Alice woke warm.
That was the first thing wrong. She had woken cold every morning she could remember: in the training dormitory at Solenne, in tents on the king’s roads, in the narrow bed at the Sleeping Lance where the shutter never quite latched. Cold was how she knew the day had started. Cold was the bell.
This was not cold. This was a weight across her waist, heavier than it had any right to be, warm as a hearthstone. It rose. It fell. Someone was breathing slowly against the back of her neck.
She opened her eyes.
Gold. Not a little gold, the way a guild hall had gold, in a strongbox behind a nervous clerk. Gold the way a beach had sand. It rolled away from her in dunes toward the far wall of the cave, catching the grey light from an entrance a hundred metres off. A silver goblet stood upright on the nearest crest, as if the hoard had stopped mid-toast to stare at her.
Closer, the bed. It was the size of a modest courtyard, heaped with furs and quilts in colours nobody had dyed for three centuries. Alice knew its size. She had known it for months, the way she knew the number of steps from the cave mouth to the spot where she usually drew her sword. It had always been knowledge she had no business having.
Closer still, the hair.
A river of it had spilled across the pillow, red as forge coals. Some of it lay over her shoulder. Some of it had wound itself into her own braid, which had come mostly undone, so that red ran through the blonde like a banner stitched by someone with no plan at all.
Right, Alice thought. Stock.
Dame Hester had drilled it into her at nine years old. After any fall, before you move, count what you have. Alice counted.
Head: clear, which was unfortunate. Arms: both present. Legs: both present, though the left one was hostage to something smooth that had looped twice around her ankle. Armour: not on her. Clothing: not on her either. Sword: Brightoath, blade of the prophecy, forged for the slaying of the red storm, leaned against a chest of coins three metres away. Her linen undershirt hung from its hilt like washing.
Location: the bed of the dragon she had sworn to destroy, in front of King Aldous, the royal guard, a choir of schoolchildren and four thousand cheering citizens.
Memory: all of it.
Every single piece, in order, in detail. With the sounds.
Oh no.
She lay very still. The breathing at her neck caught, deepened, settled. The arm across her waist tightened by a fraction, as if its owner had dreamed of losing something. Then it went slack again.
Oh no, no, no.
A year and a day ago she had ridden into this cave in full plate with the prophecy in her mouth. One shall climb who does not break. She had climbed. She had not broken. She had struck the dragon across the flank with twenty years of training behind the blow.
Brightoath had bounced off the scales with the sound of a dinner bell. The recoil had sat her down in the gold, legs out, a child in a sandpit.
Above her, thirty-five metres of red dragon had shifted its weight on its hind legs. It had folded its great wings against its sides, the hooked claws at the wrists clicking on the stone. It had lowered its head until one emerald eye hung beside her, the size of a shield. The jaws had opened. Alice had braced for fire.
The dragon had yawned.
The yawn had blown her braid straight back. It had smelled faintly of smoke and cinnamon, which she still did not understand.
“Again,” Rakshaza had said, eye already half closed. “Louder this time. I almost noticed.”
Alice had struck that dragon three hundred and sixty-five more times since. Brightoath had never once left a mark.
Last night, apparently, she had tried another approach.
Get up. Get dressed. Get out.
She took hold of the wrist at her waist. It was a slender wrist, elegant, warm all the way through. She lifted it the way she would lift a sleeping cat off an important letter: slowly, with total commitment. The fingers curled once against her stomach.
Alice stopped breathing.
The fingers uncurled. She laid the arm down on the quilt between them, an exhibit she was choosing not to examine.
Then the tail.
It was a deep red at the root, darkening to crimson toward the tip, scaled so finely it felt like oiled silk. It had wound around her ankle with the confidence of ivy on a wall. She pinched the very end of it between two fingers. She began to unwind.
The tail tightened.
Alice froze with one leg in the air, holding the tip of a dragon’s tail like a stolen ribbon.
Behind her came a sleepy sound. Not a word. A small, displeased hum, the noise of someone whose blanket had been tugged.
The tail gave one lazy flick. It slid off her ankle to curl back under the quilt where it belonged.
Thank you, Alice thought, then hated herself for thinking it.
She rolled off the edge of the bed.
The edge of the bed was not where she expected it to be. Her foot met a slope of coins instead of a floor. The slope moved. A small metallic avalanche hissed away from her down the dune, collecting cups, a candlestick, a crown missing three of its points. It fetched up against an old pottery wheel with a soft, musical clatter.
Alice crouched in the gold, naked, utterly still, while the echo ran laps around a cave the size of a city square.
Nothing moved on the bed.
Fine. Good. Faster.
She hunted.
Undershirt: off the sword hilt, over her head, inside out, no time to care. Breeches: draped over the neck of a lute that had two strings left, a third curled up beside it like a dead fern. Gambeson: under the bed, which was a sentence she would carry to her grave. Boots: side by side at the foot of the bed, neatly paired, toes aligned. She had not left them like that. She refused to think about who had.
The armour was worse. The armour was everywhere.
Her breastplate lay upside down on a hillock of silver, full of coins like a fruit bowl. One pauldron had landed on a heap of lopsided clay bowls, none of which could have held soup. The greaves had gone in opposite directions, as if they had quarrelled. Her helmet sat on the head of a marble statue of some forgotten king, who wore it with more dignity than she had worn anything last night.
She gathered it all, piece by piece, holding each plate against her chest so it wouldn’t ring.
Full plate took twenty minutes with a squire. Alone, Alice could do it in fifteen. She had done it every morning for a year, by lantern light, in her room at the Sleeping Lance, while Marta banged pans downstairs. Greaves. Cuisses. Breastplate. Pauldrons. Vambraces. Right gauntlet. She was quick. She was silent. She was very nearly proud of herself.
Then she reached for the backplate straps.
There were three. They sat in the middle of her back, between the shoulder blades, exactly where a human arm stopped being useful. At the inn she fastened them by hooking each strap over the bedpost, leaning, twisting, buckling half-blind. There was no bedpost here. There was a bed the size of a courtyard, with a dragon in it.
She got the bottom strap. She got the middle one on the second try, wrenching her shoulder, swearing under her breath in words Hester had spent twenty years pretending not to hear.
The top strap swung free. It slapped gently against her shoulder blade.
Slap.
Slap.
“Come on,” Alice hissed at it. “Come on, you miserable little...”
* * *
Rakshaza had been awake since the avalanche.
She lay with her eyes closed. She kept her breathing slow, the way she did when bandits camped in the valley and she wanted the sound to carry. Through her lashes she watched the most dangerous human in Aurelmark try to buckle herself into her own backplate like a cat chasing its tail.
She is leaving, Rakshaza noted.
Good.
Excellent, in fact. Very sensible. A sensible hero leaving a borrowed bed at a sensible hour. I would have asked her to go anyway. I was about to. Any moment now.
The strap slapped. Alice swore again, a word Rakshaza had last heard from a sailor in a harbour city that had since fallen into the sea.
Rakshaza had lived for more than three thousand years. She had watched kingdoms stand up and fall over. She had watched mountains shrug, rivers move house, empires argue about borders that no longer existed. She had tried weaving. She had tried pottery, painting, the lute, the keeping of very small trees. Every one of them had gone flat in the end, like wine left open on a table.
Last night had not gone flat.
Last night Alice had laughed against her mouth, once, startled, as if she hadn’t known she was allowed to. Alice had said wait before not waiting at all. Alice had fallen asleep with one hand fisted in Rakshaza’s hair, holding on hard. Nobody had ever held on to Rakshaza. Nobody had ever been able to.
Irrelevant, she told herself. Entirely beside the point.
Something under her ribs disagreed. It had been disagreeing since dawn.
She stretched. She did it slowly, with care, because a stretch was a statement. Her arms went over her head until her knuckles brushed the carved headboard. Her tail slid out from under the quilt to curl along the furs. She let the sheet do whatever it liked.
“Hero,” she said. “You’re clanking.”
Alice spun. The loose strap swung round with her.
For a moment neither of them spoke. Alice stood in the gold in nearly all her armour, pink to the tips of her ears, her hair a ruin. Rakshaza lay in the bed wearing a sheet, loosely, along with a great deal of confidence.
“Go back to sleep,” Alice said.
“In my own bed? How generous of you.”
“I’m not being... I’m only...” Alice drew a breath through her nose. When she spoke again it was in the voice she used for royal heralds. “This never happened.”
Rakshaza considered the ceiling for a while.
“Agreed,” she said.
Alice blinked. “Agreed?”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I sound efficient.”
“You sound,” Rakshaza said, “like a woman who expected me to beg.”
“I did not expect...” Alice’s jaw worked. “Nobody is begging. Nobody has to beg. We are two grown adults who made a tactical error.”
“A tactical error.” Rakshaza tasted the phrase. “I have been called a great many things, Hero. Plague. Calamity. The Red Ruin of somewhere or other. Never a tactical error.”
“Well. Now you have been.”
“Three times,” Rakshaza murmured. “If we’re counting the errors.”
Alice’s ears went from pink to scarlet. Rakshaza watched it happen with enormous interest. It was the most satisfying sight she had seen in a century, apart from last night, which didn’t count, because it hadn’t happened.
“We are not counting,” said Alice.
“Of course not.”
“Because it didn’t happen.”
“Because it didn’t happen,” Rakshaza agreed.
She sat up. Her hair slid over her shoulders in a long red fall. Alice’s eyes followed it all the way down before she dragged them to a safe spot on the far wall, somewhere near an abandoned loom.
“Besides,” Rakshaza went on, “you aren’t the only one here with a reputation.”
Alice’s eyes came back, sharp. “Your reputation?”
“I am the terror of the Redcrown. Shepherds use my name to frighten their children into bed. Do you know what becomes of a terror if word gets out that she was found...” she searched for a phrase that wasn’t fatal “...wrapped around a hero like a cat round a warm stove?”
“You weren’t wrapped.”
“I was arranged.”
“You had your tail round my ankle.”
“I was asleep. Nothing a person does asleep counts.”
“You weren’t asleep the whole time,” Alice said.
It was out before she could stop it. Rakshaza saw the exact moment Alice heard herself. The hero’s mouth closed. Her right hand, the one with the gauntlet on it, clenched on nothing at all.
Silence came down over the hoard.
In it, the same memory went through both of them. Rakshaza could see it go through Alice: the colour climbing her throat, the way her weight shifted in the gold. Rakshaza found that she, too, needed to look at the loom for a while.
Her ears were hot. The tips of them, specifically. She knew this because her ears had not been hot in three thousand years. The sensation was alarming.
“Did I...” The words came out lower than she meant. She stopped. Started again. “Are you hurt?”
Alice looked at her.
“I’m heavy,” Rakshaza said, to the loom. “Even like this. I forget what is breakable. I have never had to remember.”
“You’ve never hurt me.” Alice said it quietly, the way people say things they have checked many times. “Not once. Not in a whole year.”
It sat in the cave between them.
Rakshaza had nothing clever ready for it. Three thousand years of conversation, of insult, flattery, threat. Nothing in any of it fit this. She looked at the hero in her half-buckled armour. The hero looked back. For a moment Alice’s face was open, unguarded, nothing like the face she rode up the mountain wearing every morning. It looked tired. It looked like it wanted to sit down somewhere and stay.
Rakshaza very nearly said something true.
“Naturally,” she said instead. “Breaking you would ruin my mornings. Do you know how hard it is to find decent entertainment on a mountain?”
Alice’s face shut like a gate.
“Entertainment.”
“Daily. Reliable. Arrives with its own horse.”
“I’m leaving.”
“So you mentioned.”
“I didn’t mention. I’m mentioning now.” Alice turned toward the cave mouth. Then she stopped dead, staring down the long tunnel at the light. “What time is it?”
“Morning. Quite late morning.” Rakshaza lay back on the pillows. “You snore, by the way.”
“I do not snore.”
“Like a small, determined bear.”
“I have never...” Alice wasn’t listening to herself. She was looking at the daylight with the expression of someone watching her house burn down. “I’ve never stayed the night. Not once in a year. I always ride back before dark. They’ll think...”
“That I ate you,” Rakshaza offered.
“That you ate me.” Alice put her gauntleted hand over her face. “There’ll be bells. Marta will have sent riders. Pip will have written a song.”
“Pip has already written a song.”
“A new song!”
She went. She went at a pace that was not quite a run, because heroes did not run from caves, across the gold in a clattering spray of coins. The loose strap flapped behind her like a flag of surrender.
“Hero,” Rakshaza called.
Alice halted at the mouth of the tunnel. She turned, every line of her braced for something awful.
Rakshaza tipped her head toward the chest of coins. Brightoath still leaned against it, gleaming faintly, the blade of the prophecy, forged in the old fires of Solenne for the slaying of the red storm.
“Forgetting something?”
There was a long pause.
Alice walked back across the hoard. She walked slowly, with immense dignity, the strap slapping her shoulder blade at every step. She picked up the sword. She slid it into its scabbard.
“I was coming back for it,” she said.
“Of course you were.”
Alice left again. Rakshaza listened to the clank of her going down the long passage, the slap of that strap growing fainter, until even dragon hearing could not find it.
Then the cave was quiet. It was always quiet. It had been quiet for most of three thousand years.
She turned over in the enormous bed. The pillow on the other side still held the dent of a head, still smelled of road dust, leather oil and something warmer underneath. Rakshaza did not bury her face in it. She was a terror of the age. She merely happened to be lying very close to it, for a while, for no reason.
Her hand found something cold under the quilt.
She drew it out. A steel gauntlet, white enamel over the knuckles, blue cloth lining. A left one. The fingers were still curved a little, shaped to the hand that had worn it.
Rakshaza looked at it for a long moment.
Then she smiled, slowly, with every one of her teeth.
* * *
Turnip had spent the night in the hollow below the cave ledge, where the path ran out among boulders and a cold stream. He did not look worried. He looked like a horse who had eaten most of a meadow and was considering the rest.
He lifted his great grey head as Alice came scrambling down the last of the scree. He looked at her hair. He looked at the strap.
“Not a word,” Alice told him.
Turnip blew out through his nose, long and wet.
“I said not a word.”
Mounting a warhorse in plate armour was a skill. Mounting a warhorse in plate armour with one shoulder wrenched, a loose backplate and no left gauntlet was a different skill, one she had not trained for. It took three tries. On the second, the backplate shifted far enough to pinch her somewhere unmentionable. On the third she made it, mostly by sheer will, landing in the saddle with a crunch that made Turnip turn his head to check on her.
“Don’t look at me like that. Walk on.”
He walked on. Alice sat very straight, staring down the long green shoulder of the Redcrown toward the valley. Somewhere down there, two hours away, Brackenford was waking up to a hero who hadn’t come home. She tried to compose a sentence that would explain this. There was a battle. True, in its way. It went long. Also true.
I lost my glove.
She looked down at her bare left hand on the reins. She closed her eyes.
Turnip stopped.
His ears had swung forward. His head came up, toward the peak behind them, with an expression of mild, pleased interest. It was the look he gave Marta when she came out with apples.
Alice knew that look. She had been seeing it every morning for months. She had chosen not to think about it.
The wind arrived first.
It came down off the mountain in a single shove, flattening the grass to silver, ripping the surface off the stream in a sheet of spray. Pebbles skittered past Turnip’s hooves. Alice’s loose hair whipped across her eyes. The light went out as something vast slid between her and the sun.
Rakshaza came down the slope of the sky in a long, lazy curve. Her wings were wide enough to shadow the whole hollow, the membranes glowing red where the morning lit them from behind, the hooked claws at the wrists bright as sickles. Her hind legs hung beneath her, talons half closed. The air she pushed down ahead of her hit like surf. Any other horse in Aurelmark would have bolted for the next kingdom.
Turnip lifted his tail, as if in greeting.
Something glinted. It dropped from one hind talon, turning over in the air.
It struck the rock beside Turnip’s shoulder with a loud, bright clang. It bounced once. It lay still in the grass, white enamel, blue lining, fingers slightly curled.
“You’ll want both hands tomorrow, Hero.” The dragon’s voice rolled down the hollow like a rockslide with good diction. “For all that slaying.”
Alice stared up at thirty-five metres of smug red dragon.
“This never happened!”
Rakshaza banked. One emerald eye found her, glittering.
“Then whose glove is that?”
She beat her wings once, twice, each stroke a thunderclap. She climbed toward the peak. Halfway up she opened her jaws to the whole valley. She roared the morning roar, the one Brackenford heard every day, the one that rattled shutters in three villages, the one mothers used to hurry children indoors.
Alice had heard it from the town for a year. It had always sounded like the end of the world.
Up close, this morning, it sounded like somebody showing off.
Turnip whickered after her, soft and fond.
“Traitor,” said Alice.
She leaned down from the saddle, her backplate creaking alarmingly, to snatch the gauntlet out of the grass. She jammed it on. She flexed her fingers. She sat up again, very straight, every bit the chosen hero of Aurelmark.
Then she rode down the Redcrown with her dignity intact.
Most of it.
The parts she could reach.