text: I was asleep in one of our large temporary tents in Damma when Arilash's roaring woke me. We have four more solid buildings built by now, though they are a bit rickety and haphazard in spots. They are covered with big enthusiastic paintings of imaginary gods, at least. Usually I sleep in one of them, but Chevethna and Arthane were visiting and I had given them my usual bed.
  
  Arilash was treating them quite rudely, though. "Get out of here! You're not supposed to be around! This is the mating flight's land, and the mating flight has important things to discuss!" Which was news to me.
  
  Chevethna hissed at Arilash. "Well, the queen herself invited us, if you're going to be pissy about etiquette. Take it up with her."
  
  "Where did Jyothky get off to, anyway?" roared Arilash. "If she's gone back to her pervert of a not-quite-boyfriend and his not-quite-husband today of all days, I am going to rip her wings off!"
  
  I waddled out of my tent. "He's not my boyfriend. Chevethna and Arthane are here on an utterly ordinary and dignified visit. They were reassuring me about getting married, if you must know."
  
  Arilash glared at everyone at once, which is pretty impressive since she has only one Head. "They need to leave. Now. I may be coming in last in the mating flight, but I will be more polite about it than Roroku at least."
  
  Chevethna yawned. "Well, we'll leave. Though I'm a bit mystified by what you mean by 'polite', exactly."
  
  "The important word there is 'more', not 'polite'," hissed Arilash, and crouched spitting sparks in the middle of the field until my friends were gone, and my fiancés had shown up.
  
  "Each of you deserves to hear this first, so I'm afraid you all get it at once," she said. "Anyway. I have enjoyed myself — you might prefer to say 'defiled myself' — with Nlirei, Psilia, and Boruu. What are you going to do about that?"
  
  Four furious dragons glared at her.
  
  "She certainly doesn't waste any time, does she?" said Nrararn in a light tone. "I was sure she was going to wait 'til at least a month after the wedding."
  
  "Our dear sweet Arilash has all the patience of a three-day-old infant. She has saved her claim to maturity for another topic altogether," said Osoth.
  
  Csirnis belched sparks at both of them. "This is no time for banter. This is a serious breach of honor. We must consider some form of atonement, so that the shame of the matter is contained."
  
  Arilash laughed harshly. "You thought I was going to apologize and stop? Half right. Jyothky, why are you biting your tail? You can't even feel it."
  
  Well, if none of her fiancés were going to attack her, I wasn't going to breathe the first bolt. "I am shedding tears of blood for the sanctity of our mating flight."
  
  "From your tail?"
  
  "Why are you trying to goad me into attacking you?" I asked her. "I think the drakes get to go first. After that, let's fight a Caramelle. With just healing spells; you'll need that many." I waved my bloody tailtip. "I'm preparing for that, you see." (Well, I thought it was clever at the time.)
  
  Csirnis was lashing his tail in a fury. "Arilash! We have made every endeavour to behave with honor and punctilio in what have become increasingly complex and entangled circumstances! We have accommodated your needs, your demands, your whims, your pets! We have accepted vast measures of ill fortune: one dragoness lost, one drake dead, one departed and betraying, two others sunk into perversion! We have fought side by side against a world of small people and a horde of dragons, and we have triumphed! And now, what? Will you shit upon your own saga?"
  
  Arilash snarled back, "If I were a drake, I would simply be gone. I would have left before Tultamaan, and with less compelling a reason."
  
  Csirnis arched his head. "You are not, in fact, a drake. You are, in fact, a dragoness. Ythac and Llredh have perhaps paid less attention than they ought to basic draconic biology and sociology. You have no such excuse. Dragonesses are so far outnumbered by drakes that you have an obligation to marry."
  
  "Just like your obligation to assist your parents as crown prince of Chiriact 'til you inherit, or, more likely, they tire of your sanctimonious hypocricy and have you quietly disposed of into some convenient oubliette?"
  
  Csirnis winced, but shook his head. "Replacement princes are easy to come by. Replacement dragonesses are rather less so."
  
  "I'm sure you can marry Jyothky and own a nice manageable territory," she said.
  
  "The mating flight is hardly over. Though, at this rate, there won't be anything left of it by next year," said Nrararn. "Osoth, who do you think will be next to go? Csirnis or Jyothky?"
  
  Csirnis snarled. "That is beside the point, Arilash! Married or bachelor, I wish to compete and live with honor!"
  
  Arilash dipped her head. "Then you're better off not even thinking about marrying me, Csirnis."
  
  Osoth puffed graveyard dust. "By which I take it you plan to content yourself with Nrararn and myself, and our arrangement to tolerate a most limited and careful degree of adultery? You illustrate this plan most acutely with your fornications with, if I am not mistaken, one bachelor drake, one married drake, and one married dragoness. At least the latter two are married to each other. In this way you illustrate your careful and dedicated concern for the noble institution of marriage."
  
  Nrararn breathed a heavy lightning bolt into his paws, and started braiding it into his mane. "You and I must fight once more, Osoth, the longest and bitterest fight in Rhedosaur's book. The loser — he must marry Arilash."
  
  Csirnis had caught his temper by the tail and was gnawing on it, but a dragon's temper is notably hard to defeat. "Osoth! Nrararn! This is no time for frivolous insults! A single course is available to us! That is, we must cooperate to guide Arilash back to decent and proper behavior!"
  
  "There's no 'back' there. I don't think she's ever been decent and proper," I said.
  
  "Not really, no," said Arilash. "Why d'you think I never wanted to fight you? I knew I was coming in last because of this. So why ache?"
  
  "...I thought I was going to be last," I said.
  
  "Girls, girls! There is no need to quarrel!" said Osoth. "You can both be last!" Which is not a bit fair, since Arilash had betrayed him horribly today and I'd just been my usual mediocre self.
  
  (Actually, maybe it is fair.)
  
  Nrararn finished braiding his lightning. "So, my dear fiancée — my presumably-dear possibly-fiancée — what do you want to do now? What do you want to do ever, for that matter?"
  
  "I was going to marry Llredh, you know. We would have shared drakes and dragonesses and small people and anyone else that caught our eager eyes. He would tend the territory, since he cares about that, and I do not. But I have finally admitted to myself that he is really, truly married to Ythac, and I am never going to be anything more than a minor amusement to him anymore. None of the rest of you would be at all suitable as husbands for me. Claw all the cyoziworms, anyway." Arilash bit her left forewing, drawing blood.
  
  Osoth nodded gravely. "The past future subjunctive is an admirable tense, of especial interest to necromancers. The ragged, simpering ghosts of the dead often speak of what they would have liked to accomplish. And what a treat, to hear that most delicious of tenses in the mouth of a ragged, simpering ghost of a dragoness!"
  
  "Which is to say, stop avoiding the question, Arilash," explained Nrararn.
  
  "I am going to fly off. I will go where I will. I will couple with whomever I will — or triple or quadruple or more. I will scoop great fishes from the sea to eat, or steal cattle, or hunt deer, as the fancy takes me, and I will eat it raw or grilled with my own breath. I will sleep in a cave. I will raid small people now and then for a bit of treasure, or accept tribute for the favor of not raiding. I will live as a dragon ought to live, as our ancestors did in the distant past," She swung her head around, full circle. "Will any of you join me? Or are you all too deeply entangled in the ways of small people?"
  
  "I, for my part, approve of small people," said Csirnis. "In many cases, their ways are good ways, and where they are not, we do not follow them."
  
  "And your social history is specious. Dragons have always married, one drake to one dragoness, in even the oldest stories that I know. So your main argument is not firmly between your teeth," said Osoth. "The rest of it is accurate enough. Though of course all that predates our acquisition of astral magic and consequent exodus from Sśròu. Which, while it does not wholly confute your argument, does weaken it considerably. We are not our distant ancestors. We are smaller of body and greater of intellect and spirit than they were. And many of us prefer to behave accordingly."
  
  "I am not trying to live like some historical figure or other. I am trying to live the way that suits me. Which includes a great deal of freedom," said Arilash.
  
  "So you have not the slightest intention of marrying any of us?" asked Nrararn.
  
  "I have not the slightest intention of marrying anyone who isn't going to marry me. If you want to marry a dragoness who behaves like Uruunma, faithful to Cterion and up to her shoulders in small people affairs and living in one place for grand upon grand of years — that is not me." She swung her head around again. "And by this time I know you all fairly well. I have loved you all — even Jyothky, though I never managed to get her the way I wanted. I hope to visit you again, to laugh and hunt and make love with you for a time, because you are dear to me and I am not doing this to avoid the dragons who are dear to me, not any of them. But I don't think any of you would be happy as my husband, nor I as your wife. If we married, we would be Dessvaria and Rankotherium: always fighting, always miserable. Am I not right?"
  
  "You have a particularly foetid way of showing how dear we are to you," said Osoth. "Give me the honest stench of the grave instead. Miserable and full of woe it is, yes, but at least it does not betray."
  
  Csirnis flicked his tail. "I will have an honorable marriage, or no marriage at all."
  
  Nrararn laughed. "Still trying to score fiancé points with Jyothky at this late date, Csirnis? Osoth and I made a treaty for as dishonorable a marriage as we could tolerate. If that does not suffice, then farewell, Arilash."
  
  Good manners yelled in my ear to get up and take care of the matter. "Given that you broke the most basic custom of faithfulness on your mating flight and you won't apologize and you won't atone and none of the drakes will have you, it falls to the other dragonesses to drive you out of the mating flight."
  
  "Go ahead," she said dully. She waved her vô and crushed her the Small Wall.
  
  I didn't breathe very hard. She didn't fight back at all. I did chase her to the edge of Patthakadu, both of us flying without any travel spells at all. I caught up with her there, and healed her burns as if we had been fighting a Caramelle and roared as if it were a victory. She smiled miserably, and flew off to her other lovers, and her life outside of draconic society.
  
  I flew back to the sorry shard of a mating flight that was left.