“I am.”
“You can't do it.” He held up a hand. “I mean no offense. But it's not possible. You'll need all of us and some of them if there's going to be any hope.”
“I'll go alone.”
Silence fell in the small room and Juoth looked at Tarek and the old man looked back for a long moment and then nodded once and Juoth's eyes grew larger and he sat back and shook his head and looked at the far wall. What he saw there invisible to the other two.
Tarek touched the map again. Something almost reverent in it. “You think it will be enough?”
“I'll bring gold,” Brack said. “He'll come to a horse and gold.”
“He'll know you're there.”
“He already knows I'm here.”
“How will you take him?”
Brack thought for a moment and looked back at the map and traced along it with his finger. Tapped a place when he found it. “A crossbow from here. One shot. An eye if I can. Then the sword.”
“And if the bow misses?”
“Then the sword.”
“Look,” Juoth said, leaning forward. “What you're saying is going to get you killed. Is this some sort of joke?”
“Not at all,” Brack said.
The old man smiled softly and stood, looking at Juoth. “It's not what you think it is. He can do this.”
“The one he killed at the city was different.”
Brack stood as well. “You know dragons,” he said. “So you know there's no easy way to kill them. Yet I've done it. I'll do it again.”
“In land you don't know, with a crossbow and a sword.”
Bending, Brack picked up the mugs and the map curled into itself and rolled to the edge of the table. He watched it roll and thought of what he'd seen and how far it was and how the blood had been under the new snow and then he said: “Think maybe I should leave the crossbow. Just so it's a fair fight.”
He woke the next day at early light and they were gone from before the cabin, but they had left a man. Clad in fur and canvas, holding himself against the cold. As Brack stepped from the doorway the man looked up and his eyes widened and he turned and ran and shouted something as he ran that was lost and taken by the wind.
Brack watched him go for a moment and shook his head and turned to where the old man was bringing the horse up from the small stable behind the cabin. A big black pack horse, the type used to bring the wagons through the country. Nothing like the lean and powerful horses he'd ridden on the field in front of the Ringed City when the red dragon had stood roaring in a sea of mailed men burning and dying as they ran with pikes and swords, the arrows so thick on the beast's back until he raked his wings and tore them free or sheered them off and then the rolling wave of fire as he bent and killed whole companies at once.
But a horse nonetheless, one that would get him where he needed to go and serve its purpose well enough. This not a dragon he would fight with long charges and a lance and then the sword.
In his other hand Tarek held the crossbow, made of wood and leather and the string fresh and new. Three bolts in the quiver. Brack looked at them and thought how if he had time for even the second something had gone quite differently than he'd planned and very wrong but it was all the same. Better to have the bolts and never fire them than to find time to loose them and run out. He reached out and took the bow and patted the horse's flank while it eyed him and began to attach the bow to the rough saddle.
“You remember where it is?” Leaning closer to Brack. Urgent and calm and fire all together. Juoth stood back by the cabin watching and when Brack looked at him he looked away.
“I do,” Brack said.
The old man reached and put a hand on his shoulder and looked at him for a moment. “I didn't get to see you kill the one at the Ringed City. I wish I could see you do it now.”
Brack smiled. “I'll show you it when it's done.”
“That's not the same.”
“I know.”
“You're sure I can't come?”
“It's better this way. Try to slow them down if you can.”
“I'll tell them you went toward the river.”
“Even better.”
Brack stepped forward and embraced the old man and felt his strength through fur and leather and armor and then released him and turned and put his foot in the stirrup and pulled himself onto the horse. The iron helmet hanging on the far side of the saddle, opposite the crossbow. His other armor already on and heavy but not too heavy for this horse. He looked out at the path before him and then back.
“Listen,” he said. “Anything else happens, you leave here. All right? Don't try to come kill it.”
“Nothing else will happen.”
“If it does.”
“If it does I will.”
“Take as many as you can. They'll want to stay but you have to tell them. Get down to the plains.”
“You know what a city is for a dragon.”
A feeding ground, Brack thought, but he said: “Walls are better than none. If it kills me, it's going to track me back here. There won't be anything left when it leaves. You need to be gone before that. Ignore the cities if you want, but get to the plains.”
“I will.”
“And tell Kayhi.”
“I won't have to.”
Brack nodded, then looked up and raised a hand toward Juoth. The islander raised his hand briefly and then turned and went into the cabin.
He turned the horse and rode out. The spine of the ridge tall and dark before him, the top blown free of snow and just black rock jutting in jagged relief. As if bathed in fire and smoke and now burnt all to the core. The trees stunted and dead. He rode and the horse struggled in the deep snow here in the valley and then found the path and when he turned back the town had been consumed by the wilderness and snow as if it did not exist and it was just he and the horse and the dragon, alone and all three being drawn together by the movements of fate or the world and when those paths came to the same point two would die and one would live and all moved to that intersection to see which those would be.
Chapter Six
He brought the horse to a halt on the edge of the plain and stood looking out at it. All about a ring of dark stones rising. This ancient caldera. On the far side and to the north that stone ridge falling lower, perhaps twice his height, but rising to three times that on his left, the crags and outcroppings free of snow as the wind tore it from those surfaces and sent it swirling away down the side of the sloping mountains, running toward the true mountains where they towered like behemoths on the horizon. There the land too wild and untamed for a man to live and all raw as if in the world's forming.
The field itself perhaps four hundred yards in each direction, a rough circle with the stones jutting in at points and retreating at others. Flat as the calm sea of a dead morning. Drifted in heavy snow. The horse breaking through it, but hard enough that he could stand on it were he to dismount. It looked like the mouth of a volcano where the molten heart was frozen solid and the burning rivers plunging away were made of ice. He looked back along the ridge to the lower plain and the forest that stood between him and the town.
A good place to kill a dragon, here in this frozen world.
He got off the horse and tested his weight on the snow and nodded and held up a hand for the wind, though he knew where it came from. Turned slowly in that spot to look all about and determine his hunt. For a hunter must know his place better than the game for that one slim moment in which the game's life is in his hands and he can make no mistake or that life will slip swiftly off and be lost to him.