One Good Knight (10 page)

All heads in the Audience Chamber turned, and all eyes stared at Andie.

She swallowed hard, and surreptitiously rubbed her sweaty palms against her gown. Yes, she had gleaned every bit of information on dragons that there was in the Great Library. Not that there was much. And none of it was very comforting. Still—

“If everything I've found in the Library is correct, there is a way to be rid of it. First, we need a Champion,” she said carefully. “Every single document is quite clear on that. Only a Champion will have the weaponry and the magic to defeat a creature like a dragon. Champions generally belong to Orders, and each Order has a Chapter-House. The nearest is—” she consulted her notes “—the Kingdom of Fleurberg, the Chapter-House of the Order of the Glass Mountain.”

Cassiopeia turned her gaze upon the Guard Commander, who looked happier than he had since this meeting started, and nodded. “Inland and north of here. It's farther than we usually trade, but I've seen it on the maps. Messengers will be dispatched immediately, Majesty.”

“But until the Champion can be found?” Solon asked, persistently, turning his penetrating gaze on Andie while her nerves stretched thin. “Is there a remedy to keep this monster from ravaging the countryside? As the Queen has said, if we cannot keep it in check, we will starve before help can come.”

Andie felt sweat trickling down the back of her
neck. “Well, yes,” she admitted reluctantly. “The Tradition is very—very strong on this point. There
is
one way to keep it from raging everywhere. But—but it's not very nice—”

“My dear child!” one of the other advisers exclaimed. “What is going on now is a great deal worse than ‘not very nice'! Come, what it is?”

She bowed her head over her notes. “You have to give it an offering. Mostly The Tradition says that it has to be once a week, although some records say it has to be more often. Once a week is probably right.” She felt the words forced out of her against her will. “But it has to be a very—very special sort of offering, in order to make the thing work. It has to be something that's a real—sacrifice.” Finally the last of it came out in a rush. “You have to offer it a virgin to eat. A girl. A live girl, once a week, left tied to a stake where it can easily find her.”

Her words fell into the silence like leaden pellets.

Then, everyone began talking at once.

Andie remained numb, listening to them. She could hardly believe what she was hearing. Not one of them asked if there was some other way of dealing with this dragon. Not one suggested a different approach. They simply, and without argument, and with no hesitation at all, accepted this preposterous idea, and began putting forward ways of implementing it, immediately.

“Slaves—” said Lord Hira, who was something of a slave trader. “We can bring in slave girls to feed it. I can have my factors contact the slave fleet—”

“I believe that the sacrifice was specifically to be a
virgin,
Lord Hira,” Solon said dryly. Papers rustled in his hand as he looked over the copy of the notes Andie had made for him. “Yes. A virgin, and nubile,
not
a little girl. So trying to get around the stipulation by using a child won't work—and when have you ever brought in a nubile virgin, eh?”

Lord Hira mumbled something, but he knew, as Andie knew (though she wasn't to say so, as she wasn't supposed to be aware of such things) that Acadia was the end of the corridor of the slave trade. Technically in fact, the slave trade was illegal in Acadia; any slave purchased was supposed to be freed immediately, and allowed to work off the price of his or her freedom from the master. In practice, this was impossible; a master would set the value of the slave so high, and wages so low, that it would take a miracle to work the sum off. Only someone like Cassiopeia, who chose to buy her slaves' loyalty with their freedom, would actually follow the spirit as well as the letter of the law.

But because of this, it was unlikely that Lord Hira would be able to purchase a dozen virgins or even one virgin at short notice, at this end of the trading corridor. Virginity had a very high value, and a correspondingly high price tag attached to it in the southern kingdoms across the Lesser Sea, and by the time a girl arrived here, that price would certainly have been met long ago.

“We should ask for volunteers!” said Lord Cheon insistently. “For the good of the country!”

“You don't really believe that any girl is going to offer herself to be eaten by a dragon, do you?” Lord Hira sneered. “At least, not a sane one! I suppose we might get some poor wet fish of a girl who wants to kill herself who will offer, but surely not more than one!”

“Well, then, offer to enrich her family if she volunteers!” Cheon said desperately. “Offer a fat reward!”

“Then we will not be getting volunteers,” Solon pointed out. “We will be getting young ladies whose families have no use for them, or who value gold over their offspring. And what is more, I should doubt their virginity, as well.”

Andie wanted to clap her hands over her ears. This was awful, but there was worse. None of them wanted to say it—the only possible solution, if they were really going to go through with this horrible thing… It was up to the Queen to say it.

Andie knew her mother. Cassiopeia had a gift for seeing straight to the heart of a matter, facing it without flinching, and saying the things that no one else would say. After listening to her Advisers wrangle for a few moments, she ended the entire argument. “A lottery,” she said, the sound of her voice sending them all into silence. “A lottery. It is the only fair way.”

“You do realize that there is a simple way for girls to evade their duty, don't you?” Cheon said, sounding sullen.

“I can do nothing about a girl choosing to dishonor herself before being chosen,” Cassiopeia replied, serenely. “And no doubt, many will consider the
risks attendant on lying with a man less than those of taking the chance on the lottery. But as for afterward—well, once the selection is made, the girl who is chosen must be placed into protective custody to prevent such a thing. Comfortable custody, but the simple expedient of using female Guards should ensure that she doesn't find a way to render herself ineligible.”

After that, there seemed to be no other choice, or at least, there was no other choice that the Queen was willing to consider.

It made Andie feel absolutely ill. If the decision had been hers to make, she would have gone into the countryside, hunted high and low for some other solution. She was certain there must be one! And the dragon had killed no people yet. Maybe the Sophonts could do something—drive it into the mountains, make it hole up in a cave until the Champion could be found, or present it with something other than human beings to eat. She wanted to say this, but she knew no one was going to listen.

She knew that her nightmares were going to be haunted by this—and it would be worse once the sacrifices started. She couldn't possibly sit in the Palace and pretend it wasn't happening. She would have to force herself to attend the ceremony and be a witness, but her own conscience demanded that she not ignore it, nor pretend it wasn't happening.

“There should be some solemn ceremony, of course,” Solon was saying. “Something to show that
we aren't taking this lightly. Something to honor the girl. And some compensation for her family. Not enough to make it seem as if we are paying them for their daughter, of course, but enough to make it clear we value what they are losing.”

And then, even more horribly, they began calmly discussing just how much was “appropriate.” She glanced at the Guard Commander. He looked suitably appalled.

Then again, this was a complete violation of everything he stood for. His duty was to protect the people of Acadia, not offer them up to monsters. But he wasn't going to be given any choice in the matter, either.

Finally the long, dreadful meeting was over, and she was able to flee back to her wing. Once there, she waved off offers of food or drink, to go out into the clean and open air of her terrace-garden.

But once she was outside, she happened to look up—and there, in the distance, she saw it. Unmistakable, having seen it once…

The dragon.

She fled back into the sanctuary of her rooms, and once alone, clasped her hands together, shut her eyes and began to pray, fervently, that a Champion would come.

And soon. Very soon.

Iris pulled back the heavy bedroom curtains, letting in the thin morning light. “What does the weather look like this morning, Iris?” Andie asked, without moving out of bed. If she had not woken up knowing what day it was, the sad, gray light would have told her. On these days, she put off getting out of bed as long as she could—

“Cold, damp, overcast,” Iris replied. “You can't even see the sun through the clouds. Not like yesterday.”

Of course not. The Tradition was working in full force today. You couldn't have a brisk breeze, full sun and a cloudless sky today.

“No chance of a storm, though,” Iris added, taking garments out of the clothespress and the wardrobe. “Not like last time. This one drank the
potion, and they say she was quiet about it even before she drank.”

Andie winced, and slid out of bed. She wasn't sure which was worse, on a sacrifice day—the ones who screamed and wailed and wept, who had to be tied to a stake in a cart and taken to the sacrifice grounds that way, or the ones who drank the drugged potion that Balan always offered them and went to their death quiet and dreamy, carried in a sedan-chair bedecked with flowers or ivy. The fighters brought storms with them, real tempests, with wild wind and lightning striking the tops of the hills; the quiet ones invoked bleak, heavy overcast skies, with a sad drizzle of rain, or a mist.

In the beginning, there actually
had
been a brief influx of volunteers. Some were clearly insane, viewing the dragon as some sort of manifestation of God to which they had been called. Some came from homes with a father so abusive that in the minds of these girls, death was preferable to remaining under the same roof. Some actually stepped forward bravely out of a sense of duty.

Not all of them had been accepted. Some had been rejected because, on inspection, they no longer had the necessary “qualification.” But after that first lot there had been no more volunteers, and the other option became a necessity.

It had been six months since the lottery began, and there was still no sign of any Champion, nor word from the messengers. Once a week, Solon
plunged his hand into a bag of tokens and condemned another poor girl to death. They had been as young as twelve, and as old as fifty. The fifty-year-old had been a Sister at a convent in the hills, who had prayed and sung the entire time. She'd actually been the easiest for Andie to bear; the twelve-year-old had been the worst. The girl had not been told she had been selected. Her parents had given her the potion themselves, and she had looked like a sleeping angel in that sedan-chair….

Iris helped her into her gown of fine black lamb's wool, with heavy black cords and embroidery of black silk acanthus leaves around the hem. She sat down at her dressing table while Iris bound up her hair in a severe knot, then arranged a black mantle over it and pinned it in place. “Are you sure you won't have something to eat, Princess?” she asked anxiously.

Andie's gorge rose at the mere thought. “Positive,” she replied. She never could eat on sacrifice days.

“You don't have to be there,” Iris said tentatively, touching her shoulder, before helping her push her feet into soft black leather boots, suitable for the cold of the day and the rough track they would have to climb.

“Yes, I do.” Though Iris would never understand, Lady Thalia did, and approved. Andie had to be there because not only was Andie the heir-apparent, it was at least partly Andie's fault that these poor girls were being sent to their deaths. If she hadn't found the passages that described how the virgin sacrifices would keep the dragon pacified—

Maybe someone else eventually would have, but she didn't know that. What she did know was that she was the one who had. To attend the sacrifices was to acknowledge her guilt and the part she had played in this.

She glanced at her face in the mirror; pale, swathed in black, she looked properly in mourning. There were dark circles under her eyes that not even her oculars could hide.

The echo of muffled drums sounded all through the Palace, and Andie stood up to go. Iris opened the door for her, and with the servants lined up, watching her with solemn faces, she moved out of her rooms and into the Great Hall, where one of the Guard fell in behind her as her escort without a single word being exchanged. She generally tried not to talk before a sacrifice, because talking often made her cry.

Outside, at the front of the Palace, on the graveled area in front of the two enormous double doors leading into the Great Hall, the procession had already begun to form. First came the sacrifice in her sedan-chair; this morning, the girl was already there, waiting for them. Or rather, she was sitting passively in the chair; from the look on her face, she was off in her own dim little world. She wasn't a pretty one this time; that would make it easier on the other people who came to watch. In fact, with her sallow skin, dull dark hair and slightly receding chin, she was distinctly plain. What little expression was left to her after drinking the potion made it look to Andie as if
she was the timid sort, accustomed from the moment of her birth to obeying orders. Not all the pampering and preparation in the world could change the red, chapped condition of her hands, nor the brittle state of her hair, nor the pinched, half-starved look of her. This one was poor. It shouldn't have made a difference, but of course, it did. Most of the people in and around the Court found it easier to shrug off a sacrifice when it was a poor girl, as if being poor made them somehow less human.

“Well, not so bad!” Andie had heard one woman say. “She'll never have had food that fine, nor baths, nor clothing as lovely, and never would have in her whole life.”

That was just wrong. There was something more pathetic about the fact that the poor girl's entire, short life had been nothing more than a lead-up to a single feast, one nice gown, a warm, soft bed for the night, then a horrible death.

She was dressed in a flowing white gown, with a crown made of ivy, and there was ivy woven all around her chair. In the dead of winter it was hard to find any flowers or greenery except ivy. The gown was thin, but it didn't look as if she felt the cold. She sat very still, her eyes wide and fixed on nothing, her mouth a little open.
The potion must have taken her hard.
With luck, she wouldn't even see the dragon coming.

Usually behind the sedan-chair came the parents, but in their place was a single priest, reading silently from a prayer book. Her parents probably couldn't
bear to watch—when they were so cold as to not care, they always showed up, and reveled in being the center of attention, usually carrying on with theatrical weeping and wailing that would have made a bad actor ashamed of himself. It was the parents who cared the most that kept away from the procession, who sometimes had to be drugged into insensibility themselves. Or maybe the poor thing was an orphan.

Andie shuddered at that, because it somehow made it all that much more horrible, that this poor girl's sad and deprived life should end like this, before she even had a taste of any kind of happiness. And once the day was over, she would be utterly forgotten. No one would mourn her. No one would even remember her name.

Behind the priest, Cassiopeia's chair waited; it was empty, but her ladies were clustered around it, all in black. Andie joined them. They knew enough, or were sensitive enough, not to say anything to her.

To give her credit, the Queen never kept them waiting for long on an occasion like this one. Even the most restless of them had just begun to fidget when she appeared. Like the rest, she was all in black, enveloped in a black wool cape, but unlike the rest, she was veiled. Without a word to any of them, she took her seat in her chair, nodded to the Guard Captain in charge of it all, and the procession began.

It wound down from the Palace, out into the quiet, deserted streets of Ethanos, until it came to the main road. First came a priest, reading prayers
aloud, followed by the girl in her chair, carried by four burly men. Another priest followed in the place where her parents would have been, then all of the Queen's advisers, Solon leading. They, too, were dressed in black and afoot. Then two men playing muffled drums, followed by the Queen's chair, also carried by four men, and flanked by two Guards. Behind Cassiopeia's chair came her ladies-in-waiting, with Andie among them, more priests, another pair of drummers, and whomever of the court wished to attend. In the beginning, there had been a fair number of courtiers, drawn by curiosity, but now, unless a courtier was related in some way to the sacrifice, there generally weren't more than a handful. Last of all came a full troop of thirty-six Guards. The only people not afoot were the Queen and the sacrifice.

Ethanos might have been deserted; there was no sign of life or habitation until they reached Tavern Street, the main street that led from the docks to the city gates and the trade roads beyond. There, at last, were the citizens of Ethanos, lining the street like two ranks of silent statues.

No one spoke. Today, no one wept, either. But they did look sad and solemn, as if they felt the same guilt that Andie labored under. Strangely enough, no one had ever ordered them to do this; they had turned up for the first sacrifice, and had continued to show their faces and their feelings every week since. In that they were far more faithful and respectful than the courtiers, and Andie never felt their presence to be mere show.

They passed down Tavern Street to the outer walls of Ethanos, and went out through the Old Willow Gate, which was barely big enough to accommodate the cart they sometimes had to use. There was no trouble today, of course, since the girl was in the sedan-chair.

It was a long way to walk, and it wasn't over yet. They moved along the Trade Road for a while, until farther on, an old track branched off the main road and headed up into the hills.

It led to what Balan and the other Sophonts had deemed the most appropriate place of sacrifice, so up the track they went. A horse-cart could never have made it up this track; the few times a sacrifice had to be brought here in that manner, the cart had been pulled by a donkey.

Last night, the victim had been at least treated like royalty. She had been luxuriously bathed, scented, massaged and perfumed. She'd been fed on every delicacy available to the Queen's own table, and had slept—if she could sleep—in the softest eiderdown, on silk sheets, under a fur coverlet. This morning there had been more of the same pampering. From the moment she had been chosen, she would have been offered Balan's potion as often as she cared to drink it—and about half of the girls accepted it at that point. Balan had told Andie that it was a euphoric, and it clouded the memory, until by morning, the sacrifices generally had no idea why they were in the procession or what it was about, nor did they care.
He swore to her that it made them happy, that they were unafraid and mostly lost in a kind of dream.

In Andie's eyes, that didn't make it better.

She'd suggested arming the sacrifices and, needless to say, that particular notion had not gone down well. She had suggested having the Guards attempt an ambush, and that had been ignored. No one so far had even been allowed to try to defend the sacrifices.

Behind her came the drummers, their slow cadence setting the pace of the procession, their drums muffled in mourning. The drums weren't just a symbol, or a part of the pomp and show. They had a purpose. The sound of the drums told the dragon that they were coming. By now, Andie knew, he would be waiting, perched on the top of a crag overlooking the place where they would leave the girl. He never moved, from the time they entered the little cup of a valley to the time they left it—though Andie had, once or twice, caught a glimpse of him flying off with a limp figure in one fore-claw. The victim looked like a doll in the hand of a child; the dragon must be enormous.

She looked up as they entered the valley, and there he was, black against the dark sky. In the sunlight he was a kind of dark bronze with gold touches here and there. As usual, he didn't move, and the sacrifice must not have seen him before the priests surrounded her in her chair and flung a thick white veil over her head. They led her to the stake and gently pushed her back up against it, then pulled her
hands around behind her back and tied them there. One of them gave her the Last Rites; like most of the drugged ones, she was oblivious to what was going on, though she went through the motions readily enough, or at least, as well as she could with her hands tied behind her back. If there had been loved ones there, this was when they would have taken a final farewell.

And at that point, it was over. There was nothing more to do, except to leave her to the fate that perched above the valley. The procession formed up again and filed out of the valley, heading back to the Palace.

No one looked back.

Not even Andie.

 

The life of a Fairy Godmother was generally not the easiest in the Five Hundred Kingdoms, and that of a Godmother with not one, but several Kingdoms to administer as well as a myriad of other duties tended to be as crowded as a swarm of bees in a too-small hive.

But Elena would not have traded it for another life. Not even the one of the princess she would have been, had The Tradition had its way with her and had “her” prince not been a toddler at the time they “would” have met. Unfortunately, for every scullery maid with a Fairy Godmother who went to a ball and enchanted a prince, there were dozens for whom that particular happy ending never came. Elena had been lucky, in a sense. She had not gone off and mar
ried someone else, and although The Tradition had built up enough magical potential around her to flatten a palace, it had not driven her mad nor attracted the attentions of something evil. Instead, she had been taken as a Godmother's Apprentice herself, and learned how to use the magic of The Tradition, steering The Tradition in ways
she
wanted it to go. It was a challenging job. It could be a very, very exciting job. It was always a rewarding job.