Read Online Filter House by Nisi Shawl - Free Book Online

must slay me, it shall be here, no matter what your custom or instincts.”
    “Slay you? You—my dear Princess, how did you manage to arrive at this deduction? Slay you? I am merely attempting to return you to your father’s camp.”
    “I thought you were going to eat me. Like the monk.”
    “At first, I admit, the thought did enter my head. But soon enough, I had already supped to a sufficiency. Again, you proved so charming that the notion of you as no more than a source of nourishment became offensive. Finally, at my age, consuming large quantities of humans is a luxury I simply can no longer afford.”
    “Why?”
    “Salt. You all have an abominably high salt content. It makes you difficult to resist, but I am convinced that the retention of fluids which inevitably results when I succumb is damaging to my delicate constitution.”
    While Ousmani digested this novel concept, the dragon slithered to the cave’s entrance and peered out, wings flickering nervously. “This will proceed the better,” it suggested, “the sooner we depart. You wish to arrive before the evening, do you not?”
    The Princess gathered her wits. “On the contrary,” she asserted, “I see no necessity for me to arrive there ever. At any time. If you explained this before, I am afraid I missed your arguments, which I hope you will not object to repeat in all their doubtless elegance.”
    “Why, I—” The dragon’s glittering head drew back, and a hiss of steam came from its suddenly dilated nostrils. “It appears obvious. These mountains will soon be filled with your people, who at best will be far more punctilious than the present scattered peasants in offering me a food that I know to be too rich for my health. This while removing my accustomed dietary sources through their husbandry.
    “At the worst, they will hunt me down and slaughter me. Their greater concentrations betoken a greater likelihood of success.”
    Ousmani opened her hands and held them up as if to protect herself from this eventuality. The opportunity for research, the wasted knowledge, the sheer, strange beauty of the beast, lost to her father’s madness. Not to mention access to a marvelous and altogether unappreciated library. “This must not happen.”
    The dragon smiled. “I am glad to see you agree. Princess, I must leave, and while it desolates me to deprive myself of your discourse, I cannot take you with me, for I know not where I go. I have some distant relatives in Sind. Also, in Hyperborea…”
    “Stay!” said Ousmani. “There is another solution, one that has just now occurred to me. The more I think upon it, the more good I see. But wait—your cleric from Narbonne, had he upon him any implements for writing, or tools with which one might illuminate a book?”
    “He did, Princess, though I fail to see what use such scholarly activities will prove in the face of my persecution.”
    “You will see, though, for I shall show you. First, the tools. Or, no, stay—we must prepare a suitable place in which to work. A desk—I suppose a log will do, if you will roll it near the fire. And speaking of the fire, I must ask you to build it up—”
    The dragon proved most pliable when apprised of the details of the Princess’s plan. It kept the flames burning brightly through the entire night, sleeping but fitfully. The Princess slept not at all, but toiled without ceasing, for penmanship was not one of her areas of greatest expertise.
    “Your name,” said Ousmani, when the dragon put its head over her shoulder during one of its wakeful spells. “We ought to include your name, and I don’t know what it is.”
    “My mother called me Bumpsy.… I suppose that will not do.”
    “No.” The princess retied the dead knight’s garter, from which tendrils of black hair were escaping to daub themselves with gold and cochineal. “What of your victims? Did they construct any memorable epithets?”
    “Their remarks were always decidedly insipid, dear