Isobelle could not speak around the lump in her throat. This was a foreign experience for her – of all the difficulties she was accustomed to overcoming, her powers of speech deserting her were not high on the list. And there were many things she wanted to say – she wanted to say them so badly her vision swam.
Don’t shut me out, she cried in her thoughts, willing Gwen to hear her, feel her.Let me help you, hold you, take your mind off it all.
And, quietly,This is all I can do to help. Please don’t take it away.
Finally, she managed to croak, ‘Gwen, I think we ought to talk about the dragon. I know there are parts of it you haven’t told me, and I think if you did, I could—’
‘I’mfine,’ Gwen snapped. Her hand on the sheets had curled into a fist. She looked down and took a breath, and her fingers relaxed. ‘I’m fine,’ she said again, more quietly, and when she looked up, the moonlight revealed the curve of her smile, though it did not illuminate her eyes. ‘Really – we should both go back to sleep. I wasn’t dreaming about the dragon. I know I used to, but that wasn’t it. Get some rest. Tomorrow will be a long day.’
Isobelle’s body moved, as responsive to Gwen’s subtext as ever. She had closed the door behind her and turned around, her back against the wooden surface, before the thought really sank in.
Gwen had lied to her.
9
Cowardice is a choice
In the dream, Gwen longed for a fate so simple and final as death.
Instead, no matter how badly she was wounded, no matter how many times she fell, the fight went on. No matter how many times she slew the dragon, it came back, again and again. Like a hero in an ancient myth who had offended the gods, she was condemned to fight the beast in her nightmares, over and over, for all eternity.
She killed it, and it rose again. She maimed it, or put out its one remaining eye, or severed a limb or wing, and when she turned, or blinked, or took her eyes away for a single moment, the creature was somehow whole again.
Whole, but changed. She’d killed it so many times that it was beginning to decay, its green-bronze skin sagging. Part of its cheek was missing, the brutal teeth bared through the ragged gap in a horrible, perpetual grin.
The only thing that never changed was the dragon’s eye. A force so natural as decay could not touch that orb of molten gold. Every night that eye was there, waiting for her to be so foolish as to sleep. It stared at her, through her,intoher, and ruthlessly shredded her soul. Under its stare, she chose, night after night, to give in, to give up, and fall into the inky depths of madness.
In her most recent dream, she’d driven her sword between the dragon’s armoured plates and felt, rather than heard, its chuckling rumble of a growl vibrating back through her arm. Its eye found her, and the terror swelled up to grip her, driving out everything she was until the only thing left of her soul was fear. She was flung aside as it lifted one scaled foot to crush her, as it had crushed her helmet in the dark confines of the mine.
She had thought, when she saw her flattened helm, that her painstakingly crafted armour looked no more substantial than a prop made for a stage melodrama. Now, she realised she herself was no more than a bit of paper and paste. Nothing. Just a girl frozen by her own fear, dressed in costume armour, realising too late that she was no hero.
A moment longer and she’d have to look into the monster’s eye, let it tear away all hope and leave her falling endlessly into despair – and, as always, she knew she couldn’t face it. So she ripped herself from sleep and woke with a muffled shriek.
As soon as she heard Isobelle’s light step move away from her door, Gwen slipped out of bed, threw on yesterday’s dress, and buckled on her sword.
She paused in the hallway. It wasn’t too late. She could knock on Isobelle’s door, because she knew the other girl hadn’t gone back to sleep. She could still ask Isobelle to comfort her. Isobelle would tell her some story from her childhood, or weave a new one about some place they’d go, and Gwen would replace the locks and chains keeping her pit of fears shut, and be able to pretend all was well again.
But for how long? How long until the dragon burst free of those chains once more, and dragged her down into that abyss?
Isobelle could help her wallpaper over that dungeon door that led down to the pit of Gwen’s fears, but she couldn’t stop the dragon growing stronger every time Gwen pretended she couldn’t hear it clawing at her from deep inside her own heart.
Gwen sighed and slipped out of the inn, keeping to the shadows as much as she could. Her breath steamed in the frigid air. She cast a glance back up towards the darkened windows, trying to figure out which was Isobelle’s. No movement stirred behind any of them – Isobelle must have gone back to bed.
Finally deeming it safe to step out of the shadows, she made her way down towards the water.
All Galanty-Uponne-the-Sea was sleeping. The moonlight washed the colour out of the last of the autumn flowers in their window boxes, the cobblestones swept clean by a light freezing drizzle earlier in the evening. The glimpses of the silver sea between the houses were like glass, perfectly still. The world might have been a painting.
If only the serenity of her surroundings mirrored her thoughts. Her entire body felt like it was on fire, limbs itching for action, to run or fight, but the harbour, as she emerged from the clustered houses, was quiet. No monsters. Not even a restive fish or ripple of wind broke the glass-smooth swells that glided in to break against the jetties.
Gwen put a hand on the hilt of her sword anyway, taking comfort from its familiar shape – the sword she’d made with her own hands, the one she’d spent so many years engraving, the one that had played a starring role in all her younger fantasies of becoming a knight.
But what good was a sword against a monster that existed only inside her mind?
‘Gwen?’
The voice made her startle and she whirled, her heart trying to plummet and soar all at once. But the girl standing some distance away was not Isobelle, and Gwen swallowed the lump in her throat, trying to catch her breath.
‘Tabitha? What are you doing out here?’
