Chapter 4: The Princess Has a Plan

Princess Meera had not spent her captivity waiting to be rescued.

On the first day she had explored the dragon's lair: a vast cavern at the top of the Burning Peak, heaped with everything that shone. Golden plates. Brass lamps. Mirrors, spoons, temple bells, a thousand polished coins, and one very confused peacock.

On the second day she had noticed that the dragon, for all his terrifying brightness, was lonely.

On the third day she had started talking to him.

"Why do you collect all this?" she asked, as SuarJ arranged a row of silver bowls by size.

The dragon was quiet for a long time. "When I was young," he said at last, "there were other sun-dragons. The sky was full of us. Then, one by one, they flew away to wherever old dragons go, and the sky became very dark. So I gather things that shine. It makes the cave feel less empty."

Meera looked at the heaps of treasure, glittering in the dragon's glow, and felt something she had not expected to feel. Sympathy.

"SuarJ," she said carefully, "things that shine don't keep you company. People do."

"People run away from me."

"Some of them might not," said the princess, "if you stopped kidnapping them."

The dragon considered this with the slow seriousness of a creature that has lived four hundred years.

That was when a small knight with visible ankles climbed over the edge of the cave, holding a dented shield in front of him, and shouted, "Release the princess, foul beast!"

Meera put her face in her hands.

"Oh no," she said. "Not now."