Prince charming's Arc

Chapter 16 of 30

The bell did not ring that night, but Prince Charming woke anyway. He sat up in the dark and listened. The wind moved in the trees. Nothing else. He pulled on his boots and walked out to the road with a lantern. Halfway up the rise he found the cord. It lay slack in the grass, cut clean at the stake. He knelt and touched the ends. Someone had crouched here in the dark and sawed through the line while the princess slept. He looked up the road toward the ridge. Wet prints led off the track and into the trees, climbing. One man. Moving fast and quiet toward the mountain. Prince Charming ran back to the tower and shouted the princess awake. She leaned over the rail with her hair loose. He told her the cord was cut and a man was already on the ridge path. She said she would watch the road for others. He turned and ran for the birdbath. He had no time to send a bird. He cupped his hands at the stone rim and shouted up the mountain, the way he had never shouted before. He called that a man was climbing with a bow and to hold the promise, to hold it. Then he ran the path himself. The honey strips brushed his shoulders. He crossed the first stream and started up the ridge trail. He heard the poacher before he saw him. A branch cracked ahead. Prince Charming shouted again, this time at the man. He shouted that the mountain was watched and the dragon would not strike, that he should turn back before he wasted an arrow. The poacher spun in the path with his bow half drawn. Behind him, above the pines, the dragon dropped from the ridge in one long glide. Its wings threw shadow across them both. It landed between the man and the mountain, folded its wings, and lay down across the trail. It did not open its mouth. It did not lift a claw. It only put its body in the way and looked at the poacher with its yellow eyes. The bow lowered. The man stepped back once, then again, then turned and ran down the path past Prince Charming without a word. Prince Charming walked to the dragon and pressed his palm to the warm scales at its jaw. The dragon had held. It had kept the promise even with a weapon drawn on its own ground. He sat down in the dirt beside it and caught his breath. He knew now the cord would need a guard, and that word of a dragon that would not kill would travel faster than word of one that would. More would come. But the mountain had answered when he called, and that had not been true a season ago.