CHAPTER SIX
That night, the reception at the Quist mansion got under way. Upon leaving the lab to return to her guest quarters and prepare for the festivities, Brianne found that Conran Quist had indeed thought of everything. An evening gown lay across her bed, ready for her to slip into. It was a long, sleek, shiny frock in deep blue, with star patterns dappled upon it in the finest, most polished Lacertan quartz. She could tell at first sight that it would be the most elegant, most beautifully comfortable thing she had ever worn.
And once she had finished her bath and styled her hair for the evening, she found she was right. It hugged her body like a cool embrace. Studying herself in the full-body reflector in her room, she felt not like a spacefaring scientist, but almost like a lady of another time, someone out of an ancient storybook. She could easily imagine herself on the arm of one of the Knights of Lacerta themselves, someone like a Sir Thrax Helmer or a Sir Rawn Ullery.
Or even a dragon male who was not a Knight but was instead high-born—like a Conran or Donar Quist. As fantasies went, it was one she did not mind entertaining.
_______________
The moment Brianne stepped through the threshold of the ballroom, she froze, her skin tingling with alarm, at a trilling sound that filled the spacious room in front of her and turned every head in a throng of people, human and otherwise, in her direction. Brianne’s eyes darted about, looking for something, she did not know what. What was the purpose of that sound? Had she done something? Had she unwittingly committed some breach of Lacertan protocol, some faux pas, at the very moment she appeared? What was happening?
A second later, the voice of the mansion computer announced to all attending, “Please welcome tonight’s guest of honor, Dr. Brianne Heatherton.”
Brianne relaxed, somewhat embarrassed, as a wave of applause and greetings washed over her. She looked off, smiling sheepishly, imagining what shade of pinkish red she must be turning right now. Through the crowd of guests and well-wishers stepped Conran Quist, wearing his finest burgundy-red formal skin suit with gold trim, looking every bit the dragon prince he was. He carried two glasses of wine and handed one to Brianne, who gratefully took it. Just a step behind Conran was Donar, similarly outfitted in green, gold, and black.
The room was filled with dignitaries from all over the Lacertan colony settlements and a half dozen or more non-human planets. The Quist twins escorted Brianne into the party and began to introduce her around. She caught sight of Burton and Sondra, who smiled and waved at her and gave her a chance to meet the interstellar glitterati and shake hands—or appendages—with the invited well-wishers. Among them she spotted a number of avian Kryagians; violet-skinned Krayolites; hairless, green-skinned Sudolians; and a variety of other species friendly to Earth, Lacerta, and their allies.
Brianne had the unmistakable feeling of being surrounded by wealth, privilege, and celebrity status, befitting the station of her hosts. She was without question in the company of the cream of interstellar society, beings whom in her capacity as a traveling scientist studying interplanetary wildlife she would not ordinarily have occasion to meet. She smiled cordially at them and shook whatever hand or extremity they offered her, or accepted whatever other greeting was the custom of their respective species, knowing that in all likelihood she would never see most of these people, or beings, again.
At one end of the ballroom, a band was playing. Most were human, but a couple, from their manner of dress, were obviously Lacertan. The Quists had hired a pianist, a couple of saxophonists, a couple of guitarists, a harpist, and several people on violins, cellos, and bass. And they were good, mixing in familiar terrestrial jazz with genres from a variety of other planets.
After running a gauntlet of greetings and small talk, Brianne let the twins take her over to listen to the band. She watched the players, she watched the twins, and she wondered if they would ask her to dance. To be sure, for the occasion, it would not be too much of a breach of their professional boundaries just to share a dance…
The musicians ended their number and stepped away for a break between sets, leaving the guests to mingle and talk without melodies playing under them. Brianne took the opportunity to ask Conran, “What about your parents? Will I get to meet them tonight?”
“Unfortunately, no,” replied Conran. “They’d wanted to be here to meet you, but they send their regrets.”
“I’m afraid our little soiree fell at the same time as their annual trip to the Proxima Zarriah Nebula,” Donar explained further. “Ever been there?”
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t,” Brianne said. “Is it nice?”
“Nice enough,” said Donar. “If you like being in a cloud of ionized gas full of satellites and space stations with nothing but rich people aboard them.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Brianne. “I never really go to places like that.”
“Trust me,” said Donar, “our parents are the only things you’re missing about that place.”
“Stop it, Donar,” Conran chided. “You liked it well enough when we were kids.”
“I liked it well enough when we could go there without being chased around by every spoiled rich human girl this side of Lambda Librae.”
“If you’ll remember,” said Conran pointedly, “it wasn’t always them doing the chasing.”
“A bored teenage dragon surrounded by stuffy rich people has to do something,” argued Donar. And to Brianne, he added, “Not that I don’t enjoy the life we have. I’m just not always that impressed with some of the other people in it.”
“The ones that aren’t young, attractive, and female, that is,” Brianne teased.
“Ha!” Conran almost crowed in reaction. “That’s getting him.”
With a mock frown at his brother, Donar explained, “Well, when we were old enough that we didn’t have to go wherever our parents went, we were happy to leave Proxima Zarriah to them. And they’re welcome to it.”
“But what about the daughters of all those rich people?” Brianne teased further.
“They have plenty of other rich young weredragons to chase,” said Donar.
“And plenty to chase and catch them,” Conran admitted.
With a sip of her wine, Brianne laughed softly at them. “You two… You must have caught as many as you had chasing you.”
Donar almost replied, and threw them all back. But he caught himself and refrained from casting a look at his brother to see that Conran was thinking the same thing. But neither of them was about to admit it in front of Brianne. Instead, Donar simply replied, “Like I said before, we’re dragons of honor.”
“That we are,” Conran agreed.
“Speaking of dragons of honor,” said Brianne, casting her eyes around the room, “are any of the Knights coming this evening?”
“We invited some of the Mentors,” replied Conran. “They’ll be showing up before long.”
“It may seem a bit shallow,” said Brianne, “but there were certain ones I was actually hoping I’d get a chance to meet after hearing so much about them. Sir Hagen Maxon…Sir Thrax Helmer…maybe even Sir Rawn Ullery. I guess it’s a little presumptuous of me to think you must know them…”
“Actually,” Conran said, “we happen to know all of them. Or at least, we’ve met all of them. We met Sir Rawn at the homecoming ball that was given for him at the Ruling Aerie in Silverwing.”
Brianne blinked, remembering the media accounts of that night. “You mean the party that Joanna Way was abducted from, and taken to the spaceship where that Dr. Sabian held her hostage?”
“Yes,” replied Conran. “That party.”
Shutting her eyes for a second, Brianne said, “Can you just imagine? All that evil from all those years ago, catching up with Sir Rawn on that night of all times—and Joanna being in such danger from it…”
“Well, we should all hope that’s the last of that particular evil anyone sees,” said Donar. “Everyone had enough of the Chimerians back in the big war with them.”
“I’ll say,” Brianne agreed, remembering her history. “So…you did invite Sir Rawn and Joanna Way? And Sir Thrax and Agena Morrow?”
“We did invite them,” Conran confirmed.
Brianne’s eyes widened with interest. “Did they RSVP? Are they coming?”
Donar grinned sheepishly. “Weeelll… if we’re really honest, Sir Thrax’s RSVP was a decline. He explained that he and Agena Morrow are…otherwise occupied this evening.”
Brianne grinned over her wine glass, “I can just imagine with what.”
“And I’m sure you’d be right,” Conran said.
For a moment, an image passed through Brianne’s mind. She saw the dark and magnificent Sir Thrax Helmer naked in bed with the athletic, auburn-haired human Agena Morrow. She pictured him lowering his wondrously handsome face between Agena’s thighs to taste of her and bringing down his awesome body on top of her to slip the erect instrument of his dragon passion into what he’d tasted.
She saw Agena as the ecstatic recipient of his dragon desire, crying out in an all-too-human ecstasy… In the name of common courtesy, she pulled herself out of that image. It was not a place she wanted to go, after all, in the company of her hosts and surrounded by all these other people.
“Sir Rawn and Joanna RSVPed likewise, so we can assume they’re occupied the same way,” Conran added. “Unless they happen to be on duty, no one sees very much of Sir Rawn or Sir Thrax lately.”
“No one except Agena and Joanna,” Donar said, one side of his lip curling.
“I’ll bet,” said Brianne, with a quick swallow of the last of her wine. She handed her glass to a passing server. Unbidden, another flash of imagination came into her mind, this time of a naked Sir Rawn Ullery, every bit as darkly handsome as Sir Thrax but without the short beard, built even more magnificently and—she had no doubt—hung just as enormous. She saw him looming over a naked, prone, and waiting Joanna Way, who did not have to wait long before Rawn’s godlike body pressed her down on the bed, the dragon between his thighs claimed its place inside her, and Joanna wailed euphorically under him…
Brianne’s imagination burst into fresh awareness of her actual surroundings. Voices raised abruptly in a growing hubbub from the other side of the room, near the entrance. Brianne and the twins looked and found people jostling to either side amid a commotion and a blustery murmur.
They squinted into the rumbling crowd that a moment ago had been a congenial gathering, and all at once a single voice raised louder than the others: “Never you mind, I have perfectly good business here! I’m every bit a Quist, as much as those two lizards I call nephews! Where are they? Where in Fafnir’s name are they?”
Conran and Donar rolled their eyes at each other, recognizing the older, male voice at once. “Oh no…,” Donar groaned.
“Bane and damn,” said Conran, clenching his teeth.
“What?” asked Brianne, more alarmed now than she was when she arrived. “Who is that? Who’s here?”
“Someone who was not on the guest list,” Conran answered.
“You’ll see,” added Donar, frowning.
Brianne kept looking in the direction the twins were looking, and as she did, she remembered her breakfast conversation with the brothers—and what they said about certain dragons to whom they were related. Then, she recalled what the voice said: …those two lizards I call nephews!
The newcomer strode, leaning on an ornate cane of black wood, through the crowd of guests until he came into view and glowered at Conran and Donar in a manner not at all festive. His hair was a dull blond hue, streaked with white. His face was creased and lined with age. Brianne had never seen a truly elderly weredragon, but it occurred to her that this was the oldest one she had yet seen. She tried to imagine how he must look at this age in his other body. Before she could fully form the image, the old Lacertan, leaning on his cane but looking as if he could breathe fire like Sir Rawn Ullery, snapped at the twin brothers: “Am I to assume my invitation to your little gala was lost in the Stellarnet?”
“You know better than that, Uncle Xorian,” Conran balked.
And that confirmed it. Brianne knew now that she was looking at Xorian Quist, patriarch of the side of the family to which the brothers were alluding at breakfast, the members of the Quist nest who were turned out as a liability. Conran’s words about them replayed themselves in her memory: Illegal hunting by one, or a few, reflects on the entire nest. Xorian and his brood had to go.
“I know well enough to know the real reason for this affair of yours,” Xorian growled at the brothers. “Thought you’d take the last bit of the taint off your scales after disowning us, did you? This is your final gesture to show the rest of the Commonwealth what you stand for?” He looked at the brothers as if to sink spiteful dragon claws in them with his eyes before turning his attention to Brianne: “And you…you must be the human with the pet cralowog.”
Brianne frowned, empathizing with the brothers’ dislike for their uncle. As dragons went, this Xorian struck her as quite the ugly, dirty old bird. “She’s not a pet,” Brianne defied him.
Xorian Quist seemed more a venomous serpent in human guise than a dragon. Brianne instinctively recoiled inside as he burned his eyes into her. “‘Not a pet,’ you say? Do you know what she is, then? I’ll tell you exactly what she is. She’s absolution for these two!” He lifted his cane and shook it at the brothers.
His entire body shook with it; he seemed less than steady on his feet, as if age and disgrace had taken a heavy toll on him. “She’s a chance for these two to show the rest of space that they’re not dragons of the same ilk as my sons and me! And that’s true enough. We’re better dragons than they ever were, no matter that they disowned us and threw us out of the nest!”
“We’re not the ones who disowned you, Uncle,” Conran said defensively.
“No, of course you’re not,” Xorian fumed, lowering his cane and steadying himself. “Not you. Never you. Your father, your mother, they were the ones. It wasn’t you. But did you say a word in our defense when your parents did it? Did you come to the side of my boys, who were nestlings with you and played with you and spent your childhood with you? Did you show them or me a shred of loyalty?”
“Don’t talk about loyalty to us,” said Donar. “Were you loyal to our nest and our name when you broke interstellar law and brought shame on all of us? What else were we to do?”
“Stand up for your own, that’s what!” Xorian shouted. “Defend us, not join those who condemned us! We are of your own scales and blood! Did you care?”
“What if we had defended you?” Conran demanded. “And what if Father and Mother had relented? What would you have done then? Would you have stopped illegally hunting protected and endangered species on other planets? Respected interstellar law? Stopped engaging in the illegal trade of alien animal carcasses and furs and body parts? Stopped trafficking with interplanetary criminals?
Would you have stopped associating this nest and its good name with the worst, lowest elements of galactic society? Or would you have gone on doing exactly as you were doing, committing greater ecological crimes, and possibly brought ruin on all of us? You’re lucky we cut you off with the shares of the family fortune you already had.”
“Conran and I agreed with Father and Mother then,” said Donar, “and we agree with them now. You were all a liability to this nest, our reputation, and our future. If Father and Mother hadn’t done as they did, you would have continued to be a liability, and where would we all be headed then?”
“You could have helped us!” Xorian shouted back.
“You mean we could have colluded with you!” Donar shouted in return. “Aided and abetted you and helped you cover up your illegal activities! Become criminals along with you! By rights, you should all be in a dungeon. It was only the heavy sanctions that our parents took on your behalf that saved you from that. After the losses we took for you, being cast out was the most lenient thing we could have done.
We could have let the law have its way with you, and perhaps we should have at that! ‘Loyalty’ to you? For all your ‘loyalty’ to us? We could all have been dungeoned for standing with you, every one of us! Bane and damn on that!”
“What are you even doing here?” asked Conran. “You weren’t invited, you’re not wanted, and you’re upsetting our guests. Tonight is meant to be about welcoming Brianne and her friends to Lacerta and showing our support for their work. This is not the welcome we wanted for her.”
Xorian straightened up somewhat in a gesture of proud defiance, still leaning on his cane and still seeming to shake and tremble. Was it with age or was it something else? If it was something else, from the look of him, he was damned if he would let on about it.
Frowning bitterly, he moved his eyes from the indignant twins to their guest of honor. “Oh yes,” he almost hissed. “Yes—Ms. Heatherton. Lest we forget, the lady who occasioned the party.” Directly to Brianne, he asked, “Do you see who it is that’s honoring you tonight? They have all the honors in the world for someone not of their own scales—someone of no scales at all—but none for their own kin. But from the look of you, that’s only to be expected.”
Now Brianne was growing as indignant and offended as Conran and Donar. She looked back and forth out of the corners of her eyes for people’s reactions to that latter part. “Meaning what, exactly?” she asked.
His eyes still fixed on Brianne, Xorian replied, “Meaning that my nephews are dragons, well enough, in their own way. Like so many of our young males, they still have all the predatory instincts of dragons—but for a different sort of prey. They’re not so much predators of the kind that nature intended dragons to be—as they are conquerors. That’s what they do. They don’t claim prey. They conquer. You know that about our world, don’t you?”
“That is enough, Uncle,” Conran warned.
“Have I said anything untrue?” the old weredragon asked, as if somehow stung. “That is what you do, isn’t it? Your trophies are not things that you stalk and kill and preserve and mount. Or I should say, you do ‘mount’ them, after a fashion…”
“This is obscene!” Donar cried.
Brianne felt her entire body grow tense, as if she were a serpent coiling to strike. This old dragon was deliberately saying the most ugly, inflammatory things in front of the entire party, and it wasn’t enough that she was saying them about Donar and Conran. Now, he was starting to say them about her, and she liked it less and less by the moment.
“I’ve said nothing that the young lady doesn’t already know,” protested Xorian. “She must have heard the accounts of the ways of young Lacertan males. If she hasn’t experienced them herself, I daresay she soon will.” He fixed a malevolent grin on Brianne. “I’m sure the thought has occurred to you already, my dear.”
“My relationship with your nephews is professional. They’re donors and benefactors of my work,” said Brianne in a deliberately even tone. She would not give this toxic old reptile the satisfaction of letting herself be baited.
“Yes, of course,” said Xorian. “Conran and Donar are your most generous benefactors. They are the friends of nature. But this planet long ago gave our kind a gift—a gift that made us masters of nature. Kings and rulers of nature. It’s a gift that our ancestors turned away from. This planet made us dragons. Dragons. And what did we do? We folded up our wings and settled into a life as no better than sheep.”
“What are you talking about?” Brianne asked, mystified.
“You already know,” said Xorian. “You know the history of Lacerta. You know about the lost human colony whose ships crashed here, cut off from the rest of human space. You know about the mineral we now called Draconite, dissolved in all the waters of the planet, that mutated our ancestors, made them both human and dragon. It gave them power—power. Power that no other humans have ever possessed. Strength and flight—power! It made them the perfect hunters, the perfect predators, capable of bringing down the mightiest beasts on this planet or any other. And what did they do with it?”
“If I remember my history correctly,” answered Brianne, hands on her hips, “first they were confused and terrified by what had happened to them. First, they turned on each other, insane with fear of what they’d become. And the reason they have the kind of world they have now is that they overcame their fear and learned to live with their mutation.
They have a beautiful world now because they learned how to be dragons and still stay civilized men and women. Instead of living to be hunters and killers, they learned to be builders and protectors. They could have lived up to their predatory dragon instincts and become monsters. They could have become the enemies of every planet in space. But they’re not. They’re a world that commands respect, not fear.”
Xorian almost spat at her in disgust. “‘Respect,’ indeed. Power commands respect. Power is what Lacerta has. But we deny what we are. We’ve created this genteel world of reluctant dragons more interested in what we can do with our loins than with our muscles and talons and wings. A world of creatures like these feckless nephews of mine, creatures who’d rather fuck than hunt. Haven’t they got around to that with you yet?”
Donar, losing his grip on his rage, stepped out in front of his brother and Brianne and put himself right in his contemptuous uncle’s face. “Shut your mouth, old man!” he bellowed. In his outburst, he instinctively, unconsciously released his form. His neck and head morphed to dragon, his wings and tail unfurled, and his hands turned to scaly talons.
In spite of herself, Brianne gasped at this sudden display of dragon wrath. Conran grasped her by her shoulders and called to his brother, “Donar, don’t!”
As quickly as the words of warning were out of Conran’s mouth, Xorian morphed himself to half-dragon as well. He was as impressive a sight as any transformed Lacertan could be, but the tone of his scales and the texture of his horns, spikes, and wings showed his age.
He was still a powerful reptile-man, but a more waxen and brittle one than his furious young nephew. The two weredragons stood with mouths agape and fangs sharp and glistening, and Xorian shook his cane at Donar. Thrashing his tail, he hissed, “Want to have at me, nestling? Come on, then! Snap and slash! Do your worst!”
Conran stepped away from Brianne to Donar’s side, now grabbing Donar by the shoulder and squeezing. “Donar, I tell you, don’t do this! Shift down—now! I mean it! Shift down and stop this!”
“Did you hear what he said to Brianne, in front of everyone?” Donar hissed at his brother. “Did you hear?”
“Yes, I heard,” said Conran. “And he’s only showing himself for the bitter, grizzled old thing that he is. Everyone sees that. Show them something better and shift down.”
“Is everything all right here?” came a voice from the edges of the surrounding crowd of party goers.
Xorian swiveled his old dragon neck around to his rear. Donar, Conran, and Brianne looked that way as well, and they all saw that two new figures had arrived, a male and a female, older than the brothers but younger than Xorian. They were clad in armor-skin uniforms of black, red, silver, and gold, with power blades sheathed at their sides. The newcomers were instantly recognizable as Mentors of the Knights of Lacerta: trainers of the most formidable defenders of the planet, and mighty warriors in their own right. A hush fell over the ballroom at the appearance of the Mentors and the gaze that they fixed on the hosts, the guest of honor, and the intruder.
The female mentor asked, “Is there some trouble? Something we can do?”
At once, Donar backed off from Xorian and relaxed his form back to human, withdrawing scales and horns and wings and tail and letting his skin return to man-flesh. These were the Mentors that he and Conran had invited to the reception as a show of respect for the local lawkeepers. It would not do to have them discharge their duty here tonight, of all nights.
“There’s nothing wrong,” Donar lied. “My uncle and I were having a discussion about who was invited this evening, and it got a bit…spirited.”
The Mentors looked at each other, having dealt with enough disputes between aggrieved weredragons to know what Donar was not saying about the situation. They observed Xorian as he morphed himself back to human, more slowly than Donar had changed. They and everyone saw him shake tremulously while supporting himself with his cane. Once he was human, his body rocked with a tremor so hard that he crumpled to his knees. Gasps of alarm welled up from the onlookers.
Conran bent over and reached for his uncle to help him up, but Xorian swatted Conran’s hand away with his cane, startling him and making Conran rear back. “I need no help from you, boy!” he growled. Still shaking, he used his cane again to brace himself while struggling back to his feet. This time, the male Mentor came to his assistance and helped him back up.
“You don’t seem to be looking well, Mr. Quist,” the Mentor said to the older male. “You should let us see you home.”
“Yes, do that,” agreed Conran. “You can return to the party later. See to it that our uncle gets home and into bed safely now.”
Xorian shot another venomous look at Conran. “I’m not an invalid, you little lizard,” he said with barely disguised hostility.
“Still,” said the female Mentor, “I think your nephew has a point. Let us see you home as he suggests.”
From the look on the lady lawkeeper’s face, Xorian could tell that she was not about to take “No, thank you” for an answer. The male Mentor wore the same expression. Letting this dispute go any further was not in Xorian’s interests.
“Very well then,” said the elder Quist. “I suppose I’ll call it an early evening.” Steadier on his feet now, he looked one last time without warmth at his twin nephews. “Thank you, both of you,” he said, “for not inviting me.”
“It was our pleasure,” answered Donar in the same tone.
With the escort of the two Mentors, Xorian, with his black cane, took his leave of the reception. The collective sigh of relief, audible or not, from the entire party was almost palpable.
Conran faced his brother with a look of rue and irritation. “You realize there are members of the media attending tonight as well?”
Donar rolled his eyes. “I know.”
“And you realize that this little display just now is liable to be transmitted all over the Commonwealth; in fact, it’s probably being beamed into the interstellar communications net even as we speak.”
Donar huffed, “I know.”
“And of course, you know which one of us is going to have to talk to the mediates now and try to spin damage control.”
Donar held up his hand, aggravated, in a gesture of surrender. “Yes, yes, I know!”
“Can I trust you to entertain Brianne while I go and try to mitigate what just happened?”
Donar looked over at Brianne, who stepped to his side supportively and took him by one arm. He found her touch decidedly soothing at the moment.
“Yes, go on ahead. Talk to them. They’ll be wanting a statement from me too. The ones you’re not busy with will come right to me, I’m sure.”
“Try not to give them anything more to work with, will you?”
“I’ll do my best,” Donar sighed.
Conran spun on his heel and walked off into the party beyond, leaving his brother with Brianne.
“Are all your parties like this?” she asked.
Donar did not answer. He just looked up, mortified, as if asking some ancient dragon divinity for the strength to make it through the rest of the evening.