She was too tempting. I needed to choose a very distant town for the cakes. If I stayed too close, I would send my tentacles upward and pull her into my embrace, and she would be angry with me.
I assigned a group of dolphins to guard her and moved away toward the small continent. I would go ashore in one of the coastal towns, purchase the cakes, then return to her with them and reveal myself. It could take days, but she would still be on the sea and easy to find, even with the pendant that muted our connection so we could both endure it without pain. The seas were mine, all of them, and as long as she stayed on the water, nothing could harm her.
I would make certain of that until the last wave broke, at the end of the world.
SKADI
It had to be the end of the world. There was no other plausible explanation.
I had ahoard.
I raged at the sky, sending lightning racing from the white-cold dome above to the icy plain where I stood now, my clawed feet sinking into the surface of the glacier, my home.
How was this possible? I was an elemental god, not a dragon. That was merely a form I’d worn to give shape to my being. To create a mouth to use for speaking to the mortal things, so their minds would perceive me as more than wind and ice.
Scales and claws and teeth and wings were signs of weakness, the trappings of mortality that my descendants wore. Well, my descendants and those of my enemy.
This was his doing. He must have sent her, as some sort of test, or emissary, or… spy. That was it. She was his tempting, conniving spy. I’d felt her presence, the north wind tasting her even when she was far from the sea. It had carried a hint of her aroma to me, enticing me to leave my home.
She’d come close enough to lure me in, and then she’d afflicted me. She’d made mewantthings.
I rolled the sharp tooth of the little enemy in between two icy claws. A splinter almost too small to be perceived, with a gleaming green bead at one end. A sharp needle on the other, that she’d plunged into my eye, waking sensations in me I had never been physical enough to feel.
Hunger. Pain. Shock. And… desire. A cold wave of lust for the tiny, warm creature who’d pinned me to this form, forcing me to smell her, feel her softness, long for her.
A perfect spy for my greatest enemy.
I panted, drawing blessedly cold air into my lungs. When I’d tasted her tears, a long-frozen dream inside me had woken. Moved inside me, and continued to move, altering my inner landscape in some permanent, unknowable way. Like the small drops of saltwater I’d stolen from her were somehow more powerful than the glaciers of my home.
Then she’d dared to strike me in the eye. She’d pinned me to consciousness, to the temporal plane.
I’d raged for a moment, then fled back to the place that was most familiar: the northern pole of the world, where the only movement was the slow, inexorable creep of ice, and the bracing blast of wind. Where even the seas held still when I commanded it. I’d slept here for so long, since… since my enemy had been pinned under the earth, far to the east. He’d been contained as securely as he could be with water, earth, air, and ice. I’d made sure of that before I slept.
But now the world stank of his tainted power, flames everywhere, his beady, shifting eyes spying. He was awake, or waking. I could not allow that.
I stretched my cursed wings out to the sides and flapped them, crystals of ice flying away from them as I became more and more real in this plane. I felt the urges of my body, this limited shape. I needed to move, to drink, to eat.
Worse, I wanted her. The rest of the pieces of her that belonged to me.
An idea formed like a perfect flake of snow. For now, I had a small, pathetic hoard with only one thing in it: a shining tooth. I could find her, then use the next thousand years to rend her into equally small pieces, slowly. Creating a hoard of shards of the little, tainted spy until I could sleep again. Until this form became ice, and I lay in peace in my lair.
My stomach growled, and I roared at the sky once more. How revolting, to be flesh. How debased, to desire a creature of flesh. She’d weakened me in a few short seconds. She had to be his tool; there was no other explanation.
But now she would be mine. I flapped my wings again and went hunting.
She was farthersouth and east than she had been before, and I could smell my enemy in the air that blew from the island where I’d trapped him long ago. I could smell her, too—the sweetness of green things and the kiss of rain, with only the slightest hint of his corruption.
He’d planted her well. I placed the tooth she’d stabbed into my eye under an iced scale on my belly and flapped harder, forcing the dragon skin I wore as high as I could go, so as not to alert her to my presence.
Then, when I was above her, I dove. Straight and true, like a comet falling from the sky, I plummeted, only extending my wings at the last moment, when she was within my grasp. She wore an ash-gray cloak, and it kept her skin from being broken by my claws. Unfortunately, I had not yet learned the limits of my new flesh, and something cracked at the same moment Iplucked her from the boat. The joint at the shoulder of my right wing was broken somehow, and the muscles in my left torn inside as well.
I flew anyway, ignoring her squawking as I carried her north. I would not be able to make it back to my resting place, but I had seen islands below on my flight and knew one lay close enough, a mere hundred miles northwest. I coasted to it now, the wind at my tail, my wings screaming in agony as more muscles tore in the effort to hold us up.
There!Just as my feet dangled close enough to skin the rough waves of the sea here, I spotted the stark black rock face of the cliff island, thousands of seabirds wheeling above it and nesting on its shore.
Only a few more miles. I flapped again, roaring as I fought to maintain control of my weak flesh, and at last reached the shore. The sharp rocks rose to meet me as I fell onto them, my scales sending splinters of ice into the air, but protecting me from the rock. I let my claws open and tossed the little enemy to one side.
The sound of her screaming, though, demanded my attention. Then the smell of her iron and salt blood bit into me deeply, like a sword of fire.
