One Good Knight (22 page)

“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
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
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
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, sultry-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
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?”

“Well,” Gina began. “You know that a Champion was sent for. And the nearest 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. Godmother Elena herself looked into the situation,
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.”

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.”

“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
mouth in disgust, she would happily have drunk a gallon of the stuff to get the taste of
this
out of her mouth.

One of the girls had brought pitchers of water flavored 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.”

Every hair on the poor fox was standing straight
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.”

“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” the countryside, he and Peri bought their dinners
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.

The fortress's original kitchen was in ruins, but
the girls had improvised a fairly good one in what had once been a storage room. Having no 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
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?”

“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 blackened 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
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.