Andie could only stare at him, perplexed. “Ask it how? Foxes don’t speak—”
“Of course they do,” Peri replied a little impatiently. “They speak Fox. The only difficulty is that humans don’t understand Fox. Unless, of course, they’ve drunk dragon’s blood.”
“Drunk—” Andie couldn’t help herself. Her first and unconsidered reaction was “Ew.”
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“Do you want to be able to interrogate this fox, or are you going to take our word for what he says?”
Peri asked reasonably, his tail curling back and forth.
Much as Andie was revolted by the idea, she also, on consideration, didn’t want to hear things at second hand….
“Well, I’ve downed worse things than a little blood,” Gina said with a shrug. “And since we seem to have a ready source for it at hand—”
“I’m told it’s rather nasty,” Peri said apologetically.
“It cannot possibly be worse than my aunt’s medicinal tea,” Gina said, shuddering.
It was Periapt who, in the end, provided two small wineglasses with a few drops in the bottom of a maroon liquid the consistency of thick soup. “It’s the blood of a Bookwyrm,” Peri said helpfully.
“That makes it much more potent for Understanding than ordinary dragon’s blood. That’s why you only need a taste.” Gina and Andie looked at each other with some misgiving, but at that point, Andie suspected, neither of them was going to back out. She certainly wasn’t going to balk unless Gina did, and she suspected that Gina was not going to, because she felt she had to live up to being a Champion. So the two of them toasted one another and—
And it was horrible.
Andie had no idea what that medicinal tea tasted like, but at the moment, as the liquid choked her throat and made her tongue want to leap out of her 250
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mouth in disgust, she would happily have drunk a gal-lon of the stuff to get the taste of this out of her mouth.
One of the girls had brought pitchers of water fla-vored with mint, and when she had managed to force the wretched stuff down her throat, Andie snatched up the pitcher and tried to wash the vile taste out.
“Rinse and spit,” Peri suggested in a kindly tone.
“I’m told that works.”
It wasn’t very ladylike, but at this moment, being ladylike was the furthest thing from her mind. And rinsing and spitting out the contaminated water repeatedly did seem to help. What helped even more was when another of the girls brought her a bunch of mint and a bunch of parsley to chew.
“Now what?” Andie asked.
“Now,” said Adam cheerfully, “I make it quite clear to this little beast what he has to lose if he refuses to answer us.” And with that, Adamant picked up the wooden crate, grabbed the beast by the tail and popped the fox into his mouth. But he didn’t entirely close his mouth. The fox stared helplessly out through the “bars” of the dragon’s bared fangs.
On the one hand it was comical. The dragon looked as if he were grinning. Actually, he probably was. This looked like a situation that perfectly suited Adam’s sense of humor. On the other hand, the fox was terrified, and Andie was starting to feel sorry for it.
“You’d better answer our questions,” Periapt said with perfect calm. “He can swallow at any time.”
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out. “I was just sent to make sure the dragon got the Princess!” the fox said hysterically, his nose shoved between two of the teeth. “I mean, if the dragon doesn’t get the Princess, he’s going to ravage the countryside! Right? We can’t have the dragon ravaging the countryside? Right?”
“Well, the dragon has the Princess,” Periapt said reasonably. “Your orders were only that the dragon should ‘have’ the Princess, correct? You were not told to make sure the dragon ate the Princess? I want to be quite clear on how your orders were phrased.”
“An ah ih im ou eh?” asked Adam, which Andie interpreted as “Can I spit him out yet?”
“Not quite,” Peri said, and repeated his question to the fox. “Your orders were that the dragon should
‘get’ the Princess, and not ‘eat’ the Princess, correct?”
“Yes!” the fox yelped. “The word was get!
Definitely! Positively! Not eat! ”
Adamant spit out the fox. “Bleah,” he said. “Next time I do something like that, wash the prisoner first. What were you rolling in?” he asked the fox.
“Just some dead leaves,” the fox said absently, staring up at the dragons. But it didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere. “Nobody told me about a Champion,”
he said doubtfully. “I thought it was just some random would-be hero. Not a Champion. I can see you are a real Champion, female human—only a real Champion would not have slain these dragons without seeing if there was something more going on here. I don’t like this. Something about this doesn’t seem right.”
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“Well, the things you’ve been overhearing should have made that obvious,” Gina said with irritation. “I thought foxes were supposed to be intelligent.”
“Clever and cunning, not intelligent,” the fox corrected absently. “Not the same thing at all.”
It was carefully looking all of them over. “I don’t like this. Most of the geas-spell on me is in force because this is all supposed to be—Traditional.
Dragon ravages countryside, dragon eats virgin, dragon stops ravaging countryside until it’s time for the next virgin delivery. Only…only you didn’t eat the virgins, you don’t want to ravage the countryside, and I can feel the geas breaking down. This is not Traditional.”
“You can say that again,” muttered Gina.
“This is not Traditional,” the fox repeated obediently. Gina rolled her eyes.
“I think we had all better put our heads together over this,” Andie put in.
“Over dinner, please?” Adam pleaded. “Or…after dinner?”
“After dinner,” Amaranth said pointedly. “You two have terrible table manners.”
Considering that the dragons ate entire sheep at a gulp…
It turned out that they had an arrangement with the Centaur hunters and Cyclopsean herdsmen.
When Adam was not being compelled to “ravage”
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with some of the “baubles” they had collected. So they went out to collect (and eat in private) what they had bought, while the maidens—Gina and Andie now counted as part of their company—got together their own dinner. The fox trailed along, looking hopefully at the preparations.
A great deal of what they were eating was gathered or grown there. The guess about Amaranth being a hardworking lass was true. She had been a dairymaid, and had a flock of goats to provide milk, which mostly went into cheese. Andie chose to believe that the dragons had bought the goats rather than stealing them.
The girls had a good vegetable garden, a flock of hens, several beehives, the dragons brought back flour and other things they could not grow or raise themselves, and there was much they could collect from the forest in the valley below. Nuts, berries, wild olives. Cress and other edible greens and herbs.
Mushrooms. They had discovered the same thing that Gina and Andie had about mushrooms, and a castle full of virgin girls was to Unicorns what a beehive was to a bear. They wouldn’t come near the dragons, but they were only too thrilled to meet the girls in the forest and purify their mushrooms in return for being petted and being fussed over. But they kept the secret of the girl, and the dragon from all other Unicorns in the forest. Reluctantly, true, but they were afraid of the dragon.
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the girls had improvised a fairly good one in what had once been a storage room. Having n
o source of water at hand meant a lot of hauling for the cooking and the cleaning, however. Especially the cleaning.
Since Andie was no use at all in the kitchen, she was delegated to haul water.
And this was certainly a first. It wasn’t long before her arms were trembling with fatigue and aching worse than she ever remembered. Gina had taken her bow and gone hunting, and come back with rabbits that she proceeded to clean and skin out of sight of the others. So that was the Champion’s contribution to the meal. Andie was glad when they told her she had fetched enough water for the moment and she could go and sit down again.
Preparing a meal, she was just learning, was a lot of hard work. Even when it didn’t involve much “cooking.”
After much discussion of portions, the designated cooks—who were, Andie was told, the ones who could reliably be trusted not to burn anything—decided on a kind of stew as the way to stretch the meat the furthest. The fox finally got his hoped-for handout, when Gina presented him with the pile of entrails, heads and feet. Shortly afterward, there was a wet spot on the stone and a round-bellied fox dozing happily beside the kitchen fire.
One girl made flatbread, another cleaned and sliced greens, cucumbers and mushrooms, and a third made dressing of olive oil, vinegar and herbs. So One Good Knight
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while they waited they had greens and mushrooms tossed in the dressing with crumbled goat cheese on top to eat on the folded-up flatbread.
There was more flatbread to sop up the juices of the stewed rabbit and vegetables, and the dragons appeared, as they were finishing the meal, with yet more flatbread and honey. By this time Gina had unbent enough to take off her armor and put on one of the tunics that all the girls seemed to wear. She wouldn’t wear a longer gown, though. She looked uncommonly leggy and rangy without the bulk of the armor and the padding underneath it.
“Time for a council of war!” Adam called cheerfully as he landed. Peri rolled his eyes, but made no comment.
Once again they all gathered in the courtyard, though as the sun set, the air was quickly growing cooler, and the girls had all brought woolen mantles with them. Andie had the cloak she had gotten in the village—it seemed a lifetime ago—and Gina had the cloak that went over her armor.
“Well,” Peri said, once they had all settled in.
“The list of things that we know is sadly short and most of them come with questions. We know that someone put a geas-spell on Adam to make him come here and become a villainous monster. But we don’t know who, and we don’t know why.”
“What about some random evil Magician?”
Amaranth asked. “Don’t they just do that—come in and cause misery just for the sake of it?”
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“Actually, no,” both Peri and Andie said at the same time. They looked at one another, and Andie laughed.
She gestured to him. “You’re the lore-scholar.”
“Evil Magicians are like any other sort,” Peri explained. “It costs them in terms of power to be able to work magic, so they aren’t inclined to spend it just for the sake of spending it. They’re also as impelled by The Tradition as the rest of us are. The Tradition requires that they have reasons for everything they do.”
“And,” Andie added thoughtfully, “it’s not as if they’re insane. At least most of them aren’t. People who are not mad always have reasons for what they do.”
“And that’s the problem here in a nutshell,” Peri said, putting his head down on his fore-claws with a sigh. “So far, no reason for this has come to light. No one has come forward to say, ‘Make me King or I’ll see to it that the dragon turns this land into a black-ened cinder.’ No one has demanded gold to make the dragon go away. No one has come forward to slay the dragon except one genuine Champion. When the Princess was offered up, that would have been the time to do so, as well. The Tradition would have put all of its force behind it, even if the motives were evil. Slay the dragon, rescue the Princess, wed the Princess, rule the Kingdom. All very Traditional.”
Andie brooded over that. “The thing is,” she said slowly, “no one with a motive has turned up. In fact, if it weren’t for the geas on you, Adam, and the magic spell keeping Champions out of the country, you One Good Knight
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would just be the Traditional, mindless, ravening monster that is supposed to awaken a hero for the people.” Solon might have rigged the lottery, but he couldn’t have summoned the dragon. All he’d done was take advantage of the situation. Plus, if he’d wanted the Kingdom, all he would have had to do was arrange to marry Andie.
“No heroes,” said Adam. “And though my brother might disagree from time to time, I’m not entirely mindless.”
“That’s another thing. Why the spell?” asked Gina. “It doesn’t even seem to have a purpose.
Unless the purpose is for Adam to lay waste to the country until it can fall to the first outside force that crosses the Border.”
Andie snorted. “Nobody wants Acadia,” she pointed out. “Look at us! We’re not particularly fertile, we have no wealth. All we have is a convenient port that a lot of traders can and do bypass. We’re too small even to have a standing army. So if anyone really wanted to invade us, it wouldn’t exactly be difficult.”
The courtyard was entirely in shadow now, and the last of the sun was sinking behind the mountains. The cloudless sky overhead had turned to a soft, dark blue; only in the west did some deep crimson light linger. And in the farthest east, the first stars had begun to emerge.
“And I am not exactly ravaging the countryside, either,” Adam said, raising his head. “We’ve been buying our meals, thank you. What’s more, we never 258
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did all that much ‘ravaging’ in the first place. People were still coming to market days—we watched them. People were still raising crops, building things, making things.”
“He has a point,” Peri sighed. “Begging your pardon, maidens, but sacrificing one virgin girl a week does not ruin an economy.”
“Might even improve it in some areas,” Adam observed dispassionately. “Anti-lottery charms, fireproof roofs, dragon-repellent…”
Both Peri and Andie leveled glares at him, which he probably didn’t see.
“And the Queen doesn’t seem to be doing much, either, not even when her own daughter was selected,” one of the girls put in.
The fox trotted in and joined them at that moment, perhaps because he wanted company, perhaps because he was hoping for a snack, perhaps just because the fire had died out in the kitchen and company was better than cooling stone. He sat down with his tail wrapped neatly around his forepaws and listened to the conversation with all the interest of an observer at a sporting event.
Andie thought with guilt of the Queen’s reaction to her selection. Cassiopeia had gone into immediate mourning, secluding herself, dressing in black….
She wished there was some way she could let the Queen know that she was all right. It didn’t seem right that her mother should be left to grieve over something that hadn’t actually happened.
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Granted, probably every one of the other girls here felt the same, but still…
“My mother was absolutely stricken,” she said quietly.
“Stricken is one thing, but wouldn’t you have thought she’d actually do something?” asked one of the other girls. Thalia. “She is the Queen after all. Couldn’t she have mustered up an army or something?”
“Such as? She’d sent for a Champion,” Myrtle reminded them.
“Well, something. That adviser of hers is supposed to be so clever, you would be more than clever enough to find a way to save the Princess.” Thalia looked unconvinced. “Why didn’t he try to find a Wizard or a Sorceress? A powerful one. There are Wizards that can defeat dragons. Why didn’t he look for a Godmother?
Why didn’t he realize there was a spell on the Border?”
&nbs
p; “Because,” Andie said with a touch of scorn, “Solon might have a reputation for cleverness, but quite frankly, I think he’s too timid to ever go outside the Palace walls. Most of the powerful Magicians that I have ever heard of want you to come to them in person to prove your sincerity. I’ve never even seen Solon go down to the marketplace himself—he always sends a servant instead. As for mustering an army—” And there she had to pause because she couldn’t think of any good reason why her mother had not put at least a small army together to hunt the dragon. After all, if a single Champion was supposed to be able to beat it, why shouldn’t several hundred men?
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“Oh, he’s not such a weak-necked creature when there’s no one around to see him,” the fox put in casually. “And he does go outside the Palace walls, a great deal in fact. He’s the one that sent me, after all.
There I was, minding my own business, and the next thing I know, I’m living in a cage in his rooms. I don’t even remember how he caught me. And suddenly I’m stuck obeying his commands, he’s promoted me to Familiar and stuffed all sorts of things in my head no self-respecting fox really needs to know.” But the fox seemed crestfallen, rather than proud. “Then, as if I’m just something to be used and thrown away, he sends me out chasing you to be sure you get into the dragon’s claws. He’s probably using that stupid toad now. The humiliation! Passed over for a toad!”
“Wait—” Andie stared at the fox in astonishment.
“Are you saying that Solon is a Magician?”
“A good one, if I’m any judge,” the fox replied.
Then he added, “But then again, you know, he’s the only one I’ve ever seen, so I’m not sure I’m that good a judge. Still, he does do quite a bit. He can keep track of people and know where they are, for one thing. He can send birds and animals to find things out for him.
He can turn some things into other things.”
“The Queen’s Adviser is a Magician. And no one knows.” Periapt stared off into the darkness. “You know,” he said after a long pause, “Traditionally when one’s Adviser is a secret Mage, he’s generally a bad one, and generally intent on stealing your throne.”
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