veiled, which was why she was being led by the boys.

My god. Had she always been that tall? Her dark hair was visible behind the veil, intricately braided, while her wings and tail stuck out of the dress via customisations not unlike the ones in that first dress I'd seen her wear so many years ago.

My father dropped my hand and I ascended the steps alone. I faced her before the priestess. The boys helped her turn and then vanished back into the wings.

The priestess spoke in both dragonewt and Common, for the benefit of the few humans that were there, mostly just attaches and assistants of my father and their families. It was good to have some human faces in the audience, though, among all the toothy grins.

The time came for the exchanging of the vows. I managed to utter all of mine without tripping up on any of the pronunciation, although my tongue ached at the end of it. Lanissa's voice, the first time I had heard it for ten years, came through the veil in response. She spoke the Common with confidence and without any trace of the accent she'd had at school.

"Your enemies have become my enemies," she said. "As mine have become yours. And whenever your arm tires with the effort of your blows, I will be there to support you and to strike in your place..."

Such romantics, the dragonewts. And yet I enjoyed listening to her voice. It was lower than the one I remembered and the words slipped sweetly off her lips. I wondered at the face hiding behind the veil.

"...and so now I offer you my blood, as proof of my words."

That was my cue. "And I offer you my blood, as proof of my heart."

As proof of my heart. Well, they were just words, right?

I raised my hand palm up and so did the veiled Lanissa. I stared at it. Long and slender, with the sharp claws filed down as was the style with female draggonewts. Her scales were pale blue gold, iridescent in the subdued light. I'd forgotten that about her. She'd had a most beautiful colour to her scales.

I stared at the veil. Now that she'd ceased speaking, the veil had returned to being a white barrier between us. I knew she couldn't see anything behind it, but so too was she shielded from me. I was still staring when the priestess took our hands and cut them across the palm with her dagger and joined them together.

This was the end of the dragonewt wedding. But one last part of the human rite remained to be performed.

"You may now kiss the bride!"

I raised my hand which had been quickly bandaged by the priestess. A small patch of blue and red, our mingled blood, was soaking through the material as I took hold of the hem of the veil. My hand trembled. I hoped they would think it was from the pain.

I lifted the veil from my bride's face while trying not to be too obviously on tippy-toes. She'd always been taller, but sometime over the past decade she'd really taken off on me.

What had I expected? I think I must have expected to see a grown-up version of the Lanissa I had known, the pretty girl with the oval face and babyish features and her ever-present frown. The face I drew the veil away from hinted at that little girl - her eyes were still large, a deep, speckled gold, her nose small - but it was a woman who looked back at me. Lanissa's face had matured from youthful cuteness into remarkable beauty. This was no trick of make-up, which had been sparingly applied to her in the human fashion rather than the dragonewt one.

The fact could not be avoided. She was beautiful.

And yet she still wore the same frown I remembered.

My heart sank. A frown. Was she disappointed? After all, it was the first time she'd seen me in ten years. Her veil had hidden me from her as well.

But as I looked, her tinted lips shifted from down-turned tension into a smile I knew well. I'd seen it many times on her face, the gently mocking smile so sure of its own superiority.

The priestess said something, but I didn't hear her. I was lost in a reverie.

Lanissa raised a single, gorgeous eyebrow. I kept staring at her. Then she sighed and taking hold of my waist she pressed her pursed lips against mine.

Her lips were sweet, her breath fragrant. All of her smelled good, actually. How was it that she smelled so good? My arms felt suddenly awkward, hanging at my side, and so I placed my hands on her waist. But I was too dazed to kiss back properly.

No one noticed. There was a roar of applause, the sharp clashing of clawed feet on the floor.

Lanissa broke the kiss.

"Just like the play," she murmured.

That god-damned play.

Lanissa held out her hand. I took it and together we raised our hands into air. Then the ritual finally came to an end and to further applause, both human and dragonewt, we walked down the aisle to our waiting guests as husband and wife.

--

The reception was short and sweet. dragonewts did not usually keep the newly-weds from each other for long. A drink was thrust into my hand and I was slapped on the back by a crowd of people I didn't know. I must have heard the same lewd joke - about being careful not to get my back broken on my wedding night - about a dozen times. I was also offered a stream of advice on how to be a good husband, from how I should be careful never to argue with her where there were weapons close at hand, to how long we should wait until we tried for our first clutch.

Clutch. As in clutch of eggs. Humans and dragonewts were technically able to have children together, but because of the state of the relationship between our nations, there hadn't been a human-dragonewt couple in the public eye for a very long time.

I was quickly overwhelmed with a tsunami of emotions. I guess I hadn't really thought the whole thing through properly. I looked for Lanissa, for my wife, in the crowd. We'd been separated early on. But there she was, embracing hands with an older female draggonnewt, probably a relation, nodding and smiling as she no doubt received as I had a barrage of marital advice.

Lanissa glanced in my direction and caught sight of me. She gave me a pointy-toothed smiled and after a moment of confusion I smiled back. Then I was swept back into my own world as my father brought over a number of his staff, all of them armed with the same well-meaning advice and tired jokes.

-

Lanissa and I didn't get a chance to exchange more than a few smiles and exasperated looks and words until the reception was over. After final farewells to our family members, the last guests remaining, we were placed in the back of a horse-drawn cab.

I helped Lanissa in, which proved a challenge give her wings and her tail. I was very careful of that tail. That tail, despite its slender, attractive length and the white ribbon tied at the tip, was a tail which had caused me a lot of grief in the past.

She gave a gasp of delight as she sat down on the cushioned seat and I echoed it as I joined her. The seats were of the softest leather and the cabin was luxuriously outfitted in velvet and lacquered wood.

The driver slapped his tail on the horse's rump and we started to move.

We sat in silence for a while. Lanissa turned and smiled at me and I smiled back. She found her voice first.

"I'm sorry about the whole half-dragonewt wedding thing," she said. "I told father I wanted a human-style wedding, but he was worried about how it would look to the public, like I was being conquered or something." She sighed. "It's that damn council's fault, of course. I hope you didn't find it too tiresome. I wanted there to be dancing, but it was mother who said no to that. She's never been a huge fan of human traditions. Dragonewt dancing is all jumping up and down and clashing your weapons on your armour." She leaned closer. "Remember how we used to learn dancing at school?"

"Uh," I said, surprised at the barrage of words. During the reception we'd spoken barely a dozen words to each other and now we were alone together it was as though the floodgates had opened up.

I obviously didn't answer quickly enough for her, since she sighed and lay back. "Maybe it's best we skipped the dancing. I wouldn't have wanted you to tread on my tail." She turned her head and considered me with her gold eyes.

Was she in earnest or was she just teasing me? I suspected I could see humour dancing in those large eyes, but the cast of the rest of her face was enigmatic.

"Yeah," I said. "I have a bad track record, don't I?"

I was trying to be funny, but I think it came out too heartfelt. Her eyes narrowed.

"I guess my tail was too big when I was a kid, too," she murmured.

I tried to remember whether having a long tail was a good or bad thing in dragonewt culture.

"The ribbon is a cute touch," I said. I had to be safe with that, surely.

My words pleased her. She sat forward and looked at me. "Thank you," she said. "You know, I'm sorry about how I looked."

"What do you mean?"

"My expression. When you lifted my veil. I saw your reaction. I guess I was frowning. I was just worried, you know. I mean, I hadn't seen you in ten years. People can change a lot, right?"

I shrugged. "So you were disappointed?"

She snorted. "Are you fishing for a compliment?"

I laughed. "I suppose I am."

"You haven't changed a bit," she said. "Except that you're maybe a little taller." She drew closer to me. "I guess you're lucky I'm short for a dragonewt, otherwise we might clash." She fell silent for a while, then she said, "Have I changed at all?"

"A bit," I said.

The enigmatic look on her face returned. "is that good or bad?"

That caught me.

"Are you fishing for a compliment?" I turned back on her.

She laughed. "You know, I've missed this. In the ten years since I've seen you, I haven't met anyone worthy to test my wit on."

Testing her wit on me. So that was what she called it.

I made no reply. After a while she sat forward. Even with her sitting flush with me, she felt suddenly a thousand leagues away.

It was my turn to break the silence. "So, why did you...?"

But at the moment the carriage came to a halt and the driver leaped off the box and opened the door for us with a flourish.

I was left flapping my mouth like a moron, so I closed it and sat up. I got out and then offered Lanissa help in alighting. As I took her hand I saw again that smile, that smile which was almost a smirk. It brought back a lot of bad memories.

Her slender hand in mine, that softness of her scales. Dragonewts look as though their bodies are clad in some kind of mail, not all over of course, just patches on their hands and wrists almost like gloves, and on the side of the face beneath the ear, extending down the neck and along the spine to the tip of their tails. They also had patches where their wings meet the body, and of course those clawed feet. Everywhere else the iridescence of their scales was muted and was more or less equivalent with human flesh. Since Lampeti was a coastal resort town and swimming was one of our school's strongest sports, I'd seen Lanissa in a swimsuit many times. Of course, back then, she hadn't filled it as nearly as nicely as she would now with her adult figure. Her childish body had picked up some serious curves which all dragonewt females tend to have, fulsome but comely, the powerful shapeliness of an athlete tending to voluptuousness.