Prince charming's Arc

Chapter 8 of 30

He understood then that the sitting was the point. The dragon had come because he had not chased it. But when he stood at last and walked back toward the trees, the smaller creatures scattered. A fox bolted. Two deer wheeled and ran. A rabbit froze, then vanished into the ferns. The dragon watched from the field. Prince Charming stopped at the treeline and saw the truth of it. The animals near his house had learned to trust him because he fed them. The deeper creatures, the ones who lived farther in, had never seen him except as a man walking with a beast at his back. His claim to unite the forest was empty while half the forest ran from him. He went home and thought it through. Food had worked once, but food alone would not carry into the deep woods. He needed a sign the animals would read from a distance, something that said he came in peace with the dragon, not as its hunter. He took the black scale the dragon had returned to him weeks ago. He drilled a hole through its edge and threaded it on a leather cord. Then he cut strips of cloth from an old shirt and soaked them in honey and crushed seed. He walked into the deep forest wearing the scale at his chest. He tied the cloth strips to low branches at intervals along the path. He did not call out. He did not look for the animals. He walked slow, and he left the trail behind him marked and sweet. On the third day the deep creatures came. A badger took cloth from a branch while he sat ten paces off. A stag stepped onto the path and held its ground when he passed. A pine marten climbed down and sniffed the scale at his chest before slipping away. They did not follow him home. They did not gather at his hand. But they no longer ran. He walked out of the deep woods at dusk and found the dragon waiting in the field. Beside it, on the grass, stood Princess Elara Rosemary in her traveling dress, the diamond earring bright at her ear. She had come back down the road. She looked at the marten tracks on his sleeve, and at the dragon behind him, and said she had heard a rumor from the next village that the forest had a keeper now, and she had come to see if it was true. Prince Charming said it was becoming true. Then he asked her why she had returned.