"Preeeeeesentiiiing, to their Royal Majesties, His Highness King Nalerimon of dOr mAntua, and her Highness Queen Elaenil, Sir Gregor the Valiant of Althessa, Beholden to His Highness High King George, Slayer of the Dread Beast of the Golden Plains, Destroyer of the Mighty Western Elderborough Chimaera, and the Conqueror of many fearsome dragons!"
Sir Gregor stood proudly as her deeds were listed. She'd slain several monsters other than those mentioned, but it was only the really big ones that got put on your list. That was fine with her. The only battles worth remembering were the ones that mattered, and she'd saved whole kingdoms--small kingdoms, but whole kingdoms--from the chimaera and that freakish monster that had terrorized the Golden Plains of Thwaight.
The conquering mighty dragons bit just meant she was a good negotiator.
Sir Gregor came to stand at the base of the steps that led down from the thrones' raised platform and went down on one knee, bowing her head, as was custom.
"Please, Sir Knight, arise," said King Nalerimon. Sir Gregor did so, meeting the king's pale green eyes.
They were surrounded by a deeply troubled face, that was just as deeply exhausted by its troubles.
"I have come to answer your summons, good king," Sir Gregor said, squaring her shoulders and loosely placing her hand on her sword hilt. "The matter of the dragon."
"Yes, and I thank you for it," King Nalerimon said, nodding his head. "And if you can rid our fair land of this memace, Sir Gregor, I and all of my people would thank you to the ends of our days. But I fear you may not find this particular beast as...simple a matter as others you have dealt with in the past."
Sir Gregor raised an eyebrow. Here it comes, she thought warily.
"Alas, the dragon atop the mountain Cronehead seems to see no reason," the king said, close to violating the unspoken rule of Never Admitting To The Agreement. "I have sent a score of knights, professional dragon slayers, atop the mountain to...deal with this creature, nigh on six times now. All have either come back gravely injured, or not at all."
Sir Gregor felt her stomach sink. It did indeed sound as though this was one of Those Dragons. The ones that Took Things Seriously.
This was still deeply wrong, though. Six knights, already? An inquisitor should have been by already and sorted things out. So why hadn't one?
And there was something else...
"And of the princess, my lord?" Sir Gregor inquired.
The king gripped the arms of his throne. Sir Gregor struggled not to let her eyes move directly towards the motion, but it became easier when they focused on the clenching of his jaw.
"The...princess," the king began. "Yes."
This is wrong, screamed a thousand survival instincts, honed as they only could be by inhabiting a crossdresser living in a land where wearing the wrong kinds of clothes got you killed. Back out of it. Find some way to back out of it. Something is wrong with this princess, this dragon, this everything.
"The princess is...she..."
"The princess is tainted," the queen said with the fluid tones of a born liar, "by the dragon's magic. Alas, it has crept inside and made her...unwell. It first began to lure her some years ago, we believe, until some months ago it was discovered she had completely gone. T'was a woodgatherer that saw her up on the mountain. We have sent whatever knights have come to us ever since."
Sir Gregor stared right at the stone-faced queen for several moments. She endeavoured to ask, even plead, with her eyes: Is this reallywhat you're going with?
The queen didn't waver.
After several long seconds, Sir Gregor finally said:
"Indeed, Your Majesty. A horrible travesty. I must offer my condolences."
Her Majesty nodded, ever so slightly.
This explanation was, of course, a bigger crock of horse shit than many of the things Gregor had ever heard. She knew about dragon magic, clearly far more than this queen had ever considered. You picked up a few things when you'd spent seven years dealing with them. Dragons didn't do things like this. They weren't like people. They were individuals, certainly, but like all beasts, they had a nature to their kind, and this sort of thing wasn't in their nature.
"It is, indeed, and thank you for your consideration, Sir Knight," the king said. "Because of this, we fear, even once one has slain the beast...bringing the princess home may prove more difficult."
"What makes you say such a thing, Your Majesty?" Sir Gregor asked, raising an eyebrow. "Surely her Highness would be glad to return home, once the beast's will is lifted from her."
The king and queen exchanged brief glances.
"The princess is mad," the king finally said, shortly. Something twanged with satisfaction inside Gregor. This sounded closer to the truth. "The dragon's magic has driven her to it, you see. Twisted her body and her mind, both. It has made her...nothing short of a monster. We fear the creature's death may not be enough."
"I see," Sir Gregor said slowly, turning this over and over in her mind. "I see. It is, indeed, a great sufferance that has been paid to Your Majesties. I will do everything in my power to rectify it. And, in exchange...fifty gold per stone?"
"And ten diamonds per horn," the king said firmly.
Sir Gregor's eyes nearly bugged out of her head.
"I--er--of course, Your Majesty, such generosity--" she stammered, but the king waved a hand, cutting her off.
"Bring the princess home, Sir Gregor the Valiant," he said, his eyes burning, "and I will give you whatever you desire. Just bring--bring the princess to me."
"I--I will," Sir Gregor managed, still stumbling over the words ten diamonds per horn. "10 GEMS OF VALU PER HORN"--she hadn't even imagined diamonds entering the picture. "Consider it done, Your Majesty. Your Highness," she said, bobbing a quick bow to the both of them.
As Sir Gregor made her exit, her mind was whirling madly.
Ten diamonds per horn...I wonder if I'd asked for half the bloody kingdom...the princess...
Something about that exchange had deeply bothered her. And tomorrow she would figure out what it was, on her way up the mountain.
"My lord?"
Gregor jolted as a servant materialized in front of her.
"Hrnnf?" she grunted in surprise.
"This way, please, my lord," the maid said. "If you'll follow me, my lord, your rooms for the night are just this way." She gestured down a hallway off to the left. "...Ah," Sir Gregor said. It was common for a knight to request a king's hospitality for the night, but she'd completely forgotten about it. Ten diamonds per horn! She followed the young woman down the hallway.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, she would set her mind to grinding out why the king's constant referral to his daughter as the princess bothering her. But tonight...tonight she would think about the things she could do with ten diamonds per horn.

Here, tonight, was another bath. Again, as always, Gregor made sure all doors to her room and the bathroom were closed and locked securely. She didn't want any maids nipping in to take care of that last detail while she was soaking in the tub, and end up walking in on them, barechested and with a towel around her waist.
Ten diamonds per horn was still running around in her mind, but the part of Gregor that was easily irritated by stupidity was speaking up.
What reason had a dragon to taint any person with magic? It didn't. They didn't typically bother luring them with it, either. Dragons used their magic for practical things, or artistic things. They didn't use it on other living things, unless they were driven to it in combat. And only a dragon could push a dragon that far. And as for capturing princesses, well, when a dragon wanted to grab one, they just waited for one to come out in the open where they could get at them, and then what followed was typically a lot of swooping and roaring. They didn't need to do anything else.
Unless they were bloody clumsy little red whips, but that was another thing to worry about later.
Gregor wondered if this was the same lie fed to the other knights, if they'd even thought to ask. If Gregor knew her fellow knights--and it depended on the specific knights in question, but for argument's sake, she was splitting it fifty-fifty, three idiots, and three experienced warriors--some of them had, and some hadn't. Had they all been told something different? Gregor thought about asking the next morning which knights exactly had gone up the mountain. If she could track them down, and ask them...
...Then Gregor's body began to talk to her about its various aches from riding a full day in rain, and how very, very tired it was. And being tired reminded Gregor of the important things in life.
Such as: did it really matter?
She'd wondered so much about it because you had to ask questions to survive in this job. You didn't want to go up a mountain not knowing that the female up there had happened to mate sometime after she'd gotten the princess and had started brooding eggs. There wasn't any negotiations in those cases. The female dragon and her mate would kill anything bigger than a fox that came near a cave with their eggs in it, no questions asked either before or after. You didn't want to go up there if there was a young whip running around that had never seen humans before--many of them didn't mean to, but they ended up burning or eating humans because they didn't realize they were humans, they just thought they were funny-looking animals. If a dragon had been acting strange lately, you wanted to know about it. If there had been strange weather lately, you wanted to know about it. Were the king and queen even sure that the princess had been captured by the local dragon? How long had it been since the last abduction? How much ransom had been asked? Was it an older dragon? Had there been any discussion of arranged marriages lately?
Granted, magic could affect things, but Gregor's gut was still snorting and spluttering over the ridiculous type of magic that had been described to her. And as for the princess being mad? That certainly sounded more likely, and it made more sense. The princess, if she'd gone mad, had probably gone off on her own and the dragon had picked her up.
What Gregor had really wanted to know was why the bounty was so high, and now she knew. The dragon had been hostile with six other knights. More than one of them was dead. The others were probably dying, or mortally wounded. Gregor felt a pang of sympathy for them if they were--a life with one arm or one leg or neither of either after a life of knighting was a cruel way for any knight to retire. But beyond that, it wasn't her business. They probably couldn't even speak right now, much less give specifics about what the king and queen told them about the princess before they'd rode off.
If it didn't affect the job, it wasn't important. That was the promise Gregor had made herself right at the start.
She wasn't stupid, obviously, she'd gotten this far in this life--Gregor knew better than to even begin picturing a life where she fell in love with a man and settled down to live happily ever after. She knew better than to imagine a life in which she had close friends. Gregor wasn't even sure she liked men--other than drinking companionably or swapping tales, much of what they did and said and how they thought repulsed her. And as for friends? Far too dangerous.
So Gregor had decided, right when she'd begun down this path, that the job was what mattered. There was just the job, there could only ever be the job, and at best, she hoped to retire someday, somewhere quiet, off in the woods. Far, far off. Farther than any other human had set foot, where no one could ever find her. Maybe she'd breed some hounds, for her own pleasure. Hounds didn't care what you were or what other humans would do to you if they found out. They just loved you, and wanted to be loved back. And they weren't near as bloody complicated as human beings.
Ten diamonds per horn...just with ten diamonds, Gregor could buy a large house. Of course, for the location she had in mind, she'd probably be building it herself, if she wanted to live in total secrecy. Maybe with ten diamonds, she could find a dragon and convince them to build it for her, with magic...with just ten diamonds, she could buy a fine stud hound...with five diamonds, a grand bitch, though any kennelmaster worth his salt would price the bitch at ten, because any kennelmaster worth his salt knew that the bitch's bloodline was just as important as the stud's in how a litter came out. With another ten diamonds, well, she wouldn't have to worry about feeding the litter, housing them...she could make the leads and equipment herself, it was all leather and string and animal furs, with a few metal clasps here and there... Gregor dried herself off and went to sleep that night with her mind full of narrow, regal snouts, needle-thin legs, and long, flowing, silky fur.

The next morning she saddled Briar up early in the morning and requested provisions from the kitchens--if the dragon was a man-eater, then she really did have to slay it, and it was going to take a few days to plan. The castle was plenty willing to accommodate her.
Hisenrou would be watching from afar to ascertain it was safe to meet up with Sir Gregor. She could tell from a good whiff which mountain the local dragon was lairing in, though Gregor had warned her to stay away until she had a better handle on what was going on.
Now Gregor was glad for her foresight in the matter. In fact, she regretted Hisenrou being in the area at all. While dragons often lived spread apart, this was largely for the sake of making sure everyone had enough to go around. Dragons ate only once or twice every few weeks, and most of them varied in their hunting schedules, but when they did, they ate a lot. If you had three or four dragons within a few hundred miles of each other, and at least one was hunting when the others weren't, they soon ran out of prey. Dragons were neutral on the subject of socializing, as they had never developed an instinctual need to band together, like humans and wolves had. But they still enjoyed each others' company, and when one dragon passed through another's territory, it was likelier that the local would invite the traveller over to the lair for a cauldron of tea and some freshly roasted deer.
However, when a dragon became hostile, it became very hostile. To everything. Even its own kind. Gregor had heard once of a stunted female, weighing in only at two hundred and fifty stones(about twice the size of your average bull), who had completely ripped apart a fully-grown bull dragon three times her size when he attacked her lair while she had been brooding eggs. It wasn't that a hostile dragon became suddenly three times stronger and immune to pain. It was just that pain and the screaming of overdrawn muscles suddenly ceased to be relevant to their current need to tear whatever was in front of them to tiny, tiny shreds. A small whip like Hisenrou against a fully grown dragon would be dead in a matter of seconds.
Gregor didn't take the clear track up the mountain used by hunters. Instead, she spent most of the day riding up and around it, keeping to the thickest parts of the forest and stopping whenever she...well, when there was a dragon circling nearby, it was something you sort of felt. And Gregor had developed a very good feel for it. There was the feeling of being watched, and then there was the feeling of being watched by a dragon. Instead of the hair prickling on the back of your neck, it stood up and screamed in terror. You sensed a sort of heaviness in the air, an impending sense of futility, of insignificance, of doom.
She'd once met an older knight who said that this was not a sixth sense sort of thing, which people do have just like animals and anyone who denies it has too much booklearning shoved up their...well, somewhere unpleasant.
It was part of their magic, he'd said. Dragons could do head magic, but not like the kind the queen of dOr mAntua had so blatantly lied to Gregor's face about. They didn't reach into people's minds and make them do things. They sort of...it was a sort of mind net, the knight had said. They could feel about with their minds. That was how they hunted--they had fantastic hearing and smell, of course, all predators do, but the mind magic was sort of an extension of their hearing. They listened for minds. Minds are much louder than heartbeats or breathing or footsteps, the knight explained, as a dragon he'd befriended had explained to him. Much louder, yes, in humans most of all--cities are like one great big roar of MONEY and FOOD and WORK and SEX. This was why dragons lived in on top of mountains, when they lived near humans at all. But when they were hunting prey, prey minds were very different. Prey minds, minds of deer and rabbits and squirrels and the like, they sort of...reflected the world around them. When deer grazed, their minds were full of grass, and the smell of grass, and the taste of grass, and the sound of grass munching in their teeth. When they snapped up their heads to look around, their minds were full of tree, this tree, that tree, that tree over there, that grass moving in the wind there, it is wind moving it, no danger.
It all made a very convincing mental picture of the forest.
The thing was that when dragons cast out their mind nets, they also heard the minds of trees and grass and all the things that affected them, and in this way, prey minds actually camoflauged themselves when they were calm.
When they were afraid...that was the thing. Then everything changed. Then you got bright, hot little slivers of fear, slicing through the grass under the trees. DANGER DANGER RUN RUN RUN.
While prey blended very well with the world around it, mentally, any dragon had yet to encounter a tree or a blade of grass that ever had thoughts about running. When a dragon's mind net fell across a human, that was the sensation that sparked such fear in them. It was the terrifying awareness that you were not the strongest, the fastest, or even the smartest creature in the area anymore. It was usually the only time any human being experienced the true, cutting sensation of being helpless prey. Humans were so used to being either predators or securely neutral forces that this was deeply averse to their natures. It tore open part of you that you didn't know you had and brought it roaring to the surface in a flood of adrenaline and terror. It made every nerve in your body scream to run and burrow and shelter. Gregor actually had started to run the first time she'd felt it, urging Briar faster and faster until she'd been almost galloping, before Gregor had thought to ask herself why they were running away. Then the dragon's shadow had passed overhead, and she'd almost pissed herself in her saddle.
Gregor felt the dragon casting its net several times before she reached a place that felt safe to camp in. It was far out of the way of any tracks or trails, laid by human or beast. If the dragon did hunt tonight--and they hunted at night as often as day--it was highly unlikely the chase would bring it near Gregor and Briar. What bothered Gregor deeply, though, was that the dragon's casting patterns that day had not felt like hunting.
It had felt like patrolling.
Either her opponent was abnormally cautious and thorough for a violence-maddened dragon, and had been patrolling its territory ever since the knights had started coming, or it already knew she was out there. And if it did know...well. Then it was only a matter of time, and if she died she'd probably be dead before she knew it, so there wasn't much point worrying about it.
This was what any monster-slaying knight told themselves before they went to sleep at night on a hunt. You either learned to believe there was no point in being afraid, or you'd go mad with paranoia and sleep loss.
Gregor didn't light a fire as night fell deep and rock-hard cold on the mountainside. She didn't dare. Fires of any size called to dragons like music called to humans. So the knight wrapped herself in the thick furs she'd requested from the castle in preparation, and draped a large blanket over both herself and Briar to share the charger's heat.

The next two days were a mixture of scouting and hiding. For some of it Gregor rode Briar--horses counted as prey, and Gregor knew the horse's mind would help mask hers--but Briar was a charger, not a mountain horse, and since they couldn't use real paths, the rocky, uneven terrain would wear hard on the horse's body. Aside from her breastplate, shield, and sword, Gregor went unarmoured. People didn't stop to think about how bloody stupid it was to go up against a dragon in full metal armour. Metal got hot and soft in any fire warm enough, and if a knight was caught full on by a dragon's flame, the metal didn't protect them--most times it melted directly into their skin, or if they were lucky, quite literally cooked them like a stripped bird in a stove faster than they knew what was happening. And even if you weren't already dying, you couldn't get the stuff off, because it was too hot--even with the layer of leather cushioning a knight's hands on the inside of their gauntlets, the metal outside would be so bloody hot that the slightest pressure and that heat would sink right through the leather. So you couldn't use your hands. You weren't getting the gauntlets off, because that took a lot of fiddling with straps, and that took complicated work with your fingers, which were in the process of being cooked like sausages. And even if you did, if you wanted to get everything else off, well, the metal clasps holding the straps were all burning hot, weren't they? Gregor had never fought a hostile dragon before, just because they were so rare, but she'd heard tales from knights that had fought them and survived. They'd told her all the tips and tricks, the things that would keep you alive. Wear leather gauntlets, because if the flame hits your sword, it'll be too hot to hold with bare hands. Don't bother armouring up your arms and legs, because if a flame catches the armour, they'll get melted on or burned up, and if a dragon chomps or claws them, well, they're already gone, and the metal isn't going to stop that. It wasn't worth it. But the breastplate was worth it. You kept a lot of leather padding under it and around the edges so you could get it of if you wanted, and if you got hit by a tail or a glancing blow, it would save your ribs from getting busted in. The helmet, now, don't even think about it. Even a glancing blow on the head, from a dragon, would knock your brains about so hard that by the time they stopped banging in your skull, you'd be dead, or good as. A shield wouldn't take more than two or three direct hits, but those it did take, it wouldn't be you taking them.
So Gregor had her breastplate, and her leather gauntlets, and her sword and her shield. She hiked all over the mountain, familiarizing herself with the area, until finally she spotted the back entrance.
Like foxes, a dragon always had a back way out of their den. Unlike foxes, they didn't do this out of instinct. They did it because they could think, and they weren't stupid.
And dragons brooding eggs always had another, extra way out, but much smaller. They usually dug it out with magic, because they couldn't fit in tunnels that small--they were extra tunnels for hatchlings in case they needed to escape. As the hatchlings grew, and as soon as their soft baby claws hardened up, the parents would have them expanding those tunnels to adjust for their growing size. The hatchlings' back way out was also usually the very first way a hatchling was introduced to magic. Baby dragons typically weren't strong enough to dig for very long; dragon forelegs lacked the slab of muscle most animals had behind their shoulders, because for dragons, it was up on their backs supporting their wings.
Baby dragons did not yet have wings big enough to flex that muscle, and their forelegs were stick-thin. So they dug to strengthen those forelegs, and when they got tired, they dug with magic to flex whatever mind muscle dragons used for that.

Gregor was looking for the hatchling tunnel. She was almost certain that the dragon's hostility was from brooding, though dragons typically mated for life and brooded together, and she had yet to see more than one of them in the sky. Gregor had glimpsed the patrolling dragon three times now, and each time she was certain it was the same 550-stone bronze, blazing like gold in the sunlight.
That was also strange. Brooding single dragons didn't patrol. They hunted when they had to, and spent the rest of the time nesting.
But Gregor couldn't think of any other reason for the dragon to be aggressive, and if it was a brooding pair, it made sense that one was out patrolling while the other brooded. Dragons typically switched off nesting, but not always; some dragons just didn't like sitting on the nest. They got restless or bored, and irritable with their mate. The knight kept telling herself this had to be the reason, but even so, the cold, sick feeling from when she'd first stood before the king and queen had returned to the pit of her stomach.
Something was deeply wrong here, and she had no idea what it was. Gregor finally found the hatchling tunnel on her third day, around mid afternoon. Dragons didn't typically hunt around noon; the high sun flashed off their scales too much and frightened the game, and if the bronze wasn't hunting, it seemed to have taken a break from patrolling.
Gregor stood, panting, and sweating, in front of a well-concealed tunnel midway up the mountain. A tree had been enchanted to grow almost directly in front of it to mask it. The trick to finding these tunnels was to look for large shrubbery growing slap up against the mountainside, because anything larger than a fern or a knee-high bush didn't grow slap up against mountainsides. Certainly they could grow on them, but they didn't naturally hug them like this; they leaned away, stretching towards the sun.
Gregor carefully crept up to the tree and plucked a leaf. She held it up close to her eye, and tilted her head back until the light struck it. The veins of the leaf were warped and twisted. It was a healthy leaf from a healthy tree, but magic always twisted things. Instead of stretching out directly, like typical leaf veins, the veins of this leaf did loops and swirls. It wouldn't hurt the tree, and didn't make it stronger or weaker than other trees. That was the tricky thing about magic. You never were sure what it could do, but you could always count on it to change things.
It was passing high noon now, and the sun was beginning to sink into the west. Gregor decided to leave Briar where she was and camp in the area. She'd relieved the horse of all her tackle the day before, and left her to graze in the forest. Briar had been left alone in forests overnight before. She would be fine. And Gregor didn't want to bother going all the way back to camp, there wasn't much point--if the dragon came by overnight to check on things, it would definitely smell her here whether she was nearby or not, and then it would only be a matter of minutes after it had her scent before it was roasting her alive.
That night Gregor pulled off her breastplate and set aside her sword, and curled up on a patch of soft grass, facing the small back door cut into the mountainside.