Emory watched him slit an opening in the rabbit’s fur and set aside the knife. The king glided his pointer and middle fingers of both hands into the hole he’d made, and he pulled, and with a sound like cloth tearing, the rabbit’s pelt pulled away, revealing the white shiny membrane underneath and, beneath that, the red muscles and white tendons and bones. The king tore the pelt all the way open, to the head and remaining hind foot, then he snapped the foot easy as could be, sawed though the neck, and pulled the pelt the rest of the way free. He flipped the rabbit belly-side up, made a shallow cut just through the thin white skin, slipped his fingers underneath to lift the skin away from the intestines, and then cut all the way up the length of the rabbit. Pulling open the skin, he carefully retrieved the heart, placing it into Emory’s cupped hands.
“It’s your heart, son,” he said. “Do you want to eat it now, or later, after Cooky can fry it up?”
Emory stared down at the raw red thing he was holding. He knew his father wanted him to eat it now, raw and fresh from the rabbit’s chest. But the thought of swallowing such a warm slimy thing, like a large red slug, made him feel as if he might vomit. “Later, please,” he said, and if the king was displeased, he did not show it.
He turned back to his work, quickly spilling the intestines into the dirt and scooping the liver, kidneys, and lungs, then the heart from Emory’s hands, into a leather pouch.
What was left of Emory’s kill looked like meat, now, rather than rabbit, and Emory’s mouth began to water. How pleased Mother would be!
Then the king had given Emory an apple to eat on the walk home, and he let Emory lead the way.
Now, here in the dragon’s lair, seeing the reflected amber eye watching him, Emory remembered. He had been afraid of the devil’s eye when he had entered the forest, and though it still had hung in the sky when he emerged, with the hare’s foot in his pocket and his first kill behind him, it was no longer the devil’s eye that hung in the sky, not to Emory; it was only a trick of shadow and light, and nothing more.
“Dragon,” he said, the talisman from a decade ago snug in his pocket, “I am here to conquer you.” Perhaps he would die today. Perhaps he would live. Either way, he would not hesitate. He would not falter.
A dragon is a big and scary thing, but it is not the only big and scary thing. Emory had seen others. Perhaps this monstrosity before him was like the devil’s eye from his childhood: made bigger and scarier by fear and ignorance, cut down and put into its place with perspective and knowledge.
The dragon opened its other eye and turned its giant head. And then it opened its jaws, black teeth and black forked tongue, and it roared a deafening screech that vibrated Emory’s skeleton.
Or, Emory reconsidered, perhaps not.
Emory’s Sword
Emory held his weapon waist-high, perpendicular to the ground, cutting his field of vision into two equal parts. He shifted his weight from right to left and back again, testing the beast’s response to his movement. Its gaze, he noted, did follow him, but slowly, as if it didn’t see him well, or clearly.
In his kingdom, no one would speak to Emory about dragons; all his life, he had known that one day he would face a dragon unaided and untaught. But still, he heard things from time to time: servants telling tales, stories bandied about at market. And though he had no real study of dragons on which to depend, he’d heard it said that dragons have vision only for far and not for close, and other times that the dragons’ deep love of gold and jewels comes from their attraction for brightly colored things. This had all seemed like the senseless talk of those who would never themselves meet a dragon in close quarters and had nothing better to do with their idle time than chatter, but seeing this creature’s unfocused gaze gave Emory hope that, perhaps, there was some truth to the old legends, after all.
Then his steel blade caught a glint of sunlight through the window, and the dragon’s focus shifted in an instant, becoming razor sharp, and it drew itself up on its haunches, claws tapping the mirrored floor, and stepped toward him.
It was the brightness that drew the dragon’s gaze! Emory shifted his sword so the sun no longer struck it, and he stepped back as the dragon opened its maw. He had half a second before a jet of blue flame sprayed out, and he leaped away, rolling behind a mountain of jewels just in time.
He had to dull the shine of his blade. Emory looked about, desperate, but all around him were jewels and reflections of jewels, and reflections of his own panicked visage, the color high in his cheeks.
But, there—at his reflection’s waist! The bag of chalk he’d used when climbing. Emory dug a handful of powder from the bag, its dry coolness coating his fingers, such a contrast to the hall’s humid heat, and he rubbed it across the blade, turning his sword from hilt to tip a dull gray-white.
The hand he’d dipped in the chalk had been transformed, as well, its bronze skin well masked, and so Emory dug into the bag again, scooping up another fistful of chalk, and he rubbed it into his cheeks, his forehead, his chin, his nose, his neck, turning himself into a ghost, a shadow warrior.
As a test, he found a gem, a ruby the size of an apple, and rolled it away from the pile as quietly as he could. The dragon’s smart amber gaze was upon it at once, tracking its progress across the floor.
Then, his heart pounding in his throat, Emory extended his arm from behind the jewel heap where he crouched, waiting for the dragon’s breath to scorch it.
Nothing. Emory wiggled his fingers. Again, nothing. Drawing his hand back, Emory sighed his relief.
There was naught wrong with the dragon’s hearing, Emory instantly learned as the beast charged the jewel stack with a roar, sending gems flying to clatter in all directions, striking the mirrored walls in a series of bangs and crashes. Silent as a ghost, Emory slipped along the wall to the far side of the chamber, and the dragon did not follow.
The mirrors all around were not made of glass. They were instead highly polished sheets of gold that reflected almost as clearly as a looking glass, but with a strange rosy tint that he could not explain.
There were panels in the mirrors, Emory saw, panels that meant there were rooms beyond this one. Rooms in which a damsel must be hidden. Was she suffering, he wondered, his fated beauty? Was she locked and chained? Was she frightened? She was somewhere, Emory knew, and he would find her.
But first he must focus here, in this room, on this foe. He trained his mind back to his immediate surroundings.
Now that he had proved true the chatter he’d heard about a dragon’s vision, Emory racked his brain for anything else he may have ever heard about the beasts.
“Not many places you can stick a dragon,” Thad, the pig boy, had told his fellow slop-hands. It was early evening, just before sunset, and Emory and Maddie, the hedge warder’s niece, were trying their best to stay silent in the hayloft where he had just relieved her of her virginity.
“Aw, Thad, you don’t know shite about dragons,” said little Merle, hefting his bucket of scraps up into the trough.
“Do too!” Thad shouted. “I know a sight more than you fools, I ’spect!”
“’Spect all you want,” said Merle’s older brother Darro. “You don’t know shite about shite.”