"Esther M. Friesner - Chicks 03 - Chicks 'N Chained Males" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

until humans made them so had survived two years in the King's Cavalry, knew nastiness when she saw
it.

"It's hovering," Sophora said, pointing upward. Sure enough, the bigger dragon, now only a bowshot
above, had stopped its descent and was balancing on the wind. Its gaping mouth, still pointed downward,
gave fiery light to the scene, but its body no longer glowed. Sophora waved her sword at the big dragon.
"This one's ours," she shouted. "Go away, orтАФ"

The dragon laughed. The blast of hot air that rolled over them smelt of furnaces and smiths' shops, and
desertsтАФbut it did not fry them. It laughed, they knew it laughed; that was enough for the moment, and
the great creature rose into the dark night, removing its light and leaving them once more in darkness.

With a live and uncooperative dragon on their flattened tent.

"We haven't seen the last of that one," Sophora said.

"My best jerkin is probably getting squashed into the mud," said Krystal.

"Shut up, Krystal," they all said. All but the dragon.
***

Cavernous Dire had never seen a dragon before he became one, and thus had only the vaguest idea what
they were supposed to look like. Big, of course, and scaly, and breathing fire from a long, toothy mouth.
Long tail with spikes on it. Legs, naturally, or dragons would be just fire-breathing snakes. If he'd known
that dragons have wings, he'd forgotten it after he became a dragon, and his own wings were, like those
of all man-drakes, pitiful little stubs on the shoulders, hardly more than ruffles of dry itchy skin.

So when the real dragon swooped down the valley, he was amazed. SheтАФhe still thought, at this point,
that the dragon was femaleтАФwas an awe-inspiring sight, with the wide wings spanning the valley from
side to side. She was so much bigger than he was. Crumbs of information about insects in which the male
was much smaller than the female tried to coalesce and tell him something important, but he couldn't quite
think, in the presence of this great beast. Dragons have this effect on all humans, but it's much stronger
with man-drakes, and it amuses them to reduce their toys to mindlessness right before they reduce them
to their constituent nutrient molecules.

The dragon flew past, and out of sight. Cavernous thrust his own long scaly neck out of his cave, trying
to see where she'd gone. Nothing but wet rock, nothing but wet wind, nothing but curtains of fine rain
stirred by her passage. She must be shy . . .

Strong talons seized his neck and plucked him from his cave as a robin plucks out a worm from the
ground. The wings boomed on either side of him, and boomed again, and he was rising upward so fast
that he felt the blood rushing to his dependent tail.

It is not for Men to know, or Bards to tell, what true dragons do to man-drakes in the high halls of the
air, but it took several hours, during which time Cavernous realized how little he knew about dragon
anatomy, his own or that of others, and how little he liked what he was learning now. Night had fallen by
then, and soon he had fallenтАФwas fallingтАФand the glowing beast beside him rumbled warm laughter all
the way down to the base of the clouds, then let him fall away into the wet night.

He didn't remember hitting the ground, but waking up was terrible. Darkness, cold, rain pelting his hide,