At the far end of the village, the path ended in a wide clearing at the foot of the mountains. The entrance to the mines was no more than a squat, black, rectangular hole at the edge of the clearing.
Gwen swung a leg over Achilles’s saddle and slid to the ground, keeping her palm against his shoulder. Her big bay stallion gave a nervous whicker, his eyes rolling and nostrils flaring as he sniffed and snorted. His senses told him there was danger here—he could smell the dragon that had made this place its home centuries ago.
Gwen ran her hand over her horse’s cheek and then stroked his neck, running her fingers through his mane until his breath calmed. “Stay here,” she whispered to him as his ears flicked and swiveled toward the sound of her voice. “Unless something comes—then run.”
She left him untied, wanting him to have the option to flee if the mine was empty and the dragon came flying over while shewas inside. Her mouth had gone dry, and it went drier every time she glanced at the squat little opening into which she had resolved to go. The miasma of death and sour smoke hung in the air, and Gwen’s every instinct screamed at her to turn and ride away again as fast as Achilles would take her.
Eventually, Lord Whimsitt and the knights would do something. They would have to, for the dragon was not likely to stop again so soon after being woken from its sleep—at some point the dragon would attack the castle again.
But it would attack more villages first. Aberfarthing was the closest settlement to its lair, but the destruction would spread, and the beast would visit its wrath upon countless people unable to fight back. Any who survived would be like those women who had come to the dragon bonfire seeking aid—penniless, terrified, with no means or homes to return to.
Gwen found a torch among the mining supplies strewn about the clearing, and after a few too many tries with her flint, got the thing lit despite her shaking hands. The light of the flame against the mountainside flickered and wavered far too much.
Gwen retrieved her helmet from Achilles’s saddle, but she left the spear. It was a weapon for use on horseback, far too long and heavy for Gwen to use in the tight confines of the mines. If she could find the beast and catch it unawares, inside the tunnels, she had a chance—if the dragon managed to get outside, the odds slid wildly in its favor.
Gwen pulled the helmet down onto her head, drew her sword, and stepped into the darkness.
Her breath was harsh and metallic against her visor, too loud to her own ears in the heavy silence of the underground. The tunnelsloped sharply downward and bent back on itself, so that the exit was swiftly out of sight, leaving Gwen wrapped entirely in stone and the meager, wavering glow from her torch. Twin ruts in the rocky floor marked the tracks of the mine carts, so she followed those down, ignoring the occasional side passages that opened up in favor of moving deeper into the earth.
Something dry and leathery whispered above and just behind her. Gwen jumped and nearly dropped the torch, even as she shut her eyes and told herself,Bats. It’s bats. It’s only bats, stop cowering!
The sharp pounding in her chest made her stop, turn, and lean back against the wall, trying to catch her breath. Despite having seen the beast flying overhead at the tournament, Gwen was not entirely prepared for how desperately afraid she felt. The fear was like a monster in itself, infecting her moment by moment, replacing her strong limbs with ones that shook and weakening the fingers clutched round the hilt of her sword.
What the hell am I doing here?she thought desperately, closing her eyes and focusing on the air moving in and out of her lungs. Dupont had taught her a pattern of breathing that forced the body to relax as a way to combat her nerves before jousting. Gwen wasn’t sure she’d ever really mastered it, though, relying instead on her fury at her opponents, at the tournament itself that reduced a human being to a prize. Now, the anger she’d felt at seeing the destruction outside paled in comparison with her fear.
Still, Dupont’s breathing exercises worked, even though the air she inhaled was acrid with sour smoke. Her heartbeat was slowing, quieting. Each inhale felt easier, her lungs less tight. The hand holding the torch steadied enough for the flames to stop quivering.
And as her mind quieted, Gwen became aware of a soft sound.At first it seemed to her that she was hearing some distant underground ocean, tides still stirred by the moon invisible beyond the top of the mountain—she heard the rise and fall of the surf, a soft, rhythmic susurration. The sound was so incongruous, there in the depths of the earth, that Gwen could only stand still in confusion, staring into the darkness beyond her ring of torchlight.
And then a section of shadow beyond the light moved, and all at once the meaning of the sound, the moving shadow, and the faint rumble that now echoed through the tunnel clicked together into a single, awful truth.
The dragon was there.
It lay just beyond the light of her torch, chest rising and falling in a rhythm like an ancient sea. Gwen’s body moved of its own accord, even as her mind froze like a mouse before a deadly serpent—she took one step, and then another, moving as silently as she could in her heavy armor. Sweat gathered damply against the padding at her lower back, and dripped, itching, between her breasts.
The torchlight fell upon a flow of thick scales—an outstretched leg, the foot alone as large as Achilles, each scaled toe tipped with a black claw as long as Gwen’s leg. She stepped closer, still strangely distant from her own movements, like an observer watching some foolish ant about to be annihilated by a booted foot.
Gwen lifted the torch higher.
The dragon lay on its side, its back half out of sight around a curve in the tunnel. Its body was covered in scales the color of decaying bronze, with shades ranging from deep brown to copper to the pale, putrid green of corrosion. Its front legs were grotesquely, disproportionately long, forming the arch of the wings, which were currently folded in close against its thick body. Theneck was long and serpentine, and its head rested on the ground, pointed squarely at Gwen. One of its eyes was a mess of scar tissue, the marks of ancient blades etched into the ridge of scales forming the upper edge of its eye socket.
The other eye was closed.
Slowly, Gwen backed up, moving along the wall until she found a place to wedge the torch. Then she gripped her sword, breathing in the bitter scent of latent dragonsfire, and moved in.
Carefully, she stepped between the taloned toes of the monster. Her armor scraped the tiniest bit, the articulated plates at hip and knee whispering against each other, and her boots tapped a soft, irregular patter against the stone. She was close enough now to feel heat radiating from the creature, not from its body, but from the base of its long, curled neck—the place from which it brought forth its flames, a burning forge above its heart.
The scales there were long and thicker than Gwen’s arm, impenetrable, but they overlapped much like the articulation on the joints of Gwen’s armor. If the beast stretched its neck back far enough, it might be possible to thrust a sword or a spear between them. But not while it lay curled up this way.
Gwen crept instead toward the head, approaching the closed eye. Even these scales on the dragon’s eyelids were thick, but if she struck at the seam and managed to drive her blade deep enough, she might reach the creature’s brain before it could react.
Gwen caught her breath, wrapped both hands around the hilt of her sword, and raised it over her head.
The eyelids parted. They were followed by the wet slide of a second cloudy membrane sweeping back from the outer corner of the eye. A gaping hole of a pupil rolled down from the top of the eyesocket, wandered a moment, and then narrowed into a wicked slit, pointed directly at Gwen.
Neither of them moved. Gwen could see her armored reflection, sword raised, in the huge eye. Its irises were the color of molten gold and seethed like cauldrons of liquid fire. The slitted pupil trembled, adjusting its focus as the creature clawed its way out of sleep.
Then Gwen drove the sword down, throwing her entire body weight behind the thrust, a scream of effort bursting from her—and suddenly she was flying, breathless, suspended for two heartbeats in the air until she hit the wall with a horrible metallic clatter and dropped to the ground. She’d managed to keep hold of her sword, and she scrambled up, head spinning, to see the dragon shaking its own head where it had knocked her aside.
