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Being struck by the dragon-god had left Sir Casey dazed. He heard the voice of Lauren screaming at him, and the children copied her. He heard the labored breathing of Rey Polilla, and he knew his lance found its mark. Both he and his opponent suffered. Had the other knights fallen? He looked left and right. He saw their bodies thrown to the snowy ground. The dragon’s thrashing about had knocked them across the battleground. None stood.
Sir Casey recalled his promise. He recalled the way the people spoke of him and the burden that placed on his shoulders. He rolled over to place his arms on the ground and push himself up. The sword he wore on his back—a vicious two-hand slaughter-sword—refused to let him get up from a reclined position. With the weight of that thing and so much armor pushing against him, he lifted himself up and turned to face the dragon. Rey Polilla stared at him with his serpentine eyes. The façade of servitude collapsed; their enmity lay in stark honesty on the frigid battlefield.
“You’ve lost the privilege of my protection,” Rey Polilla said as puffs of fire and smoke emerged from his nostrils. Snowflakes glistened in the firelight like stars.
The words meant nothing to Sir Casey; Rey Polilla had never intended to keep the people of Cronine safe. He’d only used his words to extract more from them at a safe distance.
Sir Casey raced toward the dragon-god and tilted his sword at the throat of the beast. Rey Polilla seemed to want to say more, but Sir Casey’s sword met the throat of the beast before it could continue. The impact with the dragon’s hide stunned Sir Casey, but he pressed forward, and the sword began its slow descent into the neck of the dragon. The dragon gurgled and rolled back, taking Sir Casey with it. Sir Casey continued the pressure until the sword stuck into the beast all the way to the hilt. As Rey Polilla rolled over, Sir Casey kept up the pressure until he stood on the dragon-god’s chest, clutching the hilt with both hands. Rey Polilla squirmed until the last of his life left his body.
Sir Casey tried to pull his sword out of Rey Polilla, but the dragon-god’s muscles gripped it too tightly for him to retrieve it.
“Sir Ryan!” the king called out.
“Yes, your highness,” he answered. He still held his broken lance in one hand, proud evidence of his contribution.
“Summon the kingdom’s most talented butchers. Sir Casey wants his sword back and a dragon’s skull on his mantle.”
Sire Casey called out, “I don’t care what you do with the rest of the meat, but the dragon’s heart is mine to eat.”
Two servants of Rey Polilla, each of them men in colorful tunics and hats with exotic feathers, approached Sir Casey.
“What have you done?” the first asked.
“Rey Polilla was our whole life,” the second said.
Sir Casey looked down at them from his vantage point on top of the dragon-god’s body. He saw their youth and knew that their formative years had been spent in service of this perverted beast. No conversation could rescue them now. Only years later, if they lived long enough, would they be able to understand their liberation. Sir Casey said nothing to them, as no dialogue could achieve anything. The two servants kneeled at the corpse of Rey Polilla and cried. Between their breaths, they cursed Sir Casey for his cruelty and ingratitude.
***
“It will be beautiful,” Sir Casey promised Lady Lauren. “A pastoral wedding with a white winter theme.”
“Of course, it will be beautiful,” Lady Lauren said. She sat on the opposite side of the wagon’s interior and retained remarkable composure despite the bumpy ride.
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Her lady-in-waiting sat beside her and sewed the embroidery into a work of fabric art. They traveled west, beyond the reaches of Cronine, because embittered servants of Rey Polilla still existed who wanted to trouble Sir Casey and his soon-to-be wife. To his side sat Sir Ryan, ever the faithful companion.
“Vanilla bean cake, imported coconut milk, and all the crème based dishes you can think of served on white ceramic plates on white linen,” Sir Casey said. “Tell me what you want. There’s no limit to what I’ll give you! We can make our home in Westfair echo Porcelain Hall.”
“It sounds wonderful,” Lady Lauren said with an agreeable smile, “but I don’t think you understand how hard it is for a young lady to be separated from her family and friends. I had a home in Cronine, you know.”
“And we’ll return to it when times are safe. That’s my promise to you.”
“I hope sooner rather than later, but I understand that doing the right thing has made us plenty of enemies.”
“It has to be the case in a world full of lies and deception. We were true to our word. Now we have to protect ourselves from the serpents who served the beast. I’ll provide everything you need in our new home. This awful winter will pass soon! Someday the new blossoms will bloom and see us back in Cronine, in Porcelain Hall, where all our art and family can join us.”
Lady Lauren smiled as though she had more to say, but she held her thoughts to herself. Sir Casey wanted to know what moved through her mind, but he decided to let the conversation rest there. They’d been through plenty to arrive at this point. He couldn’t believe she chose to travel with him, to marry him, and to tolerate him.
The wagon came to an abrupt halt; the driver must have found this to be a good time to take a break. Sir Casey stepped out of the wagon and onto the crunchy snow below. The wagon driver took this time to find a private place to relieve himself, and Sir Casey squinted his eyes at the snowy landscape. They’d stopped on a snow-capped promontory overlooking a familiar place. Sir Casey looked at the town that unfolded before him, where blankets of snow rested on half-timber buildings, gothic arches, and thatched barns. “Abernathair, my home town,” Sir Casey said to himself. The warmth of its familiarity made him smile. He heard Lady Lauren approaching behind him, her footsteps slow and curious.
“You grew up here?” she asked. He’d told her the name of his hometown many times, but she’d never seen it in person.
He nodded. Memories of this place stirred in his mind. He’d never been a proper man in Abernathair, only an idiot-child who destroyed everything he touched. He’d been the laughingstock of the community he grew up in, a bakers’ apprentice who burned everything he touched.
The period of his life that permitted such failures also allowed for levity on a scale he couldn’t tolerate now. He recalled his favorite pub, Hog and Apple, where he once ate three enormous potato cakes and earned them for free by finishing them. This was the absurd and mundane life that Sir Colm and Sir Ryan had found him in, only a year ago. It seemed like a previous life.
As a kid, he chalked his name and silly drawings on the stones of the streets and buildings in the alleyways. He made girls furious by teasing them. He took his first punches and kicks from bullies here. Abernathair gave him his love of culinary arts and so much else, and yet the town had only ever seen him as a nothing. He’d struggled to meet the demands of even a yeoman here. For as long as the people here lived, he’d be that person to them.
The snow blanketed every surface as if to close Abernathair off to him now, the knight who slew Rey Polilla.
“Do you want to visit Abernathair?” Lady Lauren asked. “You have family and friends there, right?”
Sir Casey thought on her words for a moment. He did have family and friends there, but they knew him as an immature boy, before the words of King Lloyd III’s court transformed him. No knightly business required his attention here. He had a lady who loved him and a wedding in Westfair to plan.
“A rooster can’t return to its shell,” Sir Casey said with a wince. He saw the dip in the landscape where Hog and Apple sat in a shaded alley. He remembered the way people spoke down to him there, and that pained him still.
“Are you sure? I know you have a lot of memories of Abernathair.”
“It’s a closed window; I can’t return there now. I don’t want anything to do with the man I was there. He’s dead now. Our home is in Westfair, and my future is your future.”
Lady Lauren left his side. She opened the wagon door, took a step inside, and turned to look back at her soon-to-be husband.
He took a final look into the sleeping town of Abernathair, smothered in white snow and enveloped in the shadows of its tall, gothic structures. Long ago, he’d felt the inescapable pull of the stories that anchored him there. Now Abernathair slept like a fallow field or an old dog in its winter years. He stood truly outside of it, a man made some other place and bound somewhere else, alienated again. This time by choice.
With no compunction to ever see Abernathair again, Sir Casey returned to the wagon in his seat opposite his fiancé. She smiled a knowing smile, likely having anticipated his answer, and they were off to their shared future.