One Good Knight (30 page)

“Have you ever gone down to the henhouse and listened to the chickens?” she asked. It was not a rhetorical question.

“Uh, no, I don't believe I have,” Peri replied, looking nonplussed.

“You and Adam have the inherent ability to understand the language of the beasts,” she said. “And I don't. So I began to feel guilty after listening to the fox babble, wondering if the things I had been blithely eating were that—personable. I went down to the henhouse. And imagine my relief to discover that the chickens were basically saying nothing but ‘hey' with various inflections.”

It had been kind of funny as well as a relief. Each cluck translated directly as ‘hey.” “Hey, hey, hey,” one hen clucked as a greeting to another. “Hey! Hey, hey,” a mother hen cautioned her chicks to follow. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” called a third, alerting the whole yard to the hawk overhead. It might just as well have been the clucks she'd have heard before she drank the blood.

“In fact, I've been all over the area down there by the stream where we wash dishes and clothing, hiding until wild things come out and say something. The birds are all calling some variations on a few themes—calling their fledglings, saying they found something to eat, calling their mate, singing just because they can, and yelling at everything and everyone to get out of their space.” That had been another immense relief. Even the deer she had encountered had been not much brighter than the chickens, taking one look at her, shouting “RUN!” and following his own advice. This might actually have been intelligent behavior if there had been any other deer with him to warn.

She explained all this as Peri listened intently. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “you're right. I don't ever remember any other animal behaving the way this fox does. Except the Unicorns—”

“Which are inherently magical beings, like a Sphinx,” she pointed out.

“This makes a great deal of sense.” He nodded. “But our poor fox! What is going to happen to him?
When he goes to find a mate, all he'll find are dumb vixens that can't talk and are only interested in—”

She favored him with a look loaded with irony.

“—oh,” he said after a moment. “Forget I said anything.”

It was, in fact, comforting to know that The Tradition had provided them with this particular source of information. It meant that The Tradition was paying attention to them. Just as the girls were picking up weapons' skills preternaturally fast, as if each and every one of them was a natural with a blade or a bow, showed that it was happy with this Traditional path and was doing its best to keep them on it.

“So we must be doing the right things,” Peri said. “That's a good sign!”

“Yes, but just remember one thing, something Gina told me.” She paused. “The Tradition favors tragedy as much as it does happy endings.”

He nodded somberly.

There didn't seem to be anything more that either of them could say at that point. After staring at one another for several more long moments, it was Andie who broke the silence.

“Let's get back to the books.”

Either Gina was the most brilliant weaponry teacher in all of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, or The Tradition really liked this new version of the Ragged Company.

Now, Gina was good, quite good. And Adam was turning out to be extremely helpful as an assistant instructor. He had an excellent eye for where someone was making a mistake, and a knack for coaching them through doing it right without being able to demonstrate the actions himself.

But the likeliest explanation was that things were picking up momentum.

Most days, when she wasn't slinging stones well enough that she was adding to the larder, Andie was with Periapt, digging more deeply into his books to find every scrap that might give them a little more
Traditional edge. The latest was to give their group a name, the “Sworn Sisterhood,” and an oath.

Peri had very carefully worded that oath. Not once was there even a hint that the Sworn Sisterhood had pledged to fight until death, or anything equally extreme and unpleasant. That would just have been an invitation to The Tradition to kill some of them off, with noble dying speeches.

As Peri said succinctly, “Dying with a noble speech on your lips is still dead. And having a wonderful monument is not compensation for a too-early demise.”

Both Gina and Andie had been in fervent agreement with him. So the oath that the maidens took was defiant, but it wasn't invoking that particular aspect of The Tradition.

“We, the Sworn Sisterhood, do solemnly vow to take back Acadia from those who are responsible for the scourge of the dragon and the tempests. We will fight them with our hands and our weapons. We will fight them with the power of our conviction. We will face the enemy without fear. We will take the enemy down and bring the enemy to justice and there is nothing that can stand in our way.”

All very powerful and empowering and not one word of defeat. The “enemy” was also cleverly defined as “those who are responsible for the scourge of the dragon and the tempests” so that The Tradition could not twist this around until the maidens were locked into being the “saviors” of Acadia
forever. It felt like a good, tight oath, to Andie anyway, and when they had all sworn it, she thought she “felt” something respond—although not being a Magician, she couldn't be sure.

The Sworn Sisterhood now looked very good in their drills. Andie was used to watching her Guard drilling, and the girls compared favorably with those seasoned soldiers. Although there was no telling what they would do when they actually got into combat.

With Peri gone for the afternoon, off to see their trading partners for more supplies, Andie was somewhat at loose ends.

And oddly lonely.

She wandered off to watch the other girls practicing one-on-one with Gina's oversight. They wore their full armor now, although they did not use real swords, only weighted wooden ones. They didn't use shields, either, somewhat to Andie's surprise. Instead, the hand that would ordinarily have held a shield held a knife nearly long enough to be called a sword itself.

As she sat there, her feeling of loneliness increased. And this was strange, because she had always been solitary, and did not usually feel lonely when alone. But she watched Gina with Adam and—

—and she realized that she wasn't happy being solitary anymore.

But the person she was happiest with wasn't a person.

It was Periapt.

Being with him was like being with the perfect companion. He was clever. He was kind, at least to her—though he had been scathing with the fox, and once or twice with Cleo, whom he regarded as being rather too full of herself. They found the same kinds of things funny, they enjoyed the same sorts of books, and it was getting so that they could finish each other's sentences. She was never happier than when she was curled up with him, having a lively discussion over some obscure point in a book.

In fact, simply being with him made her happy—happy in a way that no human male had ever made her feel. Maybe it was simply that he didn't take long, doubtful glances at her oculars, or act polite while all the time he was actually bored.

That realization made her feel very odd indeed. And she wasn't entirely sure what to make of it.

While she was thinking about this, Adam oozed up the hill as only a dragon could, and arranged himself on the hillside near her. “You watched your Guard practice, right?” he asked. “How do my girls compare?”

He was calling them “my girls,” and she had to smile at that. “The truth is that I'm no expert, nothing like,” she demurred. “I mean, they look like they know what they're doing but—but I'm used to people who use shields as well as swords.”

“Well, Gina thought this would be a much better style for them, and I have to agree,” he said, his eyes on the two combatants on the trampled grass in the
center. “The problem with a shield is that it's heavy, and the longer fighting goes on, the heavier it seems to get. People who have never fought before either forget to bring it up in time, or are so busy hiding behind it that they forget they're supposed to be fighting. That long dagger can do almost as much as a shield can, yet it's not as heavy, and you can't hide behind it. You can only attack and continue attacking, keeping your opponent off balance as much as possible.”

She nodded, now beginning to see the shape of Gina's tactics.

“Now that, combined with the fact that once the girls close in and it is going to be clear that they
are
girls, should give your Guards a bit of hesitation. And that, Princess, is where you come in.” He leveled a shrewd gaze at her. “When they hesitate, you show yourself. One way or another, it's going to startle them. If they think you're dead and a spirit, good. They'll wonder why you're on the Sisterhood's side. If they think you're alive they're going to get a shock that you're on the Sisterhood's side.”

“That's—that's really clever,” she said.

He smiled. She could read all the dragons' expressions now, even the subtle ones. Like smiling.

“She's a Champion, but she's also a wise and thoughtful Champion. Me, I'm a kind of brute. You point me in the direction you want me to go, and I generally manage to clear a path for you.”

She chuckled. “You don't give yourself enough credit.”

He arched his neck, and his ruby-crystal eyes sparkled. “I do what I can. It's hard to keep up with someone like Gina, though my clan would probably have my hide for comparing myself to a mere human. But they ought to pay more attention to their own legends.”

“Their own legends?” Now her curiosity was piqued. “What legends?”

“The legend of the first Bookwyrm. Didn't Peri tell you?” When she shook her head he cocked his. “I suppose he didn't think it was important. Well, it goes like this.

“There once was a Wizard who loved books more than anything. He had an enormous library, and as you might expect, he spent most of his time in it. So as a consequence he wasn't paying nearly as much attention as he should have been to the goings-on in his Kingdom. An army invaded and overthrew the King, and since this happened to be a barbarian horde that didn't have a lot of use for books or Wizards, they decided to finish the job by killing the Wizard and burning his books. He was caught entirely unaware, couldn't muster a lot of the usual defenses, and his men were pretty quickly cut down. So he did something your average powerful Wizard really shouldn't do unless the situation is entirely desperate and out of control. He cast a powerful and very open-ended spell, to transform himself into something unspecified that had the power to protect the books and to transport them to safety.”

“He turned into a dragon?” she hazarded.

Adam nodded. “The first Bookwyrm. He managed to scare off the barbarians temporarily—just long enough for him to carry all the books away before they got their courage back. If the legend is true, he probably took them a short distance to get them all out, then found a more secure lair and moved them from the first spot at his leisure. But at any rate, that supposedly is why Bookwyrms like company in general, enjoy being with humans and hoard books.”

At that moment he raised his head on his long neck and stared off into the distance. “And here comes Peri at last. I hope he managed to negotiate us something other than goat this time. I'm so tired of goat at this point that I'd choke down the oldest cow in Acadia.”

Andie's heart leapt at the sight of the dark dot winging its way toward them.

 

“What are you thinking?” Peri asked curiously, breaking into her reverie.

Andie shook her head and stopped gazing into space. “A lot of things,” she temporized, “but—” In desperation, because she did not want to even begin to talk about things she didn't understand herself yet, she brought up the one that was the most likely to intrigue him. “I—I'm trying to think of what I'm going to do if we really do have to depose Mo—”

—and now she couldn't bring herself to say the word “Mother.”

Peri rescued her. “Queen Cassiopeia? I was under the impression that you were just going to have yourself crowned Queen. It's the usual thing.” As usual she was in the “library,” curled up with her back against his stomach, sitting on his folded legs. It was very comforting to be there.

The thing was, it was also beginning to feel a great deal like an embrace.

Not that she'd had a lot of experience with embraces. Once in a while as a child she had gotten a hug from someone, though not for a long while now. But—

This definitely felt like an embrace. It felt wonderful, in fact.

Was that wrong?

“Well…” she began.

“If you were going to entertain other ideas, however,” he said, while she was still hesitating, “there is something I think you really ought to try for your country. No King, no Queen.”

That so startled her that she lost track of the slightly disturbing thoughts she'd been having about Peri, and looked at him with both eyebrows raised. “How can you have a Kingdom with no King?” she asked.

“Well, it wouldn't be a Kingdom anymore. Just a country. And what you would do is find several people who are good leaders, then have the people of Acadia vote on which one they want.” His eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. “It wouldn't work in a big
Kingdom, because it would take too long to collect the votes, but Acadia is small enough you could do it.”

“That,” she said flatly, “is insane.”

He looked terribly crestfallen. “But—there are people on the island of—”

“That's an island.” She knew where he was talking about now, and the notion was quite, quite mad. “This is not only a Kingdom, it's one where it is hard to get to places outside of Ethanos. You can
fly.
It took Gina and me days to get to a village. Just how long do you think this—vote collection should go on? And how would people off in the hinterlands find out about these men? They can't afford to leave their homes just to spend a day or two listening to speeches. Should the candidates tour the countryside? That could take a year at least, and maybe longer. And it's dangerous!” She began to warm to her subject. “Unless you propose to leave the Wyrding Others out of the voting, which I do not advise, that means your candidates will have to come in here, the Wyrding Lands. Oh, that would be charming, for one or more of them to get eaten by a Chimera or carried off by a Sphinx!”

“But—” Peri said weakly.

“And seriously—aside from all of that—how can you
know
these people would be fit to rule? It could easily devolve to the best liar winning.” She thought she had him there, but evidently that was the one argument he had a counter for.

“Rule-by-inheritance is hardly better,” he said scornfully. “Look where it got you! The Queen is
either the puppet of her Mage, or, far more likely, his co-conspirator in sending the country to ruin. She's fallen so far that she had no compunction about sending you to your death! And—”

She felt her face crumple, and tears form at the corners of her eyes.

He stopped in mid-sentence and stared. “Oh—oh my goodness, Andie—Andromeda, I'm sorry, please don't—”

She felt her stomach knot up and her throat close. All this time, and she had been trying so hard to keep it all under control. Because crying about it wasn't going to change anything.

“I didn't mean to offend you or upset you—I think you'd make a lovely Queen, really I do, the best possible—” He was babbling.

She was finding it hard to breathe. Her eyes burned and her throat and chest ached.

“And just because the Queen doesn't care about you, that doesn't mean that you aren't a wonderful, wonderful per—”

The first sob escaped her. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to hold the next one in, but it was too strong for her, and the tears began, the strangled sobs slithering out of her control and shaking her body.

She felt him shifting himself under her and around her, rearranging himself, until she was being held in a real embrace. She opened blurring eyes to find that he had tucked her between his forelegs with his neck curled around her.

“Shhh—” he said, as she closed her eyes and threw her arms around his warm, soft, slippery neck. “I know, I know. It's all horrible. Just go ahead and cry, Andie. Go ahead and let it out. I think you've been holding it in too long.”

She couldn't have stopped the flood now if she'd wanted to, and she really didn't want to. He was right. She'd been holding it in too long. She sobbed against his neck, eyes streaming and burning, throat raw and sore, chest aching. She babbled between the sobs, nothing really coherent, but just—

She'd wanted a mother. She'd wanted to make Cassiopeia proud of her so that she'd
be
that mother. Show her that even if her daughter wasn't like
her,
she was still worth something. Was useful. Could stand at the Queen's side and—