Alice came down to breakfast in full plate.
She had decided it on the stairs, at about the third step. The armour was her job. The town needed to see it. Yesterday had been yesterday, a necessary thing, done once, for a reason. Today the hero of Aurelmark would ride out the way she always had, white steel and blue cloth, sword at her hip, so that nobody would look at her twice.
The common room cheered.
It was not a small cheer. Dobbs banged his tankard. Pip leapt onto his stool. Gideon rose from his eggs with both arms in the air, as if she had come back from a war rather than down a staircase.
“One to three!” he shouted. “I knew it! Marta, I knew it!”
Marta was already counting coins out of her apron. She paid Pip. She paid Dobbs. She paid Gideon twice, which he took with the face of a man who had been right about something for the first time in a week.
Then she turned to the end of the table, where Hester sat over her porridge. She held out her hand.
Hester looked at Alice for a long moment. At the breastplate, the pauldrons, the blue surcoat, the helmet under her arm. Something in the wolf-grey eyes went very still, like a hound that has heard a rabbit under the hedge.
She put the copper coin in Marta’s palm.
“Cheap,” she said, “at the price.”
Alice did not know what that meant. She was fairly sure she did not want to.
In the yard she backed up to the gatepost to hook the top strap. It went on the second try. She felt rather proud of that. When she turned round Hester was standing in the stable door, leaning on the frame, watching.
Hester had watched her arm herself perhaps ten thousand times. In the yard at Solenne, in the dark before the tourneys, in tents on the march. A hero arms herself alone. Hester had said that to a fifteen-year-old who had just sent the squires away, as if it were the proudest thing she had ever seen.
She said nothing now. She only looked at the gatepost. Then at Alice. Then back at the gatepost.
“I’m riding out with you,” she said.
Alice stared at her. “To the mountain?”
“Is there another one?”
“Nobody rides out with me.”
“I know,” said Hester. “I’ve heard.”
Gideon appeared at her elbow, gleaming, golden boots on his feet, the goat skull under his arm. He had not been parted from it since last night. “Splendid! We’ll all ride out! Bram’s got the new awning...”
“No,” said Hester. “Just me.”
“But the company...”
“The company can have a day off. Take the skull for a walk.”
Gideon opened his mouth. He closed it. He looked down at the skull, as though it might have an opinion.
“I’ll take it for a walk,” he decided.
* * *
Hester’s horse was an old bay mare with a white blaze, one ear that would not stand up, the worst temper Alice had ever met in an animal. Her name was Grudge. Hester had ridden her for twenty years. Turnip took one look at her across the yard. He walked behind Alice to hide.
They rode out of the gate together.
The town did not quite know what to do about it. The children started the chant, faltered, started again. The woman with the basket waved at Hester uncertainly. Somebody said, “Is that her mother?”
Somebody else said, “Don’t be daft, the hero hasn’t got a mother,” which was true, near enough, though Alice had never heard it said out loud before. She found she did not like hearing it.
Then they were past the bend. The houses fell away behind them. The road opened up between the barley fields, empty, the way it was empty every morning.
Except this morning it wasn’t.
Alice kept glancing sideways. Grudge was trying to bite Turnip’s shoulder. Hester was letting her try. The old woman rode the way she did everything, straight-backed, without hurry, the bad leg out of the stirrup on the near side, resting.
It was the strangest feeling. Alice had ridden this road three hundred and seventy-odd times. She knew every rut, every gatepost, every hare’s hole in the verge. She had never once had to wait for somebody else on it. She had never once had anybody to look at but Turnip’s ears.
She waited for Hester to say something. Hester didn’t.
After the first hour Alice couldn’t stand it.
“You can ask,” she said.
“Ask what?”
“Whatever you came to ask.”
“Didn’t come to ask anything.” Hester shifted the reins. “Came to ride.”
“Since when do you ride for nothing?”
“Since I got old. You’ll see.” Grudge made another lunge for Turnip. Turnip sighed. “Your friend. The one with the horns.”
Alice nearly fell out of the saddle for the second time in two days. “Who told you about her?”
“Everybody. Before I’d got my boots off.” Hester looked at the road ahead. “Lady somebody. From the coast.”
“Shaza. She’s from Solenne. From school.”
“Is she,” said Hester. It was not a question. Hester had run the junior yard at Solenne for twenty-two years. Hester knew every child who had ever held a practice sword there, what they’d eaten, who they’d cried over. Hester would have noticed horns.
Alice waited for the rest. It didn’t come. The old woman only nodded, once, as though a box had been ticked somewhere.
* * *
On the ledge, at dawn, Rakshaza had yawned the morning cloud off the peak. It had gone without a fight. She was feeling very well. She was feeling, if anyone had asked, which nobody would, almost unbearably well.
So she was there to see them come round the shoulder of the hill: the big grey horse she would have known from the moon, white steel on his back, catching the sun. A second horse beside him. A bay, smaller. Somebody old on it, broad, sitting the saddle like a sack of grain that had opinions.
The hitting one, Rakshaza thought. Hester.
She lay very still on the warm rock. She had seen a great many people approach her mountain. Kings, generals, a tax collector once, which had been a novelty. She had never felt anything about it except a mild wish that they would hurry up or go away. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
Now she found she wanted to make a good impression.
This was a problem. A good impression, for a dragon, was a terrible one. The old woman had to come away certain the Red Storm was the most dreadful thing alive. She also had to come away... Rakshaza did not quite know what. Thinking well of her. Somehow. In a way that she could never be told about.
She went over her options. Fire was crude. The skulls were tidied away. A dive out of the sun would be showing off, she had done it for Gideon, it would look like repeating herself.
She settled on a roar. A proper one. Nothing fancy. The kind that said old, vast, do not.
She lifted her head. She looked again at the white steel on Alice, the blue cloth, the helmet tied to the saddle. She was absurdly glad of it. Yesterday she had been glad of the shirt. She could not explain it. She liked buckles, that was all.
There had been a day, in the tenth month, when Alice came up the mountain with her right hand wrapped in a dirty strip of linen. Rakshaza had noticed it at once, from the ledge, from a kilometre off. She had said nothing until the duel was over, because she was a dragon, with standards.
“What did that?”
“Nothing.”
“Something did.”
Alice had sighed. “A cart. In the market. The brake went. There were children.” She had flexed the hand, wincing. “I stopped it.”
“With your hand.”
“It was the hand I had.”
Rakshaza had said nothing more about it. She had been very scornful of human fragility for the rest of the afternoon. Then for a week afterwards, from the ledge, she had glared at every cart on every road she could see, until a carter in the next valley reported to his guild that the dragon had taken against wheels.
The two riders came into the hollow. They dismounted. The old woman stood at the foot of the cliff with her hands on her hips, looking up.
Rakshaza drew in a breath that emptied the air out of the tunnel behind her.
Then she let it go.
* * *
It was a very good roar. Alice had heard perhaps four hundred of them. She ranked this one high.
It came down the cliff face like a rockfall made of sound. It went through her plate, through her ribs, into the ground under her boots. The stream jumped in its bed. Every bird for a kilometre left at once. Somewhere far behind them, faint, a shutter banged in a village.
Grudge put her one good ear flat. Turnip did not even look up from the grass.
Hester did not move at all.
She stood with her hands on her hips, head tilted back, squinting up at the ledge. The great red shape filled it. The emerald eyes looked down. The jaws were open just far enough to show what was inside them. It was, Alice thought, a deeply sincere effort.
The roar rolled away into the hills. The silence after it rang.
Hester considered the ledge. She considered it for what felt to Alice like a very long time.
“Bit long,” she said.
On the ledge, the dragon’s head went back two centimetres. It was nothing. Only Alice would have seen it.
The great shape turned, on all fours, wings folded, without hurry. It walked into the dark of the cave mouth with enormous dignity. The tail went last. The tail, Alice noticed, was twitching.
“Bit long?” Alice said. Her voice came out higher than it should have.
“Lovely voice. Good chest. Holds the note past where it’s useful.” Hester lowered herself onto a boulder by the stream, the bad leg first. “Seen generals do the same. Fall in love with the sound of themselves. You lose the room.”
Alice did not know what to say. She did not dare look at the cave.
Turnip, meanwhile, had wandered to the foot of the cliff, ears pricked, waiting. Grudge watched him go with deep contempt.
Hester watched him too. Then she looked at Alice. Not at the armour this time. At her face.
Alice knew what she must look like. She had felt it come up on her the moment the roar began, like the sun coming up on a wall. She had felt her own mouth do it. She could not put it away fast enough.
“There,” said Hester quietly.
“What?”
“That.” Hester did not point. She didn’t need to. “Nineteen years. I never once saw that on you. Not when you won the tourney. Not when the King put the sword in your hand, with four thousand people singing.” She looked away, up at the ledge, at the dark mouth of the cave. “You’re looking at a mountain like it’s somebody’s door.”
Alice could not breathe properly. The armour was too tight. It had never been too tight.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“No. You wouldn’t. I didn’t teach you that.” Hester rubbed her knee slowly with the flat of her hand. “I taught you to stand. Taught you to lose nothing, need nothing, arm yourself alone. Thought I’d done well. Proudest thing I ever made, you.” A breath. “I never taught you what to do if somebody turned up who could carry you.”
The stream ran. A bird came back cautiously to a pine and decided against it.
Alice stood in the hollow in thirty kilos of steel. She had faced the King’s whole court, a charging bull, a burning barn, a dragon thirty-five metres long. Nothing in nineteen years had ever gone through her armour like that sentence did.
She did not answer it. She could not.
“Go on,” said Hester, almost gently, which was worse than anything. “I’ll be here. Grudge needs her rest.”
Alice turned. She walked to the cliff. She did not run, because a hero does not run. She climbed the first five metres faster than she had ever climbed in plate, because she could not bear one more second of anybody seeing her face.
Behind her she heard Hester say, conversationally, to the mare: “Well. That’s that, then.”
* * *
Rakshaza was waiting fifty-three steps in, in human form, in a gown of ash-grey silk. She was pacing. Her tail was lashing so hard it had cleared a second, smaller circle of its own, a little to the left.
“A bit long,” she said, before Alice was properly in the light. “A bit long. I have roared at emperors. I once roared a whole fleet back into harbour. Three hundred ships, Hero. Not one of them said a bit long.”
Alice walked straight into her.
She did not mean to. She meant to stop at the edge of the circle, say something dry, take her helmet off. Instead her feet kept going. Her forehead found the curve of Rakshaza’s shoulder. The plate hit silk with a noise like a dropped tray.
Rakshaza stopped talking in the middle of a word.
“Hero,” Rakshaza said, quite differently. “What did she do to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Something did.”
Alice laughed. It came out in pieces. “She said nobody should arm herself alone.”
The arms tightened. Neither of them said anything for a while.
Then Alice felt fingers at her back. They found the top strap, the one she had fought onto the gatepost at dawn, the one that had gone on the second try. They worked the buckle loose.
“Then we’ll start,” said Rakshaza into her hair, “in the other direction.”
She took the armour off her piece by piece. The pauldrons. The backplate. The vambraces, slowly, the right one first. She set each piece down on the coins with great care, in a row, by size, as if they were being put to bed. Alice stood there and let her. She had never once let anybody. It felt like the ledge, the day she fell. It felt like being caught.
When it was done she was in her arming shirt in the middle of the circle, very light, very warm.
“Better?” said Rakshaza.
“Yes.”
They sat down in the circle, because Alice’s knees had decided it for both of them. Rakshaza folded herself onto the coins beside the row of armour, the tail curled round behind Alice’s back like the arm of a chair. For a while neither of them said anything. Far down the tunnel the light lay on the stone in a long, bright bar.
“There was more,” Alice said at last. “What she said.”
Rakshaza waited. She was, Alice had noticed, getting better at waiting.
“She said she taught me to stand. To need nothing. That I was the proudest thing she ever made.” Alice looked at her own hands, bare, pale from a lifetime in gauntlets. “Then she said she never taught me what to do if somebody turned up who could carry me.”
The tail behind her went very still. Not the bad stillness, from the stable yard. A listening one.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I climbed a cliff.”
“In plate.”
“In plate. Fast.” Alice rubbed her face. “I’ve never run from anything in my life. I didn’t run. I climbed very quickly in a dignified manner.”
“Away from her,” said Rakshaza slowly. “Toward me.”
Alice opened her mouth to deny it. There was nothing there to deny it with.
“That,” said the dragon, very quietly, “is very nearly an answer, Hero.”
She did not push. She did not ask for the rest of it. She only put one hand flat on the stone between them, palm up, the way a person sets down a cup for somebody else to pick up when they are ready. After a moment Alice put her own hand in it. It was warm, of course. It always was.
They sat like that while the bar of light crept a hand’s width along the floor.
Then Rakshaza cleared her throat. When she spoke again it was in a voice of the most terrible restraint. “Hero. In the most general sense. Purely out of interest. Did she say anything else? About the roar?”
Alice pressed her face into the grey silk. “She said you had a lovely voice.”
“Well. Naturally.”
“Good chest.”
“Obviously.”
“She said you hold the note past where it’s useful. Like a general in love with the sound of himself.”
There was a long, dreadful silence.
Then Rakshaza let go of her. She walked to the mouth of the cave in a swirl of grey. Her ears were scarlet to the tips. Her tail had gone stiff as a rod.
“Where,” said Alice, “are you going?”
“Nowhere,” said Rakshaza. “I am going to the ledge. I am going to practise.”
* * *
Down in the hollow, Hester Coll sat on her boulder with a heel of bread from Marta’s kitchen. She had a flask of cold tea. Grudge was asleep on her feet. Turnip was at the cliff, waiting, contented.
At noon the first roar came down off the Redcrown.
It was short. Very short. A single bark of thunder that went off over the hollow like a door slammed in a palace.
Hester chewed. She tilted her head, considering it.
A minute later came another one. Shorter still. Sharper. It knocked a pine cone off a tree fifty metres away.
Hester swallowed her bread. She brushed the crumbs off her knees. Then she raised one hand, without looking up, the way she had once raised it in the yard at Solenne to a nine-year-old who had finally, after a whole summer, got her footwork right.
She held up two fingers, very slightly apart.
High above, on the ledge, a long red head leaned out over the drop to look.
Hester nodded at it, once.
The dragon withdrew. A moment later, faint, from deep inside the mountain, came a noise Hester had heard once or twice in her long life, mostly from young knights who had been praised when they weren’t expecting it.
It sounded very much like somebody trying not to look pleased.
Hester unscrewed her tea.
“Much better,” she told the horse.