"You go off over in the woods there, then, and I'll meet up with you by that big rock in the distance tomorrow morning," she told the young dragon some time later.
"In the morning?" the dragon asked, rearing its head back. "I have to spend all night out there? Why can't I spend it in my cave?"
"Because I'm going down there to tell the villagers it was a misunderstanding and I've run you off," Sir Gregor explained. "And once I do, they'll be up to your cave, with pitchforks and scythes and hammers, poking about for any treasure you may have left behind."
"But I've never had any treasure," the dragon said, exasperated.
"I know that," Gregor said, "and I could very well tell them that, and they'd laugh when I was gone and called me daft for saying it. Everyone knows dragons keep treasure, and they'll want their piece of it, after all the trouble you've given them, and if you're still there when they come up with their sharp things--and they'll bring them, just in case--they'll run you through out of sheer spite. So you go on along to that rock, and I'll pick you up tomorrow morning. Now get on, we're getting close, and I want you well away before they all come running out and cheering me as the damn big hero of the hour. Off you go!"
Grumbling under its breath, the dragon tucked its wings in tight so as not to catch on trees and cantered off into the woods. There was a reason dragons liked rocky mountainsides and caves. Several, actually, but not catching up their wings every few feet was a big one.
"And as for you," Sir Gregor said, turning to pin the middle-aged, somewhat dumpy woman clinging to her horse's saddle horn. "I'll thank you not to tell anyone about what you've seen and heard today, and Briar here won't accidentally spook and dump you in the river on the way back to your village. Fair enough?"
The woman nodded meekly, her eyes still wide with fear and drawn with exhaustion. "Please, sir," she said, "I'd just like very much t' get home."
"I'm sure you would," Sir Gregor said, nodding. "It's no vacation, being shut up in a cave for two weeks with nought but blueberries to eat."
The woman nodded, and was quiet for the rest of the way.
It was nightfall by the time they reached the village, and many of its inhabitants had come out to wait by the start of the mountain path. When they saw the gleam of Sir Gregor's armour in the torchlight, and drew closer so that its light fell on the relieved face of the woman, a tired but genuine cheer went up. Sir Gregor smiled as the previously wary and timid village folk all swarmed Briar, who was quite used to this part of the job and stayed very still, lifting the exhausted and half-starved woman out of the saddle and carrying her to her home.
"We done good again, girl," Sir Gregor murmured, patting Briar and stroking the stocky warhorse's neck. "Now it's fine oats and sweet hay for you, eh?"
Briar knew the meaning of the word "oats". She snorted in excitement and lipped at Sir Gregor's armour where the pockets in her clothing usually were. Sir Gregor laughed, pushing the horse's face away.
"Steady on, girl, all in good time."
The tavern's stable was in good condition, with fresh straw laid down for the knight's horse, and the blanket beaten thoroughly clean of any mites or dust earlier that day. Sir Gregor left her horse in what she felt confident were kind and competent hands, and when up to her room, where a hot meal and warm bath were waiting.
After latching the door securely and going so far as to lean a chair against it so that it could not slide open so much as an inch, Sir Gregor felt safe enough to undress, undo the custom-made thin-leather binding she wore to flatten her chest, and slide gratefully into the steaming water. More than once, Sir Gregor had been spied upon by the younger members of tavern housekeeping staff, hoping to catch a glimpse of the handsome young knight with his shirt off, and each time it had lead to some of the quickest thinking and fastest talking Sir Gregor had ever had to do. And even then, money had been necessary to grease palms and cloud memories. Sir Gregor had learned the wisdom of caution.
She sighed and sank lower into the large tin tub, letting the water ease her muscles and loosen knots of tension. She was trying not to think about the ordeal tomorrow would bring, not quite ready to face the responsibility she'd brought on herself. Sir Gregor had convinced the young whip to leave its current cave behind and join her on her travels. Gregor wasn't sure how she would teach a dragon to hunt, though she had some ideas about how it could be done. Her older brother Angus had kept falcons since before Gregor had been born, and Gregor herself had spent all her free time in her father's kennels, playing with the young pups, and watching the handlers train the juveniles. Anyone that had known a wolfhound for any amount of time knew they were stubborn, arrogant, and difficult to bait, as they were finicky eaters even when hungry, and could be tempted into obedience only with the choicest, smelliest of morsels. Even so, as passionate as she was about them, Gregor had been a dab hand at it, and if she could convince a stubborn, leggy pup to do what she wanted without even being able to speak the same language, she felt confident she could work something out with the dragon.
Gregor drifted in and out of fond childhood memories of wrestling with the descendents of her favourite hound bloodline, the victories of finally convincing a pup to obey because of love and not food, and schemes to translate these techniques to a talking, flying, fire-breathing beast.
She awoke when the water in the tub had cooled uncomfortably. Grunting as she clambered out of it and towelling herself off, Gregor pulled on her chest binder and then her sleeping shift on over it. Gregor never did anything without her chest binding other than bathe when she was anywhere near civilization, and that was only because the water would ruin the leather. There was too much risk of some emergency, like a fire, or bandits, or some other possible reason sending people barging into her room calling for the knight to leap out of bed and into action.
To quiet her mind of worry and planning, Gregor sat for a while and polished her blade until she felt her eyelids beginning to droop again.
Finally, with her sword along the bed beside her, its freshly polished, ever razor-sharp edge gleaming dully in the light of the candle that stood on the night stand, Gregor lay down with her back to the door and pinched the light out with her fingertips.

"Good grief, don't tell me your parents never taught you how to fly properly!" Gregor exclaimed some weeks later as Hisenrou, as she called herself, fell clumsily out of the sky after a failed swipe at a young buck that had been grazing in a meadow. The young red whip crashed into the ground, tumbling wing over tail for several feet before she skidded to a stop in a small mound of long grass and dirt. Meanwhile, the two-point buck she'd been aiming for was nothing more than a disappearing shadow among the trees at the far end of the meadow.
"Shut up," Hisenrou panted, glaring at the knight. "It's not as easy as it looks, you know!"
"I never said it was easy, I just said you weren't doing it right," Gregor replied, leaning against a tree trunk and pulling out a small knife. She began to clean her fingernails. "Perhaps you ought to practice recovering in flight before you keep after picking up prey. If you can't pull out of a dive properly without the extra weight of prey, you'll never manage it with it, and when you've crashed and snapped your neck on the ground, then where will you be?"
"I don't know," Hisenrou growled, spitting grass out of her mouth for the third time that day. "Where?"
"Dead, that's where. Alright, no prey this time." Sir Gregor walked over to their camp site and riffled through Briar's saddlebags until she found the one she kept her clothes in. Tying it more securely shut with an extra length of twine she made sure to always have on hang, Gregor brought it back out to the meadow, hacking off a good-sized low hanging tree branch on her way. She worked a hole into the ground with her sword, then stabbed the branch securely into the ground, mounding dirt and nearby rocks around its base. Prodding it firmly to make sure it stood steady, Gregor hung the saddlebag from one of its branches.
"Now," she said, "This time, you're aiming for the saddlebag. Don't try to grab it the first few times, just aim for the air above it, and then try to pull out of it as fast as you can. And if you're going to crash again, try to aim for that berry thicket." Sir Gregor pointed a fat plot of bushes grouped together at the opposite edge of the meadow. "It'll break some of your fall. Now try again."
"I don't want to," Hisenrou complained. "I'm tired of this. I'm not getting any better, and I ache all over from the first three times. Can't I take a break?" she wheedled.
Gregor plucked a length of sweetgrass from near where she stood and sucked on it for a moment.
"How about this," she said. "You manage to pull out of one dive--just one--and circle back, and land properly and all, and I'll go hunt you a nice fat fox." Seeing the dragon somewhat disappointed with this offer, she added, "alright, and a few plump trout. Sound fair?"
Brightening noticeably, Hisenrou nodded in agreement and took off at a brisk trot to get herself airborne. Gregor watched this with some niggling trepidation. She had this nagging feeling that dragons oughtn't have to build up enough speed before they took off. She'd seen many dragons flying, hunting, and taking off--without getting a running start first--as on occasion she'd felt it prudent to request their hospitality as opposed to that offered by her human fellows. Dragons didn't care much about what humans wore or what their gender was. Typically such occasions had followed after rumours concerning the curious habits and the words of maid staff that had walked in on Gregor in the middle of changing had made towns she'd been staying in uncomfortable.
Dragon females were largely the same as dragon males, as among their kind size varied only depending on age and the growth of horns depended on a dragon's magic. Hisenrou's juvenile bumps were already beginning to crown bone tips, and she couldn't have been much older than two or three years. She would likely be a prominent sorcerer among her kind, something Gregor felt obligated to encourage. Once the dragon was able to hunt for herself, Gregor knew of a couple patient and experienced sorcerer dragons she'd befriended in her travels that she could send the whip to for tutelage.
In the meantime, though...
CRUNCH
"Oof--ow--ouch!"
Gregor sighed, and went to dig her young dragon ward out of the tree she'd just crashed head-first into.

"I really do think you're getting better," Gregor insisted that night as they shared a pile of trout over the fire. Gregor had to admit, travelling with a dragon, however young, had its perks. While Hisenrou still struggled with aerial hunting, her fire-breathing was top form and she definitely was getting the hang of fishing. It had poured with a vengeance the night before, but even the most soaked of firewood was no match for the whip's lava-hot breath, and when Gregor had tired of baiting and tossing her fishing line, the dragon had taken over and had contributed several fine, fat trout to their pile that evening.
"I'm not," Hisenrou said sullenly. "I just can't do it. I'm worthless at it. I can never do anything right, no matter how hard I try. It was the same way with my parents, I just can't--" Hisenrou stopped, and Gregor didn't press her to finish her sentence. Instead, she decided to try comforting, something she'd never been very good at.
"Well," she began, and thought for a minute. "You see...it's...well...the thing is...I know it's hard," she finished lamely, giving up on attempting feelings. "But you'll get better. You just have to practice. I was just as clumsy with a bow and arrow when I started learning--" she never had been, really, she'd taken to form like a fish to water, "--and all it takes is practice."
Hisenrou snapped down the rest of her pile of trout and glumly curled up in a horse-sized ball of red scales and shimmering, vein-shot canvas, tucking her head under her wing.
Gregor sighed. She knew her pep talks were getting repetitive--Gregor had never been gifted with words--but she couldn't think of what else to do. She felt that a lot of this ought to be instinct to begin with--after all, hawks and hounds knew when to chase, when to pounce, and when to wait. Training was just fine-tuning this, and really, the majority of training them to do it was training them to do technically unnatural things--like bringing their kill back and not dragging it off, and handing it over rather than eat it.
Hisenrou seemed to be somehow lacking in those natural instincts that told the muscles when to go, the wings when to fold, the jaw when to bite, the claws when to snap. She really had improved in the few weeks she'd been together, but she had never yet managed a real kill. Gregor knew there had to be some underlying reason, something Hisenrou either wasn't telling her or didn't know herself. Gregor didn't consider Hisenrou a dumb beast, but, well, animals were animals, and when they weren't doing what ought to be natural instinct, it wasn't just clumsiness, or inexperience--it was something wrong.
The problem was, Gregor wasn't sure how to uncover it without offending or hurting the whip's feelings.
Gregor sighed as she lay back on her bedroll, gazing up at the starry sky that turned gently above Argenwaul. She'd thought training the whip would be easier than dogs and hawks--after all, she could tell Hisenrou exactly what to do and how to do it. But when Hisenrou did something wrong, she couldn't just scold her and run her through the same exercise over and over day after day until she got it right.
Hisenrou wasn't just an animal. She got frustrated, and while animals got frustrated, they usually forgot about the whole thing entirely within an hour and were ready to go again the next day. Gregor could see the wear that constant failure was having on the dragon, and she knew they had to manage a breakthrough soon, or one day she would wake up and the young dragon would be gone.
The most frustrating thing for Gregor was that she had a suspicion that Hisenrou's failure had something to do with her family and why she left home, and there was nothing Gregor could do about it.

"We're going to try something different today," she announced a few days later. Her travels had brought them across a crossroads the night before, and there had been some very intriguing papers nailed to the newsboard next to the signpost. Heavy thunderclouds rolled overhead as the knight began to pack up camp, leaving the dousing of the firepit for last.
"And what's that?" Hisenrou asked glumly, picking at her teeth with a trout's rib bone. She had been particularly unsuccessful lately with hunting, though she'd managed to get the hang of pulling out of dives--without crashing, anyway. Her recovery involved a good deal of clumsily flapping about like a sick duck, though, and Gregor was beginning to suspect that certain aspects of Hisenrou's tutoring were going to take nothing less than a real dragon's touch. "Some brilliant new technique you've concocted overnight?"
"No, actually," Gregor said, raising an eyebrow as she saddled up Briar and strapped the saddlebags on to the saddle. "It's the same technique I've used for years when I feel like getting paid lots of money for sitting around and talking with a great big lizard for a few hours. And occasionally getting winked at by princesses, but I consider that a downside more than anything." It was considered traditional for knights to bring princesses back riding sidesaddle or sitting on their lap, and the keen ladies could make the journey particularly awkward for Gregor.
Hisenrou considered what Gregor was saying, and then brightened noticeably, trotting briskly to keep up as Gregor directed Briar through the trees and onto the road, turning down the track directed in the poster on the board by the signs:

SUMMONING ALL KNYTES TO HYS ROYAL MAJESTY THEE KYNG OF dOR mANTUA'S AYDE:
FOR THEE SLAYYNG OF ONE 3OO-AND-50 STONE BULL DRAGONNE
RESCUYNG AND SAFE RETURNE OF ONNE PRYNCESS WHO YS:
UNWED
FULLEE MAYDYNNE
ELDEST OF ALL HYS MAJESTY'S CHYLDREN

50 GOLD PEECES PER STONE
10 GEMS OF VALU PER HORN

PLEESE YNKWIRE WYTHYN THEE CASTLE OF dOR mANTUA
DOWN YON PATH OF THEE RYGHT
AND STRAYT ON TYLL YE COME TO THEE DRAW BRYJ
WHER THER YS A RUNNER WAYTYNG

"You mean you're going dragon slaying and I get to take a break while you do?" Hisenrou asked brightly.
"Not quite," Gregor said with a wry grin. "It's more like I'm going slaying and I'm going to try and bargain some proper lessons out of the dragon for you while we're there."
Hisenrou groaned very loudly and a bit longer than Gregor felt was necessary.
"That's not fair," she whined. "Don't I get to take a break ever?"
"Yes. When you've landed your first kill."
Hisenrou groaned again, though not as long after Gregor shot her a glare.
"You know, I don't have to do this," Gregor snapped, weeks of whining and grumbling finally wearing through her last nerve. The thunder rumbled ominously above them and began to open up, inch by inch, drops coming down in spatters, then steadying into a light rain. "I didn't have to save your scaley arse from a proper skewering on the pointy tools of a dozen angry villagers. I didn't have to bring you with me. And I certainly don't have to try to teach you how to be a proper bloody dragon! I don't know if you've noticed, but all this trouble hasn't exactly benefited me either! You make so much noise crashing through the forest you scare off half the prey, you can't fly high enough overhead that they don't see you and run away anyway, you moan and complain about everything I've tried to do to help you, and frankly I'm about through with it! So either shut your scaley trap or learn to start showing a bit of gratitude, or so help me I will truss you up one of these nights and throw you in the river!"
Hisenrou shrank in on herself throughout Gregor's tirade, raising her wings as if to shield herself against the onslaught. When Gregor was done, the knight turned back to face the road and urged Briar onward onto the road they'd been camping alongside.. Eventually Hisenrou felt brave enough to catch up and bring her head level with Gregor's.
"I am grateful," she said quietly. "I am."
Gregor grunted, which Hisenrou knew was about as much of a "You're welcome, I forgive you for being an ingratiating little brat," that she was going to get out of the knight. Feeling satisfied, the dragon fell back a ways before she began her clumsy flapping gallop to lift herself up and into the air, soaring ahead of Gregor down the road towards the bright, shining silver towers that were glimmering on the horizon between raindrops.

Gregor was uneasy as Briar trotted up to the drawbridge of the castle of dOr mAntua, one of the richest and largest kingdoms of Argenwaul. Something about the reward advertised was going round and round in her mind, setting off the subtler senses her mind reserved for trickery.
She had never seen a reward that large. "Ten gold per stone" of dragon meant ten per cent of the ransom paid for the princess--after a knight had negotiated the ransom with a dragon, they added their per cent due on to the total when they presented it to the king, and would subtract it from the ransom wagons before they set out on the path up to the dragon's lair, sending it to the inn or household they were staying at for safekeeping.
Dragons took this into account when they made their ransom demand, and a knight also took this into account when haggling them down. Smart knights struck a deal halfway between what a king was willing to pay and what the dragon wanted--halfway was considered the most reasonable point. Stupid, greedy knights caved towards the dragon's end to get the largest ten per cent they could--those knights were talked about and typically ended up getting turned away after they'd pulled a swindle like that two or three times. They didn't stay in the business long.
There were poorer kingdoms, of course, that could barely manage to pay a knight's ten per cent in addition to the dragon's ransom, but they still did it, because most knights would turn up their noses at anything less. Larger kingdoms didn't offer more than ten per cent because they didn't want to, but since dragons demanded more of larger kingdoms, the knight would get more anyway.
But fifty per cent? That was insane. Sir Gregor could only think of one reason why any kingdom would offer to pay that much, and that was maybe because they weren't plannign to have to pay at all.
...Or, maybe this was an occasion where the dragon actually needed to get slain, and no one would go challenge it for anything less.
Well, it said "YNKWIRE WYTHYN". She'd find out when she inquired within.
The shimmering silver spires on the horizon had to be huge, because it took much longer than Gregor had expected to reach it. This was not the main path to dOr mAntua, the one used by the caravans of merchants, travellers, and those seeking their fortunes, but one of its many side paths twisting up the foothills to its mountain doorstep. Gregor had seen the main road to dOr mAntua once in passing, and it was laid with well-kept broad cobbling, whereas its side paths were merely broad dirt tracks.
The whole day had gone by by the time Gregor reached the city gates, and the steady rain had turned to a thunderous pour. Briar's head drooped miserably, though she picked up her feet some as her hooves struck stone and she recognized that they were entering a place of civilization. For all the stories Gregor's adventerous uncle had told her of herds galloping across plains in the eastern land, she had never seen such longing for wilderness in Briar. Briar loved her straw-strewn stalls with soft, warm blankets and buckets of oats. The day's journey uphill in the rain carrying her master in full armour had worn sorely on the beast. Gregor did feel very sorry and very grateful, but it was considered downright insult if a knight arrived at a household in anything less than full armour when he had ridden up to take up a task. It was another of those silly etiquette things Gregor had never understood, like women wearing stockings when no one could see so much as an ankle under their dress to be able to tell the difference.
Hisenrou was well away by the time Gregor had reached the city, knowing better than to fly too near within sight of it. Gregor had not seen the bright red whip swerve away in the downpour, which was rapidly becoming ever heavier, but she trusted the young dragon by now to find her own lodging for the cold, wet night that was falling. Perhaps Hisenrou would even happen upon the local dragon that had stolen the princess--though as she recalled her earlier theory about the dragon's potential hostility, Gregor found herself hoping against this rather than for. She also realized her previous plan to barter for lessons for Hisenrou may not work out after all, and was seriously debating forgoing the whole ordeal as all around her, shutters slammed and doors were locked tight as the city went to bed early in the face of the merciless, clinging cold and wet. Though Gregor understood, she felt a stab of disappointment.
That was one aspect of attention Gregor usually enjoyed in coming to a village or city with a king in need. She liked the initial gathering of crowds, the cheering, the murmurs of awe, the relieved faces all around. These all came before questions, and Gregor liked to pluck one lucky child out of the crowd, placing him--or her, Gregor was very particular about including little girls as well as boys--on the saddle in front of her and taking a brief trot down the street or around the nearest square. Gregor typically did not like children, especially babies, that did more crying and shitting than anything else and could drive her to madness quicker than anything--but knowing the joy she gave the ones old enough to understand the treat they were given, especially seeing the delight on the faces of little girls, when she herself had been so young once and wished so badly to see the world from atop a tall and fearsome charger. These were some of Gregor's favourite parts of knighting and slaying.
Briar the horse was excited beneath Gregor as they approached the castle, picking her feet up in a near-prance as she realized she would be spending the night in a proper stable after their few weeks on the road. As a travelling dragon slayer, while Gregor was a knight of the realm and could demand lodging from any inn or village she chose to stop at and hospitality from any local lord she deigned to drop in on, the whole reason Gregor had chosen the life she had was to avoid such situations. Gregor certainly enjoyed a proper bath and a three-course meal, but oftentimes the households that provided such things were run by authority figures or reported to them. Dragon slayers were, while everyone knew what really went on between knights and dragons, still a prominent heroic sort of figure. This was because dragon "slaying" was not the only thing dragon slayers did--those that dealt with dragons had also always been expected to likewise deal with any kind of monster, whether it was a matter of peaceful negotiation or down-and-bloody sword-to-gullet slaying. When peace had been struck between dragons and kings a little under a thousand years ago, the other monsters that plagued the realms hadn't just jolly well quieted down and gone away. Gregor had slain several monsters in her travels, from minor Jenny Greenteeths that lurked in rivers and drowned villagers, to great big raging chimaeras that rampaged with the bodies of bulls, the heads of lions, and great spikey snakes for tails. She was a good negotiator and a better, genuine monster slayer. Despite her efforts to remain in anonymity, word of the dark-skinned knight and his mighty silver charger had gotten around.
The more rumours spread, the more questions Gregor was asked. The harder she tried to avoid them, the more her mysterious allure grew, and the harder she was pestered--especially by the unwed daughters of village men, and sometimes by the wedded ones, too. It was all very awkward and made it much harder for Gregor to keep her secret. However, it was basic etiquette that a visiting dragon slayer be put up in the castle for the night, and it wasn't the kind of thing Gregor could wriggle out of without offending the resident king. And kings, however big or small, were never good people to offend.
The runner leaning against the gatehouse and chatting with the guard within started and tried to look important as Gregor rode up to it.
"Hail there, boy," Gregor boomed in her best man's voice. The lad straightened and then remembered to bow halfway through, putting his back through some interesting bends before he managed to get himself upright and at attention. "I am Sir Gregor the Valiant, of His Royal Majesty, High King George, noble and mighty warden of these fine and prosperous lands. I have ridden far and wide in search of good deeds through which I might better our great realm, and have arrived here at word of your king's great distress. Away with you now, speed within and tell His Majesty that the aid he has sought is at hand."
The boy gave another quick bow and sped off, his feet slapping on the wet and slippery cobbles. Gregor watched him as he disappeared under the portcullis and continued on through the courtyard beyond that, and then another portcullis. Hard as it was to see in the fading light and thickening rain, Gregor could barely make out that this castle had three outer walls, all with portcullises, all mightily thick and what seemed mountain-high.
Some castle hands had appeared as if by magic out of the great stone wall; Gregor knew there would be servant's entrances, concealed to almost perfect invisibility in the walls. Gregor dismounted as they neared, and Briar whickered happily as she was lead away by the stable hand for a good rub-down and a pail of honeyed oats. The others lead Gregor within the first portcullis and into a much larger gatehouse that was clearly more for temporary entertainment of important visitors, though not-so-important visitors that would have been lead up to the castle immediately. Dragon slayers were afforded great respect and often treated like lesser lords in their own right, but they were travelling knights, and in the constant political undercurrents and barely concealed hostilities and rivalries that seethed like a pot of snakes between the royal houses of the realms, caution was always the first watchword of any of them. Though Gregor had taken great pains that her hands were never dirtied with any politick, dragon slayers in general were regarded as "buyable" knights, those that would sell their loyalty for a price. Unfortunately, this was true more often than Gregor liked to think about, and so, until they felt certain of her allegiance or lackthereof to any of their current enemies, here Gregor would stay in the large, warm gatehouse until the king bade her up to the castle.
In truth, Gregor hardly minded these unspoken formalities much; she enjoyed the time spent with the rougher, common sort of guards and beholden knights that she and her brothers had grown up with in their father's house. She enjoyed their beer, their loose and easy talk, and often gleaned valuable information on the current status of the rumours involving her and her fellow travelling knights. These guards and soldiers, who often entertained her sort, could see easily enough when a fellow was too tired to regale others with tales, and would leave her alone to drink her beer quietly in the corner, or just as easily welcome her into their end-of-the-day talk. Gregor downed three or four tankards before the drink finally began to warm her; the wet cold had seeped much deeper than she'd realized. After that she leaned against the fireplace,quietly sipping her beer and listening to the knights and guards talk and laugh. Usually she would have liked to join in, but she was too preoccupied with her nervousness regarding the bounty.
An hour or so had passed by the time another runner came for Gregor, and by now she was beginning to feel insulted herself. The inside of the castle had better be a hive of activity right now for some reason, Gregor told herself, because to keep a knight waiting like this was not a matter of traditional etiquette, but evidence of a total lack of respect.

"Their Royal Highnesses are very busy at the moment, I expect," she said conversationally to the runner after they'd passed through the second inner courtyard and he had directed her into a hallway within the wall.
"Er, they...are preoccupied," the runner said, with the tones of an underling choosing their words carefully. "H...Her highness's abduction has been difficult for us all."
"The King and Queen are very upset, I imagine," Sir Gregor said. "I know that life can be difficult for servants in any home run by an unhappy master." "Yes, sir." Sir Gregor recognized that response. It was the fail safe of any servant talking to a figure of authority when they did not want to talk to them. It was safe, respectful, and confirmed nothing about anything. It could also be used in response to almost anything, until the authority figure gave up or went away or both. Sir Gregor gave up.
The castle was indeed busy, she found as they entered into a main corridor and headed down along it, but this was the increased busyness found in any large building when there was still work left in the day, and the outdoors was too inhospitable to do it outside. Gregor marked the hunched and hurried posture of all, in both the lowest laundry carriers and the small group of important looking staff, probably task supervisors, gathered in one corner of the hallway and discussing things in quiet, rapid voices. There was much furtive glancing over shoulders, and a noticeable lowering of volume as Sir Gregor and her runner passed. This, too, Gregor recognized, not as anything as sinister as plotting, but as the behaviour of those important enough to get away with standing around while they agreed on their disapproval of the current Goings On.
The house of the king of dOr mAntua was not busier than usual, but it was worried about something.
This further upset Gregor. She was used to anxious. She was used to wringing of hands, the desperate busyness of those trying not to think about something that was happening. But this quiet fear was something different.
There was something more going on here than just a kidnapped princess, though it probably still had everything to do with it, and Sir Gregor had a deeply irritating feeling that she was not going to find out what it was.
Sir Gregor glanced at a portrait of the royal family as the turned a corner, down a hallway that looked to lead to the throne room, judging by the massive double doors looming at the end of it--and Sir Gregor stopped.
She backed up a few steps and stared at the wall where the portrait of the royal family should have been. Instead, there was a glaringly blank expanse of wall, and yes--Sir Gregor squinted and could make out the clear, large rectangle of slightly brighter stone where something had hung for enough years to prevent the permanent stain of dust that had affected the stone around it. And there--she could see the iron bearings that had supported it, still nailed into the wall.
"Sir Gregor," the runner said quickly, snapping her attention away for a moment. "Sir, if you please, their Royal Majesties..." She stared at the suddenly anxious young man for a moment, then back up to the blank expanse of wall.
Sir Gregor was kind to peasants.
"The royal family portrait was damaged recently, I expect," she said in a tone that let on she expected no such thing, but was giving the man an easy out. "Had to be taken down for repairs?"
The relief in his face was enough to confirm her suspicions.
"Yes, sir," he said. "Terrible accident."
"Scaffolding was involved, I should think," Sir Gregor went on, slowly turning and continuing down the hallway with her grateful guide.
"Sir?"
"Big wooden ladders," Sir Gregor translated. It was not the first time she'd forgotten the gap in vocabulary level between herself and commoners. "Put up to dust the portrait, of course."
"Yes, sir," the young man continued to agree. "Great tragedy. Happened just before you rode in, Sir."
"Perhaps it happened while I was in the guard's house, even," Sir Gregor went on conversationally. She saw the young man's white mountain-born skin pale even further.
"I...it may have, Sir," he said, speeding up his gate slightly as they neared the doors of the King and Queen's audience chamber. "I was not present for it."
Sir Gregor turned her attention to the doors in front of her as the runner dissolved to her right to alert the fanfare givers waiting inside.

The farmer wrung his hat with his hands.

"...S'a bloody nuisance, s'wot it es," he muttered resentfully. ""ow're we s'posed t' sleep in our own beds, Oi ask yoew sir? We carn't, 'at's 'ow, not wit' it roamin' about out there wot like 'et owns the woods, makin' all its bloody noise at night, burnin' all manner a' moi crops, an' 'ow'm Oi s'posed to make up fer wot crops Oi've lost, eh, wot with harvest season nearly on us..."

Sir Gregor the knight nodded companionably.

"It sounds like it," he said, having last tuned in several dozen words ago.If a woman had been present, she would have made the correct assumption that Sir Gregor was unmarried. Married men quickly learned, when the brain was preoccupied, to install a direct line from their ears to their mouth. This was an act of self-preservation, in the sense that most married men quickly tire of sleeping in the barn, especially if winter is on the horizon.

"...an outrage, I tell ye'. S'just not proper. It makes us look a laughin' stock, it dos! We pay our taxes, don't we, well, wot'r we payin' 'em for, then..."

Sir Gregor muttered another sound of agreement, looking over the piece of parchment in his hands. Apparently the local king had received an identical one several weeks ago, and Sir Gregor had happened to be passing through the area by the time the official flyers went up. It read:

THEE VILLUJMEN OF WEST LEMENS HAVE OF THEE PASSD 2 MUNS SUFFRD:

4 CROPS O KORN BURNT

3 CHIKNS BURNT

4 COWS ET

1 DOG OV FAMILY GONNE MISSSNG

1 TO MAY TO PACH TRAMPD

2 BLU BRRY PLOTS TRAMPD OR ET

1 MAIDEN WOMAN TAKIN DURIN WASHNG

Sir Gregor noted that the woman's abduction was not listed until last. This probably meant she was neither pretty, nor available. Funny how when it was beautiful virgins stolen away by monsters, their youth and purity was all anyone yammered about until the knight had brought them home. Sir Gregor often wondered if this was because of the desires of those who'd lost her or what they assumed of his own desires.

Dean Harper was a forward-thinking man. Organization was a priority in his life, the rows of various plants on his farm were kept in rigid, square-cut order, chickens were expect to lay on time and at a minimum of two eggs today--how Farmer Harper managed this, no one knew, though it was a subject of deep fascination in the local tavern--and though he couldn't read or write, he got the members of his family that could to make lists for him. Lists for supplies, for crops ready for harvest, crops already harvested, crops that had to be purged of rot and other mess, lists of tools needing replacement. His attention to detail was, Sir Gregor would later hear in the town's tavern, nothing short of a properly trained surgeon's attention to the placement of arteries in a major heart-surgery. These were admirable skills in, say, officials of government, or even the ambitious secretaries of successful merchants.

The universe had done Dean Harper a cruelty in having him born to a five-acre scrap of mud over a hundred miles from anywhere these skills might actually amount to anything. In the deepest recess of Farmer Harper's soul, he knew this, in a way, though he could not have put it to words had he been asked. And because of it he was a deeply resentful man.

He made up for it, as many such men do, by making mountains out of molehills and berating those around them until such molehills were reduced and organized into proper order. Now, for the first time in his life, Farmer Harper had been handed an actual mountain to complain about.

He was endeavouring to cultivate it into an entire continent.

"I mean, 'o ever 'eard of a bloody dragon comin' down to proper villages, like, and takin' up wot women is out don' 'ere laundries? S' bloody ridiculous! An' 'ere, 'lizabeth not even bein' a prop'r maid'n an' suchlike--"

There were two other men behind Farmer Harper. Sir Gregor noted one of them clenching his jaw and exchanging looks with the other. Whoever Elizabeth was, her husband was going to have words with Farmer Harper once he got his wife back. Possibly before. "--take proper prin-cesses an' the like, not bleedin' villagers, s'how it's always been, here now, what d'we pay our taxes for anyhow, Oi ask you sir? 'f bloody great dragons come'n down from'a mountains, wot's a' world comin' to, then--"

"I understand your...er...being upset," Sir Gregor finally cut the man off. "I'm sure there's just been a misunderstanding. I'll sort it out presently, my good man."

"Too right you 'ill!"

Sir Gregor straightened up, which caused a certain matter-of-fact clinking and clanking as Sir Gregor was, in fact, in full armour and he was, in fact, a knight in the service of High King George, whose authority was, in fact, currently present in the very shiney, very red emblem emblazoned on Sir Gregor's chest.

Farmer Harper swallowed hard as he remembered his place in the world compared to very shiney knights in very shiney armour with very shiney red symbols on their chests. "I, er, that is...we'd be mighty 'ppreciative if ye did, sir," he mumbled, dropping his eyes to the ground. "No disrespec' meant, m'lord."

"I'm sure there wasn't," Sir Gregor said coldly. Sir Gregor was typically kind when it came to dealing with peasants, after all, they were where the food came from, and Sir Gregor was nothing if not a fan of a well-marinated steak and fried onions with thick, hot, fresh bread at the end of the week. But he had no patience for Harper's sort, those that chose to be bitter about their lot in life and exacted their due from those around them.

After working out the directions to the dragon's cave and implying that a hot bath and warm meal waiting in the tavern at the end of the night would not go amiss, Sir Gregor the knight mounted his noble steed and trotted off to do his job. Farmer Harper gave a gruff snort and tromped off to see if his chickens had managed to lay their second round of eggs for the day. The other two men that had stood with him gazed off after Sir Gregor for another few minutes.

"So that were th' great big Sir Gregor we'm all been 'earin' about, eh?" said one after a while. "I thought e'd be taller. An' 'is skin's a bit dark, ain't it? Yew think 'e's foreign, or some such?"

The other one shrugged.

"We can' 'elp 'ow we're made, eh?" he said. "Anyway, if he gets rid a' th' bloody thing, 'o cares if he's foreign? Or short, for tha' matter. Don' matter wot a man's made of, long as 'e can do 'is job. S'what my pa always said."

Sir Gregor could indeed do his job, despite being only five and a half feet tall. When you had a sharp enough sword and a sturdy enough shield, the only matter that height factored into was that it made you a smaller target. As for Sir Gregor's skin, his mother would be considered a foreigner, though only by the sort of old ladies, most of them grandmothers, that gathered around some unlucky daughter-in-law's kitchen every teatime to discuss local politick in front of the stove.

People of the darker-skinned variety had sort of slid into every day society in most of the medium-to-larger sized towns and cities of the joint kingdoms of Argenwaul around a hundred years ago. Most of their ancestors had originally been slaves in a neighboring single kingdom that the kingdoms of Argenwaul had been at war with until recently, when the neighboring kingdom had been badly undermined from within by, shockingly, its own slaves. Argenwaul had not gone to war with its neighbor over the issue of slavery, but it had certainly made use of it by declaring it a non-issue within its own borders. Over half of the neighbor's work force--most of which was made up of slaves--had deserted in the first month before its government could come to terms with what was happening.

Argenwaul had only ever enslaved its own criminals, on the basis that people who stole property and lives should work to pay back whatever value of what they had taken, rather than sit in chains behind bars all day getting fed and being otherwise unconstructive. Originally they hadn't had much truck with peoples of different colour, mostly because Argenwaul was curiously lacking ambition in the exploring department and most that lived there had never traveled beyond their own kingdom's borders. Once people started hiring the darker-skinned foreign freed slaves of their now-dissolving neighboring kingdom, they'd found that all these dark fellows wanted was a decent home, good food, and a wife to come home to, and, well, that wasn't much different than them, now was it? And that was that.

As for Sir Gregor's father, he had been a general in the war and was now a retired noble living on a healthy plot of green field and rolling glen on the edge of one of Argenwaul's larger kingdoms, Althessa. He had met his wife when she and several other escaping slaves had run into his regiment in the woods. They had helped the healers patch up some of the soldiers, Sir Gregor's father among them, and his parents' eyes had met while his mother was putting a poultice on his father's leg. She'd stayed on to help the healers rather than following her fellows over the border, and she and the soldier with the deep grey eyes had married once the war was over. It was all very romantic.

Sir Gregor had little time for romance, himself.

He left his horse nibbling at a patch of stubby grass on the mountainside several hundred feet away from the cave, hiking the rest of the way himself. If a dragon attacked you, you weren't going to make it out of the cave anyway, and that was no reason to leave a good horse where it could get eaten or set on fire or both. When he reached the cave, he left his sword and shield leaning against a rock outside it, stepped up to the mouth, and called down it.

"HALLO THE LAIR!"

His call echoed down it, and then it was silent.

Sir Gregor went and sat on his rock. He pulled out a whetstone and, with an air of great nonchalance, began to sharpen his sword.

Within a few minutes, the sound of rattling scales became audible, and louder, until it stopped just inside the cave. Sir Gregor waited.

A jet of flame suddenly shot forth, razing the ground several dozen feet in front of the cave, and falling just short of where Sir Gregor sat. As it was, his sabatons became uncomfortably warm.

"Oh, good," Sir Gregor muttered under his breath, setting down his whetsone and sword. "This one's keen."

A bright red snout poked out of the cave, just far enough for a suspicious yellow eye to glare down it.

"And who might you be?" it demanded haughtily. Sir Gregor stood up and stretched.

"My name is Sir Gregor of Althessa," he announced. "As you can see, I have laid down my arms in a show of peace and good faith. I wish to commence negotiations with you regarding the village West Lemens and the woman you abducted from there some days ago. May I come in?"

The snouth sniffed and raised several inches.

"Have you brought me the objects of my demands?" it replied.

Sir Gregor felt his stomach sink. It was going to be a long day, and the sun had only risen a few hours ago. He sighed and took off his helmet, placing it next to his sword and stone on the rock. His long, rich, dark brown hair, tied back with a piece of string and shot through with tight waves, spilled several inches down his back plate.

"I'm afraid the villagers mentioned naught to me of your demands," he said. "Would you care to enlighten me?"

"I require several fattened cows, a dozen deer, a brace of fine hares and three jugs of milk to be left outside my lair by nightfall," the snout said. "And I will require this monthly, on the eve of the new moon, and if it is so much as a day late, I will take a member of the female sex from their brood and keep her with me until the demands are met." The snout added with a deep self-satisfaction, "I'm given to understand humans prize their females quite highly. Well, they shan't see hide nor hair of the one I've taken till you return with my tribute!"

"Oi!" Sir Gregor snapped as the snout moved to pull back inside the cave. "Now just you wait here, one minute." Sir Gregor walked, clinking and clanking, over to the mouth of the cave, and stood squarely in front of the juvenile red dragon standing just inside it. The youngster reared its head back to glare at them, nostrils flaring deeply as it breathed in.

"Don't you dare," Sir Gregor growled. The young dragon opened its glittering, toothy maw, and a deep orange glow lit the back of its throat. Flaring its wings, the youngster reared back on its hind legs to deliver a vengeful gust of flame-- --And lifted its head off the stone floor an hour or so later, blinking in confusion, a bad ache between its eyes and its stomach strangely cold. It swung its gaze around to meet that of Sir Gregor, who had moved helmet, sword, shield, and whetstone inside the cave to take shelter in its coolness from the near-noon sun. Somewhere in the process, he'd found a length of sweetgrass to suck on. He maneuvered it round to the corner of his mouth as the dragon drew another long breath--

--and choked as nothing came up but air and a bit of spittle. The dragon's eyes went wide in amazement that was slowly being overtaken by fear as it regarded the totally fearless and surprisingly short man who sat on a rock, slowly sharpening his sword. The dragon drew another, deeper breath, the scales around its chest and belly sliding unnervingly against each other as the dragon's body expanded and prepared to flame. Sir Gregor paused his sharpening to watch.

Finally the young beast gave up trying to flame, and grudgingly resigned itself to diplomacy.

The dragon made to speak and gagged, coughing raggedly. Its next attempt was a squeak, and by the third, it managed:

"Whort 'id 'ou d'?"

Sir Gregor grinned, a little meanly.

"S'an old trick most knights learn soon after they start dealing with dragons," he said, and went back to sharpening. "S'the soft spot under your belly. S'not really a soft spot, 'course, not in the scale--Mother Nature's a fine hand at turning out smart-made creatures, and she's not the type to put a hole where there should be scales. The soft spot's literally in your belly. Your fire belly, anyway. A good thump in the right spot and it stuns your fire gut. An equally good thump between a young dragon's eyes will put 'em down for about an hour, anyone knows that."

The juvenile glared.

"S' whhy not jus' kk'll me," it asked, sitting up.

"'Cause that's not how it works," the knight said amiably. "Most people think it is, or at least talk like it is, and it's how they write it in the history books, but no knight or dragon has killed each other in...oh...say, nine hundred years?"

The juvenile's eyes widened in astonishment.

"But I thought--"

"Aye, most people do, most people do," Sir Gregor said, nodding sagely. "Look, it should've been your parents telling you this, but how it works is this: a dragon comes along to a kingdom, nicks the princess, or a princess if there's more than one--usually the oldest--and after a week or two, or as soon as a knight comes along, or one is summoned, the knight'll ride up the mountain and tell the dragon how much the king has to pay. Usually a dragon doesn't ask too much, like, it'd be unreasonable to ask for the whole treasury, that kind of thing does get a dragon into trouble. Usually with their own kind. And then, after the treasure's sent up, the dragon hands over the princess and the knight escorts her back to her castle."

The dragon narrowed its eyes.

"But...why comply with the ransom in the first place?" it asked, puzzled. "Why not just kill the dragon or steal the princess back anyway?"

"Because one, your folk are bloody hard to kill, and a whole mess of knights were burnt to a crisp before they figured that out. And for two, well, after the ransom's paid, the dragon usually hangs around, maybe nicks a few princesses from surrounding kingdoms to add to his pile. And thing about anyone with a dragon living near them is, they aren't going to have too much trouble with bandits, cattle thieves, and highwaymen and the like. Dragons look after the land they're living on. They protect it from the outside and the inside. That's the pact."

The young dragon was taking all this in and rolling it over and over in its mind. "But..." it began slowly. "What if a dragon doesn't like treasure?"

Sir Gregor stared at it until it started to shift uncomfortably.

"Well...er...I'm not sure," he said slowly. "...Why do you ask?"

The young dragon hung his head a little and avoided her gaze. Sir Gregor's jaw dropped.

"Are you serious? You really don't like treasure?"

"I don't know! I don't think so. It's just...it's just a lot of metal, isn't it? And shiney rocks? And they aren't even very comfortable to lie on, I tried nesting like my parents showed me, and I got sore ribs for it. I just don't see the point, is all."

"Don't...see...the point?" Sir Gregor exclaimed. "But--you--it--you're a dragon! You have to like treasure! All dragons like treasure!" "And all human females wear dresses," the dragon said coldly.

Sir Gregor went very still. The dragon flared its small neck fans smugly. Finally Sir Gregor glared and demanded:

"All right, what gave it away?" The dragon sniffed.

"I can smell your sex, you know," it said arrogantly. "Your males and females smell different, just like dragons--just like anything, really. You stink of sweat and metal, but that was hardly going to cover it up."

Sir Gregor harumphed and began sharpening her sword again.

"Fine," she muttered. "So I'm a woman, so what? It doesn't make me not a knight, little whip, and it doesn't make you not a bloody fool. You're a dragon, and dragons hoard treasure, and they take princesses."

"But I don't want any treasure!" the dragon wailed. "I want food, proper food, not squirrels like I've had to eat, and if princesses are anything like the yammering creature I've had to deal with for the past two weeks, well, you can stuff that too! I don't care if that's how everyone does things, I don't have to do them that way if I don't want to!"

Sir Gregor raised an eyebrow.

"Firstly, yes, they can make you do things the way everyone else does things. Your own kind makes sure you lot do things the way they ought to be done--s'why we've got no more nonsense with princesses getting chained to rocks to get eaten, or knights getting cooked in their own armour, or, and this is important: villages getting burned to the ground. Which, while you haven't quite done that yet, you're getting dangerously close to doing. Hells bells, pup, you're lucky I got to you first, before they sent an inquisitor out to inspect you! You wouldn't like that, they're not nearly as gentle as I am--a thump between the eyes would be the least of your worries. And secondly--why the bloody hell have you been eating squirrels? A growing whip like you should be feasting on bucks, not squirrels." The young dragon hung its head again, and fiddled with the tip of its tail between its forepaws.

"I...I can't hunt properly," it admitted. "My parents didn't get to teaching me before I left. And...and that's why I had to take the cows, don't you see? I'm so hungry all the time and I just couldn't take it anymore..."

Sir Gregor felt a softening in her heart. She sighed pityingly, and hesitantly stood up and went over to pat the dragon on the shoulder.

"Er...there, there," she said gruffly. "I...look, I can see now this has all been a misunderstanding. That's why you've made these odd demands, is it? You need food you can't get yourself. It makes sense, it does, and I suppose it's rather clever of you, but...dragons don't make demands of villagers. They just don't. It's not sporting, and it's not fair--in fact, it's bloody indecent, and in this case, where you've actually taken one of them, and damaged crops--well, that's borderline cruel. These are no more than poor villagefolk. Whatever they beat out of the ground around here goes straight to their bellies, and it's rarely enough to fill them. All these things you've listed for them to bring you--it's downright impossible for them to actually meet these demands."

The young dragon's head drooped.

"But I don't know what else to do," it whined. "I don't know how to carry off princesses, I don't know how to hunt, I don't like treasure--what am I supposed to do?"

"Go home to your parents," Sir Gregor said flatly. "I don't know why you left them before you even knew how to hunt, but it's obvious you've got a lot left to learn before you're ready to start out on your own."

The dragon stiffened.

"I...I can't," it mumbled. "I can't go home."

"Why not?"

"I just can't," it said. "You wouldn't understand. It's...I...I just can't." Sir Gregor hesitated to press further. She, after all, had her own reasons for having left home and never returning. And if someone asked...well, her answers would also probably have to end in, "just can't." Sometimes you just had to, and you just couldn't explain why.

"Well, alright," she sighed. "But you've got to figure out what you're going to do with yourself. You can't keep doing this, and after you give the woman back, I wouldn't advise sticking around--you won't be able to keep on burning things and taking animals, the inquisitors will come after you, and if you just stop, the villagers might take it into their heads to actually try dealing with you themselves. You ought to leave, find another cave somewhere, away from humans until you figure things out."

"But I can't hunt for myself!" the dragon protested. "What I am going to do?" Sir Gregor looked out through the mouth of the cave, and her gaze went somewhere far beyond the horizon framed in its stoney walls. She had an inkling of an idea, and something much bigger than an inkling telling her it was a horrible one, that it could only end horribly, and she was a horribly stupid person for even thinking of it.

But Sir Gregor's gut was telling her that this didn't mean she shouldn't try, and that it would be wrong not to. And the reason Sir Gregor was so very good at knighting--and not just the peaceful negotiating aspect of it--was that she always listened to her gut.

"You go off over in the woods there, then, and I'll meet up with you by that big rock in the distance tomorrow morning," she told the young dragon some time later.

"In the morning?" the dragon asked, rearing its head back. "I have to spend all night out there? Why can't I spend it in my cave?"

"Because I'm going down there to tell the villagers it was a misunderstanding and I've run you off," Sir Gregor explained. "And once I do, they'll be up to your cave, with pitchforks and scythes and hammers, just in case, poking about for any treasure you may have left behind."

"But I've never had any treasure," the dragon said, exasperated.

"I know that," Gregor said, "and I could very well tell them that, and they'd laugh when I was gone and called me daft for saying it. Everyone knows dragons keep treasure, and they'll want their piece of it, after all the trouble you've given them, and if you're still there when they come up with their sharp things--and they'll bring them, just in case--they'll run you through out of sheer spite. So you go on along to that rock, and I'll pick you up tomorrow morning. Now get on, we're getting close, and I want you well away before they all come running out and cheering me as the damn big hero of the hour. Off you go!"

Grumbling under its breath, the dragon tucked its wings in tight so as not to catch on trees and cantered off into the woods. There was a reason dragons liked rocky mountainsides and caves. Several, actually, but not catching up their wings every few feet was a big one.

Dollface chapter 1 bits of the beginning

The sun rose on the moon.

There are two ways to measure a day on the moon, but it was unlikely that anyone other than the scientists of New America knew what they were. What everyone else knew was the result: from their perspective, it came down to about twenty-nine and a half earth days. What everyone actually cared about was that they only had real sunshine every other month.

On the surface of the moon, which humans had taken to calling Luna ever since they came to live on it, a large, curving dome with a shimmering silver-blue surface began to unfold its shell. A hundred miles of glittering proto-metal temperature-regulating panels shuddered and slid back on each other, down, down, down the surface of the dome to its base. The process only took several minutes and was nearly soundless to the inhabitants, separated as they were from the panels by a hundred feet of solid, thick, hyper-dense megaplexi, a form of synthetic glass.

Within the dome, faces turned up and quiet sighs of pleasure and delight peppered bedrooms, offices, walkways, levehicles, stores, and parks. Thousands of things divided the citizens of New America in this age, but the warmth and purity of true sunlight brought them all together for some precious minutes every other month. When a human night fell, the panels would recover the dome, and thousands of satellites would converge above, outside the synthetic darkness, to soak up precious sunlight on their solar panels. And when another moon night fell, the hearts of men would deflate--just a little, in most, but just enough in others--and crime rates, suicide rates, and violence would rise for another month as humans scrapped and despaired in their dome's false, synthetic sun as well as during its truly starry night. It was astounding how true and false sunlight could have such affects on people. Psychologists were still going mad about it, and the remnants of Earth's population had been settled in their domes on the moon for nigh on two hundred years. One thing everyone, or at least everyone who had ever gotten stark raving drunk--and, in an enclosed glass ball on a barren satellite currently being devastated by overpopulation, filthy air, and the very foundations of buildings and homes crumbling from weight and years, that was indeed most of the population--could say for sure was that real sunlight definitely hurt more in the eyes of the hungover. In a small, cramped, two bedroom apartment based in a small, cramped, condemned apartment building hovering erratically in the lower portion of New America's many hovering levels of habitation, a young man with a new haircut was waking up.

"...well-known and by some revered, psychologist Dr. Allen Krieger, author of "The Pants Anomaly" and, many argue, the most recent mass-cultural phenomenon many are calling the Fem-Masc movement...Everyone please give a warm hand to our guest tonight!"

The thunder of thousands of hands cracking together jerked my head off the pillow. I stared blankly at a dim grey wall with a one-foot-square chunk of glass stuck in the middle of it. Gears churned sluggishly as I tried to make sense of why applause was coming from our apartment window, and how people were standing outside it when I was twenty floors up.

"Thank you, Mr. Downey."

"Richard, please."

"Heh, Richard. Oh, and before we go any further, just to prevent any future confusion--the word is actually pronounced mazz."Masc" is taken from the front of 'masculine', but you say it with a z sound. Otherwise it can sound like a 'mask' that you wear."

"Haha, I was wondering about that, I appreciate that...Allen? Can I call you Allen?"

"Sure, I'm fine with that."

"Now, there are several questions I--and I'm sure the audience too--would love to know the answers to..."

I wiped grime and sleep sand out of my eyes and finally made sense of the lights and shadows playing on the wall. I groaned and flopped back down onto the couch.I'd left the living room wallscreen on last night.

I was torn between digging the remote out of the couch to turn it off and leaving it. On the one hand, effort. On the other, I really wanted to go back to sleep.

"...that masc--I'm sorry, mazz--women are naturally more aggressive and prone to violence than your typical feminine woman?"

"Aggressive? You mean, more forward, more dominant, more persistent, bolder than feminine women? Sure. They're also more of all those things than feminine men are. That's part of being masculine. And as for violent? Well, that depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about a teenage masc punching the schoolyard bully in the face, sure, because that's something anyone forward, dominant, persistent, and bold would do. If you're talking about whether or not a masc is likelier to smash a barstool over someone's head because they insulted her boyfriend, well, that depends."

"Depends on what?"

"On the people themselves. You see, people in our society are so programmed to think feminine equals woman, and masculine equals man. But that's not true, as I conclusively prove in my book. It contains plenty of interviews and evidence to support that not all women are feminine, and neither are all men masculine. Maybe we're not the majority, but we exist, and that matters, and you can't say we don't or it doesn't. It's not a genetic coding you're born with. It's a personality trait. Masculine people are going to be more aggressive, and possibly more violent. Feminine people are typically more submissive and deal with confrontation in less hands-on ways. It's all about perspective, and I've proven in my book that the perspective that sees these traits as connected to gender is simply incorrect. "

"You're throwing a lot of unconventional ideas at us all at once, Allen. Would you mind if we go back and analyze some of them more closely?"

"I would love that."

I would love to go back to sleep, but I couldn't find the wallscreen remote and I couldn't connect to it with my palmface chip because it was malfunctioning. I stared blearily at it and tried to remember whether I'd punched someone in the face last night. I was pretty sure I hadn't, but whenever I got blackout drunk I did things I'd never do otherwise.

And man, last night I had been blackout drunk.

I stumbled through the tiny hallway of the tiny apartment I shared with my mom and her boyfriend. We called it a two-bedroom, though technically my bedroom was a large closet. No, really. My bed wasn't even a real bed, it was a standard twin foam mattress with the last third cut off so it would fit, and that took up the whole floorspace. I had a wall cabinet Suq'd(tm) to the top of the wall over my pillow that I kept nice clothes in. Everything else I shared with my mom in her dresser in her and Louis's room. I usually did sleep in my closet, but last night I obviously hadn't made it that far.

I kept as quiet as I could, because if I was lucky Louis slept most of the day and wouldn't wake up until I'd gone out for the night. Louis did most of his...cooking at night. And if Mom woke up and heard me she might think I was a "burglar"--seriously, who even says that?--and wake him up to find out.

It had happened before several times. It was very sad.

And considering Louis usually hit me with a baseball bat and asked questions later--a few times I was pretty sure he had recognized me and just used it as an excuse to hit me with something--I did not want to take chances.

I fumbled in the dark for about five minutes and barely kept the shelves and shelves of pill bottles--most of which were not there legally--from crashing to the floor several times. I finally found the bottle of hangover cure and downed about four of them. You weren't supposed to take more than two at once, but whatever.

Then I went back to bed. In my closet.

When I woke up again it was because of more noise. I froze with my heart in my throat, listening.

"...can't understand what is so fucking hard about buying me one dress, just one nice dress, so I can go the Benefit this year not looking like a gutterhumper."

I heard my mom giggle. "But doesn't he get you one every year anyway? Why the sudden change of routine?"

"Because he paid for another dress about a month ago, and it was, like, ninety k creds, but like, I didn't know he was expecting me to wear that dress, like, he thought that was the dress I'd wanted for it. I keep trying to explain to him that no, it was just a really nice dress I wanted, and I've spent the past month planning my outfit and now I'm ready to..."

I relaxed and tuned them out. It was just my mom on the phone with her friend Alissa Miyazaki, the latest wife of one of the biggest business tycoons in NAD, and the only reason she even knew that tiny gnats like us existed was because she used to live in our apartment block. I'd babysat for her several times, and the rumour was Tristan, her kid, actually was Miyazaki's biological son from an affair...God, when was it? He'd been fourteen the last time I babysat, though it was more hanging out by that time, he was a good kid and I'd tried to keep him that way. That was three years ago. Was he really seventeen already? Damn. That made me feel old. But twenty-six wasn't really old, was it? I was just being self-conscious, right?...Damn. It was way too early to think about this at...I coaxed my clock hologram out of my palmface...shit, one in the afternoon. For some reason I had a feeling this was bad, and that there was something I should have been doing.

Anyway, the only reason his mom was bigwigs these days was because Miyazaki had moved her in after kicking his last wife out, to spite her for the divorce. In another year he'd be back out chasing ass again, and another year after that she'd be back down here with us, rolling in grime and struggling to breathe the smog-thick air.

I stood, balancing on my squishy sawed-off foam mattress, and fumbled for my gas mask on the nail next to my nice-clothing-cabinet. Then I climbed quietly out of my closet and muttered a greeting-and-goodbye to my mother as I passed her in the living room on my way to the door. I doubted she even noticed.

I was halfway down the stairs(the levelator hadn't worked in years, and since this was technically a condemned building, I wouldn't have risked it if it had) and already pulling my mask on when I realized I actually had no idea where I was going. I paused, pulled my mask back off, and patted myself until I came up with a half-charged cigalectrik. I took a long pull on it and thought as I blew the vapor out my nose and mouth.

Normally I slept the day away until I went out at night, but I had this nasty, nibbling feeling I'd done something nova stupid last night, or I'd forgotten something I really, really should have remembered.

I puffed more vapor out and nibbled on a hangnail, trying to think. I'd gone out with friends...but I was always going out with friends. People I called friends.

My palmface fizzled and cracked as I curled my fingers around my cigalectrik again, and I winced as an internal spark from it shocked my palm. Okay, first things first--I could start by checking up on who I'd contacted last night, and maybe they could remind me what had happened and what I'd done.

I flexed my palm and yelped as it shocked me again, harder. Scowling stubbornly at it, I flexed a few other commands. It either shocked me or fizzled at each one. I groaned, tilting my head back against the stairwell wall. I wasn't contacting anyone, or reaching anything in my Palmface, until I'd gotten the stupid thing fixed. ...The wall didn't feel like it should.

I kept my head against it, trying to figure out what was wrong. I took another drag and turned the cigalectrik back off, jamming it into my pocket for later, and rubbed the back of my skull back and forth against the wall.

Part of my head was feeling my hair pressed between my skin and the wall. The rest of it...

I slowly reached my hands up and patted my hair. Or where my hair should have been.

I'm sure they heard me screaming all the way to the top floor.

The pigeons