The lie took Alice most of the way down the mountain.
She built it the way Hester had taught her to build a defensive position: start with the ground you actually hold. There was a battle. True. It went long. Very true. I could not return before dark. True in every possible sense.
“It was a long battle,” she told Turnip, trying it out loud.
Turnip flicked one ear back, the way he did when a stablehand promised oats that did not exist.
“It was. Technically.”
The path left the scree for the pine woods, then the woods for the high pastures where the goat farms began. A shepherd boy on a stone wall saw her coming. He stared at her as if she were a ghost. Then he jumped off the wall backwards and ran, shouting, toward the farmhouse.
Alice looked down at herself. White plate, blue cloth, one strap still flapping at her back. Both gauntlets, now. Hair loose and wild, because she had not dared stop to braid it.
I look like I fought a dragon all night.
I look like I lost.
She dug her heels in. Turnip, who disliked hurrying on principle, sighed through his whole enormous body and broke into a trot.
* * *
She heard the bells before she saw the walls.
Brackenford had one bell tower. It stood over the guildhall, a squat stone thing with two bells in it: a small bright one for market days, a big flat one for fires. Both were going. Not in the brisk pattern of a fire. Slow. One, then the other. One, then the other. The rhythm you rang when somebody wasn’t coming back.
Alice’s stomach dropped somewhere around her stirrups.
The north gate stood open. In front of it, in the road, a crowd had gathered. It was not a mob. It was worse than a mob. It was organised.
There were perhaps forty of them. Farmers with pitchforks. The blacksmith with his heaviest hammer. Two adventurers from the guild in mismatched leather, looking as if they had been woken up for this and paid in advance. A baker holding a rolling pin with grim purpose. Three mules loaded with rope, lanterns, a stretcher.
Standing on a cart at the front, a ledger under one arm, was Marta Brin of the Sleeping Lance. She was giving orders. She was giving them in the voice she normally used on drunks at closing time, which was a voice that had moved larger men than any of these.
“...in pairs on the scree, nobody goes ahead of the mules. If you see anything red the size of a barn, you lie flat. You do not poke it. Dobbs, I am looking at you.”
“I wasn’t going to poke it.”
“You poked the bull.”
“That was different.”
“Rope,” Marta said. “Lanterns. We go up, we find her, we bring her back. Whatever we find.” Her voice snagged on that, very slightly. “We bring her back.”
Nobody in the crowd had ever been up the Redcrown. Nobody in the crowd had ever wanted to. Alice sat on her horse at the edge of the road, watching forty ordinary people prepare to climb toward the most dangerous creature in the world, carrying a stretcher.
For her.
Something went tight in her throat. She did not have a drill for it. Hester’s lessons covered falls, ambushes, sieges and the correct way to address a duke. They did not cover this.
Then the shepherd boy came tearing up the road behind her, red in the face, yelling at the top of his lungs.
“She’s back! She’s back, she’s here, she’s...!”
Forty heads turned.
There was a silence so complete Alice could hear the bells stop, one, then the other, as the ringer up in the tower leaned out to look.
Then the noise hit her like surf.
* * *
They surrounded Turnip. They touched her boots, her greaves, the blue cloth at her knee, as if checking she was solid. The baker burst into tears. The blacksmith clapped her on the thigh hard enough to dent a lesser greave. One of the guild adventurers asked, quite politely, if this meant they still got paid.
Alice sat in the middle of it, stiff as a fence post. “Yes,” she kept saying. “I’m fine. Thank you. Yes. Please don’t cry on the horse.”
Marta climbed down from the cart. The crowd parted for her.
She was a short, broad woman in a flour-dusted apron, grey hair pinned up with what appeared to be a meat skewer. She stopped beside Turnip’s shoulder. She looked up at Alice for a long moment.
Then she looked a little lower. At Alice’s collar.
Alice became aware, very slowly, that the seams of her linen undershirt were showing at her throat. On the outside.
Marta’s eyebrows rose by perhaps two millimetres. That was all. It was enough.
“Long night,” Marta said.
“A long battle,” said Alice.
“I’m sure.”
“It went on,” Alice said, “for some time.”
“Mm.” Marta patted Turnip’s neck. Turnip leaned into her hand, a traitor to everyone. “You’ll want breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’ll want breakfast,” Marta repeated, which was how Marta ended all arguments. She turned to the crowd and raised her voice. “Right! She’s alive! Nobody’s climbing anything! Dobbs, put down the pitchfork before you hurt yourself. Go home. All of you. Ring the market bell, Harl, so they know up the valley.”
High in the tower, the small bright bell began to ring. It rang fast, over and over, a silly happy jangle. Alice suspected it would be heard on the Redcrown.
She tried very hard not to think about who might hear it there.
* * *
She did not get far toward the inn.
Halfway across the market square, a figure in a green coat with a lute on his back threw himself into Turnip’s path, arms spread wide. Turnip stopped, mostly from curiosity.
“Alive!” cried Pip Larkwell. “Alive, alive, she is alive!”
“Good morning, Pip.”
“I wrote you a lament!” He brandished a wad of paper covered in crossings-out. “Seventeen verses! I was up all night! There’s a part where the wind itself weeps for you. I rhymed ‘valiant’ with ‘medallion’!”
“That doesn’t rhyme.”
“It does if you sing it with feeling.” Pip clutched the papers to his chest. “It was going to be my masterpiece. Do you know how rarely a hero dies in a way you can rhyme? It’s mostly ‘fell’ and ‘well’. But never mind! Never mind! This is better! Tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
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“You fought the dragon all night!”
“It...” Alice made herself stop. The ground you actually hold. “It was a long battle.”
“How long? From sunset to sunrise? The whole night through?” Pip’s eyes shone. “Did she breathe fire?”
Alice thought about it. She thought about a warm mouth on hers in the dark.
“Some,” she said.
“Did you wound her?”
“She was...” Alice’s voice came out higher than intended. She cleared it. “She seemed very tired. Afterwards.”
“Tired!” Pip was scribbling on the back of the lament. “The beast, exhausted, fled to her lair...”
“She didn’t flee. It’s her lair. She was already in it.”
“...exhausted, sank in her lair,” Pip amended, without pausing. “Did you strike her many times?”
“I don’t want to talk about the striking.”
“Was there a moment when all seemed lost?”
There had been a moment, around midnight, when Alice had said we shouldn’t in a very small voice. Rakshaza had said then stop me in a much smaller one. Alice had not stopped anything.
“Several,” Alice said.
“Several!” Pip nearly dropped his lute. “Oh, this is going to be enormous. This is going to be bigger than the lava verse. I’ll have it by tonight.”
“Please don’t have it by tonight.”
But he was already gone, sprinting toward the guildhall steps where he did his best work, papers fluttering behind him like startled pigeons.
Alice sat on Turnip in the middle of the square. Beside the guildhall door, the quest board was crowded with the usual notices: wolves in the east pastures, a lost ring, a cellar full of something that squeaked. Pinned over all of them, freshly written in a careful clerk’s hand, was a new one.
WANTED: Recovery of the Hero, or Remains Thereof. Forty silver. Apply within.
Alice dismounted. She walked over to the board. She took the notice down, folded it into precise quarters, then slid it into her vambrace.
It was a long battle. She might want proof.
* * *
Rakshaza did not watch the hero ride down the mountain.
She happened to be on the ledge outside the cave, in her true shape, sunning herself on the warm rock. The ledge happened to face south. Brackenford happened to lie to the south. A grey horse with a white figure on its back happened to be moving along the valley road at a sulky trot. None of that was her responsibility.
She lay with her head on her folded wings, eyes half shut. Thirty-five metres of red dragon, utterly at ease.
Inside, she was screaming.
Entertainment.
Arrives with its own horse.
Three thousand years of conversation. I have negotiated with emperors. I once made a sea serpent cry with a single remark about its posture. And this morning, with the only creature in the world who has ever held on to me, I compared her to a travelling puppet show.
The hero had looked at her, just for a moment, as if she wanted to stay. Rakshaza had seen it. She had seen it clearly, with eyes that could count the feathers on a hawk at two kilometres.
She had seen the gate come down, too.
Well done, she told herself. Truly. A masterpiece of strategy. If your goal was to make her leave, you have achieved it beautifully. If your goal was anything else...
She had no other goal. Obviously.
She lifted her head anyway, to see whether the grey horse had reached the town yet. It had not. It was still a pale fleck on the road. It was going rather slowly. Possibly the strap was bothering her.
Rakshaza put her head back down.
* * *
On the thirty-first day, the hero had arrived with a split lip from a fall on the scree. She had drawn her sword. She had charged, as she always did. Rakshaza had shifted one hind foot, very slightly, so that the charge carried Alice past her and into a heap of copper pots.
Alice had climbed out of the pots. She had looked at the dragon for a long moment, breathing hard.
“Do you ever actually move,” she had demanded, “or do you just wait for erosion to finish the job?”
Rakshaza had been so surprised she had answered honestly. “I moved once. Into this cave. It was exhausting.”
“It shows.”
“You swing that sword,” Rakshaza had said, recovering, “like someone apologising for being late.”
“You lie there like a sofa somebody set on fire.”
There had been a pause. Then something had happened in Rakshaza’s chest that she had not felt in a century. It had come up through her throat. It had escaped through her teeth in a short, startled huff of smoke.
She had laughed.
The hero had stared at her, then scowled, then gone back to hacking at her ankle. But the next morning, Rakshaza had been awake before dawn. She had found herself at the mouth of the cave, pretending to inspect the weather. She had inspected the weather for two full hours, until a grey horse appeared at the bottom of the scree.
She had never once admitted, even to herself, what she had been waiting for.
* * *
The wind turned a little after noon. It came up from the valley, warm, smelling of hay and woodsmoke.
It carried bells.
Rakshaza’s head came up off her wings. Not the slow bells. She had heard those all night, faint as a heartbeat in the dark, and had not let herself wonder what they were for. These were quick. Bright. Silly. Something being rung by a person who was very, very happy.
She understood all at once.
The slow bells had been for the hero.
They thought she was dead, Rakshaza realised. All night. They thought I...
“They thought I ate her?”
She said it aloud, in her dragon’s voice, which rolled out over the valley and frightened a flock of crows off a pine tree two kilometres below. She did not care.
“I have never eaten anyone. Three thousand years! Not a farmer. Not a knight. Not one single unpleasant tax collector, and believe me, there were candidates. I eat goats.” She lowered her voice, out of habit, though no one could hear. “Paid-for goats.”
The crows settled back into their tree, muttering.
Rakshaza lay very still, thinking.
On the one hand, this was magnificent. This was the best thing to happen to her reputation in two hundred years. An entire town, ringing the death bells all night, certain that the Red Storm of the Redcrown had finally devoured their champion. Children would be hearing about this until they had grandchildren. She could not have bought publicity like it with the whole hoard.
On the other hand, a whole town had grieved all night. That was not the sort of thing she did. Frightening people was a sport. Grief was something else.
On the third hand, which she did not possess, a woman in half-buckled armour had ridden down into that grief alone. She would be standing in it right now, without a scratch on her, explaining it away.
She will lie for both of us, Rakshaza thought. She is very bad at lying. She will do it anyway.
Something under her ribs went quiet. Then warm. Then very uncomfortable.
“No,” Rakshaza told it.
It did not listen.
* * *
She went inside. She shifted, because the cave felt too large today, which made no sense, because it had always been exactly this large.
She walked through the hoard on two feet, her tail lashing behind her, scattering coins. She picked up the lute with two strings. She plucked one. It made a noise like a disappointed goose. She put it down. She picked up a pottery bowl, considered throwing it, put it down too. Some of the bowls were older than kingdoms. All of them were ugly.
She ended up behind the loom.
The tapestry on it was half finished: a sheep, in a field, under a sky that stopped abruptly in the middle where she had lost interest seven hundred years ago. Behind it, low down, the cave wall was smooth and pale. Nobody would ever look there. Nobody but Rakshaza ever came this deep into the hoard.
She took a small silver dagger from a pile of small silver daggers. She crouched.
She scratched one short line into the stone.
Then another.
Then a third.
She sat back on her heels and looked at them.
Tactical errors, she thought. Three. For the record.
For the purpose of not repeating them.
It was, she told herself, a perfectly reasonable thing to keep track of. Any sensible creature would. She stood. She put the dagger back on its pile with great precision. She walked away from the loom without looking back at the wall, because there was nothing there worth looking at.
She went back to it twice before sunset, to make sure the marks were straight.
* * *
The common room of the Sleeping Lance was full by evening. It was always full by evening, because the hero came back every evening, so the town came to watch her eat. Tonight it was fuller than Alice had ever seen it. People stood along the walls. People sat on the stairs. Somebody’s grandmother had been carried in on a chair.
Alice sat at her usual table by the fire, in a clean tunic, with her hair braided so tightly it hurt. Every time someone caught her eye, they raised a mug. Every time they raised a mug, she raised hers back. She was on her fourth.
Marta had been bringing food at intervals, without being asked. Stew. Bread. A whole roast onion. A slab of honey cake the size of a shield. She set each dish down without a word, then went away again. Alice ate all of it. She had not realised how hungry she was until the first spoonful. She had not eaten since yesterday’s noon.
Since before.
She did not think about before. She thought about stew.
Her room upstairs had been cold when she changed. The shutter still did not latch. She had stood there for a moment, in the thin draught, with her armour off and her skin prickling. She had felt the cold the way she always felt it, every morning of her life. She had noticed, for the first time, that she minded.
Stew, she reminded herself. Think about stew.
At the far end of the room, by the barrels, Pip Larkwell climbed onto a stool.
The room went quiet. Pip’s songs were terrible. Pip’s songs were also the only entertainment in Brackenford that didn’t involve goats, so the town treated each new verse of The Thousand Blows of Brackenford like a royal decree.
“Friends!” Pip cried. “Last night, while we slept...”
“We didn’t sleep,” someone shouted. “You made us ring bells!”
“...while we wept,” Pip corrected smoothly, “our hero fought on, alone, beneath the burning crown! I give you the newest verse! I give you... The Long Night!”
He struck a chord. The lute was out of tune. It always was.
He sang:
All night she struck the scarlet beast beneath the burning crown; she would not yield, she would not rest, she never once lay down! The room roared.
Alice inhaled a mouthful of ale.
She coughed. She coughed hard, bent over the table, eyes streaming, while the blacksmith thumped her on the back with a hand like a shovel. Around her the whole town was singing the last line back at Pip, over and over, stamping on the floor.
She never once lay down!
She never once lay down!
When she could breathe again, there was a fresh mug in front of her. Marta stood beside the table, wiping her hands on her apron, looking down at Alice with an expression of total, terrible serenity.
“On the house,” Marta said.
“Thank you,” Alice croaked.
“Long battle, was it?”
“Very long.”
“Mm.” Marta picked up the empty plate. She tucked it under her arm. She leaned down, just a little, so that only Alice could hear. “Wear your shirt the right way out tomorrow, love. Folk notice.”
She went back to the kitchen.
Alice stared at the fire. Her ears burned. Her face burned. The room went on singing.
On his stool, Pip raised both arms, glowing with triumph.
“Second verse!”
Alice put her forehead down on the table. Gently. With dignity. She left it there.