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their time than bicker and snort and stare at my slippers!
    The gold paused again. “You truly have no idea what makes those shoes any different?”
    “If I had,” I answered, letting my confusion and frustration show through, “I wouldn’t keep asking every dragon I’ve ever met about them.” I folded my arms, taking the same stance my mother had always used when she was in a huff with one of us.
    “How many dragons have you met?” The dragon sounded almost amused.
    “Three so far, and that’s more than most humans can claim,” I retorted.
    “True,” he said. He sounded melancholy. “Things were different once, you know.”
    “Were they?” I edged along the wall, trying to look for a way out as stealthily as I could. I hoped that he was not going to reminisce about the olden days, when dragons carried off young girls all the time, or so the town storyteller had led me to believe.
    “Yes, four hundred years ago it was not unusual for a human and a dragon to be friends.”
    That stopped me. Friends? None of the stories I had heard ever mentioned dragons being friends with a human. They were always eating them or kidnapping them or burning them to ash.
    “I-I didn’t know that,” I stammered finally. “But what has that got to do with my slippers?”
    “You were given those slippers because Theoradus, whatever else he might be, is a creature of honour,” the gold dragon said with a snap of his jaws. “He promised you any shoes you wanted.”
    I had a very strong feeling that there was much more going on here than he was telling me. But I was not foolish enough to pester a dragon, no matter how badly I wanted my questions answered.
    The dragon drew his head back and looked off into the dimness at the far end of the cave, which was not large. He hummed a little to himself and it made my back teeth vibrate in a not altogether unpleasant way. I dared to ask a question, carefully avoiding the topic of footwear.
    “So, did you have many human friends?” I was hoping that he would say “Yes”, which would indicate that he didn’t always eat the humans he encountered.
    “I had one,” he replied shortly.
    “Oh,” I said, cursing myself. He probably
had
eaten them.
    “Since you have shared your story, allow me to share mine,” he said finally, with a sigh that blew my skirts against my legs. “I am called Shardas, and I have lived in this hill within this forest for some seven hundred years.”
    “Pardon me?” I interrupted as politely as I could. “May I ask two questions?”
    “Of course.” He nodded genially.
    “First: May I sit down?”
    “Oh, certainly! Forgive my lack of manners. It has been some centuries since I have hosted a human.”
    I seated myself gingerly on an outcropping of rock, which proved to be surprisingly comfortable. Although my feet were not sore despite all the walking I had done in the past week, they felt sort of itchy, and it was bothering me. I wiggled my toes, but the itching did not subside.
    “And your second question?” Shardas prompted.
    “Oh, yes. If you’re over seven hundred years old, and Theoradus said that he was six hundred and something, what does that make you?”
    “What does that make me what?”
    “Are you an old dragon, or a young one? You seem very … spry. But the oldest human I’ve ever heard of was Gammer Tate, and he was only eighty-four when he died.”
    “Ah. Let us say that we are comfortably in our middle years, Theoradus and I, though I am a full century older.”
    “Goodness.”
    “Yes. The oldest dragon I have ever heard of was Minchin One-Eyed, and she lived to near three thousand years.” His scales rippled in a strange motion that I recognised as a shudder. “But if I have to linger on in that state – toothless, blind in my only remaining eye, and with my scales coming off in patches – I want to be harpooned through the ear instead.”
    “Er,” was the only response I could think of. Though, remembering what Gammer