Daughter of Dragons

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Bij leapt from the landing with a majestic roar and then propelled himself through the sky with bold, swift strokes of his wings. Distance soon dwarfed his massive form: it shrank into a blood-red speck, then disappeared within the plumes of a far-off cloud. Taziem watched until she was sure he wasn’t coming back, then loosed a rumble and retreated to the scanty comforts of her outer caves. There, surrounded by scintillas of their mingled scents, the she-dragon reminisced about this latest encounter with her chosen.

All things considered, she decided, she was glad to see him go.

It had been a short Season for them, and less pleasant than some she could recall. For while their couplings had been as exhilarating as ever, the interludes in between had quickly acquired a sour tang because of his obsession with humans. She curled her lip at the memory, an expression of weariness and scorn. Despite his great age and experience, he had a very little imagination. He refused to admit that people could be intelligent in any significant way, or that they might be something more or less than a passing pain in the tail. And his callow remedy for that pain was wholesale s*******r and good riddance to them all.

Fool! Did he truly believe that it would be that easy?

Indeed he did. For while he could rail against men hour after hour, he knew close to nothing about them. He had not studied them for any length of time, had not seen for himself how clever and persistent they could be. And Bij compounded his ignorance by refusing to listen to her.

But that was his problem, she reminded herself. If he did not want to listen to a dragon wiser than himself, then let him learn from hard experience instead. As for herself, she was perfectly content to leave men alone so long as they continued to do likewise.

Her stomach growled then, and a wave of dizziness lapped at her thoughts. She hissed, resenting the immediacy of this next phase of pregnancy. She had hoped to have a few days to lounge in her nest and think interesting thoughts. Her belly rumbled again, more emphatically this time. The fast-growing embryos within wanted to be fed. Moreover, they wanted to be fed now.

Unable to deny that internal demand, she lurched to her feet and headed for the landing. There, she catapulted into the sky and toward a distant hunting ground where she would begin the gluttonous binge that would leave her as bloated as Bij’s obsession.