Prince charming's Arc

Chapter 12 of 30

Prince Charming woke before dawn with the hunters' story already running ahead of him. By now their village had heard it, and by noon the next village would too. Someone would come to look. Someone would come to shoot. The dragon knew none of this. If a stranger climbed the ridge with a bow, the dragon would meet him as it had met the hunters at the stream, and this time it might not stop at breathing. He had to warn it before the first curious face came over the fields. He went to the birdbath at the forest's edge with a folded strip of bark in his hand. On the bark he had scratched three marks: a man, an arrow, and the mountain. It was the plainest message he could make. He set a smear of honey on the stone rim and waited. The jewel birds came in a bright drift and settled to drink. He tied the bark to the largest bird's leg with a thread of his own hair and lifted his hand. The flock rose and turned toward the peak. He watched until they were a line of sparks against the gray rock and then gone. Princess Elara Rosemary came down the path behind him with two cups. She asked if the message would be enough. He said the dragon knew the shape of a man and the shape of an arrow, and it would know the mountain meant itself. They sat on the stones and waited. Near midday a single bird returned, slower than the others, carrying something heavy in its claws. It dropped the object into the birdbath and flew off. Prince Charming reached into the water and lifted out a black scale, smaller than the first one the dragon had sent him, and warm as if it had been held. Beside it in the basin lay a curl of ash in the rough shape of an arrow, snapped in half. He closed his hand around the scale. The dragon had understood. It would watch the ridge, and it would not strike first. Princess Elara Rosemary took the broken ash between her fingers and let it crumble. She said the mountain had answered him like a neighbor now, not a stranger. Prince Charming looked up at the peak. The warning was delivered. The dragon would hold its fire for a face it did not know, at least until he came. But holding fire was not the same as trust between the dragon and the people who would soon climb toward it, and that was tomorrow's trouble, not today's.