The swallows were flying low over the Brackenford rooftops, close enough to part the chimney smoke. Alice noticed them from her window while she buckled her greaves. She decided not to think about it.
The common room had noticed them too. Dobbs stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands, sniffing the street like a dog at a pantry.
“Storm,” he said. “Afternoon. Big one. My knee’s been talking since midnight.”
“The sky is entirely blue.”
“Look north.” The far mountains had gone the colour of an old bruise. “Knee’s never been wrong. Except the once. That was a different knee.”
Gideon came down the stairs in his rabbit slippers with an oiled-leather cloak over his arm, gold-trimmed, the size of a small tent. “Alice! Storm weather! Take my campaign cloak. It kept me dry through the whole of the Marsh Ogre affair. Please. Knight to knight.”
Alice took it, because the alternative was a conversation. It weighed about as much as Little Fen.
Marta had not said a word. She was at the slate with the chalk. When she stepped back, there was a new line under all the old ones.
STORM KEEPS HER UP THERE: 2 TO 1 “Marta.”
“Just a line, love. Takes folk’s minds off the hay.”
Pip put down a copper for. Dobbs put down a copper against, on the grounds that the hero had never once been kept anywhere. Gideon put down two silver crowns against, with feeling. Then Hester got up from her corner table under the stairs. She crossed the room on her bad leg, laid one silver crown on the bar, then went back to her bread.
“For,” she said.
Alice stared at her. Hester buttered the bread.
“Have you got something you’d like to say?”
“Storm by the third bell,” said Hester. “Mind your horse.”
* * *
Rakshaza had smelt it before dawn.
She had lain on the ledge with her chin on the lip of the rock, nostrils wide, while the first light came up thin as milk. Iron in the air. Wet stone a long way off. That sharp taste, like a coin on the tongue, which a big storm sent ahead of itself the way a king sent heralds. By noon it would be over the Redcrown.
She liked storms. They were the only weather that had never once bored her: every one was different, every one went exactly where it pleased without asking anybody. When she was very young she had flown up into one to see what it was made of. She had come down singed, half deaf, laughing so hard she set a forest on fire. People had started calling her a storm after that. She had not minded.
There was a sensible thing to do this morning. The sensible thing was to fly out over the road, find a hero on a grey horse, then roar something about the weather until she turned round.
Rakshaza thought about the sensible thing for some time.
Then she went inside to sweep the circle.
* * *
The sky turned while Alice was on the climb. One moment the sun was hot on her backplate. The next it had gone out like a shuttered window. The light went yellow, then the green of pond water. Below her, Turnip lifted his head from the grass, looked north, then walked without hurrying to the overhang under the cliff, where the rock leaned out over a dry shelf of stone. He had stood there all year whenever it rained. He did not need telling.
The dragon lay on all fours across the ledge, head turning to follow the clouds the way a cat’s head follows a bird.
“You came,” she said, far too pleased.
“I always come.” Alice hitched the tent on her arm. “Don’t.”
“I said nothing. Is he planning to live in it?”
The first drop hit the ledge between them. It was the size of a coin. It made the sound of one, too. Then the sky simply opened, the way a sack of grain opens when somebody cuts the bottom. Thunder rolled along the northern mountains like barrels down a cellar stair.
They went inside. The rain followed them three steps into the tunnel, then gave up.
* * *
By the fourth hour the cliff was a waterfall.
Alice stood at the cave mouth with Gideon’s cloak round her, watching the water pour off the ledge in a solid sheet. The hollow had become a lake with a stream galloping through it. Under the overhang Turnip stood dry, eating something.
“I have to go down.”
“You can’t climb that.” Rakshaza had shifted at the threshold, the way she always did now. Her gown today was the grey-violet of the sky before rain. She stood barefoot in the spray, looking at the storm as if somebody had given it to her for her birthday. “Nobody could. It’s a river standing on its end.”
“Then fly me.”
“No.”
“You flew me to the summit...”
“In sunshine.” Lightning cracked down over the next ridge. Every coin in the hoard flashed at once. The thunder came close enough that Alice felt it in her teeth. Rakshaza waited for it to finish with a connoisseur’s patience. “You’re wearing thirty kilos of Crown steel, Hero. Up there you’d be the shiniest, most interesting thing in the sky. The lightning would come to have a look at you.”
“It would hit you first.”
“It has hit me. Several times. It tickles.” She tipped her head. “You, I think, it wouldn’t tickle.”
Another bolt came down into the pines across the hollow. A tree split along its length with a noise like a giant tearing a sheet. Turnip flicked one ear.
Alice closed her mouth.
“Rule four,” she said after a while.
“The hero leaves before dark.” Rakshaza said it as if reading it off the inside of her eyelids. “I believe I raised the matter of storms in negotiation. I believe you said: there won’t be any storms, Dragon, it’s summer.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said it with your face.”
“Hester bet on this. A silver crown.”
Rakshaza’s tail moved behind her, very pleased with itself. “I like her a silver crown’s worth more every day.”
* * *
The armour came off by lamplight. Rakshaza did it without being asked now, from behind, starting with the strap nobody else was allowed to touch. She laid each piece in a row on the coins by size. Under the breastplate Alice’s shirt was soaked at the shoulders, where the rain had got in at the neck while she watched the hollow.
“You’re dripping on my hoard.” Rakshaza went off into the dark. She came back with her arms full. “Here.”
It was a robe made for someone very tall, very wide, very important. Black velvet, sewn all over with golden suns. The sleeves passed Alice’s fingertips by a hand’s width. The hem pooled on the coins.
“Whose was this?”
“An emperor’s. He came to ask me to burn his brother’s palace. I took the robe for my trouble instead.” Rakshaza stood back to admire her. “It suits you better. He was mostly neck.”
Alice spread her wet shirt over the shoulders of the marble king, then hung Gideon’s dripping cloak over the top for good measure. With the gilt pauldron still on his head, the cracked clay moustache still on his lip, the king looked like a man caught in the rain on his way somewhere important, who had decided not to go. Find the original chapter at novelping dot com.
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“He looks happier,” Alice said.
“Nobody’s ever lent him anything.”
* * *
The trouble with being trapped, Alice discovered, was supper. Her saddlebag was in the hollow beside a horse. The hoard held gold.
“There’s a goat,” said Rakshaza. “In the north valley. I could...”
“In the lightning.”
“It tickles.”
“No.”
Rakshaza’s face did the thing it did when she was searching a very long memory with a lamp. She went off into the hoard. There was a sliding of coins, a chest lid, then a grunt that no dragon would ever have admitted to. She came back with a clay jar the size of a man’s head, sealed with old wax.
“Honey. Four hundred years. Perhaps a little more.” She set it down. “Honey doesn’t go off. I checked. Twice. A century apart.”
Under the wax it had gone dark as old amber, thick as tar. Alice found two silver spoons in a chest of forks. They sat cross-legged at the edge of the swept circle with the jar between their knees, eating it off some forgotten duke’s spoons while the storm roared at the mouth of the cave.
It was the best supper of Alice’s life. She could not have said why.
“What flowers?”
Rakshaza licked her spoon slowly. “Heather. Clover. Something I don’t know any more. There was a meadow below the old road. It’s a town now.”
Alice took another spoonful. A meadow gone for four hundred years, tasting of itself.
* * *
The Pirate Queen’s Revenge was in Rakshaza’s lap by the time the honey was finished. The copy Alice had bought for a friend.
“I have been saving it for an occasion.”
“This is an occasion?”
“There is a storm. There is a hero who can’t leave.” She opened it at the first page. “You’ve read it.”
“Once.”
“Until three in the morning. Your horse left without you.”
They settled on the bed. Alice realised it was the first time they had settled on it for something other than the obvious. She lay on her side in the emperor’s robe with her head on her arm. Rakshaza lay propped on pillows with the lamp beside her, her tail drawn up over the coverlet the way a person draws up a blanket.
She read well. She did not do voices this time, as if she meant to give the book a fair chance before improving it. The pirate queen escaped a harbour prison by chapter two. By chapter six she was in a sea battle, with a great deal of rope.
Alice kept her face perfectly still. She knew about the traitor in the crew. She knew about chapter nine.
Rakshaza stopped mid-sentence. “You’ve gone still. The way a hare goes still. Somebody’s about to die.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“It’s the cook. He’s been far too cheerful for three chapters.” She turned the page, read on, then lowered the book. “It isn’t the cook. It’s the bosun. I liked the bosun.”
“So did I,” said Alice, before she could stop herself.
“You let me like the bosun. You lay there in my bed, in a dead emperor’s robe, knowing.” Her tail twitched once. “I’ll never forgive you. What happens to the rope?”
* * *
The thunder had moved off by the time the wedding came. The ship had been sinking for six pages. The pirate queen stood at the wheel in water to her knees, with the frilled-shirt man beside her refusing to get into the boat without her. They were married by the ship’s surgeon because the captain was busy steering.
Rakshaza got as far as the surgeon clearing his throat. Then she held the book out across the coverlet.
“You read it. I know exactly how I sound. I want to hear how you do it.”
“Badly.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Alice sat up against the carved headboard, among the stags, one of whom was still missing an antler. She read it in the voice she used for Crown reports, because it was the only reading voice she had. Do you, Captain Moira Black, take this man, in the sight of the sea, until the sea takes you both. She read the pirate queen’s answer like a list of supplies for the border forts.
Rakshaza laughed so hard the lamp flame bent. She put both hands over her face. Her tail thumped the coverlet.
“Again,” she said through her fingers. “Until the sea takes you both. Like a tax demand. Again.”
Alice read it again, worse, on purpose. Halfway through she started laughing too, so that the vow came out in pieces. The book slid off the bed onto the coins. Neither of them picked it up.
“Do they live?”
“You’ll have to read the next one.”
* * *
It had been the tenth week of the year. Rakshaza remembered the day by the colour of the hail.
It had come out of a clear afternoon, white stones the size of plums hammering the ledge, halfway through the hero’s speech about lizards. It was not yet sunset. The hero could have ridden down in it. Anyone else would have.
She had sat down in the tunnel instead, back to the wall, sword across her knees, scowling at the weather as if it had insulted her. She stayed past the light for the first time. She did not say why.
Rakshaza had closed her eyes. Then, very slowly, the way a sleeping dragon might simply move in her dreams, she had laid her tail across the tunnel between the hero and the wind.
The hail beat on it for an hour. She did not feel a single stone.
When it was over, the hero stood up, looked at the tail for a long moment, then said quietly, to a dragon who was very obviously asleep, “Thank you.”
Rakshaza had not answered. She had lain awake half the night wondering why.
* * *
The storm came back after midnight, harder than before.
Alice woke to the cave turning white, then black, then white. The thunder was directly overhead. It did not sound like a noise any more. It sounded like the mountain being moved. The lamp was out. The place beside her was empty.
She found Rakshaza on the ledge, in her own shape again, lying on all fours on the streaming rock with her chin raised into the storm. Every flash lit her red against the black, wet scales shining like a forge seen through a door, green eyes half closed in something very like pleasure. Each bolt threw her shadow back across the hoard, enormous.
For a moment Alice saw her the way Brackenford saw her. The Red Storm on her mountain, thirty-five metres of fire in the dark, older than every story about her.
Then the dragon turned her head. “You’re up. Come and see.”
The dragon looked at her for a while. Lightning came down. She did not look at the lightning.
“Hero. Are you afraid of storms?”
“I’m not allowed to be afraid of anything.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Alice waited for the thunder to finish rolling down the valleys. “My first year in Solenne. I was seven. There was a storm like this. The other children in the dormitory all went to the windows. I went under my bed.” She looked at the rain. “It was the only place nobody looked for me. They looked everywhere else. The chosen one, gone. Somebody rang a bell. I could hear them shouting my name. I stayed under there till morning. Nobody could see me. Nobody needed me to be anything.”
“Did they find you?”
“Hester did. She lay down flat on the floor, looked under the bed, then said, Breakfast. That was all. She never told anyone.” Alice shrugged inside the enormous sleeves. “I’ve never been under anything since. Heroes don’t hide.”
The rain hammered the ledge.
Then Rakshaza lifted her left wing.
She did it slowly, the way she did everything that mattered, shifting her weight onto her hind feet and her right wrist. The great red sail of the wing came up off the rock, round, over, until it made a roof. Under it lay a space as big as a room at the Lance: dry, dim, warm with the heat of her side.
“Then come under something,” she said.
Alice stood still. Then she walked out into the rain. It soaked her in three steps. She did not care. She went in under the wing, which came down a little behind her to close the space, until she stood in a red dark that smelled of smoke, rain, cinnamon. The rain drummed on the membrane overhead like fingers on a table. She put her hand flat against the dragon’s side. It was hot as a hearthstone.
Nobody could see her in here. Not the town, not the King, not the prophecy. Alice sat down on the dry rock with her back against the warm scales. She pulled the robe round her knees.
“Better?” The voice came through the scales into her spine.
It took her a while to answer. The storm went on overhead, enormous, wonderful, nothing to do with her.
“Yes,” she said.
They watched it together until the thunder walked away into the south.
* * *
Later, dry again, the lamp relit, Alice lay looking at Rakshaza in her human shape, who lay on her back with her eyes open.
“You never start it,” Alice said.
Rakshaza’s eyes moved. Nothing else did. “Start what?”
“You know what. Since the first night. It’s always me.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Name one time.”
The silence went on long enough to be an answer. Rakshaza’s ear tips were going quietly crimson. “Dragons don’t start things, Hero. We finish them.”
“That’s not a reason. That’s a line.”
“It’s a very good line. I’ve used it on two kings.” Rakshaza turned on her side. Her tail came round over the coverlet to lie against Alice’s ankle. “Go to sleep.”
Alice looked at her a while longer. Then she let it go. She was asleep before the next rumble, one hand curled in the grey-violet sleeve the way she always held on, as if somebody might try to take it away.
Rakshaza lay watching her.
Everything in this cave she had taken. Won, frightened out of somebody, left at her feet by people who wanted her to go away. In three thousand years she had never once been given anything she had not reached for first.
Except a pie, held up on a palm. Except a horse, walking towards her across a hollow. Except this: a woman who came up the mountain on her own two feet every day, then reached for her.
Rakshaza could reach. She had almost done it yesterday. She would, one day. She only wanted to be certain first that Alice would keep choosing. That nobody had sent her. That if a dragon reached out, the hero wouldn’t simply let herself be taken, the way she let herself be sent everywhere else.
She did not say any of that. She lay listening to the rain, to the slow breathing beside her. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.
It was the best night she had spent in three thousand years.
* * *
The morning came up clean, the sky over the Redcrown washed so thoroughly it looked new. Every pine dripped. Turnip stood at the edge of the shrinking lake, looking bored.
Rakshaza woke first. She had slept after all, which surprised her.
She got up, careful of the hand in her sleeve, then went round the loom to the dark corner behind it. Eight marks stood in a row in the stone. One leaned. One was perfectly straight. She stood in front of them with the silver dagger for some time.
She put the dagger down. There wasn’t a mark for it. She would have to invent one.
When she came back, Alice was sitting up in the emperor’s robe with her hair standing straight up on one side, glaring at the light in the tunnel as if it owed her money.
“I stayed the night.”
“Storm loophole.” Rakshaza sat on the edge of the bed. “I did mention it.”
Alice looked at the coverlet, then at her. Something went across her face slowly, like the sun coming over a ridge.
“Nothing happened,” she said.
“Nothing at all.”
Neither of them, for once, said never again. There was nothing to say it about. Alice began to laugh. After a moment Rakshaza did too.
* * *
Brackenford had come out to count the damage: two roofs down, the duck pond spread across most of a street, the guildhall weathervane pointing at the ground. Then somebody saw the grey horse coming down the mud of the road with the white plate shining on top of him. Somebody rang the small bright bell.
The first thing Alice saw was Gideon, sitting on the guildhall steps in his rabbit slippers, soaked to the skin, with a coil of rope over his shoulder. He stood up when he saw her, then sat down again very suddenly, because his legs had gone to sleep.
“I kept watch! All night! In case you needed rescuing!” He sneezed. “Where’s my cloak?”
Alice thought, with sudden clarity, of the marble king.
“It was a hard battle,” she said.
Inside the Lance the slate was already wiped. Hester sat at her corner table with her bread, her tea, her silver crown, now joined by two others. She looked at Alice’s dry hair, at the shirt that had spent the night on a king.
“Good roof?”
Alice sat down across from her. She took half the bread without asking.
“The best,” she said.