Alice woke warm.
She lay very still with her eyes shut. She knew this feeling now. She had a name for it, which was worse. There was a weight across her waist. There was a slow breath against the back of her neck. Somewhere close, coins shifted with a sound like a sleeper turning over.
No, she thought. I left. I definitely left. I remember leaving.
She did not remember leaving.
She remembered the circle. She remembered the coins pouring over them, cold, while everything else was hot. She remembered being carried part of the way to the bed, which she would deny under torture. She remembered lying in the furs afterwards with the cave gone gold around them, thinking, I’ll just close my eyes for a moment. The sun’s still up. There’s time.
She opened her eyes.
The tunnel mouth, far off across the hoard, was grey. Not gold. Not red. The flat, early grey that came before birdsong.
It was morning.
“Oh, no,” said Alice.
The arm across her waist tightened slightly. A voice behind her said, thick with sleep, “Mm. You’re awake.”
“It’s morning.”
“It does that. Every day. I’ve tried complaining.”
“It’s morning.” Alice sat up so fast the furs slid off her shoulders. Cold air hit her bare skin. She grabbed for a pillow, found one the size of a hay bale, held it in front of herself with great dignity. “Rule four. The hero leaves before dark.”
“I know the rules. I wrote half of them.”
“You were supposed to wake me!”
“Was I?” Rakshaza rolled onto her back. Her hair spilled everywhere, a red flood across the furs. Her horns had made two neat dents in the pillow. She stretched, slowly, arms over her head, with the air of a woman who had nowhere to be for the next several centuries. “Show me where it says that.”
“It’s implied!”
“Nothing is implied. You said so yourself, when I tried to imply rule eight only meant the left hand.”
Alice opened her mouth. She closed it. She looked at the grey light in the tunnel. She thought about Brackenford, which would be waking about now. She thought about forty people who had carried a stretcher.
She thought about bells.
“Did they ring?” Her voice came out smaller than she meant. “Last night. Did you hear?”
Rakshaza stopped stretching.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, without any drawl at all, “No. I listened. There was nothing.”
“You listened.”
“I happened to be awake.” Rakshaza looked at the ceiling. “For a while.”
“How long a while?”
“Some of it.”
Alice studied her. The dragon’s ear tips had gone faintly pink. It was the one tell she had never learned to hide, which Alice had only learned last week. She found she was keeping a list. That was also worse.
“Why didn’t they ring?” Alice said. “They rang the first time. All night.”
“I have no idea. Perhaps they have finally learned that I don’t eat heroes.” A pause. “Or perhaps somebody had money on it.”
Alice put her face in the hay-bale pillow.
“Never again,” she said into it.
From the other side of the bed came a long, delighted silence.
“Hero,” said Rakshaza, “you said that yesterday.”
* * *
The dragon had a confession to make. She had no intention of making it.
The confession was this: she had not been awake for a while. She had been awake all night.
Not because of the bells. She had been half sure they would come, after the first time. She had lain with her ears pricked toward the valley, ready to fly down at the first slow note, ready to drop the hero in the town square like a cat bringing in a bird. The bells had not come. Brackenford had slept.
She had stayed awake anyway. It was difficult to say why.
Alice slept like a soldier. She did it the way she did everything: completely, without wasted motion. She had made one small, grumpy noise when Rakshaza drew the furs up over her shoulder. She had snored, briefly, then stopped, as if she had overheard herself. At some point in the deep middle of the night she had rolled over, found Rakshaza in the dark with one outflung hand, then gripped a fistful of tunic. She had held on until dawn.
Rakshaza had not moved for six hours. She had a cramp in her tail that she suspected would outlive several kingdoms.
She did not regret it at all.
That was the confession. She kept it to herself.
* * *
The armour was everywhere.
Alice found the breastplate on a heap of silver plates. She found one greave by the loom. The other had slid under the marble statue of a forgotten king, who now appeared to be standing on it in triumph. Her gambeson had landed on the two-string lute. Her boots stood side by side at the edge of the bed, paired, toes aligned.
She had not left them there.
She looked at them for a long moment. Then she put them on without a word.
The dressing went much as it always did, until the backplate. She settled it over her shoulders. She did the lower straps. She reached up over her own shoulder for the top one, found it with her fingertips, lost it. Found it. Lost it.
“I can do it,” she said, before anybody had offered.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to remark on the weather.” Rakshaza sat cross-legged on the edge of the bed, watching. She had found a robe from somewhere, deep green, belted loosely. Her tail curled round behind her on the furs like a sleeping cat. “It’s very fine. Good weather for riding home in disgrace.”
Alice twisted. She hooked a finger under the strap. The buckle slid out of reach again.
At the inn she had a bedpost. She would loop the strap over it, lean, pull, then wriggle until the tongue went through. It took a quarter of an hour. Marta had once walked in halfway through, looked at her bent double against the furniture, then walked out again without a word.
There was no bedpost here. There was only a carved headboard three times her height, crowded with things that might once have been lions.
“Hold still,” said Rakshaza.
She was behind Alice before Alice heard her move. Bare feet made no sound on the coins.
“I don’t need...”
“Rule eight,” Rakshaza said mildly. “I’m not touching you. I’m touching the armour.” Her fingers found the strap. “The armour signed nothing.”
Alice stood very still.
It was not a large thing. A strap. A buckle. Hands at the back of her neck, pulling leather snug, drawing the tongue through, settling it with one small, competent tug. It took about four breaths.
Nobody had buckled Alice’s armour since she was fifteen.
There had been squires, back then, at the school in Solenne. They had been very young. They had been very nervous. They had stopped coming the year Hester said a hero must be able to arm herself alone, in the dark, in the rain, with nobody at all to help her. Alice had agreed. It had seemed like good sense. She had done it alone ever since, every morning, in tents, in barns, against bedposts, for thirteen years.
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She had not known that she minded. She found out now, standing on a dragon’s hoard, as somebody else’s fingers settled the last buckle against her spine.
Her hands did not move away at once. They rested, very lightly, on the steel at Alice’s shoulders. Not quite touching her. Touching the armour.
“Thank you,” Alice said.
It came out rough. She cleared her throat.
“It’s a buckle, Hero.”
“I know what it is.”
The hands stayed one breath longer. Then they lifted. When Alice turned round, Rakshaza had stepped back. She was examining her own fingernails with enormous interest.
Her ears had gone scarlet to the tips.
* * *
There had been a day around the third month, in a high wind, when the hero had not been quite so careful.
She had come out of the tunnel at sunset as usual, furious as usual, after losing as usual. The wind had been tearing across the Redcrown hard enough to make the dragon’s own wings shudder. Alice had paused on the ledge to shout one last insult back into the cave. Something about lizards. She had been very proud of it.
A gust had taken her mid-word.
Rakshaza remembered the next part very clearly. She remembered it more clearly than most of the third century. One moment the hero was on the ledge, shouting. The next, the ledge was empty. There was a long, white, falling shape below it, turning over in the air.
She did not remember deciding anything. She remembered the cliff edge going past. She remembered folding her wings so tight she dropped like a stone. She remembered reaching down with both hind feet, opening the talons wider than she had ever opened them, closing them with enormous care round something small, dented, shouting.
She had carried the hero down to the hollow without a scratch. Two hundred metres of air, then grass. She had opened her talons. Alice had rolled out onto the turf beside a very surprised horse.
The hero had lain there for a moment, staring at the sky.
Then she had sat up. She had pointed a finger straight up at the dragon’s face.
“I had that.”
“You had two hundred metres of nothing.”
“I was going to grab the pine.”
“There is no pine.”
“There was a pine! On the way down!”
“The pine was forty metres to your left, Hero. You were holding your sword.”
Alice had looked at her sword. She had been holding it all the way down. She had not let go of it once. It was the single most heroic thing Rakshaza had seen in a thousand years. It was also the stupidest.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Alice had said, still pointing.
She had been. The next day, there had been a new rope looped through her belt. It was coiled very neatly. She never used it.
Rakshaza had lain awake for three nights after that, which she had not done in a century. She had told herself it was indigestion.
She had moved the hero’s circle three steps further from the ledge. Alice had never noticed.
* * *
The boots were still at the tunnel mouth.
Alice stopped beside them on her way out. Four boots, two pairs, stood in a neat row on the stone. One was still laced.
“I’d forgotten about those,” she said.
Rakshaza leaned in the tunnel mouth behind her, still in the green robe, arms folded. The dawn wind lifted her hair. Below them the valley was filling with pale light, blue at the edges.
“Take them,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because two idiots are sitting in your inn with their feet in a tub.” The dragon tipped her head toward the valley. “Because you need a reason you were gone all night. Because a hero who climbed into the beast’s own lair to fetch back what it stole...”
“You didn’t steal them. They ran out of them.”
“... is a far better story than a hero who fell asleep.”
Alice turned round.
“I’m not lying to them,” she said. “Not again. I won’t stand in that room and tell them I fought you for a pair of boots.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“Then what are you asking?”
Rakshaza looked at her for a long moment. Something moved behind the green eyes that was not teasing at all.
“Don’t tell them anything,” she said. “Show them the boots. Answer what they ask, if you must. Every word true.” The corner of her mouth went up. “You’ll find, Hero, that people are wonderful at telling themselves stories. They hardly need us.”
Alice thought about it.
She thought about Hester, years ago, in the yard at Solenne, saying, Start with the ground you actually hold.
She held four boots.
“If anybody asks me whether you were tired,” she said slowly, “I’m going to say no.”
“I’d be insulted if you didn’t.”
“That’s all I’m going to say.”
“That’s all you’ll need.” Rakshaza nudged the nearest boot toward her with one bare foot. “Go on. Your horse is waiting. He’s been waiting since dawn. He’ll want to know everything.”
Alice crouched. She gathered the boots, two in each arm. She stood up holding them against her breastplate like a farmer with an armful of leeks.
“Never again,” she said firmly. “I mean it this time.”
“Of course you do.”
“I do.”
“You meant it yesterday too. I could tell. You said it very well.” Rakshaza smiled. It was a slow, wicked, fond smile. “Same time tomorrow, Hero.”
Alice stood there holding the boots. She tried very hard to be angry.
“I’ll be here,” the dragon said softly, before Alice could say anything at all. “I am always here.”
* * *
Turnip was delighted with the boots.
He sniffed every one. He made it clear that, while he disapproved of the night in the hollow, he would forgive everything if somebody gave him an apple. Nobody had an apple. He forgave everything anyway, out of a general sense of goodwill toward the world.
Alice tied the boots to the saddle by their laces. They swung on either side all the way down the mountain, knocking together with every stride, clop, clop, thud, thud, like a very slow drum.
She arrived in Brackenford a little after the market opened.
There were no bells. There was no crowd at the north gate. There was a cart of cabbages, a dog, two small boys, one of whom pointed at the boots with his mouth wide open.
Then he turned. He ran. He was shouting before he reached the corner.
By the time Alice had walked Turnip up the main street, the whole town was there.
They came out of the bakery. They came out of the smithy. They came out of the guildhall, the dye works, the well. They lined both sides of the street in total silence, staring at the boots.
Alice rode through the middle of them with her back very straight. Clop, clop, thud, thud.
Marta was waiting on the steps of the Sleeping Lance. Corwin and Tamsin stood behind her, barefoot, in borrowed stockings. When they saw the boots, Tamsin made a noise like a kettle. Read this novel at novelping dot com for the best experience.
Alice swung down from the saddle. She untied the boots. She walked up the steps. She held them out.
“Yours, I think,” she said.
Corwin took his pair as if they were made of glass. He turned one over. He looked up at her with naked awe.
“Where...” His voice cracked. “Where did you find them?”
Every person in the street leaned in.
“At the entrance to the lair,” said Alice.
A long murmur went up and down the street.
“Just... there?” Tamsin whispered.
“Lined up in a row.”
“Lined up?”
“In pairs.” Alice thought about it. “The toes were very straight.”
The murmur became a buzz. On the steps of the guildhall, Pip Larkwell sat down very suddenly on his own lute. He did not appear to notice.
“She keeps them,” somebody breathed. “The beast keeps trophies.”
“Lined up,” said someone else. “Like a collection. Like she’s proud of them.”
“It was a warning,” said Dobbs, from the crowd. He said it with the deep authority of a man who had once poked a bull. “Plain as day. Come up my mountain, I’ll have your boots.”
A shiver went through the whole street. Several people looked down at their own feet.
“But you got them back,” said Corwin. He was clutching his boots to his chest now. “You went all the way into the lair. At night. You got them back.”
Alice said nothing. Every word true.
“You were up there all night,” Tamsin said slowly. “Again.”
“I was.”
“Fighting it.”
Alice opened her mouth. She thought about the circle. She thought about coins pouring over them. She thought about the anvil, Hester’s anvil, the best throw she had ever made in her life.
“There was a fight,” she said.
The street erupted.
People cheered. People whistled. Someone’s grandmother hit Corwin on the arm for no clear reason. On the guildhall steps, Pip had pulled his lute out from under himself. He was tuning it furiously with the look of a man in the grip of a great vision.
Then, over the noise, one small, clear voice from the back.
“Was it tired?”
The street went quiet again. Everyone looked at Alice.
The voice belonged to a girl of about eight, sitting on her father’s shoulders. She had a pie in one hand. She looked as if she very much wanted to know.
Alice met her eyes.
“No,” she said. “It was not tired.”
The girl nodded slowly, as if this was exactly what she had suspected.
“Good,” she said. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.”
Alice looked at her. She thought, for no reason, of a dragon eating half a mutton pie off a bare palm with the very front of its teeth.
“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t.”
* * *
It took until noon for the street to clear.
By then Pip had a verse. It was called “The Boots of Brackenford.” In it the hero had descended into the inferno, fought a whole night against a beast at the height of its power, then carried back the stolen boots of the fallen in a sack of burning gold. Nobody had fallen. There had been no sack. Pip did not let this trouble him.
“Untired, untamed, the dragon roared,” he sang from the guildhall steps, “yet still she brought the boots ashore!”
“There’s no shore,” said Alice, passing.
“It’s poetic, Hero. The mountain is a kind of shore.”
“Of what?”
“Of... the sky.” Pip beamed. “See? Poetic.”
Corwin and Tamsin had their boots on. They had been followed all morning by small children asking to touch them. They had announced, in the common room, in front of witnesses, that they were giving up dragon hunting entirely. They were going to try goblins. Goblins, Tamsin said, did not line anything up.
Alice sat at the bar with a bowl of porridge she had not asked for.
Marta wiped the counter in front of her. Slowly. She was not looking at the porridge. She was looking at Alice’s head.
“Nice braid, love,” she said.
Alice’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.
She had forgotten the braid.
She had sat on the edge of the bed while the light went from grey to gold, while long fingers worked through her hair. Rakshaza had said it was a disgrace, the state of it. Rakshaza had said nobody could fight with hair like that. Rakshaza had taken nearly half an hour over it. Alice had sat with her eyes shut the whole time, not saying anything, not breathing much.
She put up a hand. She felt it now. It was not her braid. Her braid was one thick plait, tight, practical, done in two minutes in the dark. This went round her head in a crown. It was woven through itself in some old, intricate pattern she had never seen. It was pinned with something smooth and cool.
She pulled the pin out. She looked at it.
It was gold. It had a tiny ruby at one end. It was probably older than Aurelmark.
“The fight,” Alice said, “was very long.”
“Mm,” said Marta.
“It went on all night.”
“Mm.”
“My hair came down.”
“Lot of fights like that,” said Marta. “In my experience.” She took the cloth over to the slate behind the bar. She looked at it a while. Then she wiped out a line. She chalked in a new one, in her neat, square hand.
Alice read it over her porridge.
HERO STAYS THE NIGHT AGAIN: 3 to 1 “Marta.”
“Odds are odds, love.” Marta set down the chalk. “Somebody’s got to keep the book honest.”
“Who won the last one? Nine to one. Who bet on it?”
Marta’s face did something complicated. It was not quite a smile. It had been a long time since Alice had seen anyone try so hard not to make one.
“I couldn’t say,” said Marta. “Bad for business.”
Alice looked at the slate. She looked at the gold pin in her hand, its tiny ruby winking in the light from the window. She thought about the mountain, two hours away, where a dragon was almost certainly lying on a heap of silver plates, feeling pleased with herself.
She put the pin back in her hair.
She did it carefully, so the braid would hold.