Alice’s part, it turned out, was four verses long.
She sat on Turnip at the edge of the square through all four of them. She could not leave. Sixty people had turned round to beam at her. The children on the guildhall wall were pointing. Pip, transported, had stood up on his stool to sing directly at her, one hand on his heart.
She rides at dawn, the brave, the bright, the bane of scale and claw; her blade is quick, her heart is true, her braid is very poor...
“That’s not in it,” said Alice.
“It is now,” said Pip happily. “My muse suggested it.”
The muse sat on the step below him, finishing her honey cake. She did not look up. Her tail swayed gently behind her in time with the lute.
The verses ended. The square applauded. Alice swung down from the saddle, handed Turnip’s reins to a stable boy, then crossed the square with the steady, deliberate walk Hester had taught her for approaching an unexploded fire pot.
The crowd parted. Several people patted her on the armour as she went past.
She stopped at the foot of the guildhall steps.
“Hero!” Pip spread his arms. “You must meet my muse. She’s a player, come early for the Fair. She knows everything about dragons. Madam, this is...” He stopped. He looked stricken. “Madam, I never asked your name.”
Rakshaza brushed a crumb off her russet sleeve.
“Shaza,” she said.
Alice made a small noise.
“Lady Shaza,” Rakshaza went on, with great dignity, “of the Coast.”
“Which coast?” asked a woman holding a basket.
“It moved.”
The woman nodded as if this were a common problem with coasts.
“The hero and I,” said Rakshaza, rising to her feet in one long, elegant unfolding, “are old acquaintances.”
Every head in the square swung toward Alice.
Alice looked at the dragon. She looked at the crowd. She thought very fast about rule two, which was nobody ever finds out. She thought about the town’s faces if she said, That is the Red Storm of the Redcrown. She has been sitting on your steps all afternoon, eating cake.
“We’ve met,” she said.
“Many times,” said Lady Shaza warmly.
“Not that many.”
“Daily, almost.”
“She’s from Solenne,” Alice told the square, through her teeth. “A friend. From my school days.”
“Oh, a friend!” said the basket woman, delighted. “Well, isn’t that nice. Somebody for the hero.” She said it the way people said a pie for the oven, as if the hero were a thing one put somewhere warm. “We always said, didn’t we, she needed a friend.”
There was a murmur of agreement all round the square.
Alice had never heard anyone say this. She had not known they talked about her when she was not there. She looked at the faces, all kind, all pleased for her, and felt her ears begin to burn.
From the door of the Sleeping Lance, across the square, came a familiar voice.
“Bring your friend in, love. Dinner’s on.”
* * *
Rakshaza had never been inside an inn.
She had seen them, of course. She had looked down into a great many through a great many roofs, usually during a period of her life she now considered unfortunate. She had never walked in through the front door.
The common room of the Sleeping Lance was low, warm, smoky. It smelled of onions, beer, wet wool. There was a fire at one end big enough to roast a sheep. Above the bar hung a dented lance, very old, which had clearly once belonged to somebody who had lost an argument with something larger.
Every table was full. Every seat at every table turned to look at her.
She had been looked at by armies. She had been looked at by emperors on their thrones, by the high priests of seven dead gods, by a sea serpent the size of a river. She found she liked this better. These people did not look at her with terror. They looked at her the way they had looked at the honey cake.
Marta put them at a table by the fire. She brought two bowls of stew, half a loaf, a jug of beer. Then she set down, between them, a mutton pie, a little burnt along one edge.
Rakshaza looked at it.
Her whole body went still.
“House special,” said Marta. “The hero likes them. Used to eat a powerful lot of them at one time.” She looked at Alice. “Nine days running, it was. Two at a go. I said to myself, that girl’s eating for two.”
Alice choked on her beer.
“I was very hungry,” she managed. “That month.”
“I remember.” Marta turned to Rakshaza. Her eyes were small, grey, entirely unreadable. “You ever had one of mine, Lady?”
Rakshaza looked at the pie. She looked at Alice, who had gone the colour of the stew.
“Once or twice,” she said. “Secondhand.”
“Did you like it?”
There was a pause. It was only a short pause. Alice would remember it for a very long time.
“It was the best thing I ever ate,” said Rakshaza.
Marta looked at her for a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, as if a question she had not asked had been answered.
“I’ll bring another,” she said, then went back to the bar.
* * *
Alice waited until the noise of the room had risen around them again. Then she leaned across the table.
“I waited all day.”
“Did you?” Rakshaza cut into the pie with tremendous care. “How dull for you.”
“In the cave. All day. On my own.”
“You might have read a book. I have several.”
“I didn’t know where you were!”
“I was here. Keeping my promise.” Rakshaza put a piece of pie in her mouth. She closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, she looked at Alice across the table with an expression that was entirely too pleased. “Did you see me fly over the town, Hero?”
Alice’s fist tightened round her spoon. The spoon bent.
“You know exactly what I meant.”
“I know exactly what you said. It’s not my fault the two were different.”
“Everything’s all right over here?” Pip had appeared at Alice’s elbow, holding his lute. Behind him, three people from the next table had stopped eating to listen. “Not quarrelling, I hope? Old friends?”
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“We’re discussing a dragon,” said Alice.
“Oh, wonderful!” Pip pulled up a stool. So did the three people from the next table. So, after a moment, did Dobbs. “Go on, Hero. The two of you. What’s the beast really like? Up close?”
Alice looked at Rakshaza across the pie.
A slow, terrible idea occurred to her. She felt it settle into place with a click, like a well-made buckle.
“Vain,” she said.
“Terribly vain,” Alice went on. “She lies on a heap of silver plates. She thinks it shows off her best side.” She took a calm sip of beer. “She doesn’t have a best side.”
The table laughed. Dobbs slapped his knee.
Rakshaza laid down her fork. She folded her hands under her chin. She smiled at Alice with every one of her teeth.
“I’ve heard,” she said, to the table, “that the hero snores.”
Pip gasped. “No!”
“Like a small bear. A small, determined bear. One hears it all the way down the mountain.” She tilted her head. “That’s how the beast always knows when the hero has fallen asleep. Mid-battle.”
“I have never fallen asleep mid-battle.”
“Well, I heard...”
“From whom?”
“Sources.”
“Name one.”
“A dragon told me.” Rakshaza turned to Pip. “Is there a rhyme for snores?”
“Roars,” said Pip at once, scribbling. “Wars. Floors. Shores...”
“Not shores,” said Alice.
“I think it’s very sweet,” said the basket woman from the end of the table, who had somehow joined them. “That the beast would notice. Like she’s keeping an eye on the hero. Like she cares.”
There was a short, very loud silence.
“She doesn’t care,” said Alice.
“She doesn’t care at all,” said Rakshaza at the same moment.
They looked at each other. Then they both looked away, very fast, in opposite directions.
“Right,” said the basket woman, nodding slowly. “Right you are.”
* * *
The betting slate hung on the wall behind the bar. Rakshaza found it on her way back from asking Marta, very politely, for a third pie.
She read it from top to bottom. HERO BACK BY DARK: 1 to 4. HERO BACK BY DARK-ISH: evens. HERO STAYS THE NIGHT AGAIN: 3 to 1.
She stood there a long time.
“What,” she said at last, “is this?”
“The book,” said Marta, wiping a glass. “Folk like a flutter. The hero goes up the mountain every day. Somebody’s got to make it interesting.”
“People bet on her?”
“On the duel. On when she’s back. On whether the beast’s in a temper.” Marta set down the glass. “Used to be just does she come back. Nobody’s taken that one in a long while. She always does.”
Rakshaza looked at the third line. STAYS THE NIGHT AGAIN. Somebody had already put two coppers on it. There were two little marks in chalk beside the odds, very neat.
She reached into the slashed sleeve of the russet gown. She took out a coin. It was thin, gold, very old. She laid it on the bar.
“That line,” she said. “The third one.”
Marta looked at the coin. She did not pick it up. She looked at it the way the baker had looked at it that morning, a long, slow, considering look. Then she looked up at Rakshaza’s face.
“That’s a lot of money, Lady.”
“Is it?”
“For a bet like this one.”
“I feel,” said Rakshaza, “very confident.”
Marta held her eyes a moment longer. Then she picked up the chalk. She made a third mark beside the line. It was a small, neat circle, very round.
“Done,” she said. She slid the coin into her apron. “Good luck to you, Lady.”
When Rakshaza turned round, Alice was standing two steps behind her. She had seen everything. Her face had gone from red to white to a colour that had no name.
“Outside,” said the hero.
* * *
They walked out past the last houses with the town at their backs.
Alice walked fast. She walked the way she walked up the tunnel: head down, armour clanking, as if the road had personally insulted her. Rakshaza walked beside her in the out-of-date gown with her hands clasped behind her back, perfectly at ease. Her shoes had begun to pinch about an hour ago. She did not mention it.
The road went down between two fields of barley, silver in the starlight. Behind them the lights of Brackenford were warm, small, far away. Ahead was the dark line of the beech wood.
Alice stopped at the stile at the edge of the last field. She turned round.
“You bet on me.”
“On the duel,” said Rakshaza. “It’s a local custom. I was being polite.”
“You bet that I’d stay the night. With you.”
“The slate doesn’t say with whom.”
“It’s implied!”
“Hero, how many times...”
“Don’t.” Alice’s voice cracked, suddenly, in the middle. “Don’t make it a joke. Not tonight.”
Rakshaza stopped smiling.
Alice stood in the dark by the stile. Her hands were fists at her sides. She was breathing hard, as if she had ridden up the whole mountain at a run.
“I sat in that cave all day,” she said. “All day. I sat in my circle. I kept thinking, she’s hunting, she’ll be back. Then I thought, she’s always there. She’s always, always there.” She swallowed. “You say it every night. I’ll be here. I am always here. I thought it was a joke. Today I sat in that cave and I knew it wasn’t.”
The barley moved in the wind, a long silver sigh across the whole field.
“Nothing can hurt you,” Alice said. “I know that. I’ve known it for a year. I’ve hit you with everything I have. I sat there all day knowing it.”
She did not say the rest. She did not have to. It was in her face, in the starlight: a woman who had spent her life being the strongest thing in every room, sitting in an empty cave, afraid.
Rakshaza did not move for a long moment.
She had thought, in the town that morning, about the gate. About the smile going out like a lamp. She had thought it was the worst thing she would see that day.
It was not.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The words came out stiff, rusted, in a voice she barely recognised. She could not remember the last time she had said them. She suspected it had been to a sea serpent, insincerely.
Alice looked at her.
“I should have told you,” said Rakshaza. “I didn’t think. I thought you’d come up, find me gone, curse me. Ride home in a temper. I thought...” She stopped. “It didn’t occur to me that anybody would wait.”
“Well, somebody did.”
“So I see.”
They stood there by the stile in the dark. A night bird called somewhere in the beeches.
* * *
There had been a day in the seventh month when they had not fought at all.
They had not planned it. Alice had arrived. She had drawn her sword. The dragon had said something about her hair. Alice had said something about the dragon’s breath. Then, somehow, it had been noon. Then it had been sunset. They had spent the whole day lying on the hoard, Alice on her back in her circle, the dragon curled round the edge of it, talking.
About nothing. About everything. About what Alice would have been, if no one had read a prophecy over her cradle.
The dragon had lifted her head. “A baker?”
“You get up early. You make something. People eat it. Then they’re happy. Then you go home.” Alice had stared up at the cave roof. “Nobody ever asks a baker to save them.”
The dragon had said nothing for a long while. Then she had said, very softly, “You’d burn every loaf.”
“Probably.”
“You’d be terrible at it.”
“I know,” Alice had said, smiling at the ceiling. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful.”
* * *
“Do they ever go with you?” Rakshaza asked.
Alice blinked. “Who?”
“Your town. When you ride out. In the morning.” Rakshaza looked back at the lights. “Does any of them ever ride with you? Part of the way?”
Alice looked puzzled.
“Why would they?” she said.
It was not a complaint. It was a real question. She said it the way she might have asked why anyone would ride beside the sun.
Rakshaza did not answer. She stepped forward instead. She put both hands on either side of the hero’s face, very carefully, as if it were made of something that might crack.
There was no sword in them. There was no armour, nothing at all between her palms and the warm skin. Rule eight lay broken somewhere on the road behind them.
“I’ll tell you next time,” she said quietly. “Before I go anywhere. I’ll leave a note. On your circle.”
Alice’s eyes were very bright in the starlight.
“You can write?”
“Hero. I’ve been writing since before your kingdom had a name.”
Alice laughed. It was wet, cracked, real. Then she reached up. She took hold of the fur collar of the ridiculous cape. She pulled.
The kiss was nothing like the one in the circle. That had been a charge. This was a door coming open, slow, in a house where nobody had lived for a long time. Rakshaza felt it all the way down into the oldest part of her, the part that had slept for two hundred years because there had been nothing worth waking up for.
When they broke apart, Alice was holding on to the cape with both hands.
“Never again,” she said, unsteadily.
“Never again,” Rakshaza agreed.
Neither of them let go.
“The wood’s that way,” Alice said. “You’ll want to change. Before you fly.”
“I will.”
“It’s eight kilometres.”
“I know how far it is.” Rakshaza paused. “My shoes hurt.”
Alice looked down at the shoes. She looked back up. Something wicked came into her face, slowly, the way the sun comes over a ridge.
“I’m going back to the inn,” she said. “I’m going to sleep in my own bed. Alone.” She let go of the cape. “You’re going to lose your bet.”
Rakshaza looked at her.
“I am,” she said. “Aren’t I.”
“Every copper.”
“It was gold, actually.”
“Good.” The hero turned. She vaulted the stile in full plate, which should not have been possible. She set off back up the road toward the lights, clanking, triumphant, without looking back.
Rakshaza stood alone in the barley field, in shoes that pinched, smiling at nothing at all.
* * *
Alice was asleep within minutes. She was dreaming about bread.
The tapping woke her a little after midnight.
She lay in the dark, listening. Tap. Tap. It came from the window. Her room at the Sleeping Lance was on the top floor, under the eaves. The window looked out over the yard. Nothing should be tapping on it except the ivy.
Tap.
She got up. She crossed the room in her shift, barefoot. She pulled back the shutter.
Rakshaza was sitting on the roof of the stable below, in the dark, with her shoes in her hand.
“You’ll want to see this,” she said.
“How did you...”
“Your landlady has very strong ivy.” Rakshaza stood up on the stable roof. She held up one finger. “A question. On the slate. Your landlady’s slate, behind the bar.”
“No.”
“HERO STAYS THE NIGHT AGAIN.” The dragon tilted her head. “Where are you, Hero?”
“In my room!”
“Are you staying the night in it?”
Alice opened her mouth.
“Then the hero,” said Rakshaza, “is staying the night. Again. As she does every night. I’d say I’ve won. Your landlady may want to make her slate more specific.”
“That is the most...”
“I know.”
“That is not what anyone meant!”
“I know.” Rakshaza climbed up the ivy, three easy steps, until her face was level with the windowsill. Her hair was coming loose. Her horns were very black against the stars. She looked up at Alice, close enough to touch. “I came to give you back my winnings.”
“You haven’t got any winnings.”
“Then I came for something else.”
Alice stood very still in the window.
Below them the yard was dark. The common room had gone quiet hours ago. Somewhere under her feet, Marta was asleep. The walls of the Sleeping Lance were old, thin, made of plaster and gossip.
“The walls,” Alice said. “They’re very thin.”
“Then you’ll have to be quiet, Hero.”
“I’ll have to...”
Rakshaza climbed in over the sill.
* * *
Marta was wiping the slate when Alice came downstairs at dawn.
She did not look round. She rubbed out the third line with the corner of her apron. She took up the chalk. In her neat square hand, she wrote beside it a single word: PAID.
Then she took a thin gold coin out of her apron pocket. She laid it on the bar in front of Alice’s usual stool.
“Your friend’s winnings,” said Marta. “She left in a hurry. By the window.”
Alice sat down very slowly.
“Mind the ivy, love,” said Marta, setting down a bowl of porridge beside the coin. “It’s had a hard night.”