Prince charming's Arc

Chapter 28 of 30

The morning after the bargain, a jewel bird dropped onto the birdbath with a scrap of cloth in its beak. Prince Charming untied the note. The princess had written three words: farmhand at treeline. He looked up the ridge. Smoke rose thin from her tower's chimney, her signal that she had eyes on someone he could not yet see. He left the seed dish half full and walked the path to the forest's edge with his hands empty and his sleeve pushed back to show the strip of her cloth on his wrist. The farmhand stood ten paces inside the trees. He was young and thin, with dirt on his knees and a short knife in his belt. He had a length of cord in one hand and a scrap of burnt wood in the other. He was measuring the tinker's story against the ground. When he saw Prince Charming he did not run. He said he had seen a shape in the sky two days back, low over the fields, and he meant to know if it was true. If it was true, his master would pay to hear it, and the town would pay more. He said this plainly, like a man reciting a price. Prince Charming did not offer him coin. He had none. Instead he asked the boy to walk with him to the stone dish at the edge of the trees. He knelt and pulled a pebble from the rim and held it in his closed fist. He told the boy to watch the ridge. Then he opened his hand. High on the mountain, the dragon lifted from its ledge and came down over the fields in one long glide, close enough that the boy could see the red along its wings and the yellow of its underside. It circled once above them, low, and the wind of it flattened the grass. Then it climbed back to the mountain and settled on the stone. Prince Charming told the boy the truth: the dragon was real, it was his to call, and it would come again if he called it. He said the town could hear the story from him and go home poor, or the town could send hunters and go home dead. He said the boy could choose which story to carry. The farmhand dropped the cord. He said he had seen nothing worth telling and walked back through the trees toward the fields. Prince Charming watched him until he cleared the treeline. Then he climbed the ladder of the wooden tower and told the princess what he had shown. She said the story would reach the farm by supper, and the whole valley by market day, whether the boy meant it to or not. Prince Charming had traded secrecy for fear. He no longer had the choice of being unknown.