It was quiet and dark when next he awoke. He heard the woman breathing nearby. He flexed his fingers, wondering that he could still feel all ten. Under the blanket, he began to explore his body. His left wrist was bound and splinted, and radiated the familiar pain of a healing broken bone. Heavy scabs covered the right side of his from just below his shoulder all the way down to the knee. He wiggled his toes. Something was sticking out of the scabs, and after puzzling over it Paulus realized that the woman—or someone—had stitched the worst of his wounds, with what he could not tell. He was going to live. He knew the smell of infection and his nose could not find it. He had clean wounds. Bad wounds, but clean. They would heal. He would walk, and he would live. He saw details in the near-perfect darkness of the room: the last embers in the fire pit, the swell of the woman under her blankets. His fingers roamed over his body, feeling the pebbled scars where the dragon’s poison had burned him and the strangely smooth expanses that were without wounds. He flexed the muscles of his arms, and they hurt, but they worked. When he moved his legs, the deep tears in his right thigh cried out. Not healed yet, then. Putting that together with the way his wrist felt, Paulus guessed that it had been two weeks since the woman had found him in the mouth of the dragon’s cave.

  The teeth, he thought. And the tail.

  He must not fail the queen.

  “The dragon,” he said to the woman the next morning. She shushed him. “I have to—”

  Again she shushed him. Paulus sank back into the pile of furs and skins. He still had no strength. He watched her move around, taking in the details of her home. It was made of stone and wood, the spaces between the stones stuffed with moss and earth. One wall was a single slab of stone; a hillside, with three manmade walls completing the enclosure. Timbers slanted from the opposite wall to rest against the natural wall, covered with densely woven branches. Paulus couldn’t believe it could contain warmth, but it did. He threw his covers off, suddenly sweating in the fur cocoon. The woman did not react to Paulus’ nakedness. She opened a door he hadn’t noticed and the interior of the house lit up with sunlight reflected from deep drifts of snow. The snow must be waist-deep, Paulus thought. Perhaps the dragon’s cave was buried. Perhaps no one here wanted trophies from its carcass. Exhausted again, he did not resist when the woman settled covers back over him and went about her business. “Why did you save me?” Paulus asked her.

  She shushed him, and again he fell asleep.

  Gradually over the winter he learned more of her language, and she bits and pieces of his. From this he learned that she had hauled him to her home, put him on the pile of furs, and tended his wounds with skill that few surgeons in The Fells possessed. Or she was fortunate, and Paulus was strong. Perhaps he would have lived in any case, given shelter and food. He would never know.

  His horse was outside, kept in an overhung spot along the bluffs that also made up the fourth wall of the house. As soon as he was strong enough, he went out to see it and found that someone in this icy wilderness knew something about horses; it was brushed, its hooves were trimmed. If these people had mastered ironworking, Paulus thought, the horse would have new shoes. The hospitality was humbling. He thanked her and asked her to thank whoever had taken care of the horse. About the dragon, she appeared confused when he finally made her understand that he had traveled for two months just to get pieces of it to take home. “For my queen,” he said. Though she understood the words, the concept made no sense to her. Arguing with lightning, Paulus thought. Her name meant Joy in her language. She lived alone. Her mother and father were dead, and this was their house. In the good weather months, she fished and wove and tanned hides; in the winter, she kept to herself and wove cloth to sell the next summer. There was a village twenty minutes’ walk away. A man there wanted to marry her, but she would not have him. He was the one who had cared for the stallion.

  Paulus thanked her again. She shrugged. What else would she have done?

  Growing stronger, he went out into the snow dressed in clothes Joy made. He met a few of the villagers, who lost interest in him as soon as they confirmed that he had not made Joy his wife. The dragon, it seemed, had made little difference in their lives. It ate caribou and sea lions. There were plenty of both to go around. In The Fells, should he survive to return there, Paulus would be celebrated; here, he was a curiosity.

  On one of the first spring days, smells of the earth heavy in his nose, Paulus went out from Joy’s house with the butchering knife tucked in his belt. He found his way to the dragon’s cave and went inside. It lay more or less as he had left it. His broken sword blade, its edges now rusted, protruded from behind its left front leg. Marveling, Paulus paced off the length of its body. Fifty feet. It was mostly still frozen. He laid out the canvas sheet he’d used to protect his armor and set to work hacking into the carcass with the butchering knife. Four fangs for the queen, and the tip of the tail. Then he gouged out most of the rest of its teeth, leaving those that broke as he worked them free of the jawbone. In the pages he had copied from Mario Tremano’s book were recipes for alchemical uses of the dragon’s eyes, as well as a notation that its heart was said to confer the strength of giants. The eyes came out easily enough; the heart was another matter. Paulus went to work prying loose the scales on its breast until he could crack through its ribs. The heart, larger than his head, was pierced six inches deep by the blade of his sword. Sweating in the cold, he cut it out and put it with the eyes. Then he added several dozen of its scales, each the size of his spread hand.

  When he was done, he walked back to Joy, who was outside bartering a roll of cloth for the haunch of a moose killed by a villager who would have gladly given her the haunch, and anything else, if she would accept him. That night, Joy and Paulus ate moose near the fire. When they were done, she got up to put the bowls in water. He handed her his dagger, slick with grease, and she looked at it for a moment before slashing it across his right forearm.

  Paulus sprang away from her, hand instinctively dropping toward a sword hilt that wasn’t there. “Joy!” he shouted, squaring off against her, glancing around for something he could use as a weapon. He had no doubt that he could overpower her, even weak as he still was, but no man ever went unarmed against an opponent with a knife if there was even a stick nearby that could improve the odds.

  She pointed at his forearm. Unable to help himself, he looked. The skin was unmarked. Paulus looked back at her. She made no move to approach him; after a moment, she turned and dropped the knife into the pot of water with the bowls.

  It is said of the dragon’s blood that washing in it renders human flesh invulnerable to blade or arrow, the seneschal’s book had said. Paulus had read over those lines the way he had the rest of the more fanciful passages, skeptically and with no effort to keep them in mind. But it was true. He had felt the blade hit his arm. It should have opened him up to the bone.

  “Dragon,” Joy said, and began to wash the dishes.

  She knew, Paulus thought. She was showing him. Not just the transformation of his skin wetted with the dragon’s lifeblood; she was showing him that he had survived.

  “How,” he began, and stopped when he realized he had too many questions to ask, and no words to ask them, and that she had no words to answer. He watched her dry his dagger and set it aside on the table. Before she could pick up another dish, he caught her wrist and drew her toward him. Her expression changed and he thought she would pull away, but she let him draw her down into the furs. She kept her eyes locked on his. Paulus—who had once been a dog, and who had spoken to the dead, and who had winterlong danced on the line between life and death—knew that when she looked into his eyes, she was seeing a dead man she had once loved.

  For him, too, she was someone else. The spill of her hair across his chest was the queen’s hair, caught in sunlight. Her moving against his was the queen’s body, pledged to another. Her eyes shining in the last light of the fire were the queen’s eyes Paulus never dared to meet.

  “He died out on the ice,” she said when he asked, a few days later. “Hunting whales.”

  How long since he had had a woman? Nearly a year, Paulus thought. And he did not want to let this woman go. For her, perhaps longer. She said that her man who died hunting whales was her first, and only. The way she spoke of him made Paulus conscious that he had never felt that way about any woman but the queen, whom he could never have. The queen, with her dying husband and the seneschal Mario Tremano plotting against her. He had come to the ends of the earth, slain a dragon, to realize the futility of his desire. If he could not have her, he could at least save her. This, too, Joy had taught him. Paulus was stronger now. The time was coming when he would have to leave. The dragon’s heart and eyes were almost dried. He had carefully cleaned the bits of gum and blood from its teeth, for presentation to his queen. But he was not ready to leave yet. He started obliquely, and over the early weeks of spring more directly, gauging her reactions to the idea of coming south. He described the city, the Keep on the Ridge, the queen, his brother the fool. Subtlety never came easy to him and was impossible to maintain; on the first day in May, he told her that his errand was not yet complete. He must return to The Fells.

  “I would have you come with me,” he said. They were tangled in a blanket and in each other’s scents. Night was falling. She would never know what it had cost him to speak the words. Having Joy meant acquiescing to the caprice of Fate that kept him apart from the queen he would love. Having Joy meant being a curiosity at court, the guard captain who had once been a dog and now had a wife with callused hands from a distant land, who had never seen silk. But he was willing. He would take her if she said yes.

  “I would have you stay here,” Joy said. “But I know you will not. Go.”

  “In a little while,” Paulus said.

  Joy shook her head. “If you know that you are going, go,” she said. “Go to your queen. Go.”

  “You saved my life,” he said. Meaning that he felt an obligation to her, but also that he believed she too was obligated, that once she had held his life in her hands, she was no longer able to stand back from him and watch him go. Man logic, he thought. And she is lightning.

  “I am from this place,” Joy answered. “Someday when I am done mourning, I will take a man from the village, and there will be children in this house. I would take you if you would stay; but if you will not, go to your queen.”

  There was nothing to say to this. Paulus was not going to stay and Joy was not going to go. She had nursed him back to health, but she did not want him. She wanted a fisherman, a black-haired hunter of moose and caribou, a second chance at her man who had died on the ice. Not a soldier from a foreign land, entering his forty-seventh year, determined to finish a quest he had begun in honor of a woman he could never have. They both knew what it was to find solace for a little while and then reawaken into the desire for what they could never have, or never have again.

  The next morning, Paulus saddled the horse and packed into its saddlebags the teeth and tail of the dragon, the scales, the heart, and the eyes. His sword and shield were broken, his armor shredded, his spear taken to hunt seals, the great sword ruined by a winter under snow. He had a thousand miles to cover with a knife and the sling, and a good horse. Mikal would be glad to see it, but not at all glad to see Paulus.

  Perhaps the queen would be glad to see him. Perhaps.

  Joy came out from the house with jerky and a fish. “I caught it this morning before you woke up. Your first meal when you ride away from the ocean should always be a fish,” she said. Paulus thought he understood. He swung up onto the horse and did not look back as he rode south, up the hill track toward the mountains.

  AS WOMEN FIGHT

  SARA GENGE

  Merthe stands next to the felled doe and casts a worried look at the sky. He’s aching to train for Fight. Between hunting and setting traps, he hasn’t trained for a fortnight, but it’s too late and he’s too far from home. He hoists the doe on his shoulder and heads back. Snow crunches like starch under his boots, reminding him of when he was a young woman and knew a dozen names for snow, all stolen from the dessert section of a cookbook. Whipped cream, soufflé, eggnog with a crisp burnt crust . . .

  The doe is small and Ita will complain. She trusts Merthe only when she can see what he’s accomplished in a day’s work. She’ll want proof that he hasn’t been lazing around, or worse, training for Fight. As if he’s ever neglected to feed the family. As if he’d ever put his own future before theirs. He swears under his breath. Five years as a man is too much to bear and he vows he will not lose the Fight again even if it means training every waking hour that he isn’t hunting.

  When he gets home, the children run to him shouting. He lets them tug at his beard, tries to hug them all at once. He senses them drifting away. No matter that he can still feel them tugging at his breasts. He is either the figure of authority, or the gentle giant. The clown. They come to him to play, but if the wound is deep, it is their mother that they run to.

  “Did you hunt at all?” Ita asks.

  He nods but says no more. He’s been a man so long that this flesh has imprinted its own ways into his mind. Male silence comes easy these days; he revels in communication by grunts—or kisses. He knows how much it enrages her; he sometimes tries to be more verbal. But not now. Anything that’ll annoy her may throw her off her game. She’s won five years in a row. He needs all the help he can get.

  He winks at the children and nods towards the shed. They run off, bringing back the doe between the six of them, the toddlers contributing by getting in the way. Serga doesn’t go with them; shei is the eldest, almost ten. Merthe sometimes wonders if shei still remembers heir first mother, still remembers Merthe in Ita’s body. He fears shei doesn’t: shei was so young when Ita and he swapped places. And yet, Serga stares at him with understanding, a look of pity even. Merthe shivers.

  Ita hurries about and Merthe lets her serve him. In the warmth of the winter hut, the children quickly lose their wraps. Merthe’s clothes crack open like a husk, revealing thawing feet and a wide chest that has lost its summer tan. He looks upon Ita to do the same and, finally, she obliges. She’s gained some weight since she took over that body. Her arms are rich and soft but Merthe isn’t fooled: he knows first hand the damage they can inflict in combat. She bounces about, all hips and breasts, and the toddlers stare at her as if she were food, following her with eyes and mouths round as Os. Merthe lets his eyes roam her body, disguising one desire for the other. Ah, to be in those hips again. Yeah gods, to inhabit them! There’s bounce to her skin and the marks of pregnancy stretch proud across her tummy. Some of them, Merthe put there when he bore Serga and Ramir.

  She serves him and leans forward to whisper in his ear.

  “Like what you see? Enjoy. You’re not getting back in here any time soon.”

  He grabs her by the waist and tumbles her, eats her mouth, lets her feel the weight of his on hers. The strength. She gasps in surprise and the children laugh. They’re still androgens, and too young to read beneath the surface and into the hidden struggle between man and wife.

  She giggles with them, making Merthe’s ribs jiggle against hers. He lets her sit up—the children are awake—and nibbles her ear.

  “I’ll be in there in no time, darling,” he says. He doesn’t specify what exactly he means by that.

  The weeks before Fight come and go so fast that Merthe wonders if he’s growing old. Time always seems to speed up the further along you go. Three days before the match, Elgir walks up to the hut at dawn. He’s their closest neighbor but Merthe doesn’t know him that well. The People don’t gather too close. Hunters need their space and the gender arrangement makes for frequent domestic fighting. Nolikes to live close to noisy neighbors.

  Merthe crawls out to meet him without disturbing Ita. The two men step inside the shed, neither knowing what to say.

  Merthe offers Elgir a cup of tea.

  “You’d make a good woman,” Elgir says.

  Merthe grunts at the compliment. “Yes, I did make a good wife.”

  “Ah yes, I forgot. The first two are yours, aren’t they?”

  It takes Merthe a second to realize Elgir means the children. Merthe nods to hide his shame. It seems impossible that he can’t reclaim that body. And the whole village knows how much he wants it. He damns himself. It would not matter so much if he could appear not to care.

  “Don’t beat yourself up. She’s so good she’s scary,” Elgir says.

  Elgir himself has little to fear. He can easily defeat his partner, Samo. She’s a small woman and not too fast. She’s only been in a woman’s for a year and relied so much on muscle when she was a man that she never mastered technique. Looking at Elgir, Merthe understands how someone inhabiting that could grow complacent. The man could fell a tree with a backhand cuff.

  “How are things at home?” Merthe asks. It must be hard on Samo, knowing that she’s going to lose. Elgir made a stunning fighter as a woman. The litheness that is Samo’s bane was an advantage when Elgir was in control. Merthe remembers a particularly impressive kick roll in which a female Elgir was too fast for the eye. Merthe misses that lightness. Some days, he trudges around with the grace of a bear.

  “Samo doesn’t want to lose,” Elgir replies.

  “Who does?” says Merthe.

  Elgir’s eyes hold Merthe’s for a second. “Some do. Some like being men. Some don’t care either way,” Elgir says.

  Merthe blushes; nocan judge another person’s likes or dislikes, but some things are rarely said in public. Both men look down.

  “The moss is thick this winter,” Elgir says.

  “Yes. It’ll get cold fast.”