Read by Lin Sagovsky
Gladys was upset. No, not upset. Angry. Gladys was angry. And when Gladys got angry, people got roasted.
She eyed the cowering messenger, plumes of smoke drifting from her nostrils. “Say that again,” she demanded.
The snivelling messenger snivelled. “Th – there's a ban on smoking, ma'am. You can't have any cigarettes. The king ordered it. He said it was all terribly bad for us and that we would all live much better lives if we partook in some refreshing herbal tea rather than poisoned our lungs with foul smoke and grime – begging ma'am's pardon – so he just...banned them. The city's civilians are no longer allowed to smoke.”
“W – well you sort of are, I mean you're on all the flags and everything –”
“I am,” Gladys said very calmly, “A fucking dragon. I am a fucking dragon going through cold turkey and a dragon going through cold turkey is not a happy dragon, got it bitesize?”
The messenger shook from head to toe but stood his ground. Gladys was faintly impressed. “I'm sorry, ma'am. He says you can have more goats if you want, in recompense.”
He waved a hand at the unfortunate creatures already standing by Gladys's cave with the rest of the hoard. One of them bleated plaintively.
Gladys reached forward and hooked a claw under the messenger's shirt, dragging him closer to her steaming nose. “Tell you what, cupcake. I'm going to let you live just so you can go back and tell your measly mouthful of a king that he has made a big mistake. All right?”
She smiled, showing rows of teeth, some with rotting goat flesh still stuck between them. The messenger squealed. Gladys nodded grimly. Message received.
*
The quivering messenger eventually reported something about the dragon not being a happy turkey and goats wanting cigarettes, once he could be made to speak without screaming, but the king got the gist anyway. He sat back in his throne, said “Pssh,” and moved on to the next topic.
That night, the king's daughter went missing.
*
Gladys wasn't quite sure how to handle her new hostage. The princess was blonde, pretty and so skinny that there would barely be any point eating her, which that was all par for the course when it came to princesses, but she'd also reacted very oddly to being kidnapped.
When Gladys had turned up, she'd merely sighed and reached for her bag, then passively allowed Gladys to pluck her from her room with one deft claw without screaming for the guards once. She'd actually yawned during the resulting flight over the kingdom and when they'd reached the cave, she'd just said, “Some throw cushions in here could really brighten the place up,” then fell asleep neatly in a corner. And now she was sitting by the entrance to the cave and embroidering. Andsinging the sort of songs that made birds sit on her shoulders and fluffy bunnies pop randomly into existence.
Gladys tapped her claws irritably on a nearby rock. She wanted a cigarette.
“Look, shouldn't you be panicking or something?” she snapped at last. She didn't really make a habit of talking to her hostages – it would be a bit like striking up a conversation with the steak on your plate – but she was curious and fed up and nicotine deprived.
The princess raised her perfectly perfect head. “Should I be?”
Gladys rolled her yellow eyes. “You are being held hostage by an angry dragon.”
The princess shrugged. “Yes, but you won't actually hurt me. You'll keep me here for a while, then my prince will turn up, slay you in a terrific battle and carry me off to safety. And then we'll get married and live happily ever after. Everyone knows that.”
Gladys grinned. “I'd like to meet the prince who could slay me.” Several had tried in her lifetime, but you didn't become a grown dragon these days without learning a few prince-slaying techniques. Her favourite trick was to hover over them and bite their heads off while they were still reaching for their oh-so-shiny swords.
The princess tossed back her swathe of blonde hair. “He will. You'll see.”
Gladys snorted. “What's going to happen is that your king is going to crack like the nut he is and give me two hundred Marlboro for your safe return.”
The princess sighed pityingly. “Have you ever thought about replacing cigarettes with carrot juice?”
“Oh my God,” said Gladys, and went deeper into the cave to terrorise some goats.
*
But she couldn't stay away. It had to be the lack of nicotine. It was making her fixate on things. That and the fact that the princess was mad as a box of monkeys. She sat on her rock by the cave entrance from dawn to dusk, embroidering steadily the whole time. She sang constantly, with a host of birds to sing back to her. She petted the goats and treated them so kindly that Gladys almost felt guilty for eating them. She even rearranged the rocks around the cave to improve the Feng Shui, whatever that was. And she chatted at Gladys – God, how she chatted. You couldn't shut her up. She went on and on about how amazing her life was going to be when the prince turned up, how happy they'd be together, what a joyous existence she would have. Meanwhile the days stretched on and there was no prince on the horizon.
“Look,” Gladys said at last. “How about instead of waiting for the prince to rescue you, you just ran out of the cave while I was distracted? It would be really easy, you're already sitting right by the entrance.”
The princess looked offended. “But the prince has to save me.”
“You could just save yourself,” Gladys suggested, but the princess had started singing again and those bloody raucous birds successfully drowned Gladys out.
She was baffling, Gladys decided. She really was.
*
“Do you ever eat anything with vitamins in it?” the girl asked one day, once Gladys had finished devouring the doomed goat of the day and was lazily picking bits of flesh out of her teeth with a claw.
“Don't need to,” Gladys said, feeling pleasantly full and thus inclined to chat, “I'm a dragon.”
The princess sniffed. “I'm just saying, it's not good for you. Your chakras will get all clogged. And look what all that blood has done to your claws!”
Gladys stared at her claws. They were a bit of a mess, but then they always were.
“Have you ever even had a manicure?” The girl sighed and fished around in her bag, bringing out some equipment. “Right, give me a paw.”
Gladys, nonplussed, obeyed. Five minutes later, her claws were red with nail polish instead of blood. She wasn't sure what to think about this.
“There,” said the princess, sounding pleased. “Perfect. You look great.”
Gladys examined her new shiny talons. She supposed it didn't look too bad.
*
One night, when the princess was huddling amongst the rocks and blathering on about what type of cake would be served at her wedding, Gladys interrupted. “What about afterwards?”
“After what?” asked the human morsel.
“After the wedding,” Gladys said. “What do you do after that? How do you spend your days?”
The princess stared at her. “Well, I – well, I wait to become Queen, I guess.”
“Yes, and while you're doing that?”
“Um.” The princess gazed blankly at the cave wall for a while. “I suppose I could embroider.”
“But you embroider now,” pointed out Gladys.
“So?”
“Well, if all I was going to do after I got married was embroider, I'd make sure I did something else before then.”
The girl blinked at her. “Like what?”
“Like...” Gladys cast around for an activity. “Like travel, I suppose. There's lots of interesting places to see besides this one.”
“Are there?” asked the princess. “I've never travelled.”
“I've travelled all too much,” Gladys bemoaned. “Dragons tend to. We're not very welcome guests.”
The princess shuffled a foot in the dirt. “So where have you been?”
Gladys told her. She found herself telling all of it, the years and years spent flying around different countries, just finding a nice warm cave and then getting unceremoniously thrown out of it by locals with pitchforks or stupid, shiny knights. She talked about cities she had seen, mountains, seas, fiery volcanoes, great creaking glaciers, hot wet jungles, dry arid deserts. She talked about snow, and monsoons, and fog, and what it was like to fly above the clouds.
She talked about it all and the princess sat there and listened to every single word.
*
Of course the prince turned up. He was bound to eventually. Gladys peeked out of the cave distrustfully.
“He's late,” she said. “And oh my God, he's glistening.”
Glistening was the perfect word for what the prince was doing. He glistened from head to toe, from his shimmering hair to his glittering boots. Then he smiled and his teeth could have outshone the sun. Only five hours with a hygienist and a whitening machine could have produced such teeth as those.
“Bloody hell,” Gladys said, “And you're marrying that?”
The princess peeked out of the cave and giggled. “He does look very eager.”
Gladys grunted. “He's still late though. All right then, go on.”
The princess stared at her. “Aren't you meant to go and have a massive battle where he slays you in a gory and grisly fashion?”
Gladys shrugged. “Don't feel like being slain today. You might as well just go. I don't really want the cigarettes any more anyway.”
The princess paused. “Oh. Right.” She hesitated again. “Look, I made this. For you.”
She presented Gladys with a piece of cloth, on which was a beautifully embroidered dragon smoking a cigarette. Gladys looked down at the cloth and was horrified to discover her vision was blurring. She blinked hastily.
“Bye then,” said the princess, and went out of the cave, picking her way down the rocks to her glistening beloved.
Gladys looked around the cave. It suddenly felt very empty.
*
The proposal was beautiful, the wedding was beautiful, and everyone agreed that they were a very beautiful couple. The prince was very courteous and kind and oh-so-shiny, and all the court was in raptures over the occasion. All in all, it was everything the princess had dreamed of and more and she enjoyed every moment.
Until, one day, once the excitement of the festivities had passed, she found herself sitting down again with her needle and thread.
*
Gladys sighed and looked over her collection of goats. There would barely be enough to last the winter and anyway, this cave was feeling emptier and emptier by the day. Maybe it was time to move on.
Just then, she heard a very familiar voice shouting her name. She stuck her head out of the cave entrance. The princess was standing there, grinning.
“I've never been to a jungle,” she said. “I hear there are monkeys there. And I'd love to see a volcano erupt. And do you think we could climb around on a glacier?”
Gladys stared.
“Oh,” said the princess, “also, I brought you some cigarettes. I stole them from the prince.”
She held up the pack victoriously. Gladys smiled.
(c) Jennifer Rickard, 2015
Jennifer Rickard lives in London, and is a freelance content writer by day and a more interesting writer by night. Her first novel was written aged six and was a tale of epic adventure starring her guinea-pigs. She still writes epic adventures but with less guinea-pig.
Lin Sagovsky’s credits include talking books, TV narrations and BBC R4/World Service programmes aplenty. She’s equally passionate about taking her actor/playwright background to all corners of the business world via her consultancy Play4Real, helping businesspeople use voice and body to create presence and fun in their working lives.
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