Handbook for Dragon Slayers

by Merrie Haskell

  “All right, then,” I breathed, and went downstairs.

  I had to descend slowly, one step at a time like a child, to avoid pain or, worse, falling. Stairs always made me feel ungainly, and I hated them.

  In the great hall, a wave of silence spread before me as my presence brought all conversation to a halt. Alder Brook’s various retainers and servants looked up from their whetstones, from their preparations for the day’s dinner, from all the little tasks that had brought them to the great hall, and watched in silence as I toiled across the room.

  One servant, a girl named Roswitha, made the sign against the evil eye as I passed.

  I made my face smooth like ice, and pretended not to see.

  chapter 2

  I AM SURE ROSWITHA TRULY THOUGHT I DID NOT SEE her; she made the sign, flicking her fingers over and over, until Frau Aleidis grabbed her hands. Someone in the hall stifled a cough, or maybe a snort.

  A hot-cold flash of emotions swept over me—embarrassment, shame, rage. I summoned the memory of my mother’s voice in my ear, reminding me that Alder Brook was my freehold and my responsibility, that Alder Brook’s people were my people, even if they thought my lame foot brought down the evil eye.

  But the memory of my mother’s voice wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough to allow me to ignore Roswitha. The mask of ice I imagined on my face only saved the world from me; to save me from the world, I had to imagine iron bands around my chest to protect my heart.

  Once outside the keep, the pressure on my heart did not ease. In the distance, a group of small children played a variety of tag—only one boy had a tree branch shoved in his armpit, and he was pretending to limp as he chased the other shrieking children. He was pretending to be me.

  I couldn’t get to the boat landing fast enough. When I climbed into Aged Arnolt’s boat, my lame leg shivered and gave out. I crumpled gracelessly into the bow.

  Judith made a concerned cluck from behind me, but there was nothing for her to do, and I couldn’t talk yet without crying. So I ignored her.

  Aged Arnolt turned blank, impassive eyes to the far shore and rowed us across the Victory River. Judith and I didn’t speak. We had learned at an early age how easily sound carries across water; we knew that even a quiet conversation would float right to listening ears.

  All I could do was stare at the receding walls of my home. Alder Brook Keep was a wasserschloss, a water castle, and its outer stone walls came right down to the river’s edge, where a rippled mirror image was reflected.

  Everyone always said it was a pretty castle. I’d never thought so; the gray stone walls were square and heavy. I thought the keep looked like a prison, and I wished I didn’t have to return to it.

  Aged Arnolt let the current do most of the work in crossing to Sir Kunibert’s manor. Soon enough, the boat nosed the shallows, and Judith hopped out to grab the prow and haul it in before reaching to help me. Arnolt handed up my crutch without a word.

  “Thank you for the smooth journey, Arnolt,” I said, because princesses should show gratitude.

  Arnolt nodded briefly, not meeting my gaze.

  He wouldn’t even speak to me. I jammed my crutch under my arm and stalked away from the river. I did not look back, just in case Arnolt was also making the sign against the evil eye.

  “Tilda,” Judith said, hand on my arm, “you were so excited to come to Boar House. What happened? What’s wrong?”

  I wanted to tell Judith everything: overhearing Father Ripertus and the refused betrothal and “the rumors”—whatever they were exactly—and also about the sign against the evil eye and the limping boy. But what good would telling her do? It would all just make her angry, too.

  So I told her the important part, about my mother’s broken leg, and how she was going to spend a long time at Larkspur, recuperating.

  “Say the word and we’ll go to her,” Judith said. “You know how good we are at nursing creatures back to health! Think of all the babies we’ve rescued.”

  She meant baby squirrels and fledgling birds and kittens and—most memorably for the punishment we’d received for trying to keep them under the bed—goat kids.

  “No—no. That’s . . .” I couldn’t even think of the word. Impractical? Impossible? Dangerous? It would certainly get us into more trouble than just running off to help out Boar House for a few days. “That’s not a good idea.” How would we even get there? Larkspur didn’t lie on the river. I’d have to take a litter, since riding a horse with my foot was out of the question.

  “You’re sure?” Judith asked.

  I nodded. “There’s nothing we can do for her that Larkspur’s physician won’t do; and yelling at us wouldn’t be good for her, anyway.” We stood outside the door of Boar House, which was open to let the bright autumn sunshine in.

  Judith gave me a reassuring smile, and together we crossed the threshold.

  SIR KUNIBERT, A KNIGHT of five-and-fifty, was a freeholder. He held his house-fief by right of property, same as my family; but he had no vassals to speak of and claimed only the lands he could see out his window.

  This was a sharp contrast to Alder Brook. Alder Brook Keep was four times the size of Boar House, and the farmlands we held directly amounted to two thousand acres. The whole of the principality of Alder Brook measured maybe twelve leagues across: You could ride a fast horse from one edge of Alder Brook’s holdings to the other inside a day, but it had to be a sturdy animal, and you wouldn’t take it back the other direction without a day’s rest.

  Inside, Boar House had one feature that made it impressive in a way that Alder Brook Keep never would be. Sir Kunibert should have renamed the place Dragon House, for the dried head of every single one of his slain dragons hung in his hall.

  Sir Kunibert tromped in from the practice field, mud up to his knees, shortly after our arrival. He interviewed me with short, sharp sentences: Did I need parchment? Did I need pens? Did I really need to talk to him, or could I read through all his contracts and receipts and just figure it all out? I was given a chest full of jumbled papers and codices, and he went back out to the practice field.

  And with that, I was left to it.

  I found it creepy to work with half a dozen dragon heads staring down from their sunken eyepits. I faced the opposite wall, which was lined instead with deer antlers and boar tusks—hundreds of them. Or maybe thousands of them, for they not only lined the walls but crept onto the ceiling as well.

  At least the antlers and the tusks didn’t have empty eye sockets, like the dragon heads.

  Judith brought me a pair of fresh tallow candles, then went to ensure our sleeping quarters would be relatively vermin-free. She had stowed some fumigants in our luggage—big bundles of sage, santolina, bay laurel, and rosemary, whose fragrant smoke should drive off most bugs. “Don’t forget to stretch your leg,” she reminded me as she left.

  I frowned, biting back a sharp retort. I had long ago learned not to take out my frustrations on Judith. Yelling at Judith was the only thing my mother had ever punished me for directly, instead of just sending me off to confess to Father Ripertus, but in truth, it was the only thing my mother didn’t need to punish me for. I had felt so awful, the first and only time I’d yelled at Judith, that I had tried to give her the circlet off my head in apology.

  She had wisely refused the circlet, and Judith’s mother, Frau Aleidis, had intervened to keep me from pushing it on her.

  Instead of snapping, I forced myself to smile and said, “I’ll take a break every other contract.” I reached into the chest, fighting to untwine the ribbons and ribbons of dangling seals from each other.

  “All right. Your crutch is against the wall, behind you.”

  After she left, I finally got a contract free. It was an agreement about a benefice that included an apple orchard and ten tenant farmers—I was wrong, then, and Boar House did have more land than Sir Kunibert could see from his windows—but there was no mention of the rents from the orchard anywhere in Sir Kunibert�
�s nearly empty accounts book. I sharpened my pen, dipped it into my inkhorn, and began to write out the details of the rent.

  The scratch of my quill across the parchment was the only noise other than the crackle of the fire. I was alone with my thoughts for the first time in . . . ever. Solitude and silence. For a moment, I let myself pretend that I wasn’t working on accounts underneath the staring gaze of desiccated dragons.

  Instead, I pretended I was writing a book.

  Whenever I had to copy something or write a letter for my mother, I’d pretend the same thing. I hated the fact that the most exciting employment of my skills was copying numbers or writing down what other people said. Even my push to copy something for the emperor had stuck me with copying a book about horses—me, who was forbidden from riding and deathly afraid of them to boot.

  What I really wanted was to write my own book. Not just a commentary on someone else’s work, either. I wanted to write something important. Something that rivaled the works of the heathen philosophers or the great Boethius.

  Father Ripertus had taught me the methods of the scribes by having me copy from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. I hadn’t understood any of it when I was younger, but it hadn’t given me less of a puff of pride when people asked what I was copying and I could tell them.

  Eventually, I stopped caring if I copied great works; I wanted to make great works. Certainly, I had a place in the world as the Princess of Alder Brook—the Splayfooted Princess of Alder Brook, as it happened. Every time my mother held court, I could see people watching me, watching my foot and the way I walked; I could see the way their faces were skeptical when I spoke until the sense of my words came through to them. But wouldn’t it be nice for people to appreciate the sense of my words and not be thinking about the shape of my foot at the same time? Wouldn’t it be nice to be remembered for something other than being the little lame princess whose parents never managed to beget a proper heir?

  I often thought that writing a book would be the key. Boethius himself had been a favorite of emperors before his downfall; but when people thought of him today, they didn’t think of his treason or his time in prison. They thought only of his books on music, arithmetic, geometry, and philosophy.

  The problem was, I didn’t know what sort of subject I should pursue for such a book. All I knew, really, was about housing and clothing servants, vassals, and tenants; reading land contracts; flattering higher lords through fawning letters; and collecting rents. These were hardly subjects that inspired a flurry of copying or commentary from scholars and scribes. And they were boring.

  Pen poised over parchment, I closed my eyes and listened to the blessed silence of the hall. The few servants were all out in the kitchen, preparing for dinner.

  This is what it could be like. In my mind’s eye, I saw a quiet cloister scriptorium around me, where my fellow nuns copied books while I worked on something else, something greater. The others cast me sideways glances, wishing to know what wondrous thoughts flowed from my pen, but dared not interrupt. A young nun mixed ink for me. And another supplied a steady stream of sharpened pens.

  Mathilda of Alder Brook would cease to mean the ruler of a principality that couldn’t even afford to buy a professionally scribed copy of On Horsemanship for the emperor. Mathilda would become a name coupled with Aristotle and Augustine. Scholars would pore for countless hours over my words, writing fevered glosses in the margins. No one would again equate my name with the evil eye or suggest my mother had walked over a grave while she was pregnant with me.

  A cough interrupted the silence of my imaginary cloister.

  I opened my eyes to find Lord Parzifal of Hare Hedge staring down at me.

  I muffled a scream of surprise so well that it just came out as a strangled squeak. I hadn’t seen Parz in weeks. Last time, his hair had tumbled to his shoulders. Now his head was close-cropped, covered in golden stubble.

  Even without hair, he was drastically handsome. The first time I’d seen Parz, my head had felt as dense and warm as a cake just out of the oven. I was pleased to note that my head felt no worse than well-cooled yeast bread now. A vast improvement.

  “What happened to your hair?” I blurted, then jerked my chin down, angry with myself for being so unmannered. All right, perhaps I was not a well-cooled yeast bread at all.

  Parz’s hand went up to finger the stubble on his scalp—and farther back. He half turned to show me: a brutal-looking wound in some stage between scab and scar, surrounded by an every-colored bruise that went from dull mulberry at the center to pale pear at the edges.

  I winced. “What happened?”

  “I was . . . too slow on the quintain,” he said. I must have looked confused, because he said, “You know that spinning thing you see in training yards? Looks like a scarecrow with a shield attached to one side? You hit the shield with your lance, and if you do it right, when it spins around, it doesn’t hit you with a bag of sand as you ride past.”

  I frowned. I knew what a quintain was, but I still didn’t understand. “Even if you didn’t do it right, a bag of sand shouldn’t—” I gestured at my head.

  Parz’s mouth hardened. “Not only didn’t I do it right, but some fatherless donkey weighted the bag with rocks instead of sand. As a prank, I guess, but it was less funny when the bag knocked me out.”

  “That’s horrible! Who would do such a thing?”

  “Another squire, visiting with his lord. I guess he grew . . . bored.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, sure,” Parz said. “I only vomited twice, and that was days ago. The barber said more vomiting would be a bad sign. And I didn’t break my skull.”

  “I hope the other squire was punished!”

  Parz seated himself on the bench across from me. “No! That’s just it. I was too busy vomiting to explain what happened, and by the time I was done, that pighound had swapped out his rocks for sand again, and then he was gone home. No one believes me. They all just think I’m incompetent. A fool.”

  “But you were hurt!”

  “Sir Kunibert doesn’t tolerate excuses, not even for a claked head. Not even for an illegal bag of rocks that no one can prove. He’s sending me home as soon as I can ride without further injury. It’s the end of my training here.”

  “That’s unfair!”

  Parz cracked a half smile. “I was awfully slow on the quintain.” His smile faded. “And I should have noticed that the quintain was weighted wrong, and the way that idiot was clutching his belly and laughing.”

  “Oh, Parz,” I said, and fell silent. Parz leaving Boar House was . . . was a disaster. I didn’t travel, and when he went away, I’d never see him again.

  The first time I’d met Parz, Sir Kunibert had brought him along to Alder Brook on a visit to my mother. Parz had heard about me and my interest in books, I guess, because he hadn’t been in the keep ten minutes before he cornered me and demanded to know where the books on dragons were kept.

  You might think I would hate a guest who came up to me and demanded something from me, seemingly at random, and I did try to hate him for a little bit. But Parz had become instantly charming—bowing over my hand, calling me “the princess-librarian,” and otherwise using his looks to maximum effect.

  I’d been suspicious at first. Hadn’t I always, always hated being judged on my appearance? And here I was, letting a boy I didn’t know behave brashly to me just because he was pretty to look at?

  But there was more to Parz than his face. He was lively and enthusiastic—but he was also kind. We spent an hour talking about dragons before Sir Kunibert finished his business with my mother, claimed his squire, and returned to Boar House.

  When Parz had departed, the room and the whole world seemed darker. And now the world would stay that dark, always, once he left Boar House.

  I took several deep breaths, trying to screw up my courage to tell Parz how much I was going to miss him.

  But he wasn’t even looking at me. He was s
taring at the dragon heads on the wall. “What I need to do,” he said thoughtfully, “is to slay a dragon. Yes. And as soon as possible.”

  chapter 3

  “SLAY A DRAGON? WHY?”

  “To restore my honor,” Parz said. “To prove that I’m more than just an idiot who gets knocked off a horse and put near death by a prank. To prove . . . I’m worth training.”

  “So!” Judith said angrily. Parz and I both jumped. “In order to train further with a dragon slayer, all you have to do is kill a dragon?” She thunked a mug of hot honey water down in front of me. “Makes no sense, Parz. Sounds like a good way to get yourself killed, in fact.”

  “Judith!” I said, shocked that she would not only interrupt Lord Parzifal and scold him, but that she would also address him so familiarly.

  It obviously shocked her, too, because she stared at me, blood draining from her face. “I’m—sorry, Princess Mathilda,” she said. “I forgot my—my place.”

  “I think your apology goes to Lord Parzifal more than me.”

  “I apologize, Lord Parzifal.”

  Parz looked from Judith to me and back again. “Um,” he said, and finally turned to me. “Tilda, you know things. Where can we find a dragon? A little one?”

  Still thrown off by Judith’s behavior, I said, “My steward says there’s a new dragon at Mount Lorelei.”

  “I’ve heard of that one. It’s way too big for me to try on my own,” Parz said. He didn’t look at me as he spoke. He looked at Judith instead.

  I glanced at Judith, who met Parz’s gaze with a grim mouth and a sharp headshake.

  Puzzled, and also slightly embarrassed for some reason, I turned my attention back to the box of contracts before me. The next one I pulled out was a contract for killing a dragon somewhere down the Rhine past Snail Castle.

  “There’s a record of Sir Kunibert’s past dragon slayings in here,” I said. “Maybe . . . maybe there’s some sort of indication of survivor dragons, or, um, incomplete contracts?”