How to Kill a Dragon

I have been called haughty, depraved, and reclusive, generally by people who have never met me. But it is not wrong to judge yourself superior if you are, nor to do terrible deeds when they are warranted. As for the third accusation, solitude is not always a choice. A reputation hardens with time. People learn to keep their distance until isolation settles into the bones.

Kora was a little thing, with bared arms and a bone necklace. Her black hair had been shaved close on either side, leaving a narrow crest from brow to neck. In her fist she carried a xiphos that, from where I sat, looked better suited to buttering bread than slaying dragons.

She had entered my home armed and without invitation. Under normal circumstances, I might have taken offense. But I had not spoken to anyone in nineteen days.

“What brings you to me?” I asked.

“They say you know how to kill a dragon.”

“People talk. Even if I did know, why would I tell you?”

Her grip tightened around the sword. She was trying not to tremble. Of all the intrepid souls who met me face to face, few stood their ground this long.

“There is a dragon attacking Myrtia.”               

“I see nothing unusual in that.”

“It is rampaging. It burned the western olive terraces. Three nights ago, it carried away two fishermen. One was my brother. All we found were bones. Just this morning, it tore the roof from the assembly hall.”

“Rampaging,” I said. “Really. Rampaging. What a word. Emphasizes the danger. But renders it senseless. That is rich. I may have to steal that one. You don’t mind, do you?”

“You think this is funny? People are dead.”

“The dumbest dragon is a genius by human standards. Dragons are cunning. Ruthless, even. They do not rampage. They settle accounts.”

“Even so. There is no justification for murder.”

“Are you so sure?”

Kora stared at me.

“I intend to kill it,” she said. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“Why you? No offense, but you don’t exactly look the part.”

Kora remained silent.

“Why would the Order entrust this task to an apprentice?” I asked.

“They didn’t. No one knows I’m here.”

“A lone wolf then. Interesting. Stupid, but interesting. I wonder if anyone ever counts the cost of vengeance?”

“I came because I thought you could tell me how.”

“And does this dragon have a name?”

“Noxrath the Devourer.”

It was an old name, and one I had hoped never to hear again. I rose and turned toward the mouth of the cavern so Kora would not see my expression.

“You don't need my help,” I said. “You should talk to Damon Sideris.”

“The drunk?”

“Don’t you think that’s a bit reductive? Calling Damon a drunk is like calling a giant ‘tall.’ He once went draught for draught with Methe for three days and left her prostrate beneath the table.”

“He shoes horses.”

“He once hunted dragons.”

“Not anymore.”

“That is precisely why you should speak to him. Damon learned that dragons mourn their children and take vengeance on those who murder them. Maybe he will talk you out of it.”

Kora lowered her sword. “His family was killed by a dragon.”

“After Damon killed her firstborn.”

“That is not how the story is told.”   

“No,” I said. “I suppose not. People always tell the story in a way that absolves the hero of his own wrongdoing.”

She paced toward the cavern entrance. “The Order of the Gates has weapons, maps, hunters—and did I mention weapons?”

“And an excellent talent for sending children to finish what prominent men are too afraid to take on themselves. How do you think Damon became a slayer at such a young age?”

She stood taller. “I am seventeen.”

“Old enough to die. Young enough for them to call it heroic.”

Color rose into her face. “Damon Sideris is the village drunk. He is no hero.”

“Yes.”  

“And you believe he can teach me how to kill Noxrath?”

“No,” I said. “He can teach you what happens afterward.”

***

Kora did not go to Damon Sideris. Predictably, she went to the Order of the Gates, and against my better judgment, I followed.

I left my cave for the first time in nineteen days. On the ledge, I uncoiled my tail, stretched my wings, and yawned into the summer wind. Then I shrank my noble proportions into the cramped frame of an ordinary man.

Markos was white-bearded, wealthy, and one of Myrtia’s agathoi. He also held one of the seven seats in the Order of the Gates, which I had found useful for keeping watch over men who believed they were keeping watch over dragons.

By dusk, all seven of us occupied our appointed seats in the assembly room. We wore crimson robes and ceremonial myrtle wreaths, which made the Order look less like Myrtia’s secret guardians than guests at an expensive funeral. Alexios sat in the center, with Galen and Georgios on either side. The remaining members were window dressing.

Torchlight shifted across the chamber walls. Kora’s eyes passed over me without recognition. Humans place remarkable faith in appearances. We dragons recognize a being by its words, its deeds, and the gestures no borrowed shape can conceal.

“I will take my vengeance with or without your help.”

“And if you fail? Noxrath will set Myrtia ablaze,” Alexios said.

“What makes you believe you can kill Noxrath?” Georgios asked.

“She has never hunted so much as a wolf,” Galen said.

Alexios raised one hand. “Weapons can be supplied. Courage cannot.”

The men exchanged glances. Their objections were theater. I had watched this performance many times. Before she even arrived, they had worked out her fate and decided what aid they would offer.

Alexios rose and signaled to Georgios. While Georgios left to retrieve Kora’s prize, Alexios spoke. “A dragon’s scales will turn aside any human metal. Beneath the breastplate, however, is a seam through which the heart may be reached. But ordinary steel cannot breach it. Only a dragon’s horn can pierce a dragon’s armor.”

Assuming a human could get close enough to strike the seam, I thought. But I was as curious as the rest at what useless talisman Alexios had dreamt up this time.

Georgios returned and knelt before Alexios, holding up a cedar box. Alexios opened the box and removed a spearhead carved from black horn. Three pale veins ran through its polished surface. Those were the marks of the Vaelith Line.

I knew then why Noxrath had come to Myrtia.

The black horn belonged to Veyra, Noxrath’s firstborn.

But I had to hear it for myself.

“When did we come upon such a prize?” I asked.

“A team of seafarers learned that the young serpent fed along the southern shallows. They left a slaughtered goat there, its flesh steeped in opium, mandrake, and henbane. When she fed and collapsed, they bound her in weighted shipping nets and dragged her beneath the water,” Alexios said.

“And now we have made armor-piercing spearheads from her horns,” Georgios said.

Heat climbed my throat. I swallowed it before smoke escaped Markos’s mouth.

“Your brother helped lay the nets, Kora. You have as much right to wield this weapon as any of us,” Georgios said.

Kora nodded in acknowledgment. So she had known about the nets, if not whose child they had drowned. Like the others, she had begun her story with the retaliation.

The hubris of these humans—to murder a creature that might have lived ten thousand years and imagine there would be no consequence. Alexios owned the western olive terraces. Kora’s brother had helped lay the nets. The assembly hall was where the agathoi levied the taxes that funded the Order. Noxrath’s attacks were not random. They were retribution.

“How good, Alexios,” I said. “Splendid work.”

Alexios returned the spearhead to its cedar box. “Take this to Damon Sideris. He will know how to mount it.”

Kora accepted the box with both hands.

“Finish what your brother began,” Alexios told her.

Then she left, every bit as unarmed as when she had come.

***

In the end, Kora went to Damon Sideris—not because I had told her to, of course, but because Alexios had given her a weapon only Damon could finish.

I reached Damon’s shop ahead of Kora and exchanged Markos for one of my smaller disguises: the swallow that nested in the corner of the eaves. It was not a form suited to dignity, but no one guarded his words in the presence of a bird.

Damon Sideris stood at the forge, ash caked on his arms by sweat, his long gray hair tied back with a strip of leather. He worked the bellows until the coals brightened, drew out a glowing bar of iron, and laid it across the anvil. Each fall of his hammer sent sparks scattering across the floor.

Kora waited before him with the cedar box tucked beneath one arm. Damon acknowledged her only after a dozen blows.

“Don’t stand there staring, girl. Make yourself useful. Fetch me some akraton.”

He pointed toward a clay jug of unmixed wine. Kora filled a lion-headed rhyton and offered it to him. Damon seized it hard enough to spill wine into the dirt, then drained it in one pull.

“Ah, that’s better,” he said. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“I need you to mount a spearhead.”

“Find another smith. That box bears the insignia of the Order. I want no part of it.”

Damon raised his hammer for another blow, saw what lay inside the box, and did not bring it down.

“You think they’ve given you a weapon,” he said. “You are not their champion. You are bait for Noxrath.”

“Then Noxrath will come to me.”

“Dragons know their own blood. Noxrath will follow that horn wherever you carry it.”

“Good.”

Damon lowered the hammer. “That is nearly the same thing that I said when the Order sent me.”

Then Damon looked up at the nest where I was perched, listening.

“You may as well come down, Eryndor. This concerns you too.”

***

I descended from the eaves and took the shape of Markos. There was not enough room for my dragon form without destroying Damon’s roof, and I doubted he would appreciate the improvement.

Kora reached for her xiphos. “You followed me.”

“You ignored excellent advice. I was curious how much worse your decisions might become.”

“I didn’t know dragons could change form.”

Damon placed his hammer on the anvil. “When I was seventeen, the Order put a spear in my hand and sent me after Othryssa the Ashen. They told me she was breeding serpents in the northern caves and that her firstborn would eventually threaten Myrtia. I killed him before he had learned to breathe fire.”

“And she killed your family,” Kora said.

“Othryssa found me before the blood had dried on my armor. She could have killed me, but death was not what she wanted. She gave me a choice. I could surrender my wife and sons, or she would burn every home in Myrtia and leave the island barren.”

Kora’s expression hardened. “What did you choose?”

“Myrtia.”

The forge cracked behind him. Damon stared into the coals.

“By sunrise, my family was dead,” he continued. “The village still stood. The Order called that a victory.”

Kora looked down at the cedar box. “I have no family. My brother was the last. My life is all that remains, and it means very little to me.”

“Mine meant little too,” Damon said. “Othryssa anticipated that. She forbade me to die. If I take my own life, Myrtia burns.”

Kora’s eyes lifted to mine.

“A person who believes she has nothing to lose will carry any weapon, enter any cave, and accept any death, provided important men give that death an admirable name.”

“What would you have me do? Let Noxrath continue killing?”

“No. But if Noxrath has come to settle an account, we should present the account to those who opened it.”

Damon glanced at the box. “The horn will draw Noxrath wherever we carry it.”

“Then we should return it to the Order,” Kora said.

I smiled. The girl was learning.

Before midnight, Markos summoned the Order of the Gates to the assembly hall. The ruined roof had not yet been repaired, and the moon stared down upon our meeting like an indifferent judge.

Alexios arrived first, followed by Georgios, Galen, and the others. They found Kora standing beside the council table, Damon at her right hand and the cedar box before her.

“What is the meaning of this?” Alexios demanded.

“An accounting,” I said.

The wind entered the hall.

Every torch bent toward the western wall. Something vast passed across the moon, followed by the beating of wings that shook dust from the rafters. Noxrath descended through the broken roof and landed upon the stones. Black scales covered him from jaw to tail, and two horns swept backward from his skull. Three pale veins ran through each of them.

His head lowered until one golden eye filled the space above the council table.

“Give me my daughter.”

Kora opened the box.

Noxrath drew in a breath. The sound that escaped him was not a roar. It was lower and more terrible. It was the sound of an earthquake splitting rock.

“This is all they gave me,” Kora said.

“The rest is in the armory,” Georgios blurted. “We can retrieve it.”

Noxrath turned his eye upon him. Georgios fell to his knees.

“You carved her into weapons.”

No one answered.

“I took those who laid the nets,” Noxrath said. “I burned the groves of the man who paid them. Still, my daughter’s bones remain beneath your hall. Give me the firstborn of every man who sits upon this council, and I will consider the debt satisfied.”

Alexios went pale. “You cannot hold our children responsible.”

“Those words arrive late,” Damon said.

Kora placed both hands upon the cedar box. “No children.”

Noxrath’s gaze settled upon her. “You came seeking my death.”

“I did.”

“For the man who helped murder Veyra.”

“My brother.”

“Does that make him innocent?”

“No.”

“Then what do you offer me?”

“The Order of the Gates.”

Alexios rose. “You have no authority—”

Kora turned on him. “You sent my brother to kill Veyra and led him to his death. Then you gave me her horn and sent me after Noxrath. You were willing to sacrifice us both so that you could remain seated beneath your wreath.”

She faced Noxrath again.

“The Order will confess what it did. Every piece of Veyra will be returned to you. Its weapons will be destroyed, its treasury used to rebuild what was burned, and its members stripped of their seats and titles. Myrtia will know why you came here. No songs. No heroic lies. Only the truth.”

Noxrath regarded her. “You offer shame in place of blood.”

“I offer the death of the thing that killed your daughter.”

“You cannot bargain away what does not belong to you,” Alexios said.

“No,” I said. “But I can ensure it dies.”

Noxrath looked toward me. “You have hidden among them for a long time, Eryndor.”

The members of the Order turned toward Markos.

“I preferred to think of it as observation.”

“You observed while they murdered Veyra.”

“I did not know.”

“Ignorance,” Noxrath said, “is the defense humans offer when the truth is inconvenient.”

There was justice in the accusation, which made it particularly irritating.

I released Markos. His white beard vanished first, followed by the stooped shoulders and soft human flesh. My crimson robe split as my wings unfurled across the hall. The council members scattered from their chairs. Alexios pressed himself against the wall.

“If the Order refuses Kora’s terms,” I told Noxrath, “I will tear down its gates myself. If it rises again under another name, I will know.”

Noxrath regarded me across the table.

“The Order dies tonight,” he said. “My daughter is returned to me. The truth of her death is spoken before all Myrtia as a warning that murder will be avenged in these lands.”

“And the killing ends,” Kora said.

Noxrath’s claws scored the stone.

“The score is settled, and peace is restored.”

Alexios looked from one dragon to the other and reached for his courage.

“We do not accept,” he said.

Noxrath showed his teeth. “You mistake judgment for negotiation.”

The Order of the Gates died before morning.

Damon collected every spearhead carved from Veyra’s horns. The Order’s other weapons went into the forge. Its treasury was emptied, its records opened, and its members surrendered the titles behind which they had concealed themselves. Before all Myrtia, Alexios confessed that Noxrath had not attacked without cause. Then he spoke the names of those who had killed Veyra and the names of those who had paid them.

Noxrath carried his daughter’s remains across the sea. He has not returned.

Kora never became a dragon slayer. She did, however, kill the Order of the Gates, a more difficult monster to vanquish and one that had devoured far more than Noxrath ever had.

She still visits my cave. She brings bread, unmixed wine, and enough stubbornness to exhaust an immortal being. She carries her xiphos too, although we generally use it for buttering the bread.

I have not gone nineteen days without company since.