The truth was that the king’s early death had stolen years of preparation from Emory.
It mattered not to the people of Harding that Emory must face a dragon before he had even reached his twentieth year, though his forbearers, as far back as history remembered, had made it to nearly thirty before each faced his dragon. For Emory to take his father’s place as king, he must do as his father had done, and his father before him. He must conquer a dragon and rescue a damsel, and take that maiden as his bride. And he must do so without having been given any instruction in the ways of dragons, and he must do it single-handedly, without aid from any quarter. For so it had been throughout his people’s memory, that a dragon and a damsel made a king.
“Your chances may be slim,” the queen mother said, who had herself once been a rescued maiden, “but your choices, as you say, are slimmer. So, take these gloves.” And she handed them into Emory’s grasp, and he took them. They were heavier than they looked to be, and the leather, though soft, was thick. “These will protect your hands against the dragon’s heat,” she said. “They are half of what I have to offer, and they are not enough,” she went on. “So listen to what else I have to say. Your sword is one weapon. Your mind is another. But you have a third, and to conquer the dragon you shall need all three.”
Emory had looked deep into his mother’s dark eyes, waiting for her to tell him what his third weapon was, but something in him told him not to ask. He had nodded as if he had understood, and thanked her for the gloves, and kissed her cheek, and walked away, leaving her in her chamber by the fire, a ginger cat curled in her lap.
The gloves were on his hands. His sword was at his hip. His brain was in his head. Whether or not Emory had the other weapon, the one his mother had told him he would need . . . well, it no longer mattered, did it? For Emory watched his hand push against the door and he heard it moan open, and then he stepped inside the dragon’s castle.
The Devil’s Eye
Emory was a warrior first, and so the dragon was the first thing he saw. Nothing else mattered except how it would figure in battle: the debilitating heat mattered only in the challenge it would pose to Emory’s stamina; the heaping jewels mattered only in how the piles of them might provide protection, how they might be useful as weapons; the mirrors he noted as a strike in the dragon’s favor, for surely the dragon was used to their deception, though Emory was not.
The scent—the sweet-spice tang that he could not see but was as real as everything else in the great castle hall—the scent, he took care to not breathe in too deeply, for perhaps it was poisonous.
Sword unsheathed, held steady in front of him, Emory assessed his enemy. Why a creature this repugnant would choose to line its lair in reflective glass, Emory could not begin to guess. For though its opalescent scales were what drew a man’s gaze, the skin around the dragon’s eye slits and nostrils was puce, like dried blood; and the claws on the dragon’s front feet, which it had crossed in front of itself like a housecat, were each a black, serrated, menacing hook that could tease the guts from a man with the gentlest stroke.
From where he stood, Emory could see but one of the dragon’s eyes, and it was closed. Great bursts of steam billowed from the dragon’s nostrils; the mirrored walls dripped with condensation. The beast had holes instead of ears. The tips of black teeth gleamed along the edges of its lipless reptilian mouth. A tongue flicked out—forked, black, awful—and disappeared.
And then Emory looked past the beast’s head, into the mirror behind it. Slitted, unblinking, amber—the reflection of the dragon’s other eye—open, watching.
Emory gasped, his breath catching like a death rattle, for in that moment he knew that he would die. He knew it, sure as he’d been about anything ever before, and he wished suddenly with a fervor that he was just a boy again.
In the dragon’s amber gaze, Emory saw the sun of his seventh summer. For the hottest three days of that summer, in mid-August, some strange celestial event had cast a shadow across the middle of the sun—a long slit, it looked like, that transformed the sun Emory had always known into a cruel reptilian eye.
Devil’s eye, the priests called it, kissing the sharp-tipped triangles they wore on chains about their necks, and they warned everyone to stay inside, away from its unblinking watch.
But Emory’s father, the king, did not abide such hogswallop. “Come, son,” he said on the hottest of the three days, the last. “We shall hunt.”
And he waved away the squires and the footmen and the master of the hounds, taking only a paring knife from the kitchen, two apples, and Emory’s own small bow and quiver of arrows.
Young Emory followed his father away from the castle and keep, the weight of the devil’s eye heavy on his head, and he followed his father through the gate in the wall, and on, until they reached the forest, dappled and shadowed and hushed, where the eye could not see him anymore.
The king was a big man, broad and handsome, with skin tanned to leather, feet and hands callused from battle and from play. At seven, Emory already fashioned his hair after his father’s, worn down in loose black curls to please the ladies when at court and tied back with a strip of leather when afield. The king’s strong brow meant he never had to squint against the sun, and his full mouth was never afraid to laugh, to kiss, to eat, to cry. He was a man who held life in his jaws as a dog held a smoked lamb’s leg—with devourous greed and absolute pleasure.
On this day, he would teach his son, his first and only child, how to kill. What a pleasant way to spend a summer afternoon!
Emory carried his own quiver across his shoulder, his own bow in his hand. He had unloaded his small shafts many times into targets and practice dummies, to the applause and praise of his teachers, and with his quiver over his shoulder and his father at his side—and now that he was hidden by trees from the devil’s eye—he felt himself very brave indeed. He imagined that he and his father were two of a pair, both big, both strong, both rulers of their world. He followed his father and made a game of stepping just where his father had stepped before him, hopping from place to place, since the king’s stride was easily three times the length of his own. It was cooler in the forest, away from the sun’s reach, and Emory was happy.
Suddenly, his father stopped. Emory stopped too, just barely before crashing into the king’s back. “There,” said the king, and he pointed not twenty feet away, near the base of a tall fir tree, at a light-brown hare.
Emory did not hesitate. He reached over his left shoulder with his right hand, plucked an arrow from the quiver, notched it in his bow, and, with an exhale, loosed it.
The hare looked up and locked its gaze with Emory’s. Its eyes, jewel black and shiny, did not blink. The hare knew it was too late to hope for mercy, and Emory knew it was too late to call back his arrow, though if he could have, he would not.
The arrow struck the hare in its neck, piercing through the front and coming out the other side. Blood stained its white scruff red, and it was dead before Emory had run to its body.
He stared down at the rabbit, at the eyes that had just been alive with shine a second before, and now were dull with death. The king’s heavy, callused hand landed with a thump on Emory’s shoulder. “Well done, my son,” he said.
And then he handed Emory the paring knife and said, “Choose the best foot.” Emory selected the right rear, because he himself favored his right hand, and because the rear foot was where a hare held its power. His father the king watched as Emory sawed through the still-warm fur, meat, tendon, and bone to retrieve his talisman. Then the king took the paring knife.