Prince charming's Arc

Chapter 11 of 30

In the morning, Princess Elara Rosemary came back from the birdbath with a stranger's arrow in her hand. She said she had found it stuck in the moss beside the near path, the shaft fresh, the fletching cut in a pattern he did not know. Prince Charming turned the arrow in his fingers. Hunters from the next village over the ridge. Word had crossed the fields that the forest had gone tame, and men with bows had come to test it. If they shot a fox on his honey path, or a jewel bird at the basin, every trust he had built would break in one afternoon. He put the arrow in his belt and went out with the black scale at his chest and an empty pouch over his shoulder. He found them at the second stream, three men crouched behind a fallen log with a stag in their sights. The stag was the one with the broken antler. Prince Charming stepped into the open between the bow and the animal. He did not draw a weapon. He told the men whose forest they stood in, and he told them the stag would not run. To prove it, he laid his hand on the stag's neck. The men lowered their bows halfway, unsure. Then a shadow crossed the leaf mold. The dragon came down through the canopy in a slow, heavy glide, wings the color of coal and coals, horns swept back, and landed in the stream bed. Water rose to its knees. It folded its wings and looked at the hunters. It did not roar. It only breathed, and the breath was hot enough to bend the ferns. One man dropped his bow. Another knelt. The third backed away with his hands open. Prince Charming told them to go home and to tell their village that the forest had a keeper and the mountain had a friend. They went. When the men were gone, the dragon lowered its head to the water and drank. Prince Charming stood in the stream beside it and rested his palm on the ridge above its eye. The stag walked past them both without flinching. Princess Elara Rosemary met him at the treeline at dusk. He gave her the arrow and told her the hunters would not come back, but others would hear the story and come to see. She said the story would travel faster than he could walk. He looked up at the mountain, where the dragon was climbing again in the last light. The forest was safe for tonight. The mountain was still its own country, and now the whole ridge beyond the fields knew a dragon guarded it. Tomorrow the trouble would be people, not creatures.