Sable's Arc

Chapter 1 of 18

Sable had thrown a stone at the dragon once, from the ridge above Birchrot, and watched it bounce off the beast's scaled neck like a pebble off a wall. That was the day she decided to kill it. It had claimed the cliffs above her village as a roost, and now it hunted the goats, the sheep, and once, a shepherd boy. Sable was small and wiry, and her sling had never missed. But a sling was useless if the stones could not bite. Now she walked the river shallows, hunting for something harder. Her boot caught on an edge in the water. She reached down and pulled up a box hewn from smooth river stones, sealed with a rusted latch. She shook it. Something shifted inside. She pried the latch with a flat rock until it snapped. Inside sat a tuft of dark mushrooms, caps broad and shadowed, still damp. Sable knew them. Gloomcaps. Her grandmother had called them killing caps and buried them deep so no child would touch them. One bite stopped a heart. A voice piped up behind her. "Those won't help you." She spun. A creature no taller than her knee crouched on a wet stone, skin like bark, an acorn cap perched on its green hair. A forest sprite. It watched her with sharp, amused eyes. "You want to wound the great scaled thing," it said. "Poison won't pierce it either. But a stone dipped in Gloomcap juice, driven into a soft place, will carry the poison inside." Sable stared at it, unblinking. "The scales have no soft place." "The eyes do. The mouth does." The sprite tilted its head. "You only need one true throw." Sable turned the mushrooms over in her palm. Her sling could not break scale. But it could split an eye at fifty paces. She had done that to a hawk once, and hated herself for a week. She thought of the shepherd boy. She crushed three gloomcaps against a river rock. The dark juice ran black. She rolled her smoothest stone through it, then wrapped it in a scrap of cloth and tucked it apart from the others on her belt. One poisoned stone. One chance. "Careful," the sprite said. "That stone will kill anything it enters. Anything." "I only need it to kill one thing." The sprite grinned and slipped into the reeds. Sable stood alone with a weapon that could finally hurt the dragon, and a new fear pressing cold against her hip. The poison did not know the difference between a dragon's eye and her own hand. One slip, one broken cloth, and it would be her name in the crossroads ledger. She climbed the bank toward the cliffs. Now she needed to reach the dragon's face without dying on her own belt.