I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons

by Peter S. Beagle

Good manners inevitably decay under siege, especially when an aggressor wakes to the fact that the walls being breached are his own.

Krije, scourge of evildoers and—ah—doers even thinking about being evil… Krije, master of land and sea, and most of his neighbors—” Queen Hélène clutched a handful of his robe, but the beaming King was not to be diverted. “Krije, terror of the mighty, trampler of the triumphant, destroyer of the—well, of the really rather feeble, actually—”

Needs, however, may change, and when they do, beliefs have a way of being bent or reimagined.

There’s just something upsetting about getting what we want. I suggest knitting.

Your Reginald cannot be entirely direct with you, my dear, because he is a man, and men believe themselves to be all straight lines and right angles—an illusion you will find it important to allow them, though in fact they are as hopelessly snarled as a ball of yarn after a cat gets through playing with it.

where anything royal was concerned. It was one thing to want to work for them, if it got him where he wished to go. But this was perilously close to thinking of one of them as a person, just like himself or his friends or his family, and that would never do.

Oh, Mother, if you ever knew the truth. But Odelette would arrange not to know, no matter what he told her. It was a quality of hers that he was gradually coming to admire, and even envy.

but he was royal and therefore was assumed to know these things from birth. Gods, he thought, why was I born a prince? What bloody good has it ever done me?

Fear cannot breed where there is action.”

“I don’t want to be a hero. Heroes kill things. I want to be ordinary—never mind Vardis, never mind my mother. I just want to have an ordinary life.”

“My mother, sometimes she says that everybody in the world is a donkey with the heart of a lion. Everybody. Only most people don’t ever discover it—they don’t have to, they get along all right just being donkeys. But it’s there, always, if you really need it. If you really want to find it. If you look for it.

“It is not my fault that I am the son of a great king—it is not my fault that I look like a hero. But it is my fault that I am both a fool and a coward.

“Wonderful beasts, those, Krije. Fearless and murderous, and absolutely loyal, and not in the least handicapped by anything like intelligence. I’ve often thought the same of you.”