“How does it go?” said the dragon.
Alice did not look up. She was sitting in her circle with Brightoath across her knees, polishing a smear off the blade that had not been there before she struck a dragon with it. The smear was soot. The dragon had sneezed.
“How does what go?”
“The new verse. The boots.” Rakshaza lay on the hoard with her chin on a heap of silver plates, which she claimed was her best side. Her tail curled lazily through a drift of coins behind her. “You said there was a new verse. Yesterday. With a shore in it. You were very upset about the shore.”
“I regret mentioning it.”
Alice polished harder.
“I’m not singing it.”
“I didn’t ask you to sing it. I asked how it goes.”
“Rule seven.”
“Rule seven forbids humming the song. In the cave.” The great head lifted off the plates. “It says nothing about reciting it in a dignified speaking voice.”
“It’s implied.”
“We’ve discussed implying, Hero.”
Alice set the cloth down. She looked up at thirty-five metres of red dragon, all of it wearing the same expression a cat wears outside a closed door.
“It’s a terrible song,” she said. “It’s wrong in every line. You’d hate it.”
“I already hate it. I’ve hated it for a year. I’d like to hate it accurately.”
* * * Rule seven had been born around the fifth month.
Alice had arrived that day after two hours of riding through rain. She had slogged up the tunnel. She had struck the dragon four times without enthusiasm. Then she had sat down in her circle to wring out her braid. She had not noticed she was humming until the hoard went entirely silent.
“What,” said the dragon, “is that?”
Alice had stopped. “What’s what?”
“That noise. You were making a noise. Something with a lot of hey-ho in it.”
“It’s nothing. It’s a song.”
“About what?”
Alice had made the mistake of telling her.
She had only meant to give the gist. It had come out in full: Pip’s first ballad, all twenty-two verses of The Thousand Blows of Brackenford. In it, the hero struck the beast a thousand times. The beast’s blood turned the river crimson for a week. In the eleventh verse the dragon, crushed by shame, wept tears of molten lava into the valley. The tears set fire to a mill.
The dragon had listened to all of it in absolute silence.
When it was over, she had said, very quietly, “I wept lava?”
“Only in verse eleven.”
“There is no mill.”
“There used to be. It burned down.”
“I didn’t burn it down!”
“Pip says you did. With your tears.” Alice had shrugged, wringing out her braid. “The miller agrees. He got a new mill out of it. The town took up a collection.”
The dragon had stared at her for a long moment.
“You will not,” she had said, “ever hum that in my home again.”
They had written it down months later, with the other rules. Alice had argued for keeping it short. The dragon had argued for adding on pain of death. They had settled on in the cave, which had seemed at the time like a fair compromise.
* * *
“Tell me the shore verse,” said Rakshaza now.
“No.”
“Then I’ll go and hear it for myself.”
Alice’s head came up so fast her braid swung. It was her own braid again, plain, practical. She had taken the crown out two days ago, carefully, at night. The gold pin was in the pocket of her gambeson. She had not decided what to do with it.
“You will not set foot in Brackenford.”
“I wasn’t going to set foot in it. I was going to sit on the bell tower, quite quietly, in the dark.”
“The bell tower would collapse.”
“Then I’ll sit beside it.”
“You’ll crush the guildhall.”
“Only the corner.” The dragon sank her chin back onto the plates. Her eyes half closed. “Very well. I’ll stay up here. Suffering. Not knowing how the shore verse goes.”
Alice studied her.
It was hopeless. In her other shape, her ears gave her away. In this one there were no ears at all, only a perfectly smooth, perfectly innocent head the size of a cart. There was nothing to read.
“Promise me,” Alice said.
“Promise you what?”
“That you won’t come to the town.”
There was a long pause. The tail stopped moving.
“I promise,” said Rakshaza, “that you won’t see me fly over the town.”
Alice thought about the wording of that for most of the ride home. She thought she had found every hole in it.
She had not.
* * *
Rakshaza left the Redcrown an hour before dawn.
She went the long way: north first, low over the pine woods, then round in a wide circle with the sun behind her. She landed in a beech wood eight kilometres east of Brackenford, in a clearing nobody had walked through in a hundred years.
She shifted. She stood among the beeches in the grey light, choosing clothes.
This took longer than the flight.
She wanted something sensible. Something a person of the town might wear. She had not been to a town in a while. She settled at last on a gown of deep russet wool, high at the throat, with long sleeves slashed to show a lining of gold silk. Over it went a short cape with a fur collar. On her feet she put, after some thought, shoes.
That had been three hundred and twelve years ago. Rakshaza did not know this. She thought it was about forty.
She left her horns where they were. She left her ears. She tucked her tail through a slit at the back of the cape, where it hung down behind her, red, swinging a little as she walked.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Then she set off for Brackenford on foot, to keep her promise.
* * *
She reached the east road as the sun came up over the ridge. From the top of the last hill she could see the whole town laid out below her: the guildhall, the bell tower, the inn with its painted sign, the north gate.
There was a crowd at the north gate.
Rakshaza stopped walking.
She had seen this from the Redcrown for a year. From two hours away, with eyes that could count the feathers on a hawk, she had watched the little white figure ride out every morning, through a smear of townspeople. She had never thought much about the smear.
She thought about it now.
There were perhaps sixty people at the gate. Children sat on the wall. Someone was holding up a banner, slightly crooked, with a painted sword on it. When the big grey horse came out of the inn yard, the whole crowd turned toward it like flowers toward the sun.
They cheered. They shouted her name. A man ran alongside the horse for a while, holding up a baby. The children on the wall began their chant, which Rakshaza could hear clearly from the hill: She never once lay down! She never once lay down!
The hero rode through all of it with her back straight. She raised one hand. She nodded left and right. She smiled at the baby.
Then she passed through the gate. The road bent round the first field. The crowd fell behind her.
Rakshaza watched the smile go out of her face like a lamp.
It did not fall. It simply went. Alice rode on toward the mountain with her shoulders square, her face very still, a woman alone on an empty road with sixty people at her back. Not one of them could see her face. Not one of them had thought to ride with her.
Rakshaza stood on the hill for a long time after the white figure was gone.
Every day, she thought. For a year. I watched her come up the road every single day. I never once saw her come out of that gate.
She did not like the feeling that came with that. It sat in her chest like a swallowed coal.
She went down into the town.
* * *
Nobody screamed.
This was the first surprise. Rakshaza had braced herself for screaming. She had half hoped for it. She walked in through the east gate past a woman feeding chickens, who looked up, looked at the horns, then looked back down at the chickens.
“Morning,” said the woman.
“Good morning,” said Rakshaza, slightly put out.
In the market square they stared. They stared a great deal. A boy walked into a post. Two women stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. A man selling eels watched her pass with his mouth open, holding an eel, which escaped.
But nobody ran. Nobody fetched a pitchfork. After the first long look, they went back to their business, still glancing over now and then. They had the air of people who had decided something.
It took her most of the morning to find out what they had decided.
“You’ll be one of the fair folk,” said the baker, wrapping a honey cake. She said it with great confidence. “Come early for the Lantern Fair. The players, is it?”
“The players,” Rakshaza repeated.
“The horns are very good.” The baker leaned closer, lowering her voice. “Are they glued?”
“They are not glued.”
“Ooh.” The baker looked delighted. “Lovely work. The last lot had theirs on string. You could see it.” She handed over the cake. “That’s two coppers, love.”
Rakshaza put a coin on the counter.
The baker looked at it. Then she picked it up. She turned it over in the light from the window. It was gold, very thin, very old, stamped with the head of a king whose kingdom was now mostly sheep.
“I can’t change this,” said the baker faintly.
“Keep it.”
“I can’t keep it. This is...” The baker stared at the coin. Then she stared at Rakshaza with a new, odd look. “My granddad had one like this. Dobbs’s father gave it him, for a goat. Years back. Said he found it in the pen.”
Rakshaza’s tail went quite still behind her.
“How fascinating,” she said. “Good day.”
She left with the honey cake. She left rather quickly.
* * * The quest board stood by the guildhall door, crowded with notices. Rakshaza stopped in front of it while she ate the cake.
Lost: one brown hen, answers to Duchess. Wanted: strong lad for the dye works. Wolves seen past Corley’s farm, guild rate, see Marta.
In the very centre, nailed over everything else, was a much larger sheet. It had a royal seal at the top, red wax, slightly cracked.
BY ORDER OF HIS MAJESTY ALDOUS, KING OF AURELMARK: TEN THOUSAND CROWNS to whosoever shall SLAY the RED STORM of the REDCROWN, the Fire Ruin, the Terror of the North...
There was a picture.
Rakshaza stopped chewing.
The picture showed a dragon. It was a large dragon, drawn in thick black ink with great energy. It had a long neck, a long tail, wings. It had four legs: two at the back, two at the front. It was standing on all four of them like a dog. It had two large pointed ears, like a dog. Its tongue was hanging out.
It looked, more than anything, like a lizard who had been told some unwelcome news.
Rakshaza looked at it for a long, long time.
Then she reached past the notice for the wolves. She took the stub of charcoal that hung from a string beside it, for people to sign their names.
She began to correct.
She removed the front legs. She did it carefully, with long strokes, turning them into wing-arms with a single hooked claw at each wrist. She removed the ears. She took the tongue out entirely. She gave the eyes a certain look. She added scales along the jaw, the proper shape, the proper number. She made the tail twice as long. She stood back, considered, then made it longer.
When she was finished, a small crowd had gathered behind her.
“That’s much better,” said a boy of about ten.
“Thank you.”
“It looks real now. Scarier.” He peered at it. “How do you know what it looks like?”
Rakshaza dusted off her hands.
* * *
The Redcrown was empty.
Alice knew it before she got to the top of the tunnel. She had climbed it every day for a year. She knew the sound of it, the warm breath of air that came down from the hoard, the faint rumble of something enormous breathing in its sleep. Today the tunnel was cold. It was silent.
She came out into the cave with her sword already drawn.
“Dragon?”
Her voice went out across the hoard. It came back to her from the far walls, twice, thinner each time.
The gold lay smooth. There was no great red shape on the plates. There was no tail in the drifts, no wing folded over the bed. Her circle was there, swept clean as always. Nobody was lying beside it.
“Dragon!”
Nothing answered.
Alice stood in her circle for a long time.
She went hunting, she told herself. She’s eating a goat somewhere. She’ll be back. She sat down on the swept stone with Brightoath across her knees. She waited.
The light in the tunnel moved. The sun climbed. The cave was very quiet.
She had never been in it alone. Without the dragon in it, it was simply a cave: a very large hole in a mountain, full of other people’s things. The loom with its half-woven sheep. The two-string lute. The great bed, the furs still rumpled, nobody in them.
It was the loneliest place she had ever seen.
I’ll be here, the dragon always said. I am always here. It is the great tragedy of my existence.
Alice had always thought that was a joke.
She sat on the stone. She thought, for the first time, about what it meant. A thousand years. Three thousand. Alone in this, every day, every night, with only the furniture of dead hobbies for company. No one to talk to. No one who wasn’t afraid.
Then, for a year, someone had come.
She’s not here, Alice thought. She’s always here. Something’s wrong.
That was ridiculous. Nothing could hurt Rakshaza. Nothing in the world. Alice had spent a year proving it.
She stood up. She sat down. She stood up again. She went out to the ledge to look at the sky in every direction, then came back in to check the bed, in case anybody was lying behind a pillow.
At noon she shouted, “This isn’t funny!” into the hoard. The hoard did not reply.
She waited until the light went gold. Then she waited until it went red. Then, at last, she rode down, sick to her stomach, looking up at every cloud.
* * *
By the middle of the afternoon, Pip Larkwell had a new muse.
She had arrived at the guildhall steps just as he finished the third verse of The Long Night. She had sat down on the step below his with the air of a queen sitting on a throne she had only recently conquered. She had listened with tremendous attention. Then she had raised one elegant hand.
“A question.”
Pip had beamed. Nobody ever had questions.
“In the second verse. The scarlet beast rears up on all four feet.”
“A powerful image, madam.”
“How many feet does a dragon have?”
Pip had opened his mouth. He had closed it.
“Four?” he said. “Like a... like a horse, I suppose.”
“Two.” The muse held up two fingers. “Two legs. Two wings. The wings are the arms, you see. With a claw at the wrist. Like a bat.” She considered. “A very large, very beautiful bat.”
“Madam,” said Pip, deeply moved, “you speak as though you’d seen one.”
“I have an excellent imagination.”
He had rewritten the second verse on the spot. Then the fourth. By the seventh she had moved up to his step. By the eleventh she was holding his lute. She did not play it. She only tuned it, very fast, by ear, in a way that made Pip clutch his heart. Then she handed it back. It was, for the first time in its life, in tune.
“Now the lava verse,” she said.
“The lava verse is my finest work.”
“The lava verse is a crime.” She crossed her legs. Her tail curled round the step beside her. “She did not weep. She has never wept. She would never weep over someone hitting her. She would be bored.”
“But then what does she do?” Pip asked. “When the hero strikes her? Nobly? Day after day?”
The muse was quiet for a moment.
The square had gone gold. A small crowd had gathered, eating pies, listening. The bell tower threw a long shadow across the stones.
“She waits,” said the muse. “She waits for the next day. Because it’s the only interesting thing that has happened to her in a very long time.”
Pip stared at her. Then he scribbled for a long time.
When he struck up again, the crowd joined in on the chorus. The muse did not sing. She sat on the step with her chin in her hand, looking at the north road, listening to the new verse with an expression nobody in the square could quite read.
* * *
Alice rode into Brackenford at dusk.
She heard the singing before she reached the gate. The whole square was singing. It was Pip’s tune, The Thousand Blows, the same old jaunty hey-ho. But the words were wrong. She had heard every version of every verse a hundred times. These were new.
Two legs she has, and wings for arms, the claw upon the wrist; each day the hero rides to her, each day the blow is missed...
Alice reined Turnip in so hard he snorted.
The crowd on the guildhall steps was laughing. Pip sat on his stool with his lute, looking happier than she had ever seen him. In the middle of them all, on the step below, sat a woman in a russet gown three centuries out of date. Her red hair poured down her back. Two black horns rose from it, gleaming in the lantern light. Behind her, over the edge of the step, a long red tail was keeping time.
She was eating a honey cake.
She looked up. Across the whole square, across the crowd, across the singing, the emerald eyes found Alice on her horse at the edge of the lamplight.
Rakshaza smiled. She lifted the honey cake in salute.
“Ah,” she said. “Hero. We were just getting to your part.”