why you keep them around.”
Probably because they were warm at night,
piled on her bed, with Cordelia’s silky muzzle
tucked under her chin. Whenever she got home
after a long day at the office, they greeted her,
trilling in unison. They never told her
that her hairstyle didn’t fit the shape of her face,
or she really should lose a few pounds, unlike her mother.
They never asked her to file incorporation
documents yesterday, or talked to her
for an hour about baseball while she was trying to listen
to NPR. Anyway, who would take them,
all seven of them? Dragons don’t make good pets,
and she hated the thought of separating them.
They needed each other.
Finally, she moved to a lighthouse in New England.
She saw the advertisement—Lighthouse keeper
wanted. Must be willing to live on an island
off the coast of Maine, near Portland. Competitive salary.
The ferry comes twice a week. She can take it to Portland
if she wants to, but it brings everything she needs,
from light bulbs to chocolate chip cookies to art supplies.
Sometimes she goes, just to get Chinese takeout.
The dragons have learned to fish and fend for themselves.
She watches them flying up in the sky like kites
when she goes on her morning walk, collecting shells
and bits of seaglass. Mostly they stay outdoors,
but Cordelia still sleeps in the bed beside her at night,
stretched out on the blanket. She has not grown much larger
than a Great Dane, although Alexander is now
the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. On sunny mornings
she finds them lying on the rocky shore, like seals,
shining in the sunlight. On rainy days, there’s a cave
on the other side of the island, although Dolores
curls up in the lighthouse itself, around the beacon.
On stormy nights, she’s seen them guide a ship
to shore, which seems an unusual behavior, but dolphins
do it, so why not dragons?
She’s started painting again, the way she used to
when she was a teenager, before her father
told her to focus on something more practical.
Her canvases sell in a gallery and on her website.
Mostly, she paints the dragons—rolling around
in the waves, lying on the shore, cavorting above
in intricate arabesques, as if they knew
she was sketching below, showing off for her.
She doesn’t make as much money
as she did at the law firm. But then, on the other hand,
she has dragons.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollinsPublishers
....................................
Dragon Slayer
Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick (www.michaelswanwick.com) has received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six consecutive years and been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. He has also lost more of those awards than any other writer in the history of the field. He has written ten novels, more than one hundred fifty stories, and countless works of flash fiction. His most recent works include The Iron Dragon’s Mother completes a trilogy of stand-alone fantasies begun twenty-six years earlier with The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. The second novel, The City Under the Stars, was co-written with Gardner Dozois and finished very shortly after his old friend’s death. Swanwick’s share of the novel is dedicated to him. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.
Every road and open doorway is a constant danger to a man of wandering disposition. Olav had stood on the threshold of his cottage one spring morning and the road had looked so fine that he couldn’t resist setting foot on it, and the next thing he knew, it had carried him to the sea. There he chanced upon a merchant ship in need of a new hand. He learned the sailoring trade, fought pirates, killed a kraken, grew a beard, pierced an ear, and one memorable night won a handful of rubies at a single turn of the cards and lost them all to a barmaid who doped his ale. Two years later, he was shipwrecked off Thule and briefly married to a witch-woman who had blackwork tattoos on her face and had filed her teeth to points.
The marriage did not last, however. One day, Olav returned from the hunt with a red hart slung over his shoulders and found his wife coupling with a demon she had summoned up from one of the seven hells that lie at the center of the world. He slew them both, threw the fire pot onto the thatched roof of the witch’s hut, and left his memories burning to his back.
So it was that, having nothing better to do, Olav set out on foot to see what lay to the south. Always there was something interesting just a little farther down the road. Always there was good reason not to stay.
To the south it was summer. It seemed to be always summer there. Like water, he flowed downhill, taking up whatever work came to hand, staying with it long enough to fill his pockets, and then proceeding onward, ever onward. He chopped wood, built walls, twisted cord into rope, and rode as a guard in a small caravan traveling across the desert, which one night was attacked by brigands who set about killing everyone, women and slaves included. He accounted for five of their number before realizing there was nobody left to defend save for one brown-skinned merchant’s son and so scooped him up, sat him on the horse behind himself, and escaped.
Olav came away from that adventure with an excellent horse, a serviceable bedroll, a saddle that had seen better days, and the merchant boy for a servant.
The caravan trail led at last to a standing stone atop a high barren ridge, at the foot of which were low scrub forests and beyond them, at the horizon, a line of blue that might be ocean. The stone was carved with runes that made no sense to Olav. But Nahal, his boy, spoke up. “It says all the land beyond belongs to the free port of Kheshem.” He pointed. “It’s there, where the Endless Mountains touch the sea. The harbor is small but the mountains go inland many hundred baridi, so all trade must pass through it.”
“You can read these squiggles, then?”
“My . . . I was taught how.”
“What else does it say?”
“That the Khesh of Kheshem welcomes all honest men. But evil travelers will be tortured and put to death.”
Olav laughed. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to take our chances.”
They rode down toward the sea. Kheshem lay nowhere in sight, but there was the tang of salt marshes in the air when they made camp. Nahal gathered wood and built a fire while Olav quested out into the twilight and returned with a brace of hares. He sparked the fire to life using a chunk of flint from his pouch and the hilt of his knife, then gave the tool to the boy to dress and section the meat and prepare spits. Finally, he took back the knife and cut them a pair of quarterstaffs. “Have you had weapons training?” he asked.
“Some.”
“Then come at me.”
Nahal seized the staff with both hands together and swung. Olav easily sidestepped the blow and rapped the boy’s knuckles, making him drop his weapon. Smiling, he said, “You know nothing. So we’ll start by working on your stance.”