The first morning of autumn came in cool. There was a different smell in the air, of wet leaves, of woodsmoke that somebody needed. The lantern ropes still hung across the square. Half the lanterns had blown down in the night. Children were collecting them.
Alice came down to breakfast humming. She noticed halfway down the stairs. She stopped. Then, since nobody was there, she finished the line.
Gideon was at the long table.
He was not eating his egg. He was holding it in his hand, in its cup, the way a man holds something he has forgotten is there. He had dark rings under his eyes. His golden hair stood up at the back. Odo sat beside him with a scroll open on the table between the bread and the honey, his lips moving as he read. Valour was under the table, eating Odo’s sandal.
When Alice came in, Gideon stood up so fast he dropped the egg.
“Alice,” he said. “Good morning. How are you? How do you feel?”
“Fine.”
“Fine. Good. Very good.” He sat down. He stood up again. “Any... humming?”
Alice, who had been humming on the stairs, went still.
“Lights?” said Gideon. “Sudden fondness for things you didn’t used to be fond of? A feeling that you’re not quite in charge of your own... arms?”
“Gideon. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing! Nothing’s wrong with me.” He looked at Odo. Odo looked at the scroll. “Do you... would you say you’ve been yourself? Lately?”
At her table under the stairs, Hester put her cup down very quietly. Alice saw her do it. Hester did not look up. She was listening the way a cat listens to the inside of a wall.
“I’m always myself,” said Alice. “I don’t know how to be anything else.”
“No,” said Gideon, with deep sympathy. “No, of course you don’t. That’s exactly what they’d want you to think.”
Then he picked his egg up off the floor, put it back in its cup, then walked out into the yard without his breakfast. Odo rolled up the scroll, retrieved his sandal from Valour, then followed with one bare foot.
Alice looked at Marta. Marta was looking at the ceiling.
“What did I do?” said Alice.
“Don’t know, love,” said Marta. “He was up all night in the stable. Talking to the goat. Goat didn’t have much to say.”
* * *
Rakshaza had been lying on the ledge since dawn, doing nothing, magnificently.
She was very happy. She had decided to be generous about it. She had yawned the cloud off the peak early, then lain in the cool sun with her chin on the rock, her eyes half closed, thinking about willows. About a hand held out, shaking. About the expression on the hero’s face just after, when she had said You started it in a voice that sounded as if somebody had taken all her armour off at once.
The tally behind the loom had not gained a mark. Rakshaza did not care. She had decided some things did not go on walls.
At the usual hour, she heard Turnip on the road. She lifted her head.
Then she heard the other horses.
Five of them. No, six. Matched chestnuts, heavy, with the jingle of good harness. A small, quick, unshod animal running between their legs, bleating. Then a voice she knew, carrying up the valley in the clear autumn air with the confidence of a man who has never once been told he is too loud.
“Steady, Odo! Steady! Don’t read the end yet!”
Rakshaza closed her eyes. She opened them again. It was still happening.
* * *
Alice had told him not to come. She had told him at the gate, then at the bridge, then at the bend in the road. Each time Gideon had said, “Of course, Alice,” with great tenderness, then gone on riding behind her. When she had stopped Turnip in the middle of the road, he had stopped too. When she had started again, so had he. It had been like trying to lose her own shadow.
Bram, Wren, Little Fen, Odo. Five chestnuts. Valour, who ran.
At the hollow Gideon dismounted. He looked up at the ledge, where the dragon now lay with her head over the edge, watching them with an expression of vast, cold, terrible patience.
“Great Red Storm!” Gideon called. He put his hand on his heart. “I come not to fight! I come to ask for your help!”
The dragon said nothing for a long moment.
“Help,” she said at last. The single word rolled down the cliff like a falling barrel. A crow left a tree.
“Yours! Knight to beast. Warrior to warrior.” Gideon took a breath. “There is an evil in Brackenford.”
Alice had got off Turnip. She stood very still at the foot of the cliff, holding his reins as if they might save her. Above, the dragon’s great head turned, slowly, just enough for one green eye to look down at her. Alice felt it like a hand on the back of her neck.
“Go on,” said the dragon.
“A witch,” said Gideon.
There was a silence.
“A witch,” the dragon repeated. Her voice had gone very flat.
“A horned witch. She calls herself a lady from the coast. But I was at the Solenne school, I knew every face there, she was never... well, she says earlier, but nobody’s that much earlier. She has a tail. She has scales on her face. She has...” Gideon lowered his voice, which on a mountain made no difference at all. “She has your eyes. Exactly your eyes. That green. I said so the day I met her. I thought it was a joke.”
“Did you,” said the dragon.
“I think she’s yours,” said Gideon. “Your creature. Your... servant. Your spy. Sent down into the town in a woman’s shape. I don’t blame you! It’s a very clever thing to do. It’s what I’d do. If I were a dragon.”
Up on the ledge, the dragon’s tail had begun to move. Alice knew that movement. It was the movement of something trying with all its strength not to laugh in front of witnesses.
“Why,” said the dragon slowly, “would I need a spy, Sir Gideon?”
“To get at the Hero! You can’t beat her! Nobody can! So you sent this... person... to beguile her. To bewitch her. To soften her.” Gideon pointed up at the mountain with a hand that trembled with conviction. “I saw it. Last night. Under the willows by the stream, after the lanterns. I saw the witch... I saw her... take hold of Alice’s face.” He swallowed. “Then Alice... then the Hero...”
“Kissed her back,” said Gideon in a horrified whisper.
Wren put her hand over her eyes. Bram studied his shield. Little Fen looked at Alice with an expression of the purest, most terrible delight. Odo sat down.
Alice did not move. She had decided she would simply stand there until she turned into a rock. It seemed the safest thing.
* * *
Rakshaza had faced armies. She had faced a sea serpent the length of a river. She had faced, once, a council of seven emperors who had all brought their mothers. Nothing in three thousand years had been as difficult as keeping her jaws closed now.
Your servant. Your spy. Kissed her back.
The hero stood at the foot of the cliff holding a horse, perfectly still, the colour of the inside of a cherry. Rakshaza could see the pulse jumping in her throat from a hundred metres up.
She could have ended it. One roar. The boy would have run. She could have said, in a voice that rattled windows, There is no witch. She could have said a great many things.
Instead she said, very gently for a dragon, “Why do you think she’s bewitched, Sir Gideon?”
Gideon looked up at her. Then he said the worst thing anyone had ever said in that hollow. He said it kindly. That was what made it so bad.
“Because Alice doesn’t love anybody,” said Gideon. “She can’t. She’s the Hero.”
* * *
It had been the ninth month of the year. Late afternoon. The hero had not drawn her sword at all that day. She had sat in her circle with a letter on her knee, very straight-backed, looking at the wall.
Rakshaza had said something rude about the letter. She did not remember what. The hero had not answered. Then, without moving, without making any sound at all, she had begun to cry.
It was the only time. Rakshaza had never seen anybody cry so quietly. The tears just ran. The hero did not wipe them. She sat with her hands flat on her knees like a soldier at an inspection, staring at a pile of silver plates, letting them run.
The letter was from Solenne. A girl Alice had sat beside, the first year at the Crown school, before they took her off to the hero’s yard. A baker’s daughter. They had shared a slate. The girl was married now. There had been a wedding, a big one, with dancing. The letter was a very kind letter, written afterwards, saying how sorry she was that they hadn’t invited the Hero, of course, she’d have been so busy, they hadn’t liked to trouble her.
“They don’t invite me to anything,” the hero had said to the plates. “Only to wars.”
Rakshaza had not known what to do. She had never known what to do about anybody’s tears. So she had laid her great head down on the coins beside the circle, close, not touching, the way she had on the first day of the rules. She had stayed there until the sun went down.
She had never once mentioned it. Neither had the hero.
* * *
Alice heard Gideon say it. She can’t. She’s the Hero.
She had heard it all her life, she realised. Not in those words. In every bow. In every banner. In every boy at every ball who asked her to dance because he had been told to, then looked relieved when she said next year. In every kind letter from Solenne.
She looked up at the ledge. The dragon was looking down at her. Not at Gideon. At her. Waiting.
She was not going to send anyone away this time. Nobody was going to place her. She was not going to stand there until she turned into a rock.
Alice let go of Turnip’s reins.
“Gideon,” she said.
He turned. His whole face was ready to be kind to her. “It’s all right, Alice. Odo has a scroll. The Unweaving of Glamours. He’s read nearly all of it. We can...”
“Nobody bewitched me.”
“That’s exactly what...”
“Nobody bewitched me.” It came out loud enough to ring off the cliff. Turnip lifted his head. Valour stopped eating a thistle. “Nobody has ever bewitched me, Gideon. I’m a very bad subject for it. Hester tested us all at fourteen. I was the only one in the yard who didn’t even get a headache.”
“Then...” He stopped. “Then why...”
“Because I wanted to.”
The hollow was very quiet. Up on the ledge, something enormous had stopped breathing.
“I wanted to,” Alice said again. Her voice shook. She let it. “I kissed her because I wanted to. I danced with her because I wanted to. I crossed a whole square in front of the whole town because I wanted to, Gideon, I’ve never in my life wanted to do anything so much. Nobody sent me.” She swallowed. “I’m the Hero. I’m also a person. It turns out you can be both. I didn’t know that either, until recently.”
Gideon looked at her for a very long time. Several things went across his face, slowly, one after the other, like carts over a bridge. None of them was anger. That was the strange thing. Alice had braced for anger. It never came.
“Oh,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
“You’re not enchanted.”
“No.”
“You just...” He looked lost for a moment. Then something cleared. He stood up a little straighter. “You’re in love.”
Alice opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She had not got that far. She had not got anywhere near that far, not out loud, not even in her own head with the shutters closed.
From the ledge above, there was a sound like a very large kettle trying not to boil.
* * *
Odo, who had been reading quietly to himself on the grass all this time, chose that moment to reach the end of the scroll.
“...releasing all that is bound by false weaving,” he read aloud, with great relief, “let it all fall away!”
A thin, silvery light went out from the parchment like a thrown ribbon. It went straight to Alice. It passed through her like a breeze through a sheet on a line. Nothing happened. It came out the other side, looked about for something more promising, then shot straight up the cliff to the ledge.
It struck the dragon squarely on the nose.
It was not a large sneeze, for a dragon. It blew every leaf off every tree in the hollow. It knocked Odo flat. It sent Gideon’s golden cloak out over the valley like a lost kite for the second time that year. Then a puff of warm smoke rolled down the cliff, smelling strongly of cinnamon, settling over all of them like a blanket.
When it cleared, the dragon was looking down at Odo with her eyes watering.
“Was that,” she said, “meant to do something?”
“I... it unweaves glamours,” Odo said from the grass. “False shapes. Enchantments.”
“Then it found none.” The dragon sniffed. “Neither here. Nor there.” Her great head turned to Gideon. “You may tell your witch, Sir Gideon, that she is nobody’s servant. Least of all mine. Dragons don’t keep servants. Nobody worth having would stay.”
“Then she’s... not a spy?”
“She is,” said the dragon, after a pause with a great deal in it, “exactly what the hero says she is.”
“What did the hero say she is?”
The dragon looked at Alice. Alice looked at the dragon. The whole of the hollow seemed to lean in.
“Mine,” said Alice, before she could think better of it.
* * *
Gideon took it beautifully.
That was the thing Alice would remember afterwards. He stood in the hollow with leaves in his hair, his cloak gone over the valley again, his whole careful theory lying in pieces round his golden boots. Then he took a deep breath, put his hand on his heart, then bowed. Not to the dragon. To her.
“Then I beg your pardon,” he said. “Hers too. For the witch. For all of it.” He hesitated. “She’s very beautiful, Alice. I should have known it wasn’t magic. Nobody needs magic to look at someone like that.”
Alice could not speak. She nodded.
“Your secret is safe with me,” said Gideon. “I swear it. Knight’s honour. I shan’t tell a soul.” He turned to his company. “Nobody tells a soul!”
“We heard it,” said Wren. “We’re standing right here.”
“Then nobody else.” He turned back, then up, to the ledge. “Great Red Storm. Thank you for the counsel. You’ve been... surprisingly understanding. For a beast.”
“I have my moments,” said the dragon.
“Does it trouble you? That she has your eyes?”
The dragon considered this for a long time.
“No,” she said at last. “I’m told they suit her.”
* * *
They rode down at dusk. All of them. Gideon at the front, singing, very badly, the turning dance from the Fair. The company behind. Little Fen riding beside Alice, not saying anything, smiling at her ears in a way Alice decided to forgive. Valour on Bram’s saddle, asleep.
Somewhere past the bridge, Fen spoke for the first time all afternoon.
“I knew,” she said.
Alice turned her head. “Since when?”
“Since the boots.” Fen looked down at her own feet in the stirrups, at the double knots, the tucked ends. “Before the dragon, the first day. You knelt down in the road. You tied my laces for me.” She shrugged. “Nobody ever does that. Not unless somebody’s started doing things like that for them.”
Alice thought of a top strap buckled at dawn. Of a braid. Of boots paired by a bed.
“That’s not evidence,” she said.
“No, Dame,” said Fen, smiling at her ears again. “Course not.”
Alice had not gone up the cliff. She had not needed to. Before they left, the dragon had come down to her. She landed in the hollow on all fours, folded her wings, then lowered her great head until one green eye was only a few metres above Alice’s face.
“Mine,” the dragon said, very low. Only to her.
“You heard that.”
“Hero. They heard it in Solenne.” The eye half closed. Something went over it that Alice had never seen in it before. It took her a moment to recognise it. It looked very like someone being quietly, completely happy. “Same time tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here,” Alice said.
It was the dragon’s line. It always had been. The eye opened wide for a moment, startled.
Then the dragon laughed, a sound that shook every pine in the hollow. Two beats of her wings put her back on the ledge before anyone could see her face.
* * *
The Sleeping Lance was full, as it always was in the evening. Pip was on his stool. Hester was at her table under the stairs.
Gideon came in first. He stopped in the middle of the common room. He looked round at everyone with tremendous seriousness. Then he lifted his tankard.
“To the Lady of the Coast,” he said. “Who is NOT a witch. Whom I personally have NEVER seen kissing anybody. Under any willows. Ever.”
The room fell completely silent.
Then, slowly, every single tankard in the Sleeping Lance went up.
“To the Lady of the Coast!”
Alice put her forehead down on the table. She left it there.
Across the room, she heard Hester’s chair creak. Then Hester’s bad leg dragging across the floor. Then a cup of hot tea being set down beside her head, very gently, the way you’d set down something for a nine-year-old who had finally got her footwork right.
“Well done,” said Hester. “Drink your tea.”