The two guild adventurers came back to Brackenford a little after midnight, without their boots.
Alice heard about it before she was properly awake. It came up through the floorboards of her room in a dozen voices: Marta’s, the blacksmith’s, the bell ringer’s, somebody’s grandmother’s. By the time she had her armour on, the story had spread across the whole common room. By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, it had three versions.
The two of them sat by the fire under blankets, their feet in a tub of warm water. Alice knew them by sight. Corwin was lanky and freckled, with a crossbow nobody had ever seen him fire. Tamsin wore a great many knives, mostly for the look of them. Both had stood at the north gate with Marta’s rescue party. Both had asked whether they still got paid.
Their faces were the colour of porridge.
“We only went up to look,” Corwin was telling the room.
“Only to look,” said Tamsin.
“Because the hero said...”
He saw Alice on the stairs. He stopped.
Every head in the common room turned.
“Go on,” said Alice.
Her voice came out perfectly calm. Hester would have recognised that calm at a hundred metres. Hester had spent years teaching her to distrust it.
Corwin swallowed. “Well. You said she was tired. Afterwards. Pip’s been singing it all week. We thought, if you’d worn the beast out, if she was lying up there all spent...”
“Somebody ought to finish the job,” said Tamsin. “Professionally.”
“For a fee,” said Corwin.
“You climbed the Redcrown,” Alice said. “In the dark. The pair of you.”
“Not the whole Redcrown. Just to the hollow. The one with the stream.”
By the barrels, Dobbs the farmer nodded with deep fellow feeling.
“We’d only just got behind the big boulder,” Tamsin said. Her hands had begun to shake around her mug. “Then the mountain opened its eye.”
“It was on the ledge,” said Corwin. “Right above us. We never heard it move. One moment there was rock. The next, the whole sky had gone red.”
“I shouted that the hero said it was tired,” Tamsin admitted. “I don’t know why. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Then it spoke,” Corwin whispered.
The room held its breath. Somebody’s grandmother leaned so far forward in her chair she had to be caught.
“What did it say?” she demanded.
Corwin looked at the tub. He looked at the fire. Finally, miserably, he looked at Alice.
“It said, ‘Tell your hero I was not tired.’”
Silence.
Every face in the room turned back to the stairs.
Alice stood on the bottom step in full white plate, the chosen champion of Aurelmark, while forty people waited to hear what the dragon had meant by that.
“Dragons lie,” she said. “It’s well known.”
A murmur went round the room. It sounded agreeable. It also sounded like a great many people saving a question for later.
“What happened to your boots?” someone asked.
“The wind took them,” said Corwin.
“I don’t remember having boots,” said Tamsin.
Over by the barrels, Pip Larkwell was already scribbling. “The beast, in shame, denied her rout,” he muttered. “Rout... doubt... boots... no. Boots won’t go.”
Marta set a bowl of porridge on the bar. She did not say eat. She did not say anything at all. She only looked at Alice for a moment, kindly, over the steam.
It was much worse.
* * *
Alice rode up the Redcrown composing speeches.
She composed them aloud, to Turnip, who had heard a great many speeches in his life. He listened to this one with an expression of polite fatigue.
“Tell your hero I was not tired,” Alice said. “To two people who will repeat it in every inn between here and Solenne. As though I made it up. As though I’m the sort of person who stands in front of a whole town...”
She thought about standing in front of a whole town, saying it was a long battle.
“That’s different,” she told Turnip.
Turnip did not reply.
“It is. I was protecting both of us. She was protecting her pride.”
At the top of the pine woods, the path came out into the hollow. Turnip’s ears went forward. His whole body brightened. He looked at the flat boulder by the stream with enormous hope.
The boulder was empty. No bare feet in the water. No apple.
Turnip’s ears drooped.
Alice found, to her fury, that she was disappointed too. That made her angrier than anything Corwin had said.
* * *
Rakshaza had found the boots in the hollow at first light.
Two pairs, abandoned behind the big boulder. One boot had come off its owner so fast it was still laced. She had gathered them in human form, barefoot in the wet grass, then walked the whole climb back up with four boots hugged to her chest. She had set them at the tunnel mouth, side by side, toes aligned, so that anyone coming in would see them first.
It was a message. She was not entirely sure who it was for.
She lay on the hoard now in her true shape, chin on the gold, watching the light in the tunnel.
Tired, she thought.
The one with all the knives had shrieked it up at her from behind the boulder, as if it were a password. The hero says you’re tired! A whole town had been singing it, apparently. Pip Larkwell had put it in a verse. It would travel from Brackenford to the next valley, then the next, until every hedge knight in Aurelmark believed the Red Storm of the Redcrown could be had for forty silver on a good night.
Three thousand years of careful terror. Undone in a week by a woman who could not lie.
She had tried to be patient about it, up on the ledge. She had told herself the hero had been cornered. She had told herself it hardly mattered.
Then she had remembered the pies.
* * *
It had been around the fourth month. The hero had come in late, grey with tiredness, a cloth bundle tied to her belt. She had walked to her circle. She had sat down on the bare stone without drawing her sword at all.
“I’m having lunch,” she had announced. “Then I’m going to stab you.”
Rakshaza had been too astonished to object. She had watched the hero unwrap a mutton pie, a little burnt at one edge. She had watched her eat half of it in four businesslike bites.
Then the hero had looked at the other half. She had looked at the dragon. She had held it up on her flat palm, the way people offered sugar to a horse.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“You look hungry.”
“I am thirty-five metres long.”
“Then it’s a start.”
Nobody had ever fed Rakshaza. People left her things: gold, cattle, the occasional bewildered sheep tied to a post with a ribbon round its neck. Nobody had ever offered her half of their own lunch.
She had lowered her head. She had taken the pie off that bare palm with the very front of her teeth, so delicately they never grazed the skin. It had been mostly crust. It had been slightly cold. It was, she remained certain, the finest thing she had ever eaten, including an entire course at the wedding of an emperor.
The next day the hero had brought two pies. Rakshaza had called it a bribe. The hero had called it a ration. It had gone on for nine days, until Marta had started asking why one woman needed quite so much pie.
I ate her pies, Rakshaza thought now, in the dark. I swept her circle. I sent her home with both her gloves.
And she tells the world I sleep.
The clank came up the tunnel. It was fast. It was the clank of a woman walking much too quickly in plate.
Rakshaza did not pretend to sleep. She lifted her head off the gold, slowly, to its full height. She waited.
* * *
Alice did not stop at the boots. She saw them. She saw that they were paired. She stepped over them without breaking stride.
She did not draw her sword. She did not stop at fifty-three steps. She walked straight across her circle to the far edge of it, where the coins began, and stood there with her hands in fists.
“You spoke to them.”
“They were in my valley,” said the dragon. “With a crossbow.”
“You sent a message to my town.”
“I corrected an error.”
“You called me a liar!”
“I said I was not tired. If that makes you a liar...” The great head tipped, considering. “I hardly see how that’s my fault.”
“I had to tell them something!” Alice’s voice rang off the cave walls. “I was gone all night. The bells were ringing. There were forty people with a stretcher! What was I supposed to say?”
“Something accurate.”
“Such as?”
“That you were the one who fell asleep first.”
Alice’s mouth fell open.
“I did not.”
“Before I’d finished my sentence, Hero. It was a good sentence. I had been saving it for some time.”
“That is...” Heat climbed her neck, under the gorget, all the way to her ears. “That is completely beside the point.”
“It is precisely the point. You told a town I was exhausted. Do you know what that costs?” The dragon’s voice dropped. It stopped sounding amused. “Today it’s two fools with a crossbow. Next month it’s a guild company. Then somebody climbs my mountain who knows how to fire the thing. Somebody falls off a ledge in the dark. It won’t be me who gets hurt, Hero. It is never me.”
Alice heard that. She did not want to hear it. She heard it anyway.
“They lost their boots,” she said, a little less loudly.
“I have their boots. I paired them.”
“I saw.”
“I keep people off this mountain by being terrible. It is the only thing I have ever done that works. You have made me sleepy.”
“I keep them safe by going up it.” Alice’s chin came up. “Every day. In front of everyone. You’ve made me a liar to forty people who carried a stretcher for me.”
They stared at each other. Thirty-five metres of offended dragon. One small, stubborn woman in plate, standing at the edge of the swept stone.
Neither of them gave a centimetre.
“Get up,” said Alice.
The dragon blinked. “I am up.”
“Properly. Fight me. Not lying on your plates waiting for me to fall over. Fight me.”
“The last time I fought properly,” Rakshaza said, “a coastline moved.”
“Then not like that.”
Alice unbuckled her sword belt. She dropped Brightoath on the coins with a clang. She reached for the straps at her shoulder.
The dragon’s head came down to her level, very slowly.
“What,” it said, “are you doing?”
“Hester’s ring.” Pauldron. Vambrace. The plates hit the gold one after another, bright as dropped dishes. “No swords. No fire. No wings. First one flat on her back yields.”
“Rule five.”
“I’m suspending rule five.”
“You can’t suspend a rule. It’s signed.”
“I wrote it!”
She got the breastplate loose. She got two of the backplate straps. The top one, naturally, would not come undone. She twisted, reaching over her own shoulder, swearing.
The air shimmered behind her. Heat rolled across the hoard. Coins hissed.
Something cold touched the top strap. There was a small, neat snick. The buckle sprang open. The backplate slid down her spine into the gold.
Alice turned around.
Rakshaza stood there in human form, holding Brightoath by the hilt. She had used the very tip.
“Except,” she said, “with a sword.”
“Don’t use my sword.”
“You threw it on the floor.” Rakshaza laid the blade down on the coins with great care, as if it were a sleeping child. “Very well, Hero. Hester’s ring. Is that the old woman who taught you to drop your shoulder?”
“She did not...”
Rakshaza had chosen clothes for it, of course. A sleeveless tunic the colour of dark wine, belted at the waist. Close-fitting trousers. Bare feet. Her hair was tied back for once, in a long red rope that reached her waist anyway. She looked like a wrestler at a summer fair, if any summer fair had ever produced a wrestler with horns.
Her tail was wrapped twice round her own middle. The tip stuck out under the belt at her hip.
“You said no tail,” she said, catching Alice’s look. “It doesn’t come off.”
Alice pulled off her gambeson. She stood in the circle in her linen undershirt and breeches, barefoot, the way she had stood in Hester’s yard ten thousand mornings. She had never felt so underdressed in her life.
She did not look at Rakshaza’s arms. She looked at her centre of balance, which was what Hester had taught her to look at. It happened to be quite close to the arms.
“Ready?” said Rakshaza.
Alice went for her.
* * *
It turned out that the strongest being in the world had never wrestled.
She had never needed to. Nothing had ever come close enough. Alice understood that in the first heartbeat, as her hands closed on the wine-coloured tunic. She turned her hip in. She dropped her weight, the way Hester had drilled it into her until she did it in her sleep.
Rakshaza was immensely strong. She was strong the way a wall is strong. But she stood like someone who had never once been pulled off her feet.
Alice pulled her off her feet.
The throw was clean. Rakshaza went over Alice’s hip in a long red arc. She landed on her back in the coins, just outside the circle. Gold went up in a bright spray around her. A candlestick rolled away, ringing.
She lay there, staring at the ceiling.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yield.”
“I landed outside the circle. It doesn’t count.” Rakshaza came up off the gold in one fluid surge. Her eyes were very bright. “Again.”
The second time she was ready. She did not go over. She set her bare feet in the coins, took Alice’s grip, then simply declined to move. It was like taking hold of a mountain. Alice heaved. Nothing happened. She heaved harder. Her shoulders burned.
“You’re dropping your...” Rakshaza began.
Alice hooked her ankle.
They both went down. They rolled. Coins poured over them in a cold, chiming wave. Alice got an elbow in the ribs, which might have been an accident. She got a mouthful of red hair, which certainly was not. Rakshaza’s skin under her hands was hot. Hotter than any fever, hot the way a stone is hot after a whole day of summer sun.
For a while it was a fight. A real one. Alice had never had a real one. Every opponent she had ever faced, she had held back for, gently, the way one holds back with children. She was not holding back now. She put everything into the grip: twenty years of Hester’s yard, all her absurd strength at once.
It held. Rakshaza held. For the first time in her life, Alice threw her full weight at something. The something did not break.
She laughed. She did not mean to. It burst out of her, breathless, in the middle of a headlock.
“Why,” Rakshaza panted, somewhere under her elbow, “are you laughing?”
“I don’t know!”
The tail came loose from the belt. It whipped round Alice’s knee. She went over sideways into the gold.
“The tail!”
“It isn’t in it. It’s merely near it.”
Alice rolled. She came up. She caught one wrist, then the other. She used the last of her weight, all of it in one drop, the move Hester called the anvil. They went down together in the middle of the swept stone, in the exact centre of the circle.
Rakshaza on her back. Alice above her, a wrist pinned in each hand.
Neither of them moved.
The cave was very quiet. A last coin rolled somewhere, slowed, fell flat. Alice could hear them both breathing. She could feel the pulse in the wrists under her fingers, quick, quicker than her own. Rakshaza’s hair had come loose from its rope. It spread over the bare stone in a red flood, the way it had spread over a pillow a week ago.
“Yield,” said Alice.
Her voice came out wrong. Low. Rough at the edges.
Rakshaza looked up at her. Her emerald eyes had gone very dark. The tips of her ears were hot, scarlet, the colour Alice’s own went. She did not try to get up. She did not try to break the grip, which Alice suspected she could have done at any moment she liked.
“Rule eight,” Rakshaza said softly.
“What?”
“You’re touching me, Hero.” A slow breath, warm on Alice’s face. “With nothing at all.”
Alice looked down at her own hands on those wrists. Bare skin on bare skin. No sword. No gauntlet. Her armour lay scattered across the hoard like a dropped tea service.
She did not let go.
“This is a tactical...” she began.
“Rule six.”
Alice kissed her.
She did it the way she charged: all at once, no plan, straight in. Rakshaza’s mouth was hot. It tasted of smoke. It tasted of cinnamon, which Alice still did not understand. Underneath her, the strongest creature in the world made a small, startled sound, as if nobody had ever surprised her before.
Then the wrists turned in Alice’s grip. Not to break free. To hold on. Rakshaza’s fingers laced through hers, tight, the way they had been tight a week ago in the dark.
The tail curled, slow and certain, round Alice’s ankle.
“Never again,” Alice said against her mouth.
“Never again,” Rakshaza agreed.
She pulled Alice down.
* * *
The light in the tunnel went gold, then red.
Rakshaza lay on her side in the enormous bed, watching it. They had reached the bed eventually. It was a long way from the circle. They had stopped twice.
Beside her, Alice slept on her front, one arm flung across the furs, her face turned toward Rakshaza on the pillow. Her braid had given up entirely. A bruise was coming up on her shoulder that was certainly Rakshaza’s fault. A scrape on her knee belonged to a candlestick. Her mouth was a little open. She looked younger than she had any right to look. She looked like nobody had ever asked her for anything.
The light deepened to the colour of embers. Somewhere down the valley, the sun was touching the ridge.
Rule four, Rakshaza thought. The hero leaves before dark.
She should wake her. That would be the honourable thing. That would be keeping the rules.
She lifted a hand. She held it above Alice’s bare shoulder for a long moment.
Then she lowered it, very carefully, onto the quilt between them.
The rule says she leaves before dark, she reasoned. It says nothing about being asleep. Besides, she had it on excellent authority that nothing a person did asleep counted.
She slid out of the bed. She padded across the hoard to the cave mouth, barefoot, wrapped in nothing but her hair, to look at the sunset.
In the hollow below, the stream had gone copper. Beside it, Turnip had already folded himself down in the long grass for the night, legs tucked, head low. He did not look worried. He looked like a horse who had put money on this.
Rakshaza went back inside.
She did not go straight to the bed. She went behind the loom, under the half-finished sheep. She knelt. She picked a small silver dagger off the pile.
Three marks on the pale stone. Short, neat, straight.
She scratched a fourth.
“Never again,” she murmured to it.
From the bed, muffled by a pillow, came a sleepy, indignant voice.
“’M not tired.”
Rakshaza looked over her shoulder. Alice had not woken. She had turned her face into the furs, frowning, arguing with somebody in a dream.
“No, Hero,” Rakshaza said softly. “Of course you’re not.”
She looked back at the wall. Four marks.
She did not check whether the new one was straight. She had a feeling there would be plenty of others to compare it with.