Hester Coll did not ask what was wrong. She never had. She came into the little room under the eaves, took in the bed nobody had slept in, the window open on a cold night, the hero of humanity sitting on the floor in full plate with her back against the door. Then she lowered herself onto the only stool, one leg at a time, the bad one last.
“Well,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“Didn’t ask.”
Hester never asked a question when she could see the answer. She sat there until you said it yourself, which was worse, because then you had to hear it.
“How was the road?” Alice tried.
“Long. Your town rang the fire bell as I came through the gate. Lad in a green coat told me the dragon’s gone mad.” Hester stretched the bad leg out with both hands. “Has it?”
“No.”
“Hurt?”
Alice opened her mouth. She closed it again.
Hester nodded, as if she had been told a great deal.
Someone knocked, straight through Alice’s spine. She shifted aside with a noise like a cutlery drawer falling down the stairs. Gideon put his head in, candle in hand, rabbit slippers on his feet.
“Dame Hester! I thought I heard your voice. I’d know it anywhere.” He beamed. “You won’t remember me. Fairweather. Second year.”
“Fairweather.” Hester looked at him for a long moment. “Still lead with your chin.”
“You do remember!”
“I remember everybody who leads with their chin. It’s a short list. Mostly dead. Go to bed, boy.”
“Yes, Dame Hester.” He went. He came back. “The beast burned a whole quarry today, Dame Hester. We think it’s mad with pain...”
“Bed.”
The rabbits retreated down the corridor, flapping. Hester braced a hand on her good knee, stood, looked down at Alice for a while.
“After a fall,” she said. “Before you move.”
“I didn’t fall.”
“You’re on the floor.”
At the door Hester stopped without turning round. “Nobody sleeps in plate. Take it off.” The bad boot scraped once on the threshold. “Whatever you broke, you won’t mend it in that.”
The door shut. After a long time, Alice took her armour off, piece by piece, on her own. The top backplate strap gave way at the first tug. Undoing it had always been easy. It was only the doing up that needed somebody else.
* * *
She came down at dawn in a linen shirt, old riding breeches, mucking-out boots, a grey wool cloak with a darn in the hem. Her hip felt strange all the way down the stairs. There was nothing on it.
Marta stopped stirring the porridge.
Gideon, at the long table in his full gilded harness, dropped his spoon into his egg. “Alice! Your armour!”
“It’s upstairs.”
“Is it damaged? Bram has a little hammer...”
“It isn’t damaged.”
“Your sword!”
Hester sat at the end of the table with a bowl of porridge. Alice laid Brightoath across the old woman’s knees, scabbard, belt, all of it.
Hester looked at the sword, then at Alice. Then she went back to her porridge.
“You can’t go up there like that.” Gideon was on his feet. Egg ran down his breastplate. “It burned a quarry. We’ll all come, we’ll...”
“No.”
“But you’ll be...”
“Fairweather,” said Hester, without lifting her eyes from the bowl. “Sit.”
He sat.
“Eat your egg.”
He ate his egg, watching Alice like a dog watches a door it has not been allowed through.
In the yard Turnip sniffed one sleeve, snorted, then sniffed the other in case it made more sense. Alice swung up the way she had every morning for a year. She nearly went straight over the far side of the saddle.
Thirty kilos, she thought. I’ve been riding with thirty kilos of steel for so long I’ve forgotten how much I weigh.
Brackenford had come out to see her off. Nobody cheered. The children at the gate opened their mouths for the chant, then shut them. A woman with a basket on her arm said, quite loudly, “Oh, the poor love’s lost her mind,” before someone hushed her. Dobbs took his hat off, which he only did at funerals.
Behind her, through the open door of the Lance, she heard somebody call for odds.
“Book’s closed,” said Marta. “Not today.”
* * *
The cloud still sat on the Redcrown like a lid on a pot. Halfway up the road the wind found her, straight through the wool, through the linen, to the skin. Plate kept the rain off, the sun off, the world off. For eleven years every gust had been a sound against steel. Now it was a cold hand on her ribs.
In the hollow, Turnip walked to the foot of the cliff with his ears forward. He had not done that yesterday. Alice took it as a sign.
She climbed. She overshot the first hold by a hand’s width, slapped bare rock, nearly laughed. She overshot the second. Her body kept pushing for weight that wasn’t there. By the ledge her fingers were white with cold.
No warmth came out of the tunnel. She tied the cloak tighter, walked in.
* * *
Rakshaza heard the steps a long way off. They were wrong.
Every morning for a year the same music: the clank of greaves, the scrape of sabatons, the little ring when the scabbard tapped the wall at the bend. This was nothing of the kind. Soft boots. Somebody without metal, coming down her tunnel.
A thief, she thought, with a mean little spark of pleasure. Wonderful. I’ve been wanting to frighten something.
She came forward through the dark on folded wings, the way she had come for a hundred treasure hunters, letting the coins announce her. She opened one eye in the black.
It was Alice.
In a shirt. Hair whipped loose, both arms wrapped round herself, a darned cloak flapping at her knees. No helmet. No plate. No sword.
Something dropped through the middle of Rakshaza, a long way down.
Day twelve, it had been. A heat that made the rock tick. The hero had stopped mid-swing, pulled her helmet off, tipped half a waterskin over her head. For twelve days Rakshaza had been arguing with a suit of armour. She had pictured someone older inside it. Instead there had been a pink, furious, dripping face, very young, with the hair stuck to it.
Oh, she had thought then. There’s a person in there.
She had been very rude for the rest of the afternoon, to cover it.
Now there was nothing in the way at all. Just the person.
“Where,” said Rakshaza, “is your armour?”
It came out far too loud. The coins jumped. Alice staggered half a step. Rakshaza made herself lower it, which took more effort than any roar.
“At the inn,” said Alice.
“Your sword.”
“Who is Hester?”
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“My trainer. She’s at the Lance.” Alice’s teeth were chattering. “She’d probably like to meet you. She’d probably like to hit you.”
“You climbed my mountain,” said Rakshaza, “in that.”
“It was easier. I kept missing the holds.” A breath. “Upwards.”
Rakshaza looked at her. The fear was still falling through her, with nowhere to land. So she picked up the nearest thing, which was her pride, put it on like a crown.
“If you’ve come to strike me, Dame Alice, you seem to have forgotten something.”
Alice flinched. It was small. Rakshaza saw it anyway.
“Please don’t call me that.”
Then she turned away. She did not go to the bed or the ledge or the dark. She went to the place fifty-three steps in. She knelt on the cold stone. She began to push the coins back.
Alice gathered them in both hands, set them along the old low wall, went back for more. Her fingers were stiff. She dropped some. She picked them up.
“Leave it,” said Rakshaza.
Alice kept going.
“That isn’t your task.”
“It wasn’t yours either.” Alice did not look up. “You did it every morning. Two hundred and seventy-something days. I counted.”
“Two hundred and seventy-nine.”
Alice’s hands stopped.
Rakshaza wished she had said nothing. It was much too late. The number lay there on the stone between them, like a coin neither of them would pick up.
* * *
The circle took a long time. When it was clear Alice sat in the middle of it, cross-legged, shivering, because her legs would not hold the speech up otherwise.
“I spent last night on the floor,” she said. “In my armour. Against the door. Hester came. She said nobody sleeps in plate.” She stopped. “That’s not the part. Sorry. I had it in order on the road.”
Rakshaza waited. She lay at the edge of the light, chin on the coins, one eye on her. She did not help.
“I asked you to hide them. I told myself it was because of Gideon. Because he’s clever about the wrong things, because he’d seen your eyes. That was true. It wasn’t why.” Alice’s voice went thin. She pushed through it. “I wasn’t afraid he’d see you. I was afraid he’d see me. Next to you. Looking at you the way I...” She stopped again. She did not finish that one. “So I asked you to be ashamed of yourself. So that I wouldn’t have to be. That’s what I did. I worked it out on the floor.”
The cave was very quiet. Far up in the dark a coin settled, ticked, was still.
“I’m not ashamed of you,” Alice said. “I have never once been ashamed of you. Not one day. I’m a coward about me. It’s different. It isn’t better.” She looked up. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. That’s all of it.”
Rakshaza found she could not say anything for a while.
Three thousand years. Kings had begged her pardon on their knees, because they were frightened. None of it had sounded like this. None of it had come up a mountain in a shirt.
“A thousand years ago,” she said, at last, slowly, “I decided that anybody who wanted my company could have it with the horns. With all of it. I thought that was very dignified of me.” She looked past Alice, at the long dark of the hoard. “Nobody ever asked me to put them away. Not once, in a thousand years. I used to think that meant they liked them.” A small, dry sound, not a laugh. “It meant nobody stayed long enough to ask.”
Alice did not move.
“You stayed. Every day. A year.” Her voice dropped lower than she meant it to. “I thought that meant...”
“It did,” said Alice. “It does. It means that.”
The silence after that was a long one. Neither of them filled it. It was the kind of silence that is holding something up.
Then Rakshaza lifted her head off the coins.
“Say the middle part again.”
Alice blinked. “Which part?”
“The part where you were a coward.”
A laugh broke out of Alice, a wet, startled one. She wiped her face with the back of a cold hand. “I was a coward.”
“Again. Slower.”
“Don’t push it.”
At the very edge of the light, the tip of the dragon’s tail moved. It was hardly anything. A curl, a flick, back to stillness. The coins under it chimed.
Alice’s eyes went to it at once. “Your tail moved.”
“It did not.”
It did it again. More of it, this time. It swept a fan of gold across the floor, of its own accord.
“Traitor,” Rakshaza told it.
“You didn’t leave a note.” Alice was still half laughing, half something else. “When you came to the Lance. You promised me a note before you went anywhere.”
“I wasn’t going anywhere, Hero.” Rakshaza heard the word come out of her own mouth, easy as breathing. She watched it land on Alice’s face. “I was coming to you.”
* * *
Alice had to look at the coins for a moment. Hero. Two days without it, and she’d thought she might never hear it again in that voice. She had not known a word could feel like a coat put round you.
“The quarry,” she said, when she could.
“It was an ugly quarry. I’m not sorry about the quarry.” A pause. “I’m a little sorry about the bell.”
“Somebody could have been...”
“I flew round it three times. There was a hedgehog under a slab. I moved it first.” The dragon sounded affronted. “It didn’t even wake up.”
Alice put her face in her hands. It was the only thing to do with it.
When she lifted it again she said, “Come out of there.”
The great eye narrowed. “Rule five.”
“I don’t care about rule five.” She was shaking now, cold right through. She said it anyway. “Come out. Whatever shape. All of you. That’s what I came up here to say. I didn’t have it in order.”
For a heartbeat nothing happened.
Then the dark folded in on itself. The heat of the shift rolled over the circle, so sudden after the cold that Alice gasped. The coins skittered. A woman walked out of the black on bare feet.
She had not chosen a quiet gown this time. It was the exact red of her own scales. The horns rose black out of the river of her hair. The tail swung free behind her, unhurried. She had let the scales come out, more of them than Alice had ever seen in this shape: a scatter of crimson along both cheekbones, a fine line of them down the side of her throat, over the backs of her hands. One fingernail had grown long, curved, black.
She stopped at the edge of the circle. She lifted her chin, not quite a challenge.
Alice got up. Her knees were stiff. She crossed the circle. She put her cold hand on the curve of the left horn, the way she had once, with an ivy leaf for an excuse. No excuse this time. It was warm. Of course it was. She ran her thumb down it, slowly, to where it met the hair. Then the ear, the tip of it, which was hot. Then the scales on the cheekbone, smooth, like glazed clay.
Rakshaza stood very still for all of it. Her eyes did not leave Alice’s face.
“You’re cold,” she said.
“You noticed.”
“Plate keeps everything off. I didn’t want anything off.”
Rakshaza made a noise Alice had never heard from her. Then she took Alice’s frozen hands in both of hers, held them against her own breastbone, under the red cloth, where it was hot as a hearthstone. Alice nearly wept from the plain relief of it.
“Wait here,” said Rakshaza. “Don’t touch anything.” She thought about it. “Touch whatever you like.”
She walked to the mouth of the cave. On the ledge she let the shape go. The dragon came down onto all fours with a sound like a landslide settling, wings folded, head swinging up toward the grey lid of cloud that had sat on the Redcrown for two days.
She breathed in. The air rushed past Alice into the tunnel, tugged at her cloak, her hair.
Then the fire went up.
It went straight up, white-gold, so bright Alice threw her arm over her eyes. When she lowered it the cloud had a hole in it the size of a town square. The hole was spreading. The grey burned back from its edges like paper held to a candle, curling, thinning, gone.
Sunlight came down onto the mountain.
It poured over the ledge, along the tunnel floor, up Alice’s boots, her knees, her face. She stood in it with her eyes shut, warm for the first time in two days.
Somewhere far below, very faint, a bell began to ring in Brackenford. Not the fire bell. The small bright one.
When she opened her eyes Rakshaza was beside her again in the red gown, hair blown wild by her own fire, scales catching the light.
“There,” the dragon said, looking, for her, almost shy. “Weather.”
Alice kissed her.
There was nothing between them. No breastplate, no gauntlets, no pauldrons to knock against horns. Just linen, just the red silk, just the heat coming off Rakshaza’s skin into hers until Alice could not tell any more where the cold had gone. Rakshaza’s hands went into her hair, pulled the tail loose. Alice’s went to the scales along her throat. The tail came round both of them, warm, possessive.
“I was going to make you grovel for at least a week,” said Rakshaza against her mouth.
“I know.”
“I had plans.”
“Show me later,” Alice said, walking her backwards over the coins toward the long dark where the bed was.
* * *
A long while afterwards, the light at the cave mouth had gone from white to gold. Alice lay with her face in the curve of a warm shoulder, one arm thrown over a waist, the tail heavy across her ankles.
“Never again,” she mumbled, out of habit.
Rakshaza did not even open her eyes. “You’re getting worse at that.”
“I’m out of practice. It’s been two days.”
“Two days.” The dragon’s hand moved idly up and down her spine. “It felt like a hundred years. I would know. I’ve had several.”
Alice lifted her head. She looked down at her, at the scales on her cheekbones, at the ear tip still faintly dark, at the eyes that were open now, green as river water over stone.
“I won’t ask you again,” she said. “To hide anything. Not ever.”
Rakshaza looked back at her. It took her a moment to answer.
“I know,” she said. “You climbed my mountain in a shirt.”
* * *
At sunset Rakshaza stood ready by the bed with both hands raised to buckle the top strap. Alice looked at her. She looked at the linen shirt. There was no strap.
She lowered her hands. She found she was rather put out about it.
“You’ll freeze on the road,” she said instead. She went off into the hoard, came back with a cloak over her arm: deep blue wool, fox-lined, the clasp a silver hound with garnet eyes. It had belonged to a duchess who came six hundred years ago to bargain for a river. Rakshaza swung it round Alice’s shoulders herself. She did up the hound. She took longer about it than a clasp required.
“It’s too fine,” Alice said.
“It’s blue. It goes with the armour you aren’t wearing.”
Then she fetched the golden boots from beside the bed, a goat skull grinning out of each. She made to take the skulls out. She stopped.
“Leave them in,” she decided. “He’ll like them.”
“He will,” said Alice, with deep despair. “That’s the worst part.”
They stood at the cave mouth. The whole valley was clear to the edge of the world.
“Same time tomorrow,” said Alice.
Rakshaza let it hang for one breath, only one, for the pleasure of watching Alice’s face begin to fall.
“I’ll be here,” she said. “I am always here.”
When the hero was down the cliff, the golden boots slung round her neck by their laces, clanking, Rakshaza went back inside. She walked to the circle. Alice had missed one coin, near the eastern edge. She bent, picked it up, set it on the wall with the rest.
Then she went behind the loom, took up the silver dagger, cut the sixth mark.
It came out perfectly straight. She looked at it for some time. She decided not to find that suspicious.
* * *
Brackenford was in the square when Alice rode in. All of it.
“It burned the cloud,” Dobbs was telling anybody who would listen. “Midday. Straight up. Never seen the like. Stopped brooding, just like that.”
Pip was on the guildhall steps with his lute. He was singing again, something with “a heart of steel beneath the linen” in it, which Alice decided not to hear.
Nobody said a word about the fox-lined cloak. Several people looked at it very hard.
“Alice!” Gideon came clattering down the Lance steps in his rabbit slippers, with his sword half drawn, in case. Then he saw what was round her neck. He stopped dead. “Those are... are those...”
She handed them down to him.
He held his golden boots up to the lamplight. He drew a goat skull out of the left one. The whole square looked at it.
“It gave them back,” said Gideon, hushed. “With a trophy.” He turned on the step, held the skull up high for everyone to see. “Do you understand what this means? It respects me! It’s acknowledging a worthy foe!”
“That’s what it’s doing,” said Alice.
“I shall keep this forever. Dame Hester! Look!”
Hester was in the doorway of the Lance, leaning on the post. She had Brightoath on its belt over her shoulder. She looked at the skull. She looked at Gideon. She said, “I see it, boy,” which seemed to satisfy him completely.
Then she looked at Alice. At the hair down her back, the blue wool, the silver hound with its garnet eyes. She looked for quite a long time.
“Warm, that,” she said.
“Yes,” said Alice.
Hester held out the sword. Alice took it. It weighed exactly what a sword weighs.
Behind them, inside, Marta had the slate down off its hook. She chalked a new line while the common room crowded round.
HERO WEARS HER ARMOUR TOMORROW: 1 TO 3.
Pip bet for. Dobbs bet for. Gideon bet a silver crown for, then another, out of loyalty.
Hester limped to the bar. She put down a single copper coin.
“Against,” she said.