Prince charming's Arc

Chapter 24 of 30

Prince Charming woke to a jewel bird tapping the window of his house. It carried a scrap of cloth tied to its leg. He unrolled it on the kitchen table. The princess had written three words in charcoal: tracks on ridge. He pulled on his boots before the kettle boiled and rode for the tower. She met him on the ladder with a spyglass in her hand. A man had been working the ridge trail since dawn, she said. Not a hunter — no bow, no dogs. He stopped at every fallen log and turned it. He filled a sack with something she could not see from the platform. A scavenger, picking the trail clean of whatever the last poacher had dropped. He was moving up, slow but steady, and the warning sign at the ridge sat directly in his path. Past the sign, the ground opened onto the dragon's ledges. If the man kept climbing, he would meet the creature face to face before noon. Prince Charming thought about lighting the signal pot. He decided against it. Smoke and a bird would bring the dragon straight down onto the man, and a startled dragon on a narrow trail was the exact thing he had spent months preventing. He rode to the base of the ridge and climbed on foot. He caught the scavenger a hundred paces below the sign, kneeling over a broken snare. The man stood up fast and put a hand on his knife. Prince Charming kept his own hands open. He said the trail above was his, and everything on it belonged to him, and he would pay a fair price for whatever was in the sack if the man turned around now. The scavenger squinted at him. He asked why a prince would pay for scrap. Prince Charming said because the alternative was climbing another two hundred paces and finding out. He pointed at the sign further up. The scavenger read the plank and the black scale nailed to it. His face changed. He set the sack down between them. Prince Charming counted coins into the man's palm until the man nodded, and then he walked the scavenger back down the ridge himself, one step behind him, all the way to the road. He came back up alone in the late afternoon and sat by the sign until his breath slowed. The dragon had not stirred. The princess waved once from her platform and he raised a hand back. He had bought the ridge again, the way he had bought the poacher's silence, with coin instead of blood. He rode home in the dusk knowing the trick would only work as long as his purse held out, and that every stranger he turned back was one more mouth carrying his name toward town.