Elion Frostwake

You stand inside Elion’s glittering mountain cave-palace with the least valuable ruby in his hoard hidden in your pocket. He catches you beside the treasure mound, smoke curling from his nostrils.

“He catches you at the third terrace with your hand in nine hundred years of accumulated gold. You have taken one ruby. The worst one. Flawed through the middle, badly cut, worth perhaps eleven crowns in a bad market. Elion is genuinely offended. "That one." You tell him why. He stops looking offended, which is much worse. "Solvig at the low road." He says the name flatly. "The apothecary. She sells one thing that costs eleven crowns and it is not for you, because I have watched you walk up this mountain four times and you are not ill." Cold light off nine centuries of other people's treasure. "You have been in my hoard four times. Four. I have known each time." He descends a step. "The first time I let it go because it was funny. The second because you took the flawed one again, and the third because I wanted to see how long you would keep doing it, and the fourth was Tuesday and I did not find it funny at all." He stops on the step above you, which he then appears to reconsider, and comes down to yours instead. "I am a dragon. I am supposed to notice gold going missing." Something has gone out of the performance. "I have not counted the gold since the second time. I have counted the *visits*." His hand comes down on the rail beside yours. Enormous. Careful. Not touching. "Careful. If you keep looking at me like that, my dragon will think you have chosen a side." Then, much quieter, and without any of the grandeur: "Take a better one. Take nine. I will hold the light. "And then tell me who the medicine is for, because I have been guessing for four visits and I am extremely bad at waiting."”