Page 62 of Dragon Cursed
"Her name is Margery."She gave the bonnet another fond pat."She’s a 1978Mini.She was my grandmother's.She has never failed to start.She has crossed this country twice and she has never once let me down.And you, my love, are about to fold yourself into her like a piece of laundry."
"The car has a name."
"Yes."
"You have given the car awoman'sname."
"Yes."
He stood in the pre-dawn at the back of Poppy’s cottage and looked at the small green object she had pulled out of the shed.
He tried to adjust the image he had carried around in his head for more than a hundred years with what he was seeing now.He remembered, vaguely, of a thing he had read about in a newspaper someone had brought into his forest and left behind.It was French.The Serpollet.It was steam powered and had a flash boiler mounted on the front.He hadn’t thought about such human contraptions again.The lair didn’t require thought about cars and dragons could fly.
The thing rolling out of the shed was nothing like the Serpollet.
It was the metallic green of a poison dart frog, and in his opinion, wasn’t much larger than the amphibian, its body approximately the size of a small wardrobe.A very small wardrobe.For a child.
It had four wheels, like the Serpollet — that part was correct — but the wheels were the size of dinner plates.
Margery.A ridiculous name for a death trap.He frowned.He was expected to fit inside.He didn’t see how, unless Poppy expected him to shrink.
He had commanded armies.He had ruled the sky for almost two thousand years.He had survived three centuries of slow poisoning by a curse meant to kill him a hundred times over.He wasn’t going to be defeated by a machine namedMargery.
Poppy patted it on what he understood to be the bonnet with the same proud affection she had patted the rump of his dragon-form last week.“Hop in, dragon man.She won’t bite.”
Alsander only just kept his lip from curling in revulsion."I still think we should fly."Deep inside, his dragon concurred most vehemently.
Poppy laughed.
He hadn’t, in all his long years, expected to be laughed at by a woman in a dead garden in front of a frog-colored vehicle named Margery.He found, with mild surprise, that he didn’t mind.
It took him three tries to get into the passenger seat.
The first attempt failed miserably.He bent at the waist to enter and his head met the top of the doorframe with the dignity of a man who hadn’t expected to be defeated by an inanimate object made of tin.
He drew back.Considered.
Tried again at a steeper angle.
This solved the head problem and created a knee problem.His knee met the dashboard at a velocity that would have rung a smaller man's bell.
The third attempt involved Poppy crouched beside the open door giving him quiet calm instructions like a woman walking a horse into a too-small stall.
At last he was seated.More or less.Chin tucked toward his sternum.Knees drawn up almost to his chest.Hands resting awkwardly on top of his knees because there was nowhere else for them to go.
Poppy got into the driver's seat with the ease of a woman who had been doing this since she was seventeen.
She got in in roughly half a second.
She turned to him.He stared straight ahead through the windshield.It was approximately six inches from his face.
"You're sulking."
"I am not sulking.I amfitting."
"You're sulking."
"Children sulk.I am ancient, Poppy.I don’t sulk."
