The new pauldron came on the morning coach from Solenne, packed in straw, with a letter.
Dame Alice, the letter said. Enclosed please find one (1) left pauldron, Crown pattern, white. This office notes that it is the ninth pauldron issued to you since last summer. This office further notes, with respect, that the beast has not yet been slain. This office wonders whether the beast is perhaps eating them. Yours in the service of the realm, Osric Thwaite, Clerk to the Quartermaster.
Alice read it twice at the bar. She folded it into her vambrace, next to the rules and the forty-silver notice. The vambrace was getting crowded.
The new pauldron was very bright. It had never been hit by anything. When she buckled it on at the gatepost, it squeaked.
“It squeaks,” said Gideon, who still had a bare left shoulder. He had decided to keep it bare until the Lantern Fair, in honour of the beast.
“It’s new.”
“Mine never squeaked.” He said it kindly, the way you would tell somebody their baby had a loud cry. “Give it a week of battle. It’ll settle.”
It was market day in Brackenford. The square was full of stalls under striped awnings: cheeses, rope, onions, a man selling knives that he swore could cut a falling hair. Alice rode Turnip through the middle of it at a walk, nodding at people who called out to her. At the far end, by the well, the chapbook man had set up his tray.
He came once a fortnight. He was very old, very thin, with a tray hung round his neck on a strap. On the tray, in neat rows, lay the penny romances. Thin booklets with paper covers, every cover a drawing of somebody fainting into somebody else’s arms.
Alice did not stop. She never stopped. She rode past at a walk, leaned down from the saddle as if to check Turnip’s girth, dropped a penny on the tray. The old man, without looking up, slid a booklet off the end of the top row into her hand. She tucked it into her saddlebag. She sat up again.
It took less than a breath. They had been doing it for a year. Nobody in Brackenford had ever noticed.
“Morning, Dame,” said the chapbook man, to the air.
“Morning,” said Alice, to the well.
The new one was called The Pirate Queen’s Captive. On the cover, a woman with a cutlass was carrying a man in a frilled shirt up a rope ladder. Alice had not had time to look properly. She found she was very much looking forward to it.
* * *
Rakshaza had taken to visiting the horse.
She would not have called it that. She would have said she happened to be in the hollow. She happened to be in the hollow most mornings now, in human form, sitting on the flat boulder by the stream, before Alice arrived. Turnip would come over to stand beside her. He would lean his great grey head down so she could reach the place behind his jaw that he liked scratched. They did not talk about anything. It was very restful.
This morning she was in a gown the deep russet of autumn bracken, her feet in the stream, when Alice rode down into the hollow.
“You’re early,” said Alice.
“You’re squeaking.”
“It’s new. It’s the ninth.” Alice swung down from the saddle. The pauldron squeaked again, as if to agree. “The Crown would like to know whether you eat them.”
“Only on feast days.” Rakshaza held out a hand to Turnip, palm up. Turnip ignored it. He had his nose in Alice’s saddlebag.
“He wants the apple,” Alice said. She went to fill her flask at the stream. “Leave it, Turnip. After.”
Turnip did not leave it. Turnip had his own opinions about after. He got the flap of the saddlebag in his teeth, gave one practised tug, then a second. The buckle gave. The flap came open. The apple fell out into the grass.
So did fourteen small paper booklets.
They went everywhere. They slid off each other like a dropped deck of cards. One landed face up against Rakshaza’s bare foot. On its cover, a man in a velvet coat was kneeling in the rain, holding up a ring to a woman on a balcony.
Rakshaza picked it up.
“Lord Ravenmoor’s Secret Heart,” she read aloud.
Behind her, at the stream, there was a sound like a full flask being dropped into water.
Rakshaza turned the booklet over. She opened it somewhere in the middle. She read, in a low, throbbing voice: “’You are cruel,’ she whispered, ‘to come to me like this, with your cravat undone.’ Lord Ravenmoor’s dark eyes burned. ‘Then I am cruel,’ he said, ‘for I can no longer bear the weight of my own cravat.’”
She looked up.
Alice stood at the edge of the stream, wet to the wrist, her face the colour of a poppy. Her ears had gone past scarlet into a shade Rakshaza had never seen on a living person.
“Put that down,” Alice said.
“His cravat, Hero. The weight of it.”
“Put it down.”
Rakshaza looked at the other thirteen booklets lying in the grass. She looked at Alice in her full plate, with her squeaking pauldron, standing between her and the cliff.
She smiled.
She could be very quick, when she wanted to be. She had simply never had a reason to be quick about books. Rakshaza swept all fourteen into the saddlebag with one arm, slung the strap over her shoulder, kissed Turnip on the nose in passing, then ran for the cliff.
“That is my property!”
“It’s in my hollow!” Rakshaza was already three metres up the rock, barefoot, her tail swinging for balance, the russet gown hitched into her belt. “Everything that falls into my hollow is hoard! It’s well known!”
“It’s a saddlebag!”
Rakshaza did not answer. She was climbing. She climbed the way water runs downhill, without seeming to think about it at all. Behind her came the steel-shod scramble of somebody in full plate going up a hundred metres of rock much faster than was safe, saying words a hero was not supposed to know. The new pauldron squeaked at every hold.
* * *
By the time Alice reached the circle, the books were laid out across it in four neat rows.
Rakshaza was lying on her front in the middle of them in human form, her chin in her hands, her tail waving slowly behind her. She had one open in front of her. She was reading with complete attention.
“I’ve sorted them,” she said, without looking up. “By how often they’ve been read. The spines tell you. That one’s nearly in two pieces.” She pointed with her tail. “The Baker’s Daughter.”
Alice stood at the edge of the circle, breathing hard.
“Give them back.”
“In a moment. The shepherdess is about to do something stupid.” Rakshaza turned a page. “The shepherdess has just found out the duke is a duke. She’s furious. She thought he was a shepherd. She’s thrown a lamb at him.”
“She doesn’t throw the lamb. She hands him the lamb. In anger.”
There was a pause.
Rakshaza looked up. Her eyes were very green. They were dancing.
“I’ve read three,” Rakshaza went on, with tremendous kindness. “While you were climbing. You climb very loudly, did you know? The ferryman one is sad. He waits at the river for nine years. I didn’t care for that. Nine years is nothing. He should have gone to look for her.” She tapped another cover with her tail. “Lord Ravenmoor is an idiot. He has a great house. He has horses. He spends forty pages not saying a single sentence to the woman he loves because of a misunderstanding about a glove.”
“It was an important glove.”
“It was her sister’s glove, Hero. He could have asked.”
“He was proud.”
“He was an idiot.” Rakshaza turned the page. “Proud people are always idiots in books. I can’t think why.”
Alice took her face out of her gauntlets long enough to look at her. Rakshaza did not look up. Her tail, however, gave one small, guilty twitch.
“How many of these,” Rakshaza said gently, “have you read, Hero?”
“All of them.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t count.” Alice took her hands away. “That’s a lie. I always count. I don’t want to tell you.”
Rakshaza sat up. She did not laugh. She looked at the four rows for a while, at the worn covers, the creased corners, the one that had been read until it was nearly two pieces.
“Why these?” she asked.
Alice sat down at the edge of the circle. The pauldron squeaked. She ignored it.
“Because nobody in them is chosen,” she said. “Nobody’s picked when they’re seven because they fit some lines on a wall. They just meet somebody. At a market, or on a ferry, or he falls off a horse in front of her. Then they have to decide. Everything in those books is somebody deciding.” She picked at a strap on her vambrace. “I bought the first one with my first stipend. I was fifteen. It was the only thing I ever bought that nobody had told me to buy.”
“The Baker’s Daughter,” said Rakshaza.
“She burns every loaf.”
Rakshaza looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked down at the book in her hands. Very quietly, she closed it.
* * *
She had not told Alice about the candle.
It had been at the very bottom of the saddlebag, under the booklets, wrapped in a scrap of faded blue cloth. Rakshaza had found it while she sorted. She had known what it was before she had the cloth off. She would have known it in the dark.
A stub of beeswax, a finger’s width tall, its wick black. The bottom still had the three small dents in it from the points of the crown.
She had sat with it in her palm for a long time, alone in the circle, while somebody below climbed the cliff shouting. She had thought: She kept it. She kept it all summer, at the bottom of a bag, under the only things she ever bought for herself.
Then she had wrapped it up again, exactly as it had been. She had put it back.
There were things a person could not say. She was finding that out. You could keep them on a wall behind a bed. You could keep them at the bottom of a bag. You could not say them. Not yet.
What you could do, Rakshaza had decided, was something very silly instead.
She stood up. She picked up The Shepherdess and the Duke.
“Sit there,” she said. “No. On the chest. You’re the balcony.”
“I’m the what?”
“The balcony. The duke stands below it in the rain. Chapter twelve. You’ve read it more than any of the others, it falls open there by itself.” Rakshaza swept her hair back over one shoulder. “I’m going to do the duke.”
“You are not going to do the duke.”
“I am going to do both of them. I’ve done whole armies before. In voices. Once, to put off a siege.”
Alice sat on the chest.
* * *
It was the worst performance Alice had ever seen.
Rakshaza did the shepherdess in a high, fluttering voice, with a great deal of business involving an invisible lamb. She did the duke a full octave lower, striding up and down across the circle with her tail lashing, pausing to glare at the rain. She did the rain. She did the rain by blowing gently on the coins until they chimed. She did a passing owl, which was not in the book.
“There isn’t an owl.”
“There should be. It’s night. It’s a garden. I’m improving it.”
She did the duke falling to one knee on the wet stones. She did it so hard her horns rang on a goblet. She held up an imaginary ring. Alice, on the chest, was laughing too hard to breathe.
Then Rakshaza began the duke’s speech.
Alice knew it by heart. She had read it by candlelight in fourteen different inns. She knew where it went. It went the way they always went: You are everything I never thought to want. Rakshaza started it in the duke’s voice, low and grand, eyes rolling to heaven.
“I had a great house,” she said, “a great name, a great many things. I had everything a man could have. I was bored by all of it. Then you came across my field with your sheep, every day, with your terrible...”
She stopped.
Alice watched her stop. She watched the duke go out of her face, the way a candle goes out, leaving only the woman holding the book.
Rakshaza looked down at the page. She did not read the next line. Alice knew the next line. It was: with your terrible stubborn heart, until I could not remember a day before you.
The silence stretched. The coins had stopped chiming.
“It’s a very silly book,” said Rakshaza, in her own voice. It came out rougher than it should have.
“I know.”
“It’s badly written. Look. He uses ‘heart’ three times on one page.”
“I know.”
Rakshaza closed the booklet. She did not look up. Her ear tips were burning.
Alice got down off the chest. She crossed the circle. The squeaking pauldron said something on every step, which was not helpful. She took the book out of Rakshaza’s hands. She set it carefully back in its row.
“You were doing the duke very well,” she said.
“I was doing him appallingly.”
“Badly,” Alice agreed. “Beautifully.”
There was a long moment in which neither of them said anything. Then Alice took hold of the front of the russet gown with both gauntlets, the way the shepherdess, in chapter twelve, was supposed to take hold of the duke’s lapels.
“In the book,” she said, “she comes down off the balcony.”
“I know. I’ve read it.”
“You’ve read it once.”
“I read very quickly,” said Rakshaza. “I’m three thousand years old.”
The squeaking pauldron was the first thing to come off. Nobody was sorry about it.
* * *
Afterwards, on the great bed, with the light gone gold, Alice lay with her head on Rakshaza’s shoulder. She could feel her breathing. She was reaching for the words out of habit, the way you reach for a door you have opened a hundred times.
“Never again,” said Rakshaza.
Alice lifted her head.
Rakshaza had said it in Alice’s own voice. Clipped, dutiful, faintly despairing. It was a very good imitation. It was better than the duke.
“That’s mine,” said Alice.
“You weren’t using it.”
“I was about to.”
“You were slow.” Rakshaza stretched like a cat. Her tail curled lazily round Alice’s ankle. “Somebody had to say it. Somebody has to keep up appearances.”
Alice laid her head back down. She was laughing again, silently, into the warm skin under the dragon’s collarbone. “You can’t take my line.”
“I’ve taken your saddlebag. Your books. Your pauldron. I’m building quite a collection.” A pause. “I’m told it’s what dragons do.”
* * *
At sunset, Rakshaza buckled her back into her armour.
She did it slowly. The new pauldron squeaked on every buckle. Rakshaza gathered up the fourteen booklets in their order. She put them back into the saddlebag one by one. She did it with great care. She did not hurry over the bottom of the bag.
Alice watched her hands. She knew what was at the bottom of the bag. She saw the moment the hands found it, the very small pause. She saw that Rakshaza did not take it out.
“There’s something else in there,” Rakshaza said, not looking up.
Alice felt her ears go hot. “It’s a candle.”
“It’s my candle.”
“It’s a stub.”
“You kept it.” Rakshaza fastened the flap. She fastened it slowly. “At the bottom. Under all your deciding.”
Alice looked at the dark tunnel. At the coins in the circle. At anything else.
“Somebody ought to,” she said.
Rakshaza went very still. Then her mouth moved, at one corner, into something that was not quite a smile. It was better than a smile. Alice did not have a name for it.
“Bring me the next one,” Rakshaza said. “The pirate queen. I want to know if she gets him up the ladder.”
* * *
The chapbook man was still by the well when Alice rode back into the square at dark-ish. The market was packing up around him. Awnings were coming down. A boy was chasing an escaped goose between the stalls.
Alice did not lean down to check Turnip’s girth. She stopped.
She had never stopped. The old man looked up at her, very slowly, with mild surprise.
“The sequel,” said Alice. “To the pirate one. If there is one.”
“The Pirate Queen’s Revenge.” He slid it off the tray. “Very good. She gets him up the ladder.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“Course not, Dame.”
Somebody else was at the tray.
Alice had not noticed her. She had been standing in the shadow of the well with a booklet in each hand, comparing them. She was broad as a barrel, with cropped grey hair, a face like saddle leather. She had a basket on her arm with a cabbage in it.
“Hester,” said Alice.
Hester looked up. She did not look in the least embarrassed. She looked at the booklet in Alice’s hand.
“Pirate one’s no good,” she said. “Too much rope. Not enough talking.”
Alice opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
“Get the shepherdess,” said Hester.
“I’ve read the shepherdess.”
“Read it again. Chapter twelve.” Hester paid for both of hers, then tucked them into the basket under the cabbage. “Every one he’s got. Since I was twenty. Your mouth’s open.”
Alice shut it.
Hester turned to go. She stopped. Her wolf-grey eyes went to the saddlebag, which had been buckled by somebody else, much more neatly than Alice ever managed.
“That one’s for you,” she said, nodding at the pirate queen. “Who’s the other one for?”
Alice looked down. She had, without noticing, picked a second copy of The Pirate Queen’s Revenge off the tray. The chapbook man was holding out his hand for the second penny with an expression of perfect innocence.
“A friend,” said Alice.
“Thought so,” said Hester. She limped off across the square, cabbage first, past the escaped goose, which got out of her way.