In a manner of speaking, Nezzy’s brother had been killed by the dragon.
It had been the dragon that had come to their lands years before, unprovoked and unsent for and unwanted. It had been the dragon that had hollowed the old bailey into its den and feasted upon the headmen within. It had been the dragon that had taken as satisfaction a head of cattle a moon – and two sheep besides –in payment. And it had been the dragon who at last fell to the blade and hooves and bravery of an adventurer-prince, bestial and ravening hunger laid low by skill and grace.
So if the dragon had been a little fiercer, a little faster, a little hungrier, a little less clumsy and a little more wise, Nezzy’s older brother wouldn’t be on the gibbet in the Square right now, where the crows were debating over the division of his eyes.
***
It had been a long time since their lands had known the hand of a king. Things had been relearned slowly. Allowances had been given. He was a just ruler.
Do not cut or fell the trees in the woods without express permission of the king, through his headmen.
Do not hunt the game in the woods above a given size, and do not seek permission otherwise from the king or from his headmen.
Do not fail to pay a tithe of the harvest or its equivalent value to the king through the headmen, annually.
Do not refuse a request of the king or his headmen for your time or your labour.
Do not gather an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods.
Nezzy’s family had broken one or another of those rules in the first few years, but whose hadn’t?
Then mother passed, quick and quiet in the winter, and father drank until he got in fights enough to follow her, and Nezzy and her brother had gotten a bit behind, a little distracted, and that earned them a few big warnings and then her brother had gathered an inordinate quantity of sticks from the woods, and when a headman had suggested that some of them looked fresh-cut he had expressed his disagreement less than delicately.
So now he was on the gibbet, and his tithe had been taken, and Nezzy was owner of an elderly donkey and two worn cows and a half-broken shack and a headful of thoughts she shouldn’t dwell on and couldn’t stop.
Going somewhere was more important than deciding where to go. So she went, and her body did the thinking while her head did the wandering.
***
Dragons weren’t common, and thank the skies and the stones that it was so, people said. They lived in the trackless and traceless places, on moors and in thickets, where hills were stony and soil grew thin and no farm or herd could tend for a single season. No one looked for them, no one wished for them, some were just afflicted by them, and who could dare ask why?
But if you talked to the folk who worked in the woods – the deep treecutters, the charcoal-makers, the rangers and the trailblazers and the huntsmen, they would mention things. Not speak of them, you mind – not dwell on them, not introduce them, consider them, measure them, offer advice on them. Just little things in passing.
“Big one out past quarter-moon lake.”
And everyone present hadn’t nodded, hadn’t grunted agreement, had just kept on talking and if anyone had asked why none of them had ventured out by quarter-moon lake in almost a year, maybe they’d get the same answer and maybe they’d just get a shrug.
Best not to talk about what you didn’t want to think about.
Well, Nezzy was past thinking now. And past quarter-moon lake by a league, where the remnants of the trails were uneven and strange.
No fresh blazes. No woodsign. No trace of tent or graze.
But the path itself was clear. The trees hadn’t grown in. The shrubbery hadn’t swallowed it whole.
Something walked here.
Nezzy’s body, which was still doing her thinking for her, kept checking the wind and scanning her sightlines and – most importantly – never once loosened her grip on Irribelle’s lead. If something was wrong the donkey would know before she did, half-blind or no, and she wanted to have firsthand advice on which way to run first.
***
The cave smelt like death.
The cows refused to budge before Nezzy even caught wind of it. Irribelle dug in her hooves at the sight of it. And her stomach tried to keep her out when she stepped into it.
Dangerous to have the light at your back.
Dangerous to stand between any living thing and its only path away from you.
Dangerous to go alone into the woods where anyone with sense was staying clear, keeping out.
Dangerous to be the last member of a family whose second-last member had called the king in his bailey all sorts of things in public that you shouldn’t think even in private.
Dangerous to have half a fallen-down shack and two cows and a donkey to your name with winter coming on sooner than later.
While her mind collected all of those facts and stood there looking at them like an idiot, Nezzy’s body struck a light and walked in.
Still a breeze at her heels from the outside. Safe.
Still a dancing spark in her grip. Safe.
Still no movement on the walls beyond the twist and turn of the shadows. Sa
it growled.
Nezzy’s body stopped moving. Her mind accelerated.
The growl wasn’t stopping.
She stepped back. It sunk.
She stepped forward. It rose.
She stood where she was and raised her light and it pitched into a snarl into a short sharp squeal and a cluster of tree-gluttons bounced free of their nest and seethed past her feet to more hidden corners, bright teeth bared and angry eyes glistening, beautiful fur on sleek-shouldered frames and sharp sharp claws.
The nest, she recognized on inspection, was a bear’s carcass, half-mummified and half-skeletonized. It had probably died in hibernation, starved in its bed with nowhere to find food.
That could explain a little of the smell, and the rest was set by the leavings around the nest. All very regular. Very normal.
The noise she heard was not normal at all and also somewhat quieted by distance, so it took Nezzy a moment to place it: a donkey, frightened, cut short.
***
She’d seen the dragon six times. Four as a child, twice as an adult; five living, one dead and dangling from the tree of the Square, before they cut it down and raised up the gibbet. It had been huge and huge and huge and huge and stayed that way until it was dead and she could see it was taller than a horse, but not by much, and longer than a horse, but mostly in tail, and fiercer-toothed than any bear, but not impossibly, and so on. Its size had grown up with her in a way its body hadn’t.
This dragon’s belly was taller than a horse. This dragon’s tail was longer than a house. This dragon’s skull was larger than a bear. This dragon’s mouth contained all of Irribelle’s body, bar one stray hoof.
It crunched. The hoof fell and landed, maybe it made a noise or maybe it didn’t because Nezzy couldn’t hear a thing that wasn’t her own heartbeat.
Maybe the cave wasn’t helping. Her heartbeat was resonating up from her bones into her ears out and into the stone and back in her ears and to fix this she needed to get out of the cave. Yes, that was reasonable.
She stepped out of the cave into the daylight and the dragon looked at her. Tilted its skull, let those two seemingly-tiny eyes settle on her. Forward-facing like an eagle. Feet like an eagle too, three-toed and three-clawed. No arms.
Nezzy had seen the dragon six times. But she’d lived with it for years and years, and she remembered the rules her parents had taught her.
Do not make eye contact. If you do, do not hold it. Release it and move on.
Do not shed blood near it, nor show weakness or illness.
Do not stray from the adults. Do not let go of the children, and do not bring them near where it may be.
Do not ever run, and do not ever ever run away.
Do not contest its meals.
Do not venture out when it is hungry.
So Nezzy looked at the dragon’s tail, side-on as she walked – without flinching, without haste, without wobbling or whimpering – and saw by its bobbing and turning the dragon’s casual observation of her and a lack of alert focus.
And she thought to herself: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that I’m not an important meal.
And: poor Irribelle, but at least it would have been quick.
And: thanks to all and everything that it’s so damned big that she won’t fill it up forever.
The cows were gone from where she’d left them, the tether worn apart in the sort of long-term sustained-effort that came from terror rather than panic, and it took her until near sundown to find them again, trembling in a thicket. She soothed them and patted them and brushed their sides and patted their noses and felt very badly about what she was going to do tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after.
She’d grown up with them. She’d make it quick.
***
Nezzy took Mop first. Poor trusting Mop, her brother’s favorite, who went with her because what else could she do, and she led Mop back towards home and tied her close to a tree and killed her as quick and quiet as she could, which was hard because Mop was no deer and she hadn’t had occasion to practice on deer since the king came.
“Sorry,” she said afterwards, and in reply she thought she heard that half-quenched bray again. Sorry Irribelle. Sorry Mop.
Better than to starve, right? Would brother have said that? Before or after he went on the gibbet?
Her knife grew dull and her arms grew sore, but the work gave her legs a rest until it was done and it was time to move, joint by joint, cut by cut, bone and muscle and sinew, all that weight that Mop had taken every moment of her life heaved up and hauled through the too-clear-paths by a single aching human body, limbs hauling limbs.
She alternated heavy and light. A big chunk. A tantalizing giblet. A whole leg. The liver.
Work and rest, work and rest. The trip back to Mop grew longer, the distance to the cave shorter.
“Hurry up,” Nezzy told herself as she flagged. The sun was high, the evening was going to come. This wasn’t something she wanted to do at night, although she’d bet her shoes that no bear wolf or otherwise was left in these forests for as far as they could run.
She threw the last, bloodied chunk – Mop’s tongue – into the air in the direction of the cave – as far as she could – and left, a stumbling, red-smeared walking corpse. If quarter-moon lake wasn’t as far away as all she’d walked today combined she’d have taken herself all the way there to clean herself; she made do with a cold stream and a mossy stone for a scrub, then shambled all the way to where Brush waited.
She hadn’t broken her tether this time. Either she trusted Nezzy more or she was too frightened to move without Mop. Nezzy wasn’t sure which made her feel worse, and slept guiltily against the cow’s flank with Irribelle’s death-cry in her ears again, distant and wavering.
***
She moved at dawn, stiff and sure, and before she’d even reached Mop’s butchering ground she knew she’d done it. The distant stink from downwind. The quiet of the larger birds. The little itch at her eyes that said: Look Wider, Look Carefully.
The dragon lay at rest under the tree, tucked neatly on its coiled legs like a hen, long tail behind it. Its eyes were open or maybe not, shaded under the thick ridge of its brows.
Mop was no longer in evidence.
Were its sides fuller? Did its stomach look distended? At rest it was hard to say what was which, and it wasn’t as if her parents had ever let her anywhere near the dragon when it was full, scarce less when it was feeding, never at all when it was hungry.
But she measured Mop by the bloody tether wrapped around the tree’s trunk, and she measured the dragon from that, and she put that together with Irribelle.
It can make room, she told herself. But a day or two first. A day or two. There’s water nearby, the weather is nice. It won’t move.
A day or two. She could brush Brush. Comb her until she shone.
The dragon’s head had raised up. When had that happened? It was smelling the air. She should’ve heard that, she’d forgotten how quiet the old dragon could be, had already lost in disbelief her memories that this dragon had crept up on Irribelle and killed her by surprise. Big didn’t have to mean loud. Not all big things were kings.
She walked back into the woods, kept downwind the whole way. And for two, three, four days she tended to Brush until her lean sides gleamed like new, in the noon sun and under the full moon, and with every other sweep she told her ‘thank you,’ because that sounded less cruel and self-serving than ‘sorry.’
***
Brush she doled out over a wider distance. Four days of observation showed her a dragon willing to slumber in place after a good meal, and she took that time to prepare a long and bloody trail, one that took them past the very rim of quarter-moon lake.
She didn’t see it move, at night or in the day. But on the morning of the fifth day it lay happily in the morning sun where Brush’s carcass had been.
Nezzy breathed out slow.
“Thank you.”
Nezzy breathed in slow, then almost choked because she knew better than to make a single noise around this thing and because she knew better she hadn’t done that, she swore she hadn’t unless her mind was fighting her body one and for all right next to a no-longer-sleeping dragon. Its head was up. Its snout tested at the air lazily.
She was downwind. Safe.
“Thank you,” said her own voice.
Nezzy broke her own rules and ran. She was not punished.
***
She stayed away five full days that time. Told herself she was waiting for the right game to come by. Told herself she was waiting for the dragon’s belly to empty again, get it just hungry enough. Told herself several things that were completely true while being obvious lies.
So she sat in a blind she’d made by a stream she’d favoured some years ago – when food had been tight and doing something the king didn’t know about seemed safe – where the tracks seemed fresh enough, and for three days she let the selfsame stag drink and walk away, telling herself she was just holding on for something a bit bigger, or getting up the perfect shot.
The stag left again and she walked back to her den, scraped under a fallen tree. A bear would likely appreciate this spot come winter, and by the smell of it, already had.
“Thank you.”
Nezzy jumped, full on leapt straight upwards like a squirrel on a branch with her heart between her teeth, and before she landed she knew that wasn’t her imagination, she wasn’t tired enough to be mistaken, and that it was her voice.
Nobody near, not in sight, not on the trail.
She wanted to run. She couldn’t see where to run. She didn’t run.
“Hurry up.”
She ran. She ran like she hadn’t since she was four and racing her brother. She ran like she hadn’t since the miller had called to her and said the leech was with her mother. She ran like she hadn’t known better.
When she was done she cowered in her scrape of dirt and dead wood and maybe she slept and maybe she didn’t and she rose with the dawn and stopped the stag’s life before it saw another sunset.
The knife was dull as a spoon by then. She kept her mind on that, and off other things.
***
“Dragon!”
Thump thump thump, the noisy sound of human feet on human floors of human dwellings, the loudest thing she’d ever heard. She hadn’t been in the woods that long, had she?
“Dragon!”
A distant whisper, a cautious mutter behind closed doors and latched shutters.
“Dragon!”
She was loud. She was so damned loud, louder than any of them, loudest thing she’d heard. Was that enough? She hadn’t been in the woods that long, surely.
“Dra-“
The bailey’s door opened under her hands, which clawed at nothing for a moment before fisting in a shirt. A headman blinked at her, groggy in the daylight, annoyed by her presumption. He hit her – irritated, businesslike – and she let her head snap to the side and pass the force in one side and out the other, gasped like she had no air in her lungs (she didn’t) and like she was shocked (she wasn’t).
“What?” he asked. Thump thump thump, other feet on the move. She HAD been loud enough then; they’d heard her words, not just some idiot making a ruckus.
“Dragon!” she said, loud but talking-loud now, shaken but reasonable, eager to speak up. “In the fields! It took my cow!” She clawed at his arms, blood slipping wetly from her to him. “Get the king! Send for the king! Help! Help! Help! Dragon!”
She took another punch then, but she’d expected that, made sure to smear the headman extra good on her way down the ground – which earned her a kick and she’d expected that too but damnit, his boots were too new and too good.
“Dragon?” the next headman asked. She could hear it behind the shutters in the houses too, between the tiny whispers. Could hear it passing from headman to headman down the hall into the bailey. Dragon? Dragon? Dragon?
“Who knows,” said the first headman, whose clothes were so fine he must be the bailey’s steward, and she might have smeared a bit too much blood on him because he sounded more upset with her than he did about the hue and cry. “But – hst! Hear that?”
Bless the paranoia of the shepherds. Bless the keen noses of their dogs. Bless whatever quick-footed paranoid had made it to the warning bell in the Square first.
Ding! Ding! Ding! The dragon was hungry! The dragon was to be fed! Let it come to the sound! Let it come to the square!
Nezzy could have left then. Their eyes were off her. Their thoughts. Their hands.
But she was too busy hoping, too busy thinking, and for once she let her brain creep into those thoughts too: did it work? Will it come? Will the bell frighten it? What if?
What if what if what if what if what if
“Bring her.”
Firm. Decisive. Sure. Mannerless.
She’d never actually heard the king speak before. But with that voice – not its pitch, or its timbre, but its attitude – she didn’t need to see the steed or the steel armour or the fine blade, did she?
***
Down the way from the bailey they marched in company, two score good headmen and all the rest besides, and the king at their front, armed and armoured. To the Square, to the gibbet, to the bell.
Nezzy got to march near the front, besides the steward. Well, half march, half drag. If she did too much of the former he shoved her until it became the latter.
The Square was empty, the bell-ringer fled. Even the echoes had gone cold before they arrived. Headmen spread like lumpy jam across the way, hammered on doors and pried at shutters.
“Open up!”
“Did you see anything?”
“Who ran the bell?”
“Hurry up.”
It was not very loud, it was in Nezzy’s ear. It was in her own voice.
“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up,” she said aloud. The steward looked sharp at her from the end of her cuffs.
“Hurry up.”
“Hurry up!” she called. He swore at her and yanked her tight, was shouting something in her face.
“Hurry up.”
“Hurry UP!” she yelled, shoved him hard in the stomach, smearing what sticky blood was left on her palms on his oiled mail. He grabbed her face and put a hand on his belt and someone made a short sharp cry.
Like Irribelle, she thought.
The steward turned to look. Everyone did. Nezzy shouldn’t have, but she’d shouldn’t have a lot of things.
The dragon stood between the company and the bailey, nosing with interest the remains of a headman. His body was heaped, if it was in pieces it couldn’t have been more than two.
Then it stood up and looked at them. All the way up.
It had forearms, Nezzy realized. They were simply very very small compared to the rest of it.
Its mouth opened the tiniest fraction. Something wet and sharp was inside. “Hurry up,” said Nezzy’s voice, right in her ear. Right in everyone’s ear, the way the company jolted.
“Thank you,” said Nezzy.
“Thank you,” said the dragon. And then – a quick jerk of its head – a short, sharp terrible sound, the half-choked bray of a donkey cut-short, and like that was a rallying horn the company raised their arms and cried and it moved.
Nezzy broke her rule again. Nezzy ran. Nezzy ran away, and Nezzy ran for the end of the company, where the king was cursing and wrestling with the head of his horse – the same he’d killed that older dragon atop? Surely not – and grabbed at his stirrups and hauled herself up, still coated in the leftover drying paste of stag’s blood, and started a fight with a man coated in tempered steel and brandishing a sword meant to be used from horseback.
It went poorly for Nezzy, although the sword wasn’t much help against someone practically inside the same suit of armour as its wielder. She swore and spat and clawed at the metal mask and twisted and thrashed like an eel as the horse jerked and shook under her, took two solid blows that – at the very least – removed some of her teeth, and did everything she could to keep all her weight, all her pressure on that one arm that was groping at his waist, where his dagger was.
The horse bucked, but even if she wasn’t strapped in the king was, and she took the weightlessness and let it put her right full on top of him, capturing his arm until he gave up and let loose the reins and struck at her left-handed and even as she lost a few more teeth she fell and grabbed and stole the dagger loose as she fell, swung wildly against firm hide and heard a terrible equine shriek, felt hooves slam near her head, then something else.
The world moved. A claw bigger than her forearm moved past her, one of three on one of two gigantic feet.
She’d broken a second rule. She’d contested the dragon’s prey. But it had broken another, and another, because not only was it bleeding but it turned to flee.
The king shouted something, and if he’d still had use of his sword he’d probably have brandished it. But instead all he could do was wave his arm –
Do not contest its prey. Do not make eye contact.
– which was what the dragon took him by, and when it tore him loose from the horse and let him fly he was limp both in flight and after his landing, so that Nezzy wasn’t quite sure at which moment he’d been killed.
She laid there on the ground, bleeding slightly, surrounded by many who were bleeding thoroughly, and when she was done she stood herself up – steadily, not slowly or quickly – and looked at the dragon’s tail, which indicated the dragon was bent over (face deep in the king’s horse, which was larger than any of the many, many, many headmen lying about, and less metallic) and facing in her direction.
Nezzy brushed her sides once, deliberately, and walked forwards – edge-on to her audience – and towards the door of the nearest house.
She knocked.
“Thank you,” said her voice.
“This is the new steward of the bailey,” she said. “Please let me in. There are some old rules you ought to know about, and some new ones you can forget.”