Chapter 1: The Onion Peel

Often, when Lindír was a young whelp, barely the size of a nursing sow, he would ask his maid why he and Ásgeir, his twin, were of such different appearances. Every time, the maid would sigh, and set down the sponge with which she cleaned him, or the book from which she taught him, or the fork with which she fed him, and smooth the veil she wore across her head. Then she would ask Lindír if this was not a tale he had been told, though she knew that it was, and he would say that it was not, which was an evil lie. She always told the story in the same way. And Lindír always listened.

Lindír’s mother, so the tale began, was a fair queen, and beloved, of a bountiful and mighty kingdom, a woman who should have been at the peak of happiness. But she was not, not truly, and neither was her husband the king, for one thing evaded them: children. King and Queen alike desperately desired children, not merely to produce an heir who could ensure the prosperity of the kingdom far into the future, but also for the joy of having something which they could love and cherish as only a parent can cherish a child. It was for this reason that the Red Citadel was always full of cats.

The childlessness of the king and queen was not for lack of trying, of course. Here the maid would often snicker and say something about loud noises or bedsprings which Lindír did not understand. They had, the maid would then continue, sought out the aid and advice of every doctor, every alchemist and all the midwives in the kingdom, and attempted countless remedies, all for naught. But when they heard tell of a certain salt-witch who was said to live in a cave on the side of a mountain far to the east, they set off to speak to her posthaste.

In the cave in the mountain, the queen regaled the salt-witch of her woes, and begged to know what might be done to fix them. The salt-witch thought for some time, and then spoke. Lindír always loved the voice which his nurse gave the salt-witch, the way it crackled like a dying fireplace. The salt-witch said to the queen that upon returning home, the first thing she would see would be a pair of onions. She should eat these onions, raw and whole, but be sure to peel them first. If all that she had been told to do, she did, she would bear not one child but twins.

The Queen left the cave confused and saddened, believing the prediction to be the gibbering of a madwoman. But when she passed through the castle gate, the first thing she saw was a servant stumbling upon a loose bit of flagstone, upsetting the basket of produce slung in the crook of her elbow, causing two whole onions to spill from it. Remembering the salt-witch’s prophecy, the queen took the onions and prepared to eat them. But so eager was the queen that it was not until she had had a bitter time of the first onion that she remembered the instruction to peel them both, and did so with the second. Nonetheless, the witch’s words proved true: not long after, the queen was with child.

At this point in the story the maid would put on a grave expression, lock eyes with Lindír, and begin to speak in a low and sinister voice. For, as the story went, the queen’s simple mistake eventually proved to haunt her. On the evening upon which fate decreed she would give birth, a terrible thing happened. That which the queen birthed was not a human baby, but a terrible scaled thing with too many limbs, a thing that writhed and snapped and screeched as it ripped out of her womb. It tore at her insides, ripped her legs, slashed tendons, and its appearance was so terrible and unexpected that one of the midwives dropped dead of fright.

Lindír would always ask if this was him. The maid would always say yes.

All fairy tales have happy endings, of course, and the maid would always end this tale as was expected. The queen, though horribly wounded by Lindír’s birth, remained conscious long enough to birth another. This one was perfect, a baby boy of great beauty and incredible health, and he was named Ásgeir. And Lindír, the maid would conclude, would be forever cursed for his mother’s mistake. His scales were the onion peel, dirty and bitter, the part that should have been removed before he was born, but which was now bound to him forever.

Lindír, upon hearing the end of the story, would shrink, tucking all four limbs under his torso, folding his wings against his back, and curling his tail under his belly. The leather of the muzzle strapped to his jaws would creak as he rested his chin upon the stone floor. Then, at last, the maid would take up the sponge, or the book, or the fork, and resume her appointed task. This was not a frequent ritual, but Lindír would ask for it anyway, as often as once a month, in the hope that this newest repetition would cause it all to make sense. It never did; he was always left feeling miserable and unwanted.

But such was often the tone of Lindír’s upbringing. 

Lindír did not see his parents as often as most children. When they did appear, it had the feel more of a visiting dignitary than of a parent doting upon their child. Queen Guthrún, at least, had an excuse. Only on her good days was the queen capable of making the walk from her bedchambers down into the depths of the dungeons where Lindír lived. Average days meant she could only wander within a few dozen steps of the royal litter in which she was carried about. On bad days, her screams would echo through the whole of the Red Citadel, as might the moaning of a grieving ghost.

When she did visit Lindír’s cell, her arrival would usually be announced first by the tak-tak-tak of her cane against the flagstones. She would slowly open the iron-banded door, bidding her knights to remain outside. Once the door shut behind her, Guthrún would slowly, painfully fold her legs and sit, her white hair cascading over her shoulders. Lindír, still young enough to be desperate for a mother’s affection, would go to her side and lay flat against the floor with his head outstretched, letting his eyes shut as calm came over him. Guthrún would run her bony fingers over the jagged stony scutes over his spine, brush against the wrinkled vellum of his furled wings, caress the crown of horn-nubs that grew from his skull. 

While she did this, Guthrún would whisper to him, whisper of things that were but were no longer, of things that could and should have been but could not be, of things that could be but were not certain. Lindír, again, was too young to understand much of what was said. More important to him was the way she would say it, the sing-song in her voice, the sorrowful laugh akin to the sound of the calling of bells, the kindly hiss of her speech as it barely scraped its way out from between her teeth. Eventually, the queen would leave. Sometimes after only a few minutes, sometimes after well over an hour, and Lindír could ascertain no pattern in how long Guthrún would stay. In moments of charity, he thought that perhaps it had to do with the vagaries of the mutilation that, after all, he himself had caused. Her title of Queen Guthrún the Maimed was given for good reason.

Lindír’s father had no such excuse, of course. King Heimir Soot-Eater was a warrior, broad of back and deep of chest, with the strength of an ox in his arms and the power of a mountain in his sinews. He would appear at Lindír’s cell unaccompanied, his sword clanking against his hip and his shirt of mail straining to contain his trunk, and throw open the wooden door with all of the grace of a military commander. Heimir would remain in the far corner of the cell, looking down on Lindír as the chained beast he was, never allowing Lindír to touch him, and responding to any attempt with a swift strike using the flat of his sword. Nor would he refer to his son by name, but merely call him by title; “my boy” or “little beast”. But he was better than Guthrún in one respect: that being that he cared, or pretended to care, about what Lindír had to say.

Lindír would sometimes speak to Guthrún while she sat beside him, telling her that he loved her or asking what she meant by some inscrutable phrase, but Guthrún either could not hear him or did not care to listen, and would continue her monologue uninterrupted. When Lindír’s father visited, he would always ask questions. The topic varied from visit to visit, but given Lindír’s lack of worldly experience, there was a limited field of potential topics. Still, Lindír did his best, speaking of runes or what he had learned of Hvalheim, or else complaining of aches brought on by his growth. Heimir would nod and stroke his beard and offer meaningless words of encouragement. And when Lindír’s small store of talk had been emptied, Heimir would speak in turn. He spoke mostly of Ásgeir, telling of the boy’s progress in matters both martial and mental, and of the pride which he felt in his secondborn for all that he had achieved even at his young age. At other times he would speak of Lindír himself. Not to Lindír, but of him, of the hope that he might one day transcend the curse that had been placed on him at birth, to slough off  that cursed dragon’s skin and become an equal of Ásgeir, or surpass him. Lindír often said that he hoped the same thing as well.

And it was not for lack of effort that Lindír remained what he was. He would use the stone blocks of his cell as an abrasive, rubbing against them hour after hour in the hopes that he might wear off his scales entirely and reveal the human skin beneath. All it ever did was polish the lowest parts of the wall to a smooth finish and leave his skin tender and stinging. Yet he did not give up, certain in the knowledge that eventually the red would have to give way to soft cream, as it had in the little palm-sized spot directly over his heart. To the young Lindír, the words of his parents may as well have been messages sent from the gods; and why would the gods tell him to do the impossible?

There was little else to do in the cell besides. Lindír knew all of it, in every extent and each dimension. He knew the different kinds of stone which made up the walls, of which there were two, a grainy grey stone and a smooth black stone. He knew the dimensions of the cell, that in each direction it was about half again as long as he was from snout to tail-tip, or about ten arms according to one of his teachers. He knew a little of the corridor outside, that he could get up onto his hind legs and stick his snout through the bars in the door so long as nobody was looking and gaze at the candles that lit the hallway.

But beyond that, there was naught to do but wait for the next visitor. The most frequent was the maid to whom had been given the responsibility of cleaning him, feeding him, and teaching him how to speak like a proper, thinking creature. But there were other visitors. The castellan of the Red Citadel, a minor noble who Heimir would sometimes call Ernst, mostly pejoratively, was a man with the countenance of a vulture, bald-headed and wrinkly. He would often appear to yell at the knights outside of Lindír’s cell for being negligent in their duties, or to rattle the door and mumble to himself for reasons Lindír could not ascertain.

The other guests were infinitely more exciting, and Lindír would hope for them almost more than he did for an appearance from his parents. Many of these were learnèd men in floppy caps and tunics of indigo and woad, their pouches full of strong-smelling herbs and strange powders, though neither the smell nor the unfamiliarity stopped Lindír from sampling a tongue-full there and then and inevitably sickening himself. Some of these sages were surgeons, as Lindír could tell from the symbol of the snake on their chests and the way that he would be held down and thoroughly prodded whenever they arrived. Yet others were doctors of literature or history, and would be separated from him by armed escorts as they supplemented the rudiments of his education with knowledge of the wider world. The rarest of all were the true wizards, those who bore staves topped with crystals of salt or sulfur, surrounded by the smell of quicksilver, those who made the very air crackle with the arcane. These would often be brought in merely for the chance to look upon Lindír, and sometimes to speak to him. They would ask strange questions using complex words which he did not understand, but he would answer as best as he could in the hopes that he would be considered to have done well. The best he ever got out of any of them was a smile or a chuckle. 

Lindír’s constraint to that single cell, the captivity that turned every day into an exact replica of the one before and the one after stretching off into eternity in both directions, was necessary. It had been emphasized, by nurses, knights, his own parents, that Lindír’s curse made him a danger. Dragons were ravenous, uncontrollable beings, reavers and raiders who brought ruin wherever they went, leaving nothing but burned wreckage and tragedy in their wake. It was this that Lindír was cursed to become. Why they had not simply killed him, Lindír hadn’t the faintest idea, other than the possibility that they in fact loved him too much.

Though he knew the necessity of it, Lindír could not help but yearn to see the outside. He knew the words for many things he had never seen, words such as “sun” and “moon,” “tree” and “grass,” “sea” and “wind,” and wished to understand what they truly meant. To the mind of a child, the solution was obvious: he would have to prove that he could overcome the curse and be trusted with freedom. His maid had once told him the story of a knight who was cursed to wear a wolf’s form, and for seven years lived in that way; but he remained gentle and kind, finding a master to feed him scraps so that he was never forced to rely on hunting raw meat. In this way, after seven years, his curse was lifted. Though there was no promise that Lindír’s curse would be lifted, he did his utmost to live the same way.

It was no easy task. For one thing, all that he was given to eat was the same daily ration of salt pork, without utensil or plate. Lindír’s best effort was to use his claws, cutting the meat into pieces before swallowing one piece at a time. It was slow work, unsteady, awkward, but if that was what it took then so be it. He was also sure to greet all visitors in the human manner, sitting up on his haunches and bowing his head while saying “Good day.” Speech did not come easy for Lindír, for his mouth was too long and his sixty-four teeth overly sharp and jagged, such that every word he spoke had the rasping, lisping quality of dry parchments rubbing against one another. Mostly it seemed to unnerve those who entered.

And of course, the ritual of abrading his scales continued; it continued until the bricks of the wall were nearly worn through. There were times when Lindír thought that it might be working, when he would find scales, little leaf-shaped things, discarded on the floor. Once he even pointed it out to his father, nudging forward a pile of a score or so that he had collected, asking if this meant the curse was coming undone. Heimir merely shook his head in disgrace. The next day, a sage came to collect the fallen scales while Lindír was shepherded into the far corner of the room by a guard of knights. 

When Lindír was first taught in the art of counting up to the hundreds, his child’s excitement at the prospect of numbers caused him to develop a sort of ritual. He would count days, taking as his timepiece the schedule of the salt-pork ration and of the various visitors to his cell. Egged on by his maid’s encouragement, Lindír would begin every day by announcing the day it was, starting from no important mark and with no end to the count, merely in order to express that he knew the passage of time. He made it to several hundreds before giving up; nothing changed to warrant keeping track of time.

But all things have an exception, and the same was true for the utter monotone of Lindír’s existence. He scarcely noticed it, but over the passage of many months, his maid seemed to grow smaller. There was a time in the far distant past when Lindír’s head barely rose to the height of her navel when they were both standing. Then her navel was only level with his shoulder, Lindír’s head rising almost up to her chest. Eventually, the day came when Lindír stood up and realized that he could look his maid directly in the eye without even having to raise his front feet off of the floor. It was not long after that that Lindír discovered that, when he stretched out his neck and his tail to their fullest extent, he could touch both sides of the cell at the same time.

It was about then that the Red Citadel grew busy. Lindír’s perspective on it all was necessarily limited from his cell, but he did not need to be able to see to understand that something was changing. He could feel the vibrations rising up through his feet, the tactile sensation of picks and hammers striking earth, the sound of many scores of feet and hooves of many beasts of burden lumbering this way and that. Heimir’s appearances at the cell grew fewer and when he did appear he was distant and laden with fatigue. The castellan ceased to appear at Lindír’s cell entirely. Something was happening.

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After many days and nights, Lindír finally grew impatient, his child’s curiosity overcoming his desire to make no fuss. He asked Guthrún what was happening, and received in turn only the usual mutterings. He asked the knights outside his cell what the source of the noise was, and they mocked him with cruel words. Finally, when his father deigned to show at Lindír’s cell, he asked him what it was that had apparently consumed the attention of the entire castle.

Heimir Soot-Eater, to his credit, did answer. He lowered his head and muttered something about cleverness to himself, and then explained that it was construction. He did not know if Lindír knew what construction was. Lindír did know, his nurse having told him stories of giants building great castles in the far past. And so Heimir nodded and said that all of the noises outside were of construction, and that they were constructing something for Lindír. He went on to say that it would be ready soon, and that Lindír would have to cooperate when it was ready. For, Heimir intoned, he would have to be bound up with ropes and escorted carefully, for the safety of all in the castle.

And Lindír asked if that meant he was to be let out above, if he had proved that he was not so afflicted by the curse of dragonhood as to be a danger, if the construction was to give him a house like most people lived in, countless questions and assertions and wishes in one long rambling babble of excitement. Heimir looked at him with bewilderment. When Lindír slowed, looking up at his father with a final, wordless question mark, the king shook his head and chuckled. He said that Lindír had been a good dragon, and that he would be brought up above.

Those few days just before the completion of the second construction were the happiest Lindír would ever have. He would lay witness, at last, to the boundless joy of reality, to the sun and the moon and the trees and the grass and the sea and the wind, and learn what they all were, and eat salt pork under the rays of the sun. All that had to be done was for Lindír to wait. And he did wait. He said “good day” to his visitors with greater vigor than ever before, and ate the salt pork ration with gusto, and began to count the days again. It lasted barely a fortnight.

Lindír knew when the day came, for a great many people gathered around the door to his cell, many more than he had ever seen in one place before. Most of them were knights of the realm, all clad up in mail and with swords at their belts. But there were others, also. The castellan was there, and King Heimir and Queen Guthrún, and a boy of twelve years wearing regal clothes and a mask of ivory to cover his face. This last was Ásgeir.

The knights, with aid from several squires and others, secured ropes around Lindír’s limbs, front and back, and his wings as well, and wrapped them around double and tied them well. Only then was he allowed to be brought forward into the hallway. It was quite a struggle passing through the door, for Lindír had grown greatly since he had entered the cell. The doorframe was bent and ruined by the time he had squeezed himself through. Then it was up, up and up and out, up stairs and through passageways, around spiral paths that sorely tested Lindír’s flexibility, leading through winding dungeons that he had never before navigated. His limbs, unused to movement over great distance, rapidly became sore, and his lungs heaved, but no amount of pain or force could have stopped him then.

And then, at last, the surface. The contrast between the utter confinement of the dungeon below, and the freedom of open air, made even the confines of the Red Citadel’s keep appear as the very vault of the gods. Lindír’s slitted eyes blinked under the dazzling light, and his wings thrilled at the slightest touch of the breeze as it called them skyward. His tail began to flick back and forth with sheer nervous excitement as he tried to take it all in at once. 

The knights led him slowly and carefully through the keep. The procession was, for the most part, alone in the keep. No maids or merchants or courtiers flitted back and forth, as Lindír’s teachers had told him they were wont to do, though he did see many nervous eyes looking down upon them from the uppermost windows. Still, he assumed that there would be time for him to come to know them all once he was allowed to, and he marched with his head held high, that the watchers might see the best of him.

But then he saw it. It was a hole in the earth, freshly dug, and it led down into yet another black pit of utter confinement. Lindír halted immediately. It was impossible. He had done all that was asked of him, he had learned the runes and said “Good day” and spoken kindly to his father, and now he was to be set free, given a home. He was not going to be placed into another cell, merely larger but otherwise just as dismal as the first.

The castellan, armed with a ceremonial great-axe, knocked the heel of his weapon against Lindír’s ankle. “Move, beast.”

“Not there,” Lindír muttered. “Not there! You were going to let me out, not put me down there!”

“Calm, my boy,” Heimir said, placing a hand on Lindír’s haunches. “There is no need for this roaring.”

“You are not going to put me down there!”

The castellan scowled. “And where else were we going to put you, the damn chapel? Damned animal. Now get a move on.”

And Lindír suddenly understood. He had been lied to. All of his efforts to be good, to be human, were for naught, for although he had acted human, he still bore his scales, and the curse that came with them. Nothing he did was ever going to change him, and nothing he did would ever win the approval of humankind.

Something broke inside Lindír at that very moment. He wanted out.

The muzzle around Lindír’s jaw was an assemblage of leather, wood, and bronze, and he had worn it for nearly a year uninterrupted. As such, it was dry and warped. It broke the instant Lindír attempted to open his jaws to let out a roar that could render men deaf. He surged forward all at once, with all his might, intent on nothing more than venting all the wrath of hell upon the castellan.

Lindír, at that age, was a child. But he was also three-quarters of a ton in weight, larger than the greatest of the mighty bruins, with claws like daggers and teeth like crossbow-heads, set in jaws that could rend mail armor. And rend mail they did, directly through the mail cladding over the castellan’s right leg, then onwards to sever sinew and shatter bone. The ropes could not hold, slipping through the hands of the knights, many of whom retreated in mortal terror. 

The castellan screamed until he could no longer, at which point he gurgled and rasped. With a single twitch of his neck, Lindír tore the man’s leg from his body, and found the taste of blood and meat agreeable. He swallowed it in chunks. He turned, ready to batter his way through all of the knights and anyone else who would stop him, only for his blood to freeze. Guthrún, leaning on her cane with one hand and her favorite son with the other, hissed out a string of curses and invectives, her eyes narrow and her face set with rage. For a moment, faced with his mother’s disapproval, Lindír’s muscles failed.

And a moment was all it took for Heimir to charge and the knights, hardened men of battle, to regroup. The Soot-Eater smote his son across the skull with a war hammer, sending him reeling, and the knights went to the ropes once more. As Lindír thrashed and screeched and screamed, he was dragged to the earth, and a half a dozen spear-points were aimed at his eyes, his throat, the patch of scaleless skin over his heart. Guthrún collapsed to the ground and began to scream in pain as her husband called out for healers, both for her and for the castellan, who lay unconscious and maimed on the ground. 

And Lindír, who only minutes before had felt the purest warmth of joy enter his heart, was dragged down below. As a score of men pulled him forcefully to his new cell, he swore an oath to himself. Silently, Lindír swore to never again bend the knee before the petty wants and little cruelties of the human species.

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