by IGMS
Perhaps there is a sign in that, Draco reflected, and a lesson for us all not to try and change our stripes. He realized abruptly that Timor had turned his head and was staring at Draco expectantly with his luminous eyes.
"I'm sorry, master. What did you ask me?"
Timor snorted, sending out wisps of steam (and incidentally killing a blackberry vine that crept up the fence beside them.) "I asked if you knew the specifics of receiving a knighthood. It's hereditary, is it not?"
"Not sure, sir," said Draco. "I think the king has to give it to you first."
"I had thought . . . ah, never mind. I know so little of knighthood."
Draco mulled that thought for a time. "How did you decide to become a knight, then, sir? If I may ask?"
"There was a man," said Sir Timor, "who came to fight me, once upon a time. I was bored and well-satiated, so I challenged him to a riddle contest instead - we dragons do love riddles, you understand, hiding the name of a thing, hedging it with secrets. It's quite as addictive as hoarding gold. He answered my opener - I like to lob an easy one out first, though I think now that the egg riddle is a bit too popular - and then he asked me a question I could not answer. A question about honor, and the purpose of life, and what it was to be a knight. I thought for a day and a night, straight through, and he stood there in his armor, never moving. At last I had to concede. I had never pondered what I was, nor what I meant in the world that such men opposed me. He told me then about the burden and the duty, the oaths and the striving. It was . . . a revelation. Then, having won the riddle contest, the knight was of course entitled to a boon." Timor fell silent for long enough that Draco dared another question.
"Did he ask for your oath? Is that why you swore to become a knight and a champion of good, for the debt you owed?"
"Hmm? No, no. He only asked for knowledge in return. I made the decision to become a knight after our . . . conversation. He gave me his armor, you know. Said he wouldn't need it any longer." Timor tapped at a shield on his right flank with his tail tip, ringing it like a bell. It was painted matte black, with no emblem. "This is his."
"What did he want to know?"
"He asked what it was to be a dragon," said Timor.
"And what is it," Draco asked carefully, "to be a dragon?"
Timor sighed. "Much, much less than I had ever realized before. I have been alive for a very long time, Draco, and I have done a great many things. I wish that I could be proud of even one of them before I pass from this world entirely."
They walked on in silence.
By the time they arrived in Brytheton, Draco was riding the horse, despite his protests. Draco wasn't an expert on knighthood, but he was fairly certain that squires did not ride warhorses. Timor had pointed out - with unusual tact and decorum - that he could hardly ride the creatures himself, and Draco's feet were blistering after a day trying to keep up with Timor's yards-long strides.
The town was clearly in the utmost distress. Half the buildings had been caved in, as if by a giant fist, and several of those had obviously burned recently, as they were still black and smoldering. The air stank of mingled dung, damp, and rot, and the harsh tinge of smoke overlay it all. The people huddled in the houses that remained, eyeing the newcomers with haunted expressions.
Timor led Ransom the horse and his wide-eyed squire to the central square, a muddy patch with a central well, the whole clearing barely large enough to contain the dragon's bulk. Draco noticed, with some lingering light-headedness, that the dragon had wended his way between several houses without breaking anything.
"Was it a dragon?" Draco asked quietly.
"I've never seen it from this end," Timor muttered as softly as he could muster, "but the signs are all here."
Draco slid from Ransom's back, wincing slightly as his feet hit the ground once more and thanking his lucky stars that Timor's gold had bought him some solid new boots instead of just straw-stuffed wraps. He led the sweating animal to the communal trough and set about working the pump handle to draw up water from the well below.
"Good people of Brytheton!" Timor called, his voice booming like thunder. Draco jumped, but Ransom affected not to notice. "I am Sir Timor the Bold. I have heard of your plight, and I have come to assist you in ridding the land of the devilish beast that plagues your home. Where is your lord or mayor, that I might offer my services to him?"
There was a brief scuffle in one of the larger buildings, and a door opened to disgorge a bedraggled man in a red cloth cap. He stumbled as he emerged, as though shoved from behind. He coughed and strode forward, stopping at what would have been a safe and respectful distance from an armed man; this put him almost directly beneath Timor's snout.
"Yes?" said Timor, lowering his head and cocking one eye at the man. "Are you the mayor here?"
"No, m'Lord." The man doffed his cap, revealing a thinning head of scraggly black hair. "Name's Gumption. Used to work alongside the mayor. Fetch and carry and suchlike, and mindin' his concerns when he was away up t'manor house to talk civic business."
"And where is the mayor?"
Draco hobbled to the edge of the watering trough and perched, taking some of his weight off of his stinging feet. He caught a glimpse of something pale behind the town's tiny church; long, white forms, stacked like cordwood.
Gumption swallowed. "He rode out with his Lordship. Last week, 'twas." The man lifted a hand and pointed to a distant hill, just visible through the trees that surrounded the hamlet. "They never came back, and the next morning, that happened."
Timor twisted his head around like an owl, then whuffed in displeasure. Wisps of steam escaped his nostrils. Draco craned his neck to see.
On the top of the hill was the wreckage of what looked to have been a fine house once, a grand and opulent manor. The local lord had had, it seemed, a wealthy and prosperous patronage. The house was now little more than a smoking crater, tumbledown and burned to ash.
"Me and the Whitfields went out to see a few days later," Gumption went on, twisting his cap in his hands as though wringing the words from its fabric. "We brung back what we could find. Truth be told, I couldn't say with a sureness whether any o' them was the mayor or not."
Timor ducked his head, almost touching the murky ground with his chin. "Do you know where the beast lairs, then?"
"Not direct, m'lord . . ." Gumption hesitated.
"I've seen it!"
Draco dragged his eyes from the bodies behind the church to see a young girl in a dirty smock struggle out of the same building Gumption had come from. She looked to be perhaps seven years old. A clutching hand failed to hold its grip on her collar, and she wriggled free, running forward.
"Lessa," Gumption sighed, rolling his eyes heavenward.
"I did!" Lessa bounded up and stared Timor in the eye. "I was up t'house when the dragon came and took Lady Elsibeth away! It took us all as was in the carriage house, but it dropped me when we got close. I'm good at escaping," she added proudly. "I saw where it landed, and I found my way home again after. I can show you."
Draco perked up, but Timor shook his head, setting his shields rattling. "No. We cannot put any other lives at risk, especially one so young and . . . innocent." Timor's nostrils flared, and Draco recalled the traditional offering of virginal girls to dragons.
"Could you draw us a map?" Draco asked.
"I don't know how," said Lessa, turning her penetrating gaze to him.
"What if I helped and you just told me how far?"
"Dunno. It was a long ways. I can walk it again, easy, though."
"Is there no one else who has seen the lair?" Timor asked, turning back to Gumption, who looked stricken.
"No, m'lord," he whispered, unwilling to lie to a nobleman, or to what he believed to be a nobleman. "We've got guesses, but there's nigh a dozen miles of deep forest to search, and any number of caves once you're in the hills. She's the only one."
"I will search, then, if it takes me weeks or months," said Timor firmly.
"The dragon comes every night," Lessa put in.
"We won't last another week, m'lord, truth be known," said Gumption. "We were all just now discussing where we could flee to, now that the Viscount and all the soldiers is dead."
"The quicker we find the dragon, the sooner we can end it," Draco put in. "If the girl can help us do so more quickly, well, you'd have your heroic deed." He left unspoken Timor's hopes to gain a knighthood from the doing of said deed; no reason anyone else had to know their savior wasn't actually a knight. They didn't seem to notice that he wasn't human, after all.
"Just . . . keep her safe, if you can, m'lord," said Gumption, hanging his head. "Our boy was in the raiding party."
Timor hesitated, caught between pragmatism and romantic notions. Draco surreptitiously kicked his master in the scaly flank; what danger could the girl be in with a dragon of her own to guard her?
"She will be as safe with me as if she were in a fortress," Timor said. He jabbed Draco with his tail tip; it could be surprisingly accurate, when he wanted it to be.
"Huzzah! We're going to slay the dragon!" Lessa grinned, a savage joy in her eyes, matched by her father's despair.
Draco rubbed the bruise on his arm. "Sir Timor is the survivor of over a dozen battles with dragons," he assured Gumption. This news seemed to revive the man's flagging spirits.
"You've killed so many?" he asked, looking up.
Timor coughed, sending forth a sulfurous smoke ring that wreathed Gumption's shining face. "I can assure you with the utmost certainty that the dragon who dwelled in the last lair I visited will never terrorize that area again."
Timor insisted on burying the dead before they left in the morning. With his massive claws and the soft earth near the river, he had deep if somewhat ragged holes dug out in a matter of minutes. There was a lot of blinking and shaking of heads among the townsfolk as their minds tried to process what they thought they were seeing, but no one mentioned anything untoward about the rapidity of the "knight's" excavations, and Draco and Timor stood at the rear of the crowd with bowed heads while the priest intoned a short burial rite.
Lessa was rather discomfitingly anxious to get underway, and so Timor begged off a half-hearted offer of breakfast with the claim of not wishing to abuse the town's largesse, already so visibly strained.
Lessa led the way into the woods, followed by Draco, leading Ransom by the reins, and Timor bringing up the rear, shouldering branches aside and rumbling with displeasure when they caught on his delicate wing membranes. Draco kept between his two companions on the grounds that the town had had no spare farm animals to feed Timor. As hunting deer with a self-grounded dragon seemed as likely as kicking a rock and discovering a freshwater spring, Timor's hunger had therefore gone unassuaged, and Draco didn't like the way Timor's nostrils kept flaring when he glanced in Lessa's direction.
The mild discomfort of walking in the trees seemed to damp down Timor's usual prattle, at least, and they proceeded without any sound other than the crunching of leaves, the puffing of breath, and the snap of branches.
"So how did you come t'have a pet dragon?" Lessa asked, so casually that it took Draco a moment to realize what she had said.
"What?" He coughed. "What dragon? There's no dragon. Who said there was a dragon?"
Lessa glanced behind them, leaning to the side to catch a good view of Timor, who was gnawing at a particularly troublesome branch that had caught in his shield harness. Her hair dangled nearly to the leaf-littered ground. "Timor is a dragon."
Draco flushed, as he usually did when caught in a lie. "Sir Timor is a knight, and I am his squire. We're here to slay the dragon. Perhaps that is what confused you," he said, layering his voice with the strongest hints he could.
"No," Lessa shook her head, "he's a dragon. You're the knight. How come you're hiding? Is it 'cause you don't want anyone to know how you beat the other dragons?"
Timor chuckled as he caught up to the two young humans, his head hovering between their shoulders. "She has keen eyes," he said. "She sees things as they are, much as you do. It's a rare enough talent among humans, who mostly see what they want to see. The only rarer gift is to see things as they should be."
"Isn't that the same thing?" asked Draco, distracted despite himself.
"It depends." Timor's tail rippled in his version of a shrug.
"On what?"
"On who's doing the seeing."
Draco glared down at Lessa. "Aren't you bothered to travel with a dragon? I thought a dragon was terrorizing your village."
"I am a dragon no more," Timor interjected. "Now I am a knight."
Lessa looked up at Timor, who returned her gaze stoically. "He's not a bad dragon. He can be a knight if he wants," she said in a tone that suggested the matter was settled.
Putting images of Timor's past meals out of his mind, Draco managed a smile. "I suppose that makes as much sense as anything. Er, don't talk about this too much; I don't think anyone will be happier knowing Timor is a dragon."
"Nobody ever listens to me anyway," said Lessa happily.
As they walked, the woods seemed to become darker and colder, the scent of rotting leaves growing to an overpowering miasma. The ground sloped uphill, and the trees sprouted thinner and thinner in the increasingly rocky soil. They passed a ravine where a hidden stream, heard but unseen, trickled beneath overhanging growth, and Lessa directed them to follow the water up to its source. They emerged on a shelf of rock, thrusting up and out of the woods. They could see nothing but a sea of green and brown stretching away, with only a distant wisp of smoke marking the hill with the manor house on it.
"Quite a trek," said Draco, puffing.
Timor heaved himself out of the foliage with a grunt and a snapping of twigs. "Dragons keep a large territory, much as human lords do."
"We're almost there," Lessa said. "Quit whining."
She pointed along the slope, where the thin soil gave out and a crevasse opened in the rock, a few bony, stunted trees clinging to the edges of the defile. "It's down there. I fell on the bushes when we were coming in."
There was, indeed, a clutch of prickly growths near the mouth of the crevice, where the land was otherwise bare of anything but dead and dying clumps of weeds. They had waxy leaves and brightly colored berries that looked poisonous. The slope opened up quickly, the walls of the ravine splitting apart as though cleaved by an axe; even Timor could have fit through it without difficulty, so long as he kept his wings furled.
"I always thought it would be more like an eagle's eyrie," said Draco. "To fly out of, you know?"
"There are dragons and then there are dragons, I suppose," said Timor, holding himself tense.
A scream shattered the hush that had fallen over them. Lessa clapped her hands to her ears, and Draco half-expected the leaves of the trees around them to shudder. The scream cut off abruptly.
"That was Lady Elsibeth!"
"Come, Draco! To battle!" Timor reached across and tugged his sword out of its sheath on his arm. It looked like a table knife in his foreclaw. He plunged into the trees with a crackling of dry wood.
"Wouldn't it be faster to fly to that clearing?" Draco called, struggling to pull his sword from Ransom's packs.
"Knights don't have wings," Lessa told him.
"Stay here," Draco ordered, yanking the sword free with a rasp. "Hold Ransom. He's very polite, but don't drop the reins and don't stand too close. Understand?"
Lessa shrugged and nodded.
Draco handed over the reins and rushed after Timor, following the path carved into the undergrowth.
After a chaotic tumble through falling branches and trees still rebounding from the force of the dragon's passage, Draco skidded to a halt in the weak sunlight of late afternoon to see one of the oddest sights yet in a life that had recently begun to include some odd sights indeed.
Timor stood on his hind legs, slightly unsteady and with his wings half-unfurled for balance. He leveled his comically small sword in
a fair imitation of a swordsman at ready to begin a fencing match. Sauntering out of the cave mouth, dwarfed by both the dark maw of the earth and by his reptilian opponent, was a slender man with short black hair and pale skin. The newcomer was clean-shaven, clad in a simple black tunic and trousers, his feet bare on the rough stones. At first, Draco thought him to be wearing red gloves, but then the man lifted one finger to his mouth and slowly, almost lasciviously, sucked it clean.
Blood. The man's arms and hands were covered to the elbow in blood.
"So it's you," the man said. "How amusing." He did not sound amused. He seemed blandly unsurprised to see Timor, who tensed and leveled his sword.
"I am Sir Timor the Bold, and I have come to vanquish the vile wyrm that plagues these hills." Timor flourished his blade in a salute, wobbling only slightly as his balance shifted.
The dark man glanced at Draco, who nearly stumbled at the physical impact of his gaze. The man's eyes were lambent gold and slit-pupiled, a tiny echo of Timor's own platter-sized orbs, but they were still somehow as pitch-dark and empty as the cave behind him. "Brought a snack for the ride home, have we? Just as well. I'd offer you some of my own, but I've just used up the last of it."
From the shadows behind him came a soft gurgling sigh. It was not repeated.
The dark man smiled, and Draco felt his legs go numb.
Timor charged, a battle cry on his lips, his ridiculous sword flashing as brightly as his scales. He was a massive being, several tons of angry muscle, heavily armored. He should have crushed the dark man like Draco crushed a beetle, snapped the man up like he had swallowed so many sheep, calves, and goats.
But he didn't.
The dark man lifted his arm and met the downrushing sword almost casually. There was a terrible ringing sound, and Timor was flung back. The dark man tossed aside the sword, which clattered against the wall of the crevice, then took one heavy step forward. His foot crashed down like thunder, kicking up dust and dirt in clouds. Shadows like clawed wings flickered in the air, and wind roared out of the cave, the stinking breath of a dying god. Timor went flying as though he weighed no more than a leaf. On the edge of the effect, Draco was pressed against the scrubby trees as if held by ropes. Timor landed heavily atop the same bushes that had saved Lessa's life. One wing snapped with a hollow crunching sound, and Timor keened in pain.