On the sixth morning of autumn, Alice woke cold.
Not the old cold she had woken to every morning before the Redcrown. A new one. It started somewhere behind her breastbone and went out to the edges of her, as if somebody had left a door open inside her chest. Her throat felt sanded. Her nose had stopped working in the night without asking.
She lay still and did Hester’s drill. Count what you have.
Two hands. Two feet. A head, which hurt. A nose, technically. A window, grey. A shirt, the right way out.
Fine, she decided. Everything accounted for.
She sat up. The room went on sitting up a little after she had stopped. She waited for it to finish, then reached for her greaves.
The armour took twenty-six minutes, which was six too many. At the gatepost the top strap took three tries. On the third her arms shook. She told herself that was the cold, which was true in a way she didn’t care to look at.
In the common room Marta put a bowl of porridge in front of her. Then she stood there with the pot on her hip.
“You look like the bowl,” she said.
Alice looked up at the shelf, where the lopsided bowl sat under the old lance with its hair-thin crack.
“I look fine.”
“You look like it’s leaning to one side. With a crack.” Marta put the back of her hand to Alice’s forehead before Alice could duck. Her mouth went flat. “You’re not riding.”
“I’m riding.”
“Hester.”
Hester was at the end of the long table with her bread. She looked at Alice for a long moment, the way she used to look at a recruit who said his ankle was perfectly all right while standing on the other one.
“She’s riding,” Hester said.
Marta turned on her. “She’s got a fever you could fry eggs on.”
“She’s twenty-eight. She knows what she’s got.” Hester tore her bread in half with great care. “Don’t you.”
“A cold,” said Alice. “Everyone gets colds.”
“Do they,” said Hester, which wasn’t a question. It was a door left open for her to walk back through, if she wanted. Alice didn’t. She ate four spoons of porridge to prove a point. They went down like gravel.
Gideon came in from the stable with straw in his hair. Valour followed him, eating the straw. Gideon took one look at her. He pulled off his campaign cloak, the one that had been blown over the valley twice and still smelled faintly of goat.
“Take this,” he said. “Knight’s...”
“No.”
“It’s very warm. It kept me dry through the whole of...”
“Gideon. I know what it kept you dry through.”
Alice sneezed. It was a large sneeze. Valour fled under the table.
“I’m going to work,” she said, with the dignity of a woman whose nose had betrayed her.
The town saw her off as it always did. Turnip went up the road at his usual pace, which was patient. Halfway up the first slope she put her forehead against his neck for a moment. It was warm.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she told him.
Turnip flicked one ear. He was a horse who kept most things to himself.
* * *
Rakshaza heard the climb start below the ledge. She heard it stop.
She was lying on her hoard with her chin on a silver tray, enjoying the first chill of the season the way other people enjoy a bath.
The climbing started again. Then it stopped.
She has never once stopped on that cliff. Not in snow. Not in plate. Not once.
Rakshaza lifted her head off the tray.
When Alice came over the lip of the ledge, she did it badly. She got one knee up, then sat there, breathing, as if the ledge were a stair she had forgotten the reason for climbing. Then she stood. She walked the fifty-three steps to her circle with great precision. It was the walk of someone carrying a full bowl of soup without a tray.
“You’re late, Hero,” said Rakshaza, from the dark. “I’d almost begun to hope.”
“I’m not late.” Alice drew Brightoath. The blade wobbled. “Have at...”
She sneezed.
The sneeze echoed off the back of the cave, round the hobby graveyard, among the cheeses. Something fell over in the glass-blowing corner. She had never heard a person make that noise in her cave. It was small. It was wet. She didn’t like it at all.
“What,” said Rakshaza, “was that?”
“Nothing.” Alice set her feet. “Come on, then. I’ve not got all...”
Then she sat down.
She didn’t fall. Alice never fell. She sat, all at once, in the middle of the swept circle, with Brightoath across her knees, as if her legs had held a short meeting without her and voted.
Rakshaza was out of dragon form before she had decided to be.
She came across the coins at a run, barefoot, in a body she hadn’t thought about. It was only when she knelt beside Alice that she noticed what it had put on. A brown wool dress. Sensible. Long sleeves. Over it, tied neatly at the back, a white apron.
She had never worn an apron in her life. She had never wanted to. Her body, apparently, had views.
“Look at me,” she said.
Alice looked at her. Her eyes were very bright. Her cheeks had two hot red patches high up, the colour of the scales along Rakshaza’s own cheekbones. The rest of her face was the colour of the bowl.
“You’re wearing an apron,” said Alice.
“I am not.”
“There’s a bow at the back.”
Rakshaza put her palm on Alice’s forehead. Then she took it away, quickly, as if she had touched the wrong end of a poker. She put it back.
Alice was hot.
Not warm. Not the warmth that came off her after a bout, or after a night in the big bed. Hot, the dry hot of a stone that had sat in a fire. Rakshaza knew heat better than she knew anything. She knew exactly what it meant when something that wasn’t supposed to burn started to.
“You’re hot,” she said.
“It’s a cold.”
“You’re hot, Hero. Humans aren’t supposed to be hot. That’s my end of things.”
Alice laughed. It turned into a cough halfway through. The cough went on longer than the laugh had. Rakshaza found she had taken hold of both of Alice’s gauntlets without quite meaning to.
“It’s a cold,” Alice said again, when she could. “Everyone gets them. It’s nothing. I’ve had dozens.”
“Name one.”
Alice opened her mouth, then shut it. “I don’t remember them. That’s how little they matter.”
She doesn’t remember them because nobody ever sat with her through one, said a voice in Rakshaza that she had not asked for. She put it away.
“Right,” she said. “Stand up. No. Don’t stand up. Stay there.”
She started on the buckles.
Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!
There was a winter, early in the year, when Alice had come up through snow with her nose running.
Month five, perhaps. The road had been white for a week. Every morning the hero arrived at the ledge with frost on her eyebrows, struck nine or ten blows with great energy, then rode home. That morning her nose had been scarlet. She had sniffed between every blow.
“Your nose is running, Hero,” Rakshaza had said, from her hoard. “It’s the only part of you that has ever had the sense to.”
Alice had struck her eleven times for that. The next day she came back with her nose as pale as the rest of her. Rakshaza never thought about it again.
Humans got colds. Then they got better. That was simply what they did.
She had known that for three thousand years. It had never once mattered to her before.
* * *
Alice did not remember the walk to the bed. She remembered the end of it. The bed was the size of a courtyard. She was in the middle of it, which seemed a long way from anywhere.
She was also under a great deal of fabric.
“I can’t breathe,” she said.
“You’re cold. You said you were cold.”
“I’m under a tapestry.”
“Two tapestries. Some furs. A banner of the old Salt League, which no one will miss.” Rakshaza was standing at the foot of the bed in her apron with her arms full of what looked like a pavilion. “And a tent. Somebody’s tent. Hold still.”
“Don’t put the tent on me.”
Rakshaza looked at the tent. She looked at Alice. She dropped the tent on the floor with the air of somebody who had been asked to give up the best idea she’d ever had.
Alice dug herself out as far as her chin. Somebody had taken her armour off. It stood in a neat row beside the bed, every piece, with the boots paired at the end. The top strap of the backplate had been unbuckled so carefully that it was still curled in the shape of the buckle.
She was shivering. She didn’t remember starting.
“Turnip,” she said.
“Is in the hollow. Eating something he shouldn’t.”
“If he goes home without me...”
“Then Brackenford rings the bells again. Yes.” Rakshaza sat on the edge of the bed. “I’ve thought of that.”
“They’ll get up a rescue party.”
“I’ve thought of that too. Forty people. A stretcher. Pitchforks.” Rakshaza had a sheet of old vellum on her knee and a quill made from something with a lot of feathers. “We’ll send a note with the horse. Tell me what it says. You’re the one they believe.”
Alice closed her eyes. “To the town of Brackenford,” she said. “The beast is... restless. The hero will hold it at bay through the night. Do not follow. Do not ring anything.” She opened one eye. “Read it back.”
Rakshaza read it back. She read it in a very good imitation of Alice’s Crown-report voice, which Alice decided not to notice.
“Sign it A.,” said Alice.
The quill scratched. Then it went on scratching after the A., for a while.
“What are you writing?”
“Nothing.” Rakshaza folded the vellum in three. “A postscript. For Hester.”
“What does it say?”
“It’s private.” Rakshaza stood. “Don’t move. Don’t do anything heroic. If you sneeze, aim it at the cheeses. They’ve seen worse.”
She went. Alice heard bare feet on coins, then nothing, then the great hush of a body changing shape at the cave mouth. Wind went through the hoard.
Alice lay under two tapestries, some furs, a banner of the old Salt League, and shivered. She had never been put to bed before. Not since she was seven. She decided she didn’t like it.
She decided it a little too late. By then she was asleep.
* * *
Turnip went down the mountain at a trot, with the note tied to his saddle by a ribbon from the hoard. Rakshaza watched from the ledge until he was a grey speck on the road. She told herself she was making sure he didn’t stop to eat a fence.
Then she went to make soup.
She had seen it through roofs for centuries. Somebody got ill. Somebody else made soup. It seemed to be the main thing soup was for. She had never cooked anything in her life, unless you counted the quarry.
She did not have a goat. She was not going to leave the cave to get one. She had, however, the rest of the four-hundred-year-old honey.
Somewhere, nine hundred years ago, she had watched a queen’s old nurse sit by a sickbed with a cup of honey stirred into hot water. The queen had lived. Rakshaza had no idea whether the honey had anything to do with it. It was the only medicine she had ever seen work.
She needed water. There was a stream in the hollow. She took Alice’s helmet off the row by the bed, carried it to the ledge, shifted, then picked it up in her jaws. She dropped off the ledge. In the air she passed it to one hind talon, skimmed the stream with it, then flew back up through the cold air with the helmet held as level as she could. Half of it was gone by the ledge. She went down again.
The silver cup from the circle was the right size. She set it on a rock, filled it from the helmet, then breathed on it. Gently. The way she had fired the bowl.
The cup melted.
It folded in on itself like a flower at dusk. The water hissed away into steam. What was left was a small, glossy puddle of the finest silver in Aurelmark, gently smoking.
“Oh, come on,” said Rakshaza, to nobody.
She tried a bronze helmet from the hoard, which had belonged to a general who no longer needed it. Bronze held. She heated the water with less breath this time, a mere sigh. It took eleven tries. On the ninth the water spat at her. She stirred the honey in with her finger, which no queen’s nurse would have done.
By the end the honey had melted into the water. It smelled of heather. It smelled of clover. It smelled of a meadow below an old road, a long time ago.
She carried it to the bed in both hands, very carefully, in her apron.
* * *
Alice woke to someone saying her name. Not her name. Hero. Said in a voice she hadn’t heard it said in before. Low. Careful. As if the word were something that might break.
She opened her eyes. Rakshaza was kneeling on the bed beside her, holding a bronze helmet with both hands.
“Drink this,” said Rakshaza.
“Out of a helmet?”
“The cup melted.”
Alice drank out of the helmet. It was hot honey water. It was the best thing she had ever tasted, apart from the same honey on the night of the storm. It went down where the porridge had refused to go.
“There’s something on your wrist,” Alice said.
Rakshaza pulled her sleeve down. “There isn’t.”
“There is. I saw it.” Alice put the helmet down on a fold of the Salt League banner. “Did you burn yourself?”
“Nothing burns me. Nothing has ever burned me.”
“Then what is that?”
“Honey.” Rakshaza licked it off her wrist, then took the helmet away with great dignity. “Lie down. You’re shivering again.”
She was. It had come back while she drank, a shaking from the inside out. The tapestries didn’t help. The furs didn’t help. It was the cold from the morning, the open door in her chest, only now somebody had left every window open too.
“Can’t get warm,” said Alice, through her teeth. She hated the sound of it. It belonged to a girl under a bed in Solenne. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Rakshaza looked at her for a long moment.
Then she climbed in.
She didn’t take off the apron. She didn’t take anything off. She simply lay down along Alice’s back under all the tapestries, put one arm round her, then drew her in. Her tail came over Alice’s ankles and stayed there.
She was warm. She was warmer than any hearthstone. It went into Alice’s back in a long, slow wave. The shaking slowed. It didn’t stop, but it slowed.
“There,” said Rakshaza into her hair. “That’s my end of things. You leave that to me.”
Alice laughed, which hurt. She found Rakshaza’s hand on her stomach. She held on to it. The wrist under her thumb was still a little sticky. She didn’t mention it.
“You’re like a stove,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“With an apron.”
“I’m taking it off the moment you’re asleep.”
“No, you’re not. You’ve forgotten how.” Alice’s eyes were closing. “Bow at the back. You can’t reach. Somebody has to do it for you.”
There was a short silence behind her.
“Go to sleep, Hero.”
Alice went. Not straight away. On the way down she said something. She meant to say something important. She could feel it sitting right there on her tongue, a word she had never said aloud, the shape of it warm.
“Turnip,” she said, and fell asleep.
* * *
Rakshaza lay very still in the dark of her hoard for a long time.
Turnip, she thought. Of course. Of course it’s the horse.
The heat in Alice’s back rose in the night, then fell, then rose. Rakshaza lay along it the way she would lie along a fire that might go out. Alice’s breath was rough at the top. It caught, sometimes, then went on. Rakshaza found, around midnight, that she had begun to count it.
She stopped counting.
She started again without meaning to. Four hundred and something. She made herself stop again.
She had watched kingdoms happen. She had known, the way you know weather, that the little warm creatures in the houses got ill, got better, got old, got... She didn’t finish that. She had always known it. It had always been a fact, like the tide.
It had never been a fact about anyone in her bed.
It’s a cold, she told herself. She’s had dozens. She just doesn’t remember them.
She put the thought somewhere at the back of the hoard, behind the cheeses, where she kept the things she didn’t look at. It went there quietly. She heard it settle.
She didn’t count again. She just listened, the whole night, the way she had listened to Alice’s horse come up the road every morning for a year.
* * *
Alice woke warm.
It was grey light. She was wet through, as if she had been rained on in her sleep. The open door in her chest had shut. Her head was clear. Her nose worked. It worked enough for her to smell smoke, cinnamon, honey, plus a little scorched silver.
Rakshaza was asleep sitting up against the carved headboard. She still had the apron on. She still had one arm round Alice. The bronze helmet sat on her knee, empty, held in her free hand as if somebody might try to take it.
Alice lay there and counted what she had. It took longer than usual. There was a great deal of it.
Somewhere far below, a voice shouted.
“SOUP!”
Rakshaza woke all at once, the way a cat lands. She looked at Alice. She put the back of her hand to Alice’s forehead. She left it there a long time, longer than she needed.
“Cool,” she said.
“Yes.”
Rakshaza took the hand away. Her face did nothing in particular, very hard.
“SOUP FOR THE HERO!” said the voice, closer to the cliff. “FROM MISTRESS BRIN! I’M TO LEAVE IT ON THE ROCK! I’M NOT TO COME UP! I WASN’T TOLD ANYTHING ABOUT A POSTSCRIPT!”
Alice put her face into the furs.
“What did you write to Hester?”
“I asked for soup.”
“That’s all?”
“I asked whether it should be soup or honey.” Rakshaza got off the bed. She untied the apron, which took her two tries, because the bow was at the back. “Then I asked what one does. For a person. When they’re ill.” She dropped the apron on the marble king. It hung off his gilt pauldron at a rakish angle. “Nobody’s ever told me.”
Alice looked at her.
“What did Hester say?”
“I imagine she said soup.”
She went to the cave mouth. The shape of her changed at the edge of the light. A moment later she dropped off the ledge. Alice heard Gideon yell, cheerfully. She heard Valour bleat. She heard Hester’s voice, short, saying something Alice couldn’t make out.
Then the dragon came back up with a black iron pot hooked in one hind talon. She landed on the ledge, let it go, then took it by the handle in her jaws. She carried it the fifty-three steps on all fours. She set it down at the edge of the circle as gently as the bowl. She shifted. There was a folded scrap of paper tucked under the lid.
Rakshaza read it first. Of course she did.
Then she handed it over without a word.
It was Hester’s hand, square, pressed hard, the hand that used to write Alice’s training marks on the yard slate.
Soup. Then sleep. Then more soup.
Sit with her. That’s the whole of it. Nobody ever did.
H.
Alice read it twice. The second time, the paper wasn’t quite steady.
Rakshaza took the lid off the pot. Marta’s mutton broth, still hot, with barley in it. She ladled it into the bronze helmet with the duke’s silver spoon, sat down on the edge of the bed, then held the helmet out.
“I’m going to learn this,” she said.
“Soup?”
“All of it. Whatever it is that people do.” She considered the pot with the narrow, interested look she had once given a loom, a wheel, a lute with two strings. “I think it will be a very bad hobby. I think I’ll be terrible at it for years.”
“You will,” said Alice, with her mouth full.
“Good,” said Rakshaza. “I’ve never had one that I wanted to be terrible at for years.”
Alice ate the soup. Down in the hollow, Gideon was singing the turning dance to the goat. Somewhere behind the cheeses, a thought lay where it had been put, very quietly, not looked at.
On the marble king, the apron stirred a little in the draught from the ledge, like a white flag on a field where nobody had lost.