“Helm?”
“Don’t have one.” It was true that you were always bareheaded in the paintings and plays, but I found this suddenly and unbearably stupid. A single stray arrow, a lucky blow—
“The belt, boy,” you said.
I had to reach both arms around your waist to fasten the belt, flushing slightly when my knuckles brushed the small of your back. I fumbled for Valiance, drawing it clumsily from its battered leather sheath. The light caught the blade and my breath stopped.
I’d never held it before. It took both hands, and the tip still bobbed and wobbled. I knew it was old—knew it had been in the yew for centuries before you drew it—but it looked fresh from the forge.
I ran my thumb up the flat of the blade. “Not so much as a dent or chip. Has it never failed you?”
Your answered evenly, without inflection, “Every tool fails, used hard enough.”
“But—is it true—” I felt like a boy asking his priest if angels were real. “The damage disappears?”
You looked away, squinting up the mountainside. “I took a hammer to it once, after—” You stopped. Coughed. “Broke it into ten pieces and threw the shards into the sea.” Your throat moved as you swallowed. “When I woke the next day, the hilt was in my hand, and the blade was whole and pure as the day I drew it from the yew.”
You had been granted a true miracle—an unbreakable sword!—yet you would cast it away if you could. Your fate was laid out before you like a shining path, a tale so perfect it must have been written by the hand of God Himself, yet you would turn away from it.
If I let you.
I thrust the sword toward you, and you sheathed it at your hip, a quick iron whisper. You reached for your hair, twisting it carelessly into your collar, and I found myself saying, “Here, sit down.”
You sat, strangely pliant. I knew as soon as I touched your hair that I’d made a mistake. The weight and texture of it—heavy and slick and tangled, like a thicket of silk—struck me as the sort of thing that might haunt a person, lingering like a wound and aching years later.
I braided it hastily, leaving long tendrils falling around your face and down across the metal of your shoulders.
With your back still turned to me, I said, “You’ll win.” I swept a wisp from your neck, tucking it into the braid. “Just—so you know, you will kill the dragon and find the grail. I’ve read all the stories.”
A slight pause before you asked, “Then why do your hands shake?”
“Oh.” My laugh was unconvincing, rusty sounding. I stepped away, trapping my treacherous hands beneath my elbows. “Because I’m an awful coward. Ask anyone.”
You stood and gestured to your horrible horse. “There’s grain for three days more. If he misbehaves”—you appeared to struggle briefly—“his name is Hen.”
“Iknewyou were lying! But—Hen? Well, perhaps some things ought to be lost to history.” Only then did I follow the implications of the instructions. My chest contracted. “You’re leaving me here?”
Your brows crimped, bemused. “Yes.”
“You can’t slay a dragon alone!”
“Everything I have done, I have done alone.” You said it without emotion, as a statement of fact. “I thought you’d read all the stories.”
“But what if—look, just let me come with you. Please.”
Your expression moved from bafflement to some harsh, taut emotion that made the muscles of your jaw roll. Eventually you said, roughly, “You make a poor coward, boy.” You turned away and said, “Stay,” as if I were a poorly trained puppy, worrying at your heels.
I watched you disappear into the clouds with something flailing behind my breastbone, a mad desire to shout after you:Wait! Come back! It is not worth it!
Instead, I wedged myself against a crag and opened the book in my lap. There are blotches on that page where the ink dripped and dried before I could think of anything to write.
Eventually I simply stole Montmer’s opening line on the grounds that, technically, Montmer would be plagiarizing from me.
UNA AND THE LAST DRAGON
It was there, in that burnt and barren place, where Una met the dragon, last of his kind.
At one time, dragons had been the plague of Dominion. They lurked in deep woods and sea caves, on lonely mountaintops and beneath ancient keeps, sleeping among the bones of stray cattle and lost children. They were unlike every natural creature—they were not born and never died, but only persisted, a ceaseless hungering that was never sated.
