By night, Teocinte had an even more derelict aspect than by day. The crooked little shacks, firelight flickering through cracks in the doors and from behind squares of cloth hung over windows. Streets winded and quiet, except for the occasional scream and burst of laughter. A naked infant, untended, splashed in a puddle formed by that afternoon's rain. Above, the silhouette of Griaule's tree-lined back outlined in stars against a purple sky. It had altogether the atmosphere of a tribal place, of people huddled together in frail shelters against the terrors of the dark, dwelling in the very shadow of those terrors.

That night Hota felt estranged from the town and from himself, troubled by the vague presence in his thoughts that had spurred him to violence. But Magali's closeness, her scent and the brush of her hip, the pressure of her breast against his arm, these things prevented him from brooding. They idled along the downslope of the street that fronted Liar's House, moving toward the dragon's head, and as they walked she said, "We should be flying now."

"Flying?" he said. "What do you mean?"

"It's the most wonderful thing, flying together."

He suspected that she was dissembling and knew she did not like being pressed; but he had the itch to press her. She rarely spoke about her life prior to their meeting, and, though he was not convinced that she was who she claimed to be, he wanted to believe her. It surprised him that he wanted this. Until that instant he had been uncertain as to what he wanted, but he was clear about it now. He wanted her to be a fabulous creature, for himself to be part of her fabulous design, and, sensing that she might be receptive to him, he asked if she could tell him how it was to fly.

She was silent for such a length of time, he thought she would refuse to answer, but after five or six paces she said, "One day you'll know how it feels."

Puzzled, he said, "I don't understand."

"You can't … not yet."

That comment sparked new questions, but he chose to pursue the original one. "You must be able to tell me something about it."

They walked a while longer, and then she said, "Each flight is like the first flight, the flight made at the instant of creation. You're in the dark, you're drowsy. Almost not there. And then you wake to some need, some urgency. Your wings crack as you rise up. Like thunder. And then you're into the light, the wind … The wind is everything. All your strength and the rush of the wind, the sound of your wings, the light—it's one power, one voice."

As she spoke he seemed to understand her, but when she fell silent the echoes of her words lost energy and were transformed into generalities. He tried to explore them, to recapture some fraction of the feeling her voice had communicated, but failed.

The town ended in a palm hammock, and at the far edge of the hammock, resting among tall grasses, was a squarish boulder nearly twice the height of a man, like a giant's petrified tooth. They climbed atop it and sat gazing at Griaule's head, a hundred yards distant. The sagittal crest was visible in partial silhouette against the sky, but the bulk of the head was a mound of shadow.

"You keep telling me I can't understand things," he said. "It's frustrating. I want to understand something and I don't understand any of it. How is it you can be here with me like this … as a woman?"

She lifted her head and closed her eyes as she might if the sun were shining and she wanted to indulge in its warmth, and she told him of the souls of dragons. How, unlike the souls of men, they enclosed the material form rather than being shrouded within it.

"Our souls are not prisoners of the flesh, but its wardens," she said. "We control our shapes in ways you cannot."

"You can be anything you choose? Is that what you mean?"

"Only a dragon or a woman … I think. I'm not sure,"

He pondered this. "Why can't Griaule change himself into a man?"

"What would be the point? Who would be more inviolate—a paralyzed dragon or a paralyzed man? As a dragon, Griaule lives on. As a man, he would long since have been eaten by lesser beasts. In any case, the change is painful. It's something done only out of great necessity."

"You didn't appear to be in pain … when I found you?"

"It had ebbed by the time you reached me."

At first there were too many questions flocking Hota's thoughts for him to single any out, but before long one soared higher than the rest: What great necessity had caused her to change? He was about to ask it of her when she said, "Soon you'll understand all of this. Flying. How the soul can grow larger than the flesh. How it is that I have come to you and why. Be patient."

Moonglow fanned up above the hills to the west, and in that faint light she looked calm, emotionless. Yet as he considered her, it struck him that a new element was embodied in her face. Serenity … or perhaps it was an absence he perceived, some small increment of anxiety erased.

"Griaule," she said in a half-whisper.

"What of him?" he asked, perplexed by her worshipful tone.

She only shook her head in response.

Something scurried through the grass behind the boulder. A dull gleam emerged from the shadow of Griaule's head, the tip of a fang holding the light. The wind picked up, bringing the still palms alive, swaying their fronds, breeding a sigh that seemed to voice a hushed anticipation. Magali folded her arms across her breasts.

"I'm ready now," she said.

Hota assumed that by those last words, she meant she was ready to return to Liar's House, for after saying them, she hopped down from the boulder and led him back toward the town; but once they closed the door of his room behind them, it became clear she had intended something more. She undressed quickly and stood before him in a silent yet unmistakable invitation, her skin agleam in the unsteady lamplight. Skeins of hair fell across her breasts like black tributaries on the map of a voluptuous bronze country. Her eyes were cored with orange reflection. She looked to be a magical feminine treasure whose own light devalued that of the lamp. All his flimsy moral proscriptions against intimacy melted away. He took a step toward her and let her bring him down onto the bed.

During the first thirty-one years of his life, Hota had made love to but one woman: his wife. Since then, he had made love to many more and thought himself reasonably knowledgeable as to their ways. Magali's ways, however, enlarged his views on the subject. For the most part she lay quiescent, her eyes half-closed, as if her mind were elsewhere and she were merely allowing herself to be penetrated; yet every so often, abruptly, she would begin to thrash and heave, pushing and clawing at him, breath shrieking out of her, throwing herself about with such apparent desperation, he was nearly unseated. Initially, he took this behavior for rejection and flung himself off her; but she pulled him back between her legs and, once he had entered her, she lay quiet again. This alternation of corpselike stillness and frenzied motion distressed him, and he was unable to lose himself in the act, half-listening to the sounds of more commercial passions emanating from adjoining rooms. When he had finished and was lying beside her, sweaty and breathing hard, she demanded that he repeat the performance. And so it went, the second encounter like the first, equally as awkward and emotionally unsatisfying. In her frenzied phase, she seemed even less complicit in their pleasure than she did when she was still. She took to snapping at his arm, his shoulder, making cawing noises deep in her throat. But their third encounter, one into which Hota had to be vigorously coerced, was different. She drew up her knees and met his thrusts with sinuous abandon and kept her arms locked about his neck, her eyes on his face, until at long last she offered up a shivery cry and clamped her knees to his sides, refusing to let him move.

After he withdrew, pleased, feeling that they had managed actual intimacy, he tried to be tender with her, but she shrank from his touch and would not speak. More confused than ever, he decided that her behavior must be due to a lack of familiarity with her body, and he counseled himself to remain patient. They had come this far, and whatever road lay ahead, there would be time to smooth over these problems. Fatigued, his eyes went to the lamplit ceiling. It looked as if all the dragons imprinted in the grain were quivering, shifting agitatedly, as if preparing to take flight. He watched them, imagining that if he watched long enough he would see one fly, the tiny black sketch of dragon flap up off the boards and make a circuit of the room. Eventually he slept.

The following morning, gray and drizzly, with a touch of chill, he woke to find Magali at the window, which stood half-open. She had on her favorite green dress and was looking out onto the street. He sat up, groggy, rubbing his eyes. The bedsprings squeaked loudly, but she gave no sign of having heard.

"Magali?" he said.

She ignored him. The rain quickened, drumming on the tin roof. Feeling the bite of the cold, Hota swung his legs onto the floor, grabbed his shirt from among the rumpled bedclothes and began to pull it over his head.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

Without turning, she said glumly, "You've given me a child."

He paused, the shirt tangled about his neck, and started to ask how she could know such a thing, then remembered that she had knowledge inaccessible to him.

"A son," she said dully. "I'm going to have a son."

The idea of fathering children no longer figured into Hota's plans, and his immediate reaction was uneasiness over having to shoulder such a responsibility. He tugged the shirt down to cover his belly. "You don't seem happy. Is it you don't want a child?"

"It isn't what I want that's of moment." She paused and then said, "The birth will be painful."

Her attitude, so contrary to what he would have expected, provoked an odd reaction in him—he wondered how it would feel to be a father. "It might not be so bad," he said. "I've known women to have easy births. At the end we'll have our son and perhaps that'll give …"

"He's not your son," she said. "You fathered him, but he will be Griaule's son."

The rain came harder yet and, amplified by the tin, filled the room with a kind of roaring, a din that made it difficult for Hota to think, to hear his own voice. "That's impossible."

Magali turned from the window. "Haven't you heard a thing I've told you?"

"What have you told me that would explain this?"

She stared at him without expression. "Griaule is the eldest of all who live. Over the centuries, his soul has expanded with the growth of his body. How far it extends, I can't say. Far beyond the valley, though. I know that much. I was flying above the sea when he drew me to him." She dropped into the chair beside the window and rested her hands on her knees. "His soul encloses him like a bubble. For all I know, that bubble has grown to enclose the entire world. But I'm certain you live inside its reach. You've lived inside it your entire life. Now he's drawn you to him as well. It's possible he caused the events that drove you from Port Chantay. That would be in keeping with what I understand of his character. With the deviousness and complexity of his mind."

Hota felt the need to offer a denial but could find no logical framework to support one.

"Don't you see?" she went on. "Griaule desired to father a son. Since he couldn't participate in the act of conception, he contrived a means by which he could father the child of his will. And for this purpose he sought out a man who embodied certain of his own qualities. Someone with a stolid temperament. With great strength and endurance. And great anger. A human equivalent of his nature who fit the shape of his design. Then he chose me to endure the birth."

Rain slanted in through the window. Hota crossed the room and closed it. As he returned to the bed, he said, "You must have known this all along. Why didn't you tell me?"

She clicked her tongue in annoyance. "I didn't know all of it. I still don't know it all. And it's as I've said—these things that have happened to us, they weren't my wish. Even if they were, I'm not like you, Hota. My thoughts are not like yours. My motives are not yours. You asked why I wasn't happy? I'm never happy. My emotions … You couldn't grasp them."

"You should have told me," he said sullenly.

"It would have only upset you. There's nothing you could have done."

"Nevertheless, you lied to me. I don't deserve to be kept in the dark about what's going on."

"I haven't lied!" she said. "Have I withheld things from you? Yes. I did what I was compelled to do. But all the things I know, the things I don't know, they may or may not be good for you. And that's what you truly want to know, isn't it? What's going to happen to you? In the end all your questions will be answered, and you'll be pleased with that. That's what I think. But I can't be certain. That's the problem, you see? Any answer I can give you is essentially a lie, except for 'I don't know.'"

Her response had the same disorienting effect as the rain—he believed her, but it was like believing in nothing, knowing nothing. He sat with his head down, dull and listless, looking at his fingers, wiggling them for a distraction. "You and me. What about you and me?"

"We'll travel the road together and learn what fate has in store. That's all I can tell you."

"I don't believe you."

"What don't you believe?"

"About your feelings," he said. "I know you were happy last night. For a time, at least."

She leaned toward him and spoke slowly, with exaggerated emphasis, as though to a child. "I lived in the side of a cliff. A sea cave. I was alone, yet I wanted for nothing. I was content with the world I knew." She resettled in her chair. "Last night, that was … strange. Now it's done. We're past that turn of the road."

She appeared to lose interest in the conversation, her eyes traveling across the boards. In the rainy light, her beauty was subdued, diminished. "Are you happy?" she asked after a minute.

"Maybe I was, a little." He spotted his pants lying on the floor and stepped into them. "Why would Griaule do this? For what reason does he want a son?"

"I've no idea. Perhaps it's just a game he's playing. You can't know Griaule's intent. Some of his schemes play out over thousands of years. He's unique, as unlike me as I am unlike you. No one can fathom what he intends."

Of a sudden the rain let up and a weak sun broke through the overcast; the wind gusted and a distorted shadow of the window, pale panes and darker divisions, canted out of true, trembled on floor.

"I need food," Magali said.

He recognized, too, that his position in the town had changed. Whereas formerly he had been someone whom people avoided, few had spoken against him; but now when passed in the streets, no one offered a greeting or a salute—instead, men and women would stand closer together, whisper and dart wicked glances in his direction. The reasons for this change remained unclear until one afternoon, as he entered the inn, Benno Grustark accosted him at the door and demanded twice the usual rent.

"I'm losing business, having you here," Benno told him. "You need to compensate me."

Hota pointed out that his was the only place in town where visitors could stay, and thus he doubted Benno's claim.

"When people hear about you, some will sleep outside rather than rent my rooms," Benno said.

"When they hear about me?" Hota said, bewildered. "What do they hear?"

Benno, who was that day dressed in his customary brown moleskin trousers and a red tunic that clung to his ample belly, a costume that lent him an inappropriately jolly look, shifted his feet and cut his eyes to the side as if fearing he would be overheard. "Your woman … people say she's a witch."

Hota grunted a laugh.

"It's not a joke for me," Benno said. "What do you expect them to think? She's about to give birth and yet she's only been with you a few months!"

"She was pregnant before I brought her here."

"Oh, I see! And where was she before that? Did you keep her in your pocket? Did you make her pregnant at a distance?"

"It's not my child," Hota said, and realized that this, unlike his previous statement, was only partially a lie.

An expression of incredulity on his face, Benno said, "I saw her when she came. She wasn't showing at all. And I've seen her since, in the hallway, no more than a month ago. She wasn't showing then, either."

"All pregnant women show differently. You know that."

Benno started to raise a further point, but Hota cut him off. "Since you're so observant, I have to assume you're the one who has been spreading rumors about her."

Benno popped his eyes and waggled his hands at chest-level in thespian display of denial. "Plenty of people have seen her. Other guests. Some of my girls. Her condition's hardly a secret."

Hota dug coins from his pocket and pressed them into Benno's hand. "Here," he said. "Now leave us alone."

With a plodding tread, he started up the stairs.

Benno followed to the first step and called out, "As soon as she's able to travel, I want the both of you gone! Do you hear me? Not one day longer than necessary!"

"It'll be our pleasure." Hota paused midway up the stairs and gazed down at him. "But take this to heart. Until that day, you would do well to suppress the rumors about her, rather than foster them." Then a thought struck him. "What possessed you to cut the boards of the inn from Griaule's back?"

Benno's defensive manner was swept away by a confounded look, one similar—Hota thought—to the looks he often wore these days. "I just did it," Benno said. "I did it because I wanted to."

"Is that another one of your lies?" Hota asked. "Or don't you even know?"

Then came a morning when the rain all but stopped and Magali's spirits lifted. She seemed calm, not irritable in the least, and she offered apology for her moodiness, then discussed with him what she would require after the child was born. He asked if she thought the birth would be soon.

"Soon enough," she said. "But that's not your worry. Just bring me food. Meat. And make sure no one disturbs me. The rest I'll take care of."

She needed an herb, she told him, that grew on the far side of the dragon's tail. It was most efficacious when picked at the height of the rains, and she asked him to go that day and gather all he could find. She described the plant and urged him to hurry—she wanted to begin taking it as quickly as possible. Then she brushed her lips against his cheek, the closest she had ever come to giving him a kiss, and tried to send him on his way. But this diffident affection, so out of character for her, provoked Hota to ask what she felt for him.

She gave an impatient snort. "I told you—my emotions aren't like yours."

"I'm not an idiot. You could try to explain."

She sat on the edge of the bed, gazed at him consideringly. "What do you feel for me?"

"Devoted, I suppose," he said after a pause. "But my devotion changes. I remain dutiful, but there are times when I resent you … I fear you. At other times, desire you."

She appeared to be studying the floor, the boards figured by dragons blackly emerging from the grain of the wood. "Love and desire," she said at last, imbuing the words with a wistful emphasis. "For me …" She shook her head in frustration. "I don't know."

"Try!" he insisted.

"This is so important to you?"

"It is."

She firmed her lips. "Inevitability and freedom. That's what I feel. For you, for the situation we're in …" She spread her hands, a gesture of helplessness. "That's as near as I can get."

At a loss, Hota asked her to explain further.

"None of this was our idea, yet it was inevitable," she said. "Its inevitability was thrust upon us by Griaule. But that's irrelevant. We have a road to travel and must make the best of it. And so we … we've formed an attachment."

"And freedom? What of that?"

"To find your way to freedom in what is inevitable, within the bonds of your fate … that, for me, is love. Only when you accept a limitation can you escape it."

Hota nodded as if he understood her, and to a degree he did; but he was unable to apply what he understood to the things he felt or the things he wanted her to feel.

Perhaps she read this in his face, for she said then, "Often I feel other emotions. Strains … whispers of them. I think they're akin to those you feel. They trouble me, but I've come to accept them." She beckoned him to come stand beside her and then took his hand. "We'll always be bound together. When you accept that, then you'll find your freedom." She lay back and turned onto her side. "Now, please. Bring me the herb. This is the day it should be picked."

There was no shortcut to the spot where the herb grew, unless you were to climb over Griaule's back. Hota was loathe to run that course again, and so he went up into the hills behind the town and walked through pine forest along the ridges for an hour until he reached a pass choked by a grassy mound that wound between hills: the dragon's tail. Once across the tail, he walked for half an hour more through scrub palmetto before he came to an undulant stretch of meadow close to the dragon's hind leg, where weeds bearing blue florets sprouted among tall grasses. He worked doggedly, plucking the weeds, cramming them into his sack and tamping them down. When the sack was two-thirds full, he sat beneath a palmetto whose fronds still dripped with rain, facing the massive green slope of the dragon, and unwrapped his lunch of bread and cheese and beer.

The trappings of his life seemed to arrange themselves in orderly ranks as he ate, and he realized that for the first time he had a significant purpose. Aside from momentary impulses, he had never truly wanted anything before Magali appeared atop Griaule's back. Nor, until the day of his wife's death, had he ever acted of his own volition. He had done everything by rote, copying the lives of his father, his uncles, compelled by the circumstance of birth to obey the laws of his class. Of course, it was conceivable … No, it was certain that he had always been the subject of manipulation, that what he had done in Port Chantay and since was not of his own choosing, and he was merely a minor figure in Griaule's design. It was immaterial, he thought, whether the manipulative forces were the arcane directives of a dragon or the compulsions of a society. The main distinction, as he saw it, was that his current purpose—that of surrogate father, caretaker, protector of a woman once a dragon—was a duty for which he had been singled out, for which he was best suited of all the available candidates, and that bred in him an emotion he had felt so rarely, he scarcely knew it well enough to name: Pride. It pervaded him now, alleviating both his anxieties and his aversion toward being used in such a bizarre fashion.

An armada of clouds with dark bellies and silvered edges swept up from the south, grazing the sharp crests of the distant hills and thundering, as if their hulls were being ruptured. White lightnings pranced and stabbed. The rain began to pelt down in scatters, big drops that hit like cold shrapnel, and Hota, leaving the remnants of his food for the ants, returned to his task, tearing up fistfuls of weeds and stuffing them into the sack. Soon the thunder was all around, deafening, one peal rolling into the next. Then he heard a low rumble that came from somewhere closer than the sky, an immense, grating voice that seemed to articulate a gloating satiety, a brute pleasure, and lasted far too long to be an ordinary peal. Hota dropped the sack and stared at Griaule, expecting the hill to shake off its cloak of soil and trees and walk. Expecting also that the head would lift and pin him with a golden eye. Rain matted his hair, poured down his face, and still he stood there, waiting to hear that voice again. When he did not, he became uncertain he had heard it the first time, and yet it resounded in memory, guttural and profound, a voice such as might have risen from the earth, from the throat of a demon pleased by the taste of a freshly digested mortal soul. If he had heard it, if it had been Griaule's voice, Griaule who never spoke, Hota could think of only one thing that would have summoned so unique a response. The child. He set about stuffing the sack with renewed vigor, ripping up weeds, unmindful of the rain, and when the sack was full, its girth that of a wagon wheel, he shouldered it and headed back into the hills and along the ridge toward Teocinte.

By the time he began descending through the pine forest, angling for the center of town, Hota was shivering, his clothes soaked through, but his thoughts were of Magali's well-being and not his own. She might have needed the herb in preparation for the birth and suffered greatly for lack of it. The idea that he had failed her plagued him more than the cold. He increased his pace, hustling down the slope with a choppy, sideways step, the sack bumping and rolling against his back. On reaching the lower slope, where the pines thinned out into stands of banana trees and shrubs, he heard voices and caught a glimpse of several men sprinting up the hill. He was too worried about Magali to make a presumption concerning the reason for their haste. Forcing his way through the last of the brush, he burst out onto a dirt street, repositioned the sack, which had slipped from his shoulder. Then he glanced to his left, toward Liar's House.

What he saw rooted him to the spot. Off along the bumpy, muddy street, many-puddled, strafed by slashing rain and lined with shanties that in their crookedness and decrepitude looked like desiccated wooden skulls with tin hats, lay the wreckage of the inn. There appeared to have been an explosion inside the place, the walls and roof blown outward … yet not blown far. Just far enough so as to form, of shattered gray boards, crushed furniture, ripped mattresses, and scraps of tin, the semblance of an enormous nest. One corner post with a shard of flooring attached had been left standing, distracting from the effect. Resting at the center of the ruin, her head high and her body curled about a grayish white egg twice the size of Hota's sack, was a dragon with bronze scales. Perhaps forty feet in length, tip to tail. Twists of black smoke fumed from the boards around her and were dispersed by the rain. Smoke also rose from the wreckage of a shack opposite the hotel. She had breathed fire, Hota told himself. He felt a twinge of regret that he had not been present to see it.

No one else was about, and Hota could feel the emptiness of the town. Everyone had fled. All the thieves and murderers. Except for him. The men whom he had passed on the outskirts must have been stragglers. His sack grew heavy. He lowered it to the ground, with no thought of running in his mind, and drank in the scene with the greediness of a connoisseur of desolation, savoring every detail, every variation in tint, every fractured angle. Liar's House had been constructed from exactly the right amount of timber to make a nest, enough to provide protection, yet not so much as to interfere with Magali's field of vision as she lay beside the egg. Griaule's design at work, Hota imagined. The boards had fallen perfectly. Those that had been part of the interior rooms had collapsed outward and thus created a wall around the inner nest; those that had been part of the exterior had fallen inward, creating a field of debris that would afford a treacherous footing to anyone who tried to cross.

Hota was still marveling over the rectitude and precision of Griaule's plan, when Magali's neck flexed, her head turned toward him, and she gave a cry that, though absent the chthonic power of the grumbling he had earlier heard, nonetheless owned power sufficient to terrify him. It started as a guttural cawing and narrowed to a violent whistling scream that seemed to skewer his brain with an icy wire. He wanted to run now, but the sight held him. How beautiful and strange she looked at the heart of her ruinous nest, with her child in his glossy shell, smoke rising about them like black incense burnt to celebrate an idol. Her sagittal crest was a darker bronze, a corroded color—some of her scales shaded toward this same hue at the edges. The shape of her head was different from Griaule's. Not birdlike, but serpentine. Her eyes, also dark, set in deep orbits, were flecked with many-colored brightnesses; her folded wings were of an obsidian blackness, the struts wickedly sharp. All in all like a relic treasure of the orient in her armored gaud. She screamed again and he thought he understood the urgency her voice conveyed.

The herb.

She wanted the herb.

He hoisted the sack onto his shoulder. Got his feet moving. Shuffled toward her, resolute yet weak with fear, his scrotum cold and tightened. He paused at the point where the front steps of the hotel had stood, now smashed to kindling, and imagined the change, the floor giving way beneath her suddenly acquired weight, the walls sundered by lashings of her tail and blows from her head. Even with the heavy odor of the rain and smoke, he could smell her scent of bitter ozone. He opened the sack, preparing to dump the contents on the ground, and she screamed a third time, a blast that nearly deafened him.

Closer.

She wanted him closer.

He knew she could extend her neck and snap him up at this distance—there was no reason for him to be more afraid, and yet he was. He reshouldered the sack and picked his way across the outer wreckage, scrambling over broken-backed couches, rain-heavied folds of carpet, barricades of splintered wood, and a litter of items belonging to guests: undergarments, shoes, spectacles, books, tin boxes, satchels, hip flasks, a trove of human accessories, all crushed and rent. As he crawled over the last of these obstacles, he saw a taloned foot ahead. The talons gleaming black, the neat scales into which they merged no larger than his hand. The boards beneath him—those that had fallen so they formed a circular wall about the inner nest—they were alive with the images of dragons. Tiny perfect dragons flowing up from the grain of the wood, changing moment to moment, clearer than previously. Counterfeiting movement by their flow, as if they were pictographs emanating from Griaule's mind, and he was telling a story in that language to his son, the story of a single dragon and how he flew and hunted and ruled. Like, Hota thought, a nursery decoration. Magical in character, yet serving a function similar to that of the fishes he had painted on the ceiling of his own back room in Port Chantay when his wife had informed him she was pregnant. He had painted them over after learning it was a lie told to prevent him from straying.

Standing beneath the arch of Magali's scaled chest and throat, Hota found he could not look up at her. He dumped the weeds from the sack and remained with his head down, appalled by the chuffing engine of her breath, the terrible dimension of her vitality. He shut his eyes and waited to be bitten, chewed, and swallowed. Then a nudge that knocked him sideways. He fetched up against the wall of the nest and fell onto his back. She peered at him with one opaline eye, the great sleek wedge of her head hanging six feet above the ground, snorting gently through ridged nostrils. Her belly rumbled and her head swung in a short arc to face him and he was enveloped in steamy breath. The implausibility of it all bore in upon him. That his seed had been transformed into the stuff of dragons; that he was father to an egg; that the beautiful woman to whom he had made love now loomed above him, costumed in fangs and scales, an icon of fear. His eyes went to the egg, glistening grayly with the rain. Lying beyond it was a sight that harrowed him. The lower portion of a leg, footless, the calf shredded bloodily. Tatters of brown moleskin adhering to the flesh. Benno. It seemed he had paid for his dutiful trespass by becoming Magali's first post-partum meal.

Magali's neck twisted, her head flipping up into the cloudy sky, and she vented a third scream. Once again, Hota understood her needs.

Bring me food, she was saying.

Meat.