“That’s almost as bad asnothing wrong with him,” Isobelle observed. “Oh, Gwen. I’m not Hilde, not swept up in the romance of finding a perfect match. I know nobody gets a fairy-tale ending. But are we really meant to...” She trailed off, for what else was there to say?
Gwen was doing everything she could to save her from the Sir Ralphs of the world, who’d treat her like a prize without a voice of her own. To save her even from the Orsons, who would, like Theo, bekind.
Gwen was putting everything on the line to protect Isobelle from those fates, so she could write her own happy ending one day—whatever it might be.
But what would become of Gwen’s ending?
Before Isobelle could begin to answer that question, a ripple went through the crowd. Like flowers toward the sun, everybody turned toward an old man who was rising to take his place by the fire. He was ancient, with the sort of wiry build that looked like he could live forever, and a face made craggy by wrinkles.
He walked all the way up to the fire, studying it in silence as his audience watched. It was only when he turned to make his way back that Isobelle saw one side of his face was a mass of scars.
“The thing about your stories up at the castle,” Gwen whispered in Isobelle’s ear, setting her skin prickling, “is that they’re all about knights fighting the big dragons. The ones who were foolish enough—or enormous enough—to attack the castles. Our stories are about what happened after. Who had to deal with the rest of dragonkind in the generations that followed.”
Her words were enough to yank Isobelle out of her contemplation of the sensitivity of her earlobes. “Therestof them?”
A young man carried over a crate for Bertin—for this must be he—and the old man eased down to sit on it with a groan. He made a great show of reluctance, but when he spoke, his tone and cadence were those of a seasoned storyteller.
“I suppose, what with it being dragon bonfire night, you’ll be wanting to hear about the night I got this,” he began, tapping gently on the scarring that knotted its way down the side of his face.
Around them the crowd gasped and whispered, and Isobelle gasped too, willingly letting him draw her into the tale and away from her own thoughts and questions and complications.
“This was, oh, so many years ago my hair was still a glossy black, my limbs as straight and strong as tall pines,” the old man began,straightening as he spoke, recalling that younger version of himself. “It was harvest time, and the world was golden. But all was not well, for when we went to fetch the woodsman and his family for the harvest feast, we found their house burned away to cinders and all of them gone.”
Isobelle let herself join in on the ripple passing through the crowd with a delightful shiver, and silently resolved that if she ever came into possession of a dreadful scar, she’d make up an equally thrilling story to go with it.
She let Bertin carry her along as he told of gathering a dozen of the village’s menfolk, the great-grandfathers of those there tonight. “And me the youngest,” he said, “a lad of seventeen. Together, we set out into the forest to track the beast.”
His gaze drifted beyond the circle of listeners to the trees that came up to the edge of the village, and Isobelle couldn’t help twisting in her seat to look, too. To picture the band setting out together, dwarfed by the trees looming above them.
“Now, dragons are the only creatures in the world that never stop growing,” he continued. “The older they are, the bigger they get. The knights of old took out the biggest, the cruelest, the ones who knocked down castles for fun. But the wee ones, well. They could hide among the trees or deep in their caves and wait ’til they grew before venturing out to pick us off, one by one.”
Isobelle’s mind gave a funny little shiver as an army ofbut what ifsandhow do you explainstried to make themselves heard, and then sank beneath the tide of Bertin’s mesmerizing voice.
“It was just such a beast we were hunting,” he said. “About the size of a wagon, to have enough flame to burn down the woodsman’s place and feast on all his family. The first track we followedended at a cave, all right—full of bears, settling down for their winter sleep. The second, we were sure we had it, but a fox hunt came through, two dozen nobles on horses, with dogs, trampling every sign of it. The third trail led to what we used to call the witch’s cave, though if there was ever a witch there, the dragon must’ve eaten her long ago. There were jagged rocks all around the opening, so it looked like a dragon’s toothy maw, waiting to close on us with asnap.”
The audience jumped at hissnap, and a couple of cries went up around the circle, whispers adding to the soft crackling of the fire.
“But before we could decide which one of us would have to brave it,” Bertin continued softly, “the dragon dropped from the sky, crashing down into the clearing, and lunging for Ranulf Turner. He hadn’t even time to cry out before his head was halfway down its gullet.”
The twinkle in his eye was gone now, and his voice lower, his gaze set somewhere long ago.
Isobelle lost all sense of where she was as the flames crackled before him, painting him the same hue as the great corroded bronze beast of his story, a dragon with foul, acrid breath and fire dripping from its mouth. She cried out and recoiled with everyone else as one by one, the man’s companions fell, crushed by a whip of its tail or torn apart by its great jaws.
Isobelle dragged her gaze away, glancing at Gwen beside her with a flash of a question, lips parting, though she hardly knew what she wanted to ask.
Gwen caught her eye, her own face grave—but she squeezed Isobelle’s hand, a comforting gesture.
If Bertin’s story were true, surely someone at the castle wouldhave known of such a tragedy. Their descendants would remember. And they’d have spoken of it, wouldn’t they?
“There we were,” Bertin said, his gaze distant. “Only three of us left. Me, Elgrin, and Old Gregor pinned beneath a log, his leg broken clean in two.”
A child’s voice piped up, asking exactly what Isobelle was thinking. “What did you do, Bertin?”
The old man came back to himself and nodded gravely at the little girl who’d spoken. “We shared a long look, Elgrin and I. We always knew each other’s minds, and I knew what he planned to do. He took off toward the river, spraying arrows all the while, to turn the beast his way. At first, I thought he’d failed. Its great gaze held me, froze me in place—I couldn’t remember who I was or why I was there. I can still remember those great golden eyes, full of malice.”
His voice was dying away now, and Isobelle was leaning forward with everyone else, clutching Gwen’s hand tightly.
“And then one of Elgrin’s arrows pierced its eye, and the spell was broken. I could move, and as it roared and turned to find him with the eye that could still see, I charged at it with my axe. The beast’s hide was so thick I barely scratched its neck with my first swing. The great head started back toward me as I swung again. And as I swung a third time, liquid agony spilled down on my head.”
