Gideon presented the pauldron at breakfast, wrapped in a silk scarf the colour of egg yolk.
He did it standing. He did it with both hands, the way squires in Solenne presented a sword to the King on his birthday. The common room stopped eating to watch. Dobbs took his hat off, then seemed unsure whether this was the right occasion for it, so he put it back on.
“I cannot carry it to the beast myself,” Gideon said. “Dame Hester has forbidden the mountain.”
“Dame Hester has forbidden breakfast running late,” said Hester from under the stairs. “Second bell, Fairweather.”
“So I ask you, Alice. As my second.” He laid the bundle on the bar beside her eggs. Something folded inside the silk went clank. “There’s a letter.”
There was. It was tucked under the knot, on good paper, sealed with gold wax. On the outside, in a large round hand, Gideon had written: TO THE RED STORM. FROM ONE WARRIOR TO ANOTHER.
Alice looked at it for a long moment.
“You’ve sealed it,” she said.
“It’s private.”
“It’s a letter to a dragon.”
“Even so.” Gideon’s face was perfectly serious. “Between warriors, there are things one doesn’t share.”
Alice had written to the Crown’s quartermaster the night before, for the third time that year, to explain the loss of a left pauldron. She had written lost in combat. She had looked at those words for a long time before sealing them. They were true. They were the truest thing she had sent to Solenne in a year.
She put Gideon’s bundle under her arm.
When she rode out of the yard, Hester’s drill had already begun. Bram, Wren, Odo and Little Fen stood in a line. Gideon stood at the end of it, gilt from collar to boots except for his left shoulder, which was bare linen. Alice rode past him with her own left shoulder bare.
“Two heroes,” said the basket woman at the gate, to nobody in particular. “Three shoulders.”
“Fairweather,” came Hester’s voice across the yard. “You’re dropping it.”
“Dropping what, Dame Hester?”
“The left. It’s your soft side now. Congratulations.”
* * *
The cave smelled of cold coins and warm dragon. Rakshaza was lying across the hoard with her chin beside the swept circle, pretending to be asleep. She had been pretending to be asleep for some time. Alice could tell because one emerald eye was open a crack, watching the bundle under her arm.
“You’ve brought me something.”
“Gideon has brought you something.” Alice set it down in the circle. “I’m only the second.”
Rakshaza lifted her head. She looked at the yellow silk. She looked at the gold wax.
“It has a letter,” she said, in a voice of deep suspicion.
“It’s private. Between warriors.”
The shift came with a warm push of air. The coins in the circle skittered. Rakshaza crouched over the bundle in human form, barefoot, in a gown the dark green-blue of deep water, her tail curled behind her like a question. She broke the seal with one nail. She read the letter in silence. Her face did several things, one after another, none of them for long.
“Well?” said Alice.
Rakshaza cleared her throat. She read aloud, in a perfect imitation of Gideon’s earnest tenor.
“Mighty one. I have faced you once, without my boots, and you returned them. I have faced you twice, in the person of my friend, and you have taken of her steel as you once took of mine. I understand now. You do not take. You exchange. I offer my left pauldron in that same spirit. Keep it as I keep the skull. Should we meet again in battle, I shall know it by the dent you leave in my other one.” She lowered the letter. “Yours in honour, Gideon Fairweather. P.S. I hope this finds you well.”
Alice sat down in her circle very carefully, as if it might tip over.
“He hopes this finds me well,” said Rakshaza.
“He means it.”
“I know he means it. That’s the worst of him.” She tugged the silk open. The pauldron lay inside like a large gilt shell. Somebody had polished it until it hurt to look at. “It’s steel pretending to be gold. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like a turnip painted to look like an apple.”
From far below, in the hollow, a horse whickered.
“Not you,” Rakshaza called towards the tunnel. “A different turnip.”
Alice put her face in her gauntlets. Her shoulders shook.
“Where are you going to put it?”
“Not on the wall.”
“No.”
“Absolutely not on the wall.” Rakshaza picked the pauldron up between two fingers, the way you would lift a fish somebody had left on your pillow. She walked away across the hoard with it, her tail high. Alice got up to follow.
The marble king stood where he always stood, on his plinth between the goblets and the loom. The clay from the pottery had dried grey on his upper lip. Nobody had cleaned it off. He looked like a man who had been told some very bad news about his moustache.
Rakshaza reached up. She settled the gilt pauldron on his marble head at a slight angle, like a helmet worn to a party.
“There,” she said. “Now he’s somebody.”
The king gazed out over the hoard with enormous dignity. A small fleck of gilt caught the light and threw it back across the cave.
Alice laughed so hard she had to sit down on a chest of silver forks.
* * *
Afterwards, they lay on the ledge in the sun. Rakshaza was a dragon again, stretched along the rock with her tail over the edge, her chin on her folded wing-wrists. Alice sat against the warm red curve of her side with her legs out in front of her. Far below, Turnip grazed by the stream. The hollow was otherwise empty. Hester had the company in the yard until noon. After noon she made them run.
“What will you tell him?” Rakshaza asked.
“That you accepted it.”
“Tell him I wore it.”
“You didn’t wear it.”
“A king wore it. On my behalf. That’s how kings work.”
Alice tipped her head back against the scales. The sky over the Redcrown was the clear hard blue of late summer. A hawk turned below them, between the ledge and the trees.
“Have you ever been anywhere,” Rakshaza said, “that you weren’t sent?”
Alice thought about it. She thought about it properly, because it was the kind of question that deserved it.
Solenne, at seven, in the back of a Crown carriage. The training yard. The palace steps, the swearing. Border forts. A bridge somebody wanted held. A village with wolves. A lake with something in it. Brackenford. The Redcrown.
“No,” she said.
“Not once?”
“There was never time. There was always somewhere I was needed.” She shrugged against the scales. “Normal people go places. On a holiday. To see a sister. I used to watch them on the roads. I never knew where they were going. I always wanted to ask.”
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Rakshaza was quiet for a long moment. Then she lifted her head off her wrists.
“Get up,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m about to take off, Hero. You’re leaning on me.”
“Take off where?”
Alice stood up. She looked at the dragon. She looked at the hundred-metre drop.
“I am not,” she said, “riding you like a pony.”
“Nobody asked you to.”
“Heroes don’t ride dragons. In the stories, the ones who try get eaten.”
“In the stories, the ones who try are very rude about it.” Rakshaza tilted her great head. “You could stand on the edge. I’ll take you off it. The way I did once before.”
The way she had done once before. Month three, the gust, the fall. The pine forty metres to the left. Alice had told her she’d had that.
She went to the edge of the ledge. She stood there in her armour with one shoulder bare, her heart going like Pip’s lute on a fast verse.
“Gently,” she said.
“Hero. I learned gently on you.”
Rakshaza dropped off the ledge.
For a moment there was nothing in front of Alice but air. Then the whole sky behind her filled with a sound like a ship’s sail taking the wind. The red shape went down, out, round in one long curve. It came back up past the ledge so close that the draught pulled Alice’s braid sideways.
Hind talons closed round her. Not tight. Each one was longer than her arm. They held her the way two cupped hands hold water. Her feet left the rock.
The Redcrown fell away beneath her.
* * *
Rakshaza had carried a great many things in her life. Cattle, mostly. A bronze bell once, for reasons. A small ship, very briefly, out of a storm, back into a harbour where it would rather have been. She had never carried anything that complained this much.
“This is undignified!”
“You’re flying!”
“I’m dangling! I’m dangling like a sheep you’ve bought at market!”
“I have never bought a sheep.” Rakshaza beat her wings once, climbing. “I pay for goats. It’s not the same.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Look down.”
Alice looked down. She stopped complaining.
Rakshaza felt her stop. The weight in her talons went still, then quite suddenly very light, the way a held thing goes light when it stops bracing against you. They were above the tree line. Above the scree. The hollow had become a green thumbprint. Turnip was a grey dot with his head up, watching. The stream was a silver thread somebody had dropped.
She climbed again. North, away from the town. She would have to bank at the summit to keep the whole bulk of the mountain between them and Brackenford. She knew exactly where every roof was. She had been not watching them for a year.
The summit of the Redcrown was a crooked spine of bare rock above the last of the snow. She came in low over it, wings cupped, slowing. She set Alice down on a flat shelf of stone as gently as she had ever set down anything, a little more gently than the bowl. Then she landed beside her on all four limbs in a long spill of loose scree.
Alice was standing very straight. Her hair was everywhere. Her cheeks were scarlet from the wind.
“Well?” said Rakshaza.
“It’s very cold.”
“It’s very high.”
“My legs are asleep.” Alice shook one. Then she looked at the dragon’s neck for a long, considering moment. “If I sat there.”
“Yes?”
“Would I be able to see? Properly?”
“Hero. You would be able to see everything.”
Alice took a long breath. Rakshaza lowered herself until her chest lay on the rock. She stretched her neck out flat along the ground like a bridge laid over a stream. Alice walked up it. Her steel boots rang on the scales. She sat down between two of the low ridges that ran along the back of the neck, where it met the shoulders. She took hold of the ridge in front of her with both hands.
“This isn’t riding,” she said firmly. “This is a better position from which to look down.”
“Of course.”
“I want that understood.”
“It’s understood.”
Rakshaza rose onto her hind legs on the summit for the length of one breath. Then she threw herself off it.
* * *
The world opened.
Alice had seen maps. She had stood on towers. None of it had prepared her for this. The whole of Aurelmark lay under her, laid out like a quilt on a bed, the fields stitched in gold and green. Rivers went across it in bright crooked threads. To the south there was a blue smudge that might have been Solenne. To the east, a darker blue line that she realised, slowly, was the sea. She had never seen the sea.
The wind was enormous. It roared in her ears. It tore at her braid. Under her, through the scales, she felt the wings working, the long slow beat of them going up through her legs like a heart.
She had expected to be cold. She was not cold. The neck under her was warm all the way through, the way a hearthstone stays warm after the fire is out. The wind could not get past it.
“Where are we going?” she shouted.
“Somewhere!” The dragon’s voice came up through the scales as much as through the air. It hummed in Alice’s bones.
“Where?”
“Does it matter?”
Alice opened her mouth to say yes. Everything in her whole life had mattered. Every road had a reason at the end of it, somebody waiting, something wrong.
“No,” she said. Then louder, into the wind, astonished: “No!”
She laughed. It came out of her the way a bird comes out of a hedge when you walk past. She could not have stopped it. She did not try.
They flew north for what might have been an hour. Nobody could see them. They were too high for anybody to look up and find anything but a red speck that might have been a hawk. Nobody could ask Alice for anything up here. Nobody could even see her face.
She found that she had stopped holding it any particular way.
* * *
The lake was in the mountains to the north, in a high stone bowl nobody had built. It was very small, very round, very blue. There were no roads to it. No paths. No fires had ever been lit on its shore.
Rakshaza came down beside it on all fours. Alice slid down her neck with a sound like a cart full of pans going down a hill. She landed on her backside in the moss. She sat there laughing.
“What’s it called?”
“I have a name for it.”
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“I’m not telling you.” Rakshaza shifted in a gust of warm air. The deep green-blue gown settled round her ankles. She sat down on a flat rock at the edge of the water, put her bare feet in the lake, then let her tail slide in after them. “Some things a person keeps.”
Alice sat beside her on the rock. She took her gauntlets off. She put her hands in the water, which was so cold it made her gasp. Rakshaza took the hands out again without a word. She held them in her lap until they stopped hurting.
The sight of her there, horns, hair, tail, all of her, sitting quietly with her feet in water, took Alice somewhere else.
* * *
Month six. Late in the morning. Alice had climbed, drawn Brightoath at the tunnel mouth, walked her fifty-three steps.
The dragon was not on the hoard.
In the middle of the swept circle stood a stool. On the stool, with a lamp beside her, sat a woman. Red hair spilled down her back to the stone. Black horns curved up from it. A long red tail had wound itself round one leg of the stool. She was reading a book as thick as a doorstep, propped on her knees.
“You’re late,” said the woman, without looking up.
Alice knew the voice. It was the same voice, only smaller, as if somebody had folded it.
She stood with Brightoath raised for a long time. The woman turned a page.
There were a great many things a hero was trained to strike. A woman sitting on a stool, reading, was not one of them. Alice could not make her arms do it. She stood there until her shoulders ached, feeling more foolish than she had ever felt in plate.
“Put that down, Hero,” the woman said at last, still reading. “I’m at a good part.”
Alice put it down. She sat at the edge of the circle. After a while, because she could not help herself, she asked what the book was about.
It was about a siege, eight hundred years ago. A city that would not open its gates. The dragon read it aloud to her, the whole afternoon, doing the voices. She did the besieging general very badly on purpose. Alice laughed at him. She was ashamed of laughing. Then she laughed again.
At sunset Alice picked up her sword.
“Same time tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here.” Green eyes lifted at last from the page. “I’ll be on chapter nine.”
It was the first day in six months that nobody had fought anybody.
* * *
“That day,” Alice said now, by the lake. “With the book. Were you really reading?”
Rakshaza looked at the water.
“I had read that page eleven times,” she said, “before you came up the tunnel.”
“You were waiting for me.”
“I was reading. Very slowly. It was a difficult page.”
“You’d planned it.”
“I had planned it for three weeks.” Rakshaza’s ear tips had gone hot. “I tried four different stools.”
Alice leaned against her. Their shoulders touched, her bare left one against the green-blue silk. Neither of them said anything for a while. A fish rose in the middle of the lake. The rings went out to the edges.
“Thank you,” Alice said. “For this.”
“It’s only a lake.”
“It’s the first place I’ve ever been.”
Rakshaza turned her head. She looked at Alice for a long moment, her face very close, the green of her eyes the same green as the shallows.
“Then it’s yours,” she said. “I’ll tell you the name some other time.”
Alice kissed her. It was slow, unhurried, a little cold at first from the water, then not cold at all. Nobody was waiting for either of them. There was nowhere they had to be. Alice had not known a kiss could feel like that, like a whole free afternoon.
When they broke apart, Rakshaza rested her forehead against Alice’s for a moment. The black horns were warm against Alice’s temple.
“We should go back,” Alice said, not moving.
“In a while.”
“Turnip will think I’ve been eaten.”
“Turnip,” said Rakshaza, “knows exactly what you’ve been.”
* * *
They came back the long way round, with the sun going low and gold behind them. Alice rode the neck the whole way. She had stopped saying it wasn’t riding somewhere over the second valley.
Rakshaza came down into the hollow behind the mountain’s shoulder. She set Alice on her feet beside the stream. Turnip lifted his head from the grass, looked at them both, then went back to eating. Nothing a dragon did had surprised him in a year.
At the foot of the cliff, Alice turned.
“Same time tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here. I am always here.” The great head dipped, close. The voice dropped to a warm rumble only Alice could hear. “Unless you’d like to go somewhere.”
* * *
The common room was full. Gideon was on his feet before she reached the bar.
“Well? Well? Did it accept it?”
Alice sat down. Marta set a cider in front of her. Every head in the room turned.
“It read the letter,” Alice said.
Gideon pressed a hand to his heart. “It reads.”
“It reads very well.”
“What did it do with the pauldron?”
Alice drank some cider. She thought about the marble king standing in the hoard with clay on his lip and a gilt shell on his head, gazing out over everything with enormous dignity.
“It put it on a king,” she said.
There was a silence.
“A king?” said Gideon. His eyes had filled. “It gave my pauldron to a king?”
“Which king?” said Pip, pen already out.
“A marble one.” Alice considered. “He’s had a hard week.”
Gideon sat down slowly. He looked at the goat skull beside his plate as though it might understand. “A king,” he whispered to it.
Under the stairs, Hester had not looked up from her stew. Her eyes went to Alice’s hair, which had not been combed since the summit, then to her cheeks, which were still pink from a wind that did not blow anywhere near the Redcrown’s foot.
“Been somewhere?” Hester said.
Alice thought about it. She thought about it properly.
“Yes,” she said.
Hester nodded once. She went back to her stew. Across the room, Pip was trying to find a rhyme for marble. From the sound of it, he was not finding one.