One Good Knight (17 page)

 

George was just as silent in the morning, though he did at least have a couple of pleasant words to say about the lentil porridge left cooking in the coals overnight. And at least he helped her with her mule's saddle and harness, utterly foreign objects to her that she had fumbled off the poor beast anyhow last night. The trouble was, he was the most difficult person to read. If eyes were the windows to the soul, his had the shutters closed and barred where she was concerned.

The one thing that
was
clear, however, was that this morning he was uncertain about something. Finally, when they had been riding for half the morning, as he grew visibly more restless, he came out with it.

“I have a concern,” he said. “I thought when I took on this Quest on, I would easily find the dragon's den. I
thought
it would be near where the girls were being sacrificed. I mean, that only makes sense, doesn't it?”

She nodded vaguely. A lifetime of reading had not given her much insight into picking the proper site for maiden sacrifice.

“When I realized the dragon
didn't
den anywhere nearby, then I thought I would be able to just ask people where to find it,” he continued, sounding aggrieved. “But I hadn't counted on all this—this—this wilderness!” The last words came out fraught with frustration. “Where are the villages? Where are the people?”

“Um—” she said hesitantly. “For one thing, this is very poor farming country. The soil is thin, and it doesn't support a lot of people. For another, they're there. At least, they're supposed to be there. They just probably won't let you see them. Not the inhabitants, and not their villages.”

Now he turned to scowl at her, and she hastened to add, “Because they aren't human.”

She had been a little afraid he wouldn't believe her, but to her relief, the scowl eased. “Elvenkind? Fay?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Centaurs, Satyrs, Fauns, Nymphs mixed about half and half with humans. Those are the friendly ones, that live in small villages with humans. There's others. Harpies and Sphinxes. Minotaurs. The Cyclopses. No one ever sees those, or at least, when they do, the people who encounter them generally don't survive. But there aren't a lot of the bad ones, and they know better than to let themselves be seen, because there would be hunts for them again. They were nearly wiped out in the Wyrding Wars, and they don't want to take that chance again.”

Now he looked intrigued. “But why won't we see them? The friendly ones, I mean.”

She shrugged. “Just because they're comfortable with
certain
humans doesn't mean they've lost their suspicions about
most
humans. The Wyrding Wars didn't end all that long ago, and the hunters weren't always very careful about what they killed. My grandfather's time, I think, was the last of the Wars. The Wyrding Others don't forget things like that quickly.”

They might show themselves to a single young woman alone, but they aren't going to show themselves to a foreign knight, and doubly not a dragon-hunter,
she added to herself. Because the dragon, after all, was a creature that had more in common with the Wyrding Others than one might think.

“Anyway, we signed a peace, and part of that peace was that some of Acadia was to be given over to the Wyrding Others and those humans who chose to be with them. This is it.” It was her turn to indicate the land around them with a sweep of her arm. “They're shepherds for the most part, rather than farmers, so this land suits them.”

He sighed. “Then I don't know how—” He paused.

Because his horse had stopped, and it was staring at something in the middle of the road.

The something looked rather like an odd-shaped plate; it stood out in stark contrast to the path, because it was dark and quite shiny. It seemed to be translucent, and the same general color as a dark smoky-quartz crystal.

George dismounted and walked over to stand above it, looking down at it. He didn't move to pick it up, which she thought was odd.

“What is that?” she asked.

“A dragon-scale,” he replied. “And the question is, what is it doing here, now, at this moment?”

She licked her lips. “The Tradition does tend to put wild coincidences in your path,” she suggested.

He shook his head. “This is more than a coincidence.” He looked up at the leafy canopy overhead. “To lose a scale and have it land right here, I would have had to hit the beast hard enough to have damaged it, and I happen to know I did nothing of the sort. It would take a catapult to crack a scale the size of this one. Furthermore, the dragon would have had to be flying directly above this path to have it land here, and that's not a coincidence, that's a miracle.”

“So?” she prompted.

“So this has to have been planted here for us to find.” Now he turned and looked at her, as if expecting her to come up with some answers. “You're the guide—”

Oh dear.
“The first thing that springs to mind,” she said, stalling for time while she thought, “is that the Centaurs or the Nymphs are just as unhappy about the dragon being here as we are. Maybe it ate one of them—”

“It's more likely to have eaten a herd or flock. Did you say that these Centaurs are shepherds?” Now he
knelt down beside the scale to examine it more closely. “I don't see any hoofprints or footprints nearby, but it could have been tossed here from farther away.”

“It's the sort of clue one of them might give us.” She felt a bit more cheerful at that thought. “To show us we're on the right road without having to show themselves.”

“Or to distract us from the right road,” he countered. “If they're working with the dragon, this could be to lead us away from the beast, or into a trap.”

He stood up. She blinked at him, because that hadn't even occurred to her. He was right, of course, but from what she knew of most of the Wyrding Others, she wouldn't have thought they would be that duplicitous. “Are you always so suspicious?”

“My father taught me that a Champion can never let his guard down because The Tradition likes tragedy as much as happy endings,” he replied. “He said there are two kinds of Champions—the ones who think ahead, and the ones who are dead.”

She swallowed, but felt oddly comforted. At least Glass Mountain hadn't sent someone who was reckless and stupid!

“What this means to us is that someone wants us to go in this direction,” he continued, looking up the path through the tunnel of ancient, gnarled trees. “Whoever it is could be a friend or a foe, and we can't know which until we end up wherever the trail is taking us. But we
are
going in the same direction
that we saw the dragon flying, and I really don't care how I get to the dragon so long as I do so.” He looked back at her.

The visor was up on his helm, but she still couldn't read whatever expression was on his face.

“A trap you are prepared for isn't a trap anymore. And the worst thing that can happen out of following a string of clues is that we are led away from the dragon.”

“What will you do if that happens?” she asked quietly.

One corner of his mouth twitched. “Then I do what I should have done in the first place. I find a Witch or a Hedge-Wizard and get him or her to give me a charm that will show me where the dragon is.” He shook his head. “No matter what, we don't lose much by following our unknown ‘benefactor,' and we might gain a lot, even if he doesn't intend it that way. Hindsight, and all that, but I really did think that the dragon's lair would be where the sacrifices were, and that the beast would stand and fight. I guess that just proves I didn't think enough and I need to start following Father's advice better. I'm just glad this little wake-up came at a time when we were not in danger.”

And with that altogether astonishing statement, he got back on his horse and started off again.

“Aren't you going to take the scale?” she called to him, as the mule eyed the scale and sidled around it.

He shook his head. “Magic can work for or against
us,” he pointed out. “Maybe the only reason for dropping that scale was to leave something we would be sure to pick up—and from that moment on, the dragon or its allies would have a way to track
us
or affect
us.
No, we'll leave it there. If nothing else, the one leaving the clues for us can go pick it up and leave it farther along the trail to show us where to go.”

He certainly does think ahead,
she reflected somberly.
None of that would have occurred to me.

“Don't feel too badly if none of this occurred to you,” he continued, in an uncanny echo of her thoughts. “You've been a sheltered Princess all your life—you've never been required to be this suspicious.” He looked back over his shoulder and the corner of his mouth twitched again. “I've been trained by some of the best, Princess. And this is much more than just my job. It is, when all is said and done, my life.”

And on that somber note, they rode on, under the deepening gloom of the trees.

 

That night when they camped, he surprised her by being very talkative indeed. But he wasn't simply chatting; he interrogated her thoroughly on all the Wyrding Others that she had ever heard or read of, their strengths and weaknesses, their general attitude toward humankind. More than pleased by this turn, since it meant he was treating her as something other than a burden or a Traditional trap, she expounded on the inhabitants of this quarter on as
great a length as he asked for. At least now all her reading was paying off!

When he finally ran out of questions, he stared into the fire with a look of intense concentration on his face. Finally he looked up at her, raised an eyebrow and asked, “And how likely do you think is it that
any
of these creatures are allies of the dragon?”

“Honestly—not very,” she replied. “There hasn't been a dragon in Acadia for—” she shook her head “—for so long that the writings I found were a matter of legend rather than record. The Wyrding Others have long memories, but not that long. A dragon wouldn't be seen as another ally, but as an interloper.”

“Not even the bad ones?” he asked.

“Not even the bad ones. In fact,
especially
not the bad ones.” She ticked off the reasons on her fingers. “The dragon will draw attention to the Wyrding Lands and might start the Wars again. At the very least it's brought in a Champion. The dragon is competition for the available food—I cannot even remotely imagine that a beast that large can subsist on a single girl once a week, it
has
to be eating more. The dragon is competition for available hiding places. And lastly, the bad Wyrding Others are not exactly cooperative by nature. The closest you can get to that is the Cyclopses, and they only cooperate with each other. The rest are as ready to fight other bad Others as they are to prey on the good ones or the humans.”

He nodded.

“Now, I have been told that there are a few self-appointed spokespersons among the Wyrding Others who would take the tactic of trying to protect
anything
that might be called Wyrding, but the moment the dragon helped itself to someone's sheep, the rest would quickly turn their backs on that idea,” she said, thinking of the earnest little man who came to Ethanos and stood in the marketplace for weeks, lecturing anyone who would listen on the topic of “The Wyrding Others Are Your Friends.” He usually lost his audience right about the time he got to the Kyryxes, a nasty little blood-sucking insect the size of a bird. Most people might not know much about Wyrding Others, but everyone had either a friend or a relative who had encountered a swarm of Kyryxes, if they hadn't themselves. There wasn't much good to say about Kyryxes, except that they didn't discriminate in who or what they attacked, so they were as likely to fell a Chimera as a Centaur or a human.

More than one hero of the Wars had turned the tide by leading a swarm of the wretched creatures into the enemy's side of a battle.

“Hmm.” He brooded into the fire some more. “I hadn't realized that there was that much competition for resources here. It seems so open and unclaimed.”

“Acadia is not a wealthy land,” she pointed out. “We don't have a lot of rich farmland. It takes a great deal of acreage and careful management to support sheep and goats, when the soil is as poor as this is.
And—” she drew ruthlessly on Sakretes's book
On the Natural Historie of Greate Beastes
“—a large predator like a Chimera needs a huge territory. They have to hunt a great deal just to keep fed.”

“That may be why the woods are so quiet,” he said, as if he was thinking aloud. “The game is wary, and possibly over-hunted.” He nodded with resolution. “Princess, I owe you an apology. I thought you were worthless, and I find instead you are a fund of knowledge. As long as we can keep The Tradition from mucking about with our lives, I believe you will be a valuable companion.”

Somewhat to her discomfiture, she found herself blushing hotly. “I've always been one for learning things,” she said awkwardly. “I'm just glad you're finding it useful.”

“Does your learning extend to the natural world around us?” he asked. “Such as what things might be poisonous and what might be edible?”

“Poisonous—yes,” she admitted, thinking about the frantic research she had done hoping to find some substance that would poison the dragon. “Edible, I am afraid not.”

“Ah well. One cannot have everything,” he said philosophically. “A Champion's education generally runs to just enough about the natural world to allow him to hunt and feed himself, and about the people and creatures he will meet to avoid offending anything or getting himself too deeply in trouble.”