It was holding a fox by the scruff of the little beast’s neck. “You seem to have brought a spy, ladies,” the new dragon replied. “One wonders why—”
Gina sheathed her sword, pulled off her helm and looked the beast straight in the eyes. “It’s not ours,”
she said slowly. “And I think we all need to talk.”
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“That,” said the larger dragon, “is exactly what I have been trying to tell you!”
“I can’t begin to tell you how long I’ve been trying to find someone who would listen to me,” the big dragon said plaintively.
They had moved their discussion to a less-ruinous part of the fortification, a courtyard nicely shaded by the cliff behind it. The two dragons, with their captive, took up most of the center; the maidens distributed themselves around the periphery, claiming whatever seats they could find. As Andie and Gina took their places, Andie was looking around the courtyard and finding it inexpressibly sad. Why had this place been abandoned? It had been built well, before it had fallen into ruin.
Horrible, really. Truly horrible. Had this once been a fortress guarding the road from the Wyrding Folk?
That would at least account for its having been abandoned. The Wyrdings had no use for such things, but would not allow anyone else to occupy the place and threaten the road.
This was a courtyard not unlike some at the Palace, a colonnade surrounding an open space. But half the columns were broken, as was the roof they supported. No one had yet moved the rubble away.
The maidens perched on mounts of broken stone or sections of columns.
The dragons were polite to a fault, making certain everyone had a seat, that the seats were comfortable, One Good Knight
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or at least as comfortable as stone got, that everyone could see, could hear.
It was surreal. These were two giant carnivores of a species known for eating humans, acting like a pair of maiden aunts with unexpected visitors.
When everyone had finally settled in place, the larger of the two dragons took control of the situation by starting with introductions. “Greetings, Champion, Princess,” he said. The voice was deep and remarkably human-like for someone who didn’t have lips. “I am Adamant, this is my brother Periapt, and I believe you know most of the ladies here.”
Well, yes and no. Yes, because she had branded their names and faces in her memory at the time of their sacrifices. No, they knew her only as a distant shadow standing behind her mother at audiences.
And she really didn’t know them—not even Kyria.
The fox had been confined in a wooden crate; the smaller dragon, Periapt, had brought it, as well. And as soon as everyone settled, the courtyard filled with the buzz of low-voiced conversation. The dragons sat on their haunches, looking gravely at the gathering. Finally when the initial chatter died down, the smaller dragon made a sound like clearing his throat and got instant silence.
“We need to begin at the beginning,” Periapt said. “And that is with my brother. And, we think, a lost scale.”
Adamant nodded. Had they learned such gestures from humans, or was a nod just universal in nature?
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And despite the red glints visible, their eyes were—very human.
“We don’t often lose scales,” he said gravely. “And most of the time when it happens, the thing just vanishes and if anyone finds it, they generally don’t know what it is. A lost scale loses its color pretty quickly, so I suppose that people who find one generally think it’s some kind of odd stone. But as youngsters we are warned that if Magicians get their hands on a lost scale they can work some real mischief with it. And I suppose that’s what must have happened. All I knew is that one day I suddenly found myself flying here to Acadia, completely against my will. I tried fighting the compulsion, but I couldn’t. As soon as I would go to sleep, I’d start flying here. Finally I had to give in, and Periapt came with me.”
“Couldn’t let you go alone,” the small dragon murmured, and the siblings exchanged an affectionate glance.
It astonished Andie how quickly she was learning their body language. She knew the glance was affectionate, and not annoyed or merely questioning.
“Once I got here, the compulsion changed, and I started ravaging the countryside. That, I managed to fight a little. I kept it from making me hurt humans or do very much real damage.”
The nature of the dragons’ faces made it difficult to read their expressions but Andie thought she heard a great deal of tension in the big one’s voice.
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Adamant? Yes, that was the right name. Another word for “diamond.”
Periapt looked away. Andie guessed that meant that Periapt was not at all sure that Adamant had been able to mitigate the damage nearly as much as Adamant thought he had. Remembering the dragon’s attack near the Palace…well, it was true that it was only property damage but…
And probably a dragon would not consider the loss of a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle to be “too much damage”—but if you asked the shepherd or farmer in question you would get a very different answer.
Instead of adding to that, Periapt looked back to them. “You know that all dragons collect treasure of one sort or another, correct?” he asked, looking straight at Andie.
“That’s The Tradition, of course,” she replied. “I don’t know how you could possibly escape that particular compulsion.”
“Well, our family does that, too, of course,” he said.
“But our treasure is a bit different. We’re librarians.”
He held up his fore-claws and she saw that they had been blunted; looking closer, she saw that what was covering the talons were sheaths of some sort with blunt tips. Well, if they were librarians…they’d have to keep from damaging the books, wouldn’t they?
“Librarians,” she said aloud, then grinned as she got it. “Good gods. You are Bookwyrms, aren’t you?”
Gina stared at her a moment, then groaned as she got the pun. The Tradition loved puns.
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“Yes, we are,” Periapt said proudly. “Very much so.
Adamant is straight out of our maternal line of fighting dragons, but I’m a pure Bookwyrm from the tip of my snout to the tip of my tail. My library is cataloged and cross-cataloged and I have read every book in it at least once. I also collect all manner of information and I have created books of my own. Without the talon-sheath, a claw makes a fine pen, and I also have Bookwyrm magic to help me write human-size tomes.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I like books, I like to collect them and I like people to tell me things, but I don’t read much myself,” Adamant said, arching his neck and looking a little uncomfortable. “Besides, the pure Bookwyrms need someone to defend them, right? There are always nasty Magicians trying to steal things out of the hoard.”
“The library,” Periapt corrected him.
“Um, yes, the library.” Dragons couldn’t shrug, but Adamant certainly was giving the impression of that gesture. “Anyway, the point is that Peri knows how to look things up, where to look, and has a pretty good hoa—uh— library of his own. So he knew how to look up what was happening to me.”
“I fairly quickly realized that someone in Acadia had decided that there was going to be a landscape-ravaging dragon wreaking havoc here, that he had probably gotten hold of one of Adam’s scales and that it was only a matter of time before someone in the populace decided to start offering up virgins.”
Periapt nodded wisely. “We still don’t know who, or One Good Knight
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for what purpose all of this is happening, but at least we knew what to predict in the short term, and I will get to the long term in a moment. The point is, that when the first virgin—”
“That’s me—” said a sturdy-looking girl off to the left, raising her hand.
�
�—showed up tied to a stake, we knew what was going to happen and we worked very hard to keep him from—from doing anything socially unacceptable,” Periapt finished.
“Like eat her.”
Andie had to smother a chuckle at that. Adamant was clearly not long on tact. Periapt had tried to be diplomatic, and Adam had blundered right into what could have been an uncomfortable moment.
But the girl in question just laughed and the awkwardness passed.
For a moment Andie sobered. Because the way that Adam had so bluntly blurted “Like eat her,”
reminded her that these were dragons after all, and there were as many “bad” dragons as “good” dragons. And, yes, if the compulsion had been strong enough, they would have eaten the maidens. They would have felt dreadful afterward, but—
But they were dragons. This was what dragons sometimes did.
She had to chuckle a second time, because after so short a time with them, the two were now “Peri” and
“Adam” in her mind, and they already showed distinct personalities.
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“Well,” Adam continued, “we pretty quickly figured out that as long as I carried off the sacrifice, I didn’t have to do anything else to her. The thing was, the magic wouldn’t let me let her go, at least not at first. So we had to bring her back here.”
“Which was where things got—difficult,” Peri added.
The girl laughed. “I’m Amaranth, Champion, Princess. And difficult isn’t the half of it. I was hysterical.”
“I wouldn’t have called you hysterical,” Peri said diplomatically, his tail twitching.
“I would,” Adam said abruptly, and the rest laughed. “You were horrible. I never heard such screams. You carried on till you were hoarse and you gave us both headaches. Why human females have such shrill voices—” He shook his massive head.
“Anyway, we had to lock her up in the tower with one of us curled around the base at all times.”
He nodded at a near-windowless spire. From where she sat, Andie thought the tower looked impossible to get out of, since the only windows were mere slits near the top.
“After three days I finally believed them,”
Amaranth said, when she had stopped laughing. She looked as if she had been a hardworking girl in her previous life, though there were no real signs of rank on any of the girls. It was mostly that Amaranth had good muscles, and the air of someone who did things, rather than had things done for her. All of One Good Knight
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them were dressed pretty much alike in sensible short tunics over long dresses that could be belted up above the knees, the sort of thing that Andie favored when she wasn’t in trews.
Well, hardly a surprise, that, given the flimsy gowns they’d been carried off wearing.
“When they kept feeding me and finally brought me something to wear besides the rags I was in, I finally believed them. It was the tunic that did it, actually.
I mean, why dress something you’re going to eat?”
“Sensible answer,” Peri said, gaping in what Andie suspected was a draconic smile. “And after that, since each of the previous girls was here, alive, well and ready to verify our explanation, of course it became easier to get the victims to believe us.”
“I’m Thalia,” said a willowy girl with raven hair.
“I was the third and it was about at that point that we all began to wonder if it was going to be safe for us to go back home.”
“I did not think it would be,” Peri said, as Adam and Amaranth nodded. “After all, some Magician had set all of this up for a purpose. If the maidens began returning unharmed, suddenly the ravaging dragon becomes less of a threat. I was very much afraid that whoever did this would then feel compelled to ensure that the maidens died…one way or another.”
“Nothing easier,” Thalia agreed. “Slow poison in our last meal.”
“So they all decided to remain with us, with a few exceptions.” Peri tilted his head to the side. “The reli-
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gious woman, the child, and two girls. The religious woman took the child with her off into the mountains to become a hermit. Of the girls, neither was particularly happy with her family about being chosen as the sacrifice. Both asked to be taken across the Border, where I put them down near the town of their choice with enough valuables to be able to set themselves up in some fashion. We dragons have a knack for acquiring treasures, and when I go searching for lost books, I often find other gewgaws put in with them.” He shrugged. “I’ll admit, we’re like magpies. If it’s shiny and valuable, we’re inclined to pick it up.”
“If it’s shiny and valuable, I’ll always pick it up,”
Adam admitted cheerfully. “But since there’s Bookwyrm blood in me, I don’t mind giving it away afterward.”
Peri nodded. “And meanwhile I thought it best to see if I could find some means of determining who was behind all of this. Once we knew that, we could move to deal with him—and everyone else could go home.”
“When I was set up—I’m Myrtle—I knew by then that a Champion had been sent for,” said a plump little brown-haired thing with melting brown eyes. “I told them as much, and then we knew we had to come up with something to deal with the Champion, as well.”
“We actually thought for a while that this whole business was a plot for some person to come in and pretend he was the Champion, kill Adam and marry the Princess,” Thalia put in.
“That would have been a very logical idea to gain One Good Knight
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control over Acadia.” Peri nodded gravely, his tail twitching again.
“Well, we weren’t having any. We actually trapped the whole fortress and waited for a Champion to appear, but when he didn’t, Peri said he thought that there must be some other plan afoot.” Amaranth made a face, and smoothed down her tunic with one hand.
“I’m Cleo. By the time I got here, it looked as if any Champion that appeared was going to be real, so we needed to deal with someone who was going to have his heart in the right place, just all the wrong information.” This was a girl who could easily have been Andie’s sibling in looks; the only difference was that she was a little more feminine, and Andie still wore her oculars. “And Adam and Peri are so kind-hearted—they got us basically anything we needed or wanted. It’s really comfortable here. And since there are a lot of us, it’s not lonely.”
“Speak for yourself,” muttered a dark-haired, sul-try-eyed lass with an impressive figure. “I could stand a few men around here.” The others laughed, in a way that seemed to indicate that this was a joke of long-standing among them.
“Believe me, Mel, if I could find a way to convince some handsome young men with good muscles to move up here, I would,” Peri replied, in a half-joking tone. “Especially stonemasons. But they keep trying to kill me when I approach them.”
“Ha. You ought to take me with you, then, and let me do the approaching.” Mel stood up and walked a 246
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few steps in a way that made Gina chuckle and Andie blush.
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Peri replied.
Thalia continued. “The thing is, we figured that if there were a couple dozen former sacrifices standing between him and Adam, that would be enough to give even the densest Champion pause. Plus, if we were armed and looked like we were serious about defending our friends, a Champion would have to fight through a mob of girls to get to the dragons. So Adam and Peri have been finding us armor and weapons, and we’ve been trying to train with them to at least look convincing for a little bit. And that’s where we are. Although—” she looked curiously at Gina “—the one thing we didn’t count on was a lady Champion.”
“And that is where we all stand,” said Peri. “So.
Your story?”
CHAPTER TEN
“Well,” Gina began. “You know that a Champion was sent for. And the n
earest Chapter-House to Acadia is Glass Mountain, so that is where the people who were looking for a Champion came. As it happens, though, this Chapter-House is rather intimately associated with a Godmother. Godmother Elena to be precise.”
Peri held up his head alertly. “Ah. Now I begin to see the start of an explanation. Godmother Elena is clever enough to have several Kingdoms in her care.”
“Well, we sent out the Champion as requested,”
Gina continued. “And—he came back. He couldn’t get across the Border. Just couldn’t. No matter where he tried to cross, he found himself back on the other side.
He was angry at first, but then started to get alarmed and came straight back to the Chapter-House.
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and sent her consort, a virgin knight and a squire to try to cross, just to see if there was some peculiar twist to The Tradition that was requiring a particular kind of Champion. But no one could, and Godmother Elena discovered that it wasn’t a Traditional problem at all. Someone had spell-set the Border so that no man who had come to slay the dragon could cross it.”
“No man,” repeated Peri, then nodded. “Of course. No man. And you are no man. ”
Gina nodded. “Godmother says that this is probably a case of The Tradition working against the spell-caster. He probably intended to say ‘no one,’
and may even still think that he did. But when he set the spell he set it as ‘no man’—and so here I am.”
“And very happy we are to see you.” Peri nodded at her. “And that leaves us with only one unanswered question. Why were you being followed by a fox?”
“It isn’t the Godmother’s doing,” Gina assured him.
“Then it is someone else’s. Foxes do not spy upon humans for the fun of it.” Peri snapped his jaws together smartly. “So. I suggest that we ask the fox what precisely it is doing here.”
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