So it was the three of them lingering over third cups of malak one morning when the first petitioner of the day came to speak to the king.
The petitioner reported a dragon, destroying crops and killing chickens. It had also badly burned a child who had accidentally discovered its lair, although the child had been rescued in time to save its life.
Arlbeth sighed and rubbed his face with his hand. “Very well. We will send someone to deal with it.”
The man bowed and left.
“There will be more of them now, with the trouble at the Border,” said Tor. “That sort of vermin seems to breed faster when the North wind blows.”
“I fear you are right,” Arlbeth replied. “And we can ill spare anyone just now.”
“I’ll go,” said Tor.
“Don’t be a fool,” snapped the king, and then immediately said, “I’m sorry. I can spare you least of all—as you know. Dragons don’t kill people very often any more, but dragon-slayers rarely come back without a few uncomfortable burns.”
“Someday,” said Tor with a wry smile, “when we have nothing better to do, we must think up a more efficient way to cope with dragons. It’s hard to take them seriously—but they are a serious nuisance.”
Aerin sat very still.
“Yes.” Arlbeth frowned into his malak. “I’ll ask tomorrow for half a dozen volunteers to go take care of this. And pray it’s an old slow one.”
Aerin also prayed it was an old slow one as she slipped off. She had only a day’s grace, so she needed to leave at once; fortunately she had visited the village in question once on a state journey with her father, so she knew more or less how to get there. It was only a few hours’ ride.
Her hands shook as she saddled Talat and tied the bundles of dragon-proof suit, kenet, sword, and a spear—which she wasn’t at all sure she could use, since, barring a few lessons from Tor when she was eight or nine years old, she was entirely self-taught—to the saddle. Then she had to negotiate her way past the stable, the castle, and down the king’s way and out of the City without anyone trying to stop her; and the sword and spear, in spite of the long cloak she had casually laid over them, were a bit difficult to disguise.
Her luck—or something—was good. She was worrying so anxiously about what she would say if stopped that she gave herself a headache; but as she rode, everyone seemed to be looking not quite in her direction—almost as if they couldn’t quite see her, she thought. It made her feel a little creepy. But she got out of the City unchallenged.
The eerie feeling, and the headache, lifted at once when she and Talat set off through the forest below the City. The sun was shining, and the birds seemed to be singing just for her. Talat lifted into a canter, and she let him run for a while, the wind slipping through her hair, the shank of the spear tapping discreetly at her leg, reminding her that she was on her way to accomplish something useful.
She stopped at a little distance from the dragon-infested village to put on her suit—which was no longer quite so greasy; it had reached its saturation point, perhaps—and then adapted, as well-oiled boots adapt to the feet that wear them. Her suit still quenched torches, but it had grown as soft and supple as cloth, and almost as easy to wear. She rubbed ointment on her face and her horse, and pulled on her long gloves. Shining rather in the sunlight then and reeking of pungent herbs, Aerin rode into the village.
Talat was unmistakably a war-horse, even to anyone who had never seen one before, and her red hair immediately identified her as the first sol. A little boy stood up from his doorstep and shouted: “They’re here for the dragon!” and then there were a dozen, two dozen folk in the street, looking at her, and then looking in puzzlement for the five or six others that should have been riding with her.
“I am alone,” said Aerin; she would have liked to explain, not that she was here without her father’s knowledge but that she was alone because she was dragon-proof (she hoped) and didn’t need any help. But her courage rather failed her, and she didn’t. In fact what the villagers saw as royal pride worked very well, and they fell over themselves to stop appearing to believe that a first sol (even a half-foreign one) couldn’t handle a dragon by herself (and if her mother really was a witch, maybe there was some good in her being half a foreigner after all), and several spoke at once, offering to show the way to where the dragon had made its lair, all of them careful not to look again down the road behind her.
She was wondering how she could tell them delicately that she didn’t want them hanging around to watch, since she wasn’t at all sure how graceful (or effective) her first encounter with a real dragon was likely to be. But the villagers who accompanied her to show her the way had no intention of getting anywhere near the scene of the battle; a cornered dragon was not going to care what non-combatant bystanders it happened to catch with an ill-aimed lash of fire. They pointed the way, and then returned to their village to wait on events.
Aerin hung her sword round her waist, settled the spear into the crook of her arm. Talat walked with his ears sharply forward, and when he snorted she smelled it too: fire, and something else. It was a new smell, and it was the smell of a creature that did not care if the meat it ate was fresh or not, and was not tidy with the bones afterward. It was the smell of dragon.
Talat, after his warning snort, paced onward carefully. They came soon to a little clearing with a hummock of rock at its edge. The hummock had a hole in it, the upper edge of which was rimed with greasy smoke. The litter of past dragon meals was scattered across the once green meadow, and it occurred to Aerin that the footing would be worse for a horse’s hard hoofs than a dragon’s sinewy claws.
Talat halted, and they stood, Aerin gazing into the black hole in the hill. A minute or two went by and she wondered, suddenly, how one got the dragon to pay attention to one in the first place. Did she have to wake it up? Yell? Throw water into the cave at it?
Just as her spear point sagged with doubt, the dragon hurtled out of its den and straight at them: and it opened its mouth and blasted them with its fire—except that Talat had never doubted, and was ready to step nimbly out of its way as Aerin scrabbled with her spear and grabbed at Talat’s mane to keep from falling off onto the dragon’s back. It spun round-it was about the height of Talat’s knees, big for a dragon, and dreadfully quick on its yellow-clawed feet—and sprayed fire at them again. This time, although Talat got them out of the worst of it, it licked over her arm. She saw the fire wash over the spear handle and glance off her elbow, but she did not feel it; and the knowledge that her ointment did accomplish what it was meant to do gave her strength and cleared her mind. She steadied the spear-butt and nudged Talat with one ankle; as he sidestepped and as the dragon whirled round at them again, she threw her spear.