He shrugged. “No sense in letting good food go to waste.”
She’d loosened her braid to dry from their earlier swim, and her hair spread around her shoulders, cascading down her back. Her still-damp shirt now stuck to her skin. The man inside Draknart craved and demanded. He hoped Belinus would come to the circle tonight. Draknart couldn’t trust himself with Einin much longer.
She looked at him over the fire. “Before the curse, could you turn into a man?”
“Aye, at will.” A form close enough to human so humans wouldn’t know the difference. That was how he’d swived the usual virgin sacrifices. Then he’d turned back to a dragon and eaten them.
Einin appeared deep in thought. “Why not stay in the shape of a man and live in one of the villages?”
“If you can be a dragon, always be a dragon,” he told her, a little offended at her suggestion.
“How old are you?” she asked next.
He tried to think back through all the changes of the human world he’d witnessed: the great plague, the wars, the succession of kings. “I’ve been in the hills since before the first villages.”
She stared at him. “But that’s a thousand years, at least!”
Sounded like a lot when she said it like that. “And you?”
“Twenty.”
He’d had stomach aches that had lasted longer. She was such an insubstantial wee lass, ’twas hard to fathom how she managed to fascinate him so thoroughly. Aye, she was small, but her fire and her courage were great. She’d been willing to give her life for her village. A village with people like the cowherd’s wife who’d whipped her bloody. Einin was more of a hero than any of the knights who’d come to challenge Draknart, knights bought by the village, men who fought for gold coin.
She licked her fingers, and for some reason, Draknart found even that interesting. She seemed equally fascinated with him, for she watched him through narrowed eyes. “Are dragons immortal?”
“We can be killed.” He’d seen plenty of his brethren fall.
“But if you’re not killed.” She tilted her head. “Would you go on forever?”
“I am not certain. Dragons are a querulous sort.” He had to think. “I know this, I have never seen one die of old age.”
“What do they die of?”
“A stronger dragon coming by and killing them for their territory.”
She digested this for a couple of moments.
“How about your family?” she wanted to know next.
“I barely remember them. I flew the nest early.”
She hesitated before she asked her next question. “Have you ever had a mate?”
“Not a mate. But I shared a cave now and then with a she-dragon.” Thinking about her always put him in a bad mood, so he didn’t.
“And children?”
He shook his head. “Dragon pups have always been rare.”
“Where is the she-dragon now?”
“When I was…cursed…” Draknart turned from Einin, flopping down onto his stomach and curling his tail around himself. “She disliked it.”
Gruna had tried to eat him several times in his human form, before he’d finally wised up and left her.
Draknart didn’t like those memories. He liked thinking of the decades that had passed since even less. Truth was he’d been lonely. And humans were growing more and more common and annoying.
The first batch he’d seen in the valley threw stones and sticks at him. He thought they were a strange kind of ape, like the ones he’d seen on his longest flight to the south in his younger years.
