The Redcrown had a cloud on it.
Alice saw it from her window at dawn, before she had her boots on. It was high summer. The sky over Brackenford was the clear, washed blue of a good morning. The mountain wore a grey cap pulled down to its shoulders, as though it had gone to bed with its head under the blanket.
She stood looking at it with one boot in her hand.
It’s weather, she told herself. Mountains have weather.
In a year, the Redcrown had never had weather in summer.
Down in the yard the wind had turned. It came off the mountain in long cold breaths that rattled the stable doors and made Turnip stamp. The farmers in the market square were looking up at the peak with their hands on their hats. Dobbs, passing with a cart of turnips, stopped beside her at the gate.
“Brooding,” he said, nodding at the cloud. “Old stories say it did that once. Before it went to sleep. Sat in a cloud for a month.” He clicked his tongue at his horse. “Burned a barn at the end of it. Empty barn, mind. Still.”
Alice buckled the top strap over the gatepost. It took her four tries.
* * *
Rakshaza had not made the cloud. She wanted that understood, by somebody, even if there was nobody to understand it.
The cloud had simply come, the way clouds sometimes came to the Redcrown in a cold wind. She had merely failed to burn it off. Every summer morning for three years she had gone out onto the ledge at dawn, yawned one long breath of heat at the sky, then lain down in the sun she had made. This morning she had not gone out. The cloud had settled in. It had made itself at home.
She lay at the very back of the cave, beyond the bed, where the hoard ran out into bare rock. It was the coldest place in the mountain. She had chosen it for that.
At first light she had got up out of habit. She had gone halfway to the circle before she remembered. The coins had slid down into it in the night. A silver cup had rolled into the middle. She had stood over it with her head lowered, the tip of one wing already reaching out to sweep, the way it had every morning for most of a year.
She had stopped. She had folded the wing back.
She asked you to put things away, Rakshaza had told herself. So. Things are away.
Then she had gone back to the bare rock to lie down. She had not looked at the circle again.
* * *
Gideon talked all the way up the road. He had his golden boots back in his heart, if not on his feet. He wore a pair of Bram’s spares, stuffed with straw at the toes.
“It’s wounded,” he said happily. “Hiding in the cloud, licking its jaw. That’s what this is. You hurt it, Alice. You hurt it properly. Nobody in history has ever done that.”
“No,” said Alice.
“I’ve been thinking we should press our advantage. Go in together today. While it’s weak.”
“No.”
“You’re right,” said Gideon at once. “Tradition. The Hero’s duel.” He beamed at the grey mountain. “But if you need me, you call.”
The hollow was cold. The stream had a skin of mist on it. The cloud sat on the ledge like a lid. The cave mouth was a grey smudge inside it. Turnip walked to the foot of the cliff the way he did every morning, looked up, then turned his head to look at Alice. He did not go and stand there. He came back and stood beside her.
Alice climbed alone into the cloud.
* * *
The ledge was wet. Nothing was lined up on it. The torn tapestry no longer hung across the tunnel. The cave mouth was simply open, dark, colder than she had ever felt it. Somewhere inside, water was dripping.
She walked the fifty-three steps.
On the fiftieth she stopped.
The circle had not been swept.
Coins had slid down into it overnight from the low wall around it, the way coins do when nobody pushes them back. Gold lay across the bare stone in a long fan. A silver cup had rolled into the very middle, where she always stood, and fallen on its side.
Alice stood at the edge looking at it. It was only a few coins. It was only a cup. It had been swept every morning for more than two hundred and sixty days. She knew because she had counted them, secretly, the way she counted steps.
She stepped into the circle. The coins slid under her boots. She did not push them away.
“I’ve come for the duel,” she said.
Her voice went into the dark. Nothing came back.
Then, very far in, past the bed, past the loom, past everything, something moved. She heard it rather than saw it: the long hiss of scales over coin, the shift of a great weight. Two points of green opened in the black, high up, enormous. They looked at her for a long time.
They closed again.
“Rule three,” said Alice. Her voice sounded thin. “The duels continue. Every day. Same time.”
The voice came out of the dark. It was not loud. A dragon’s voice never needed to be loud. It was cool, courteous, entirely empty.
“Then strike, Dame Alice. I won’t stop you.”
Alice’s hand went to Brightoath. It stayed there.
“You’re sulking,” she said.
“I’m resting.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“It was for a month. One month. Thirty-two days. It was a sensible...”
“It was very sensible.” No anger at all. That was the worst of it. “Do give Sir Gideon my regards. I hope his feet are warm.”
Alice opened her mouth to argue. She closed it. She had a speech. She had worked on it half the night, lying under the open window. It was reasonable. It was full of good reasons. Standing in that cold circle, among the coins nobody had swept, she found she could not remember a single one of them.
She sat down instead, in the middle of the circle, in her armour. She set the fallen cup upright beside her. She waited.
She waited all day.
The eyes did not open again. Nothing moved. The cold came out of the cave in slow waves, as if the mountain itself were breathing out. At noon she ate the bread Marta had put in her saddlebag without tasting it. In the afternoon she talked, for a while, about nothing. Turnip, who had not gone to stand at the cliff that morning. Pip’s new verse, which had a rhyme for slippers in it now that she would not repeat. The rabbits on the slippers, which had ears that flopped. Gideon’s opinion that the beast was licking its jaw in the cloud. She had thought that one might get an answer. It did not. Her voice went into the dark. The dark kept it.
Once, very late, she said, “I didn’t mean it how it sounded.”
The silence that answered was long enough to hear the water dripping.
At sunset she stood up. Her knees ached. She walked back to the mouth of the cave. She turned round on the threshold, the way she had every evening for a year.
“Same time tomorrow,” she said into the dark.
She waited.
The answer did not come. For the first time since the second day, nobody said I’ll be here. Nobody said I am always here. There was only the cold, the drip of water, the cloud pressing on the ledge behind her like a wet hand.
Alice went down the mountain.
* * *
Rakshaza lay in the dark until the sound of the horses had gone out of the hollow.
Then she could not lie there one moment longer.
She had not meant to answer at all. She had meant to stay silent, a mountain among mountains, until the Hero got bored. The Hero had not got bored. The Hero had sat in the circle all day. She had set the little cup upright. She had talked about the rabbit slippers in a voice that did not sound like her voice. At the end she had stood on the threshold saying Same time tomorrow, waiting.
It had taken every year Rakshaza had to keep her jaws shut.
She went out through the cloud onto the ledge. She did not bother to be quiet. She threw herself off the mountain into the dusk, climbed through the grey into the clear red sky above it, then turned north.
There was a quarry on the north side of the Redcrown, an hour’s walk from any farm. Men had cut stone there two hundred years ago, until the stone ran thin. Now it was a deep bowl of pale rock open to the sky, full of brambles, old timber, rusted chains, a collapsed hut.
She circled it three times before she did anything.
She looked for goatherds. She looked for children who might have come to dare each other. She looked for a fox, a hare, a nest of birds. She found a hedgehog asleep under a slab at the rim. She landed, picked up the slab between her wrists with great care, then set it down again forty metres away with the hedgehog still asleep under it.
Then she went back into the air. She hung over the quarry with her wings beating.
She opened her jaws.
She had not truly burned anything in a long time. She had forgotten what it was like to let it all go, everything she had been holding in her chest since a stable yard in Brackenford. It came out of her in a roar of white fire. The brambles went up in one breath. The old timber caught. The chains glowed. The pale rock itself began to shine, then crack, then run in slow orange rivers down into the bowl. The light climbed into the sky until the whole north side of the mountain was lit like a lantern.
She kept burning until there was nothing left in her to burn.
Then she landed on the rim of the quarry, on all four limbs, panting smoke. The stone below her glowed. Her ears rang. She waited to feel better.
She did not feel better. She felt tired, the way the Hero had looked tired at the end of the day, sitting among the coins.
Far to the south, past the shoulder of the mountain, the lights of Brackenford were small as sparks. Faintly, carried on the cold wind, came the flat clang of the fire bell.
A year ago that sound would have pleased her very much. A whole town looking up at her sky, afraid. It meant peace for another decade. It meant nobody would come up the mountain with a spear.
Tonight she thought only that one person in that town would be looking up at the glow. That she would know exactly who had made it. That she would know exactly why.
I didn’t mean it how it sounded.
Rakshaza closed her eyes.
No, she thought. You meant it how it was.
* * *
They saw it from Brackenford.
Half the town was in the square when the north sky went red. Somebody started ringing the fire bell. Women snatched children off the street. Pip, on his barrel, struck a chord, then lowered the lute without singing anything, which nobody had ever seen him do. The glow pulsed over the shoulder of the Redcrown like something breathing.
Gideon was on the guildhall steps with his sword already drawn. Bram’s boots had given him blisters by noon. He was back in Marta’s rabbit slippers.
“It’s raging!” He was alight with joy. “Don’t you see? It’s wounded, it’s mad with pain, it’s thrashing in the dark! We ride now. Tonight. While it’s out of its mind. Wren, the horses. Odo, find another one of those scrolls.”
“No,” said Alice.
She had not raised her voice. She did not need to. Every person in the square turned. Gideon turned with them, his face still bright.
“Alice, this is our chance...” This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
“Nobody goes up that mountain.” She came up the steps until she was level with him. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not without me. Do you understand?”
“But it’s...”
“It’s mine.” The word came out of her like Brightoath out of its scabbard. “The duel is mine. The beast is mine. If anybody goes up there in the dark, I will drag them back down myself. By the ankles. Do you understand me, Sir Gideon?”
The square was silent. The fire bell had stopped. Far away the red glow pulsed.
Gideon looked at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, he sheathed his sword. He put his hand on his heart.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course. Your duel.” He looked at her with frank admiration. “You’ve never once raised your voice in all the years
I’ve known you. Not at the tourney. Not anywhere.” He shook his head in wonder. “You must hate it very much.”
Alice turned. She walked down the steps, through the crowd. Marta stood in the door of the Sleeping Lance with a lamp in her hand. She looked at Alice’s face as she passed. She said nothing at all. She only stepped aside to let her in, then shut the door on the square behind them both. She went up the stairs to her room without stopping, without taking off her armour. She shut the door behind her and sat down on the floor with her back against it.
You must hate it very much.
She did not hate it. That was the trouble. She had never hated it, not for one day of the year.
She sat in the dark with her knees up, the way the dragon had sat on the floor of the hoard in the plum gown. The glow from the north came faint through the window.
She thought about the yard. She went over it again, the way Hester had taught her to go over a lost fight, one move at a time. Not what she had meant. What she had done.
She had asked Rakshaza to make herself look like somebody else.
Not to stay away. Not to be careful. To change. To take off the horns Alice had touched only three days ago, warm as a stone in the evening. To put away the tail that told her the truth. To walk into Brackenford as a woman nobody looked at twice. So that Alice could sit beside her without anyone wondering why.
She had asked her to be ashamed of herself. So that Alice would not have to be.
The thought was so plain, sitting there, that Alice could not believe it had taken her a whole day of cold to find it.
She remembered the eighth month.
It had been the morning of some royal holiday. Half of Brackenford had come to the gate to see her off, with ribbons in the horses’ manes, children on shoulders, a band. She had smiled at all of them. She had smiled the whole way down the road, the whole way up the mountain, until her face ached. Then she had walked into the cave. She had sat down in her circle. She had taken off her helmet.
The dragon had looked at her from the hoard for a while.
There you are, the dragon had said.
What?
You leave a face at the bottom of my mountain every morning, Hero. I’ve always wondered where you put it.
Alice had laughed, astonished. Nobody had ever told her she had a face she put on. Nobody had noticed there was one to put on. She had sat there in the circle without it, all day, feeling oddly light, as if she had taken off a second helmet.
In all the months since, Rakshaza had never once asked her to put it back.
Not when she was cross. Not when she was tired. Not when she was crying, the one time, over something she could not now remember. Rakshaza had let her come up the mountain every day as exactly what she was. She was the only one in Aurelmark who did.
Then Alice had stood in a stable yard and asked her to put on a face.
Alice put her hands over her own face in the dark.
She sat there a long time. She did not cry. Something heavier than crying sat in her chest, the way the cloud sat on the mountain.
Downstairs, the door of the inn banged.
There were voices. Marta’s, sharp. Somebody’s boots on the floor, heavy, slow, uneven, the left one dragging a little, the way it had since an old campaign in the marshes. A voice Alice had not heard in over a year, gruff as a gravel path.
“Top of the stairs? Right.”
The boots came up the stairs. One. Two. Each one landing like a decision. They stopped outside Alice’s door.
There was a knock. Just one.
Alice got to her feet before she knew she was moving. Nineteen years of training stood her up, straightened her shoulders, put her hands at her sides. She opened the door.
Dame Hester Coll stood on the landing with a travelling cloak over her arm. She was sixty-three, broad as a barrel, her grey hair cropped short as a soldier’s. Her face was the colour of old saddle leather. Her eyes were the pale, patient grey of a wolf who has already decided where you are going to run.
She looked at Alice once. Up, down. The armour. The face.
“Solenne’s talking about a deadline,” Hester said. “Thought I’d come see.”
“Dame Hester. I didn’t... you didn’t write.”
“No.” Hester looked past her into the dark room, at the floor, at the place against the door where somebody had been sitting. She looked back at Alice. She took her time about it.
Then she jerked her chin back down the stairs.
“Who,” said Hester Coll, “is the idiot in the rabbit slippers?”