Alice had eaten half her porridge before she trusted herself to look at the coin.
It lay beside her bowl, thin as a fingernail, stamped with a king whose beard nobody had worn for centuries. Every time she looked at it she heard ivy creaking.
Don’t think about the ivy.
She thought about the ivy.
The common room was nearly empty at that hour. Pip slept on the bench under the window with his lute on his chest like a cat. Behind the bar Marta scraped yesterday’s odds off the slate with the heel of her hand. She was humming. Marta never hummed.
“You’re in a good mood,” Alice said.
“Good night for business.” Marta glanced at the ceiling. “Lively.”
Alice put the coin in her belt pouch.
Outside, somebody blew a horn. Badly.
Pip sat up so fast the lute slid off him. “Is it the players?”
It was not the players. Five riders on matched chestnut horses were coming down the main street at a trot. A banner flapped over them, gold on white, a rising sun with too many rays. The man in front wore gilded armour so bright it threw little suns on the housefronts as he passed. His hair was the colour of good toast.
No, Alice thought. Not today.
Gideon Fairweather swung down from his horse in front of the Sleeping Lance and saw her through the window. He lit up like a man who has found the last apple in the barrel.
At the Solenne tourney when she was twenty-two, she had unhorsed him on the first pass. He had climbed out of the mud to thank her for the lesson, meaning every word. At the King’s spring ball he had asked her to dance. She had been on duty. He had said, “Next year, then,” without a trace of offence. He had said it every spring since. The guild called him the finest adventurer in a generation. So did Gideon, cheerfully, as if reporting the weather.
He came through the door with his arms open.
“Alice! Dame Alice. Hero of Aurelmark.” He took her hand in both of his. “You look wonderful. You look... rested! Remarkably rested.”
Behind the bar, Marta coughed into a dishcloth.
“Gideon,” said Alice. “What are you doing here?”
“Helping.” He said it the way other people said breathing. Four more people filed in behind him. A woman with a longbow who looked at the inn as if counting its exits. A silent man with a shield the size of a door. A young man in a grey robe who crackled with scrolls when he walked. A girl of about sixteen, carrying all the luggage. “My company. Wren, Bram, Odo. Little Fen. Everyone, this is Alice.”
Wren nodded. Bram nodded. Odo dropped a scroll. Little Fen said, “We’ve heard so much,” then went red.
“I also bring a letter from His Majesty.” He produced a scroll with a great deal of blue wax on it. “He asked for a courier. I volunteered.”
Alice broke the seal at the bar.
To Dame Alice, Chosen of the Prophecy, Hero of the Realm. GREETINGS.
The realm has been patient. The realm has been patient for one year and ten days. The realm notes that the beast is not yet slain. The realm notes, moreover, that the beast now keeps BOOTS.
It is therefore Our will that this matter be concluded by the Lantern Fair. On that night We expect to hear the bells of victory over Brackenford. We do not expect to hear that song again.
To speed the matter, Sir Gideon Fairweather and his Company shall render you every assistance. You will accept it.
ALDOUS, King.
Under the signature, in smaller, less royal handwriting, somebody had added: P.S. Is it true it weeps lava?
Alice read it twice. She counted. The Lantern Fair was the last night of summer. Thirty-five days.
“A deadline!” said Gideon. “Wonderful. So.” He leaned on the bar, all teeth. “What’s its weakness?”
“It doesn’t have one.”
“Everything has a weakness.”
“Not this.”
“Then we’ll find one together.” He meant it. That was the worst part. There was not a mean bone in him.
Marta set a mug of cider in front of him. “Your friend’ll be sorry she missed all this, love,” she said to Alice. “She does like a crowd.”
“Friend?” said Gideon.
Pip was awake now in every sense. “Lady Shaza! Of the Coast. Horns, sir. A tail. She tuned my lute by ear. She’s from Solenne, from the Hero’s school days...”
“Oh, I was at the school,” said Gideon happily. “Two years below Alice. I’d remember horns.”
The room went quiet in the way of a room that has smelled a story.
“Different year,” said Alice.
“Which year?”
“Earlier.”
“How much earlier?”
Alice looked into her porridge. “Considerably.”
Gideon thought about this with his whole handsome face. He beamed. “Well, I’d love to meet her. Any friend of yours.” He drained the cider. “Now. When do we ride?”
“We don’t. The duel is the hero’s alone. It’s tradition.”
“Since when?”
“Since a year ago.” Since she had decided, just this second, that it was. “Nobody has ever watched.”
“Then we’ll wait in the hollow below,” said Gideon. “If you need us, call. We’ll come running.”
Alice had once heard a king tell a seven-year-old girl that the whole of humanity was counting on her. She was fairly sure this was worse.
* * *
The fifth mark took Rakshaza a long time.
She had flown home before dawn with a pair of shoes in one hind talon. She had dropped them among the lopsided bowls, where they lay with an air of injury. She had shifted, fetched the little silver dagger, gone behind the loom.
Four straight lines. She scratched the fifth beside them.
It was not straight. It leaned. It leaned rather like somebody leaning out of a window at midnight with her hair coming loose, saying the walls are very thin in a voice that was not at all thin.
Rakshaza looked at it for some time. She did not fix it.
It’s a mark. It isn’t a portrait. Stop it.
She went out to the ledge in dragon form to wait in the sun.
The road from Brackenford wound out of the forest far below. The first thing she saw was Turnip. She would have known Turnip from the moon.
The second thing she saw was that Turnip was not alone.
Five more horses followed him up the road, matched chestnuts. A banner. Something on the leading rider glittering so hard it seemed to be on fire.
In a year, Alice had never brought anybody.
Rakshaza’s first thought was not a clever one. Something’s wrong. She half opened her wings before she had decided to. Then she saw the shining man lean across to talk to Alice. She saw Alice’s shoulders, which were set in the shape Rakshaza knew meant I am being polite at great personal cost. She saw Turnip, whose ears were pinned flat against his skull. Turnip never pinned his ears for anything except goats.
So. Not a rescue. Not an army. An irritation.
Rakshaza settled back onto the ledge. She turned her head so the sun would catch the line of her jaw. If the Hero was bringing guests, the guests would see what they had come to see.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
* * *
They were an hour up the road. He had talked for most of it.
“I got it,” said Alice.
“The whole of Solenne drank your health. Did you do anything nice?”
Alice looked at the road between Turnip’s ears.
She had ridden up the Redcrown on her birthday, the same as any day. She had not meant to say anything. She had said it anyway, at noon, sitting in her circle with her helmet off. I’m twenty-eight today. Don’t make anything of it.
Why would I? the dragon had said. I’ve had three thousand of them. They’re exactly like days.
They had fought. At sunset, when Alice came back from fetching her helmet, there was a single beeswax candle burning in the middle of her circle. It had been stuck in the old crown with the three missing points, which had been polished.
What’s that?
A candle, the dragon had said, studying the cave roof. For seeing by. It’s dim in here.
It’s the middle of summer.
Dim in the corners.
You forgot.
Entirely. Whatever it was.
She had carried the stub home in her saddlebag. It was still there, at the bottom, under some things nobody was allowed to see.
“It was quiet,” she told Gideon. “I worked.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Gideon, with deep approval. “Me too. I killed an ogre.”
* * *
The dragon was on the ledge when they came into the hollow.
Thirty-five metres of red dragon lay along the ledge a hundred metres above them, burning in the morning light. One wing hung half open over the drop, the claw at its wrist hooked on the rock like a careless hand. The tail fell down the cliff face in a long red ribbon. The great head turned slowly towards them. The emerald eyes were each the size of a shield.
Bram dropped his shield. It rang off a boulder like a gong.
Wren had an arrow on the string before the shield stopped ringing. Gideon pressed it gently down with two fingers.
“Not yet,” he said. “It’s the Hero’s duel.”
Then, to the dragon, he raised a gauntleted hand. “Good morning!”
Rakshaza looked at him for a long, long time. It was a look that had probably ended dynasties. She turned it on Alice.
“You’ve brought guests, Hero.” Her voice came down the cliff like warm weather. The pines shivered. Odo sat down without meaning to. “How thoughtful. I hadn’t had breakfast.”
“It talks,” breathed Gideon.
“It does,” said Alice. “Constantly.”
She swung down from Turnip. Turnip walked straight past her to the foot of the cliff, where he stood looking up at the dragon with his ears forward for the first time all morning. Gideon turned to his company. “We stay here. Nobody moves unless the Hero calls.” He saluted Alice. “We’ll be listening.”
I know, thought Alice. That’s the problem.
* * *
The ledge was empty by the time she reached the cave mouth. She walked the fifty-three steps to her circle with her back straight. The dragon was lying with her chin on a heap of silver plates, watching her come. Everything was normal, apart from five people in the hollow listening to a cave whose echoes reached Brackenford in storms.
Alice stopped in the circle. She lifted a hand: quiet.
The dragon lowered her head until one eye was level with Alice’s face. Then she whispered.
A dragon’s whisper was a warm gale. It set every goblet on the nearest heap chiming. A painting of a sunset fell off its nail.
“Who,” whispered the dragon, “is the shiny one?”
“Don’t,” hissed Alice. “They’ll hear you in Solenne.”
The dragon considered this. The air folded. Heat rolled over the circle, the coins skittered, the great red shape shook itself inward like a cloak in reverse. A woman stood on the stone in a gown the slate-blue of a stormy lake, barefoot, her hair loose to her waist.
“Rule five,” said Alice faintly.
“Would you rather I whispered again?”
Alice said nothing. Rakshaza smiled, the slow one, the one that meant she had already won something.
There was an ivy leaf caught in her hair, just above the left horn.
Alice reached up before she could stop herself and picked it out. Her fingers brushed the horn as she did it. It was warm, the way a stone is warm at the end of a long day. Rakshaza went very still.
“You had a leaf,” Alice said.
“So I see.”
Alice put the leaf in her belt pouch, next to the gold coin. She would think about why later, or preferably never.
“His name,” she said, low, “is Gideon Fairweather. He’s the guild’s best. The King sent him to help.”
“He shines.”
“He polishes. Every night. He has a man for it.”
“He looks at you,” said Rakshaza, “like a cake in a baker’s window.”
“He looks at everything like that. Ogres. Weather.”
“I don’t like it.”
The words came out flat, a little too quickly, the way Rakshaza said things she had not decided to say. The tips of her ears had gone dark. Something in her chest did a small, undignified turn, like a dog on a rug.
She’s jealous. Of Gideon. Of Gideon.
It was the stupidest thing Alice had ever heard. It was also, she found, wonderful.
“He’s harmless,” she said, in a voice that came out softer than she intended.
“So is a falling tree, until it lands.” Rakshaza held out her hand. “There’s a letter in your vambrace. I can see the seal.”
Alice gave it to her. Rakshaza read it in one sweep. Her eyebrows rose at BOOTS. They rose higher at the postscript. She looked up, delighted.
“May I answer him?”
“No.”
“Just the postscript.”
“No.”
Rakshaza read it again, more slowly, and this time the delight went out of her face in stages. Alice watched her reach the line about the Lantern Fair. She watched her count, the same way Alice had counted at the bar. Rakshaza’s tail, which had been moving idly over the coins, curled round her own ankle and stayed there.
“Thirty-five days,” said Rakshaza.
“Yes.”
“And if there are no bells?”
Alice had thought about that all the way up the road.
“Then he sends someone else. A great many someones.” She kept her voice even. “Or he decides I’m the wrong tool. He sends me somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else.”
“There are giants in the north. A lake in the east that eats boats. There’s always somewhere.” She shrugged. The shrug didn’t sit right in the armour. “Heroes go where they’re sent.” This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
Rakshaza said nothing.
The cave was very quiet. Alice stood in the circle that had been swept for her every morning for most of a year. She thought about riding past the hollow on some other road, in some other spring, towards a lake that ate boats. She thought about the dragon lying on the ledge in the sun, waiting for a horse that would not come up the road.
I’ll be here. I am always here.
Neither of them said it. It sat in the space between them like a third person.
Rakshaza rolled the letter up very neatly. She tapped it once against her palm.
“Well,” she said. “We’ll simply have to not let him.”
“How?”
“I’m thinking.” Her eyes went to the cave mouth. Slowly, a smile came back. It had more teeth in it than the last one. “He wants to help, you said.”
“He lives to help.”
“Then bring him up tomorrow.”
“What?”
“All of them. The shiny one. The one with the bow. The one who sat down.” Rakshaza handed back the letter with a little flourish. “Let him help, Hero. I’d so like to be helped.”
Alice looked at that smile. She had seen it before, the morning the adventurers’ boots had appeared at the tunnel mouth in pairs.
“What are you going to do to him?”
“Nothing at all,” said Rakshaza. “Not a scratch. I never have.” She tilted her head towards the cave mouth. “But today, I think, they’d like to hear a duel.”
* * *
They had never performed one before. It turned out to be much harder than fighting.
Rakshaza shifted back. Alice dragged a bronze shield the size of a cartwheel off the nearest heap. She propped it against a statue. She hit it with Brightoath as hard as she could. The clang went out of the cave mouth like a bird let go. Rakshaza answered with a roar that started somewhere under the mountain. Every coin in the hoard jumped at once.
Down in the hollow, very faintly, someone cheered.
“Again,” said the dragon, in an undertone that still made Alice’s armour hum. “Louder. And shout something.”
Alice hit the shield. “Have at thee!”
The dragon’s head swung round. “Have at thee?”
“It’s traditional!”
“Nobody has said have at thee in four hundred years. The last man who said it was eaten by a bear. Not by me. A bear. Out of embarrassment.” She thumped her tail on the stone, which shook dust from the roof. “Try something with teeth.”
“Yield, foul beast!”
“Better. Keep foul. I like foul.” She roared again. She swung her head to the cave mouth to send a long column of fire out over the drop. It bloomed orange in the empty sky above the hollow.
Somebody below screamed. It sounded like Odo.
They kept it up for an hour. Alice battered the shield until it was more dent than shield. Rakshaza knocked over a tower of silver plates, two harps, a stack of lopsided bowls. The bowls were deliberate. “I’ve wanted to do that for three hundred years,” she said, watching them roll. Rakshaza critiqued every war cry Alice knew. By the end Alice was gasping with laughter between shouts, leaning on the ruined shield, tears running down into her collar.
“Your mother,” she bellowed at the roof, “was a newt!”
The dragon made a noise that was not a roar. It came out of her in a great helpless burst, half smoke, half laughter. A tapestry at the back of the cave caught at one corner. She shifted to beat it out with her hands. She stood there in the slate-blue gown with soot on her fingers, laughing so hard she had to hold her ribs.
Alice put down the sword.
She didn’t remember crossing the circle. She remembered Rakshaza’s back meeting the bronze shield with a soft, dented bong. She remembered the taste of smoke and cinnamon, the warmth of a mouth still laughing against hers, Rakshaza’s sooty fingers spread over the plate on her back as if she could feel through it. Rule eight burned quietly somewhere at the back of Alice’s head, a candle in a corner. She let it.
“We shouldn’t,” Rakshaza said into her mouth. “They’re listening.”
“They think we’re fighting.”
“Are we not?”
“A bit,” said Alice. “You’re losing.”
“I have never lost in my...”
Alice kissed her again to settle the argument. The tail came round her knees. Her hand found the waist of the gown. The cave was warm, the light came gold through the mouth, her blood was loud in her ears...
“ALICE?”
The voice came up from the hollow, small, earnest, carrying a long way. “ALICE? IT’S GONE VERY QUIET! ARE YOU ALIVE?”
They broke apart as if somebody had thrown a bucket of water between them. Rakshaza’s ears were scarlet to the tips. Alice could feel her own burning inside her helmet padding.
“YES!” Alice shouted at the cave mouth. “STILL FIGHTING!”
Rakshaza shifted so fast the coins sprayed against the walls. The roar she let out shook gravel off the ledge. It sounded, to Alice, like a dragon who would very much like to bite something, but not anybody in particular.
Below, faintly, Gideon cheered.
* * *
Alice left at sunset exactly. The dragon walked her to the cave mouth, a hurricane on tiptoe.
“Same time tomorrow,” said Alice.
“I’ll be here,” said Rakshaza. “I am always here.” Her eye slid past Alice, down to where a golden figure was waving both arms at the cliff. “Bring your friends.”
* * *
The Sleeping Lance had never been so full.
Gideon stood on a table. Nobody had asked him to. He told the whole duel with his arms. He did the roar, which made a baby cry. He did the fire, which involved Bram’s cloak. He described the silence that had fallen near the end, long, terrible, so terrible he had feared the worst for the Hero of Aurelmark.
“What do you think happened?” said Dobbs, gripping his mug.
“Some kind of deadlock,” said Gideon. “Locked in combat. Neither yielding a hair.” He looked down at Alice with shining eyes. “Am I right?”
Alice inhaled her cider.
Marta thumped her on the back until she could breathe. Pip was writing locked in combat on his sleeve.
“Tomorrow,” said Gideon to the room, “my company rides up with the Hero. Every one of us. If the beast has a weakness, we’ll find it. If it doesn’t...” He laid a hand on his sword. “We’ll find one anyway.”
There was a pause.
“Mind your boots,” said Dobbs.
The common room broke up. Gideon laughed louder than anyone, because he thought it was a joke. Little Fen did not laugh. She looked down at her own boots, which were new.
Marta turned to the slate. She wiped a space at the bottom with her apron. She chalked, in large capitals, a new line.
GOLDEN BOY COMES BACK IN HIS BOOTS: 1 TO 6.
The bets came fast. Dobbs bet against. The baker bet against. Pip bet for, out of loyalty. He changed his mind twice. Gideon, hearing his name, bet for himself with a whole silver crown.
Alice waited until the noise moved on. She went to the bar. She laid a thin, ancient gold coin on the wood. An ivy leaf came out with it. She put the leaf back.
Marta looked at the coin. At Alice. “For or against, love?”
“Against.”
“Professional opinion?”
Alice thought of a smile with too many teeth in it. Of a row of boots at a tunnel mouth, toes very straight.
“Call it local knowledge,” she said.
Marta drew a small round circle next to the line. Without a word, she drew a second one beside it, slightly larger.
“That one’s mine,” she said. “Eat your supper.”