ANSEL AWOKE TO THE RESTLESS SNORTING AND WHINNYING of the horses. No sound of wind. Gray morning light seeped through the chinks in the wall at the cave mouth. The tempest had blown itself out in the night.

He sat up. The others sprawled about the hearth where they had fallen asleep. Flegel was still snoring wetly, bundled so deep in skins and blankets that only his red boots showed. The girl called Else had squirmed herself into an alcove in the cave wall and tugged a fleece across it, to keep the cold out or hide herself from dragons’ eyes, or Brock’s and Flegel’s, or all three.

Ansel got up and stretched. He mumbled his morning prayer. The stones he had slept upon had filled his body with nagging aches. He needed to piddle but Else being there made him shy, even though she was asleep. What if she woke?

At the front of the cave the horses stamped and snorted fretfully, tugging at their tethers. Ansel supposed that a cave was not a natural place for them. He went to calm them, slapping their necks, smoothing his hand down their long velvet noses. They nudged and nuzzled him, and ate up the bunches of dry grass he held out for them, but they stayed nervous. He went past them, pulled the door curtain aside, nervously checked the world outside for waiting wolves, and went out.

Sunlight lay on the meadow and on all the crags that watched over it. At some point in the night the rain had turned to snow. Swags and slashes of it lay about on the brown grass, almost too bright to look at. Higher up, on the crags and on the ridges above them, everything was dazzling white. The world felt fresh-made.

Ansel walked in among a tumble of large boulders that lay a short way off. Ravens rose from a sheep carcass and circled, cawing. Their shadows went flicking over the stones while Ansel opened his breeches and watched the steamy yellow stream go winding downhill between his boots. He was just lacing himself up again when a stone fell somewhere behind him, racketing down from rock to rock across the face of one of the crags that ringed the valley. It was followed by a spattering rush of dislodged snow. Ansel looked around without thinking. His eyes went up and up a mossy cliff, up to the sharp summit where the stone had come from.

An animal was perched there, watching him.

Ansel stared at the creature and tried to find a word for it. He tried to make its shape fit the shapes of creatures he had seen before. Lizard? Bird? Maybe it’s a corkindrille? Maybe it’s nothing but a trick my eyes are playing?

(It’s a dragon, said his heart, stilled to a whisper inside him. But there were no such things as dragons.)

It didn’t look a bit like the skull in Brock’s bag. Its head was a short, brutal blade, freckled with hard black scales, the spiny ridges over its eyes as rough as pinecones. A pulse throbbed in the soft leather folds of its snaky throat. Its body was as big as the body of a small horse, and armored all over in scales. The scales were longer on its shoulders and flanks and wings. They were so long that they weren’t really scales at all, but feathers, ruffling silently in the wind. The wings were folded up close under its chest, and at the end of each wing three blue-black talons glittered like dark glass. The larger talons of its feet clutched the rock’s edge.

“It’s a dragon,” Ansel’s body told him. “It’s a dragon,” said each hair on the nape of his neck, bristling.

A growl bubbled softly, deep in the sound box of the creature’s chest. The eye it aimed at him was sulfur yellow. It opened its mouth, and its teeth were icicle white and sharp as nails and its tongue was a pink spike. As it launched itself off the crag toward him, Ansel saw the long tail lash out behind it, striped like a serpent and frilled with feathers.

He ran backward through the rocks, stumbling, scattering sheep bones, bleached ribs crunching under his boots. He turned and fled uphill toward the shelter. He could hear the thing coming after him. The wind whirred in those weird feathers. A mad shadow swept over him and spread black wings across the shelter wall as he threw himself through the low door, letting the curtain of hide flump shut behind him. He fell forward into a confusion of rearing, neighing horses, maddened by the fierce scent that Ansel had brought in with him.

“Ansel?” said Brock, awake, heaving himself upright, rubbing at the bruises of the night.

Something hit the front of the shelter like a storm of wind, scrabbling claws and a rasp of scales on stone and a long, bitter screech of animal frustration.

“Christ!” Brock shouted. He reached down for his sword and started tugging it out of its scabbard. Flegel came awake too, demanding to know what was happening. Else’s eyes peeked out from the shadows of her hiding hole. The horses screamed, and something else screamed too, a hard, jagged scream, like some huge and evil bird.

“What in Christ’s name was that?” asked Brock stupidly, sword out, back against the wall.

“A wolf?” asked Flegel, almost hopeful.

“Dragon!” mouthed Ansel, scrambling up amid the stamping hooves, the spattering dung. He flapped his arms like wings in a frantic mime. He tried to show them its huge jaws, and its claws, and its feathered tail. “DRAGON!” But Brock and Flegel didn’t understand him. Only the horses knew, barging and jostling him as they turned this way and that, desperate to escape the cave as it filled with dragon scent. Brezel pulled free of his tether and pushed deeper inside, knocking Ansel down again.

Something hard was grating along the outside of the shelter wall. The bars of daylight that raked in through the chinks between the stones were put out one by one. Between the shrieks of the horses, Brock’s steady cursing and the querulous demands from Flegel, Ansel thought he heard loud, snorting breaths. He crouched in the hoof-trodden mud and dung behind the wall, and saw that sulfur-yellow eye stare in at him through a gap between two stones. The black pupil widened as the creature looked into the shadows of the cave. Ansel, nailed by a beam of sunlight slanting through a higher opening, saw his own face mirrored in it, and the answering blackness of his wide and wordless mouth.

Like a mailed fist banging on a door, the hungry creature slammed itself against the wall of stones. The stones shifted, grating against each other. Scraps of dried moss, stuffed into crannies long ago to keep the weather out, came feathering down around Ansel where he crouched. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he had grown roots. He could only wait there, watching, while the creature drew itself back and struck again. Harder this time. The whole wall wobbled. A largish stone, sprung from near the top, thudded into the mud not far from Ansel. Sunlight dazzled through the gap it left. The next blow dislodged a little avalanche of stones, which rattled down the outside of the wall, and the beast outside jumped back, snarling.

A strong hand held Ansel’s arm and hauled him bodily backward. He looked up. Brock.

“What’s out there, Ansel? What is it really?”

“Dragon!”

Brock understood him that time. Maybe he’d already guessed, so it was easier for him to read the word in the shape Ansel’s mouth made. He looked toward the cave mouth, brighter now with those stones gone from the wall’s top. “It can’t be,” he said. “It can’t be! There is no such beast….”

The dragon seemed to want to prove him wrong, for it chose that moment to thrust its head in through the curtained entrance. Its eyes were as big as eggs, as yellow as yolks. Its mouth opened unbelievably wide, and its voice filled the cave. Ansel crammed his hands over his ears. He saw Flegel do the same. At the back of the cave, the girl Else was a shuddering huddle under her sheepskin. When the roaring stopped, Ansel could hear her screaming, a thinner, higher sound than the sound of the horses. Flegel’s gelding had snapped its tether now, and he and Brezel were pushing as deep into the cave as they could, heads up and ears back and eyes wide and white.

Brock’s mare, Snow, turned circles on her halter, kicking out at the dragon with her hooves. She caught it a blow on its scaly nose that jolted its head sideways. It hissed in pain and snapped at her, but couldn’t reach; its body was too big to fit through the entrance. It pulled back, and the hide curtain flopped down into place again.

For a moment all was quiet, or at least quieter. Snow snorted and stamped. Flegel whimpered. Else stopped screaming and peeked her eyes over the edge of the fleece that hid her with a look in them that said, I told you so. Brock looked at his sword, as if he were measuring it against the dragon’s armory of hooked teeth.

“You told me there were no such things as dragons, Brock,” Flegel was saying sullenly. “You said there were no such things….”

Brock shook himself. He was very white, and the sword he was holding shook steadily in time to the shaking of his hands. In a quiet, wondering way he said, “They were telling the truth. Those villagers. They weren’t the fools we thought.”

“But you said —”

The dragon drove itself against the wall like a battering ram. Sunlight splashed in as the big stones fell. One hit Snow just above the root of her tail and she collapsed, whinnying shrilly, struggling to rise on legs that would not work. The dragon thrust its head and forequarters in through the gap it had made. Brock ran at it, cursing, brandishing his sword, but Flegel’s horse, rearing up in terror, knocked him sideways with flailing hooves. The dragon’s jaws scissored shut on Snow’s neck. Her head plunged, wild-eyed, snorting out bloody foam. The dragon snapped her spine with a quick, irritable twitch of its head. She shuddered, and grew suddenly heavy and slack, head lolling and legs tangling as the beast wrestled her back through the wreck of the wall.

Brock scrambled up and shouted something. He waved his sword.

Flegel was on his feet too, maybe reasoning that he was safe till the beast finished devouring Brock’s mare. He raised his hand, two fingers crooked, two raised in blessing, calling on God and His Saints to smite the Evil One.

The dragon took no notice of either of them. It dragged the dead mare a little way downhill and perched prissily over her, holding its long tail out stiffly behind it for balance as it started to eat. It tore the carcass open with its claws and jaws and stuffed its greedy head inside. Snow’s innards steamed in the sunlight.

Brock scrambled over the tumble of stones that had been the wall. Ansel ran to the saddlebags and fetched his coif and helmet, then went after him, very scared, but wanting to see what would happen. He pushed the mail and helmet at his master, and Brock grunted and took them and crammed them on his head without ever taking his eyes from the dragon. He walked forward, and Ansel watched. The dragon stopped eating for a moment and looked up at them. Its face was a red knife. Brock and Ansel didn’t seem to interest it. It went back to its meal, and its crunchings and slurpings echoed off the cliffs above the cave.

“That’s my horse!” shouted Brock. “That’s my horse, you worm!”

He ran downhill, his armor a mirror, all sunshine and blood. The sword swung up to strike. The dragon, with an exasperating, lazy grace, hopped away. One flap of those unlikely feathered wings carried it twenty feet. It crouched on a rock, head low, tail out like a battle lance, big armored feet set wide apart. It roared, and its bellow slammed off the cliffs and raised crows from the crags a mile away.

Brock ran at it again. This time it flapped toward him. The flash of the sword frightened it and it veered aside without biting him, but its tail came around hard and struck him across the shoulders, throwing him down into the grass.

“Brock!” shouted Flegel, watching from just inside the cave.

Brock rolled over in the grass. He had dropped the sword. Ansel ran to where it lay. He picked it up, surprised at its weight, and dragged it to where Brock was getting up. “Good boy,” said the dragon hunter, taking it, pushing Ansel behind him. But the dragon had lost interest in them again. Long-legged, folding its wings and bringing its clawed hands up against its chest, it stalked back to its prey. Ansel and his master stood and watched as it tore at the mare’s carcass, sometimes lifting its head to gulp down a morsel, sometimes watching them with those yellow eyes. Once it paused and lifted its tail and let out a loud fart. When there was nothing much left of poor Snow but bones and sinews and her hollowed hide, it suddenly took flight, flapping away across the valley. It flew clumsily, like a thing not made for flying. After each beat of its wings it seemed about to fall, until another thick, effortful beat heaved it upward again. At last it was hidden from them by the bald crags.

Ansel looked at Brock. Brock looked at Ansel. For once the dragon hunter seemed as dumb as his servant. Into their silence fell the hard voices of the ravens, which were wafting down to pick at the dragon’s leavings.