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It was so broad that its front legs dangled over the edges of the bridge on either side. Its wings, which looked too small to support its vast bulk, were folded neatly at its sides. A solid carapace of green and gold scales covered every inch of its body.

And it was, as far as I could tell, sound asleep.

Eight heads either lay on the bridge or were tucked into a twisted tangle of long necks. As we watched, the dragon shifted in its slumber, one of the heads burrowing deeper into the snake nest of scaly coils. All sixteen of its eyes were closed. We could hear it snoring, a discordant combination of rumbles, wheezes, and snorts depending on which throat produced them.

Maybe this wouldn’t be such an impossible task after all. “We need to keep quiet,” I told Sunbeam and Yudit. “Move in slowly, try not to wake it up.”

“I’m not so good with the whole keeping quiet thing,” Sunbeam said. “Hooves. Not really built for it.”

I nodded. “Yudit and I will go on foot, then.”

We dismounted and crept forward, one careful step at a time. We walked heel to toe to muffle our footfalls, going as slowly as we could so that our armor didn’t clank. An armor-clad knight is only slightly stealthier than a horse.

I wondered where the best place to stab the dragon would be. In the eye, perhaps? Would taking out one head be enough to kill it, or would it live until we’d dealt with all eight? Maybe it would be better to try for the heart, if we could penetrate its scales.

Yudit and I inched forward. The closer we came, the more daunted I was by its size. A single snap of any one of its jaws could have swallowed me whole. I tried to quiet even my breathing, just to make sure there was no sound to be heard except for the wind and the wash of the surf.

I halted mid-step. No sound but the wind and the surf?

Shouldn’t we still have heard the dragon’s snores?

On the head closest to us, two dinner-plate-sized eyes flicked open. The feathery frills that sprouted above them like eyebrows fluttered in the breeze.

“Thieves,” the dragon breathed.

Four more eyes opened, and two more voices weighed in. “Robbers.” “Burglars.”

Yudit was trying to find someplace inconspicuous to hide her sword. “Oh, hello. We’re just here to…clean the…Wait. You think we want to rob you?”

“Felt the vibrations the moment you stepped on our treasure, we did,” the first head said. “Know you’re here to steal it, we do.”

“Steal it?” I asked, my forehead wrinkling. “You mean the bridge?”

“Bridge of gold. Our bridge.” The other heads echoed the first one. “Ours.” “Ours.”

“There’s been a misunderstanding.” If we couldn’t kill the dragon in its sleep—or in their sleep, I supposed, if they were going by “we”…or perhaps it should be “they” for the dragon as a whole and “it” for an individual head?—then maybe we could talk our way to a solution. A conversation was less likely to result in our deaths than a fight, anyway. “We’re not here to take the bridge away. How would we do that? Where would we put it?”

“We wouldn’t want it, anyway,” Yudit said, catching on to my plan. “It’s not even made of gold, not really. Give the paint a scratch, you’ll see.”

The head in front of us blinked, eyelids shuttling down and back up like a pair of window blinds. “What?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “The bridge isn’t valuable at all. Now, if you want to find a real treasure, I’m sure we could direct you very far away to a nice…pile of…” I trailed off as yet more eyes opened and multiple mouths bared their teeth.

“LIES!” the dragon snarled, while overlapping voices added, “DECEIT!” “DISHONESTY!” “PERJURY!” “FIBS!”

“Easy there, Tyranno-Thesaurus.” Yudit made a placating gesture with the hand that wasn’t holding her sword out of sight behind her back. “We only want to—”

“THIEVES MUST DIE!”

The rest of the dragon’s eyes opened, and the closest head shot forward, jaws gaping wide.

Chapter Ten

Dueling with a Dragon

The dragon’s stiletto-length teeth snapped closed no more than half a foot from Yudit’s face. The lead head strained to get closer, but couldn’t. All eight necks were snarled together in an impossible knot that left hissing heads pulling in every direction. We’d have been slaughtered then and there if the dragon hadn’t been a restless, twitchy sleeper.

“Run!” I shouted. We raced to get off the bridge before the heads sorted themselves out. If we stayed, it wouldn’t take a bite to kill us; we’d be done for if it simply knocked us off the bridge into the gorge. Our armor would sink us to the bottom of the firth.