The first day of the rules went perfectly.
Alice walked into the cave at the usual hour. The dragon lay on the hoard in her true shape, thirty-five metres of red menace, exactly where a dragon ought to be. Alice drew at the tunnel mouth. She walked her fifty-three steps. She stopped.
“Dragon.”
“Hero.” One emerald eye opened. “In accordance with rule three, I shall now pretend to be asleep.”
“You don’t have to announce it.”
“I’m being thorough.” The eye closed. “Proceed.”
Alice charged. It was a better charge than yesterday’s. Her shoulder had stopped aching. Her feet found the coins. Brightoath came round in a clean arc toward the flank. At the last instant the great tail swept across the gold, lazy as a broom, and took her legs out from under her.
She landed flat on her back in a heap of copper. The air went out of her in a single honest oof.
“Better,” said Rakshaza, without opening her eye.
Alice lay there looking at the cave ceiling, where pale veins of crystal glittered in the dark. She was winded. Her elbow hurt. A copper coin had found its way inside her gorget.
She was grinning.
There it is, she thought. That’s normal. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
She got up. She charged again. She got swept again. On the fifth attempt she managed to vault the tail. She got as far as the hind leg before a wing tipped her gently sideways into a pile of candlesticks.
“You’re dropping your left shoulder,” the dragon remarked.
“I am not.”
“You’ve been dropping it since spring. It’s very endearing.”
“Rule six,” Alice said, climbing out of the candlesticks.
“Rule six forbids tactical error. It says nothing about endearing.” The eye opened. It glittered at her. “Shall I add it?”
Alice did not answer. She charged a sixth time. Her ears burned all the way across the hoard.
She left two hours before dark, sore, bruised and covered in metal dust. On the ride home she caught herself humming. She stopped. Rule seven only applied in the cave. She hummed the rest of the way down.
* * *
Rakshaza had not kept a copy of the rules. She had not needed to. She had read them once, upside down, while the hero was writing, the way she had once read the treaty terms off a nervous ambassador’s sleeve during the Second Salt War.
She had memorised them. She lay in the dark after the hero left, going over each one.
Rule one. It never happened.
Fine. Things happened all the time without having happened. Whole centuries of her life had gone that way.
Rule two. Nobody ever finds out.
Also fine. Nobody had found out anything about Rakshaza in three thousand years that she had not wanted found out.
Rule three. The duels continue.
Delightful.
Rule four. The hero leaves before dark.
Rakshaza turned this one over for some time. Before was a generous word. Dark was a disputed one. Somewhere between sunset and true night there was a whole hour that belonged to nobody.
Rule five. Dragon form only.
Here she stopped. She lay with her chin on the gold, thinking about the precise wording, which she could see in her mind as clearly as if the paper lay in front of her. When I come up here, the hero had said. You stay large.
Up here.
The cave was up here. The ledge was up here.
The hollow was not up here. The hollow was a good hundred metres down.
Rakshaza’s tail began, slowly, to curl.
Rule eight. No touching. Except with a sword.
She thought about the hero’s face when she had said especially the tail. She thought about the handshake. She thought about the precise, ridiculous, wonderful phrase except with a sword.
She thought about how many things in this hoard were swords.
She laughed, in the dark, alone, a short puff of smoke at the ceiling.
It reminded her of something. She lay there, letting it come back.
* * *
It had been around the hundredth day. Late in the autumn, when the first frost was on the scree.
The hero had walked in at the usual time, drawn at the usual place, stopped at her usual spot. Then she had looked down.
The coins were gone.
In a neat circle around her boots, perhaps three metres across, the gold had been cleared away to bare dry stone. Somebody had pushed every coin into a low wall around the edge. Somebody had done it carefully. There was not a single loose piece left inside the circle to roll under a heel.
The hero had looked at the circle for a long time. Then she had looked at the dragon.
“Did you sweep for me?”
Rakshaza, who had spent most of the previous night doing exactly that with the tip of one wing, had turned her head away with enormous dignity.
“The coins were bored there,” she had said. “They wanted to move.”
“They wanted to.”
“Coins have ambitions, Hero, the same as anyone.”
The hero had stood in her little cleared circle with her sword drawn. Her mouth had been doing something complicated. Rakshaza had realised, with a jolt like missing a step, that the hero was trying not to smile.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s done for me since I was nine,” Alice had said. Then she had looked horrified at having said it. She had charged before either of them could answer, slipped on nothing at all, and fallen over anyway.
Rakshaza had laughed so hard she had set fire to a tapestry.
She had kept the circle clear every day since. The hero had never mentioned it again. She had never once failed to stop inside it.
* * *
The third day of the rules, Turnip would not go past the stream.
Alice felt him slow as they came up out of the pines into the hollow. His ears went forward. His head came up. His whole enormous body took on the air of a horse who had spotted a particularly good apple tree.
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“What,” Alice said. “What is it. What are you...”
Then she saw.
A woman was sitting on the flat boulder beside the stream.
She had her skirts gathered up to her knees. Her bare feet were in the water. Her hair hung down her back in a long red fall, catching the morning sun like a lit fuse. Two black horns curved back from her temples. A tail lay coiled on the warm rock beside her, its tip dipping idly in and out of the current.
She was eating an apple.
She looked up as Turnip came to a stop. Her emerald eyes widened in an expression of total, theatrical surprise.
“Hero!” she said. “What a coincidence.”
“No,” said Alice.
“I was simply passing.”
“You live here.”
“I live up there.” Rakshaza pointed with the apple toward the cave mouth, high above them on the ledge. “This is down here. Entirely different place. Different altitude. Different stream.” She took a bite. “Rule five, as I recall, applies when you come up here. I’m told those were your exact words.”
Alice opened her mouth. She shut it. She thought back, hard, to the moment in the cave, the paper on her knee, the quill in her hand. When I come up here.
She had said that.
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“Then you should have written what you meant.” Rakshaza wiggled her toes in the water. “Words are very important, Hero. Ask any treaty.”
Turnip, apparently feeling that the conversation had gone on long enough, walked forward without being asked. He lowered his huge grey head over the boulder. He breathed hopefully on the apple.
“No,” Alice told him. “Absolutely not. Don’t you dare...”
Rakshaza held out the apple. Turnip took it from her palm with the delicacy of a duchess accepting a sugared plum. He crunched it with his eyes half closed.
“Traitor,” said Alice.
“He has excellent taste.”
“He eats fence posts.”
“Then I’m in fine company.” Rakshaza drew her feet out of the stream. She stood up on the boulder, shaking her skirts down. Today the gown was a dark rust colour, the shade of autumn bracken, with long sleeves and no ornament at all. It did not need any. Water ran down her bare ankles in bright threads.
Alice looked at the ankles. She looked away. She looked at the stream, which was an extremely interesting stream, full of extremely interesting stones.
“Shall we?” said Rakshaza.
* * *
They walked up to the cave together.
It was a steep climb, the last hundred metres. Alice had done it every day for a year in full plate, so she knew where every loose stone was. She led. Rakshaza followed, barefoot, stepping lightly from rock to rock as if the scree were a ballroom floor. Her tail swayed behind her for balance.
Alice did not look back at it. She did not look at the bare feet. She did not look at the way the rust-coloured gown moved. She looked straight ahead at the cave mouth, with immense discipline, which was why she heard the small oh behind her a moment too late.
She turned. Rakshaza had stopped on a ledge of rock a little too high to step up from, one hand braced on the stone, tail lashing for balance.
Alice did not think. She held out her hand.
Rakshaza looked at it. Then she looked at Alice. Her eyes glittered.
“Rule eight,” she murmured.
Alice snatched the hand back.
“Right. Yes. Fine.” She looked around, flustered, for something, anything. “Then how am I supposed to...”
Rakshaza nodded down at Alice’s hip. At Brightoath, sheathed, hanging from her sword belt.
“Except,” she said, “with a sword.”
There was a pause.
With great dignity, Alice unbuckled the scabbard. She held it out, hilt toward her own chest, the tip of the sheath angled down toward the ledge. Rakshaza took hold of the end of it with both hands. Alice pulled. The dragon came up the rock in one easy step, like a woman being helped into a carriage.
For a moment they stood very close. A metre of polished scabbard between them. Both of them holding on to it.
“There,” said Rakshaza softly. “Entirely within the rules.”
Alice became aware that she was holding the prophecy blade of Aurelmark, forged in the old fires of Solenne for the slaying of the red storm, like the handle of a picnic basket.
She let go so fast that Rakshaza had to catch the sword.
* * *
At the threshold of the cave, Rakshaza handed Brightoath back to her. Then she turned to face the dark interior, lifted her chin, and announced, in the voice of a herald opening a royal ball:
“I am now entering up here.”
The air shimmered. Heat rolled out of the tunnel. Coins hissed somewhere in the dark. When Alice could see again, thirty-five metres of red dragon stood in the mouth of the cave, wings folded, emerald eyes gleaming down at her from a great height.
“Rule five,” the dragon said, very smug, “observed.”
Alice stood on the ledge with her sword in her hand. She thought about Hester, who had taught her that every battle plan dies at first contact with the enemy. She thought that Hester, in thirty years of campaigning, had never had to contend with an enemy that read the fine print.
“I’m adding a rule,” Alice said.
“You can’t add rules. The paper is signed.”
“I’ll get a new paper.”
“Then I’ll get new rules.” The great head lowered until the eye was level with her. “You have a great many rules, Hero. I have a great deal of time.”
* * *
On the fourth day of the rules, the tail was lying across the tunnel.
All of it. Fifteen-odd metres of red tail, stretched from wall to wall at knee height, the tip resting on a stalagmite like a lazy hand on a banister. The rest of the dragon lay out of sight around the bend, breathing slowly.
Alice stood in front of it.
“Move your tail.”
“What tail?” said a voice from the dark.
“The one in the tunnel.”
“I can’t feel anything in the tunnel. I’m asleep. Rule three.”
Alice looked at the tail. She looked at the passage behind her, which was the only way in. She thought about turning round, riding home, explaining to Marta that the duel had been called off on account of furniture.
She climbed over it. There was no other way to do it. She put one gauntleted hand flat on the warm scales for balance and swung a leg across.
“Rule eight,” said the dark, sounding enormously pleased.
“You put it there!”
“The tail isn’t touching you, Hero. You’re touching the tail.”
* * *
On the fifth day of the rules, Alice found her own loophole.
She was standing in her cleared circle, breathing hard after the third charge. The dragon had just tipped her over, gently, with a wingtip. She had rolled. Come up. Found herself, for once, within reach of the great head lying low on the gold.
She did not swing. She did not stab.
Very slowly, she lifted Brightoath. She laid the flat of the blade against the side of the dragon’s jaw, just under the eye, where the scales were small and fine as river pebbles.
She drew it down. Lightly. A long, slow stroke, from the eye to the corner of the mouth.
The dragon went completely still.
“Touching,” Alice said, “with a sword.”
For a long moment there was no sound in the cave at all. Not the shift of coins, not breath, not the drip of water somewhere deep in the rock.
“Is that,” Rakshaza said finally, in a voice gone very low, “a caress, Hero?”
“It’s a technique.”
“From which manual?”
“The... it’s an old Solenne technique.”
“What is it called?”
Alice had no idea. She had never felt so much like a liar in her life. Her hand was steady on the hilt. The rest of her was not.
“It’s called,” she said, “the... the long stroke.”
The dragon made a sound. It started low in the great chest and rolled up through the throat. It came out as a sort of shuddering huff, smoke curling from both nostrils. Coins trembled all the way across the hoard.
It took Alice a moment to understand that Rakshaza was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe.
“It is not funny...”
“The long stroke...”
“It’s a real technique!”
“Hero, I have seen every sword school in this kingdom for three thousand years. I watched the founder of the Solenne school get stuck in a chimney...”
Alice lowered the sword. She was laughing too. She hadn’t meant to. It came up out of her the same way Rakshaza’s had, unplanned, unstoppable, the way it had not done since she was a girl. She stood in her cleared circle in her dented armour, the dragon’s head heaving with laughter beside her. She laughed until her ribs hurt. She laughed until her eyes ran.
When it was over, she sat down on the bare stone, right there. She leaned her back against the dragon’s jaw. Through the plate, she could feel the slow warm rise of breath.
It was not touching. There was armour in between. It was certainly not in the rules either way.
Without meaning to, she started humming.
She was three bars in before she noticed. The dragon’s head shifted under her back.
“Rule seven,” said Rakshaza.
Alice stopped.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were. ‘The Thousand Blows’, second verse. The part where my blood turns the river crimson for a week.” A long sigh, warm against her shoulders. “Rivers don’t do that, by the way. I have never bled in my life. Not a drop. Not even the time I sat on a very sharp rock by mistake.”
“Then what’s the forfeit?”
“There’s a forfeit?”
“You’re the one who reads the fine print. You tell me.”
The dragon thought about it. Alice could feel her thinking, a faint slow rumble through the scales.
“Tell me something true,” Rakshaza said.
Alice looked out across the hoard. At the gold. At the cleared circle of stone under her boots, swept every day for most of a year by somebody who said the coins had wanted to move.
She had not said anything true to anyone for a very long time. Not to the King, not to Marta, not even to Hester. A hero didn’t. A hero said yes. A hero said I’m fine or same time tomorrow.
“I don’t hate coming here,” Alice said.
It came out small. It sat on the air.
The dragon didn’t answer for a while.
“That’s a very low bar, Hero.”
“You asked for true. You didn’t ask for impressive.”
Another pause. The breath behind her back went slow, then slower.
“Your turn,” Alice said.
“I didn’t hum.”
“You laughed at the long stroke. That’s worse.”
The dragon made a sound like a door being dragged reluctantly open. Then, so quietly that Alice almost lost it under the sound of her own heart:
“I swept your circle.”
Alice did not turn around. She did not say I know. She did not say since the hundredth day. She sat very still, with her back against the warm jaw of the most dangerous creature in the world. She let it be said.
Neither of them said anything else for a long time.
* * *
She left at sunset.
Not before. Not after. Exactly at sunset, when the last sliver of the sun sat on the far ridge like a coin balanced on its edge. She mounted at the hollow just as it went under. It was, she would have sworn to any court in the kingdom, still technically day.
The dragon watched her from the ledge. Turnip looked back twice.
By the time she rode in through the north gate, the lamps were being lit along the main street. By the time she walked into the common room of the Sleeping Lance, the sky in the windows had gone a deep, unarguable blue.
The room went quiet. Everyone looked at the windows. Everyone looked at her.
Behind the bar, Marta Brin set down the cup she was drying. She looked out at the sky for a long, thoughtful moment.
“Dark-ish,” she said.
“It was light when I left.”
“Course it was, love.”
Marta picked up her chalk. She turned to the slate. Under HERO BACK BY DARK, in a neat square hand, she wrote a new line.
HERO BACK BY DARK-ISH: evens.
The whole room went for its purses at once.