Elana K. Arnold Damsel
Dedication
For my brother Zak, who loves dragons
One
The Dragon’s Blame
The castle seemed to grow from the cliffs that cupped the shoreline. Its jagged-peaked turrets pierced the rain-heavy clouds above; its windows were gaping mouths and gored-out eyes. Between the slate-gray cliffs and the smoke-gray sky and the churning gray sea and the ghost-gray mist, it was a gray place, indeed. It was so thoroughly gray that a traveler who lost his way could be blinded by it—by the overwhelming grayness that permeated everything, erasing vision entirely.
Stay too long in this gray world, the legend went, and risk your eyes turning gray too. Risk your skin growing ashen. Risk your hair dulling to iron.
Yes, it was a gray world.
Sitting upon the broad back of his night-black steed, Prince Emory of Harding scanned the vast gray scene around him. There was the beach, quiet waves lapping upon the shoreline like a kitten at its dish of cream, the tameness and gentle repetition belying the fierceness Emory knew the great sea had hidden within it. There beneath his horse’s hooves was a short, pebbled beach, peppered with stones of all shades of gray, from nearly black to nearly white. Emory and his steed, whom he called Reynard, had emerged onto this beach from a dense forest through which there was no trail. Emory had been obliged to lead his horse much of the way, slashing a path for them with his sword.
As Emory had grown closer to the edge of the forest, the trees he encountered grew harder and harder until, finally, he found that they were no longer made of wood at all, but rather petrified to stone. These trees even Emory’s loyal, lethal sword had been powerless against, a fact that ignited a flame of anger in his chest. When he struck it, a tree should fall. That is what trees do. That is what they had always done, trees. It was their duty.
But these last trees would not fall, and when Emory struck them with his sword an awful clang rang out, and the impact of the blow vibrated up through Emory’s sword arm and rattled all of his bones.
Not even a dent. Unacceptable.
Yet he had been forced to accept it, had been forced to unsaddle Reynard so the horse was narrow enough to pick a path through the trees that refused to get out of their way.
No matter, Emory had told himself as he flung the saddle back onto Reynard; as he fastened the girth, horse grunting; as he hefted himself into the saddle once again. He walked the horse along the beach, surveying, and Reynard picked a path through the pebbles. Emory would punish the forest on the dragon’s flesh.
For he knew it was the dragon’s blame that the trees had turned to gray stone, just as it was the dragon’s blame that this part of the world was misted dark with unspilled rain, and the dragon’s blame that the sea was slate gray instead of blue-green, and the dragon’s blame that the unblinking eye of the sun was dulled by a cataract of gray.
When the dragon was slain (if he managed to slay it), this part of the world would brighten again, and Emory would be the lightbringer as well as king.
He hated the dragon. It was that simple, and his hate was pure like cleansing fire. He breathed in and out his hatred as he sat upon his steed, as his eyes scanned the cliffs in front of him, searching for a way to climb them, though he knew already that there would be no easy path.
Who had built this castle into these cliffs? It was a mystery without an answer. Had they built it or had it been born? Some wizened elders claimed that the castle emerged from the craggy cliffs over millennia, growing a fraction of an inch a year, surfacing so slowly that its progress was imperceptible.
Others countered that the castle had not emerged at all, but simply had always been, like the sea, like the cliffs themselves, and to attempt to trace their origin was a fool’s mission.
No one knew how the castle had come to be, and Emory did not care. He did not care why a sun hung in the sky; it did, and that was enough for him. As long as it warmed his back each day and disappeared each night, Emory had no desire to waste his time examining the whys and wherefores behind its existence, and that was how he felt about the castle and the cliffs, the sea and the sky.
The world was made. That was all.
This resolved and set aside left Emory with just the question of how best to conquer it.
“I’ll have to scale it, Reynard,” Emory said.
The horse grunted, warm clouds puffing out from his enormous nostrils.
“You’ll have to wait behind,” Emory told him, to which Reynard said nothing.
That settled, Emory swung himself out of the saddle once again, landing on the shifting pebbles of the beach. They crunched together under his feet, like bones grinding.
Reynard would not need to be tied. He was a good horse, and he wouldn’t go far. And if Emory did tie him, and then were to die—either falling from the cliff or in the jaws of the dragon he expected to encounter up above—Reynard would die, as well.
Everything and everyone dies, of course, but dying while tied by the reins to an outcropping of rocks at the base of a cliff seemed like an undignified way to go, and Reynard was not an undignified animal, and Emory was not, he thought, a cruel master.
Once again, Emory unhooked the long leather strap of the girth, pulling it from the brass ring at Reynard’s side, unwinding it as the horse relaxed his gut. He heaved the saddle down from Reynard’s proud high back, revealing a square patch of sweat-wet fur, which Emory rubbed dry with the saddle blanket. Then he grabbed the crownpiece of the bridle from behind Reynard’s ears and pulled it forward, the bit clanking against the horse’s teeth. Freed, Reynard stretched his neck long and wandered off, snuffling along the pebbled beach in search of the few gray tufts of sea grass.
Emory considered himself to be horselike in all the best ways. One thing he could do was place blinders on his own vision, focusing on the singular task in front of him, and this he did now, preparing himself for the climb.
The saddle and its bags were slung across a boulder, and Emory rifled through them with practiced purpose, gathering what he would need: rope; a pickax; a leather pouch of fine-powdered chalk; leather gloves; a bladder of fresh water. His sword, which was never far from his body. In his pocket was his lucky talisman, a rabbit’s foot he’d cut himself from his first kill when he was seven years old.
Then he walked to the base of the cliffs, an almost-vertical wall of slate, and placed his hands on its cold, hard surface. He looked up, craning his neck farther and farther back, and for a flash it seemed that the old legend had come true, as his field of vision filled so completely with gray. So much gray, so all-encompassing, that Emory was blinded by it, and he felt his bowels loosen with fear, and for a second he was a babe again, powerless and falling, with no knowledge of what was up and what was down, drowning in the gray that whirled around him, tumbling and helpless.
But then he caught sight of his own hand against the endless gray wall, and he remembered himself. He was not powerless. He was no babe. He was Emory of Harding, and he had a dragon to slay.
Emory’s Hands
The slate was tricky. It was cold, as hard and slick as ice. There were holds, but Emory found that he could not trust his vision to find them. The trick of grayness all around made this into a shadowless world, and the wall looked flat, without dimension. But if he slid his fingers along its surface, he could feel ridges, wrinkles, recesses. That was where he would grab hold, and he would make a ladder of them, an invisible chain of handholds and footholds.