This is not a real dragon.

But the men who come in the long trains creaking through deep drifts don’t seem to know that. They come with their armor and their axes, their spears and their shields. Some–the ones who think they’re clever–come with firearms, ignoring the old wisdom that only forged metal will slay a dragon.

Their trains toil along switchbacked tracks up through the piney mountainsides, through the shanty mining towns, through the depths of winter. With monotonous regularity, the tracks are swamped by man-deep drifts, and with monotonous regularity the men disembark, forming black ant-chains when viewed from the high fastness of a mountaintop.

The chains are antlike also in their busyness. The princess tells me she watches from her eyrie and imagines the individual particles that comprise them wielding shovels and brooms, struggling to clear the tracks so their black belching beasts can wend higher through her white and green mountainsides. She doesn’t say it just like that, of course; the princess is not given to what she calls high talk. That is my purview. She could focus in and see–for a dragon is longsighted–but she prefers to keep them distant and anonymous.

At least until they come to kill her.

#

She tells me she could fall upon them from a great height, like the eagle in the Tennyson poem. She could push snow down on them, thundering avalanches, or she could tear up the fragile tracks that guide the trains’ toilsome journeys. But that is not the way the legend unfolds, and there’s always the chance that if she lets the story happen, it will work out the way it’s supposed to–with a happily ever after.

I think, deep down, she hopes so.

#

The princess could go about in white robes, in cloaks lined in ermine–”Weasel-fur,” she says mockingly, whenever I pull them from the trunks–in boots of softest leather stitched with milk-white pearls. She possesses all these things, gorgeous raiments and jewels left in tribute for the dragon.

She has no use for them. She wears the down and sheepskin coats of the men she’s murdered, their worn trousers held up by suspenders, their too-big gloves cinched about her reed-fine wrists with big elastic bands. She clambers down the mountainside, her ice-colored hair all braided up under the dead men’s flannel caps, and watches the long trains pass like some other kind of dragon–fire and steel and coal and steam and black soot staining white snow, and the white snow covering it over again. If the men in the trains see her, they imagine she’s nothing more than one of them, a coal miner playing hooky on the dragon’s dangerous mountainside.

She waves and they wave back, and when they have gone she breaks the branches of winterlocked plums and cherries. She carries them inside and sets vast armfuls in water. The vases fill the great bay windows near our fire.

In the fullness of time, in a week or two, they blossom, great white showers of petals sometimes tinged with pink. They never take root. They only linger a few days and die.

I wonder if these are the last plum blossoms in the world. But I never quite get around to asking her.

#

I remember when first I saw her. She was just a glimpse through the frozen body of the dragon, fractured into a thousand repeating bits of image the same way the beads and glitter inside a kaleidoscope get patterned by the mirrors. The dragon reared up, transparent wings buffeting me with frozen gusts at each pendulum stroke, and it turned its head from side to side, swinging each ice-prism eye by me in turn and dazzling me with beams of shattered light.

No one ever returned from the dragon’s mountaintop alive. I covered my eyes with my hands and waited to die.

But in the moment before I cowered away, I could see the blood under the ice. If you knew how to look you could see it too, the pale flush at the center of each scale.

Something like those petals.

#

I tell her she’s freezing the world. Inside the dragon, she shrugs and rolls over, showing her long, jewel-armored white belly.

#

The dragon isn’t real, but her jewels are. And so is her stolen princess.

#

I’m different from all the others. I didn’t come on the train. I didn’t come to kill her.

I came so she would eat me.

But even unreal dragons never do what you wish they would do, what you need them to do. If they did, they wouldn’t be dragons. So of course she let me live, took me in, amputated my frostbitten toes when they went gangrenous.

I had trudged a long way through the snow in cheap boots to find her. When I did, she wasn’t what I had been expecting at all. Women who’ll amputate your rotten toes–gagging, puking into a bucket, doing it anyway–don’t just grow on trees.

I guess I was expecting a dragon.

#

I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I don’t know how wide her winter has grown. If it’s grown at all.

Sparrows haunt the rafters of her great cold hall, taking shelter from her winter. They could be the only sparrows left in the world. I don’t know. They perch on the dragon’s spines and its long, curved talons when she is not wearing it like armor.

She puts out seeds for them in crystal bowls, and water near enough our roaring coal fire that she only has to break the ice in the morning. She climbs up on a tall ladder and winds pine boughs through the rafters so the sparrows have a warm place to sleep. I tell her she could put on the dragon for that, and she just looks at me and shakes her head.

I guess I wouldn’t understand.

#

“D’you love me?” the princess asks, her spines rattling like icicles along her nape as they flare and fall.

And I lie and say, “No,” because she terrifies me. When she has the dragon skin on, too. But otherwise, also.

She’s full of winter, and the winter is crawling over the world.

#

“Womenfolk are the real heroes,” the princess says shyly. “If you’d ever picked up an honest storybook you’d see, but all you read is that fancy poetry. I’ve got all these books, twenty different Beauty and the Beasts at least, all those others, you never look.”

I close my eyes and listen to the chime of her voice, ringing down crystal passages as if from a long way away.

“It’s the girls,” she says. “Always the girls who have to grab onto something that wants to be loved and isn’t strong enough to let it happen. It’s the girls who come with their hammers and chisels to cut the ice, with their pretty lips to kiss the beast. It’s girls who tame unicorns, when unicorns have horns to kill anything that touches them. Girls step up. They save the world. They kiss the Beast.”

She cranes her head back and looks up at the sky, showing the diamond-bright throat of the dragon. “When men come for the beast, men just want to stick their sharp knives into him.”

I don’t argue. She’s always right. She’s a dragon.

#

“They don’t come for me,” the princess says. “They come to fight the dragon.”

I hold my hands out to the blossoms that fill her icy windows as if to the fire, as if they could warm me. All I feel is the chill of the winter beyond the diamond-shaped panes. I draw my borrowed ermine cloak, a little too small, around my shoulders. I can’t look at her and talk at the same time, so I stare at the snow-bent pines beyond the window. I can still see her reflection between the frost that rims each flake of glass. The panes aren’t set even in their frames, so they turn her into scraps and shatterlings of patterned images.

“So send the dragon away,” I say.

The princess smiles–a gentle sorrowful smile, one that grieves my ignorance but does not mock it. She draws her wings close about her, furling them like a cloak of frost feathers.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she says, and for a moment I almost think she’s going to lay her talons on my shoulder. “But then they wouldn’t come at all.”

Sparrows rustle in the rafters. There’s so much winter outside the window. One of the plum branches sheds a petal, and as it falls I make a wish on it.

I wish for the strength to kiss the beast.