Alice woke alone in a bed the size of a courtyard, which was a great deal of alone.
For one bad moment she didn’t know where she was. Then she smelled cinnamon. Then she saw the marble king at the foot of the bed in his clay moustache, his gilt pauldron, his apron. He looked like a man who had been through something.
“Morning,” Alice told him.
Her voice came out rough but whole. Her head was clear. Her nose worked. Her legs, when she tried them, were made of something softer than legs usually were, like bread left out in the rain. She sat on the edge of the bed until the hoard stopped tilting.
The bronze helmet stood in the middle of her swept circle where the silver cup used to be. There was a folded sheet of vellum in it.
Gone to return a pot. Back before dark.
Stay in bed.
If you must get out of bed, do not touch the cheeses. Under it, the little claw-scratched flame.
Alice read it twice. She folded it. She put it in her belt pouch with the first one, the coin, the ivy leaf. The pouch was getting crowded. She found she didn’t mind.
She stayed in bed for eleven minutes. It was a record for a day without a fever in it. She spent them looking at the cave roof, which was very high, with a long crack in it shaped like a river.
Nobody had told her to stay in bed since she was twelve. The infirmary sister in Solenne had said it over a broken wrist. An hour later the Crown’s steward had come in to ask whether the chosen one could still hold a pen for the ceremony. She could. She had.
Then she got out of bed. Obviously.
* * *
Brackenford smelled of woodsmoke and wet leaves. Rakshaza walked in from the east road at mid-morning, barefoot, in a gown of saffron wool the colour of the beech wood behind her. She had Marta’s black iron pot in a flour sack over one shoulder. A pot on the hip seemed to be how it was done. A pot in a sack was how nobody asked where it had been.
People turned to look. Nobody screamed. Somebody waved.
“Morning, Lady!”
“Lady Shaza! Any word from the mountain?”
Before she could answer, a boy with a stick did it for her. “Holding the beast at bay,” he said, gravely. “All night. It was in a note.”
“So I hear,” said Rakshaza.
Rakshaza had not quite understood, until that moment, what Gideon’s toast had done. The whole town knew. The hero had kissed the horned lady from the coast under the willows. The whole town had decided this was the best news it had heard in years. A woman she had never met pressed a warm apple tart on her. An old man touched his hat. Two girls followed her down the street at a careful distance, whispering, delighted, as if she were a parade.
I am the Red Storm, Rakshaza reminded herself. I have turned back fleets.
She ate the tart. It was very good.
At the Sleeping Lance, Pip was on the front step with his lute, tuning it to a pitch only he could hear.
“Lady Shaza! You’ll want to hear the new one!”
She did not want to hear the new one. He played it anyway.
All night upon the mountain’s crown the hero held the beast at bay; it roared, it raged, it would not sleep, she would not let it have its way. “She sneezed,” said Rakshaza, before she could stop herself.
Pip’s hands stopped on the strings. “Pardon?”
“I imagine. Up there. In the cold.” Rakshaza smiled with all her teeth. “Heroes must sneeze too. Very bravely.”
Pip looked at her with dawning joy. He wrote sneezed on his sleeve.
* * *
In the stable yard Gideon was brushing Turnip, who allowed it. Valour was eating the spare brush. When Gideon saw her, he dropped the brush, stood to attention, then turned his whole body to face the wall.
“Good morning, Lady,” he said to the wall. “I haven’t seen you.”
“You’re looking at a wall.”
“Discretion.” He nodded at the stones. “I’ve sworn, you see. I know nothing about anybody. Under anything.” He paused. “Have you had any word? From her? Only Dame Hester had me carry soup up at dawn. Nobody would tell me why soup.”
“Perhaps the beast was hungry.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” He frowned at the stones. “Do you think it ate the soup?”
“I think somebody did.”
“Oh, good.” His shoulders came down from round his ears. “I’d have gone up again. Only Dame Hester said if I went up that mountain with soup again without being asked, she’d hang me off the weathervane by my belt. It’s still pointing at the ground, you know. Since the storm. She said I’d improve it.”
Turnip put his nose in Rakshaza’s hand. He blew into it, long and warm. It was a full report.
“He stood at the gate all night,” Gideon told the wall. “Waiting for the hero.”
“I know,” said Rakshaza. She rubbed the horse’s nose. “So did somebody else.”
* * *
Rakshaza went in by the kitchen door at the back. Marta was at the table with her sleeves rolled to the elbow. She took the pot out of the sack without a word. She looked into it. It was scrubbed so clean it shone. Rakshaza had done it with sand from the stream, plus a certain amount of breath.
“Well,” said Marta. “That’s never been that clean.”
“Thank you for the soup.”
“How is she?”
“Cool.” Rakshaza heard her own voice say it the way you’d say a prayer, if you had any. “This morning. She was cool.”
Marta looked at her for a long moment. It was the look she’d given the ancient gold coin on the night of the slate.
“Sit down, Lady.”
“I’d rather learn.”
“Learn what?”
“Soup.” Rakshaza stood very straight in the doorway of the kitchen. She had stood like that before kings. She found this harder. “I don’t know how. Nobody ever... I would like to know how.”
Marta’s face did something complicated. Then she took an apron off a hook and held it out.
Rakshaza looked at it.
“I’ve had a bad experience,” she said. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Put it on, love.”
She put it on. The bow was at the back. Marta tied it for her without a word, then handed her an onion and a knife.
It went very badly for an hour. The onion did not want to be small. The carrots fled across the table. Rakshaza held the knife the way she’d once seen a sea captain hold a cutlass, five hundred years ago. Marta took it off her twice to show her again. Her eyes, Rakshaza noticed, were streaming from the onion. Rakshaza’s were not.
“Doesn’t that sting you?”
“Coastal eyes,” said Rakshaza.
“Mm,” said Marta.
Halfway through the barley, Hester came in by the back door with her boots in her hand. She stopped. She looked at the Lady of the Coast in Marta’s apron, chopping a carrot into eleven uneven pieces with enormous concentration.
“Huh,” said Hester.
“Dame Hester.”
“Lady.” Hester put her boots by the fire. She sat down on the bench by the wall with a small grunt for her left leg. “Got your letter.”
“You answered it.”
“Didn’t say much.”
“You said enough.”
Marta looked from one of them to the other. She stirred the pot. She said nothing in a way that filled the whole kitchen.
“She’s on her feet?” said Hester.
“I told her to stay in bed.”
“So she’s on her feet.” Hester watched the knife go down on the carrot. “She’ll have walked round your whole place twice by now. Touched everything. Tidied something. Can’t sit still when she’s mending. Never could.”
Rakshaza’s hand stopped.
“Your place,” said Hester again, very evenly, looking at the fire.
There was a short silence in the kitchen. A log settled.
“Send her horse up in the morning,” said Rakshaza. “She’ll ride down then. If she’s well.”
“I’ll send the boy with him. Fairweather.” Hester’s mouth moved at one corner. “He’s been asking to be useful. It’ll do him good.”
Marta tasted the soup off the end of the spoon. She considered it for a while.
“It’ll do,” she said. “Needs salt. Needs doing again. About a hundred times.”
“I have time,” said Rakshaza.
Hester looked up from the fire at that, then back down.
* * *
Alice had walked round the whole cave twice.
She had straightened a stack of silver plates. She had looked at the dent wall without going in. She had talked to the marble king, who had no opinions. She had not touched the cheeses.
On the third round she stopped at the loom.
The half-woven sheep looked back at her with its red-mended eye. Behind the loom the rock went into a narrow, dim bay. Alice had never been back there. She had never needed to. Something pale caught the lamplight on the wall.
She stepped round the loom. She looked.
Scratched into the rock, at about the height of Rakshaza’s shoulder in human form, was a row of small marks. Upright lines. Neat ones, mostly. Some were very straight. One leaned, as if it had been made in a hurry and never fixed. She counted them. Ten.
After the ten there were two more marks that were not lines.
The first was a curve with a sort of hook at one end. It took Alice a moment. Then she saw it was a wing, drawn small, folded half open. Like a roof.
The second was fresh. The rock dust was still pale in the scratches. It was a little round shape with a band across it. A helmet. Upside down, like a bowl.
Alice stood there for a long time.
Ten lines. She knew what the lines were. She could count, too. The first morning. The night of the rules. The ivy. The night in the circle after the shirt. The stag that lost an antler. On, through all the nights she had said never again into a pillow, into a shoulder, into a mouth.
She had been keeping score.
The dragon had been keeping score.
Alice opened her mouth to be outraged. Then she looked at the wing again.
The storm night. Nothing had happened. They had watched the weather. They had gone to sleep.
The helmet. Last night. She had a fever. Nothing had happened.
Those were on the wall too. The nights nothing happened were on the wall, with the others. Drawn, not scratched. Drawn carefully, as if somebody had sat here with the dagger, trying to think how to say something she hadn’t got a mark for.
Alice sat down on the floor of the bay with her back against the cold rock. She didn’t trust her legs. She told herself it was the fever.
* * *
There was a name on the royal papers.
She had been seven, sitting at a long table in Solenne in a dress somebody else had chosen. A man with ink on his cuffs had read her the prophecy, one line at a time. When the red storm wakes upon the crown of stone. Then he had laid a sheet in front of her with a drawing of a dragon on it, all wrong, with ears. Underneath, in careful letters, a name.
Rakshaza.
“That’s what it’s called,” the man had said. “You must learn it. You must know your enemy’s name.”
She had learned it. She had never once said it.
Not in the first month, when she called it Dragon in a voice like a slammed door. Not when she called it lizard. That had been the twentieth day, perhaps. She had shouted it from the circle in a temper. Come out and fight, you overgrown lizard! The dragon had not come out of the dark for the rest of the afternoon. It had sulked. A three-thousand-year-old dragon had sulked at her, very audibly, all day. Alice had ridden home happier than she’d been in years. She called it a lizard forty more times after that, for the pleasure of it.
But the name, never. A name was for a person. You said a person’s name. You didn’t say the name of a chore.
Shaza, she had said, in the stable yard, in a temper. Shaza was different. Shaza was a name for the town, a cloak with a hood, a lady from a coast that moved. It was half a name with the dragon taken out. It had been easy to say. That was the whole trouble with it.
She had been very careful about that for a whole year.
Alice sat in the bay behind the loom. She looked at the little wing.
Rakshaza, she thought. Just thought it.
* * *
Rakshaza came home at dusk with a jar of Marta’s soup in the crook of her arm. She had made it. Most of it. Marta had made the parts that tasted of anything.
She had flown it home from the beech wood in one hind talon, very slowly, like an egg. She landed on the ledge, let it go, shifted, then picked it up. She walked in with the jar held carefully in both hands. The bed was empty. Of course the bed was empty. Hester had said so.
“Hero?”
Nothing. Then, from behind the loom: “Here.”
Rakshaza went cold from the tips of her ears down.
She went round the loom. Alice was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, wrapped in the banner of the old Salt League. She was looking up at the marks.
Rakshaza had never once in three thousand years wanted the ground to open under her. It did not. She checked.
“That’s a tally,” she said.
“I can see it’s a tally.”
“Of a campaign. A long one. It’s a military...”
“You drew a wing.”
Rakshaza closed her mouth.
“You drew a wing,” said Alice again. “For the storm. And a helmet. For last night.” She didn’t sound angry. She sounded like somebody reading out a letter she hadn’t expected to get. “Nothing happened on those nights.”
“I know what happened on those nights.”
“Then why are they on the wall?”
The soup jar was warm in her hands. She held it like something that might help. It didn’t.
“Because they were the best ones,” said Rakshaza.
It came out before she could stop it. It sat there in the bay with them, quite small, entirely true.
Alice looked at her. Rakshaza looked at the wall. It was a very interesting wall. She had carved most of it.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t make anything of it. It’s a wall, Hero. I am the Red Storm. I’ve been keeping walls since before your kingdom had a name. I keep what I like. I count what I like. It isn’t...”
“Rakshaza.”
Everything stopped.
The tail stopped first. Then her breath. Then something else, further in, that she didn’t have a name for, that had been going on so long she’d stopped hearing it.
It was only a word. People had said it before. Kings had written it on notices, spelled wrong. Heralds had shouted it across valleys. A man had once sung it in a song about her, very flat, three hundred years ago.
Shaza was a coat she wore into town. Alice had said that one, in a stable yard, in anger. This was not the coat. This was the whole of her: the wings, the fire, the three thousand years, every part the town didn’t know.
Nobody had ever said it to her. Not like that. Not quietly. Not as if it were the answer to something.
She did not move. She found she couldn’t. The jar of soup was the only thing in the world that was still where she’d left it.
Alice got up. She did it slowly, because her legs were still bread. She let the Salt League banner fall. She came the two steps across the bay. She took the jar out of Rakshaza’s hands, set it down on the floor, then straightened up again. They were the same height. They always had been, horns aside.
“I’ve known it since I was seven,” Alice said. “They taught it to me with the prophecy. I never said it.”
“Why?” It came out of Rakshaza in a voice she didn’t recognise.
“Because then you’d be somebody.”
The lamp at the loom guttered. Somewhere at the back of the hoard, behind the cheeses, a quiet thing turned over in its sleep.
“And now?” said Rakshaza.
Alice didn’t answer that. Her ears had gone scarlet. She put one hand flat on Rakshaza’s breastbone, over the place where she had once warmed her own cold hands. She left it there, as if checking for something.
Rakshaza covered the hand with hers. Neither of them said anything for a long time. Nobody needed to.
It was Alice who looked away first, at the wall. Her mouth twitched.
“Thirteen,” she said.
“There are twelve.”
“Thirteen.” Alice bent, slowly, mending legs and all. The silver dagger was lying on the ledge of rock below the tally where Rakshaza always left it. Alice picked it up. She weighed it in her hand like a woman about to make a very serious mark on history.
Then, with great care, beside the little helmet, she scratched a small round shape with a leafy tuft at the top.
Rakshaza stared at it.
“That’s a turnip.”
“It’s for last night.” Alice put the dagger back exactly where she’d found it. “When I said the wrong name.”
Rakshaza made a sound. She had no idea what kind. It came up from somewhere near her knees. It was very undignified. It shook the loom. The half-woven sheep swung on its frame. She had to put a hand on the wall to keep upright, then another. Alice was laughing too, hoarse, coughing, holding on to her.
“You heard that,” said Alice, when she could.
“Hero. I was lying right behind you. I’ve been waiting all day to bring it up.”
“You’d never have brought it up.”
“I’d have brought it up in a hundred years. At the worst possible moment. In front of a king.” Rakshaza wiped her eyes. They were wet. They did not usually do that. “Turnip.”
“Don’t.”
“Of all the names in Aurelmark.”
“He was on my mind.”
“He’s a horse.”
Alice picked up the soup jar. She held it out with both hands, very formally, the way you’d present a sword.
“Eat your soup,” she said. “Rakshaza.”
The second time was no easier to hear. Rakshaza suspected it never would be. She took the jar. Her ear tips were burning. She didn’t care who saw.
Across the hoard, the marble king watched them go back to the bed in his apron. At the cave mouth the first star came out over the Redcrown.
On the wall behind the loom, among the lines, there was now a wing, a helmet, plus a small, lopsided turnip. It was the worst mark on the whole wall. Nobody was ever going to fix it.