Prince charming's Arc

Chapter 23 of 30

Prince Charming slept badly and woke before the birds. The scale from yesterday's test sat on his table. The signal worked. That was the trouble. A shepherd warming his hands, a tinker boiling tea, a boy burning brush for his father — any of them could send black smoke into the sky, and the dragon would come down expecting him. He had built a bell that any stranger could ring by accident. He needed a way to mark the true signals from the false ones before someone died for a cookfire. He rode to the tower at first light and laid it out for the princess. Smoke was smoke. The dragon could not smell a name in it. But it could see color, and it could count. She listened, then pulled the diamond earring from her ear and held it up between them. The jewel birds came for diamonds. What if the signal was not the smoke alone, but the smoke and the birds together? Light the fire, then send a bird up over it. No bird, no answer. They tested it that morning. He rode to the birdbath and lit the pot with a thin feed of oiled rag. Gray smoke, then black. He did not send a bird. He sat in the grass and watched the mountain. The dragon did not come. An hour passed. The smoke thinned and died. The ridge stayed empty. He rode back to the tower with his jaw tight, half afraid the creature had simply missed it. The princess met him at the door and shook her head. No wings. The dragon had held. They lit the pot again at noon. This time the princess set her earring in a scrap of cloth and tied it to the leg of the largest jewel bird. The bird climbed above the smoke, wings throwing hard light across the field, and circled once. Within minutes the dragon rose off the mountain and came down to the ridge. It waited. It looked at the bird. It looked at the smoke. Then it lifted off and flew home. Prince Charming climbed the tower steps and found the princess already writing it down on the back of a feed bill. Smoke plus bird plus diamond. Anything less was a stranger's fire, and the dragon would let it burn. He walked back down to the birdbath in the dusk and stood a long time with his hand on the cold stone. He had closed one door. A traveler could light a cookfire now and the mountain would stay quiet. But the diamond hung from a bird he did not own, in an ear that belonged to a woman who could leave. The signal was safe only as long as she stayed, and as long as the flock did. He picked up the scale from his pocket and turned it in his fingers, thinking about what he still had to build before winter.