A lair, Rakshaza decided, needed bones.
She stood at the cave mouth in human form an hour before dawn, considering the problem with her hands on her hips. She had not had a guest in three thousand years. She had had intruders, petitioners, a poet, one very lost goatherd. None of them had needed impressing.
Today five people were coming up her mountain to look at her. Nobody would get inside. That was the first law of a reputation: the inside stayed a mystery. Still, they would see the mouth of the cave, the ledge, the dark beyond. The dark had to say monster. At the moment it said somebody lives here who once tried pottery.
She fetched the goat skulls from the midden behind the rocks. There were a great many. She had been eating goats for a long time, all of them paid for, though nobody needed to know that part. She set eleven skulls along the edge of the ledge in a row. She stepped back. She moved the fourth one a hand’s width to the left.
Better.
She dragged the half-woven tapestry across the tunnel behind them, so that nobody squinting into the cave would see a loom, a pottery wheel, or a bed the size of a courtyard. She turned every one of the sunset paintings to face the wall. She considered the shoes from the inn, still lying among the bowls with an air of grievance. She left them. Nobody was going to get far enough to see shoes.
Then she stood on the ledge in the grey light, looking at her row of skulls, while something uncomfortable sat in her chest.
It was very simple. Rakshaza was going to lose today.
Not really, of course. Nothing could make her lose. But she had worked it out in the night, lying awake in the enormous bed with her tail over her own feet. A dragon who frightened the guild’s best could keep her peace for another hundred years. A hero who drove that dragon back, in front of witnesses, could keep her post. Both of those were needed. Only one of them could be seen to win.
She had never retreated from anything. Not from an army. Not from the sea.
It’s a performance, she told herself. You did one yesterday. You were very good.
She shifted on the ledge. The skulls rattled. She opened her wings, threw herself off the mountain, then climbed into the dark on the cold air, up towards where the sun would rise.
* * *
“Formation,” said Gideon, “is everything.”
He had drawn it in the dust of the road with the tip of his sword while the horses drank. Bram in front, with the shield. Wren on high ground with the bow. Odo behind Bram. Gideon himself at the centre, where the light would catch him. Alice somewhere near the centre too, though he had drawn her slightly smaller.
“Odo has a binding,” Gideon said. “Tell her, Odo.”
Odo patted a scroll in his belt. It was older than the others, brown at the edges, with a ribbon gone to string. “The Binding of the Iron Hold. Very old. It holds anything in place. Anything.” He swallowed. “I’ve read most of it.”
“Most,” said Alice.
“The handwriting’s very bad at the end.”
“So,” said Gideon happily. “Bram draws it. Wren harries it. Odo binds it. I strike the killing blow.” He looked at Alice, then at the drawing, then generously added a small sword to her figure. “You too, of course.”
Alice looked up at the Redcrown, its peak in a white cloud. She had lain awake half the night at the Lance trying to guess what was waiting up there. She had come up with nothing. She only knew the smile.
Little Fen was sitting on a rock with the mule’s rope round her wrist, retying her left boot for the third time.
Alice crouched beside her. “New?”
“Bought them for this. Sir Gideon said a dragon hunt was an occasion.” The girl’s fingers fumbled the knot. “Is it true it keeps boots?”
“Only the good ones.” Alice took the laces gently out of her hands. “Double knot. Like this. Then tuck the ends in, so nothing can catch them.” She did the other boot too. “You’ll stay with the horses in the hollow. Whatever you hear.”
“Sir Gideon said everyone should...”
“I’m saying the horses need you.” Alice stood. “Turnip especially. He’s very nervous.”
Turnip, who was eating a fence post, did not look up.
* * *
The ledge was empty when they came into the hollow.
No red shape on the rock. No eye opening in the cliff. Only the path climbing up through the boulders, the cave mouth dark at the top of it. Along the lip of the ledge, small and white against the stone, stood something in a neat row.
Wren shaded her eyes. “Are those skulls?”
“Goats,” said Alice.
“Lined up?”
Alice did not trust herself to answer.
“It’s afraid,” said Gideon. He swung down from his horse, glowing. “It saw us coming. Five against one. It’s hiding in the dark, you see. Up we go!”
“I lead,” said Alice. “It’s my mountain.”
“Our mountain,” said Gideon warmly. He let her lead.
They climbed in formation. It held for almost twenty metres. Then Bram“s shield caught on a rock. Odo walked into Bram. Wren climbed a boulder for the high ground, then could not get down. Little Fen stood below in the hollow with six horses, looking up. Turnip had walked straight to the foot of the cliff. He stood there with his ears forward, the way he did every morning, like a horse waiting for the curtain.
They reached the ledge. Eleven goat skulls watched them from the edge. The cave mouth breathed out cool air that smelled faintly of smoke. Behind it, a curtain of old tapestry hung across the dark. Somebody had woven half a sheep into it.
”It decorates,’ said Odo faintly.
”Bram,’ said Gideon. ”Shield up. Wren, cover the...’
The sun went out.
Alice had seen Rakshaza fall out of the sky before. Once, while falling herself, with a pine tree forty metres away. She had never seen it from the ground.
The shadow came first, the whole ledge going dark at once. A sound came after it, like a sail the size of a town snapping full. The dragon came down out of the sun with her wings half folded, a red blade thrown at the mountain. She opened them at the last moment. The wind hit the ledge like a wall. Alice was ready for it. She dropped to one knee with her hand on the rock. The others were not ready. Bram went flat on his back under his own shield. Wren sat down hard. Odo rolled until he hit a goat skull. Gideon“s golden cloak tore off his shoulders and sailed away over the hollow like a lost kite.
Rakshaza landed on the ledge between them and the cave.
The mountain felt it. Gravel ran off the edge in little rivers. Thirty-five metres of dragon reared up on her hind legs, wings spread from rock to sky, every red scale burning. She held it long enough to be remembered. Then she came down onto her folded wings with a crack, the claws at her wrists biting the rock, to lower her head until her jaws were level with Gideon’s face. Her eyes were the green of very deep water.
“Guests,” she said.
Then she breathed in. The whole ledge felt it, a pull in the air like a held breath. She raised her head. She let the fire go straight up into the morning.
It went up in a column so bright the shadows on the rock turned blue. The heat came down after it like a hand pressing on their heads. When it stopped, the cloud on the peak had a hole burned through the middle of it.
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Wren got an arrow on the string. To her great credit, her hands hardly shook. She drew. She loosed. The arrow struck the dragon on the throat with a small, sad tick. It fell on the rock.
She loosed a second. Rakshaza turned her head without hurry. She caught the arrow in her front teeth. She bit it in half. Then she spat the head out, delicately, so it landed between Wren’s boots.
Wren lowered the bow. “Right,” she said, to nobody. “Right.”
Bram climbed to his feet. He planted the great shield in front of Gideon like a door. Rakshaza looked at it with mild interest. The tail came round low over the rock, almost lazily. It touched the shield.
The shield left. It went off the ledge spinning like a plate. Far below, it landed in the stream beside Turnip with a splash. Turnip moved one step to the left. He went on watching.
“ODO!” roared Gideon. “NOW!”
Odo was on his knees with the brown scroll open in both hands. He began to read in a high, fast voice. The words were old. They had edges. Alice felt the air tighten around the ledge, the way it did before thunder. The dragon felt it too. Her head came round, sharply, the first time all morning she had looked surprised.
Odo reached the bottom of the scroll. He squinted at the bad handwriting. He read the last word.
There was a sound like every drawstring in the world being pulled at once.
Bram fell over. Wren fell over. Odo fell over. Gideon wobbled, windmilled, then crashed down beside them on the rock. Alice looked down. Their bootlaces had leapt out of their boots like eels. They had wound together across the ledge in one great knot, tight as a ship’s rope, binding four people by the feet into a single furious bundle.
Most of it, thought Alice. He read most of it.
Her own laces lay quiet. She had double-knotted them that morning. She had tucked in the ends.
The dragon looked down at the knot of adventurers for a long moment.
Something passed through her body from horns to tail, a long ripple of the scales. It might have been a dragon gathering herself to strike. Alice knew what it was. It was a dragon trying not to laugh in front of witnesses.
Gideon did not waste time on the knot. He reached down, wrenched his feet out of his golden boots, rolled free, then came up in his stockings with his sword in his hand. His hair was everywhere. His face was shining.
“For the realm!” he cried. He charged.
It was, Alice thought later, the bravest thing she had ever seen anybody do in socks.
He got four strides. Then the great head came down, the jaws opened, then closed on the back of his gilded breastplate. They lifted him off the ledge as gently as a cat lifts a kitten. He hung there in the air, legs still running.
Rakshaza turned. She held him out over the drop. Below him, a hundred metres of nothing, the hollow, the stream, the small grey shape of a horse looking up. Gideon stopped running.
“I say,” said Gideon.
Bram made a sound. Wren had both hands over her mouth. Odo was crying a little.
Alice understood it all at once.
Eleven skulls in a row. The fire into the empty sky, over their heads, not at them. The arrow spat between Wren’s boots, not into them. The shield sent into the water, where it would not break. The great jaws holding Gideon, very still, the way a mother holds what she must not drop. Every piece of it built to look like the end of the world. Every piece of it built so nobody would be hurt. It had all been made for the moment after this one.
The moment that belonged to the hero.
Alice drew Brightoath.
She did not run. A year of duels had taught her that running was for people who weren’t sure. She walked across the ledge, over the knot of laces, past Bram on his back, to the dragon’s shoulder. She raised the sword. Its blade blazed in the hard sunlight.
“Put him down,” she said, “foul beast.”
The emerald eye rolled towards her. Something in it glinted. Keep foul. I like foul.
Alice brought the flat of Brightoath down on the dragon’s jaw with all her strength. It rang like the great bell of Solenne. It was the loudest blow she had struck in a year. The dragon’s head jerked sideways. Her jaws opened. Gideon dropped onto the ledge, onto the rock, on the right side of the drop, then rolled over twice in his stockings.
The roar that came after shook the mountain.
Rakshaza reared back on her hind legs, wings flung wide, a hurricane coming apart. Alice stood under her with the sword raised, not giving a step. For one long moment the dragon towered over all of them, gold and red against the hole she had burned in the cloud. She looked at the hero. The hero looked at her.
The great body came down onto its wrists with a thud that shook the ledge. Then the dragon backed away.
One step. Another. Wrist claws and hind talons scraped stone. Her tail swept the goat skulls off the ledge in a white rattle. With a last roar, furious, wounded, she turned. She plunged into the dark of the cave, tearing through the tapestry curtain. The roar went on into the depths of the mountain long after she had gone. It rolled through the stone under their feet. It sounded like something that would never forgive anyone for this.
Then it stopped.
The ledge was very quiet. A goat skull, which had stuck on the lip, fell off it.
“She,” said Gideon, from the ground, in his stockings, “she drove it back.”
* * *
Rakshaza lay in the dark behind the loom with her chin on the floor and her eyes shut.
The roar was still in her throat. It had been the hardest one of her life to make. Every scale she owned had wanted to stay on that ledge. It was not pride. Or it was only partly pride. It was three thousand years of never once giving ground, not to armies, not to the sea. Her body did not know how to back away. She had made it do so, step by step, like walking a nervous horse past a cart.
She had done it for a woman in white armour who had looked at her over a sword, once, the way nobody else ever had.
She thought, without meaning to, of the second month.
It had been an ordinary morning. Alice had charged as usual. Rakshaza had swept the tail low across the cave floor, as usual, to knock her down. Alice had jumped it.
She had not looked. She had not even turned her head. She had simply known the tail was coming. She had gone over it in full plate like a girl skipping a rope. Then she had landed. She had looked astonished at herself.
Rakshaza had laughed.
It had come out of her before she knew what it was. A great startled crack of a sound that knocked a shelf of silver plates off the wall. She had not laughed in two hundred years. She had forgotten that she could. Alice had stood in the ringing plates with her sword in her hand, staring at her.
What was that?
Nothing, the dragon had said. A cough. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
But the next day she had swept the tail again, at the same height. Alice had jumped it again, grinning this time. She had kept doing it for a week, just to see her jump.
Today Alice had read her the same way. Without a plan. Without a word. Over a ledge full of strangers, she had seen the whole shape of it, then stepped into her place in it.
There were footsteps in the tunnel. A single pair, in plate. They stopped at the torn tapestry.
“They’re on their way down,” said Alice, low. “Bram is carrying Gideon. Gideon’s walking perfectly well, he just wanted to be carried. I said I’d make sure the beast had gone deep.” A pause. “Have you?”
Rakshaza shifted. She did not bother to stand. She sat on the floor among the coins, in the slate-blue gown from yesterday, with her knees up and her tail round her feet. Alice came through the hole in the tapestry. She knelt in front of her, plate creaking. She took her helmet off.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
“You let me win,” said Alice.
“I let you look like you won. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“There will be. In the ballad.” Rakshaza looked at the floor. “I’ve never backed away from anything. Did you know that?”
“I guessed.”
“It was horrible.”
“I know.” Alice took her hand. Rule eight. She took it anyway, the gauntlet off, warm fingers round cold ones. “Thank you.”
“You struck me very hard on the jaw.”
“You told me to.”
“I did not tell you anything.”
“You looked at me,” said Alice. “It’s the same.”
Rakshaza raised her eyes. Alice was smiling, that rare one, the one that came out of her like sun through a hole in a cloud.
The kiss was short. It was not the kind that went anywhere. Five people were waiting at the bottom of the mountain, four of them without boots. It was the other kind, the kind that said I saw what you did. Rakshaza had not known there was another kind.
“Same time tomorrow,” said Alice against her mouth.
“I’ll be here.” Rakshaza let go of her hand. “Mind the skulls on your way down. I had them in a very nice line.”
* * *
The company of Sir Gideon Fairweather came into Brackenford at dusk.
The town had heard the roar. The town had seen the fire, a pillar of light over the Redcrown at nine in the morning. The town had been standing in the square for most of the day. It watched now as the hero rode in on her grey horse, with her sword at her side and her helmet under her arm. Behind her came the finest adventurer in a generation, sitting backwards on his horse to wave at people, in his stockings. Behind him came a man without a shield, a woman with half an arrow, a pale young man clutching a scroll. All of them were in their stockings. All of their stockings had holes.
Last came Little Fen, leading the mule. She was wearing both her boots.
Nobody said anything. Then Dobbs, at the front, took his hat off very slowly.
“It kept them?”
“Every pair,” said Wren. “It’s got them up there in a knot.”
“In a knot,” whispered the baker.
Gideon slid off his horse. He stood on the steps of the guildhall in his stockings. He raised his arms. The whole square fell silent.
“Friends! People of Brackenford! I have looked into the jaws of the Red Storm.” His voice rang off the housefronts. “I have hung over the abyss in its teeth. I tell you that nothing alive could stand against it. No company. No army. Nothing. Nothing, except...” He turned. He pointed. “Her.”
Alice stood very still with two hundred people looking at her. Her ears had begun to burn.
“She walked up to that beast,” said Gideon, “with her sword in her hand. As calm as you please. She struck it on the jaw. It let me go. It roared. It ran. I have never seen anything like it in my life. I’m writing to His Majesty tonight.” He put his hand on his heart. “Send no soldiers, I’m telling him. Send nobody. They’d only be food. The Hero is the only thing standing between this realm and that mountain. Leave it to her!”
The square went up like dry grass.
Somebody started ringing the market bell. Pip was already on a barrel. The children took up the old chant, then lost it, then started a new one about socks. Alice stood in the middle of the noise. People clapped her on the back plate. She looked over their heads at the Redcrown, dark against the last red light. She thought of the hardest roar of a three-thousand-year life, made for her.
Send nobody. Leave it to her.
It was not the bells the King wanted. But it was thirty-four more days in which nobody else would be coming up that mountain. It was a start.
* * *
Marta had the slate down off the wall before Alice reached the bar.
She wiped the line GOLDEN BOY COMES BACK IN HIS BOOTS with one stroke of her apron. She chalked PAID beneath it. She counted out Alice’s winnings in silver, then laid the thin gold coin on top of the pile, where it shone like a small sun.
“Local knowledge,” Marta said.
“Lucky guess.”
“Course it was, love.”
Gideon came in behind her with half the town at his back. He looked at the slate. He looked at his own name with PAID under it. He did not seem to mind in the least.
“Marvellous,” he said. “Worth every boot. Alice! I’ve decided.” He put an arm round her shoulders, plate clanking on plate. “I’m staying. Right here at the Lance, until the Lantern Fair. Every day. You and me, side by side. Whatever you need.”
Alice looked at the arm. She looked at the slate.
“Marta,” she said. “What are the odds on a hero strangling a guildsman?”
Marta was already wiping the chalk off her fingers.
“Not taking bets on that one, love,” she said. “Sure thing.”