The pea soup, or pea porridge, or whatever it was, turned out to be edible. Not what she would have called more than that, but it was hot and filling and (so her books had told her) cheap. It needed salt; fortunately, she had bartered for some. There was a variation with lentils, too, if she recalled correctly….
“Needs sage. And thyme. And basil,” said the knight, who at least hadn’t rejected her offering, nor made a rude remark about it. “Garlic wouldn’t go amiss, either.”
She squashed flat several of the sarcastic comments she wanted to make. “You can cook?” was all she said.
“Champions have to. Mostly, we’re off in the wilderness alone, or with a squire, and generally we’re the ones who have to teach the squires how to cook when they first come along with us. Unless they’re professional squires,” he added thoughtfully. “There are some who just don’t want to become Champions—they prefer being the support for the Champions. You should see them—off on a Quest with a pack-mule, and you never have to think about anything, because whatever you want, you know they’ll have it on that mule. So yes, I can cook.”
She felt crestfallen. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know to ask for herbs, I only remembered that you can make this pea porridge from a book I read, so all I bartered for was the bag of peas.”
He raised his head and looked at her in blank astonishment. When he wasn’t scowling, he had nice eyes.
“You mean, you’ve never cooked anything before?”
“Princesses don’t, usually,” she reminded him dryly. “I just tried the simplest thing I could remember, bar sticking meat on a spit over the fire. I can probably manage that, too.”
“Huh. You’re either extraordinarily lucky, or you have an extraordinary memory for what you’ve read.” He shook his head. “All right. You’ve impressed me. You haven’t whined, you haven’t complained more than you’ve a right to, you’ve done your share, and you’ve tried things you’ve never done. If you’d burned it, would you have eaten it?”
She made a face. “No,” she admitted.
“And you’re honest….” But then the scowl came back. “But I still do not want you falling in love with me.”
She flushed, and anger smoldered inside. “I know about The Tradition, too! And I don’t intend to fall in love with you! If you were the last man on earth, I still wouldn’t want to fall in love with you! Look—knight—”
“My name is George,” he interrupted her.
“Right, George then—I had an idea when I was waking up.” She had awakened with a lovely golden haze over her thoughts, out of dreams full of sinking into the knight’s tender embrace, then had realized where the dreams and the euphoria had come from, and fiercely driven that moony feeling away. “I went over every possible thing I could do to make it hard for The Tradition to muck with us. I thought, ‘I’ll dress myself up like a boy and be his squire,’ then I remembered three plays and at least as many minstrel-ballads that have a girl doing that to get close to her knight. Then I thought, ‘We’ll each swear true love to someone else!’ then I realized that if it wasn’t true, it would do nothing, and if it was, well, we might just as well ask for a forest spirit to come along with a handful of love-in-idleness or a love potion to slip into us, because there are ballads, tales, plays and an entire school of farce founded on that plot. But then I thought of the one thing we could do to thwart it.” She smiled tightly in triumph. “We have to swear to be blood-siblings.”
“Whaaat?” he spluttered, taken completely by surprise.
“If we swear to be blood-siblings, there is nothing in tale or song or anything else that The Tradition can get hold of to force us to fall in love,” she pointed out. “The only time siblings fall in love with each other, Traditionally speaking, is when they don’t know they are brother and sister. And in fact, devoted siblings rescue each other from peril all the time in tales. So?”
He reached up with one finger and scratched his head just above his ear. “It sounds reasonable. It’s got the benefit of being logical.”
“Good.” She had been cleaning her knife in the fire, and now she took the sharp blade and sliced it shallowly across her palm. As the blood welled up, George did the same with his dagger, and they slapped their palms together.
“Blood is mingled. Sibs forever,” she said, using the simplest version of the oath. With The Tradition, the simpler, the better. Simplicity made it strong and hard to unbind.
“Blood is mingled. Sibs forever,” George agreed.
And both of them raised their heads at the same time, like horses scenting something odd, as there was a sensation of something silently popping, and the release of pressure they hadn’t been aware of until it was gone.
They blinked at each other. “Was that what I think it was?” she asked, cautiously.
George shook his head. “Don’t know. I’m not a magician, and I never had The Tradition trying to force a path on me before. I hope so, though. I—”
Whatever he was going to say was interrupted by a huge shadow passing overhead. They both froze. Andie felt her heart pounding, and clapped both hands over her chest in a vain attempt to muffle the sound of it. Fear washed over her, and she fought off dizziness.
But the dragon didn’t seem to notice them. It just kept right on in the direction it had been heading, which was roughly the direction they were going. They watched until it passed out of sight, and gradually Andie’s fear ebbed.
“Do you think it’s going out to hunt, or—” The sight of the beast had made her mouth unbearably dry and her knees still felt weak.
“It’s going in roughly the same direction it was yesterday. That’s good enough for me,” George stated. Then he glanced over at her. “You’re kind of low on supplies, and you have gold. Why didn’t you barter for more?”
“Because I didn’t want to arouse suspicion,” she sighed, rolling up her blanket. “But—” She paused. She had been intending to go to Merrha’s village without telling him, but now that didn’t seem fair. “One of my friends, the one that arranged for all those things to be hidden around the valley, will probably have figured out I got away. Her home village is half a day in our direction, and I’m sure she has told someone there that I’m coming. She could have sent a runner, or she could have paid for a heliograph. Either way, a message would get to her relatives long before we could. I can barter for a lot more there and know that no one is going to betray me. If you don’t mind stopping.”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug, then something that was almost a smile. “I’ll tell you what to get when it comes to food. I only have enough for myself, and it’s all journey-bread anyway. I have to admit I wouldn’t mind cooking something a bit different, and—” he coughed “—I thought you’d slow me down, but now that I’ve seen this countryside, it’s going to take me longer to hunt this beast down than I thought anyway, and you’re something of a guide, I suppose. Can you exchange some of that gold for real money too?”
“Probably. Would that be safer?” Then she shook her head. “No, don’t answer that, obviously it would be safer. And I’ll get a donkey to ride, or a mule, so I really, truly won’t slow you down.”
He nodded. “All right. You’re along until we find the dragon and I get rid of it. After that—well, we’ll see.”
* * *
Oh dear, Andie thought, looking down on the village in the valley below them. I’m not sure I’m as prepared for all this wandering around in the wilderness as I thought I was. From here, it was clear that Kiros Rocky Springs was nothing like Ethanos, and in her mind’s eye, she had somehow pictured something a lot bigger. Oh, Merrha had said it was a tiny little place, but Andie hadn’t visualized it correctly. It was, in fact, little more than a cluster of houses around a well. There was no marketplace, just a village square with the well in the middle, where (Merrha had mentioned now and again) a market was held once a week, and since it was empty, that day was not today.
How could anyone ever get word here that I was coming? she wondered, feeling her heart sink. All her confidence evaporated, and with it went any expectation that she would be able to get what she needed here.
She steeled herself against the disappointment, and straightened her back. No matter what, she was not going to give Sir George any excuse to be rid of her. She would buy what she could, and do without what she couldn’t.
They made their way down the track; there was still a long way to go before they actually reached the village, and if Merrha had gotten word there, the sight of a weary maiden with a fully armored knight in foreign-looking gear was surely more than enough to tell them who she was.
They passed a couple of farms on their way down into the valley, and from each of them, Andie had spotted a child running off toward the cluster of houses in the distance. When she and the knight entered the village square she was nearly faint with relief, when they were intercepted by a matronly looking woman with gray hair and a strong family resemblance to both Merrha and Iris.
“Are you Merrha’s friend out of Ethanos?” the woman asked, with a glance aside at her companion.
“Yes, and this is my brother, the errant knight Sir George,” she replied, telling what was the truth, just not all of it. “As you said, my friend Merrha of Kiros Rocky Springs sent me here. I hope we can get supplies to continue our journey.”
“We’ve been expecting you,” the woman replied with a smile. “Please, follow me.”
A thousand blessings on Merrha. A hundred thousand. I don’t know how she did it—and I don’t care.
After only a day and a half outside of the Palace, Andie was woefully aware of just how unprepared she was to be outside. A few weeks ago, if you had asked her if she could go off on a journey like this one, she would have confidently said that she could. Now—well, now she knew very well that without George, she’d be absolutely helpless.
Their guide took them out of the village itself, to yet another farm on the farther side. George sat warily on his horse, keeping a sharp watch on both of them through the slits in his helmet. He still hadn’t said anything, but at this point, she really didn’t want him to. Let him think she was more in charge than she really was. But when they reached the farmhouse, he finally spoke.
“If I may water my horse—?”
For answer, the woman whistled sharply, and a curly-haired boy poked his head out of a cow-shed.
“Timon! Bring the knight some hay for his horse, then come to the house and I’ll give you something for him to eat,” she said.
“You don’t—” George began.
The woman laughed. “Oh, Knight, you’ll be paying for it, rest assured! We won’t fleece your sister, but she doesn’t expect to get anything for free from us.”
“Not a bit,” Andie replied, feeling herself relax at last. This, she understood, and finally she was in her element. The wealth of Ethanos was built on trade. She was the daughter of a long line of merchant-kings. She would have felt uneasy about being given anything, especially from people as so far from wealthy as the folk of Kiros Rocky Springs were. But a good, sharp bargain—that was different.
It might not make George comfortable, but she was on her home ground, now. Before the elevation in her status, she had slipped out of the Palace and gone down to the marketplaces of Ethanos countless times. There, when she’d had money, she had learned to haggle just like any other child of the city. Now she settled down at the kitchen table in the immaculately clean farmhouse, with her list and a glass of coarse, resinous wine at one side, feeling more at ease than she had in days.
“Now, understand, I can’t supply what you need by myself,” the woman said, sitting down across from Andie. “I’ll be acting as factor for my neighbors, and as we make bargains, anything I can’t sell you, I will send one of my children after. They know only that my cousin Merrha has sent travelers from the city who need supplies and didn’t want to be fleeced by sharpers in the big-city markets.”
Andie nodded. “I don’t have actual coins,” she began.
In answer, the woman got up, went to the cupboard and brought out a tiny scale and a bag of barley grains. “It won’t be the first time I’ve been factor for bargains with a mercenary or mustered-out Guard,” she said simply. “We’re the last big village before the mountains.”
When she was done, and the bargain was concluded, they were well into the afternoon. Each time they concluded the bargaining for a particular piece of merchandise, and the links of chain were weighed out, the woman either had a child bring the article out and set it beside George and his horse, or she sent one with the gold off to the neighbor for whom she had acted as agent, and within a short time, the child would return with precisely what had been requested.
Last of all, when the matter of a mount for Andie had been settled, came a tiny little girl riding a mule. That was when George put his oar in.
“I’ll look at this creature, if you don’t mind,” he said, and without waiting for permission, lifted the tot out of the simple riding-pad, and began a thorough inspection of the beast.
Andie was going to protest—then thought better of it. After all, what did she know about horses and mules? Merrha’s cousin wouldn’t cheat her, but what about the unknown neighbor? She watched as George looked in the mule’s mouth, inspected its eyes and the insides of its long ears, then felt each of its legs, picking up the foot for a complete inspection of each hoof.
When he finished, he stood up, and patted the mule’s shoulder with one armored hand. “Older, but not elderly.” That was directed at the woman, who nodded.
“A sturdy fellow, if you expect endurance rather than speed, and don’t overload him. Good tempered—my youngest can handle him.” The woman patted the mule herself, and it flicked an ear at her. “My neighbor breeds good donkeys and mules, but this is one he’s kept, waiting for someone a little out of the ordinary to take him—someone we know will be kind to him. If I were going on a long journey, he’s the mount I’d pick.”
“You’re sharp, but fair, Mother,” said Andie, who was actually quite pleased with how things had come out. She still had most of the belt, all her rings and half the bracelets. They had everything George had asked her to get, plus more bedding, a large piece of canvas that could serve as a tent or a rain shelter, and she had more clothing and some medicines. And she had taken the opportunity to get the woman—whose name she still did not know, and did not want to know—to help her bandage her shoulders. The pain of the scrapes was already less, and she wasn’t as concerned about infection anymore.
“Thank you,” Andie said, once she was mounted up on the saddle-pad, nicely balanced between the shoulderbags holding some supplies in the front of the saddle and the panniers holding the bulk of their purchases behind. For someone who was not a rider, this was very comforting.
“You are very welcome,” the woman replied. “We wish you all success in your Quest.”
And with that reserved farewell, she withdrew into her house. George gazed after her, his body language registering puzzlement and surprise.
“Let’s go—I’ll explain,” Andie urged. “We need to make as much distance as we can before we camp for the night.”
George shrugged and clucked to his horse. The mule followed, and as soon as they were out of sight of the farmhouse, and well on the trail leading upward out of the valley, he held his horse back for a moment so that they could ride side by side.
“I don’t know her name, so that if we are questioned about who sold us what, I can honestly say I don’t know,” she said without preamble. “I don’t expect us to be caught, but both that woman and I know it could happen, and anyone who helped us knowing that I was a lottery-maiden could be severely punished. So if someone were to question her, she only knows she sold things on behalf of her neighbors to a girl sent to her by her cousin in Ethanos, and to the girl’s brother George, who is a foreign knight. She doesn’t know the girl’s name, and the girl was dressed like an ordinary sort of person who could have been a shepherdess, or a farmer, or practically anything. She doesn’t know where I come from, whether it’s Ethanos or outside of it. And I don’t know who she is. Do you see now?”
He nodded. “And I can see that, since you took the time to bargain with them, they have no reason to consider us fugitives.”
She nodded somberly. “And from now on, we need to avoid people as much as we can. Sooner or later, someone will realize that you rescued me. And if you haven’t slain the dragon by then…”
“Even if I have, if what you are afraid of is true about the involvement of someone among the Queen’s Council, at least one person in the Royal Household is going to be angry and want to be rid of you,” George pointed out. “You won’t be safe until you are out of Acadia.”
There it was—bald and unadorned—the one fact she had avoided thinking about. She didn’t want to leave Acadia. But she couldn’t see any way around it. She would have to, if she wanted to live. Not even the centaurs could hide her forever.
But if she left Acadia, nothing would have changed, except that she alone would be safe. All the things she feared for her people would still be hanging over them.
That—that was not acceptable, either. But right now she was quite out of ideas.
* * *
This was true mountain country, now, and true wilderness. Valley meadows, leafy trees halfway up the slopes, then evergreens gradually taking over at the higher altitudes…their road wound its way up and down through tree-tunnels that only intermittently allowed them to see the sky.
It would have been a lovely journey under other circumstances. The weather remained fair, and remarkably pleasant, even if the night was going to be cold. She had only read about the wilderness, never experienced it for herself, and she found herself liking it a lot. Or—parts of it, anyway. The way it was never entirely silent, but simply quiet—bird-song and insect noises, the rustle of leaves, the distant sound of water. She had never before realized how noisy people were. And the forest was so beautiful. She wasn’t at all used to deep forest; it was like being inside a living cathedral, with beams of light penetrating the tree-canopy and illuminating unexpected treasures, a moss-covered rock, a small cluster of flowers, a spray of ferns. These woods were old, too, the trees had trunks so big it would take three people to put their arms around them, and there was a scent to the place that somehow conveyed that centuries of leaves had fallen here and become earth.
Those were the good parts. The bad parts were that as tiring as walking had been, riding the mule all day used an entirely different set of muscles, and by mid-afternoon they hurt. A lot. She wasn’t looking forward to a bed on the ground.
They camped that night among evergreens, and George showed her how to make use of her herbs for a lentil stew for breakfast. She already was thinking longingly of the food back in the Palace—though, she was ravenous enough to have eaten almost anything. But their fare was plain in the extreme and even though there was quite enough to keep her from feeling hungry, still, images of roast fowl, lamb, bowls of ripe fruit and yogurt, fresh bread and honeycomb, and sweet wine kept intruding between her and her plain flatbread and crumbled goat cheese and olives.
She didn’t say anything about her cravings, though, because she was fairly sure George would take it as just another sign of weakness. So far as she was concerned, she was already showing enough of those as it was—because when she’d gotten down off the mule, she had discovered her legs hurt so bad she could hardly walk. The muscles on the inside of her thighs and calves were screaming by the time they had stopped for the night. She had thought she was in good physical shape, good enough to face just about anything….
Evidently not.
And when she’d gone off to the nearby stream for a wash, she had realized on splashing her face that the water was so cold it would make her very bones ache. There would be no bath; she’d be lucky if she didn’t end up too cold to get warmed back up again just doing a quick wash. And at that moment, sitting beside the stream, she wept, pining for a hot bath to ease away the aches. A stupid thing to cry over—hadn’t she escaped death? What was there to cry for?
But she was just so sore, so aching, so tired, and felt so alone—
George was no help. The occasional moments of friendliness he showed toward her always turned to indifference or even what seemed to be barely concealed hostility. It was no use turning to him for any kind of comfort.
At least she hadn’t been anywhere that he could see her crying over wanting a bath, and the cold water had erased the traces of her tears. His raised brow as she hobbled around was bad enough. His earlier thaw had turned chilly again. Perhaps he was having second thoughts about having her along, doubting her ability to serve as any sort of a guide, questioning her usefulness.
Perhaps he still didn’t trust her solution for keeping The Tradition from mucking up their lives.
Certainly he was watching her carefully for any sign that she was becoming a burden. And she knew, she just knew, that the moment he could point to anything and say “You are holding up my progress,” he would find a way to be rid of her. He must be certain that as a princess she couldn’t take care of herself, and that shortly she would be demanding things of him that were impossible. Like, say, a hot bath.
It was horrible, because she got an occasional glimpse of someone who could be a pleasant companion, and then it was as if he dropped the shutter over that part of himself, closing it off from her.
At least Merrha’s cousin had been more solicitous. On learning that she wasn’t much of a rider, she’d insisted that Andie buy a bottle of sharp-scented liniment. It was effective, at least, and her legs had healed enough that she didn’t send herself into paroxysms of pain rubbing it into the places where she’d been pulling out splinters that first day. She took the opportunity when George went off into the woods to hike up her skirts and deal with the situation.
George lapsed back into his usual unnerving silence once he’d finished helping her with tomorrow’s breakfast. It was something of a relief to crawl into her blankets and close her eyes. At least she didn’t have to watch him staring into the fire with that faintly disapproving look on his face.
Of course, maybe that was her imagination at work. Maybe the scowl didn’t have anything to do with her. Maybe, given how poorly he’d fared in combat with the dragon the first time, he was trying to figure out a way to kill it all by himself. Certainly she wouldn’t be of much use there. Maybe the second thoughts he was having were about taking this Quest in the first place.
Or maybe not. Maybe he figured that her solution of declaring themselves brother and sister would only force them down another, equally noxious Traditional path, and he was trying to figure out what that would be.
Maybe he just doesn’t like me.
He certainly was a prickly sort. She had gotten the impression from tales and histories that Champions were a good bit more amiable than Sir George. This fellow acted as if he was afraid to let anyone near him.
But what do I really know about Champions? Like Godmothers, there hadn’t been one in Acadia in a very long time. It wasn’t as if there was any real need for them. Nothing had ever happened that required something as potent as a Champion—until the dragon appeared….
She shrugged and pulled the blankets a little closer. I have some suspicions about exactly why that dragon appeared when it did, she thought, clenching her teeth. She wasn’t going to share them with George just yet, though. Maybe not ever.
The tip of her nose began to grow cold, and with a sigh, she pulled a corner of the blanket over her head.
At least tonight she had enough blankets. Last night there hadn’t been quite enough coverings; it hadn’t been bad while she was falling asleep, but once she was unconscious, she’d moved about and bits of her had been sticking out in the cold all night. She must have half awakened six or eight times, with cold feet, or her neck and shoulder going stiff and cold, or the blanket slipping off her back. No fear of that tonight.
Of course, George didn’t need much except a saddlebag and his cloak. Or so he said. How he sleeps in that armor I will never know. Maybe there really was magic on it to make it comfortable, but it didn’t look like anything she would want to sleep in. And it must keep him pinned in one position all night long, since when she’d looked over at him, it hadn’t seemed as if he had moved at all. Lying on his back, with the cloak draped over him and his hands crossed over his chest, he had looked like an effigy on a tomb.
She shuddered at that thought, and fleetingly wondered if the Champion might not be able to defeat the dragon. What then?
Ruthlessly she shoved the thoughts and image from her mind for now. She needed to make some plans, and the first would be based on the assumption that George would do what he had come to do.
I need to decide what I’m going to do next. Go with Sir George when he left Acadia, of course—that was the immediate future. She couldn’t do much about what was going to happen when he actually caught up to the dragon, but until then, she really was helping him negotiate the countryside, even if he wouldn’t admit it, not even to himself. Without her along, the country people would be less friendly, and though she might not know where the beast’s lair was, she did know the roads of Acadia and what was in the kind of countryside they were passing through. But once he killed the dragon, she would become exactly the useless burden he thought her. When that happened, she would have to have a plan, a reason for him to take her along.
I could tell him I need to talk to the Chapter-Head. It wouldn’t be a lie, either; she did need to speak directly to someone about her suspicions. Surely the Godmothers and the Wizards should look into the situation, at least. Even if they didn’t interfere directly, they might find a young hero with the right Traditional background who could go to Acadia and set things right. Or they could tell her that her fears were groundless, and she could go home again.
But what if he doesn’t survive? Again, the unpleasant thought intruded. And she finally admitted to herself that was a situation she probably ought to plan for. If he couldn’t kill the dragon—
If he’s hurt, I will need to find someone to take care of him; I am not a physician nor a Healer. If he’s dead…someone will need to be told—his Chapter-Head, at least. And in either case, I am going to need to find a new Champion for Acadia. If there had been anyone capable of taking the dragon in Acadia, it would have been dealt with months ago; The Tradition would have seen to that.
That would mean getting out of Acadia on her own. Well, she could do that a lot faster, now that she had a mule. Once outside the borders, she supposed, it should be possible to find her way to the Chapter-House that Sir George belonged to—Glass Mountain. Surely one could ask to be directed to these things. It stood to reason that if a band of Acadian farmers and shepherds could find the place, she ought to be able to.
It isn’t as if Champions are trying to hide themselves, she reminded herself. What would be the point of that? They were supposed to be accessible. How could you find them to get them to handle a monster or lead an uprising against a cruel tyrant if you couldn’t get anyone to tell you where they were?
No, it stood to reason that people knew where the Champions’ Chapter-Houses were. And if George was defeated, she would just have to go and bring back an older and more experienced Champion.
Not to mention more pleasant. Those were her last thoughts as she finally drifted off to sleep with the sounds of the night around her.
* * *
George was just as silent in the morning, though he did at least have a couple of pleasant words to say about the lentil porridge left cooking in the coals overnight. And at least he helped her with her mule’s saddle and harness, utterly foreign objects to her that she had fumbled off the poor beast anyhow last night. The trouble was, he was the most difficult person to read. If eyes were the windows to the soul, his had the shutters closed and barred where she was concerned.
The one thing that was clear, however, was that this morning he was uncertain about something. Finally, when they had been riding for half the morning, as he grew visibly more restless, he came out with it.
“I have a concern,” he said. “I thought when I took on this Quest on, I would easily find the dragon’s den. I thought it would be near where the girls were being sacrificed. I mean, that only makes sense, doesn’t it?”
She nodded vaguely. A lifetime of reading had not given her much insight into picking the proper site for maiden sacrifice.
“When I realized the dragon didn’t den anywhere nearby, then I thought I would be able to just ask people where to find it,” he continued, sounding aggrieved. “But I hadn’t counted on all this—this—this wilderness!” The last words came out fraught with frustration. “Where are the villages? Where are the people?”
“Um—” she said hesitantly. “For one thing, this is very poor farming country. The soil is thin, and it doesn’t support a lot of people. For another, they’re there. At least, they’re supposed to be there. They just probably won’t let you see them. Not the inhabitants, and not their villages.”
Now he turned to scowl at her, and she hastened to add, “Because they aren’t human.”
She had been a little afraid he wouldn’t believe her, but to her relief, the scowl eased. “Elvenkind? Fay?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Centaurs, Satyrs, Fauns, Nymphs mixed about half and half with humans. Those are the friendly ones, that live in small villages with humans. There’s others. Harpies and Sphinxes. Minotaurs. The Cyclopses. No one ever sees those, or at least, when they do, the people who encounter them generally don’t survive. But there aren’t a lot of the bad ones, and they know better than to let themselves be seen, because there would be hunts for them again. They were nearly wiped out in the Wyrding Wars, and they don’t want to take that chance again.”
Now he looked intrigued. “But why won’t we see them? The friendly ones, I mean.”
She shrugged. “Just because they’re comfortable with certain humans doesn’t mean they’ve lost their suspicions about most humans. The Wyrding Wars didn’t end all that long ago, and the hunters weren’t always very careful about what they killed. My grandfather’s time, I think, was the last of the Wars. The Wyrding Others don’t forget things like that quickly.”
They might show themselves to a single young woman alone, but they aren’t going to show themselves to a foreign knight, and doubly not a dragon-hunter, she added to herself. Because the dragon, after all, was a creature that had more in common with the Wyrding Others than one might think.
“Anyway, we signed a peace, and part of that peace was that some of Acadia was to be given over to the Wyrding Others and those humans who chose to be with them. This is it.” It was her turn to indicate the land around them with a sweep of her arm. “They’re shepherds for the most part, rather than farmers, so this land suits them.”
He sighed. “Then I don’t know how—” He paused.
Because his horse had stopped, and it was staring at something in the middle of the road.
The something looked rather like an odd-shaped plate; it stood out in stark contrast to the path, because it was dark and quite shiny. It seemed to be translucent, and the same general color as a dark smoky-quartz crystal.
George dismounted and walked over to stand above it, looking down at it. He didn’t move to pick it up, which she thought was odd.
“What is that?” she asked.
“A dragon-scale,” he replied. “And the question is, what is it doing here, now, at this moment?”
She licked her lips. “The Tradition does tend to put wild coincidences in your path,” she suggested.
He shook his head. “This is more than a coincidence.” He looked up at the leafy canopy overhead. “To lose a scale and have it land right here, I would have had to hit the beast hard enough to have damaged it, and I happen to know I did nothing of the sort. It would take a catapult to crack a scale the size of this one. Furthermore, the dragon would have had to be flying directly above this path to have it land here, and that’s not a coincidence, that’s a miracle.”
“So?” she prompted.
“So this has to have been planted here for us to find.” Now he turned and looked at her, as if expecting her to come up with some answers. “You’re the guide—”
Oh dear. “The first thing that springs to mind,” she said, stalling for time while she thought, “is that the Centaurs or the Nymphs are just as unhappy about the dragon being here as we are. Maybe it ate one of them—”
“It’s more likely to have eaten a herd or flock. Did you say that these Centaurs are shepherds?” Now he knelt down beside the scale to examine it more closely. “I don’t see any hoofprints or footprints nearby, but it could have been tossed here from farther away.”
“It’s the sort of clue one of them might give us.” She felt a bit more cheerful at that thought. “To show us we’re on the right road without having to show themselves.”
“Or to distract us from the right road,” he countered. “If they’re working with the dragon, this could be to lead us away from the beast, or into a trap.”
He stood up. She blinked at him, because that hadn’t even occurred to her. He was right, of course, but from what she knew of most of the Wyrding Others, she wouldn’t have thought they would be that duplicitous. “Are you always so suspicious?”
“My father taught me that a Champion can never let his guard down because The Tradition likes tragedy as much as happy endings,” he replied. “He said there are two kinds of Champions—the ones who think ahead, and the ones who are dead.”
She swallowed, but felt oddly comforted. At least Glass Mountain hadn’t sent someone who was reckless and stupid!
“What this means to us is that someone wants us to go in this direction,” he continued, looking up the path through the tunnel of ancient, gnarled trees. “Whoever it is could be a friend or a foe, and we can’t know which until we end up wherever the trail is taking us. But we are going in the same direction that we saw the dragon flying, and I really don’t care how I get to the dragon so long as I do so.” He looked back at her.
The visor was up on his helm, but she still couldn’t read whatever expression was on his face.
“A trap you are prepared for isn’t a trap anymore. And the worst thing that can happen out of following a string of clues is that we are led away from the dragon.”
“What will you do if that happens?” she asked quietly.
One corner of his mouth twitched. “Then I do what I should have done in the first place. I find a Witch or a Hedge-Wizard and get him or her to give me a charm that will show me where the dragon is.” He shook his head. “No matter what, we don’t lose much by following our unknown ‘benefactor,’ and we might gain a lot, even if he doesn’t intend it that way. Hindsight, and all that, but I really did think that the dragon’s lair would be where the sacrifices were, and that the beast would stand and fight. I guess that just proves I didn’t think enough and I need to start following Father’s advice better. I’m just glad this little wake-up came at a time when we were not in danger.”
And with that altogether astonishing statement, he got back on his horse and started off again.
“Aren’t you going to take the scale?” she called to him, as the mule eyed the scale and sidled around it.
He shook his head. “Magic can work for or against us,” he pointed out. “Maybe the only reason for dropping that scale was to leave something we would be sure to pick up—and from that moment on, the dragon or its allies would have a way to track us or affect us. No, we’ll leave it there. If nothing else, the one leaving the clues for us can go pick it up and leave it farther along the trail to show us where to go.”
He certainly does think ahead, she reflected somberly. None of that would have occurred to me.
“Don’t feel too badly if none of this occurred to you,” he continued, in an uncanny echo of her thoughts. “You’ve been a sheltered Princess all your life—you’ve never been required to be this suspicious.” He looked back over his shoulder and the corner of his mouth twitched again. “I’ve been trained by some of the best, Princess. And this is much more than just my job. It is, when all is said and done, my life.”
And on that somber note, they rode on, under the deepening gloom of the trees.
* * *
That night when they camped, he surprised her by being very talkative indeed. But he wasn’t simply chatting; he interrogated her thoroughly on all the Wyrding Others that she had ever heard or read of, their strengths and weaknesses, their general attitude toward humankind. More than pleased by this turn, since it meant he was treating her as something other than a burden or a Traditional trap, she expounded on the inhabitants of this quarter on as great a length as he asked for. At least now all her reading was paying off!
When he finally ran out of questions, he stared into the fire with a look of intense concentration on his face. Finally he looked up at her, raised an eyebrow and asked, “And how likely do you think is it that any of these creatures are allies of the dragon?”
“Honestly—not very,” she replied. “There hasn’t been a dragon in Acadia for—” she shook her head “—for so long that the writings I found were a matter of legend rather than record. The Wyrding Others have long memories, but not that long. A dragon wouldn’t be seen as another ally, but as an interloper.”
“Not even the bad ones?” he asked.
“Not even the bad ones. In fact, especially not the bad ones.” She ticked off the reasons on her fingers. “The dragon will draw attention to the Wyrding Lands and might start the Wars again. At the very least it’s brought in a Champion. The dragon is competition for the available food—I cannot even remotely imagine that a beast that large can subsist on a single girl once a week, it has to be eating more. The dragon is competition for available hiding places. And lastly, the bad Wyrding Others are not exactly cooperative by nature. The closest you can get to that is the Cyclopses, and they only cooperate with each other. The rest are as ready to fight other bad Others as they are to prey on the good ones or the humans.”
He nodded.
“Now, I have been told that there are a few self-appointed spokespersons among the Wyrding Others who would take the tactic of trying to protect anything that might be called Wyrding, but the moment the dragon helped itself to someone’s sheep, the rest would quickly turn their backs on that idea,” she said, thinking of the earnest little man who came to Ethanos and stood in the marketplace for weeks, lecturing anyone who would listen on the topic of “The Wyrding Others Are Your Friends.” He usually lost his audience right about the time he got to the Kyryxes, a nasty little blood-sucking insect the size of a bird. Most people might not know much about Wyrding Others, but everyone had either a friend or a relative who had encountered a swarm of Kyryxes, if they hadn’t themselves. There wasn’t much good to say about Kyryxes, except that they didn’t discriminate in who or what they attacked, so they were as likely to fell a Chimera as a Centaur or a human.
More than one hero of the Wars had turned the tide by leading a swarm of the wretched creatures into the enemy’s side of a battle.
“Hmm.” He brooded into the fire some more. “I hadn’t realized that there was that much competition for resources here. It seems so open and unclaimed.”
“Acadia is not a wealthy land,” she pointed out. “We don’t have a lot of rich farmland. It takes a great deal of acreage and careful management to support sheep and goats, when the soil is as poor as this is. And—” she drew ruthlessly on Sakretes’s book On the Natural Historie of Greate Beastes “—a large predator like a Chimera needs a huge territory. They have to hunt a great deal just to keep fed.”
“That may be why the woods are so quiet,” he said, as if he was thinking aloud. “The game is wary, and possibly over-hunted.” He nodded with resolution. “Princess, I owe you an apology. I thought you were worthless, and I find instead you are a fund of knowledge. As long as we can keep The Tradition from mucking about with our lives, I believe you will be a valuable companion.”
Somewhat to her discomfiture, she found herself blushing hotly. “I’ve always been one for learning things,” she said awkwardly. “I’m just glad you’re finding it useful.”
“Does your learning extend to the natural world around us?” he asked. “Such as what things might be poisonous and what might be edible?”
“Poisonous—yes,” she admitted, thinking about the frantic research she had done hoping to find some substance that would poison the dragon. “Edible, I am afraid not.”
“Ah well. One cannot have everything,” he said philosophically. “A Champion’s education generally runs to just enough about the natural world to allow him to hunt and feed himself, and about the people and creatures he will meet to avoid offending anything or getting himself too deeply in trouble.”
She laughed. “I suppose it wasn’t likely you would have gotten into trouble with the Wyrding Others. The good ones would have avoided you if you had been alone, and if any of the bad ones had attacked you, they would have deserved what they got.”
“Let us hope that they do not elect to do so,” George said with a faint smile. “We have enough on our plate as it is.”