Handbook for Dragon Slayers

by Merrie Haskell

  “Joyeuse, no!” I cried, struggling to my feet. I wasn’t immediately overwhelmed by dizziness, but I slipped anyway. I caught myself on the cave wall, scraping my arm.

  Joyeuse took a step back to me but stayed in a defensive pose. The dragon didn’t move. I could barely make out her colors in the darkness; only the reflected gleam of her eyes and her gold let me know where she stood.

  “Joyeuse, she brought me water. She . . . she brought me firewood.” I limped along the wall until I reached the horse’s neck, then reached up to touch her shoulder. “No. Friend! The dragon is a friend.”

  Joyeuse did not look convinced, but the mare took another step backward.

  But she would go no farther. She stayed in position, firm as a boulder, all four feet planted like trees.

  “Fine,” I croaked, suddenly weary again. “Fine. If you have to guard me, that’s fine. But I think it would be best if you remembered we’re her guests, and we should give her some room.” I wondered why it was that I thought the dragon was female. I think it was the feminine touches to her crown.

  “Hey,” I said, remembering Joyeuse had been missing for some time. “Where have you been?”

  She wheeled about and nosed a shadow near the entrance of the cave. The shadow turned out to be a small sack, which she lipped up and brought to me.

  “What—where on earth—?”

  I took the sack from the horse and found three loaves. I ripped into the bread and started to chew, spitting out the occasional bit of chaff that had gotten baked in.

  “How did you do it? You’re amazing. Thank you,” I said around my mouthful of bread. She must have robbed a bakery.

  After I ate, I found my shoes and went out into the blizzard—not very far—to dig a privy hole in the snow. It was too stormy to see where we were exactly, but I thought we were atop a mountain.

  Joyeuse followed close, watching over me as I took care of my necessary business. While I needed her for balance, her close, watchful attention was almost disconcerting.

  “I really don’t need an audience,” I muttered, but that didn’t convince her.

  My fingers itched for my quills and parchment. I had been living with a dragon for at least a day. I had so much to write down! The firewood, and the melted snow. The way she could handle delicate objects, like the goblet, or the necklace around her neck. And how her throat had puffed out when she’d dried the firewood with her internal fires. The shades of her scales, and how they differed from those of the other dragons we had faced.

  And the fact that she wore a crown and a chain! What was the key for, anyway? Did the dragon simply like how it looked, or did she lock up her treasure in a money chest, the way we had at Alder Brook?

  I didn’t have pens and ink, but I did have the Handbook. I pulled over the package that Frau Dagmar had sneaked to me and unwrapped the oilcloth.

  The book inside was not the Handbook.

  I stared down, shocked. The book cover was dark leather, deeply tooled in designs of horses and hounds and twining thorns, full moons and pentacles.

  I opened to the first page.

  THE SWORN BOOK OF HEKATE

  I read the words aloud, and a cold shiver went down my back. This was a grimoire. A book of sorcery.

  I opened to the first page.

  “The Wild Hunt is the right arm of the Queen of the Underworld. The furious army rides at her behest, and is made of a throng of the unrighteously killed, eidolons given blood of the living and water from Styx. They ride through the countryside and hunt souls, to conduct them to Hades.”

  I looked up at Joyeuse. “This book is about you!” I scanned forward a few pages, until a bit about horses caught my eye, which came after a lengthy treatise on the “ghastly hounds” of the hunt. “Listen to this:

  “There are many hunts and many leaders, male and female. The Hunt of the Bright One is led by Brunhild. The Hunt of the Crossroads is led by Hekate, whose host flies on the wind.

  “In the time between hunts, the horses disperse I know not where, and make mischief among the peasantry–”

  I laughed, thinking of Upper Folkstown. “Isn’t that the truth!”

  “–until they are called to hunt once more.”

  I heard the dragon moving in the depths of the cave and I stopped reading aloud.

  The next part was about summoning a Hunt. I was aghast. Who would want to summon a Wild Hunt?

  There was a long, detailed bit about laying out an offering to the Hunt near the nights of the dark of the moon (the body of “a maiden with a prince’s blood” would do, but offerings from one’s own body were also acceptable), burning certain herbs and kinds of hair on a fire, dressing as though one was ready for a hunt, and, when the Hunt showed up—if it showed up—being prepared to challenge them to a race or a duel or an ordeal.

  If you lost the challenge? You forfeited your life. If you won, you were granted whatever boon you wanted, but as boons went, your request had to be ironclad in its wording. No magical creatures liked to be summoned and bound.

  “Oh, my heavens,” I said. “That’s what Sir Egin is trying to do. He’s trying to summon a Wild Hunt!”

  How many maidens with a prince’s blood had Egin offered?

  Seven. And I would have been the eighth.

  chapter 25

  “BUT WHY?” I ASKED ALOUD. “WHAT CAN HE POSSIBLY want with the Wild Hunt that is worth so much . . . well, trouble?” It couldn’t be easy to court seven princesses, to sign seven marriage contracts—and so on and so forth. And I was sure it must be harder and harder to get the women and their families to agree to the marriages. Especially after the first two or three times Egin had turned up a widower.

  Then I remembered the contented, floaty, dizzy feelings I’d had when I wasn’t wearing the horsetail necklace. Egin was a sorcerer. He had the power to cloud men’s—and women’s—minds. It was nothing compared to the Hunt’s magic, of course. . . . That must have to do with why he wanted to summon them and be granted a boon.

  The book went on about the ritual of the summoning, how one should address the Wild Hunt as a group and each hunter individually, and all sorts of things that didn’t seem terribly important.

  Then there was this:

  Every seven years the Hunt must capture a young dragon to become the new guardian of the Underworld. Dragons cannot live much beyond that length of time without seeing the face of the sun, and the dragons who guard the Underworld eventually sicken and die.

  This was followed by a suggestion that if you couldn’t find an appropriate offering for the Hunt, or if you consistently had no luck with summoning them, then you might try to lure them with a dragon. The problem with that was the timing; who knew the first year that the “every seven” was calculated from? What followed was a table of possible dates, which went on for pages and pages.

  The narrative picked up again on a section titled “Calling Forth the Dragon from the Depths”—all it took was apparently blood and a dragon claw and a few ritual words in the dragon tongue to summon up the nearest dragon.

  I eyed the darkness where the dragon dwelled, wondering if this ritual would really summon the creature from the depths of its cave.

  Only a fool would try to find out. And a desperate fool at that.

  “Is that why you don’t like dragons?” I asked Joyeuse. “You’re natural enemies, as a member of the Wild Hunt? Well. They aren’t your enemy, but you sure are theirs.”

  Of course, the horse couldn’t answer. But from the darkness, a serpenty, slithery voice said, “Yeeeessss.”

  I jumped.

  “Do you—did you just speak to me?” I asked stupidly. “In human speech?”

  But the dragon didn’t respond again.

  All the stories of evil dragons—the dragons at River Bend and Horsehead Gorge, the Tarasque, and all the rest—crowded my memory. I crossed myself, remembering that all the saints did that first, and frequently subdued the dragons just through the holy gesture or prayer.
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  The dragon didn’t suddenly burst apart into a thousand devils or just keel over after I crossed myself.

  I took in a deep breath. This was not an evil dragon. She had helped me when I was ill. She had given me shelter in her home—or at least, she had not denied me shelter—during a storm. She had suffered the presence of one of her enemies.

  I didn’t even know why she had shown me such kindness. Perhaps she was like Judith; perhaps she saw me as Judith saw wounded birds and baby goats. Perhaps, knowing I needed aid and succor, she had taken pity on me.

  “Hello . . . ,” I called, wanting to talk to the dragon further. But she didn’t answer me. I took a few steps deeper into the cave, but was forced to stop when Joyeuse nabbed my dress in her teeth.

  I rounded on her. “I’m going to talk to the dragon,” I said. “And you are going to stay here!”

  Joyeuse’s ears flattened.

  I took the sack that Joyeuse had brought the bread in and wrapped it round and round the stickiest, sappiest pine branch I could break off a tree without losing sight of the cave entrance. I thrust the knotted fabric into the fire to make a torch.

  The moment I headed for the depths of the cave with my torch, Joyeuse came jogging after me.

  “No!” I said, like I was talking to a willful child.

  She stared down at me sternly, and I realized: No, she wasn’t a willful child. She was a grim old nun.

  “I’m going,” I said. “If you try to stop me, you’ll probably hurt me.”

  I tromped off into the depths of the cave, torch held before me, one hand to the cave’s wall for stability. She followed, of course, but she didn’t interfere.

  As the cave floor sloped gently down, I realized the air was much warmer than outside the cave, even so far from my fire. Was the heat from the fire being drawn down? It didn’t seem possible, since I couldn’t really smell smoke here.

  “Hello, dragon,” I called in hushed tones. In spite of my low voice, the words echoed through the cave. “It’s me. Tilda.”

  I came to a fork. The left passage was far too small for the dragon to squeeze through, but the right was the proper size. I went right. Joyeuse followed.

  My torchlight revealed hidden wonders through openings like windows, some no bigger than my head: narrow caverns full of translucent white spindles, huddled colonies of sleeping bats, pools of water vast and still. The path branched. I continued to take paths that the dragon could fit through, hoping I could find my way out again. I thought about being lost down here, forced to eat bats or mushrooms and drink stagnant water to live. . . . But long before that, my torch would go out, and I would be blind.

  That way lay madness. I was just about to turn back when I heard something shift in the darkness ahead.

  I raised my chin and my torch and kept going. I passed through a small narrowing into a wider cave.

  I gasped. Spread before me was a vast landscape of wealth. Fields of tarnished silver pfennigs were dotted with fist-sized jewels every shade of the rainbow, from ruby to amethyst. Gold marks lay scattered like daffodils emerging from patchy snow. Here and there, crowns and torcs breached the surface of silver. A gilded Roman breastplate was half buried next to a gleaming eagle poised on a long stick.

  Where had it all come from? We were not far from where Siegfried killed Fafnir—could this be the Rhinegold, the fabled sunken treasure? Had this dragon pulled it from the floor of the river—or was this some other hoard completely?

  Confronted with all this wealth, I had not noticed at first that the room was lit by more than my torchlight. Above the grooved walls, there was an opening to the sky about halfway up the cave wall, and weak winter sunlight flooded in.

  A small mountain of gold moved, and the dragon’s head emerged. Coins sheeted from her like rain, and she rose to her full height—which was small for a dragon and still plenty big enough to kill me.

  Her head reared back on her long, goosey neck, and she roared.

  Joyeuse bellowed a challenge, and I cringed beside the mare. This was bad. This was so bad.

  “Sorry!” I called, retreating. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t want your treasure—”

  The dragon hissed at that word and advanced on us.

  “I don’t want any part of it! I swear. I’m a princess! I mean, I could be again if I were to return home. My name is Tilda. Mathilda. Of Alder Brook. But anyway, my point is, treasure has never really been a desire of mine, certainly not treasure for treasure’s sake, though I do know the value of a good curtain wall, and I assure you, I see a lot of curtain walls here. But I—all right. Look, have you seen my horse? She’s a walking piece of jewelry. And she has a big treasury of her own, though that stuff is worth more for arming knights than it would be in trade.”

  The dragon slowed, cocking her head to the side as though listening.

  “Anyway, we’ll be gone soon, as soon as the blizzard subsides, though I don’t know where we’re going. I need to return home to Alder Brook by Christmas, and it’s almost Christmas! But I also need to rescue my friends from Sir Egin—”

  When I said that name, the dragon’s head flattened and she hissed loudly.

  Joyeuse trumpeted a challenge back to her.

  “You know him? He’s pretty . . . awful.” How did she know him? Then I remembered what I’d read in the book that Frau Dagmar had slipped to me. “‘Every seven years the Hunt must capture a young dragon to become the new guardian of the Underworld.’ Did Sir Egin try to capture you? Try to use you for bait for the Wild Hunt?”

  “Yeeessss,” the dragon hissed.

  “We have something in common, then.”

  “Yeeessss.”

  We stared at each other in silence for a long moment. Joyeuse stamped an impatient foot.

  “How did you—how did you learn human speech?”

  The dragon continued to stare and then raised a claw to her mouth.

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “You don’t really know how to talk like a human . . . just a few words. But you understand more?”

  “Yeeessss.”

  “All right. Thank you for taking care of me when I was ill,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  I wasn’t really expecting an answer, but she said, “Curschin.”

  “Thank you, Curschin.” My tongue only got slightly lost in the soft sounds of the name. “We’ll leave you alone now. Come along, Joyeuse.”

  The horse did not turn her hindquarters to the dragon, choosing to back out of the treasury cave instead. I would have smiled, for it seemed so clear that Joyeuse’s distrust of Curschin was unwarranted, but on the other hand . . . it had not been that many weeks since I had considered all dragons evil. I had assumed that Sir Kunibert didn’t rush out and kill all the dragons because there wasn’t a reward tied to every single dragon’s death. I had, in fact, thought him a selfish man for not killing more dragons.

  But I saw now that Sir Kunibert had considered dragons merely animals all along, and he—and other dragon slayers, likely—wasn’t going to interfere with dragons unless there were complaints against them. Even in the saints’ stories and the bestiaries, there was no reference to dragon slayers who were simply on a mission to exterminate the race.

  And now a dragon had spoken to me, and had cared for me when I was sick. I was used to Joyeuse’s intelligence and bravery, which far exceeded those of a normal horse; she was a magical creature, through and through. But even Joyeuse could not speak human words or use human tools. Or tell me her name.

  Were dragons magical, like Joyeuse, or were they of a higher order, like humans? That was a question worth learning the answer to.

  We found ourselves at a dead end. We must have turned the wrong way coming back from the treasury cave. The flickering light of my torch revealed a scattering of white tree trunks and sticks spread around the floor—or at least I thought that was what they were.

  I held the torch closer. Those weren’t trees and sticks. They were
bones. Dragon bones?

  I jumped back, slightly horrified; my foot came down onto a bone, which broke beneath my shoe, and I stumbled. I caught myself against a wall and looked down to see what I’d broken. It was some sort of wing bone. I had snapped off the very end of it, which resolved into a long, thin claw.

  I picked it up and held it like a pen. It was pointed at the end, though, so it really would be better as a stylus for a wax tablet than for ink and parchment. But it balanced perfectly in my fingers, curving just slightly around the bones of my hand.

  It felt like magic.

  BY THE TIME WE backed out of the dead-end cave and found our way to the opening, the storm had finally blown over, leaving behind a calm, white world.

  We went out right away. It was the first time I’d had a clear view outdoors since we’d arrived.

  The cave mouth was at the top of a promontory. To my left stretched endless forest. On my right, the Rhine flowed far below us, almost straight down a steep escarpment. A small waterfall nearby had frozen in the midst of its breakneck descent to the river.

  There were no boats down on the icing Rhine, and almost no signs of human habitation anywhere—except for a little building in the bend of the river on the opposite shore, complete with a small tower for setting warning lights at the shoreline.

  There was only point on the Rhine where anyone felt the urge to light warning signals, and that was the narrowing at Mount Lorelei—which was famed for its murmuring waterfall. That’s where I was, then—in the cave of the dragon at Mount Lorelei.

  The dragon was altogether pleasanter than stories would have her seem.

  Joyeuse made an uneasy sound.

  “Tilda?” a voice said from behind me.

  I whirled around, frightened. I saw a figure in the trees, a figure with short, golden hair. Branches obscured him, but there was no mistaking him.

  “Parz? Parz!”

  I ran to him, planning to throw my arms around him and hoping he’d catch me if I fell—but behind me, Joyeuse screamed a challenge.