Alice checked her shirt three times.
Once when she put it on, by the grey light of the shutter that did not latch. Once after the gambeson, pulling the collar out to look at the seams. Once at the top of the stairs, with her armour on, by sliding one finger under the gorget like a woman checking for a pickpocket.
The seams were on the inside. The seams were exactly where seams belonged.
Good, she thought. Today is a normal day.
She went down into the common room.
It was packed again, which was not normal. People were eating porridge standing up. People were eating porridge on the stairs. The blacksmith had brought his children, who had brought a wooden sword each, and were dueling under a table with the solemn ferocity of the very small.
Behind the bar, on the slate where Marta kept the book, the usual line was chalked up in her square hand:
HERO BACK BY DARK: 1 to 4.
Below it, in fresh chalk, sat a new line Alice had never seen before.
HERO STAYS THE NIGHT: 9 to 1.
Alice stopped on the bottom step.
“Popular line, that one,” said Marta, without looking up from the porridge pot. “Took a lot of money yesterday evening. Can’t think why.”
“Take it down.”
“Can’t. Book’s open.” Marta ladled porridge into a bowl, then dropped a spoon of honey on top, then pushed it across the bar. “Eat.”
“I’m not...”
“Eat.”
Alice ate. Around her, the whole room watched her eat. It was the same as every morning of the year. It was nothing like any morning of the year. She kept her eyes on the bowl and her back very straight. When she finished, she set the spoon down with a precise little click, the way she did every day.
“Same time as always,” Marta said. It was not a question.
“Same time as always.”
“Back by dark.”
Alice looked at the slate. She looked at Marta. Marta looked back at her with the bland, kindly patience of a woman who had run an inn for thirty years and seen every single thing a person could do in one.
“Back by dark,” said Alice.
* * *
They saw her off at the north gate. They always did, but usually it was a handful of early risers and a dog. Today it was half the town. The blacksmith’s children ran alongside Turnip with their wooden swords held high. They chanted the new line at the top of their lungs, as children will, without the faintest idea what it meant.
“She never once lay down! She never once lay down!”
“Thank you,” Alice told them. “That’s enough now.”
“SHE NEVER ONCE...”
She put her heels to Turnip. For once in his life, Turnip did not argue.
* * *
In the first week, she had tried everything.
On the second day she had brought a spear, on the theory that reach mattered. The dragon had let her take a run at its flank. The spear had snapped into three pieces. Rakshaza had picked up the longest piece with the claw at her wrist and used it to scratch an itch behind one horn.
On the third day she had brought a net, weighted with lead, woven by the finest ropemakers in Solenne. Rakshaza had admired it. Then she had hung it between two stalagmites and slept in it.
On the fourth day Alice had tried climbing the dragon’s tail to reach the neck. She had got four metres up before the tail had politely lifted her off, carried her back across the cave, and set her down by the entrance, the way a person sets a spider outside a window.
On every one of those days, she had walked back to Turnip with her sword in her hand and her pride in pieces. On every one of those days she had turned at the cave mouth.
“This isn’t over,” she had said on the first day.
On the second day, she had said, “Same time tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here,” the dragon had answered, eyes closed. “I am always here. It is the great tragedy of my existence.”
It had become a habit. It had become the shape of the day. A year of mornings, and every one of them ended with those words at the mouth of the cave.
Same time tomorrow.
She wondered, riding up through the pines with her shirt on the right way, whether she was meant to say it today.
* * *
Rakshaza had decided on her true shape.
It was the sensible choice. Size was distance. Thirty-five metres of dragon lying on a mountain of gold made a statement no human form could make: I am a terror. Nothing occurred here. Kindly stab me in the usual manner and go home.
She lay on the hoard in the middle of the cave, wings folded, chin on a heap of silver plates, arranged for maximum menace. She had been arranged since dawn. She had rearranged herself four times. On the fourth, she had caught herself checking whether the left side of her face was the better one, which was absurd, because she was a dragon, and both sides of her face were equally horrifying.
She had not gone to the cave mouth. She had not inspected the weather.
She had, however, heard the grey horse from three kilometres away. She had been listening to it climb for an hour. She knew exactly where it was. She knew when it reached the hollow. She knew when the hero dismounted, because the clank of plate on rock had a particular rhythm, one she had heard three hundred and sixty-six times.
The clank came up the passage.
Rakshaza closed her eyes. She breathed out a slow, insolent thread of smoke.
A normal day, she told herself. A completely normal day.
* * *
Alice walked into the cave with her sword already drawn.
That was normal. She always drew at the mouth of the tunnel. It gave her twenty steps of approach to settle her breathing, to find her footing on the coins, to fix her eyes on the target.
The target was lying in the middle of the hoard looking deliberately unbothered. The great red head rested on a heap of silver plates. The eyes were closed. A thread of smoke curled from one nostril. It was the most carefully casual thing Alice had ever seen.
She stopped at her usual spot. Fifty-three steps from the entrance. She knew it was fifty-three. She had no business knowing.
“Dragon,” she said.
One emerald eye opened.
“Hero.”
Silence.
Normally, at this point, the dragon would say something. Late again. Or What have you brought me today, a ladder? Or Is that a new dent? It suits you. Normally Alice would say something back. Normally they would trade three or four insults like sparring partners touching gloves, then she would charge.
Today the eye just looked at her.
Alice looked back.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” said the dragon.
Alice charged.
It was not a good charge. She knew it as she made it. Her feet were wrong on the coins. Her shoulder, still sore from yesterday’s backplate, made her swing short. Brightoath came round in a long arc toward the dragon’s flank. Rakshaza, who had dodged that exact blow a hundred times with insulting ease, did not dodge it. She simply lay there.
The blade struck scale.
Ting.
Alice stood with her sword resting on the side of the dragon. The dragon lay under it.
“Ow,” said Rakshaza. Flatly.
“Don’t.”
“I’m merely playing my part.”
“You’ve never said ‘ow’ in your life.”
“I’m told it’s traditional.” The great head lifted from the silver plates. It swung round toward her, slow, enormous, until the emerald eye was a metre from her face. “Was that your best?”
“No.”
“Shall we try again?”
“No,” said Alice. She lowered the sword. She looked at it. She looked at the eye. Something in her chest gave up all at once, the way a knot gives up when you stop pulling on it. “This is ridiculous.”
“Entirely,” Rakshaza agreed.
“I can’t...” Alice sheathed the sword with a sharp, frustrated shove. “I can’t fight you if you’re going to lie there like a... a...”
“Sofa somebody set on fire?”
“I was going to say that.”
“I know. You said it on day thirty-one.” The eye narrowed slightly. “You have a very limited range of furniture insults.”
“We need rules,” Alice said.
The eye blinked.
“Rules,” the dragon repeated.
“Rules. Terms. A plan.” Alice was pacing now, a short tight line across the gold, plates clanking. “Because this, today, is not going to work. I can’t come up here every morning and pretend nothing... that nothing didn’t... that it never...”
“Happened,” Rakshaza supplied.
“Didn’t happen. Yes. I can’t pretend that if we’re both standing here being strange about it. People will notice. Marta already noticed. Marta has a line on it.”
“A line?”
“In the book. Nine to one.”
There was a pause.
“Nine to one for,” Rakshaza asked, “or against?”
“That isn’t the point!”
The dragon made a sound like a landslide clearing its throat. Alice realised, after a moment, that it was a laugh being swallowed.
“Very well, Hero. Rules.” The vast body shifted. “But I am not negotiating terms with my chin on a plate.”
The air shimmered.
Alice had seen it before. Not many times: maybe a dozen in six months. It never stopped being alarming. Thirty-five metres of dragon folded in on itself like a cloak being shaken out in reverse. Heat rolled across the hoard. Coins skittered. Then, where the dragon had been, there was a woman sitting on the heap of silver plates with her legs crossed at the ankle.
She had chosen a gown. Dark green, the colour of pine shade, cut simply, falling to bare feet. Her hair poured down her back to her waist, red as ever. Her horns curved back from her temples, black and gleaming. Her pointed ears pricked forward with interest. Her tail lay curled on the silver beside her, the tip twitching.
She looked like a portrait of a queen, if a queen had ever looked that pleased with herself.
Alice’s mouth went dry.
That, she thought, was a mistake. That was a tactical error. We should put that in the rules.
“Better,” said Rakshaza. She propped her chin on one hand. “Go on, then. Rule the first.”
* * *
They argued about it for an hour.
Rakshaza produced paper from somewhere in the hoard, along with a quill and a pot of ink so old it had to be thinned with wine. Alice wrote, because her hand was neater and because she did not trust the dragon with the wording. She sat on a chest of coins with the paper on her knee. Rakshaza sat on the silver plates opposite, two metres away, which Alice had insisted on, and which Rakshaza had measured out by eye with deep, theatrical resentment.
ONE, Alice wrote. It never happened.
“Agreed,” said Rakshaza.
TWO. Nobody ever finds out.
“Obviously.”
THREE. The duels continue as before. Every day. Same time.
“How else would I keep my figure?”
FOUR. The hero leaves before dark.
Rakshaza tilted her head. “Every day?”
“Every day.”
“What if it rains?”
“I have a cloak.”
“What if there’s a storm? What if there is a terrible blizzard, Hero, a wall of ice coming down the mountain? Would you ride out into that rather than wait it out in a nice dry cave?”
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
“Rule four stands.” Alice underlined it twice. “Rule five. Dragon form only.”
The tail stopped twitching.
“I beg your pardon?”
“When I come up here. For the duel. You stay...” Alice gestured broadly, encompassing thirty-five metres of absent dragon. “Large.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s simpler.”
“For whom?”
Alice did not answer. She looked at the paper. She was very aware of the woman two metres away, of the bare feet, of the green fabric sliding over one knee where she had crossed her legs. She could feel her own ears getting hot under her hair.
Rakshaza watched her for a long moment. Then the corner of her mouth curled up, slowly, wickedly.
“Oh,” she said softly. “I see.”
“You don’t see anything.”
“I see a great deal. I can see a hawk’s feathers at two kilometres. I can certainly see a hero turning the colour of a radish.”
“Rule five,” Alice said through her teeth, “stands.”
“I’ll allow it.” Rakshaza leaned back on her hands. “If I get rules of my own.”
“Fine.”
“Rule six. You will no longer refer to me as a tactical error.”
Alice wrote it down. “Fine.”
“Rule seven. You will not hum that song in my cave.”
“What song?”
“The one about the thousand blows. You hum it when you are tired. You did it on day ninety. Day one hundred and twelve. Most of the autumn. It is the worst song ever written. There is a verse where I weep lava.”
“I don’t hum it.”
“You are humming it now, Hero. In your head. I can see your foot tapping.”
Alice stilled her foot. She wrote down rule seven.
“Rule eight,” Alice said. “No touching. Except with a sword.”
“Through the armour?”
“Through the armour.”
“How very chivalrous.” Rakshaza considered. “And the tail?”
“Especially the tail.”
The tail, which had begun to drift toward the chest Alice was sitting on, curled back with an air of injured innocence.
EIGHT, Alice wrote. No touching. Especially the tail.
She looked at the list. Eight rules, in neat black lines, on a paper that smelled of old wine. Sensible. Clear. Easy to follow. Exactly the sort of thing a hero should have written a year ago.
She signed the bottom with a small drawn sword, the way she signed duty reports for the Crown.
She held out the paper. Rakshaza took it, careful not to touch her fingers. She studied it. Then she lifted one hand, let a single nail lengthen into a curved black claw, and scratched a neat mark next to the sword. A little flame.
She held it out again.
“Never again, then,” Rakshaza said.
“Never again.”
The words hung in the cave. They sounded very final. They sounded, Alice thought, like the sort of thing people said in her penny... in stories. Right before the next chapter.
She took the paper. She folded it carefully. She slid it into her vambrace, next to the notice about her own remains.
Then, because she had been raised properly, because it was how every agreement in Aurelmark had been sealed since before the kingdom had a name, she held out her right hand.
Rakshaza looked at it.
Alice looked at it.
It was too late to take it back.
Rakshaza leaned across the two metres between them. She took Alice’s hand. Her palm was warm, warmer than any human palm, warm the way it had been warm yesterday morning across Alice’s waist. They shook once, firmly, like two generals ending a war.
Neither of them let go.
It was only a second. Maybe two. Long enough for Alice to feel a thumb move, very slightly, across her knuckles. Long enough to look up and find the emerald eyes much closer than two metres. Long enough to see the tips of those pointed ears flush pink.
They let go at the same instant, as if the hand had caught fire.
Alice stood up so fast the chest of coins tipped over behind her.
“Rule eight,” she said, in a strangled voice.
“That was a handshake.”
“It was touching!”
“It was diplomacy!”
“Diplomacy doesn’t involve the thumb!”
Rakshaza opened her mouth. Shut it. Opened it again. Then she rose from the silver plates in one long, offended movement, folded herself back up into thirty-five metres of dragon with a gust that blew Alice’s braid over her shoulder, and settled on the hoard with her back pointedly turned.
“The duel,” said the dragon, to the far wall, “is over. You may go.”
“It’s not even noon.”
“I’m tired. You struck me terribly hard.”
Alice stood there in the scattered coins, breathing hard, her right hand still warm. She knew she should leave. Rule four said nothing about leaving early. It would be fine. It would be sensible.
She did not leave.
“Dragon,” she said.
The great head did not turn. But one eye swivelled back, slow, toward her.
“Yesterday,” Alice said. “When I got back. They’d been ringing the bells all night. For me.” She did not know why she was telling this to a dragon’s back. “There were forty people at the gate with rope and a stretcher. They were going to come up here. For me. Bakers. A man who once poked a bull.”
The eye watched her.
“I didn’t know they’d do that,” Alice said.
There was a long silence.
“Were you all right?” Rakshaza asked. Quietly, for a dragon. “Riding into that.”
Alice opened her mouth to say yes, the way she always said yes. To the King, to Hester, to Marta, to the whole kingdom. Yes, I’m fine. Yes, I’m ready. Yes, I’ll go.
Nobody had ever asked it in that voice. As if the answer might be something else.
“I don’t know,” she said.
The dragon said nothing. But the vast red head turned, finally, all the way round. It came to rest on the gold beside her, very close, not touching. Not quite. Smoke drifted from one nostril, warm, smelling of cinnamon.
They stayed like that for a while. Neither of them said anything. It was not a rule. It was not in the paper. Alice did not think it counted.
Eventually she straightened. She settled her sword at her hip.
At the mouth of the tunnel, she turned. She did it out of habit. She did it every day.
“Same time tomorrow,” she said.
The emerald eye closed, slowly. It did not look bored. It looked like something being kept safe.
“I’ll be here,” said Rakshaza. “I am always here.”
* * *
Rakshaza listened to the clank go down the passage. She listened to the scree. She listened to the hero reach the hollow.
Then she listened to nothing at all for a full minute.
She is mounting, she thought. She is gathering the reins. She is riding away. Any moment now.
Nothing.
Rakshaza lifted her head.
Another minute passed. Then, faint and furious, the hero’s voice drifted up from the hollow, carrying a long way in the thin mountain air.
“Turnip. Walk on.”
A pause.
“Turnip, I am not asking again.”
A longer pause. A snort, very loud, very deliberate.
Rakshaza rose. She walked to the cave mouth on her hind legs, wings folded, and looked down over the ledge.
Far below, in the green hollow by the stream, a huge grey warhorse stood planted like a boulder, all four hooves set. His head was lifted toward the cave. His ears were pricked forward. On his back, a woman in white plate was drumming her heels against his ribs with no effect whatsoever.
The horse saw the dragon on the ledge. He whickered, a long, contented, rumbling sound.
Then he turned around and walked down the mountain, as calm as you please.
The hero twisted in the saddle to glare up at the cave. Even from here, Rakshaza could see the colour in her face.
“That,” Alice shouted, “is not in the rules!”
Rakshaza lowered her head to the edge of the ledge. Her voice rolled down the slope like warm thunder.
“Rule nine,” she called. “The horse may do as he likes.”
There was no answer from the hollow. Only the clop of hooves fading among the pines, steady and unbothered.
And, very faintly, just before it was gone, the sound of someone trying not to laugh.