Dragon Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

this. What he might do next. Yet the cavern under his throat was warm, and she fell asleep after a while.
    The next day, he dove into the lagoon and was gone and she went back to the search, working her way steadily from one end of the cliff to the other, trying to find a way out. She went back through every crevice, tried to chimney up the sides, and crawled along the top of huge mounds of rubble. She found many openings back into the cliff, but always the space came to an end, the cliff pressed down on her, dark and cold.
    She crept back out to the sunlit lagoon again. The beauty of it struck her, as it always did, the water clear and blue, grading darker toward the middle of the lagoon and paler in the ring of the shore, the tiny ripples of the waves, the cream-colored sand. The sky was cloudless. The cliff vaulted up hundreds of feet high, sheer as a wall of glass.
    As she stood there, wondering what to do, the blue water began to churn, throwing off breaking waves, and the dragon’s great head thrust up through the center of it, a white fish between his long jaws.
    He saw her, and came to her, cast down the fish, and breathed on it with the harsh fire of his breath, and then, as usual, stood there watching her eat it. She was hungry and ate all the pale, flaky meat. Being close to him made her edgy. She had thought of a good story to tell him, with a long chase through a forest and the dragon’s escape at the end. She could not look at him, afraid of what she might see brimming in the great red eyes.
    He sat quietly throughout the story, as he always did. She had learned to feel the quality of his attention and she knew he was deeply involved in it. She brought it to an end, and stood.
    His head moved, fast as a serpent, and he caught her between his jaws. He laid her down on her back between his forepaws. She lay so stiff her fists were clenched, looking up at the wedge-shaped head above her, and then he began to lick her all over.
    His tongue was long and supple, silky smooth, longer than she was tall, so that sometimes he was licking her whole body all at once. She was afraid to move. He licked at her dress until it was bunched up under her armpits. His touch was soft, gentle, even tender, stroking over her breasts he paused an instant, his warm tongue over her, and against her will she gasped.
    He said, in his deep, harsh voice, “It’s only me, the Prince,” and chuckled. He slid his tongue down her side and curled it over her legs.
    She clutched her thighs together, but the tip of his tongue flicked between them, into the cleft of her body. She shut her eyes. She held her whole body tight, as if she could make an armor of her skin. Her strength was useless against him.
    But nothing more happened. He slept, eventually, his head over her. She dozed fitfully, starting up from nightmares, her body licked in green fire.
    In the morning he went off as usual and she searched desperately along the cliff face. At the waterfall she stood in the tumbling water, thinking of his tongue on her, wondering what else he would do.
    Through the streaming water she looked back into the crevice in the rock and saw a way to climb up.
    She stepped in behind the waterfall. The air was cool and damp, the rock wall of the hillside hung with long green weed. The gap where she stood closed up above her head, but just beyond, within reach it seemed of the very top, was a ledge, where a little twisted bramble sprouted.
    She slid her hands over the smooth, mossy rock, found a place to hold on with her hands, and got her foot wedged into a crack. She began to climb. The wet green weed was soft and her toes clutched at it and her soles skidded across it. She found a handhold deeper into the crevice and pulled herself higher. That led her back into the waterfall, which slammed down on her shoulders, her head. She reached up, grabbed the bramble, and drew herself up, and the bramble pulled out and she fell hard down into the