By morning, the bowl had visitors.
Alice came down at first light to find six people at the bar, looking up at the shelf the way pilgrims in Solenne looked up at the old banners in the Hall of Kings. Dobbs had his hat in his hands. The basket woman had brought a friend. Pip was sitting on the bar itself, which Marta did not allow, with his lute across his knees.
“It’s tiny,” said the friend.
“It’s the beast’s bowl,” Dobbs told her. “She took it right off the beast. Its own supper bowl.”
“What does a beast that size eat out of a bowl that size?”
Dobbs gave this the full attention of a man who had once poked a bull. “Small things,” he decided.
“Blood,” said Pip dreamily. “The blood of its enemies. Drop by drop.” He played a chord. It was in tune. It had been in tune for eleven days now, so the town had stopped remarking on it.
“Small enemies, then,” said the friend.
Alice sat down on her stool. Marta put two eggs in front of her without being asked.
“They’ve been here since I opened the shutters,” Marta said. “I’ve sold more cider before breakfast than I sell at the Fair.”
“You could take it down.”
“I could.” Marta wiped a cup. She did not take it down.
“The crack,” Pip announced to the room, pointing with the neck of the lute, “is where Brightoath struck it. I’ve decided.”
Alice ate an egg so that she would not have to say anything. The crack was where a dragon had breathed on a lump of clay more gently than she had ever breathed on anything. Alice had been there. She had held her own breath for a count of thirty.
Gideon came down the stairs in full gilt. The goat skull came with him, as it now came everywhere, tucked under his arm like a helmet he had grown fond of.
“Alice! Is it true? Pip says you took it from under the beast’s nose!”
“Something like that.”
“I’d give fifty crowns for it.” He turned to Marta with his best smile, the one that had made a whole tourney of ladies in Solenne drop their handkerchiefs. “Fifty crowns, Mistress Brin.”
“Not for sale.”
“A hundred.”
“Still not.”
Gideon took this beautifully, as he took everything. He sat down beside Alice. He set the skull on the bar between them so that it seemed to be listening.
“Between us,” he said, low, “I think they’re a set. My skull. Your bowl. It gives us things, Alice. Have you noticed? Nobody else. In all the old stories it only ever takes.”
Alice looked at the skull. The skull looked at the bowl.
“It gave the guild their boots back,” she said.
“Exactly!”
She had no answer to that. She ate the second egg.
In the corner, at the small table under the stairs, Hester sat with bread and a mug of cold tea. She had been there when Alice came down. She was always there when Alice came down, as if she had been set out the night before with the cups.
“You came down those stairs heavy on the left,” Hester said.
“I did not.”
“Left,” said Hester. “Like a cart with a soft wheel. When did you last train? Properly. With somebody who hits back.”
A year, Alice thought. Nobody had hit back in a year. Somebody had flicked a tail at her, now and then, as lightly as a cat moving a cork. That wasn’t the same.
“You’ve gone soft on that side,” Hester said. “You drop the shoulder.”
“So I’ve been told.”
One grey eyebrow went up a very small distance. “By whom?”
Alice found the inside of her cup extremely interesting. “A sparring partner.”
“Good one?”
She thought about a tail as long as the guildhall, about a weight that did not move however hard she pushed. “The best I’ve ever had.”
“Then train with them,” said Hester. “Drop that shoulder in a real fight, you’ll lose the arm.”
“Dame Hester’s staying till the Fair!” Gideon said, delighted, as if he had arranged it. “She’s agreed!”
“Said I’d stay,” said Hester. “Didn’t say agreed.” She tore her bread in half. “Your company’s in the yard at the second bell, Fairweather. All of them. Tell the mage to bring a cushion.”
Gideon looked as though somebody had given him a pony.
Alice buckled her top strap on the gatepost at the first try. In the yard, Bram, Wren, Odo and Little Fen were already standing in a row, waiting for the second bell with the faces of people who had heard about Hester. Odo had brought his own cushion. He was sitting on it.
* * *
Rakshaza had been awake since before dawn, thinking about a shelf.
It was a ridiculous thing to think about. She knew that. She had thought about empires falling, once or twice, with less attention. But the bowl was down there in a room full of people, among all the cups. Somebody had put it on a shelf. She did not know which shelf. She found that she very much wanted to know which shelf.
She yawned the sky clear from the ledge, then practised four short roars at it. The second was the best. She would have liked a second opinion. She went back into the cave to wait for the only one she trusted, which was absurd. Three thousand years of opinions, all her own. They had always been enough.
Alice came up the last stretch of the climb at the usual hour, in full plate, her sword on her hip. She stopped at the edge of her circle. She did not sit.
“I want a real bout,” she said.
Rakshaza lifted her head off the coins. “Today?”
“Hester says I’ve gone soft on the left.”
“You have. I told you months ago.”
“You said it was endearing.”
“It is. It’s also soft.” Rakshaza tilted her head. “A real one? Properly?”
“Properly. I’ll come at you as hard as I can. You hit back.”
Nobody had ever asked her for that. People had come at her, certainly. Armies had come at her. Not one of them had asked first, as if it were a favour she might grant. Rakshaza rose onto all fours with a long slide of gold off her back. She tried to look bored. She had three thousand years of practice at looking bored. It did not help in the least.
“Draw, Hero.”
Alice drew.
It was not like the old days. In the old days, Alice had fought like someone carrying a full cup across a crowded room, all care, nothing spilt. Now she came in low and fast. Brightoath hit the scales over Rakshaza’s left wrist hard enough that the whole cave rang. Rakshaza had to plant that wrist to keep it where it was. She had not had to plant anything in two hundred years.
Alice laughed. She came round again. The sword rang off the jaw, off the shoulder, off the root of the tail. Every blow was full weight.
Every blow was given to something that could take it, the way you might give a hug to someone who would not break.
Rakshaza swept her tail along the floor. Alice jumped it. Rakshaza swept it back. Alice jumped it again, landing on the left foot.
There, Rakshaza thought. The shoulder.
She had been measuring every movement for a year. She measured this one too. She sent the very tip of her tail at the soft side, lighter than a breath on a candle, simply to show the gap was there.
The tip found the edge of the left pauldron. A strap parted with a snap. The pauldron went spinning off Alice’s shoulder in a long silver turn, high over the bed. It dropped out of sight behind the carved headboard.
It did not land with the sound of steel on coins. It landed with the sound of steel on steel.
Rakshaza went very still.
It came out too fast. She heard it come out too fast.
Alice was rubbing her bare shoulder, grinning, breathing hard. “It’s my pauldron.”
“The hoard has it now. I’ll find it later. Hoards are... there’s a whole process.”
“It’s right there.”
“Hero...”
But Alice was already walking. Rakshaza’s body wanted to be between her and the bed. It would have meant stepping over the bed with a wing, through a headboard nine hundred years old. She shifted instead. It took no time at all. It took far too long.
* * *
The bed was the size of a courtyard. Walking round it took a while.
Alice had lost things to the hoard all year. Everybody knew the hoard ate armour. Well, Alice knew. The Crown’s quartermaster in
Solenne had written to her twice about the price of pauldrons. She had long since stopped looking for anything that went over the bed. You could have lost a cart in there.
Behind the headboard, the gold simply stopped.
There was a cleft in the rock, perhaps two metres wide, a little more than her own height. Beyond it the floor was bare stone. Not one coin. Swept.
She stepped through.
It was a small, quiet place, smaller than a chapel. Light came in from the cave behind her, low and gold. The far wall had been smoothed, she did not know how. Old spearheads had been driven into it in long straight rows, the way a farmer puts pegs in a barn wall for his tools.
On every spearhead hung a piece of her armour.
She knew them. That was the worst of it, or the best. She knew every one. A gauntlet with the knuckles crushed flat. A greave scraped silver down one side. Three helmets, each with a different dent, one of them folded in at the brow like a bad hat. Vambraces. A breastplate, its blue cloth faded nearly white. A sabaton with the toe turned up as if it were surprised. The visor of her very first helmet, bent double like a letter somebody had meant to post.
There were thirty-one pieces. She counted. She had never been able to stop herself counting.
Every one of them had been polished. The steel shone even where it was creased. She touched the inside of the nearest gauntlet. The leather had been oiled. Somebody had oiled the inside of a ruined glove.
Under each piece, in the stone, there was a small scratched mark in some old script she could not read. Not decoration. Something written down.
Her pauldron lay on the floor below the last row, where it had bounced. At the end of that row, nine more spearheads stood out of the rock.
Empty.
In Solenne, broken things went back to the armoury. They came out again as other things. Nothing of hers had ever been kept. She had never had a drawer with old things in it, the way people in houses had drawers. She had envied them the drawers, a little, when she let herself.
She stood very still in the swept place. Behind her, quiet feet came across the stone.
* * *
Day six.
Rakshaza had not thought of it in months. She thought of it now, standing at the mouth of the cleft in a gown the colour of old honey, her tail low.
On the sixth day the hero had charged her for the sixth time. Rakshaza, bored past bearing, had flicked her tail the way you would flick a fly off a sleeve. The hero had gone twelve metres through the air into a stack of silver plates. The noise had been like a kitchen falling down a well.
Then it had been quiet.
For the first time in a very long time, Rakshaza had not known what came next. She had forgotten. How small they were. How far a small thing went when you flicked it.
The plates moved. The hero stood up out of them. She tore the folded visor off her helmet, threw it into the hoard, said, “Same time tomorrow,” then walked out of the cave without limping. Rakshaza understood, much later, that not limping had cost her a great deal.
That night Rakshaza found the visor. She meant to throw it on the heap. She drove a spearhead into the rock behind the bed instead, with a stone, in human form, at midnight, feeling foolish. She hung the visor on it.
She told herself it was to remind her to be careful. That was even true.
From the seventh day on, she had measured every movement. She had never been careful with anything in her whole long life. She had learned it on the hero. Badly, at first. Thirty-one times badly.
Alice did not turn round.
“The hoard didn’t eat them,” she said.
“The hoard eats a great many things.”
“Not these.”
Rakshaza came one step into the swept place. It had never had two people in it. It felt smaller. It felt like a room. “Dragons keep what falls into their caves, Hero. It’s well known. It’s in all the stories.”
“You have a mountain of gold out there.” Alice’s voice was not quite steady. “You keep my old gauntlets in a cupboard.”
“It is not a cupboard.”
“It’s swept.”
Rakshaza had no answer to that. She looked at the wall instead. She knew every piece on it better than she knew the crowns in her hoard.
“It’s Crown steel,” she tried. “Very good steel. I may want it for something.”
“For what?”
“A hobby.”
“Your hobbies are out there.” Alice turned at last. Her eyes were very blue. Her ears were not pink, not scarlet, simply pale. “Under the dust.”
“This one isn’t dusty,” said Rakshaza, before she could stop herself.
The words stood there in the quiet. Neither of them picked them up.
Alice reached out. She touched the bent visor on the first spearhead, very lightly, the way you might touch a sleeping animal to see if it was warm.
“This was from my first helmet.”
“Day six.”
“You remember.”
“You went into the plates.” Rakshaza found she had to look at the visor, not at Alice. “I had forgotten how far a small thing goes. I’d never been careful with anything. I had to learn it.” She lifted one hand at the rows. “On you.”
“You never hurt me.”
“No. I hurt your armour. Thirty-one times.”
Alice looked down at the floor. “Thirty-two.”
Rakshaza made a sound that was nearly a laugh. It went wrong in the middle.
“They say I don’t break,” Alice said quietly. “It’s in the prophecy. One shall climb who does not break. They taught it to me before they taught me to read.”
“I’ve heard it. It was very popular when I woke up.”
“Everything I wore broke, though.”
“Yes.”
“You kept it.”
“Somebody ought to,” said Rakshaza.
There was a word for what this was. They both knew it. Rakshaza could see Alice knowing it, the way she had once watched a lake know the first frost. It stood in the swept place between them, larger than the wall.
Neither of them said it.
The silence went on. Rakshaza let it. She had never in her life let a silence go on without filling it with something clever. She found it did not need filling. This chapter was taken from novelping . com without permission.
At last Alice looked along the last row, at the end of it.
“What are the empty ones for?”
Rakshaza’s ear tips went hot. She felt them go. There was nothing to be done about it.
“Pegs are hard to come by,” she said finally. “One plans ahead.”
Alice counted. Rakshaza watched her count, the small movement of her lips.
“Nine,” said Alice.
“Nine.”
Alice looked at the empty spearheads for a long moment. Then she looked at Rakshaza.
“That’s not very many,” she said.
Rakshaza’s tail, which had been lying on the stone like a dropped rope, curled once round her own ankle. She did not tell it off. She could not have spoken just then.
“I can drive more,” she said, when she could.
“I’d like that.”
* * *
Alice bent down. She picked up the pauldron off the floor, the new dent bright along its edge. She hung it on the first empty spearhead herself, with care, so that it sat straight.
“You can’t hang your own,” said Rakshaza. “That isn’t... that’s not how it works.”
“How does it work?”
Rakshaza opened her mouth. She closed it. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Nobody has ever been in here.”
She came forward. One nail lengthened into a curved black claw. She knelt by the wall, her hair spilling over her shoulder onto the swept stone. She scratched a small neat mark under the pauldron in the old script.
“What does it say?” Alice asked.
“Today.”
Alice did not decide to kiss her. It was simply the next thing, the way the next step on a stair is. Rakshaza was kneeling by the wall. Then she was standing, with Alice’s hands in her hair, smelling of smoke and cinnamon. Somewhere a gown the colour of old honey met a breastplate with a sound like a dinner service losing an argument.
They did not make it round the headboard. They went over it.
The headboard was nine hundred years old. Afterwards, Rakshaza would complain about this at some length. At the time, nobody complained about anything.
* * *
Later, lying across the bed with the light gone long and low, Alice watched the carved hunting scene on the headboard upside down. One of the stags had lost an antler. She felt she might have been responsible.
Rakshaza was lying on her front with her chin on her folded arms. She was watching Alice with a look Alice could not read.
“You didn’t say it,” Rakshaza said.
“Say what?”
“You always say it. Into the pillow, usually. Sometimes at the ceiling.”
Alice thought back. She had not said it. She had not even thought of it. She went hot all the way down to her collarbones.
“Never again,” she said.
“Too late.” Rakshaza sounded enormously pleased. “It doesn’t count once you’ve been asked.”
“That’s not a rule.”
“It’s an old one. Older than your kingdom.”
“You’ve just made it up.”
“Prove it,” said Rakshaza. She put her face back down on her arms, but Alice could see the corner of her smile.
At sunset Rakshaza buckled her into her armour, every strap, from the sabatons up. She stopped at the left shoulder. There was nothing there to buckle.
“Hester will notice,” Alice said.
“Tell her the hoard ate it.”
“Hester doesn’t believe in hoards.”
“Then tell her you trained.” Rakshaza’s hands rested a moment on the bare steel of the backplate, just where the pauldron would have sat. “You did.”
At the tunnel mouth, Alice turned. “Same time tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here. I am always here.” Then, as the hero swung down onto the first hold: “Mind the left.”
* * *
When the sound of the horse had gone from the hollow, Rakshaza went round behind the loom. She scratched a seventh mark on the wall with the silver dagger. She did not look to see whether it was straight.
Then she went round behind the bed. She sat on the swept floor until it was fully dark, looking at thirty-two pieces of white steel, at eight empty spearheads.
Eight. It really wasn’t very many.
* * *
The common room was full, as it was every evening. Every head turned as Alice came in. Every head went, in one movement, to her left shoulder.
Gideon stood up so fast he knocked the skull off the table. He caught it.
“Alice! Your shoulder! It’s gone!”
“The pauldron’s gone. The shoulder’s fine.”
“It took it? The beast took your pauldron?” His face lit up like the Lantern Fair come early. “A trophy! It took a trophy from you! Alice, do you know what this means?”
“No,” said Alice, with feeling.
“It respects you!” He held up the goat skull in both hands, triumphant. “Like me! We’re the only two people in the realm it’s ever exchanged anything with!”
Alice looked at the skull. She thought about a swept place behind a bed, about thirty-two pieces of steel, about a spearhead with nothing on it yet.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what it means.”
Under the stairs, Hester had not moved. She looked at the bare shoulder for a long time. Then she looked at Alice’s face.
“Trained, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Good partner?”
Alice sat down. Marta put a cider in front of her. “They kept my pauldron,” Alice said.
Hester chewed her bread. “Keep the partner,” she said.
“I’m going to give it mine,” Gideon announced to the room. “Tomorrow. My left pauldron. An exchange of honours, knight to beast.”
“Fairweather,” said Hester.
Gideon sat down. “After the drills,” he said.
Alice thought of a golden pauldron hanging on the wall behind the bed, in the middle of all that white steel. She thought of the face Rakshaza would make. She laughed so hard that Marta had to take the cider away.