Princess Rosie and the Dragon

Chapter 2

"So... where's the dragon?"

The speaker was another in the vein of Sir William - less broody, possibly less intelligent, but in his favour, also less defeated thus far. His name was Sir Riley of Bishop, he was surveying the valley through a telescope from high on the eastern side of it, and his confusion, as indicated, stemmed from the lack of dragon.

"'At's it theyah, my Lord," Sir Riley's man servant said, in a curious accent assembled from odds and ends that sounded generically lower-class. The manservant took hold of the end of his master's telescope, and moved it downwards.

"I don't understand, Adam," Sir Riley protested. "We saw the dragon emerge and do battle with yonder knight-" He had heard someone in a play say 'yonder' once, and thought it sounded regal. "-and then it went over to the tower, and just vanished! What am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Aye suspect, my Lord, it'ul be on th' balcony, p'raps," Adam informed him.

"There's... the princess, I assume," Riley frowned. "And another woman... covered in black...?"

"At'd be th' dragon, melord," Adam said patiently. "'At's wot them's in the know calls a 'bimorphic' dragon, melord."

"You mean... it likes men and-"

"No my Lord, I mean it's a- Aye means," Adam corrected himself, realising his accent was slipping, "it be a beast wot 'as the abil... abi... knowin'," giving up on finding a suitably lowbrow way of pronouncing 'ability,' "of changin' isself from a big flyin' fire-breathin' dragon, inno a person, an' back again. My Lord."

"Ah," Sir Riley observed, in a manner he probably thought of as sagely, as he watched the princess and the apparently-a-dragon conversing on the tower's balcony.

"Are you up for a trip into town?" Rose asked brightly. "I know we weren't going to until the weekend, but you know how it is with me, I get all restless when I breathe fire, so any excuse to stretch my wings..."

"Of course," Rosie nodded. "Actually I was going to ask anyway, there's a few new books I'd like to send away for."

"I'll go get my saddle," Rose smiled. She gave an adorable little curtsey - something that had long ago become a playful gesture of friendship, rather than a requirement of Rosie's social rank over her - and climbed up onto the balcony rail, crouching and tensing.

Rosie bit her lip, and tried not to stare at Rose's lithe form too obviously, until the dragon leapt into the air, and with a rush of air unfolded into her previous huge form. She landed lightly, beating her wings to keep from crushing the grass beneath the tower, and thudded off towards her cave.

Rosie had become quite good at carefully concealing her desires from Rose - necessary because her desires were uniformly for Rose, and she was by no means sure they were reciprocated. That Rose liked her, she was sure. She would have no hesitation in describing herself and Rose as the best of friends. But when it came to matters of the heart, Rosie was somewhat inexperienced, and when it came to matters of how her heart felt for Rose in particular, she was quite at a loss.

The basic expectation was that she should marry a prince, or at least a well-to-do and valiant knight. This, she had decided fairly early in her teenaged years, would not do, and so she had set about reading through the complex and bewildering array of rules and traditions surrounding royal relationships, with the odd bit of quiet support and encouragement from her mother, to see if her particular tastes could be accommodated in some way - in short, to find out if it was allowable to be a gay or at least a bi-sexual princess.

As it happened, her relocation to a tower was handy in that regard, in that there was no actual requirement anywhere in the rules and regulations for being a princess in a tower that specified the hero who rescued her couldn't be a heroine. Doubtless an oversight by an unimaginative scribe at some point in the distant past, but the laws were written, and had been for many a generation, and that was that. Of course there weren't a lot of heroines around, compared to the veritable plethora of men in armour traipsing around the landscape in search of a quest, but Rosie was prepared to be patient. Sooner or later, she assumed, a likely enough heroine would show up, and they could take things from there.