Handbook for Dragon Slayers (3 page)

I frowned, biting back a sharp retort. I had long ago learned not to take out my frustrations on Judith. Yelling at Judith was the only thing my mother had ever punished me for directly, instead of just sending me off to confess to Father Ripertus, but in truth, it was the only thing my mother didn't
need
to punish me for. I had felt so awful, the first and only time I'd yelled at Judith, that I had tried to give her the circlet off my head in apology.

She had wisely refused the circlet, and Judith's mother, Frau Aleidis, had intervened to keep me from pushing it on her.

Instead of snapping, I forced myself to smile and said, “I'll take a break every other contract.” I reached into the chest, fighting to untwine the ribbons and ribbons of dangling seals from each other.

“All right. Your crutch is against the wall, behind you.”

After she left, I finally got a contract free. It was an agreement about a benefice that included an apple orchard and ten tenant farmers—I was wrong, then, and Boar House did have more land than Sir Kunibert could see from his windows—but there was no mention of the rents from the orchard anywhere in Sir Kunibert's nearly empty accounts book. I sharpened my pen, dipped it into my inkhorn, and began to write out the details of the rent.

The scratch of my quill across the parchment was the only noise other than the crackle of the fire. I was alone with my thoughts for the first time in . . . ever. Solitude and silence. For a moment, I let myself pretend that I wasn't working on accounts underneath the staring gaze of desiccated dragons.

Instead, I pretended I was writing a book.

Whenever I had to copy something or write a letter for my mother, I'd pretend the same thing. I hated the fact that the most exciting employment of my skills was copying numbers or writing down what other people said. Even my push to copy something for the emperor had stuck me with copying a book about horses—me, who was forbidden from riding and deathly afraid of them to boot.

What I really wanted was to write my own book. Not just a commentary on someone else's work, either. I wanted to write something important. Something that rivaled the works of the heathen philosophers or the great Boethius.

Father Ripertus had taught me the methods of the scribes by having me copy from Boethius's
Consolation of Philosophy
. I hadn't understood any of it when I was younger, but it hadn't given me less of a puff of pride when people asked what I was copying and I could tell them.

Eventually, I stopped caring if I copied great works; I wanted to
make
great works. Certainly, I had a place in the world as the Princess of Alder Brook—the Splayfooted Princess of Alder Brook, as it happened. Every time my mother held court, I could see people watching me, watching my foot and the way I walked; I could see the way their faces were skeptical when I spoke until the sense of my words came through to them. But wouldn't it be nice for people to appreciate the sense of my words and
not
be thinking about the shape of my foot at the same time? Wouldn't it be nice to be remembered for something other than being the little lame princess whose parents never managed to beget a proper heir?

I often thought that writing a book would be the key. Boethius himself had been a favorite of emperors before his downfall; but when people thought of him today, they didn't think of his treason or his time in prison. They thought only of his books on music, arithmetic, geometry, and philosophy.

The problem was, I didn't know what sort of subject I should pursue for such a book. All I knew, really, was about housing and clothing servants, vassals, and tenants; reading land contracts; flattering higher lords through fawning letters; and collecting rents. These were hardly subjects that inspired a flurry of copying or commentary from scholars and scribes. And they were boring.

Pen poised over parchment, I closed my eyes and listened to the blessed silence of the hall. The few servants were all out in the kitchen, preparing for dinner.

This is what it could be like
. In my mind's eye, I saw a quiet cloister scriptorium around me, where my fellow nuns copied books while I worked on something else, something greater. The others cast me sideways glances, wishing to know what wondrous thoughts flowed from my pen, but dared not interrupt. A young nun mixed ink for me. And another supplied a steady stream of sharpened pens.

Mathilda of Alder Brook would cease to mean the ruler of a principality that couldn't even afford to buy a professionally scribed copy of
On Horsemanship
for the emperor. Mathilda would become a name coupled with Aristotle and Augustine. Scholars would pore for countless hours over my words, writing fevered glosses in the margins. No one would again equate my name with the evil eye or suggest my mother had walked over a grave while she was pregnant with me.

A cough interrupted the silence of my imaginary cloister.

I opened my eyes to find Lord Parzifal of Hare Hedge staring down at me.

I muffled a scream of surprise so well that it just came out as a strangled squeak. I hadn't seen Parz in weeks. Last time, his hair had tumbled to his shoulders. Now his head was close-cropped, covered in golden stubble.

Even without hair, he was drastically handsome. The first time I'd seen Parz, my head had felt as dense and warm as a cake just out of the oven. I was pleased to note that my head felt no worse than well-cooled yeast bread now. A vast improvement.

“What happened to your hair?” I blurted, then jerked my chin down, angry with myself for being so unmannered. All right, perhaps I was not a
well-cooled
yeast bread at all.

Parz's hand went up to finger the stubble on his scalp—and farther back. He half turned to show me: a brutal-looking wound in some stage between scab and scar, surrounded by an every-colored bruise that went from dull mulberry at the center to pale pear at the edges.

I winced. “What happened?”

“I was . . . too slow on the quintain,” he said. I must have looked confused, because he said, “You know that spinning thing you see in training yards? Looks like a scarecrow with a shield attached to one side? You hit the shield with your lance, and if you do it right, when it spins around, it
doesn't
hit you with a bag of sand as you ride past.”

I frowned. I knew what a quintain was, but I still didn't understand. “Even if you didn't do it right, a bag of sand shouldn't—” I gestured at my head.

Parz's mouth hardened. “Not only didn't I do it right, but some fatherless donkey weighted the bag with rocks instead of sand. As a prank, I guess, but it was less funny when the bag knocked me out.”

“That's horrible! Who would do such a thing?”

“Another squire, visiting with his lord. I guess he grew . . . bored.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, sure,” Parz said. “I only vomited twice, and that was days ago. The barber said more vomiting would be a bad sign. And I didn't break my skull.”

“I hope the other squire was punished!”

Parz seated himself on the bench across from me. “No! That's just it. I was too busy vomiting to explain what happened, and by the time I was done, that pighound had swapped out his rocks for sand again, and then he was gone home. No one believes me. They all just think I'm incompetent. A fool.”

“But you were hurt!”

“Sir Kunibert doesn't tolerate excuses, not even for a claked head. Not even for an illegal bag of rocks that no one can prove. He's sending me home as soon as I can ride without further injury. It's the end of my training here.”

“That's unfair!”

Parz cracked a half smile. “I
was
awfully slow on the quintain.” His smile faded. “And I should have noticed that the quintain was weighted wrong, and the way that idiot was clutching his belly and laughing.”

“Oh, Parz,” I said, and fell silent. Parz leaving Boar House was . . . was a disaster. I didn't travel, and when he went away, I'd never see him again.

The first time I'd met Parz, Sir Kunibert had brought him along to Alder Brook on a visit to my mother. Parz had heard about me and my interest in books, I guess, because he hadn't been in the keep ten minutes before he cornered me and demanded to know where the books on dragons were kept.

You might think I would hate a guest who came up to me and demanded something from me, seemingly at random, and I did try to hate him for a little bit. But Parz had become instantly charming—bowing over my hand, calling me “the princess-librarian,” and otherwise using his looks to maximum effect.

I'd been suspicious at first. Hadn't I always, always hated being judged on my appearance? And here I was, letting a boy I didn't know behave brashly to me just because he was pretty to look at?

But there was more to Parz than his face. He was lively and enthusiastic—but he was also kind. We spent an hour talking about dragons before Sir Kunibert finished his business with my mother, claimed his squire, and returned to Boar House.

When Parz had departed, the room and the whole world seemed darker. And now the world would stay that dark, always, once he left Boar House.

I took several deep breaths, trying to screw up my courage to tell Parz how much I was going to miss him.

But he wasn't even looking at me. He was staring at the dragon heads on the wall. “What I need to do,” he said thoughtfully, “is to slay a dragon. Yes. And as soon as possible.”

“
S
LAY A DRAGON
? W
HY
?”

“To restore my honor,” Parz said. “To prove that I'm more than just an idiot who gets knocked off a horse and put near death by a prank. To prove . . . I'm worth training.”

“So!” Judith said angrily. Parz and I both jumped. “In order to train further with a dragon slayer, all you have to do is kill a dragon?” She thunked a mug of hot honey water down in front of me. “Makes
no
sense, Parz. Sounds like a good way to get yourself killed, in fact.”

“Judith!” I said, shocked that she would not only interrupt Lord Parzifal and scold him, but that she would also address him so familiarly.

It obviously shocked her, too, because she stared at me, blood draining from her face. “I'm—sorry, Princess Mathilda,” she said. “I forgot my—my place.”

“I think your apology goes to Lord Parzifal more than me.”

“I apologize, Lord Parzifal.”

Parz looked from Judith to me and back again. “Um,” he said, and finally turned to me. “Tilda, you know things. Where can we find a dragon? A little one?”

Still thrown off by Judith's behavior, I said, “My steward says there's a new dragon at Mount Lorelei.”

“I've heard of that one. It's way too big for me to try on my own,” Parz said. He didn't look at me as he spoke. He looked at Judith instead.

I glanced at Judith, who met Parz's gaze with a grim mouth and a sharp headshake.

Puzzled, and also slightly embarrassed for some reason, I turned my attention back to the box of contracts before me. The next one I pulled out was a contract for killing a dragon somewhere down the Rhine past Snail Castle.

“There's a record of Sir Kunibert's past dragon slayings in here,” I said. “Maybe . . . maybe there's some sort of indication of survivor dragons, or, um, incomplete contracts?”

Parz's eyes lit up, and he nodded.

“So, let's go through all the contracts,” I said. “Put them into piles based on what they are. Even if we don't find what we're looking for, it'll help me.” I glanced at Judith, who was now being strangely silent and prim. “You too, Judith.”

She nodded, and sat down next to me, untangling a few contract ribbons before opening the first one.

“I didn't know you could read,” Parz said to Judith.

She was a slow, painstaking reader. Every day, as soon as my lesson with Father Ripertus was over, I had turned around and taught Judith all the letters and words I'd just learned. But her opportunities to practice had been far fewer than mine. Nonetheless, she
could
read and write, even if she had to say everything aloud under her breath as she went.

“There's a lot you don't know about me,” Judith muttered.

“Judith!” I said, shocked at her continuance of overfamiliar behavior.

“It's all right, Tilda,” Parz said.

I frowned at Parz, wanting to give him an icy scolding about interfering with my servant, but I held my tongue, too confused to know who to blame. I went back to the contracts.

With Parz and Judith to help, I had the contracts sorted into three piles in short order. The first pile was dragon slaying contracts, which Parz now perused eagerly. The second pile was other kinds of income for Sir Kunibert, like his orchard benefice. The third pile was contracts for which Sir Kunibert owed money or service. There was also a small fourth pile of halfheartedly started account books, whose ledgers never went much past the first page.

“Is that everything?” Parz asked.

“Not quite,” I said, reaching into the box and pulling out a pale leather book of a size that fitted perfectly to my hand. The binding was limp, and the book moved gently back and forth in a pleasing, flippy way. I unhooked the toggle holding the book closed and opened the fore-edge flap.

The text block of the book was made of thin vellum—and it was entirely blank.

“Anything in there?” Parz asked.

I clutched the book to my chest, almost involuntarily. “It's empty,” I said, and forced myself to show him the book.

He glanced at it, then continued to study the dragon slaying contracts.

I went through the book more carefully, but it truly was empty. And of such high quality, filled with the perfect vellum.

A door swung open at the far end of the hall. A number of tired-looking young men and boys trooped in, heading for the tables. Parz stood quickly—and just like that, he disappeared out the other door, leaving his stack of contracts behind. I blinked. Judith shrugged.