BROCK WAS NOT DEAD. HE WAS STUMBLING THROUGH THE blank white world the blizzard had left, keeping as much as he could to the lee of rocks where the snow came up only to his knees and not his hips. He had lost his sword. “Ansel!” he called, and “Else!”

As the last flurries of the blizzard had faded around them he had watched the dragon, and the dragon had watched him. It must have heard Else’s screams, he thought, and been on its way toward them when the blizzard overtook it. Its ugly snout was white with crusted snow, and more snow had packed the grooves between its scales the way it packs sometimes between the stones of a wall. He looked into its yellow eyes and said as bravely as he could, “In the name of St. Michael and St. George …”

His voice trembled with cold and fear. The dragon, as usual, said nothing. It flapped its wings like a tent in a breeze. Groggily, Brock started to grope his way toward the same discovery that Ansel had made the day before. This wasn’t the Devil’s creature. It was just a creature.

It lunged without warning and he swung the sword as its long head arrowed toward him. The blade rang on scales hard as flint, and the shock jolted the sword’s hilt from his frozen fingers. The dragon shrieked, drawing clumsily aside. Brock remembered how it had used its tail as a weapon at their first meeting, and guessed what was coming, but was too sluggish from the cold to avoid it. It hit him in the side of the head, a jarring blow that laid him in the snow. He tasted blood. He had bitten his tongue.

The dragon snorted angrily, but it did not approach him. Perhaps the remains of his armor confused it and made it think he was not edible. Or perhaps it was afraid he’d sting again. Blood drizzled from a gash on its snout, showing suddenly scarlet as the clouds parted to let a thin wash of sunlight through. Brock’s sword shone dazzlingly, planted upright in a snowdrift like Excalibur. The dragon flinched its head around to look. It went forward cautiously, shaking the snow from its claws at each step. It sniffed the sword. Then, tilting its head sideways, it took the blade between its teeth.

Brock watched it, too dazed to stand or even call out.

The dragon did not look at him again. It lifted the bright sword, opened its wings, and took clumsily to the sky. Its wingbeats raised a small new blizzard of powdery snow from the crests of the drifts as it soared over Brock and away.

After a while he managed to lift himself. The buffeting the beast had dealt him had left his neck stiff and his tongue swollen, but he had no other wounds. He thought of Else and Ansel, and felt suddenly ashamed of what he had done. Where were they? he wondered, looking around at the fresh whiteness of the snow. Had the dragon come upon them in the blizzard? Or were they hiding somewhere? Hiding from him now, as well as the beast, and he couldn’t blame them for that. He cursed himself. He was supposed to be their protector. Small wonder that God had not granted him victory over the dragon….

There was no trace of their tracks in the new snow. He blundered across the mountaintop calling out their names. “Else! Ansel! Forgive me!”

There was no reply, only the endless echoes bounding away over the snow and ringing back at him from the black rocks. And then, from over the hill’s edge, the cry of the dragon.

He stopped, frozen there like an iron statue, listening. It came again, and then again, and mingled with it he thought he heard Else’s shrill screaming.

He turned, trying to tell which was echo and which the true sound. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the ridge. He scrambled toward it, feeling with one hand for the knife in his belt, which was the only weapon he had left.

He pushed his way between snow-crusted rocks and stood at the top of the screes, looking down. Below him on the glacier a flake of color showed, the only bright thing in the world. Else’s dress. He went downhill toward it, slipping and stumbling, tumbling for long stretches, battering and buckling his armor and bruising the flesh beneath it. “Else!” he shouted. “It’s me! Brock!”

Else looked up and saw him coming. She was not afraid. She was in too much pain to be afraid. When the dragon landed beside her she had thrown herself backward and her ankle had caught in a fissure of the ice that lay beneath the snow and been wrenched around. Broken, she feared at first. A bad sprain at best. And she’d lain there and watched Ansel face the dragon, and the two of them fall down together into that black hole, which opened under him in the snow, and she’d thought that there’d be no way down the mountain for her now. So she was not afraid of Brock. She raised herself up and watched as he came toiling toward her, a tiny figure growing slowly larger, shouting out every few minutes, “Else! Forgive me! I was wrong to use you so. My hatred for the dragon made me mad. You must believe me; I would never have let the creature harm you….”

Else decided to forgive him. If it were really only the two of them left alive upon that mountain, then it would be foolish of her to hold a grudge.

“Where’s Ansel?” Brock asked, when he drew nearer. “The dragon — have you seen the dragon?”

And Else just pointed at the chasm, to show him where the two of them had gone.